For what it's worth, I don't think the comment was worth the down-modding. This story may arguably be "news for nerds", but "stuff that matters"? Enough for the front page? Maybe I'm just getting old...
How about *you* go to hell, or start shouting at the right people?
I'm not actually advocating mandatory wireless encryption; it's your wireless, I think you should be free to leave it open if you want. I encrypt mine, but that's my choice.
These rules are being put into place because the appartment complex is probably getting kickbacks from the local cable or DSL provider and they want to make sure they collect the maximum possible number of subscription fees.
Now you're being utterly, utterly ridiculous. All the article says is that they're considering mandating encryption. So, rather than having an open network, you switch on WEP or WPA and tell everyone what the key is. Hell, make the SSID the key if you want.
If the ISPs were behind it, they'd simply mandate it in their TOS, and everyone would be caught by it, whether they live in an apartment block (and so have a management team) or not (and so most likely don't).
Congratulations on being a big business shill.
Congratulations on being a typical over-reacting ad hominem throwing slashbot. Nowhere in my post did I say it was ok to impose these rules, I just pointed out that they did not prevent the hypothetical collaboration posited by the OP. Hell, I even pointed out that local tenancy laws may prevent that sort of rule; I very much doubt that any landlord or association in the UK could impose them, for example.
But again, if you want to go through life wasting energy fighting battles that needn't happen, that's your choice too.
Taken to its logical conclusion, none of us here should be spending the money on an internet connection, computer, console, TV, etc. Sure, none of those things on their own are very expensive, but taken as a whole over the whole population, it adds up.
My £15/month for my ADSL connection, for example, would feed a family or two in the poorest parts of Africa, and yet here I am...
I receive several thousand spams, delivery failure notifications and assorted crap mails every single day. If other people kept their machines more secure, there would be fewer zombied PCs sending out spam and virus emails, and I'd have less crap to deal with.
That's one reason why I care about other people's network secrity despite not being paid to do so - enlightened self interest. The more secure the network is as a whole, the better it is for everyone.
Now, I'm not arguing for mandatory security, just pointing out that there are valid reasons to care about the security of other people's systems.
So if I move into one of these blocks and am friends with my neighbour and want to collaborate on a project the 'management will come and shut us down?
No, they'll tell you to enable encryption, which you'll do, and you'll agree on a shared secret, and all will be well and you'll realise that the sky isn't falling after all. That's assuming that they have the right to impose such conditions in the first place; that'll depend on your local tenancy laws.
As another poster said, that's not how clearance works. For a concrete example, here in the UK every British citizen automatically has clearance to see material marked as RESTRICTED.
However, were I to distribute any of the RESTRICTED material that I have access to, I would lose my clearance and potentially be prosecuted under the various Offical Secrets Acts. I would also no doubt be fired in short order.
The bottom line is that if someone doesn't need to know some information, whether they have sufficient clearance or not they don't get to know it, full stop.
iTunes is particularly bad in that respect - not only does it want to be your default for absolutely everything, but it forces you to install Quicktime *and* installs an iPod helper service without asking.
A touch arrogant; not everyone who wants to buy music online has an iPod, and how hard would it be to make it configurable?
On the other hand, setting aside anti-trust legislation for a moment, where does it say that MS isn't allowed to charge whatever price they want to whoever they feel like it? What's to say - remembering my previous caveat - that they can't double or triple the price to an OEM who wants to change system defaults to non-MS software, or install OpenOffice, etc?
The only reason anyone can tell them that they can't do that is because they lost the anti-trust case. If they were just another OS vendor with a roughly equal market share, they could do whatever they wanted and no-one could say anything to the contrary. Of course, that would be because the OEMs would have a viable alternative, and so have the bargaining power to say "Fine then, we'll ship with GeekOS 2008 instead then, screw you."
As for "alowing" end users to change settings like that, swap "allow" for "enable", and you'll be closer to the intended meaning.
I'm an avid Linux user but do I care about when the next kernel release is? No, not particularly
And yet, you'll find that slashdot reports on them, too. In fact, as annoying as Vista Beta stories are now, Linux kernel release stories were just as bad a year or so ago when there was seemingly a teeny release every week or so, and slashdot reported every single one of them.
It may have been a fake gun but it looked real then.
When I was a teenager growing up in Cornwall, a mate of mine had a gun.
The barrel and each of the chambers had been blocked; there was no way of firing it in that condition. Looked real enough, of course, because it was. It had been his grandfather's service rolver in the war, iirc.
Perhaps I enjoy listening to music, and refuse to allow some low-life pieces of shit scare me into behaving in a certain way?
Sure, don't take stupid risks - stay out of known rough areas after dark, etc. But I'll be damned if I'm going to stop carrying my iRiver and phone with me just because I might get mugged for them.
If I can't use them, what's the point of owning them?
weapon charges tacked on to robbery in the states make it a much bigger offense - not too sure what the UK is like regarding that
ObIANAL, but yes, armed robbery is a touch more serious here than unarmed robbery. Also, they're likely to get you on at least one firearms offence (as you almost certainly aren't allowed to own the gun or carry it in public, especially not concealed) and quite likely something along the lines of "going prepared".
For example, it's legal to own a crow bar, and leagel to transport it. If you use it to break into a house, they'll get you for going equipped as well as the breaking and entering; having the crow bar with you will be taken as demonstrating intent and some degree of planning.
While I agree with you, the argument can be made that although you have no real idea what needs to be done to keep your car in good condition, you do at least realise that it needs to be maintained, and that that requires regular services.
The computing equivalent - of regularly applying updates - really ought to be just as obvious. I think one of the major problems is that while most people realise that machines suffer from wear and tear and so will obviously fail in time if not maintained, the equivalent understanding - that almost no sufficiently-complex code is perfect first time - hasn't made it into the collective subconscious.
I imagine that most of us around here who install AdBlock and FlashBlock do so because of the bandwidth and processor power that ad-laden pages take.
Speaking personally, I generally block ads that are misleading, flashy and/or distracting. I've lost count of the number of times an otherwise perfectly good webpage has been ruined (aesthetically) by an in your face ad.
Anything that attempts to look like a system dialogue, or to convince me that my PC is running slowly and needs to be fixed, etc, gets the entire advertiser's domain and sub-domains blocked. I hate that shit.
One of the things that kept me with the original Mozilla suite for so long, rather than switching to Firefox was the ability to trigger a search from the address bar.
And one of the first things I switch off in IE (for those times when I have to use it) is searching from the address bar.
If I've typoed an URL, I want to know about it, I don't want something to present me with a list of options or to take me to its best guess at what I meant.
YMM, and obviously does, V.
Now that Firefox can do the same (and not waste screen real estate with an unneccesary extra box)
I have that "unnecessary extra box" right next to the address box; I'm assuming that's the default, as I certainly won't have put it there (if I want to search, I go to google first). This is in 1.5.0.4, although I've upgraded steadily from 1.4ish at a guess.
Well, everyone seems to be complaining about the size and speed of the Vista beta, so it's not like it's without precedent...
That aside, I've used the Firefox beta, and while I will no doubt end up using the finished 2.0, there's no way I can use the beta. I appreciate that it's slow because it's compiled in debug mode, hasn't had last minute optimisations applied, etc - but that doesn't change the fact that for me, on a P4 3GHz with 2 gig of RAM, it's slow enough to be unusable.
I don't use Opera or IE, and so have no interest in the betas, so I can't comment on them.
No, it's a really, really bad interpretation of what the article says:
By shifting more of the graphics processing tasks to the graphics hardware, the CPU is freed up to focus on other gameplay related tasks like better AI, more in-scene entities and deeper physics, thus enabling entirely new gameplay experiences.
So in fact, it offloads (even) more graphics processing to the GPU; it does not offload AI and physics processing to the CPU, it reduces the CPU's load so it can focus on that sort of task.
Proprietary software is essentially the only development model that's compatible with patents.
You can take out a patent on something then give a rolayty-free licence to anyone who wants one to implement the patented tech. No, it's not usual, and yes, there is always the fear that you'll change your mind in the future, but it's not entirely true to say that only proprietary software can work with patents.
The Slashdot editors have proven, once again, that they suck at what they do. Actually, worse than that, they don't actually DO what they do!
Actually, if you read the FAQ, you'll find that the editors don't even claim to do what you think they do:
How do you verify the accuracy of Slashdot stories?
We don't. You do.:) If something seems outrageous, we might look for some corroboration, but as a rule, we regard this as the responsibility of the submitter and the audience. This is why it's important to read comments. You might find something that refutes, or supports, the story in the main.
Answered by: CmdrTaco Last Modified: 10/28/00
I'm not saying it's right, just that you really shouldn't be surprised. It's always been this way.
I'm confused - when you refer to "their" headline, do you mean the one from the original article, which was written by PCAdvisor, or the one here, which was written by v3xt0r (assuming timothy didn't "edit" it)?
Perhaps you want to make sure you're aiming in the right direction, before flinging too much mud.
Slashdot Mirror
For what it's worth, I don't think the comment was worth the down-modding. This story may arguably be "news for nerds", but "stuff that matters"? Enough for the front page? Maybe I'm just getting old...
Indeed. 1GB is 1024MB; 12Mbps is 1.5MBps.
1024/1.5 is ~680s, or a touch under 12 minutes.
If it took 10 minutes to transfer about 100MB, something else is indeed wrong.
How about *you* go to hell, or start shouting at the right people?
I'm not actually advocating mandatory wireless encryption; it's your wireless, I think you should be free to leave it open if you want. I encrypt mine, but that's my choice.
These rules are being put into place because the appartment complex is probably getting kickbacks from the local cable or DSL provider and they want to make sure they collect the maximum possible number of subscription fees.
Now you're being utterly, utterly ridiculous. All the article says is that they're considering mandating encryption. So, rather than having an open network, you switch on WEP or WPA and tell everyone what the key is. Hell, make the SSID the key if you want.
If the ISPs were behind it, they'd simply mandate it in their TOS, and everyone would be caught by it, whether they live in an apartment block (and so have a management team) or not (and so most likely don't).
Congratulations on being a big business shill.
Congratulations on being a typical over-reacting ad hominem throwing slashbot. Nowhere in my post did I say it was ok to impose these rules, I just pointed out that they did not prevent the hypothetical collaboration posited by the OP. Hell, I even pointed out that local tenancy laws may prevent that sort of rule; I very much doubt that any landlord or association in the UK could impose them, for example.
But again, if you want to go through life wasting energy fighting battles that needn't happen, that's your choice too.
Taken to its logical conclusion, none of us here should be spending the money on an internet connection, computer, console, TV, etc. Sure, none of those things on their own are very expensive, but taken as a whole over the whole population, it adds up.
My £15/month for my ADSL connection, for example, would feed a family or two in the poorest parts of Africa, and yet here I am...
I receive several thousand spams, delivery failure notifications and assorted crap mails every single day. If other people kept their machines more secure, there would be fewer zombied PCs sending out spam and virus emails, and I'd have less crap to deal with.
That's one reason why I care about other people's network secrity despite not being paid to do so - enlightened self interest. The more secure the network is as a whole, the better it is for everyone.
Now, I'm not arguing for mandatory security, just pointing out that there are valid reasons to care about the security of other people's systems.
So if I move into one of these blocks and am friends with my neighbour and want to collaborate on a project the 'management will come and shut us down?
No, they'll tell you to enable encryption, which you'll do, and you'll agree on a shared secret, and all will be well and you'll realise that the sky isn't falling after all. That's assuming that they have the right to impose such conditions in the first place; that'll depend on your local tenancy laws.
As another poster said, that's not how clearance works. For a concrete example, here in the UK every British citizen automatically has clearance to see material marked as RESTRICTED.
However, were I to distribute any of the RESTRICTED material that I have access to, I would lose my clearance and potentially be prosecuted under the various Offical Secrets Acts. I would also no doubt be fired in short order.
The bottom line is that if someone doesn't need to know some information, whether they have sufficient clearance or not they don't get to know it, full stop.
Like paying and training humans for an army to kill, it must be done.
That's a very interesting opinion; do you have any facts or arguments to back up that assertion? In other words, can you prove that it "must be done"?
iTunes is particularly bad in that respect - not only does it want to be your default for absolutely everything, but it forces you to install Quicktime *and* installs an iPod helper service without asking.
A touch arrogant; not everyone who wants to buy music online has an iPod, and how hard would it be to make it configurable?
As that is not my experience, I am going to have to ask for some proof of that.
On the other hand, setting aside anti-trust legislation for a moment, where does it say that MS isn't allowed to charge whatever price they want to whoever they feel like it? What's to say - remembering my previous caveat - that they can't double or triple the price to an OEM who wants to change system defaults to non-MS software, or install OpenOffice, etc?
The only reason anyone can tell them that they can't do that is because they lost the anti-trust case. If they were just another OS vendor with a roughly equal market share, they could do whatever they wanted and no-one could say anything to the contrary. Of course, that would be because the OEMs would have a viable alternative, and so have the bargaining power to say "Fine then, we'll ship with GeekOS 2008 instead then, screw you."
As for "alowing" end users to change settings like that, swap "allow" for "enable", and you'll be closer to the intended meaning.
Set Program Access and Defaults was definitely NOT in Windows 98.
It was added to Windows XP in SP1, and in Windows 2000 SP3.
Seconded. No such functionality existed in Win98. I don't know if it was added with an update later, but I doubt it.
I'm an avid Linux user but do I care about when the next kernel release is? No, not particularly
And yet, you'll find that slashdot reports on them, too. In fact, as annoying as Vista Beta stories are now, Linux kernel release stories were just as bad a year or so ago when there was seemingly a teeny release every week or so, and slashdot reported every single one of them.
It may have been a fake gun but it looked real then.
When I was a teenager growing up in Cornwall, a mate of mine had a gun.
The barrel and each of the chambers had been blocked; there was no way of firing it in that condition. Looked real enough, of course, because it was. It had been his grandfather's service rolver in the war, iirc.
Perhaps I enjoy listening to music, and refuse to allow some low-life pieces of shit scare me into behaving in a certain way?
Sure, don't take stupid risks - stay out of known rough areas after dark, etc. But I'll be damned if I'm going to stop carrying my iRiver and phone with me just because I might get mugged for them.
If I can't use them, what's the point of owning them?
weapon charges tacked on to robbery in the states make it a much bigger offense - not too sure what the UK is like regarding that
ObIANAL, but yes, armed robbery is a touch more serious here than unarmed robbery. Also, they're likely to get you on at least one firearms offence (as you almost certainly aren't allowed to own the gun or carry it in public, especially not concealed) and quite likely something along the lines of "going prepared".
For example, it's legal to own a crow bar, and leagel to transport it. If you use it to break into a house, they'll get you for going equipped as well as the breaking and entering; having the crow bar with you will be taken as demonstrating intent and some degree of planning.
While I agree with you, the argument can be made that although you have no real idea what needs to be done to keep your car in good condition, you do at least realise that it needs to be maintained, and that that requires regular services.
The computing equivalent - of regularly applying updates - really ought to be just as obvious. I think one of the major problems is that while most people realise that machines suffer from wear and tear and so will obviously fail in time if not maintained, the equivalent understanding - that almost no sufficiently-complex code is perfect first time - hasn't made it into the collective subconscious.
I imagine that most of us around here who install AdBlock and FlashBlock do so because of the bandwidth and processor power that ad-laden pages take.
Speaking personally, I generally block ads that are misleading, flashy and/or distracting. I've lost count of the number of times an otherwise perfectly good webpage has been ruined (aesthetically) by an in your face ad.
Anything that attempts to look like a system dialogue, or to convince me that my PC is running slowly and needs to be fixed, etc, gets the entire advertiser's domain and sub-domains blocked. I hate that shit.
One of the things that kept me with the original Mozilla suite for so long, rather than switching to Firefox was the ability to trigger a search from the address bar.
And one of the first things I switch off in IE (for those times when I have to use it) is searching from the address bar.
If I've typoed an URL, I want to know about it, I don't want something to present me with a list of options or to take me to its best guess at what I meant.
YMM, and obviously does, V.
Now that Firefox can do the same (and not waste screen real estate with an unneccesary extra box)
I have that "unnecessary extra box" right next to the address box; I'm assuming that's the default, as I certainly won't have put it there (if I want to search, I go to google first). This is in 1.5.0.4, although I've upgraded steadily from 1.4ish at a guess.
Well, everyone seems to be complaining about the size and speed of the Vista beta, so it's not like it's without precedent...
That aside, I've used the Firefox beta, and while I will no doubt end up using the finished 2.0, there's no way I can use the beta. I appreciate that it's slow because it's compiled in debug mode, hasn't had last minute optimisations applied, etc - but that doesn't change the fact that for me, on a P4 3GHz with 2 gig of RAM, it's slow enough to be unusable.
I don't use Opera or IE, and so have no interest in the betas, so I can't comment on them.
So in fact, it offloads (even) more graphics processing to the GPU; it does not offload AI and physics processing to the CPU, it reduces the CPU's load so it can focus on that sort of task.
Perhaps the "editors" should talk to each other?
Proprietary software is essentially the only development model that's compatible with patents.
You can take out a patent on something then give a rolayty-free licence to anyone who wants one to implement the patented tech. No, it's not usual, and yes, there is always the fear that you'll change your mind in the future, but it's not entirely true to say that only proprietary software can work with patents.
Actually, if you read the FAQ, you'll find that the editors don't even claim to do what you think they do:
I'm not saying it's right, just that you really shouldn't be surprised. It's always been this way.
I'm confused - when you refer to "their" headline, do you mean the one from the original article, which was written by PCAdvisor, or the one here, which was written by v3xt0r (assuming timothy didn't "edit" it)?
Perhaps you want to make sure you're aiming in the right direction, before flinging too much mud.