It's IE that's broken. It doesn't support xhtml. BTW, I think I may have been wrong in my response to the gggparent post -- you can, for example, embed an external html file in an xhtml file via the tag, so it's quite possible that you could embed an external xhtml file in html. I'll have to fiddle with that and see if I can get it to work.
The correct way to do SVG/MathML/etc. is with embed or object tags, as has been possible from HTML 3.
This may work for svg, but it won't work for mathml. If you serve it as application/xhtml+xml, then the page won't be rendered at all in a default install of IE; the user will get a dialog box offering to download the file. If you use some type other than application/xhtml+xml, then mathml won't be rendered in Firefox.
I'm baffled by the concept of advocating a new version of html to get rid of security problems.
Web browsers aren't going to break compatibility with old versions of html. What good does it do you if your
browser supports secure html, but also supports insecure html?
The vast majority of the security problems on the web are problems that are specific to IE+Win, because Windows's
security model has problems, and security has never been a priority for the IE maintainers. None of that is going
to change if you just invent a new version of html. Also, many of the security problems in IE+Win have historically
been because of proprietary extensions that MS introduced. If MS shoots itself in the foot by not following standards,
then I don't see how a new standard is going to help.
Another problem with the proposal is that it's a dead end when it comes to new functionality like SVG and MathML.
These are xml-based standards, and there is no standards-based way to implement them in html; they have to be implemented
in xhtml, or else they have to be implemented in a nonstandard way. Today, if you want to write a web page with mathml
in it, and you want it to degrade in a sensible way in versions of IE that don't have the relevant plugin (i.e., 85%
of all browsers out there), the choices aren't pretty; basically you either have to serve up multiple versions of your
page, or you have to do incredibly kludgy tricks with xslt, or you have to do incredibly complicated stuff with javascript. The fundamental problem is that html has forked into html and
xhtml, IE doesn't support application/xhtml+xml and probably never will, and xhtml is the only sensible way to incorporate
new technology like SVG and MathML.
My own experience as a parent has impressed me with the power of genetics. I have two daughters. They had completely different personalities straight out of the womb. As infants, one liked to eat, one didn't. One is more language-oriented, the other likes to build things. Etc. There's just no way that our child raising practices differed in ways that would explain all this.
The article describes measuring students' attitudes about learning, and correlating those attitudes with success in a chemistry course. The problem is that correlation doesn't imply causation. It could be that genetics is causing both the attitudes and the level of success. Group A could have positive attitudes about learning chemistry, and a strong belief in their own ability to train their own brains to be smarter at chemistry, simply because group A has a better genetic endowment for learning chemistry. If you ask them, "Is it true that even though chem is hard, if you keep trying you can get a lot of fulfillment out of it and end up being good at it," they'll answer yes, because that's been their experience throughout life: they're well genetically endowed for this type of activity (analytic reasoning, symbol manipulation,...), so if they put some effort in, they were always able to succeed. Group B could have negative attitudes because they're genetically predisposed to be artists or novelists; their fatalistic assessment could be a realistic one, based on the hand they were dealt in the shuffle of the chromosomes.
There's a great book called Nature via Nurture that spells out this hypothesis in much more detail.
For a gas of a given composition, the speed of sound is proportional to the square root of the absolute temperature, and is independent of pressure. So if the average temp. of the interstellar medium is, say, 3 K, then the speed of sound out there will be on the order of 10 times lower than it is in the Earth's atmosphere.
If you think of the classic physics lecture demonstration with a speaker inside a bell jar, the reason the sound goes away when you pump out the air isn't that the remaining air is too thin to support a sound wave, it's that the speaker cone is very inefficiently coupled to that air.
Interesting to hear your point of view on this. I have almost exactly the opposite impression, though. There is one Summer of Code project from 2007 that I'm familiar with; it drew my interest because it was a GUI app that was going to compete with an open-source app that I wrote. I figured that friendly competition between open-source projects was always a good thing, and was looking forward to seeing what they came up with. Well, the student wrote about 3000 lines of code, with essentially no comments, and no documentation. The end result is available in CVS, but hasn't been packaged in any convenient form for end-users, and as far as I can tell it's not really functional at this point, and there doesn't appear to be any continuing work on the project. So it seems to me that they simply bit off more than they could chew. IMO, it's probably appropriate to keep the projects small and simple, because then the end result is more likely to be useful to someone. If, for example, a high school student wants to write an MMORPG, that's great, but it's not a summer project for a single person.
It does say
This is your Main Menu. You can access it by clicking anywhere on your desktop with the left mouse button or by hitting the Menu key on your keyboard.
I'd suggest that's a fairly powerful hint...
Yes, but as I've explained to you several times now, the shutdown option didn't appear in my main menu. I did finally figure out what was going on, and added a note to the review, with screenshots showing how two different versions of the menu are shown under different conditions.
Ben--thanks for the review. I'm considering getting one of these, either to use as a small server (like this guy describes) or to take out the guts and put them into a more size-efficient case. I would *love* to see some pics of the inside of this machine to see how small the components are and/or how much free space there is inside. Have you taken any?
If you're going to do that, I don't really see the point of buying this machine. Just buy a micro-ATX motherboard and a small case that's designed for a micro-ATX motherboard. You'll save money, and you'll avoid throwing the tower case in a landfill.
I can't recall where I saw it, but I read a review that did say that the case was pretty much empty.
Right, I actually mentioned that in the review. The case is 90% air.
I am interested in how you got apt-get to work and install flash, but yet the network wasn't connected yet... did it come on a CD repository or something ?
I had an ethernet connection in the room where I was setting the machine up. I just don't have an ethernet connection in the machine's final location.
You knew that the login manager was different, why didn't you just install GDM instead of a complete Ubuntu replacement ?
I didn't know how to replace their login manager with gdm.
but the mdash printed as an annoying symbol instead of a dash.
I can't reproduce your problem in konqueror on my machine.
Now, would you answer my question? Did you really mean to tell the whole world, "F You"?
The reason I didn't answer the question was that the way you asked it was offensive. I did answer it elsewhere.
He doesn't mention what OS the Athlon64 box runs,
Hi, I'm the author of the article. The x64 box is running Ubuntu Gutsy. The 12 second start time is the for the first time I run OOo. The second time, it's cached, so it only takes a couple of seconds to load. In the article, I was comparing both machines under the same conditions: the first time OOo was loaded.
And apparently that is "f you".
Look at the first screenshot, the "f" icon on the bottom menu bar is followed by the word "you". I guess the "you" is half of the youtube icon. They need to reorder that menubar.
Hee hee. That row of icons (called the "shelf" in the docs) scrolls back and forth dynamically when you put the mouse over one end of it or the other. You would only get the "f you" effect for the particular random position it happened to be in when I took the screenshot.
An article that does not work well with Konqueror is always a bad sign
Hi, I'm the author of the review. Can you tell me what doesn't work for you in Konqueror? I have it open in Konqueror right now, and it looks fine on my machine.
how is anybody buying it expected to know? Because it's not very hard? Because it's explained in the pamphlet that comes with the PC?
I have the poster that came with it right here in front of me. It's not explained there.
Use the Start button
I tried that. I didn't get the menu items you're talking about.
or right click anywhere on the desktop and select "My GoS", then "Shutdown" from the popup menu.
That's good to know, but the documentation never suggests right-clicking on the desktop.
The guy claims to be experienced with Ubuntu, but didn't know to type his user password at the sudo prompt.
You have a valid point there. I normally use fluxbox, however, not gnome, and I normally do administrative stuff as root, not using sudo. Also, it demanded the administrator's password even though I hadn't initiated any administrative action other than logging in for the first time. Remember, this review is also talking about what the experience would be like for someone who's in Wal-Mart's target audience.
He can't find the "log out" menu item...
That's because there is none. Here you just didn't read the review carefully enough. It isn't Gnome, it's gOS's custom flavor of Enlightenment. There's no "log out" menu item in the WM. As I also explained in the review, they replaced the normal gdm login manager with their own, and it also doesn't have the normal menus, either.
He thought installing Gnome would fix a network problem.
Again, you don't seem to have read the article very carefully. As explained in the article, Gnome has a GUI called Gnome Network Manager, which I'd used successfully in the past to get the same wifi chipset working on Ubuntu, without resorting to the command line. gOS has something called Exalt, which failed with an error message when I tried to run it by clicking on its icon.
The main reason they should need a warning is because they aren't webpages.
Hmm...so you want a warning every time a page links to an image in png format? It's not a web page, right?
most browser plugins are slow to load,
So why did you choose to install optional software (presumably Adobe Reader) that you didn't like, and then keep on using it, instead of replacing it with something that you might like better (maybe xpdf, or evince, or almost any other pdf viewer?).
In both cases they are more inconvenient to use than HTML or text
Personally, I find it inconvenient to read a document of any significant length off of a computer screen. I find it very convenient to have a document in a printer-friendly format. Here's what I do to print a pdf file:
The article (which is actually a PDF, thanks for the warning) uses proprietary fonts (LucidaBright). While it was typeset with TeX (open), only the PDF (closed and uneditable) is provided.
The article is a copyrighted op-ed piece, and that's the reason it's "proprietary." Harry Potter is proprietary too. Fair use gives you the right to quote from this editorial, or from Harry Potter. What you don't have the legal right to do is modify the editorial, redistribute your modified version, and attribute your views to its original author. Boo hoo. Supplying the editorial in OOo format would make it neither more nor less "open."
I've never understood why pdf seems to evoke this knee-jerk reaction from some people. Pdf is a tool. Like any tool, there are certain jobs for which it's the right tool, and certain jobs for which it's not. It isn't meant to be an editable format. Neither is java bytecode, an ELF binary, or a PNG rendering of an SVG source document.
By the way, when I clicked on the link, it opened in Evince in about three seconds, which is faster than a lot of html web pages will open, especially of the server has just been slashdotted. If people are unhappy that Adobe Reader is slow to start up, why do they keep using Adobe Reader as the pdf plugin in their browser.
Oh yeah, and when I clicked in the document in Evince, did Select All, and Copy, it copied it to the clipboard. And then when I fired up OpenOffice and hit Paste, it pasted it right in, and did a reasonable job of preserving the formatting.
This seems to me like an example of a much broader issue, which is the plethora of concerns, including privacy concerns, that surrounds the whole concept of using the browser as a platform for applications. People have been struggling with this forever, ever since Sun and MS first locked horns over Java applets. Over and over, we've seen security holes in IE caused by MS's poor handling of the javascript security model. Over and over, we've seen nonproprietary, multiplatform solutions (javascript, ajax) battling with proprietary ones (flash) and proprietary, single-platform ones (silverlight).
In the present situation with hushmail, the problem was that although hushmail had a good, secure design that used a java applet, a lot of people didn't want the hassle of installing a java runtime, so they provided an alternative using JS. But JS isn't fast enough to do encryption, so the encryption had to be done on the server side. Maybe tamarin will help with this kind of thing, but in general, security, privacy, and user control are always going to be serious problems with web applications.
The Wikipedia article has a bunch of good references. The slashdot summary seems to be incorrect in some of its particulars. If you read the various articles, none of them seem to say that hushmail turned over private keys. They turned over cleartext of messages. Yes, there was a court order (see the more recent wired article). No, hushmail doesn't seem to have lied to their users in general -- the wired article praises them for their honesty -- but they do seem to have put a strong marketing spin on the lack of real security in the JS implementation of their service (as opposed to the original, more secure Java applet, in which the private keys never left the client machine).
That distro of linux they used... no idea what it was called, but it was some Korean piece of complete SHIT. Not even linux users would like it.
It was called ThizLinux, and it was Chinese. I always just bought the machines and immediately installed some other linux distro on them.
Every one we got back, EVERY SINGLE ONE either had Windows XP installed on it by the user or a complaint that Windows wasn't on it and it couldn't run their programs
The documentation that came with them had absolutely no information on ThizLinux. What it had page after page of was information on how to install Windows. I'm sure a significant market for these machines was people who were installing copyright-violating copies of Windows. But just because you found that all the people who returned them were doing that, that doesn't mean everyone who bought one was doing that. I bought five of the things over the years (for family, for my desk at work,...), and the reason you never got any of them as returns is that they're all still running great with ubuntu on them.
I ordered one online for my kid. It's supposed to arrive at the local walmart by about Nov. 26. My wife was convinced my brain had been taken over by aliens, since I normally don't like walmart. I was like, "Honey, this is Linux! It's not evil, it's good!"
Walmart has had other linux PCs for sale online. What was supposed to be different about this one was that it was supposed to be on the shelves in the stores. AFAICT that never actually happened. The local walmart was one of the ones on the list that was supposed to have it for sale, but actually it never showed up in stock. Just out of curiousity, I checked their web site for other stores that might have it: San Francisco, NY, Chicago, etc. None of them had it in stock.
I hope these machines are good. I used to buy the $200 Fry's Great Quality machines, but Fry's is no longer selling those.
There are already good hash functions out there that don't share the basic design of SHA. I've been using whirlpool for applications where security is important. (Good old md5 is fine for applications that don't involve security.) The problem is getting these newer hash functions widely implemented. For instance, here is my request to get the perl Digest::Whirlpool module packaged for debian/ubuntu. Until better hashes are conveniently packaged, authors of applications actually have a disincentive to move to more secure hash functions.
I don't think you need to make up a hypothetical, complicated, national system for writing free textbooks. Lots of free textbooks already exist; see my sig for a catalog with hundreds of examples. Here is a series of articles I've written about free books, with an emphasis on free textbooks.
The issue of peer review and quality control is a paper tiger, at least at the college level. College professors decide what books to adopt for their courses, and they do it by looking at the book and making a judgment about its quality.
Professors use the sites to distribute homework and take tests and if you don't subscribe, then you are SOL. The result is everyone needs to buy the damn book every damn semester.
You didn't say, but I'm assuming you're talking about the college level (TFA was about elementary school), and when you refer to the online homework thing, I assume you're referring to math and science courses.
There are tons of free online homework systems out there. I wrote this one, which is open-source, and free for students to use. The web page for my system has links to a bunch of other open-source ones, and also to a free-as-in-beer one at UT that appears to be extremely popular. Of course professors, like everyone else in the world, are lazy. If the only homework checker they ever hear about is something proprietary like WebAssign, and if the content is all set up for them in WebAssign, then they'll probably go the path of least resistance. And once the prof has his workflow all set up with WebAssign, he's going to be reluctant to switch to something free like the UT system.
Slashdot Mirror
It's IE that's broken. It doesn't support xhtml. BTW, I think I may have been wrong in my response to the gggparent post -- you can, for example, embed an external html file in an xhtml file via the tag, so it's quite possible that you could embed an external xhtml file in html. I'll have to fiddle with that and see if I can get it to work.
The correct way to do SVG/MathML/etc. is with embed or object tags, as has been possible from HTML 3.
This may work for svg, but it won't work for mathml. If you serve it as application/xhtml+xml, then the page won't be rendered at all in a default install of IE; the user will get a dialog box offering to download the file. If you use some type other than application/xhtml+xml, then mathml won't be rendered in Firefox.
I'm baffled by the concept of advocating a new version of html to get rid of security problems. Web browsers aren't going to break compatibility with old versions of html. What good does it do you if your browser supports secure html, but also supports insecure html? The vast majority of the security problems on the web are problems that are specific to IE+Win, because Windows's security model has problems, and security has never been a priority for the IE maintainers. None of that is going to change if you just invent a new version of html. Also, many of the security problems in IE+Win have historically been because of proprietary extensions that MS introduced. If MS shoots itself in the foot by not following standards, then I don't see how a new standard is going to help.
Another problem with the proposal is that it's a dead end when it comes to new functionality like SVG and MathML. These are xml-based standards, and there is no standards-based way to implement them in html; they have to be implemented in xhtml, or else they have to be implemented in a nonstandard way. Today, if you want to write a web page with mathml in it, and you want it to degrade in a sensible way in versions of IE that don't have the relevant plugin (i.e., 85% of all browsers out there), the choices aren't pretty; basically you either have to serve up multiple versions of your page, or you have to do incredibly kludgy tricks with xslt, or you have to do incredibly complicated stuff with javascript. The fundamental problem is that html has forked into html and xhtml, IE doesn't support application/xhtml+xml and probably never will, and xhtml is the only sensible way to incorporate new technology like SVG and MathML.
My own experience as a parent has impressed me with the power of genetics. I have two daughters. They had completely different personalities straight out of the womb. As infants, one liked to eat, one didn't. One is more language-oriented, the other likes to build things. Etc. There's just no way that our child raising practices differed in ways that would explain all this.
The article describes measuring students' attitudes about learning, and correlating those attitudes with success in a chemistry course. The problem is that correlation doesn't imply causation. It could be that genetics is causing both the attitudes and the level of success. Group A could have positive attitudes about learning chemistry, and a strong belief in their own ability to train their own brains to be smarter at chemistry, simply because group A has a better genetic endowment for learning chemistry. If you ask them, "Is it true that even though chem is hard, if you keep trying you can get a lot of fulfillment out of it and end up being good at it," they'll answer yes, because that's been their experience throughout life: they're well genetically endowed for this type of activity (analytic reasoning, symbol manipulation, ...), so if they put some effort in, they were always able to succeed. Group B could have negative attitudes because they're genetically predisposed to be artists or novelists; their fatalistic assessment could be a realistic one, based on the hand they were dealt in the shuffle of the chromosomes.
There's a great book called Nature via Nurture that spells out this hypothesis in much more detail.
For a gas of a given composition, the speed of sound is proportional to the square root of the absolute temperature, and is independent of pressure. So if the average temp. of the interstellar medium is, say, 3 K, then the speed of sound out there will be on the order of 10 times lower than it is in the Earth's atmosphere.
If you think of the classic physics lecture demonstration with a speaker inside a bell jar, the reason the sound goes away when you pump out the air isn't that the remaining air is too thin to support a sound wave, it's that the speaker cone is very inefficiently coupled to that air.
Interesting to hear your point of view on this. I have almost exactly the opposite impression, though. There is one Summer of Code project from 2007 that I'm familiar with; it drew my interest because it was a GUI app that was going to compete with an open-source app that I wrote. I figured that friendly competition between open-source projects was always a good thing, and was looking forward to seeing what they came up with. Well, the student wrote about 3000 lines of code, with essentially no comments, and no documentation. The end result is available in CVS, but hasn't been packaged in any convenient form for end-users, and as far as I can tell it's not really functional at this point, and there doesn't appear to be any continuing work on the project. So it seems to me that they simply bit off more than they could chew. IMO, it's probably appropriate to keep the projects small and simple, because then the end result is more likely to be useful to someone. If, for example, a high school student wants to write an MMORPG, that's great, but it's not a summer project for a single person.
It does say This is your Main Menu. You can access it by clicking anywhere on your desktop with the left mouse button or by hitting the Menu key on your keyboard. I'd suggest that's a fairly powerful hint...
Yes, but as I've explained to you several times now, the shutdown option didn't appear in my main menu. I did finally figure out what was going on, and added a note to the review, with screenshots showing how two different versions of the menu are shown under different conditions.
Ben--thanks for the review. I'm considering getting one of these, either to use as a small server (like this guy describes) or to take out the guts and put them into a more size-efficient case. I would *love* to see some pics of the inside of this machine to see how small the components are and/or how much free space there is inside. Have you taken any?
If you're going to do that, I don't really see the point of buying this machine. Just buy a micro-ATX motherboard and a small case that's designed for a micro-ATX motherboard. You'll save money, and you'll avoid throwing the tower case in a landfill.
I can't recall where I saw it, but I read a review that did say that the case was pretty much empty.
Right, I actually mentioned that in the review. The case is 90% air.
I am interested in how you got apt-get to work and install flash, but yet the network wasn't connected yet... did it come on a CD repository or something ?
I had an ethernet connection in the room where I was setting the machine up. I just don't have an ethernet connection in the machine's final location.
You knew that the login manager was different, why didn't you just install GDM instead of a complete Ubuntu replacement ?
I didn't know how to replace their login manager with gdm.
but the mdash printed as an annoying symbol instead of a dash.
I can't reproduce your problem in konqueror on my machine.
Now, would you answer my question? Did you really mean to tell the whole world, "F You"?
The reason I didn't answer the question was that the way you asked it was offensive. I did answer it elsewhere.
He doesn't mention what OS the Athlon64 box runs,
Hi, I'm the author of the article. The x64 box is running Ubuntu Gutsy. The 12 second start time is the for the first time I run OOo. The second time, it's cached, so it only takes a couple of seconds to load. In the article, I was comparing both machines under the same conditions: the first time OOo was loaded.
And apparently that is "f you". Look at the first screenshot, the "f" icon on the bottom menu bar is followed by the word "you". I guess the "you" is half of the youtube icon. They need to reorder that menubar.
Hee hee. That row of icons (called the "shelf" in the docs) scrolls back and forth dynamically when you put the mouse over one end of it or the other. You would only get the "f you" effect for the particular random position it happened to be in when I took the screenshot.
An article that does not work well with Konqueror is always a bad sign
Hi, I'm the author of the review. Can you tell me what doesn't work for you in Konqueror? I have it open in Konqueror right now, and it looks fine on my machine.
I'm the author of the review.
how is anybody buying it expected to know?
Because it's not very hard? Because it's explained in the pamphlet that comes with the PC?
I have the poster that came with it right here in front of me. It's not explained there.
Use the Start button
I tried that. I didn't get the menu items you're talking about.
or right click anywhere on the desktop and select "My GoS", then "Shutdown" from the popup menu.
That's good to know, but the documentation never suggests right-clicking on the desktop.
Hi, I'm the author of the review.
The guy claims to be experienced with Ubuntu, but didn't know to type his user password at the sudo prompt.
You have a valid point there. I normally use fluxbox, however, not gnome, and I normally do administrative stuff as root, not using sudo. Also, it demanded the administrator's password even though I hadn't initiated any administrative action other than logging in for the first time. Remember, this review is also talking about what the experience would be like for someone who's in Wal-Mart's target audience.
He can't find the "log out" menu item...
That's because there is none. Here you just didn't read the review carefully enough. It isn't Gnome, it's gOS's custom flavor of Enlightenment. There's no "log out" menu item in the WM. As I also explained in the review, they replaced the normal gdm login manager with their own, and it also doesn't have the normal menus, either.
He thought installing Gnome would fix a network problem.
Again, you don't seem to have read the article very carefully. As explained in the article, Gnome has a GUI called Gnome Network Manager, which I'd used successfully in the past to get the same wifi chipset working on Ubuntu, without resorting to the command line. gOS has something called Exalt, which failed with an error message when I tried to run it by clicking on its icon.
Hmm...so you want a warning every time a page links to an image in png format? It's not a web page, right?
So why did you choose to install optional software (presumably Adobe Reader) that you didn't like, and then keep on using it, instead of replacing it with something that you might like better (maybe xpdf, or evince, or almost any other pdf viewer?).
Personally, I find it inconvenient to read a document of any significant length off of a computer screen. I find it very convenient to have a document in a printer-friendly format. Here's what I do to print a pdf file:
lpr foo.pdf
Here's what I do to print a plain text file:
lpr -o page-left=36 -o page-right=36 -o page-top=36 -o page-bottom=36 a.txt
The article (which is actually a PDF, thanks for the warning) uses proprietary fonts (LucidaBright). While it was typeset with TeX (open), only the PDF (closed and uneditable) is provided.
The article is a copyrighted op-ed piece, and that's the reason it's "proprietary." Harry Potter is proprietary too. Fair use gives you the right to quote from this editorial, or from Harry Potter. What you don't have the legal right to do is modify the editorial, redistribute your modified version, and attribute your views to its original author. Boo hoo. Supplying the editorial in OOo format would make it neither more nor less "open."
I've never understood why pdf seems to evoke this knee-jerk reaction from some people. Pdf is a tool. Like any tool, there are certain jobs for which it's the right tool, and certain jobs for which it's not. It isn't meant to be an editable format. Neither is java bytecode, an ELF binary, or a PNG rendering of an SVG source document.
By the way, when I clicked on the link, it opened in Evince in about three seconds, which is faster than a lot of html web pages will open, especially of the server has just been slashdotted. If people are unhappy that Adobe Reader is slow to start up, why do they keep using Adobe Reader as the pdf plugin in their browser.
Oh yeah, and when I clicked in the document in Evince, did Select All, and Copy, it copied it to the clipboard. And then when I fired up OpenOffice and hit Paste, it pasted it right in, and did a reasonable job of preserving the formatting.
This seems to me like an example of a much broader issue, which is the plethora of concerns, including privacy concerns, that surrounds the whole concept of using the browser as a platform for applications. People have been struggling with this forever, ever since Sun and MS first locked horns over Java applets. Over and over, we've seen security holes in IE caused by MS's poor handling of the javascript security model. Over and over, we've seen nonproprietary, multiplatform solutions (javascript, ajax) battling with proprietary ones (flash) and proprietary, single-platform ones (silverlight). In the present situation with hushmail, the problem was that although hushmail had a good, secure design that used a java applet, a lot of people didn't want the hassle of installing a java runtime, so they provided an alternative using JS. But JS isn't fast enough to do encryption, so the encryption had to be done on the server side. Maybe tamarin will help with this kind of thing, but in general, security, privacy, and user control are always going to be serious problems with web applications.
The Wikipedia article has a bunch of good references. The slashdot summary seems to be incorrect in some of its particulars. If you read the various articles, none of them seem to say that hushmail turned over private keys. They turned over cleartext of messages. Yes, there was a court order (see the more recent wired article). No, hushmail doesn't seem to have lied to their users in general -- the wired article praises them for their honesty -- but they do seem to have put a strong marketing spin on the lack of real security in the JS implementation of their service (as opposed to the original, more secure Java applet, in which the private keys never left the client machine).
It was called ThizLinux, and it was Chinese. I always just bought the machines and immediately installed some other linux distro on them.
The documentation that came with them had absolutely no information on ThizLinux. What it had page after page of was information on how to install Windows. I'm sure a significant market for these machines was people who were installing copyright-violating copies of Windows. But just because you found that all the people who returned them were doing that, that doesn't mean everyone who bought one was doing that. I bought five of the things over the years (for family, for my desk at work, ...), and the reason you never got any of them as returns is that they're all still running great with ubuntu on them.
I ordered one online for my kid. It's supposed to arrive at the local walmart by about Nov. 26. My wife was convinced my brain had been taken over by aliens, since I normally don't like walmart. I was like, "Honey, this is Linux! It's not evil, it's good!"
Walmart has had other linux PCs for sale online. What was supposed to be different about this one was that it was supposed to be on the shelves in the stores. AFAICT that never actually happened. The local walmart was one of the ones on the list that was supposed to have it for sale, but actually it never showed up in stock. Just out of curiousity, I checked their web site for other stores that might have it: San Francisco, NY, Chicago, etc. None of them had it in stock.
I hope these machines are good. I used to buy the $200 Fry's Great Quality machines, but Fry's is no longer selling those.
There are already good hash functions out there that don't share the basic design of SHA. I've been using whirlpool for applications where security is important. (Good old md5 is fine for applications that don't involve security.) The problem is getting these newer hash functions widely implemented. For instance, here is my request to get the perl Digest::Whirlpool module packaged for debian/ubuntu. Until better hashes are conveniently packaged, authors of applications actually have a disincentive to move to more secure hash functions.
I don't think you need to make up a hypothetical, complicated, national system for writing free textbooks. Lots of free textbooks already exist; see my sig for a catalog with hundreds of examples. Here is a series of articles I've written about free books, with an emphasis on free textbooks.
The issue of peer review and quality control is a paper tiger, at least at the college level. College professors decide what books to adopt for their courses, and they do it by looking at the book and making a judgment about its quality.
You didn't say, but I'm assuming you're talking about the college level (TFA was about elementary school), and when you refer to the online homework thing, I assume you're referring to math and science courses. There are tons of free online homework systems out there. I wrote this one, which is open-source, and free for students to use. The web page for my system has links to a bunch of other open-source ones, and also to a free-as-in-beer one at UT that appears to be extremely popular. Of course professors, like everyone else in the world, are lazy. If the only homework checker they ever hear about is something proprietary like WebAssign, and if the content is all set up for them in WebAssign, then they'll probably go the path of least resistance. And once the prof has his workflow all set up with WebAssign, he's going to be reluctant to switch to something free like the UT system.