Shai Agassi is somebody I've been watching for a while. He's the only person I've seen with a plan that:
1) Will not result in a loss of quality of life for US citizens
2) Can eliminate the US' dependency on foreign oil.
3) Can "fix" the problems that the power grid has with "alternative" energy sources, which generally produce energy as available rather than as needed.
4) Will actually *save* money and resources over the current transportation system.
5) Eventually result in a power grid that's virtually immune to natural disasters and/or terrorist attacks.
Every so often, there's somebody who really, really, really groks the biggest problems society faces. Henry Ford was one such fellow, Shai Agassi is another.
I hope hope hope hope that the United States gets firmly behind this guy, because he's the one that could actually do it.
He understands that Ethanol and Hydrogen are effectively red herrings that favor the petroleum industry. His solution works with wind, solar, coal, nuclear, biomass, etc. His solution, if implemented, would result in a power grid that could maintain its stability even with a severe disruption of power flow due to the distributed nature of it. (Every car becomes a potential power source as needed, with rules determined by the owners of the cars)
There are few people who really, really, really get it. Shai Agassi is one of them. No, I'm not in any way attached or related to him, or his company. I'm just an upper-middle class American who gives a damn about the future of his country and mankind.
Surprisingly, as time goes by, the amount of ancient material available INCREASES every year. Old texts that are found and discovered are digitized and released to the world, rather than being lost in obscurity, readable by a small handful until the ultimate demise of the original work.
I see this every day.
For example, years back, when I was in High School, I was a big fan of "alternative" music. Bands like Depeche Mode, Erasure, Bauhaus, and others were my meat and potatoes, but being raised in small-town, USA, I had to work like the pretty hard to find stuff to listen to. My specialty was rare concert mixes and exploratory remixes - in many cases, I resigned to dubbing cassettes in order to get my fix.
Today, it's much easier for me to find rare, concert remixes! Many (most?) are available in mere seconds a la YouTube, as well as MP3s by LimeWire! And it seems that with each year, more and more and more obscure stuff is available - from Jerry Lee Lewis concerts to Arlo Guthrie live to early stage mixes of Yaz (then "Yazoo")...
Why is this so?
Take a look at the Long Tail Economics principle made possible by the network effect of the Internet. This is one of the most insightful articles that exists on the Internet!
That's great, you've created an intranet and demonstrated it's pricing. Now, of course, try to get a peering agreement with a tier-1 ISP so that your bits can travel to and from the internet at large. Try one month at 10 Mbps and another at 1000 Mbps and see if your bill changes.
I already do this, in effect. My company has a private hosting farm. We pay a flat rate for our redundant Internet connection at a top-notch hosting facility. It doesn't matter to us how much we use it, because the price is the same either way - the bill doesn't change.
Except that power companies charge by the unit. So do water companies. This is fine, because it costs money to create a KwH, and the price of delivering more KwHs rises as more KwHs are delivered, as it costs real energy and money to pump water.
Internet is flat-rate, and should be, IMHO because it represents nothing real. Although it costs something to provide infrastructure for more demand, once that infrastructure is created, the cost of delivery is very near zero.
Here's an experiment, in case this isn't absolutely clear:
1) Buy/borrow a 2 Kilowatt gas generator. Start it up, and run it for 1 hour with no load. Note how much gasoline it burns. This represents the energy used to overcome internal friction. Then run it for 1 hour with a 1,500 watt blow-dryer running continuously. Note how much gasoline it burns. You'll be surprised at the difference in fuel consumption!
2) Get a Gb switching hub, 2 computers, and an amp-meter. Plug the computers into the wall, plug the switch into the amp meter. Note the power usage of the switch with no load. Then set up a load where you are using 1 Mbps of traffic between the two computers, and note the Amp load. Then try 10 Mbsp, 100 Mbps, and 1000 Mbps. You'll notice that the amperage (for most switching hubs) climbs very little as you do so, and that the total power consumption is insignificant.
* * *
So bandwidth usage represents nothing "real". There isn't a significant energy or material consumption per bandwidth unit. After the cost of infrastructure, and a small fixed cost for powering the equipment, the cost of delivering 1000 Mbps is only marginally higher than the near-zero cost of 1 Mbps. There *is* an infrastructure cost that needs to be amortized over the life of the connection, and this represents the vast majority of the true cost of bandwidth.
It's just idiotic that the Nation responsible for building the Internets in the first place is so far behind other industrialized nations for using it!
Books don't run on a computer. You can "download" a book, but using a laptop to read a book is inconvenient, and an e-book reader is expensive and clumsy.
But software needs to run ON the computer. There's no real benefit to the packaging and/or CD itself once it's installed, other than you can get $3 selling it back to (ahem) the local software/games store.
Used games is what the local software store makes money on, anyway. I bought GTA 3 for PS2 at the local store for $7, and I doubt the the original guy got more than $2 for the game.
While the basement is quite good for me, I always get interrupted by my partner as this is her favorite place too. What we do while there is just not relevant to Slashdot's audience at the moment. But I will say I hardly get anything done on the coding front when she drops by.
What... does your mother make you pick up your dirty socks?
They can, however, get a contract with a company that does employ developers. This company can then dive in and fix any bugs that they encounter. They can do the same with proprietary software, but only from the original seller, and unless they are a very big company they are unlikely to get bugs fixed in, say, Office or Windows.
BTW: This is *exactly* what my company does - we host software as a service for customers, and so by extension, thousands of people depend on the operation of OSS software that we host on a handful of medium-capacity commodity servers.
By the numbers: Microsoft: 1,000+ desktop computers. OSS victory: 14 servers.
Sad to say, but the "best place" to code in depends on what your goal is.
After the best quality code? The best place is a quiet place, free of distractions, where the problem can be easily and clearly understood.
Want the best mood while coding? That's when you consider the balcony of a beach-front apartment, or a nice table with comfy chairs at a restaurant with a view for the afternoon.
Pick your goals, then come up with what you are after.
The trick is to find a place with a good combination of comfort for long-term developer happiness and contentment and actual good results. So a nice office with full snacks, comfortable chairs, nice lounge, music, being treated with courtesy and respect, decent pay, decent benefits, and having the freedom to develop in a non-restrictive manner, while still being held accountable for the result is a good mix, and that's where most businesses tend.
OSS software is a total boon to developers. I'm a developer, and we use OSS everywhere possible. Since we can easily support our software when something goes awry, we jump quickly and confidently.
But not every company has their own staff of developers. Companies that don't produce software have little incentive to hire developers if they don't contribute significantly to the bottom line. And for companies in this boat, OSS does, indeed, have costs that far outstrip the purchase price.
Windows Server licenses for needed servers might cost a grand or three. If this is sufficient to avoid the cost of hiring a developer (at around $100k/year) or an admin, (at ~ $60k/year) it's money very well spent!
Sure, I use OSS because it lets me sleep very soundly at night, with perhaps 1 significant unplanned incident per year in our hosting cluster of 14 servers. But part of that is that we already have paid the price of having developers on hand to maintain and understand our OSS-based servers.
And don't think that just because it's Microsoft, you can assume it's safe to laugh. I remember when MS Word was laughable. I remember when Windows was laughable. I remember when Excel was a toy compared to the "meat and potatoes" competition.
As a corporate culture, Microsoft learns how to dominate markets. They're losing right now, and maybe they won't turn things around in time. But they have massive assetts, they still have a monopoly in the desktop computing marketplace, and with Vista, they've shown a willingness to take risks if they are necessary to improve their software.
I know this is unpopular to state here on Slashdot, but many (most?) of the problems with Vista have been centered around making the changes necessary to more properly secure Windows. Software that was badly built that did bad things broke on Vista, and that's a necessary step to take in order to preserve their long term market share.
Don't laugh. Keep your head down, keep improving the OSS software, and be wary of Microsoft - they still have everything it would take to continue to dominate.
A nice, full-choke shotgun loaded with bird shot is a wonderful way to get mistletoe out of trees, for example. They're also a nice way to impress that chick wearing leather boots and a cowboy hat at the kind of bars I personally steer well clear of.
A crow bar is not illegal. I can buy one for as little as $5-$10. It's very useful in construction and demolitions.
But a crow bar can be a terribly violent weapon. Ever banged your shin with one? It would take just a good swing or two to commit murder.
In many jurisdictions, there are laws having to do with "brandishing a weapon", typically in a threatening manner. I can carry a crow bar all day long at a construction site, and nobody would care. If I carried the same crowbar into a fine restaurant, things would be markedly different. If I sold a crowbar to a kid who wanted to help his dad work on the garage, I'd be a nice guy. If I sold the same crowbar to a kid who wanted to off his ex-girlfriend's boyfriend, I could easily be an accessory to murder.
Torrent files are under copyright - the creator of the torrent has copy rights! Granted, he/she is unlikely to enforce them, but they are still copyrighted.
2) You can configure the task manager to show task from current or all desktops (right click on it and select "Task Manager Settings"). I'm not sure about the Compiz issue but it works fine with KWin.
It doesn't work with Compiz until I select the desktop. Notice that in Kwin, when you switch desktops, there's a small delay before the task manager updates with the hot keys for *that* desktop? Programmatically, there probably should be a different task manager widget for each desktop?
3/4) The default shorcuts for those actions are Alt-Shift-Tab and Meta-Shift-Tab. You can also change them in System Setting -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Global Keyboard Shorcuts -> KWin
It's when I change them that I have this problem. While I have no problem with Meta-Tab, Ctl-Tab, or Alt-Tab as a combination, the addition of the shift button breaks any of these. I can go forward, never backward.
5) Right click on the desktop and choose "Desktop Settings". Change the Desktop Activity type to "Desktop" and you'll have your old style desktop back. BTW, the settings bar will stop popping out on hover if you lock the widgets. Click the little icon on the top right corner and select "Lock Widgets".
System Settings / Display is very Mac-like and very pretty, but doesn't support dual-head configurations. At all. I have to hack up xorg.conf (and that isn't pretty!)
1) Can't drag a submenu directly on the task bar, only menu items.
2) Cross-desktop task list is (apparently) nowhere to be found. So when I have 2,3,4 desktops with tasks on them, I have to hunt through the desktops to find a particular one. Worse, the task bar at the bottom doesn't follow Compiz cube desktop, so I have to go to each desktop, select, wait for the task bar to update, and then go to the next one. (sigh) Perhaps this is because I only like tasks from the current desktop, but when does it make sense to mix tasks from 3 busy desktops into one little task bar? (confusing as he11!)
3) Control-Shift-Tab to "go back" a task doesn't work.
4) Control-Shit-Meta to "go back" a desktop doesn't work.
5) Can't put icons on the desktop. There's a widget where you can stick stuff that looks like a file explore window with the background faded, but it's distracting, what with the settings bar popping out everytime I hover over it. (ugh)
I upgraded a while ago to Fedora Core 10, running KDE with the HW accelerated desktop, Compiz and effects turned on. It almost never ceases to draw a surprise when I'm working while on display and casually turn the whole desktop into a cube, rotate it to a blank side, and put it back down!
It's damned good looking and makes even OSX 10.5 look dated! I use OSX and didn't really notice it until I went to buy a new screen and saw OSX on display.
Windows is about as exciting as watching bread turn green, but even MacOS looked kinda plain compared to my sexy new laptop display!
And I'm talking about simple looks, here. To be honest, it still has some stability issues that annoy the ?@?!/ out of me. Fedora 9 was painfully bad - worst distro I've ever used - but 10 is a good step in the right direction. KDE 4.2.x is the best 4 so far but it's still not functionally anywhere near 3.5.
Sure the *NAME* is "Secure Sockets Layer", and perhaps that was what it was originally developed for, but it's just wrong to say that it can't be used otherwise, and/or that it only encrypts data "in transit", not on a server. Take a look at this:
Here's the use of SSL functionality without (ahem) a socket. Right from the docs:
This function can be used e.g. to encrypt message which can be then read only by owner of the private key. It can be also used to store secure data in database.
I routinely use SSL to sign files in order to prove whodunnit. This information is stored alongside the signed document. Whether it's transported subsequently is inconsequential.
You say 'SSL only encrypts the transport' as if that means something. What is a file if it's not a way to transport information from the file writer to the file reader?
I use SSL daily to encrypt files with keys to be stored for later retrieval by the intended recipient. I think you are confusing SSL (the ability to assymetrically encrypt data) with HTTPS (a use of SSL to encrypt HTTP data transfers)?
Security is insanely easy to solve on a phone... 1) Build a Java VM for 3rd party Apps 2) Limit its API scope 3) Win.
Sure. I wrote a Java VM last week, and it was perfectly secure! Err...
Saying something idiotic like "Just write a secure VM!" is somewhat akin to "Just build a car that goes 200 miles on a gallon of gas!" or "Just build a supersonic space-plane!" - yeah, they can be done, and maybe even done well. But never for cheap, and never easy.
But hey, you know what's even harder than writing a secure VM? Writing a USABLE, secure VM. Especially with a limited API.
Just for the record, California's supreme court was the first to uphold gay's right to marry. Then California passed a law via a vote to ban gay marriage, and the supreme court found it unconstitutional. Then California passed (by a narrow margin) a constutional ammendment banning gay marriage.
Now it's back to the courts as to whether or not the constitutional ammendment was (ahem) unconstitutional. So Iowa is trailing California by some 20 years or so... the right-wing anti-freedom types are, as I write this, gathering their forces, telling everybody about how the evilbadgays are going to sodomize your children...
Seriously - never underestimate a foe whose strength come from being unreasonable!
Because so many here are clueless about copyright licensing, I thought I'd give a brief explanation of what it entails.
See many people think that you can't relicense a work without explicit agreement of anybody and everybody who ever edited that work. Picture go through the mind like vast emails asking a submitter about the semicolon at the end of line 35,219 in one of over a million files.
But if that were the case, a work could basically NEVER be relicensed! You're never going to get explicit permission from everybody (or even a majority) who has submitted to wikipedia.
Instead, there's a legal process wherein the license change is proposed in a very public forum, clearly documented as such, for a 'reasonable' period of time which depends on the work in question, the number of people involved, and the reqirements of the legal jurisdiction(s) in question.
During this time, having been given legally recognized reasonable notice, copyright holdeers can either agree to the change (by doing nothing) or they can object to the claim and withdraw copyrights to their works. This process (or very similar) exists around the world and applies when there are many people holding copyrights to a shared work. In practice, it works something like the legal notice section in your local newspaper, only in this case, it's global. (you do know about the legal notice section in your local paper, right?)
IANAL and all that, but I have done a fair share of legal stuffi n pro per, etc....
But it may be more simple than that: when you submitted your work(s) to wikipedia, dd you READ the license you were submitting it under? In many cases (not necessarily Wikipedia) you are granting the copyrights themselves to the receiver. AFAIK, WP doesn't work this way or they wouldn't have become so popular.
So the question comes back to you: Do you disagree with the license change? And if not, which of your submissions do you object to them using under the new license?
About the content, why would any IT person ever have to resort to "trust" anyone for their software compatibility? You'd almost think they can't grab a VM image of Windows7 and test their software to see if there are compatibility issues.
Sure, all done in their spare time. 'Cause you know, they work 20-something hour weeks, right?
If I were a CIT and someone came up to me with this dribble, I would tell them to build a testbed and actually report on compatibility issues, possible savings, and so forth. Windows 7 probably won't be worth the money but deciding that before you actual evaluate it is madness.
In between resetting passwords, performing network upgrades, resetting drivers (again!) for that !@# laser printer near the elevator, and negotiating the contract for the OC3 WAN line between corporate and the East Coast sales office...?
Sure, we'd all love the time to evaluate compatibility, but it's not as though that time is widely available. Time to do evaluations costs companies money. Therefore, the cost of migration can be high.
YOUR time is free to you. YOU can spend it on whatever you like, including running Win7 in a VM. But as soon as you are working for somebody else, they are paying for your time, and what you do with it suddenly matters!
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Shai Agassi is somebody I've been watching for a while. He's the only person I've seen with a plan that:
1) Will not result in a loss of quality of life for US citizens
2) Can eliminate the US' dependency on foreign oil.
3) Can "fix" the problems that the power grid has with "alternative" energy sources, which generally produce energy as available rather than as needed.
4) Will actually *save* money and resources over the current transportation system.
5) Eventually result in a power grid that's virtually immune to natural disasters and/or terrorist attacks.
Every so often, there's somebody who really, really, really groks the biggest problems society faces. Henry Ford was one such fellow, Shai Agassi is another.
I hope hope hope hope that the United States gets firmly behind this guy, because he's the one that could actually do it.
He understands that Ethanol and Hydrogen are effectively red herrings that favor the petroleum industry. His solution works with wind, solar, coal, nuclear, biomass, etc. His solution, if implemented, would result in a power grid that could maintain its stability even with a severe disruption of power flow due to the distributed nature of it. (Every car becomes a potential power source as needed, with rules determined by the owners of the cars)
There are few people who really, really, really get it. Shai Agassi is one of them. No, I'm not in any way attached or related to him, or his company. I'm just an upper-middle class American who gives a damn about the future of his country and mankind.
Surprisingly, as time goes by, the amount of ancient material available INCREASES every year. Old texts that are found and discovered are digitized and released to the world, rather than being lost in obscurity, readable by a small handful until the ultimate demise of the original work.
I see this every day.
For example, years back, when I was in High School, I was a big fan of "alternative" music. Bands like Depeche Mode, Erasure, Bauhaus, and others were my meat and potatoes, but being raised in small-town, USA, I had to work like the pretty hard to find stuff to listen to. My specialty was rare concert mixes and exploratory remixes - in many cases, I resigned to dubbing cassettes in order to get my fix.
Today, it's much easier for me to find rare, concert remixes! Many (most?) are available in mere seconds a la YouTube, as well as MP3s by LimeWire! And it seems that with each year, more and more and more obscure stuff is available - from Jerry Lee Lewis concerts to Arlo Guthrie live to early stage mixes of Yaz (then "Yazoo") ...
Why is this so?
Take a look at the Long Tail Economics principle made possible by the network effect of the Internet. This is one of the most insightful articles that exists on the Internet!
BTW: Here's your flying car....
That's great, you've created an intranet and demonstrated it's pricing. Now, of course, try to get a peering agreement with a tier-1 ISP so that your bits can travel to and from the internet at large. Try one month at 10 Mbps and another at 1000 Mbps and see if your bill changes.
I already do this, in effect. My company has a private hosting farm. We pay a flat rate for our redundant Internet connection at a top-notch hosting facility. It doesn't matter to us how much we use it, because the price is the same either way - the bill doesn't change.
Do I get a cookie now?
Except that power companies charge by the unit. So do water companies. This is fine, because it costs money to create a KwH, and the price of delivering more KwHs rises as more KwHs are delivered, as it costs real energy and money to pump water.
Internet is flat-rate, and should be, IMHO because it represents nothing real. Although it costs something to provide infrastructure for more demand, once that infrastructure is created, the cost of delivery is very near zero.
Here's an experiment, in case this isn't absolutely clear:
1) Buy/borrow a 2 Kilowatt gas generator. Start it up, and run it for 1 hour with no load. Note how much gasoline it burns. This represents the energy used to overcome internal friction. Then run it for 1 hour with a 1,500 watt blow-dryer running continuously. Note how much gasoline it burns. You'll be surprised at the difference in fuel consumption!
2) Get a Gb switching hub, 2 computers, and an amp-meter. Plug the computers into the wall, plug the switch into the amp meter. Note the power usage of the switch with no load. Then set up a load where you are using 1 Mbps of traffic between the two computers, and note the Amp load. Then try 10 Mbsp, 100 Mbps, and 1000 Mbps. You'll notice that the amperage (for most switching hubs) climbs very little as you do so, and that the total power consumption is insignificant.
* * *
So bandwidth usage represents nothing "real". There isn't a significant energy or material consumption per bandwidth unit. After the cost of infrastructure, and a small fixed cost for powering the equipment, the cost of delivering 1000 Mbps is only marginally higher than the near-zero cost of 1 Mbps. There *is* an infrastructure cost that needs to be amortized over the life of the connection, and this represents the vast majority of the true cost of bandwidth.
It's just idiotic that the Nation responsible for building the Internets in the first place is so far behind other industrialized nations for using it!
Books don't run on a computer. You can "download" a book, but using a laptop to read a book is inconvenient, and an e-book reader is expensive and clumsy.
But software needs to run ON the computer. There's no real benefit to the packaging and/or CD itself once it's installed, other than you can get $3 selling it back to (ahem) the local software/games store.
Used games is what the local software store makes money on, anyway. I bought GTA 3 for PS2 at the local store for $7, and I doubt the the original guy got more than $2 for the game.
While the basement is quite good for me, I always get interrupted by my partner as this is her favorite place too. What we do while there is just not relevant to Slashdot's audience at the moment. But I will say I hardly get anything done on the coding front when she drops by.
What... does your mother make you pick up your dirty socks?
They can, however, get a contract with a company that does employ developers. This company can then dive in and fix any bugs that they encounter. They can do the same with proprietary software, but only from the original seller, and unless they are a very big company they are unlikely to get bugs fixed in, say, Office or Windows.
BTW: This is *exactly* what my company does - we host software as a service for customers, and so by extension, thousands of people depend on the operation of OSS software that we host on a handful of medium-capacity commodity servers.
By the numbers: Microsoft: 1,000+ desktop computers. OSS victory: 14 servers.
Sad to say, but the "best place" to code in depends on what your goal is.
After the best quality code? The best place is a quiet place, free of distractions, where the problem can be easily and clearly understood.
Want the best mood while coding? That's when you consider the balcony of a beach-front apartment, or a nice table with comfy chairs at a restaurant with a view for the afternoon.
Pick your goals, then come up with what you are after.
The trick is to find a place with a good combination of comfort for long-term developer happiness and contentment and actual good results. So a nice office with full snacks, comfortable chairs, nice lounge, music, being treated with courtesy and respect, decent pay, decent benefits, and having the freedom to develop in a non-restrictive manner, while still being held accountable for the result is a good mix, and that's where most businesses tend.
Including my own.
OSS software is a total boon to developers. I'm a developer, and we use OSS everywhere possible. Since we can easily support our software when something goes awry, we jump quickly and confidently.
But not every company has their own staff of developers. Companies that don't produce software have little incentive to hire developers if they don't contribute significantly to the bottom line. And for companies in this boat, OSS does, indeed, have costs that far outstrip the purchase price.
Windows Server licenses for needed servers might cost a grand or three. If this is sufficient to avoid the cost of hiring a developer (at around $100k/year) or an admin, (at ~ $60k/year) it's money very well spent!
Sure, I use OSS because it lets me sleep very soundly at night, with perhaps 1 significant unplanned incident per year in our hosting cluster of 14 servers. But part of that is that we already have paid the price of having developers on hand to maintain and understand our OSS-based servers.
And don't think that just because it's Microsoft, you can assume it's safe to laugh. I remember when MS Word was laughable. I remember when Windows was laughable. I remember when Excel was a toy compared to the "meat and potatoes" competition.
As a corporate culture, Microsoft learns how to dominate markets. They're losing right now, and maybe they won't turn things around in time. But they have massive assetts, they still have a monopoly in the desktop computing marketplace, and with Vista, they've shown a willingness to take risks if they are necessary to improve their software.
I know this is unpopular to state here on Slashdot, but many (most?) of the problems with Vista have been centered around making the changes necessary to more properly secure Windows. Software that was badly built that did bad things broke on Vista, and that's a necessary step to take in order to preserve their long term market share.
Don't laugh. Keep your head down, keep improving the OSS software, and be wary of Microsoft - they still have everything it would take to continue to dominate.
So the wireless router, cables and receiver were all free?
Often the wireless router + Internet are provided for free by the largest nationwide Wireless ISP: Linksys!
Guns are tools too!
A nice, full-choke shotgun loaded with bird shot is a wonderful way to get mistletoe out of trees, for example. They're also a nice way to impress that chick wearing leather boots and a cowboy hat at the kind of bars I personally steer well clear of.
A crow bar is not illegal. I can buy one for as little as $5-$10. It's very useful in construction and demolitions.
But a crow bar can be a terribly violent weapon. Ever banged your shin with one? It would take just a good swing or two to commit murder.
In many jurisdictions, there are laws having to do with "brandishing a weapon", typically in a threatening manner. I can carry a crow bar all day long at a construction site, and nobody would care. If I carried the same crowbar into a fine restaurant, things would be markedly different. If I sold a crowbar to a kid who wanted to help his dad work on the garage, I'd be a nice guy. If I sold the same crowbar to a kid who wanted to off his ex-girlfriend's boyfriend, I could easily be an accessory to murder.
Intent matters. It's not the tool, it's the act!
Torrent files are under copyright - the creator of the torrent has copy rights! Granted, he/she is unlikely to enforce them, but they are still copyrighted.
rware Iron is Chrome compiled without all the Google spyware crap and it has adblock built in.
Unfortunately, they don't have a download in RPM or source form, so I can't install it on my Fedora Core 10 laptop.
Without *nix support, Chrome(ium) is a non-starter.
2) You can configure the task manager to show task from current or all desktops (right click on it and select "Task Manager Settings"). I'm not sure about the Compiz issue but it works fine with KWin.
It doesn't work with Compiz until I select the desktop. Notice that in Kwin, when you switch desktops, there's a small delay before the task manager updates with the hot keys for *that* desktop? Programmatically, there probably should be a different task manager widget for each desktop?
3/4) The default shorcuts for those actions are Alt-Shift-Tab and Meta-Shift-Tab. You can also change them in System Setting -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Global Keyboard Shorcuts -> KWin
It's when I change them that I have this problem. While I have no problem with Meta-Tab, Ctl-Tab, or Alt-Tab as a combination, the addition of the shift button breaks any of these. I can go forward, never backward.
5) Right click on the desktop and choose "Desktop Settings". Change the Desktop Activity type to "Desktop" and you'll have your old style desktop back. BTW, the settings bar will stop popping out on hover if you lock the widgets. Click the little icon on the top right corner and select "Lock Widgets".
Thanks! Finally, a desktop that is a... desktop!
Another one:
System Settings / Display is very Mac-like and very pretty, but doesn't support dual-head configurations. At all. I have to hack up xorg.conf (and that isn't pretty!)
Here are a few shortcomings:
1) Can't drag a submenu directly on the task bar, only menu items.
2) Cross-desktop task list is (apparently) nowhere to be found. So when I have 2,3,4 desktops with tasks on them, I have to hunt through the desktops to find a particular one. Worse, the task bar at the bottom doesn't follow Compiz cube desktop, so I have to go to each desktop, select, wait for the task bar to update, and then go to the next one. (sigh) Perhaps this is because I only like tasks from the current desktop, but when does it make sense to mix tasks from 3 busy desktops into one little task bar? (confusing as he11!)
3) Control-Shift-Tab to "go back" a task doesn't work.
4) Control-Shit-Meta to "go back" a desktop doesn't work.
5) Can't put icons on the desktop. There's a widget where you can stick stuff that looks like a file explore window with the background faded, but it's distracting, what with the settings bar popping out everytime I hover over it. (ugh)
I upgraded a while ago to Fedora Core 10, running KDE with the HW accelerated desktop, Compiz and effects turned on. It almost never ceases to draw a surprise when I'm working while on display and casually turn the whole desktop into a cube, rotate it to a blank side, and put it back down!
It's damned good looking and makes even OSX 10.5 look dated! I use OSX and didn't really notice it until I went to buy a new screen and saw OSX on display.
Windows is about as exciting as watching bread turn green, but even MacOS looked kinda plain compared to my sexy new laptop display!
And I'm talking about simple looks, here. To be honest, it still has some stability issues that annoy the ?@?!/ out of me. Fedora 9 was painfully bad - worst distro I've ever used - but 10 is a good step in the right direction. KDE 4.2.x is the best 4 so far but it's still not functionally anywhere near 3.5.
Sure the *NAME* is "Secure Sockets Layer", and perhaps that was what it was originally developed for, but it's just wrong to say that it can't be used otherwise, and/or that it only encrypts data "in transit", not on a server. Take a look at this:
http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.openssl-public-encrypt.php
Here's the use of SSL functionality without (ahem) a socket. Right from the docs:
This function can be used e.g. to encrypt message which can be then read only by owner of the private key. It can be also used to store secure data in database.
I routinely use SSL to sign files in order to prove whodunnit. This information is stored alongside the signed document. Whether it's transported subsequently is inconsequential.
You say 'SSL only encrypts the transport' as if that means something. What is a file if it's not a way to transport information from the file writer to the file reader?
I use SSL daily to encrypt files with keys to be stored for later retrieval by the intended recipient. I think you are confusing SSL (the ability to assymetrically encrypt data) with HTTPS (a use of SSL to encrypt HTTP data transfers)?
Security is insanely easy to solve on a phone...
1) Build a Java VM for 3rd party Apps
2) Limit its API scope
3) Win.
Sure. I wrote a Java VM last week, and it was perfectly secure! Err...
Saying something idiotic like "Just write a secure VM!" is somewhat akin to "Just build a car that goes 200 miles on a gallon of gas!" or "Just build a supersonic space-plane!" - yeah, they can be done, and maybe even done well. But never for cheap, and never easy.
But hey, you know what's even harder than writing a secure VM? Writing a USABLE, secure VM. Especially with a limited API.
Just for the record, California's supreme court was the first to uphold gay's right to marry. Then California passed a law via a vote to ban gay marriage, and the supreme court found it unconstitutional. Then California passed (by a narrow margin) a constutional ammendment banning gay marriage.
Now it's back to the courts as to whether or not the constitutional ammendment was (ahem) unconstitutional. So Iowa is trailing California by some 20 years or so... the right-wing anti-freedom types are, as I write this, gathering their forces, telling everybody about how the evilbadgays are going to sodomize your children...
Seriously - never underestimate a foe whose strength come from being unreasonable!
Because so many here are clueless about copyright licensing, I thought I'd give a brief explanation of what it entails.
See many people think that you can't relicense a work without explicit agreement of anybody and everybody who ever edited that work. Picture go through the mind like vast emails asking a submitter about the semicolon at the end of line 35,219 in one of over a million files.
But if that were the case, a work could basically NEVER be relicensed! You're never going to get explicit permission from everybody (or even a majority) who has submitted to wikipedia.
Instead, there's a legal process wherein the license change is proposed in a very public forum, clearly documented as such, for a 'reasonable' period of time which depends on the work in question, the number of people involved, and the reqirements of the legal jurisdiction(s) in question.
During this time, having been given legally recognized reasonable notice, copyright holdeers can either agree to the change (by doing nothing) or they can object to the claim and withdraw copyrights to their works. This process (or very similar) exists around the world and applies when there are many people holding copyrights to a shared work. In practice, it works something like the legal notice section in your local newspaper, only in this case, it's global. (you do know about the legal notice section in your local paper, right?)
IANAL and all that, but I have done a fair share of legal stuffi n pro per, etc....
But it may be more simple than that: when you submitted your work(s) to wikipedia, dd you READ the license you were submitting it under? In many cases (not necessarily Wikipedia) you are granting the copyrights themselves to the receiver. AFAIK, WP doesn't work this way or they wouldn't have become so popular.
So the question comes back to you: Do you disagree with the license change? And if not, which of your submissions do you object to them using under the new license?
About the content, why would any IT person ever have to resort to "trust" anyone for their software compatibility? You'd almost think they can't grab a VM image of Windows7 and test their software to see if there are compatibility issues.
Sure, all done in their spare time. 'Cause you know, they work 20-something hour weeks, right?
If I were a CIT and someone came up to me with this dribble, I would tell them to build a testbed and actually report on compatibility issues, possible savings, and so forth. Windows 7 probably won't be worth the money but deciding that before you actual evaluate it is madness.
In between resetting passwords, performing network upgrades, resetting drivers (again!) for that !@# laser printer near the elevator, and negotiating the contract for the OC3 WAN line between corporate and the East Coast sales office...?
Sure, we'd all love the time to evaluate compatibility, but it's not as though that time is widely available. Time to do evaluations costs companies money. Therefore, the cost of migration can be high.
YOUR time is free to you. YOU can spend it on whatever you like, including running Win7 in a VM. But as soon as you are working for somebody else, they are paying for your time, and what you do with it suddenly matters!