If I were the manufacturer, at this point I'd say: (1) lawyers are expensive; (2) competent programmers are expensive, but less expensive than lawyers; (3) our business is selling the beathalyzer, not the software, so we gain nothing by keeping the source secret; (4) this publicity is hurting us; (5) let's hire some more competent programmers to clean up the code, and then we can make it public; (6) profit!
This is different from the case of the voting machines. In the case of a voting machine, there are lots of people who might be motivated to hack it, lots of people have access to the machines, and it only takes one compromised machine to throw a close election. If you believe in security by obscurity, then there is at least some logical argument for keeping the voting machine code secret. In the case of the breathalyzer, there's not even that lame argument.
Really? You think you're going to have pleasure running Ubuntu 9 on hardware you're not sure can handle Windows XP?
Okay, first off, Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) is a long-term support release, which will be supported on the desktop until April 2013, which is still a long way off. So, no, there would be no reason to run Ubuntu 9 on such hardware.
Next: I haven't seen any evidence that Ubuntu 9.x is significantly more resource-hungry than Ubuntu 8.x. I have Ubuntu 9.x running on a 2.2 GHz celeron with 512 Mb ram, and it seems perfectly fine. I think a lot of people are so brainwashed by the upgrade-treadmill thing that they just assume software always gets dramatically more resource-hungry with each release. In my experience that's not true with Linux, or with any other open-source software. The more recent versions of Ubuntu have some fancy graphics built into Gnome. However, (1) you don't need to use Gnome as your window manager (xfce is better on low-end hardware), and (2) if you don't have a high-end graphics card, Ubuntu automatically detects that, and turns off the fancy eye candy.
It tends to be extremely difficult to get reliable information on what hardware is really necessary in order to run a particular version of Windows with decent performance. The hardware I'm talking about is P4 systems from ca. 2001, with 512 Mb of memory. The IT manager at my school has cautioned us that they may have crap performance with XP. MS's official system requirements say no problem, they'll run XP just fine. It's hard to know whom to believe.
Testing doesn't necessarily help much, either. My campus is currently experiencing a lot of problems with computers that used to run just fine, but now, with no OS upgrade or anything, they just suddenly take 35 minutes from power-up to having a web browser up and ready. Our IT staff waves their hands and says it's because the network is slow. I had a room with 7 identical machines, and one of them was having the problem, while the other 6 performed just fine; IT upgraded the memory on all of them from 256 Mb to 512 Mb, and the problem seemed to be fixed. Looking through this thread, it's amazing how many totally contradictory opinions you can see about what hardware is necessary in order to get what performance with what OS.
Re:Saw It in Music! Coming Soon in Games, E-Books
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Why Bother With DRM?
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To amplify on your point about e-books, this is already happening in the college textbook market. The textbook publishers hate hate hate hate hate the used book market. They try to fight it by bringing out a new edition every three years, but they're still not satisfied. The latest thing they're pushing heavily is digital books that students pay for on a subscription basis. As soon as the student stops paying, he can no longer use the book. This is exactly analogous to the way the slashdot summary describes the game makers as using DRM to try to impede the used game market.
no, linux does not always run well on old hardware. ubuntu and kubuntu are very bad in this regard. try and run 9.04 on a 5 year old 256mb 2ghz p4 setup. you will bang your head into the monitor. it's just too slow.
Uh, I do run ubuntu on machines with exactly the specs you're talking about. In the Windows lab at my school that I described in my original post, I have a bunch of Linux boxes that I picked up at garage sales and Good Will. About half of them have 256 Mb, the others 512. Linux's performance on those machines, including the 256 Mb ones, is perfectly acceptable. It's true that Gnome doesn't feel fast on those machines; that's why I usually use xfce or fluxbox on them. (My students use xfce or Gnome.) I used to have some with 128 Mb, and they were very slow when you ran OpenOffice in Gnome. Upgrading to 256 Mb made them into perfectly decent machines.
When I had a hard drive go bad, I threw a lastest-release distribution on a 1-year-old laptop and it was staggeringly slow.
I can't comment on your hardware and software setup, since I don't know what it was. However, I use Ubuntu on machines from circa 2001 (256 Mb of RAM), and it performs fine. Gnome can be a bit of a dog on older hardware; xfce is better.
Do you believe you could purchase a support contract for a 10-year-old distribution of Linux today?
No. Why would I want to? I'd upgrade. With Linux, there's no hardware treadmill (because Linux works well on old hardware), and the OS treadmill is free.
Can you please list other commercial OS'es which are still supported after 10 years?
No, I can't. I didn't intend to imply that MS was worse than other proprietary OS vendors. I just meant that proprietary OS vendors were worse than open-source OS vendors.
Apple often has the same issue where its interests conflict with the interests of its users. The existence of the iPhone jailbreaking scene is a good example of that. If anything, I think the treadmill phenomenon is worse with MacOS than with Windows. I've owned something like a nine macs since 1985. My wife and I finally stopped paying for the $130 MacOS X system upgrades several years ago, and stopped putting money into repairing her ailing lampshade iMac. The result is that we have one iBook that can't run any recent software, and which we only get out of the closet a few times a year when we need it on a trip, or when we need to access a web site that won't work with Firefox.
There's a gigantic conflict of interest here. By treating MacOS as a second-class citizen, they can hurt a competitor in the OS market. If MS can make people perceive Windows as the only first-class platform on which to run Office, it makes MS more likely to retain market share for Windows. MS's interests in this case are diametrically opposed to the interests of their users.
A similar situation applies to old versions of Windows. The California community college where I teach has a whole bunch of student computer labs with machines from about 2001, which all have Windows 2000 on them. MS's support for Win2k ends in July of 2010, and that means no more security patches. We could upgrade to XP, but although our machines do theoretically satisfy XP's hardware requirements, it's not clear whether they'd have acceptable performance with XP. Again, MS's interests are diametrically opposed to ours. They want to keep us on the upgrade treadmill. They're happy to let Win2k become a non-viable platform, so that we'll be forced to buy new hardware, which will come with Vista preinstalled. Except, uh, the California state budget crisis means that we can't afford to buy new hardware. Of course they MS never promised us to support Win2k indefinitely, and our managers should have done a better job of planning ahead so that this wouldn't become a crisis. But it really does strike me that this is the kind of problem that would have never happened with Linux. I can run Ubuntu for as long as I want, and just keep upgrading to the latest version. Linux runs well on old hardware, so there's no upgrade treadmill. No big mystery why it's this way: it's because Linus Torvalds, Mark Shuttleworth, etc. don't have interests that conflict with the user's.
...it is, I think, reasonable to suspect that authors in different places might have different optimal strategies.
One thing to point out about this is that the optimal strategy may depend very strongly on technological trivia that could change tomorrow. Right now, the average person has no easy way to take a pdf consisting of pages scanned from a novel and convert it into something more convenient for readers, like a plain text ASCII file. Similarly, the TV studios didn't have much to worry about until technology got to the point where a large number of people started to see the internet as more convenient than cable for watching TV shows.
Another thing to consider is that a lot of established authors seem to see free distribution as being in their own best interests. For instance, check out the list of titles available in the Baen Free Library. A bunch of these authors are extremely commercially successful, but they seem to be convinced that giving away texts for free in digital form will actually increase their sales of printed copies. And Ursula LeGuin arguably has more to gain from free internet exposure than, e.g., Mercedes Lackey. Try browsing the SF shelves of your local chain bookstore to see which author is better represented, and which one's books are oriented face-outward rather than spine-outward. Lackey probably sells more than LeGuin. I suspect that the reason Lackey makes some of her work available for free is more a generational issue than a matter of cold calculation of economic self-interest.
The plain, cold truth is that probably nobody knows how this will all work out in the end. People are just trying stuff to see what might work.
First off, the events they're talking about in the NY Times article actually came to a head in September 2007. It looks like a reporter dusted off some old notes simply because the Kindle is starting to get a lot of press, so it seems relevant now. The article doesn't really depict clearly what the controversy was about.
There's a guy named Andrew Burt, who has published a little science fiction, and had gotten elected to a middle-level position in the Science Fiction Writers of America. He noticed that scribd.com had a whole bunch of copyright-violating scans of books. He did an automated search of scribd's catalog, and based on that search, and without much consultation with anyone, he sent scribd a slew of what appeared to be DMCA takedown notices. The trouble was that he wasn't very careful, and, e.g., he got them to delete some fiction by Cory Doctorow, who actually wanted it on scribd as a form of publicity. IIRC, DMCA takedown notices are also supposed to be sent by copyright owners, and signed under penalty of perjury, but Burt's notices were sent without consulting the copyright holders, and were factually inaccurate in many cases; I think he ended up claiming that they weren't DMCA notices, but scribd apparently thought they were. Doctorow got very angry, and publicized his anger on his web site boingboing. Doctorow also published a very short piece by Ursula LeGuin on boingboing, without her permission, which made her furious. Burt ran for president of SFWA after this, and lost. The whole thing exposed a generational divide between older and younger SF authors. The older ones typically were suspicious of the internet, and saw it as a threat. The younger ones typically saw it as a way to publicize themselves. An old-timer named Howard Hendrix compared authors who gave their work away online for free to scabs, resulting in an ironic response called International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day.
Here are some representative opinions on the whole thing:
So first off, this isn't really a controversy about whether copyright should exist. The positions of all the different parties are quite similar on that issue. Scribd, Burt, Doctorow, LeGuin, and Hendrix are all pretty much in agreement that it's a bad thing to violate authors' copyrights. What they disagree on is mainly whether the internet presents more of a threat, or more of an opportunity.
Another thing to understand about this is that scribd is just a tool, in the same way that bittorrent is just a tool. I've posted some of my own nonfiction on scribd, simply on the theory that publicizing my work is always a good thing. However, just as The Pirate Bay has an extremely heavy presence of pointers to copyright-violating torrents, scribd also has a huge amount of copyright-violating stuff. Maybe the percentage is lower, but it's still a huge presence there. It's the classic situation where the web site is willing to devote x amount of effort to policing itself, but various people would like them to devote 10x (similar to Craigslist and prostitution).
They're talking about the wrong type of choice. I'm not interested in choosing whether to allow all ads on foo.com or block all ads on foo.com. First off, it would be a pain, because every time I hit some new web site, I'd have to make this choice. In many cases, this would be my first and last visit to the site: it's just a google hit, and it turns out it's not relevant to me. Why do I want to add extra effort to this quick, pointless visit to foo.com? And even if it was a site I thought I might be coming back to, how would I make an informed decision? I'm not yet familiar enough with the site to know whether their ads are annoying or not. I don't know if their ads are animated or static; I don't know if they load flash; I don't know if they lock up my cpu with heavy javascript.
What I want is a way to control the type of ad that's shown. I don't mind text-based ads. I just don't want ads with graphics, flash, or javascript (beyond the basic javascript that's required in order to load a text-based adsense ad).
The sites that think this is a good idea also need to do a reality check. The reason I use adblock plus is that I don't click on internet ads. I never have, and I never will. If, as TFA says, 5% of internet users use adblock plus, and if most of us never would click on an ad even if we selectively turned off filtering, then what is the point of showing us ads? The number of impressions would go up by 5%, but the number of click-throughs would go down by 5%. Advertisers would see that click-through rates were down 5%, so they would be willing to pay 5% less for ads. So sites that ran ads would get exactly the same revenue, and all they'd gain would be the happy knowledge that they were annoying 5% of their users and making them more likely to stop visiting.
The timeline is really goofy. This press release from last week appears to be the request by the government for content, and they say they want it for fall 2009. Huh!?!? The press release refers to "free, open-source digital textbooks for high school students" and says the government will "develop a state approved list of standards-aligned, open-source digital textbooks for high school math and science." Textbook publishers with books already on the market obviously aren't going to make their books free and open source. Individuals clearly can't start writing new ones and get them done by fall 2009. So the only possibility left is apparently to look for free books that already exist. That's fine (see my sig for a catalog of free books), but I think it's extremely unlikely that there are any preexisting free books that meet the state standards, which, as the Ars article points out, are insanely difficult to comply with.
I teach physics at a community college in California, and I'm the author of some open-source physics textbooks. They're intended for the college level, but I do get quite a few of my adoptions from high schools (see the list on that page). So far, however, zero of my adoptions have been from California public high schools. I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to understand why: California's textbook selection system makes it impossible. Actually most of my high school users are at private religious schools. I assume that's because private schools aren't regulated by their state governments in terms of textbook adoption, and they also usually operate on a shoestring, so free textbooks sound like a good deal to them.
Re the wiki approach, it's a dismal failure at producing useful textbooks. If you look at the catalog linked to from my sig, there are hundreds of textbooks in it, and very few of them were made via wikis. Wikibooks' original goal was to revolutionize education; in reality it seems like the killer app for Wikibooks is video game guides. Plenty of people are writing free books. They're just not doing it using wikis. A textbook is an entirely different kind of project than an encyclopedia.
This is not the reason to cut grad programs. Rather it is a reason to broadly educate grad students. A decent Ph.D. in Italian who can't get/doesn't want an academic job should be able to get a job in the "real world".
I disagree with that for several reasons. First, graduate programs cost money. In a state university system, that money comes directly from the taxpayers. If the hypothetical graduate program in Italian at CSU Fresno isn't a center of excellence, then there is no reason for the taxpayers to pay for it.
Graduate programs are supposed to have two missions: research, and educating grad students.
In terms of research, the reason this hypothetical department isn't in the top 100 in the US is presumably that the faculty don't do much research, and what research they do publish is crap papers that fill the pages of third-rate journals. There's no reason for anyone to fund this activity.
Now, graduate education. You could argue that there's nothing wrong with the vast surplus of grad students being produced by the present system, if it's only a surplus in relation to US universities' ability to provide faculty jobs for people who want to be their thesis advisers' "mini-mes." As you say, they can work outside of academia. One problem here is that tenured faculty get prestige and power from having lots of grad students, and in the sciences they need grad students to do the grunt work for them. That gives them, and the departments they run, a strong incentive to mislead prospective grad students about their chances of getting careers in research. It's not necessarily that they intentionally mislead them, but they may be... overly optimistic. One thing they'll tell every crop of students is that there are a lot of older people in the field who are getting ready to retire soon, so the job market should get much better by the time they graduate. The other problem is that a PhD (as opposed to an MA) is a research degree, so it doesn't necessarily indicate any particular preparation to do anything other than academic research. It may demonstrate a certain level of problem-solving skill, ability to do original thinking, etc. --- or it may not. My mother is a manager at a company that hires a lot of people with PhDs in statistics and psychology, and she says a surprising number of them are utterly unable to think for themselves. There's also a problem because you have these armies of grad students, postdocs, and untenured faculty who are all trying to crank out the maximum possible number of publications in order to increase their chances of getting a tenured job at a research university. Almost all of them will find out by the time they're about 25 or 30 that that's not going to happen, but in the interim they've contibuted to the crapflood of academic papers, and used up a large amount of tax money.
Skeptics have throwing out a variety of reasons that open-access journals like PLoS will never work. One of those reasons is that traditional print journals have a lot of prestige, just based on their centuries of momentum. Scientists won't want to publish in upstart open-access journals, according to this argument, because nobody will take their publications seriously. Well, this scandal would seem to show that you can't trust a journal just because it comes from a centuries-old publishing house.
The other thing to understand is that the vast majority of scientific papers are crap. They're not necessarily wrong, just utterly unimportant. Although this particular scandal has to do with the obscenely corrupt drug industry as well, it's also part of a more general problem. Science is like an Easter egg hunt where there are too many kids and not enough eggs. Everybody is trying to pad their c.v. with as many papers as possible, in order to land one of those prized research jobs. Because of this, there's been a huge proliferation of small, specialized, low-quality, expensive journals, and that's been creating a lot of problems for librarians. That's the environment in which these bogus journals were able to slip in under the radar. One solution, in my opinion, is for the big research universities to practice "grad student birth control," i.e., ending the expectation that every professor will produce 20 grad students over the course of his career, each of whom will have the same academic career as their advisor. Schools should also eliminate their weaker graduate programs, e.g., if Cal State Fresno (hypothetically) has a graduate program in Italian, but it's not in the top 100 Italian programs in the U.S., maybe they should just cut it; it's not doing anyone any good for them to be handing out some tiny number of master's degrees and pretending that their faculty are doing high-powered research.
So what can you do to help facilitate the move away from SHA-1?
One specific thing that would really help would be if debian would make it a priority to do a complete job of packaging the relevant hash functions, along with bindings for popular languages. For instance, I have an open-source perl app that uses digital watermarks. The user can choose between SHA1 and Whirlpool. However, I want to keep my app simple for users to install, and the perl binding for Whirlpool hasn't been packaged for debian yet, so I've made SHA1 the default. A debian user who wants to use Whirlpool with my app has to jump through hoops, e.g., installing the perl module via CPAN. That's actually a real pain for a debian or ubuntu user, because CPAN and apt don't play nicely; you can get in all kinds of screwed-up states if you try to install half your perl modules using apt and half using CPAN.
TFA is talking about gpg. Well, realistically, the choice of hash function is not the bottleneck in terms of security when it comes to sending encrypted or signed email. The bottleneck is mainly just that it's too hard to use (isn't built in to most GUI email clients), and in the case of encryption it also suffers from negative network effects -- there's no big benefit to me from using gpg encryption in my email unless the people I'm communicating also use the technology. The world's best crypto doesn't do you any good if you don't use it because it's too much of a pain. I think gpg is clearly a case where the perfect has been the enemy of the good. They've been so hung up on protecting the user against obscure vulnerabilities that they've ended up making the darn thing too hard for the vast majority of users. The docs, last time I checked, were basically written in Martian. I have a bachelor's degree in math, I program computers as a hobby, and I've read Schneier's Applied Cryptography. I'm not claiming that makes me a big expert on crypto, but it does put me out in front of the vast majority of the population. Well, I simply cannot figure out all the ins and outs of gpg. Okay, I could, but it would take more time than I'm willing to invest.
think the main benefit of such a system would be responsiveness. It is very unpleasant when one tab temporarily causes the entire browser window to become completely unresponsive--including the STOP button or the button to CLOSE the misbehaving tab. The UI should never freeze for any reason.
That never used to happen to me when I used NoScript. Then a few days ago I uninstalled NoScript because of the recent news about its malware-type behavior. Eesh, now my browser is becoming unresponsive all the time. The solution isn't to dedicate 128 cores to executing 128 javascript-based ads simultaneously. The solution is for someone (someone trustworthy) to fork or replace NoScript.
Going into the future, we are going to see more ARM based netbooks (and they are going to be more usable), and the already common ARM handheld device is going to become more powerful.
Can you amplify on this? I tried an intel-based netbook recently and was pretty dismayed at the performance. I have an ARM-based music server running Linux, and although it's fine for the purpose I'm using it for, it feels agonizingly slow when I ssh in and do things on the command line -- I shudder to imagine what it would be like running Gnome and OOo or Firefox on that CPU. It seems unlikely to me that anyone could make an ARM-based netbook with acceptable performance any time in the near future, unless they were using software much more lightweight than Gnome, OOo, and Firefox. And yet I hear people talking as though ARM-based netbooks will be on the market within a year or something. What am I missing here? Is it all vaporware? Are clock speeds of ARM chips improving at some fantastic rate? It's one thing to run software like iPhone apps that are designed from scratch for a low-end CPU, but I just don't see how it's going to happen with a more traditional desktop software stack.
Just a few centuries ago computers were impossible, as was flying and a great number of other things we think of as common now.
Well, first off computers were not impossible a few centuries ago. Both analog computers (the slide rule) and digital computers (the abacus) existed 400 years ago.
Flying was also not impossible a few centuries ago. The Montgolfier brothers flew more than 200 years ago.
But more to the point, you're misunderstanding how science works. Modern physical science basically dates back to Galileo and Newton. Since then, nobody has ever found a violation of Newton's laws of motion within their realm of applicability. Newton's laws didn't just go out of style with the advent of relativity and quantum mechanics. What happened was that we learned that Newton's laws were only an approximation that was valid under certain circumstances (v<<c, etc.). Almost every depiction of FTL in science fiction directly contradicts relativity within the realm where it's already been thoroughly tested, and therefore those stories are simply scientifically wrong. A good example of FTL in science fiction that doesn't violate relativity is Contact, by Carl Sagan. Two of the constraints that relativity puts on FTL, if it's possible at all, are that (1) it has to involve the manipulation of godlike amounts of mass and energy, and (2) any technology for FTL is also automatically a technology for time travel. Contact, for example, gets it right: the FTL is accomplished by aliens with godlike powers, who can also do time travel.
And, by the way, I'm not arguing that science fiction has to be scientifically correct in order to be good. I liked Contact, but it's not my favorite SF story ever. There's actually a serious dramatic limitation imposed if your story has to have time-traveling gods appearing on stage.
If we want to be realistic, we should admit that even the simplest kind of crewed slower-than-light space travel, like going to low earth orbit, is much harder than we imagined in the 1950s. It's so much harder than we thought that by the time crewed space travel of any kind becomes economically reasonable (rather than a nationalistic propaganda exercise or a lark for a few billionaire tourists), I'm guessing that human beings will no longer be recognizable as anything like today's human beings.
This seems to be describing the Alcubierre drive. The Wikipedia article is much, much better than the crappy article linked to from the slashdot summary.
A few ideas to keep in mind about general relativity:
The structure of general relativity implies, on fundamental grounds, that to build anything like this would to require godlike mastery over huge amounts of mass and energy. This is because the basic field equation of GR relates the curvature of spacetime to its mass and energy content.
The structure of relativity also implies that any faster-than-light technology will also be a technology for time travel. This is because if two events A and B are separated by a distance x that is greater than ct, where t is the time interval separating them, then there are some frames of reference in which A occurs before B, and some in which B occurs before A.
General relativity does not forbid FTL on a totally generic basis.
A good book on the subject is Time Travel in Einstein's Universe, by Gott. (Yes, it's the same subject as FTL, because FTL is equivalent to time travel.)
One big problem with this proposal is profiteering. Any time government offers to inject some money into the private sector, powerful commercial interests will line up to feed at the public trough. We saw it in the Iraq war, with Halliburton. We're seeing it with banks that are gaming the federal bailout system, maneuvering so that they can be subsidized without accountability. And it's always the most politically well connected private interests that are able to play this game successfully, e.g., it sure didn't hurt that Halliburton was in bed with Dick Cheney.
So if this proposal were enacted, I predict that Symantec, for instance, would make out like bandits, while zero money would flow to ClamAV
Another problem is that this kind of thing takes on its own momentum, and tends to continue indefinitely long after its justification is gone. We've seen this with farm subsidies, which were meant as an emergency measure to try to help family farms survive the Great Depression. Now it's just a subsidy to agribusiness. As far as antivirus software, IMO it's already long outlived its usefulness; it's become a kind of snake oil, a kind of difficult-to-remove malware in and of itself, used by people would would rather pay $40 for a bandaid rather than taking proper security precautions.
And yet another problem is that this kind of thing subsidizes dumb behavior. In the case of antivirus software, it subsidizes MS's poor design of its operating system, which makes it more vulnerable to viruses than MacOS or Linux. It also subsidizes dumb behavior by users who click on executable email attachments from strangers.
As far as the economic justification, I don't buy it for a second. Since I don't run Windows, I don't suffer a lot of direct negative economic effects from viruses. The effects I do suffer are small and indirect. Mostly I get a negative effect because I get spam from botnets. However, I don't believe for one second that increasing adoption of antivirus software by some percentage will have any significant effect on the amount of spam I get from botnets.
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If I were the manufacturer, at this point I'd say: (1) lawyers are expensive; (2) competent programmers are expensive, but less expensive than lawyers; (3) our business is selling the beathalyzer, not the software, so we gain nothing by keeping the source secret; (4) this publicity is hurting us; (5) let's hire some more competent programmers to clean up the code, and then we can make it public; (6) profit!
This is different from the case of the voting machines. In the case of a voting machine, there are lots of people who might be motivated to hack it, lots of people have access to the machines, and it only takes one compromised machine to throw a close election. If you believe in security by obscurity, then there is at least some logical argument for keeping the voting machine code secret. In the case of the breathalyzer, there's not even that lame argument.
Okay, first off, Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) is a long-term support release, which will be supported on the desktop until April 2013, which is still a long way off. So, no, there would be no reason to run Ubuntu 9 on such hardware.
Next: I haven't seen any evidence that Ubuntu 9.x is significantly more resource-hungry than Ubuntu 8.x. I have Ubuntu 9.x running on a 2.2 GHz celeron with 512 Mb ram, and it seems perfectly fine. I think a lot of people are so brainwashed by the upgrade-treadmill thing that they just assume software always gets dramatically more resource-hungry with each release. In my experience that's not true with Linux, or with any other open-source software. The more recent versions of Ubuntu have some fancy graphics built into Gnome. However, (1) you don't need to use Gnome as your window manager (xfce is better on low-end hardware), and (2) if you don't have a high-end graphics card, Ubuntu automatically detects that, and turns off the fancy eye candy.
It tends to be extremely difficult to get reliable information on what hardware is really necessary in order to run a particular version of Windows with decent performance. The hardware I'm talking about is P4 systems from ca. 2001, with 512 Mb of memory. The IT manager at my school has cautioned us that they may have crap performance with XP. MS's official system requirements say no problem, they'll run XP just fine. It's hard to know whom to believe.
Testing doesn't necessarily help much, either. My campus is currently experiencing a lot of problems with computers that used to run just fine, but now, with no OS upgrade or anything, they just suddenly take 35 minutes from power-up to having a web browser up and ready. Our IT staff waves their hands and says it's because the network is slow. I had a room with 7 identical machines, and one of them was having the problem, while the other 6 performed just fine; IT upgraded the memory on all of them from 256 Mb to 512 Mb, and the problem seemed to be fixed. Looking through this thread, it's amazing how many totally contradictory opinions you can see about what hardware is necessary in order to get what performance with what OS.
To amplify on your point about e-books, this is already happening in the college textbook market. The textbook publishers hate hate hate hate hate the used book market. They try to fight it by bringing out a new edition every three years, but they're still not satisfied. The latest thing they're pushing heavily is digital books that students pay for on a subscription basis. As soon as the student stops paying, he can no longer use the book. This is exactly analogous to the way the slashdot summary describes the game makers as using DRM to try to impede the used game market.
Uh, I do run ubuntu on machines with exactly the specs you're talking about. In the Windows lab at my school that I described in my original post, I have a bunch of Linux boxes that I picked up at garage sales and Good Will. About half of them have 256 Mb, the others 512. Linux's performance on those machines, including the 256 Mb ones, is perfectly acceptable. It's true that Gnome doesn't feel fast on those machines; that's why I usually use xfce or fluxbox on them. (My students use xfce or Gnome.) I used to have some with 128 Mb, and they were very slow when you ran OpenOffice in Gnome. Upgrading to 256 Mb made them into perfectly decent machines.
I can't comment on your hardware and software setup, since I don't know what it was. However, I use Ubuntu on machines from circa 2001 (256 Mb of RAM), and it performs fine. Gnome can be a bit of a dog on older hardware; xfce is better.
No. Why would I want to? I'd upgrade. With Linux, there's no hardware treadmill (because Linux works well on old hardware), and the OS treadmill is free.
No, I can't. I didn't intend to imply that MS was worse than other proprietary OS vendors. I just meant that proprietary OS vendors were worse than open-source OS vendors.
Apple often has the same issue where its interests conflict with the interests of its users. The existence of the iPhone jailbreaking scene is a good example of that. If anything, I think the treadmill phenomenon is worse with MacOS than with Windows. I've owned something like a nine macs since 1985. My wife and I finally stopped paying for the $130 MacOS X system upgrades several years ago, and stopped putting money into repairing her ailing lampshade iMac. The result is that we have one iBook that can't run any recent software, and which we only get out of the closet a few times a year when we need it on a trip, or when we need to access a web site that won't work with Firefox.
There's no hardware treadmill (because Linux supports old hardware well), and the OS treadmill is free.
ACLU, PO box 96265, Washington, DC 20090-6265
There's a gigantic conflict of interest here. By treating MacOS as a second-class citizen, they can hurt a competitor in the OS market. If MS can make people perceive Windows as the only first-class platform on which to run Office, it makes MS more likely to retain market share for Windows. MS's interests in this case are diametrically opposed to the interests of their users.
A similar situation applies to old versions of Windows. The California community college where I teach has a whole bunch of student computer labs with machines from about 2001, which all have Windows 2000 on them. MS's support for Win2k ends in July of 2010, and that means no more security patches. We could upgrade to XP, but although our machines do theoretically satisfy XP's hardware requirements, it's not clear whether they'd have acceptable performance with XP. Again, MS's interests are diametrically opposed to ours. They want to keep us on the upgrade treadmill. They're happy to let Win2k become a non-viable platform, so that we'll be forced to buy new hardware, which will come with Vista preinstalled. Except, uh, the California state budget crisis means that we can't afford to buy new hardware. Of course they MS never promised us to support Win2k indefinitely, and our managers should have done a better job of planning ahead so that this wouldn't become a crisis. But it really does strike me that this is the kind of problem that would have never happened with Linux. I can run Ubuntu for as long as I want, and just keep upgrading to the latest version. Linux runs well on old hardware, so there's no upgrade treadmill. No big mystery why it's this way: it's because Linus Torvalds, Mark Shuttleworth, etc. don't have interests that conflict with the user's.
One thing to point out about this is that the optimal strategy may depend very strongly on technological trivia that could change tomorrow. Right now, the average person has no easy way to take a pdf consisting of pages scanned from a novel and convert it into something more convenient for readers, like a plain text ASCII file. Similarly, the TV studios didn't have much to worry about until technology got to the point where a large number of people started to see the internet as more convenient than cable for watching TV shows.
Another thing to consider is that a lot of established authors seem to see free distribution as being in their own best interests. For instance, check out the list of titles available in the Baen Free Library. A bunch of these authors are extremely commercially successful, but they seem to be convinced that giving away texts for free in digital form will actually increase their sales of printed copies. And Ursula LeGuin arguably has more to gain from free internet exposure than, e.g., Mercedes Lackey. Try browsing the SF shelves of your local chain bookstore to see which author is better represented, and which one's books are oriented face-outward rather than spine-outward. Lackey probably sells more than LeGuin. I suspect that the reason Lackey makes some of her work available for free is more a generational issue than a matter of cold calculation of economic self-interest.
The plain, cold truth is that probably nobody knows how this will all work out in the end. People are just trying stuff to see what might work.
First off, the events they're talking about in the NY Times article actually came to a head in September 2007. It looks like a reporter dusted off some old notes simply because the Kindle is starting to get a lot of press, so it seems relevant now. The article doesn't really depict clearly what the controversy was about.
There's a guy named Andrew Burt, who has published a little science fiction, and had gotten elected to a middle-level position in the Science Fiction Writers of America. He noticed that scribd.com had a whole bunch of copyright-violating scans of books. He did an automated search of scribd's catalog, and based on that search, and without much consultation with anyone, he sent scribd a slew of what appeared to be DMCA takedown notices. The trouble was that he wasn't very careful, and, e.g., he got them to delete some fiction by Cory Doctorow, who actually wanted it on scribd as a form of publicity. IIRC, DMCA takedown notices are also supposed to be sent by copyright owners, and signed under penalty of perjury, but Burt's notices were sent without consulting the copyright holders, and were factually inaccurate in many cases; I think he ended up claiming that they weren't DMCA notices, but scribd apparently thought they were. Doctorow got very angry, and publicized his anger on his web site boingboing. Doctorow also published a very short piece by Ursula LeGuin on boingboing, without her permission, which made her furious. Burt ran for president of SFWA after this, and lost. The whole thing exposed a generational divide between older and younger SF authors. The older ones typically were suspicious of the internet, and saw it as a threat. The younger ones typically saw it as a way to publicize themselves. An old-timer named Howard Hendrix compared authors who gave their work away online for free to scabs, resulting in an ironic response called International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. Here are some representative opinions on the whole thing:
So first off, this isn't really a controversy about whether copyright should exist. The positions of all the different parties are quite similar on that issue. Scribd, Burt, Doctorow, LeGuin, and Hendrix are all pretty much in agreement that it's a bad thing to violate authors' copyrights. What they disagree on is mainly whether the internet presents more of a threat, or more of an opportunity.
Another thing to understand about this is that scribd is just a tool, in the same way that bittorrent is just a tool. I've posted some of my own nonfiction on scribd, simply on the theory that publicizing my work is always a good thing. However, just as The Pirate Bay has an extremely heavy presence of pointers to copyright-violating torrents, scribd also has a huge amount of copyright-violating stuff. Maybe the percentage is lower, but it's still a huge presence there. It's the classic situation where the web site is willing to devote x amount of effort to policing itself, but various people would like them to devote 10x (similar to Craigslist and prostitution).
They're talking about the wrong type of choice. I'm not interested in choosing whether to allow all ads on foo.com or block all ads on foo.com. First off, it would be a pain, because every time I hit some new web site, I'd have to make this choice. In many cases, this would be my first and last visit to the site: it's just a google hit, and it turns out it's not relevant to me. Why do I want to add extra effort to this quick, pointless visit to foo.com? And even if it was a site I thought I might be coming back to, how would I make an informed decision? I'm not yet familiar enough with the site to know whether their ads are annoying or not. I don't know if their ads are animated or static; I don't know if they load flash; I don't know if they lock up my cpu with heavy javascript.
What I want is a way to control the type of ad that's shown. I don't mind text-based ads. I just don't want ads with graphics, flash, or javascript (beyond the basic javascript that's required in order to load a text-based adsense ad).
The sites that think this is a good idea also need to do a reality check. The reason I use adblock plus is that I don't click on internet ads. I never have, and I never will. If, as TFA says, 5% of internet users use adblock plus, and if most of us never would click on an ad even if we selectively turned off filtering, then what is the point of showing us ads? The number of impressions would go up by 5%, but the number of click-throughs would go down by 5%. Advertisers would see that click-through rates were down 5%, so they would be willing to pay 5% less for ads. So sites that ran ads would get exactly the same revenue, and all they'd gain would be the happy knowledge that they were annoying 5% of their users and making them more likely to stop visiting.
As I explained in my original post, I called their tech support, and they said it was impossible to fix in software.
Thanks for the informative comments, and the link to the state standards. (My book does cover thermo, BTW.)
The vendors are doing a poor job. I bought an Asus eeePC. The wifi was misconfigured, and their tech support said they couldn't fix it. I returned it.
The timeline is really goofy. This press release from last week appears to be the request by the government for content, and they say they want it for fall 2009. Huh!?!? The press release refers to "free, open-source digital textbooks for high school students" and says the government will "develop a state approved list of standards-aligned, open-source digital textbooks for high school math and science." Textbook publishers with books already on the market obviously aren't going to make their books free and open source. Individuals clearly can't start writing new ones and get them done by fall 2009. So the only possibility left is apparently to look for free books that already exist. That's fine (see my sig for a catalog of free books), but I think it's extremely unlikely that there are any preexisting free books that meet the state standards, which, as the Ars article points out, are insanely difficult to comply with.
I teach physics at a community college in California, and I'm the author of some open-source physics textbooks. They're intended for the college level, but I do get quite a few of my adoptions from high schools (see the list on that page). So far, however, zero of my adoptions have been from California public high schools. I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to understand why: California's textbook selection system makes it impossible. Actually most of my high school users are at private religious schools. I assume that's because private schools aren't regulated by their state governments in terms of textbook adoption, and they also usually operate on a shoestring, so free textbooks sound like a good deal to them.
Re the wiki approach, it's a dismal failure at producing useful textbooks. If you look at the catalog linked to from my sig, there are hundreds of textbooks in it, and very few of them were made via wikis. Wikibooks' original goal was to revolutionize education; in reality it seems like the killer app for Wikibooks is video game guides. Plenty of people are writing free books. They're just not doing it using wikis. A textbook is an entirely different kind of project than an encyclopedia.
I disagree with that for several reasons. First, graduate programs cost money. In a state university system, that money comes directly from the taxpayers. If the hypothetical graduate program in Italian at CSU Fresno isn't a center of excellence, then there is no reason for the taxpayers to pay for it.
Graduate programs are supposed to have two missions: research, and educating grad students.
In terms of research, the reason this hypothetical department isn't in the top 100 in the US is presumably that the faculty don't do much research, and what research they do publish is crap papers that fill the pages of third-rate journals. There's no reason for anyone to fund this activity.
Now, graduate education. You could argue that there's nothing wrong with the vast surplus of grad students being produced by the present system, if it's only a surplus in relation to US universities' ability to provide faculty jobs for people who want to be their thesis advisers' "mini-mes." As you say, they can work outside of academia. One problem here is that tenured faculty get prestige and power from having lots of grad students, and in the sciences they need grad students to do the grunt work for them. That gives them, and the departments they run, a strong incentive to mislead prospective grad students about their chances of getting careers in research. It's not necessarily that they intentionally mislead them, but they may be ... overly optimistic. One thing they'll tell every crop of students is that there are a lot of older people in the field who are getting ready to retire soon, so the job market should get much better by the time they graduate. The other problem is that a PhD (as opposed to an MA) is a research degree, so it doesn't necessarily indicate any particular preparation to do anything other than academic research. It may demonstrate a certain level of problem-solving skill, ability to do original thinking, etc. --- or it may not. My mother is a manager at a company that hires a lot of people with PhDs in statistics and psychology, and she says a surprising number of them are utterly unable to think for themselves. There's also a problem because you have these armies of grad students, postdocs, and untenured faculty who are all trying to crank out the maximum possible number of publications in order to increase their chances of getting a tenured job at a research university. Almost all of them will find out by the time they're about 25 or 30 that that's not going to happen, but in the interim they've contibuted to the crapflood of academic papers, and used up a large amount of tax money.
A couple of observations:
Skeptics have throwing out a variety of reasons that open-access journals like PLoS will never work. One of those reasons is that traditional print journals have a lot of prestige, just based on their centuries of momentum. Scientists won't want to publish in upstart open-access journals, according to this argument, because nobody will take their publications seriously. Well, this scandal would seem to show that you can't trust a journal just because it comes from a centuries-old publishing house.
The other thing to understand is that the vast majority of scientific papers are crap. They're not necessarily wrong, just utterly unimportant. Although this particular scandal has to do with the obscenely corrupt drug industry as well, it's also part of a more general problem. Science is like an Easter egg hunt where there are too many kids and not enough eggs. Everybody is trying to pad their c.v. with as many papers as possible, in order to land one of those prized research jobs. Because of this, there's been a huge proliferation of small, specialized, low-quality, expensive journals, and that's been creating a lot of problems for librarians. That's the environment in which these bogus journals were able to slip in under the radar. One solution, in my opinion, is for the big research universities to practice "grad student birth control," i.e., ending the expectation that every professor will produce 20 grad students over the course of his career, each of whom will have the same academic career as their advisor. Schools should also eliminate their weaker graduate programs, e.g., if Cal State Fresno (hypothetically) has a graduate program in Italian, but it's not in the top 100 Italian programs in the U.S., maybe they should just cut it; it's not doing anyone any good for them to be handing out some tiny number of master's degrees and pretending that their faculty are doing high-powered research.
One specific thing that would really help would be if debian would make it a priority to do a complete job of packaging the relevant hash functions, along with bindings for popular languages. For instance, I have an open-source perl app that uses digital watermarks. The user can choose between SHA1 and Whirlpool. However, I want to keep my app simple for users to install, and the perl binding for Whirlpool hasn't been packaged for debian yet, so I've made SHA1 the default. A debian user who wants to use Whirlpool with my app has to jump through hoops, e.g., installing the perl module via CPAN. That's actually a real pain for a debian or ubuntu user, because CPAN and apt don't play nicely; you can get in all kinds of screwed-up states if you try to install half your perl modules using apt and half using CPAN.
TFA is talking about gpg. Well, realistically, the choice of hash function is not the bottleneck in terms of security when it comes to sending encrypted or signed email. The bottleneck is mainly just that it's too hard to use (isn't built in to most GUI email clients), and in the case of encryption it also suffers from negative network effects -- there's no big benefit to me from using gpg encryption in my email unless the people I'm communicating also use the technology. The world's best crypto doesn't do you any good if you don't use it because it's too much of a pain. I think gpg is clearly a case where the perfect has been the enemy of the good. They've been so hung up on protecting the user against obscure vulnerabilities that they've ended up making the darn thing too hard for the vast majority of users. The docs, last time I checked, were basically written in Martian. I have a bachelor's degree in math, I program computers as a hobby, and I've read Schneier's Applied Cryptography. I'm not claiming that makes me a big expert on crypto, but it does put me out in front of the vast majority of the population. Well, I simply cannot figure out all the ins and outs of gpg. Okay, I could, but it would take more time than I'm willing to invest.
That never used to happen to me when I used NoScript. Then a few days ago I uninstalled NoScript because of the recent news about its malware-type behavior. Eesh, now my browser is becoming unresponsive all the time. The solution isn't to dedicate 128 cores to executing 128 javascript-based ads simultaneously. The solution is for someone (someone trustworthy) to fork or replace NoScript.
Can you amplify on this? I tried an intel-based netbook recently and was pretty dismayed at the performance. I have an ARM-based music server running Linux, and although it's fine for the purpose I'm using it for, it feels agonizingly slow when I ssh in and do things on the command line -- I shudder to imagine what it would be like running Gnome and OOo or Firefox on that CPU. It seems unlikely to me that anyone could make an ARM-based netbook with acceptable performance any time in the near future, unless they were using software much more lightweight than Gnome, OOo, and Firefox. And yet I hear people talking as though ARM-based netbooks will be on the market within a year or something. What am I missing here? Is it all vaporware? Are clock speeds of ARM chips improving at some fantastic rate? It's one thing to run software like iPhone apps that are designed from scratch for a low-end CPU, but I just don't see how it's going to happen with a more traditional desktop software stack.
Well, first off computers were not impossible a few centuries ago. Both analog computers (the slide rule) and digital computers (the abacus) existed 400 years ago. Flying was also not impossible a few centuries ago. The Montgolfier brothers flew more than 200 years ago.
But more to the point, you're misunderstanding how science works. Modern physical science basically dates back to Galileo and Newton. Since then, nobody has ever found a violation of Newton's laws of motion within their realm of applicability. Newton's laws didn't just go out of style with the advent of relativity and quantum mechanics. What happened was that we learned that Newton's laws were only an approximation that was valid under certain circumstances (v<<c, etc.). Almost every depiction of FTL in science fiction directly contradicts relativity within the realm where it's already been thoroughly tested, and therefore those stories are simply scientifically wrong. A good example of FTL in science fiction that doesn't violate relativity is Contact, by Carl Sagan. Two of the constraints that relativity puts on FTL, if it's possible at all, are that (1) it has to involve the manipulation of godlike amounts of mass and energy, and (2) any technology for FTL is also automatically a technology for time travel. Contact, for example, gets it right: the FTL is accomplished by aliens with godlike powers, who can also do time travel.
And, by the way, I'm not arguing that science fiction has to be scientifically correct in order to be good. I liked Contact, but it's not my favorite SF story ever. There's actually a serious dramatic limitation imposed if your story has to have time-traveling gods appearing on stage.
If we want to be realistic, we should admit that even the simplest kind of crewed slower-than-light space travel, like going to low earth orbit, is much harder than we imagined in the 1950s. It's so much harder than we thought that by the time crewed space travel of any kind becomes economically reasonable (rather than a nationalistic propaganda exercise or a lark for a few billionaire tourists), I'm guessing that human beings will no longer be recognizable as anything like today's human beings.
This seems to be describing the Alcubierre drive. The Wikipedia article is much, much better than the crappy article linked to from the slashdot summary.
A few ideas to keep in mind about general relativity:
The structure of general relativity implies, on fundamental grounds, that to build anything like this would to require godlike mastery over huge amounts of mass and energy. This is because the basic field equation of GR relates the curvature of spacetime to its mass and energy content.
The structure of relativity also implies that any faster-than-light technology will also be a technology for time travel. This is because if two events A and B are separated by a distance x that is greater than ct, where t is the time interval separating them, then there are some frames of reference in which A occurs before B, and some in which B occurs before A.
General relativity does not forbid FTL on a totally generic basis.
A good book on the subject is Time Travel in Einstein's Universe, by Gott. (Yes, it's the same subject as FTL, because FTL is equivalent to time travel.)
One big problem with this proposal is profiteering. Any time government offers to inject some money into the private sector, powerful commercial interests will line up to feed at the public trough. We saw it in the Iraq war, with Halliburton. We're seeing it with banks that are gaming the federal bailout system, maneuvering so that they can be subsidized without accountability. And it's always the most politically well connected private interests that are able to play this game successfully, e.g., it sure didn't hurt that Halliburton was in bed with Dick Cheney. So if this proposal were enacted, I predict that Symantec, for instance, would make out like bandits, while zero money would flow to ClamAV
Another problem is that this kind of thing takes on its own momentum, and tends to continue indefinitely long after its justification is gone. We've seen this with farm subsidies, which were meant as an emergency measure to try to help family farms survive the Great Depression. Now it's just a subsidy to agribusiness. As far as antivirus software, IMO it's already long outlived its usefulness; it's become a kind of snake oil, a kind of difficult-to-remove malware in and of itself, used by people would would rather pay $40 for a bandaid rather than taking proper security precautions.
And yet another problem is that this kind of thing subsidizes dumb behavior. In the case of antivirus software, it subsidizes MS's poor design of its operating system, which makes it more vulnerable to viruses than MacOS or Linux. It also subsidizes dumb behavior by users who click on executable email attachments from strangers.
As far as the economic justification, I don't buy it for a second. Since I don't run Windows, I don't suffer a lot of direct negative economic effects from viruses. The effects I do suffer are small and indirect. Mostly I get a negative effect because I get spam from botnets. However, I don't believe for one second that increasing adoption of antivirus software by some percentage will have any significant effect on the amount of spam I get from botnets.