I've been stalling buying a laptop because of the Vista debacle. I refuse to pay for a Vista license, plain and simple. That includes paying for a Vista license plus some extra fee to allow me to upgrade to either XP or Windows 7.
Because of this, I have not been able to buy the type of laptop I am looking for for several years now.
Yes, I know that there are Windows-free laptops available. I also know that they are either A) lousy hardware/low-end specs; B) off-brand, or C) too high-priced, i.e., Apple. (Calm down, fanboys: I think Apple hardware is worth the cost, but only at price bands that are out of my range.)
What I'm saying is that it is not possible to find a decent desktop-replacement laptop from a major brand that doesn't force you to pay for Windows.
This announcement is happy news for me, since it removes the Vista roadblock that has been preventing me from buying a laptop for years. Not that I intend to run Windows 7 (except perhaps in a VM), but if I must pay good money for a Windows license to get the hardware configuration I want, then I may as well get a passingly useful license.
After playing Half-Life, I suspected Half-Life 2 to be more of the same storyline. Instead, I was treated to a very confusing and surreal world, with no guidance or explanation. It was a joy and a comfort to find old friends; even familiar enemies were a relief. It was nerve-wracking to be dropped off in an invaded, oppressed world with some crazy plot in progress, with no information about it other than survive and keep moving forward. Not being told the story was a major success in Half-Life 2, as far as I'm concerned.
Storytelling in a game is not a new idea; there have been many incredibly detailed text-based games made in the past. The genre title "interactive fiction" sums up the idea exactly. These games could tell a story, while filling countless hours with fun, excitement, suspense, confusion, and triumph. So what has happened?
The problem is that the overhead for creating games has just become too high. These text-based games could easily fit on a floppy and run on hardware older than the average Slashdot user. They were usually written by less than a half-dozen people, and often by only one or two.
Modern games, to contrast, all seem to require cutting-edge technology. Do you realize that games nowadays require three *orders of magnitude* more drive space, RAM, and processor speed than they did 20 years ago?
In addition to the ridiculously powerful video cards, fast processors, and huge amounts of RAM needed to play current titles, the costs of making these games has also increased by three orders of magnitude. Half-Life 2 cost $40 million to make. Creating high-polygon-count models, scripting movements, writing and recording soundtracks, and paying for famous likenesses and/or voice-actors or makes it difficult to tell anything but a tightly-defined story. It's just not cost-effective (or even possible, factoring in time-to-market considerations) to make games that allow you to explore the world and tell your own story. All the money the game studio makes is in the initial sale, so replay value is not that important.
The exception to this is subscription-based games. Since game studios continue to make money on a title, they can keep adding patches/add-on packs/world upgrades. This is an incremental development process, but the underlying concept still applies: it takes lots of money to make new games. That hasn't always been the case, but it's where we're at now.
Storytelling, I believe, is leaving the studios and being put in the hands of the gamers themselves. In the last 5 years or so, there has been a large shift toward massively-multiplayer worlds. This unloads much of the storytelling burdon from the game developers, since it is based on user-interaction. The players narrate their own stories with their actions.
Presently, there is another shift underway: toward user-generated content. This is an even bigger development, as it allows for user creativity and reduces the content-creation cost for the game studio. Users can finally make their characters look exactly how they want, in worlds that they create. These are amazing times.
The only problem now is how to keep it all from falling apart. The studios want money, so they either have to control access or incorporate marketing. And many players who create content...well honestly, make crap. It's like the rest of the internet: you've got the pay-for-subscription quality content, the ad-laden decent-ish content, and the low-quality user content (usually also ad-laden.) Somehow there needs to be some sort of free-as-in-beer, free-as-in-freedom, quality game content available for everyone.
Yes, frames! Did it get any more high-tech than that?
Remember those images people would use in place of the [hr] tag, which looked just like a horizontal rule but it would have with curlicues at the end, or cats sitting on it or whatever. Very stylish.:-)
For those who might enjoy a walk down memory lane, here is a list of all the GeoCities neighborhoods, their suburbs, and the dates when they were added. Kudos to this gentleman for preserving a bit of history.
As much as people are bashing Geocities, consider*:
Their ad requirements, while irritating, were tame compared to most social sites today.
Animated GIFs were obnoxious, but are nothing compared to the Flash animations of today.
They provided free web-hosting, with no requirement to use their page builder. CMSs are good in certain contexts, but being forced to use them is bad.
Many people were less interested in page hits and more interested in sharing information. This does not seem to be the case as much anymore.
* This is going from memory, 14 years ago now.
I don't mind saying I had a GeoCities page, for several years from 1995 on. It wasn't much, but it was mine. I edited it in the college labs (faster than dialup, and free!) and shared it with friends and family from their home computers. Times were good.
Of course, I also used tables and transparent GIFs for layout; there was no CSS back then. And pay-per-minute dial-up was lousy. And there was no Google (remember having to use different search engines for different topics? I remember preferring AltaVista.) No Wikipedia, either -- Encarta was great, though. (Which reminds me, farewell, Encarta. You helped me through many a paper.)
Great; now I'm feeling nostalgic. Does anyone remember canyon.mid? Man, I used to listen to that all the time. Of course, then I discovered Impulse Tracker, and realized that MIDI was crap (except perhaps as a control language for devices.)
"The interface consists, essentially, of a keyboard displayed on a computer screen. "The way this works is that all the letters come up, and each one of them flashes individually," says Williams. "And what your brain does is, if you're looking at the 'R' on the screen and all the other letters are flashing, nothing happens. But when the 'R' flashes, your brain says, 'Hey, wait a minute. Something's different about what I was just paying attention to.' And you see a momentary change in brain activity."
Their "cognitive click from flash recognition" interface sounds an awful lot like the retrace timing system used for the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NES_Zapper.
I'm curious what kind of language optimization has been added, if any. Do they use predictive text of some sort?
Also, it seems a waste to limit the input to a display of a static keyboard (other than ease of use for people who know where to look for certain letters.) Why not have a dynamic interface, something alongs the lines of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasher/?
I, for one, welcome the possibility of seeing the _last_ of our corrupt, litigious, copywrong overlords. I may be hopelessly optimistic, but it is fun.
If you are able to make significant changes, it will give me a little more hope for the U.S. Good luck!
This is a good point. But as collisions become more and more frequent, I don't think they be able to maintain momentum. The energy from each collision is spread out among all the fragments produced, and also some is lost during the impact as heat and the energy required to separate the fragments from the larger original pieces.
Let's say that "first-generation" objects are on a stable orbit with sufficient momentum to maintain orbit. After impact, some of the resultant second-generation fragments will fail orbit quickly due to grossly incorrect trajectories, while others enter trajectories that will take longer to fail. Over the time it takes for these second-generation fragments to fail, they cause more impacts. More of these third-generation fragments are lost more quickly, and the remaining ones proceed to cause fourth-generation impacts, and so on. This is the general chain-reaction idea being posited.
One factor to consider is the fact that as these particles reach higher "generations", they are in more and more grossly failing trajectories due to either bad vectors or insufficient momentum. These trajectories intersect less and less with stable orbits, so the collisions are more and more likely to be with already-failing particles. This could only accelerate the orbit failure. Essentially, these particles should clean themselves up.
Again, I am no astrophysicist, but it seems that if chance supported easily-achieved orbits, then we would already be at saturation. The fact that we're not suggests that the "random collisions creating a permanent* cloud of debris" theory may not be self-supporting.
Of course, it may be that the time it takes for this debris field to fail is on a scale which is inconvenient to us. But to say that we'll eventually end up with a stable cloud of microscopic bits just doesn't add up.
Something doesn't seem to add up. They've already indicated that slight modifications to trajectories can deteriorate an orbit, so some portion of the space junk caused by collisions must fail to remain in orbit. But they also say that collisions cause more junk, which causes more collisions, as though this were a never-ending cycle of feedback.
It seems as though there must be a threshold somewhere where the introduction of further space junk removes from orbit, on average, an equal amount of debris as it introduces. The farther past this threshold, the more likely that introducing debris will remove more than is introduced. There must be a point of equilibrium.
Take the following exaggerated scenario, for example. Let's say that by chance or plan, there is debris in orbit within every cubic meter at stable altitudes. (I am not a physicist, but this seems highly improbable statistically.) The introduction of a meteoroid through this debris field would almost certainly cause a significant chain-reaction with many affected objects acquiring unstable orbits leading to failure.
Not-to-scale pictures aside, I doubt we're anywhere near such a threshold -- even if we are reaching a point where our ability to avoid debris is insufficient to mitigate the danger. But surely it would be at least interesting, if not practically useful, to know this "saturation" point.
Or perhaps this is already known, and I am just unaware.
This may be interesting to watch play out. On the one hand, Psion did actually use the trademark in the past, and the letters it sent could be considered a defense of trademark. On the other hand, if they intentionally falsified information, there ought to be repercussions.
Beside those legal grounds for making a decision, the question of "buzzword-squatting" will likely come into play here. I don't know if that label necessarily applies in this case, but to the extent that Dell uses the concept in its argument, it becomes relevant.
Actually, for a hexagonal wheel, that would be correct.
Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
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· Score: 1
If Google were aiming this at geeks, it would have made sense to develop a *nix or OS X version first, and get the geeks interested in using it.
By making Chrome available for Windows first, Google is promoting standardization and security to the masses that need it most. As a geek, I am very interested in this.
Sadly, by making it Windows-only, they have missed the boat for stirring any interest in much of the more tech-savvy community...
I don't know about you, but I live in a world where Windows has a huge market-share. This is a fact, whether you like it or not. I'd rather have millions of windows users have a more secure system, than a shiny new toy for me to play with. I don't need a more secure browser; they do. It benefits them, which benefits all of us.
But the beauty of Chrome, which it seems you failed to notice, is that it is open-source. We can vouch for the security, add features, and improve it to our heart's content.
Despite your negative attitude, I believe there is already significant interest within the tech-savvy community, and a working Linux build is in the works. If you're that impatient for a *nix build, either join in or keep your words to yourself while the rest of us do the work.
... and quite probably have left yet another opportunity for malware infestations on insecure boxes.
The security model that Google is adopting within Chrome is excellent, and long overdue. That's one of their main points in creating the project to begin with. So please do at least a little research before you make blanket statements like this. Thank you.
The thick-accented Dell rep ("Michael" or somesuch, I'm sure) could not understand why I'd want to order a laptop with no OS, no matter how I explained it.
Samir: "Why don't you go by Mike, instead of Michael?"
Not only that, how does going from ONE nagging wife to TWO nagging wives make for longevity??
Maybe it just *seems* like his life is longer?
"Sit on a hot stove for a minute and it feels like an hour; sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it feels like a minute. Live with two wives and it makes sitting on a hot stove look pretty good." (with apologies to Albert Einstein)
Very well said. I was primarily referring to legal rights, not human and civil rights -- which I believe cannot be relinquished, voluntarily or otherwise.
The right to civil disobedience? A right is an established claim on something. [...] You've totally misunderstood the whole point of rights.
A right is "the legal or moral entitlement to do or refrain from doing something or to obtain or refrain from obtaining an action, thing or recognition in civil society. Compare with duty, referring to behaviour that is expected or required of the person, and with privilege, referring to something that can be conferred and revoked."
In reference to civil disobedience, I was saying that there are times when it is not just an entitlement to act, but a duty. Obviously this point of transition is different for everyone, but I think it is important to acknowledge that our rights carry an obligation to be exercised as our consciences dictate. This is in the Declaration of Independence (emphasis is mine):
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
Now, whether we are in a condition of despotism, and whether civil disobedience constitutes "throwing off" is open to interpretation.
When I was asking the grandparent whether he remembered giving his rights away, I was trying to ask him (and others) whether there have been times when they chose to "suffer, while evils are sufferable" rather than standing up for their rights. I will be the first to admit I have done this. There was a point you made:
To say that people brought it on themselves because they didn't resist enough is blaming the victim. Doing that is as morally reprehensible as the actual act of taking the rights, because it indicates you are accepting those morally reprehensible actions as justice.
which is exactly right, but also not quite what I was trying to convey. We are voluntarily accepting the taking of our rights, and accepting these morally reprehensible actions largely without complaint. And that is reprehensible.
Unlike slaves, we are not under threat of pain or death and have the freedom to rebel. We are safe to do so, and are supported by law, but still we do not. Certainly, some individuals work hard to stop these actions, but the inertia (or lack thereof) of society largely negates their efforts. This is a shame and an embarrassment, but is entirely our own fault.
You pose an interesting line of thought. Here are my answers. I generally do not pirate software, but there are a few exceptions when I do.
The most common instance is when I have a one-time need for a tool, usually just for a couple of hours, though sometimes up to a day or so. First, I look for an OSS solution. Often I find one, which is wonderful, but there are times when the commercial offerings are a better fit or the only option.
In such a case, it is hard to justify spending any significant amount of money for something I only need for a matter of hours. I wish more companies would offer product pricing for short-term usage. I would gladly pay $5 to use a program for a day, for those programs which I do not see a long-term or future need for. But I will not drop more than that, and especially not hundreds of dollars. If pirating and OSS were not an option, then I just would not buy for such short-term use, so the developers do not lose any money on my account of my piracy.
The second instance is when I am interested in a product, and desire to try it before committing money. Hopefully, the developers offer non-crippled trial versions. Time/usage trials are the best, and I can handle nag screens on startup/shutdown, but disabled features are frustrating since I'm trying to evaluate the functionality and feature set of the program.
As I said, if trial versions are available, great. But if there are no trial versions available, and I do not have access to it from a friend or at work, and I am keenly interested in the product, then I may pull down a pirated copy to evaluate. It doesn't usually take long to determine if I want to purchase the software, and as I said, if I like a program enough to use it, I will purchase it. If I do not think the product is worth the asking price, then I will not use it, pirated or otherwise.
The last case where I will use pirated software is if the legal version has DRM that I do not agree with. In this case, I buy a license but continue to use the hacked copy. As far as I'm concerned, DRM is crippleware, and I do not believe I should be limited when using software I've purchased.
In all cases, I make sure my piracy does not negatively affect the developers. If I do not like the program, I get rid of it and move on. But if I like the program, I will purchase it -- and recommend it to friends and family if it meets their needs.
I do not promote piracy or encourage friends or family to do it. But I've found that personally, there are times when temporary use of a pirated program will meet a need that cannot effectively be met via other means.
First, most of our laws were written well before the advent of the internet, and determining how to apply them wisely in contexts that they were never designed for is difficult for even the best judicial minds.
Second, of those laws written with the internet in mind, nearly all were heavily influenced by politics and corporate interest, and are either ineffectual or biased.
Third, there is a difficult time applying the US Federal Rules of Evidence as regards expert testimony, because of the rapid pace of technology and the difficulty of finding consensus among experts in the pertinent fields. Worse, the definition of original data does not address the veracity of the source -- especially troubling given the ease by which electronic records can be modified or fabricated. (For a case in point, see the screenshots of file sharing programs provided by the RIAA.)
Given the current conditions of our laws as regard technology-based crimes, is it any wonder that state and federal prosecutors do not pursue more cases?
Slashdot Mirror
Did anyone else read this title as, "Sprint Rollover Begins Making Night Sky Observations"?
I was thinking, "Now what? The phone companies won't let us use our rollover minutes after dusk? Sheesh."
I've been stalling buying a laptop because of the Vista debacle. I refuse to pay for a Vista license, plain and simple. That includes paying for a Vista license plus some extra fee to allow me to upgrade to either XP or Windows 7.
Because of this, I have not been able to buy the type of laptop I am looking for for several years now.
Yes, I know that there are Windows-free laptops available. I also know that they are either A) lousy hardware/low-end specs; B) off-brand, or C) too high-priced, i.e., Apple. (Calm down, fanboys: I think Apple hardware is worth the cost, but only at price bands that are out of my range.)
What I'm saying is that it is not possible to find a decent desktop-replacement laptop from a major brand that doesn't force you to pay for Windows.
This announcement is happy news for me, since it removes the Vista roadblock that has been preventing me from buying a laptop for years. Not that I intend to run Windows 7 (except perhaps in a VM), but if I must pay good money for a Windows license to get the hardware configuration I want, then I may as well get a passingly useful license.
Well said. Mod parent up.
After playing Half-Life, I suspected Half-Life 2 to be more of the same storyline. Instead, I was treated to a very confusing and surreal world, with no guidance or explanation. It was a joy and a comfort to find old friends; even familiar enemies were a relief. It was nerve-wracking to be dropped off in an invaded, oppressed world with some crazy plot in progress, with no information about it other than survive and keep moving forward. Not being told the story was a major success in Half-Life 2, as far as I'm concerned.
Storytelling in a game is not a new idea; there have been many incredibly detailed text-based games made in the past. The genre title "interactive fiction" sums up the idea exactly. These games could tell a story, while filling countless hours with fun, excitement, suspense, confusion, and triumph. So what has happened?
The problem is that the overhead for creating games has just become too high. These text-based games could easily fit on a floppy and run on hardware older than the average Slashdot user. They were usually written by less than a half-dozen people, and often by only one or two.
Modern games, to contrast, all seem to require cutting-edge technology. Do you realize that games nowadays require three *orders of magnitude* more drive space, RAM, and processor speed than they did 20 years ago?
In addition to the ridiculously powerful video cards, fast processors, and huge amounts of RAM needed to play current titles, the costs of making these games has also increased by three orders of magnitude. Half-Life 2 cost $40 million to make. Creating high-polygon-count models, scripting movements, writing and recording soundtracks, and paying for famous likenesses and/or voice-actors or makes it difficult to tell anything but a tightly-defined story. It's just not cost-effective (or even possible, factoring in time-to-market considerations) to make games that allow you to explore the world and tell your own story. All the money the game studio makes is in the initial sale, so replay value is not that important.
The exception to this is subscription-based games. Since game studios continue to make money on a title, they can keep adding patches/add-on packs/world upgrades. This is an incremental development process, but the underlying concept still applies: it takes lots of money to make new games. That hasn't always been the case, but it's where we're at now.
Storytelling, I believe, is leaving the studios and being put in the hands of the gamers themselves. In the last 5 years or so, there has been a large shift toward massively-multiplayer worlds. This unloads much of the storytelling burdon from the game developers, since it is based on user-interaction. The players narrate their own stories with their actions.
Presently, there is another shift underway: toward user-generated content. This is an even bigger development, as it allows for user creativity and reduces the content-creation cost for the game studio. Users can finally make their characters look exactly how they want, in worlds that they create. These are amazing times.
The only problem now is how to keep it all from falling apart. The studios want money, so they either have to control access or incorporate marketing. And many players who create content...well honestly, make crap. It's like the rest of the internet: you've got the pay-for-subscription quality content, the ad-laden decent-ish content, and the low-quality user content (usually also ad-laden.) Somehow there needs to be some sort of free-as-in-beer, free-as-in-freedom, quality game content available for everyone.
Yes, frames! Did it get any more high-tech than that?
Remember those images people would use in place of the [hr] tag, which looked just like a horizontal rule but it would have with curlicues at the end, or cats sitting on it or whatever. Very stylish. :-)
Forgot to mention Hotdog Stand.
As much as people are bashing Geocities, consider*:
* This is going from memory, 14 years ago now.
I don't mind saying I had a GeoCities page, for several years from 1995 on. It wasn't much, but it was mine. I edited it in the college labs (faster than dialup, and free!) and shared it with friends and family from their home computers. Times were good.
Of course, I also used tables and transparent GIFs for layout; there was no CSS back then. And pay-per-minute dial-up was lousy. And there was no Google (remember having to use different search engines for different topics? I remember preferring AltaVista.) No Wikipedia, either -- Encarta was great, though. (Which reminds me, farewell, Encarta. You helped me through many a paper.)
Great; now I'm feeling nostalgic. Does anyone remember canyon.mid? Man, I used to listen to that all the time. Of course, then I discovered Impulse Tracker, and realized that MIDI was crap (except perhaps as a control language for devices.)
"The interface consists, essentially, of a keyboard displayed on a computer screen. "The way this works is that all the letters come up, and each one of them flashes individually," says Williams. "And what your brain does is, if you're looking at the 'R' on the screen and all the other letters are flashing, nothing happens. But when the 'R' flashes, your brain says, 'Hey, wait a minute. Something's different about what I was just paying attention to.' And you see a momentary change in brain activity."
Their "cognitive click from flash recognition" interface sounds an awful lot like the retrace timing system used for the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NES_Zapper.
I'm curious what kind of language optimization has been added, if any. Do they use predictive text of some sort?
Also, it seems a waste to limit the input to a display of a static keyboard (other than ease of use for people who know where to look for certain letters.) Why not have a dynamic interface, something alongs the lines of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasher/?
Good luck! I wish you both success and wisdom.
I, for one, welcome the possibility of seeing the _last_ of our corrupt, litigious, copywrong overlords. I may be hopelessly optimistic, but it is fun.
If you are able to make significant changes, it will give me a little more hope for the U.S. Good luck!
This is a good point. But as collisions become more and more frequent, I don't think they be able to maintain momentum. The energy from each collision is spread out among all the fragments produced, and also some is lost during the impact as heat and the energy required to separate the fragments from the larger original pieces.
Let's say that "first-generation" objects are on a stable orbit with sufficient momentum to maintain orbit. After impact, some of the resultant second-generation fragments will fail orbit quickly due to grossly incorrect trajectories, while others enter trajectories that will take longer to fail. Over the time it takes for these second-generation fragments to fail, they cause more impacts. More of these third-generation fragments are lost more quickly, and the remaining ones proceed to cause fourth-generation impacts, and so on. This is the general chain-reaction idea being posited.
One factor to consider is the fact that as these particles reach higher "generations", they are in more and more grossly failing trajectories due to either bad vectors or insufficient momentum. These trajectories intersect less and less with stable orbits, so the collisions are more and more likely to be with already-failing particles. This could only accelerate the orbit failure. Essentially, these particles should clean themselves up.
Again, I am no astrophysicist, but it seems that if chance supported easily-achieved orbits, then we would already be at saturation. The fact that we're not suggests that the "random collisions creating a permanent* cloud of debris" theory may not be self-supporting.
Of course, it may be that the time it takes for this debris field to fail is on a scale which is inconvenient to us. But to say that we'll eventually end up with a stable cloud of microscopic bits just doesn't add up.
Something doesn't seem to add up. They've already indicated that slight modifications to trajectories can deteriorate an orbit, so some portion of the space junk caused by collisions must fail to remain in orbit. But they also say that collisions cause more junk, which causes more collisions, as though this were a never-ending cycle of feedback.
It seems as though there must be a threshold somewhere where the introduction of further space junk removes from orbit, on average, an equal amount of debris as it introduces. The farther past this threshold, the more likely that introducing debris will remove more than is introduced. There must be a point of equilibrium.
Take the following exaggerated scenario, for example. Let's say that by chance or plan, there is debris in orbit within every cubic meter at stable altitudes. (I am not a physicist, but this seems highly improbable statistically.) The introduction of a meteoroid through this debris field would almost certainly cause a significant chain-reaction with many affected objects acquiring unstable orbits leading to failure.
Not-to-scale pictures aside, I doubt we're anywhere near such a threshold -- even if we are reaching a point where our ability to avoid debris is insufficient to mitigate the danger. But surely it would be at least interesting, if not practically useful, to know this "saturation" point.
Or perhaps this is already known, and I am just unaware.
This may be interesting to watch play out. On the one hand, Psion did actually use the trademark in the past, and the letters it sent could be considered a defense of trademark. On the other hand, if they intentionally falsified information, there ought to be repercussions.
Beside those legal grounds for making a decision, the question of "buzzword-squatting" will likely come into play here. I don't know if that label necessarily applies in this case, but to the extent that Dell uses the concept in its argument, it becomes relevant.
Really? I was told that the magic words are Squeamish Ossifrage.
Actually, for a hexagonal wheel, that would be correct.
If Google were aiming this at geeks, it would have made sense to develop a *nix or OS X version first, and get the geeks interested in using it.
By making Chrome available for Windows first, Google is promoting standardization and security to the masses that need it most. As a geek, I am very interested in this.
Sadly, by making it Windows-only, they have missed the boat for stirring any interest in much of the more tech-savvy community ...
I don't know about you, but I live in a world where Windows has a huge market-share. This is a fact, whether you like it or not. I'd rather have millions of windows users have a more secure system, than a shiny new toy for me to play with. I don't need a more secure browser; they do. It benefits them, which benefits all of us.
But the beauty of Chrome, which it seems you failed to notice, is that it is open-source. We can vouch for the security, add features, and improve it to our heart's content.
Despite your negative attitude, I believe there is already significant interest within the tech-savvy community, and a working Linux build is in the works. If you're that impatient for a *nix build, either join in or keep your words to yourself while the rest of us do the work.
... and quite probably have left yet another opportunity for malware infestations on insecure boxes.
The security model that Google is adopting within Chrome is excellent, and long overdue. That's one of their main points in creating the project to begin with. So please do at least a little research before you make blanket statements like this. Thank you.
The thick-accented Dell rep ("Michael" or somesuch, I'm sure) could not understand why I'd want to order a laptop with no OS, no matter how I explained it.
Samir: "Why don't you go by Mike, instead of Michael?"
He really just needs to throw the photos in a black hole, because, as Hawking proved, black holes don't destroy information.
Oh sure, fantastic compression ratios and high write speeds, too -- but the read speeds suck.
Not only that, how does going from ONE nagging wife to TWO nagging wives make for longevity??
Maybe it just *seems* like his life is longer?
"Sit on a hot stove for a minute and it feels like an hour; sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it feels like a minute. Live with two wives and it makes sitting on a hot stove look pretty good." (with apologies to Albert Einstein)
Very well said. I was primarily referring to legal rights, not human and civil rights -- which I believe cannot be relinquished, voluntarily or otherwise.
The right to civil disobedience? A right is an established claim on something. [...] You've totally misunderstood the whole point of rights.
A right is "the legal or moral entitlement to do or refrain from doing something or to obtain or refrain from obtaining an action, thing or recognition in civil society. Compare with duty, referring to behaviour that is expected or required of the person, and with privilege, referring to something that can be conferred and revoked."
In reference to civil disobedience, I was saying that there are times when it is not just an entitlement to act, but a duty. Obviously this point of transition is different for everyone, but I think it is important to acknowledge that our rights carry an obligation to be exercised as our consciences dictate. This is in the Declaration of Independence (emphasis is mine):
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
Now, whether we are in a condition of despotism, and whether civil disobedience constitutes "throwing off" is open to interpretation.
When I was asking the grandparent whether he remembered giving his rights away, I was trying to ask him (and others) whether there have been times when they chose to "suffer, while evils are sufferable" rather than standing up for their rights. I will be the first to admit I have done this. There was a point you made:
To say that people brought it on themselves because they didn't resist enough is blaming the victim. Doing that is as morally reprehensible as the actual act of taking the rights, because it indicates you are accepting those morally reprehensible actions as justice.
which is exactly right, but also not quite what I was trying to convey. We are voluntarily accepting the taking of our rights, and accepting these morally reprehensible actions largely without complaint. And that is reprehensible.
Unlike slaves, we are not under threat of pain or death and have the freedom to rebel. We are safe to do so, and are supported by law, but still we do not. Certainly, some individuals work hard to stop these actions, but the inertia (or lack thereof) of society largely negates their efforts. This is a shame and an embarrassment, but is entirely our own fault.
But do you remember giving any of your rights away? There are times when civil disobedience ought to be an obligation, not just a right.
You pose an interesting line of thought. Here are my answers. I generally do not pirate software, but there are a few exceptions when I do.
The most common instance is when I have a one-time need for a tool, usually just for a couple of hours, though sometimes up to a day or so. First, I look for an OSS solution. Often I find one, which is wonderful, but there are times when the commercial offerings are a better fit or the only option.
In such a case, it is hard to justify spending any significant amount of money for something I only need for a matter of hours. I wish more companies would offer product pricing for short-term usage. I would gladly pay $5 to use a program for a day, for those programs which I do not see a long-term or future need for. But I will not drop more than that, and especially not hundreds of dollars. If pirating and OSS were not an option, then I just would not buy for such short-term use, so the developers do not lose any money on my account of my piracy.
The second instance is when I am interested in a product, and desire to try it before committing money. Hopefully, the developers offer non-crippled trial versions. Time/usage trials are the best, and I can handle nag screens on startup/shutdown, but disabled features are frustrating since I'm trying to evaluate the functionality and feature set of the program.
As I said, if trial versions are available, great. But if there are no trial versions available, and I do not have access to it from a friend or at work, and I am keenly interested in the product, then I may pull down a pirated copy to evaluate. It doesn't usually take long to determine if I want to purchase the software, and as I said, if I like a program enough to use it, I will purchase it. If I do not think the product is worth the asking price, then I will not use it, pirated or otherwise.
The last case where I will use pirated software is if the legal version has DRM that I do not agree with. In this case, I buy a license but continue to use the hacked copy. As far as I'm concerned, DRM is crippleware, and I do not believe I should be limited when using software I've purchased.
In all cases, I make sure my piracy does not negatively affect the developers. If I do not like the program, I get rid of it and move on. But if I like the program, I will purchase it -- and recommend it to friends and family if it meets their needs.
I do not promote piracy or encourage friends or family to do it. But I've found that personally, there are times when temporary use of a pirated program will meet a need that cannot effectively be met via other means.
There are a few other considerations to make:
First, most of our laws were written well before the advent of the internet, and determining how to apply them wisely in contexts that they were never designed for is difficult for even the best judicial minds.
Second, of those laws written with the internet in mind, nearly all were heavily influenced by politics and corporate interest, and are either ineffectual or biased.
Third, there is a difficult time applying the US Federal Rules of Evidence as regards expert testimony, because of the rapid pace of technology and the difficulty of finding consensus among experts in the pertinent fields. Worse, the definition of original data does not address the veracity of the source -- especially troubling given the ease by which electronic records can be modified or fabricated. (For a case in point, see the screenshots of file sharing programs provided by the RIAA.)
Given the current conditions of our laws as regard technology-based crimes, is it any wonder that state and federal prosecutors do not pursue more cases?
Yes, as long as you don't plan on scheduling any tasks today...
The problem with gotos is that
it's hard to keep track
of what you're reading.