I kept checking the local walmarts for availability via the online inventory interface, and they were always out of stock. Checked SF, Chicago, NY,... same deal. I wonder if there's been unexpectedly strong demand. The customer reviews on the walmart site look very positive. I finally ordered one via walmart's service where you can get it shipped to the store for free, and they'll you email when it arrives. This is for my young daughter to play flash games on, read wikipedia articles, etc. Not sure if I'll want to keep gOS or just install standard ubuntu. I guess I'll try installing gnome and seeing whether the performance is acceptable. The monitor and keyboard will probably end up costing more than the machine itself. I love the low power consumption, so I don't have to nag her to turn it off.
Oops, sorry, there was one mistake in what I said in the previous reply. The problem with square roots not being displayed correctly was my mistake -- I didn't have the mathematica fonts installed. However, the other two errors (nagging dialog box, extremely buggy printing) are still there once I do all the things you suggest.
Hmmm...thanks for the post, but of the two steps you posted, 1 is what I'd already done, and doing step 2 doesn't help with any of the problems I've experienced. This is all in firefox 2.0.0.8, ubuntu gutsy. With this setup, I get the dialog box every time, square roots look goofy, and printing is extremely buggy.
There's nothing new about being able to produce good-looking math output using free software and free fonts; people have been doing that for decades using tex/latex, and the relevant fonts are free enough that they can be distributed with linux distributions.
What's really new and important about STIX is that it will work better with technologies other than latex, especially web browsers. Mathml has been kicking around since 1999, but browser supported has always sucked to high heaven. One of the things holding browsers back from implementing mathml well has been the issue of fonts. Mathml is xml, so it naturally should use unicode. Latex dates back to long before the creation of unicode, so all its fonts are in obscure non-unicode encodings. The approach so far has been to cobble together something that works by building a Frankenstein's monster made out of various fonts that weren't designed to look good together, and that come from various sources. Even though Firefox now has mathml enabled by default, and I have the recommended witches' brew of fonts installed on my linux box, firefox still nags me about its fonts every time it needs to render mathml. The only way this is going to get better is with the STIX fonts.
For an example of how screwed up things have been, take a look at the archives of the Wikiproject Mathematics talk page on Wikipedia. WP's software uses software that renders LaTeX math into bitmaps, and that software has only very limited mathml output functionality, which is not actually being used. There was a project by a math grad student at harvard to make something better, called blahtex, which would have allowed mathml to be output as well. A user who was interested in mathematical topics, and who had Firefox, could set a preference on his WP account so that math would always be displayed to him in mathml, which would look much better (both on the screen and on paper) than the crappy screen-resolution bitmaps. Well, he wrote the thing, got it working great, tested it extensively on a huge number of equations harvested from actual WP pages, built support for it among WP editors. And when all was said and done, the Mediawiki developers wouldn't take his code. Basically the reasoning seems to have been that browser support for mathml sucked, so there was no point in disturbing mediawiki's codebase for a feature nobody cared about.
Ouch.
It's been a real chicken-and-egg thing. Since mathml support in IE requires a plugin, nobody's bothered to put much effort into making mathml content. MS's motivation for building mathml support into IE has been low, because nobody was using mathml, and the fonts weren't available. Although firefox has mathml support, it's extremely buggy, and the motivation to fix the bugs has been low, because nobody was using mathml, and the fonts weren't available. The fact that STIX is finally coming out may finally generate some excitement among developers about making mathml into a going concern on the web.
Anothing thing holding everyone back is that people are still expecting to be able to write html as if it was 1995, with no quotes around attributes, unbalanced tags, etc. That isn't going to work for xml-based technologies like mathml, and in fact firefox won't render mathml if it occurs on a page that's not valid xhtml. That seems to have been one of the big factors holding back adoption of mathml by mediawiki, for example, because the html code generated by mediawiki isn't valid xml.
I'm really hoping that sometime soon square roots won't look messed up on the screen in firefox's rendering of mathml, and a printed mathml web page won't look so horrible.
I agree with you that MS has a point, but I actually think the present incarnation of JS is quite a nice language. It's elegant how they made it possible to do OO techniques using prototypes, with a minimum of cruft. Unfortunately TFA doesn't have any information about the actual changes, but IIRC the planned changes have to do with making it more like java, with classes rather than prototypes. Well, I don't see any evidence that the current version of JS is broken and needs to be fixed. I think the problem, if there is one, is that a lot of people go to college these days and learn that OO programming, as embodied in Java, is the One True Way. It's true that if you want to write really huge js applications, you have to adopt a certain level of discipline, but it's no big deal; the O'Reilly rhino book, for example, shows techniques for avoiding the pollution of namespaces, and you just have to be disciplined enough to use those techniques. Perl is going through similar conniptions with the perl 5->perl 6 transition, but at least in the case of perl there's some good justification for a major redesign, since OO really is a hassle in perl 5.
Here are my notes:
http://www.lightandmatter.com/cgi-bin/meki?computer_unix#Debian,CUPS,_printing,_Brother_printer
The answer to your question is that currently, I don't have network printing working. My notes describe how I got it working in Breezy. When I upgraded to Fiesty, it broke, and to fix it I had to bring back my old cups config file. When I upgraded to Gutsy, it broke again, and restoring the old config file didn't help.
One interesting thing to note is that the language in the article implies that the computer will actually be on the shelf in stores. IIRC, previous cheap walmart linux PCs were only available by mail order.
Being able to buy a linux box for $200 is nothing new. I've been buying $180-250 Great Quality machines at Fry's for years. My daughter has one, I have several in the physics lab at the school where I teach, I gave one to my dad, etc. And although the "Great Quality" brand name probably sounds goofy to most people, I have in fact found that the quality of those machines is wonderful. I've never had a single hardware failure on any of them over many years.
In the physics lab, we have 7 Windows boxes supplied by the school, plus 3 Great Quality machines and one nicer linux box donated by a student. Because of that situation, I've had a lot of opportunities to see typical, naive users' first reactions to Linux running on low-end hardware. Basically GNOME and KDE are so similar to Windows that none of them have any issues with that. Many of them don't even realize they're not running Windows. Although GNOME feels dog-slow to me on these machines (especially the one that's five years old), I've never had a student complain about it, presumably because standards for responsiveness in a UI have been slipping over the years, and people are starting to perceive worse and worse performance as normal. (Personally, I'd go nuts trying to use these machines with GNOME, although Fluxbox is fine.) However, when it comes to using OpenOffice for graphing, we get a lot more problems. One problem is that, although in my eyes OOo Calc is actually too bug-for-bug similar to Excel, to many of my students the minor differences seem daunting. The other problem is that OOo is extremely slow to start up on a low-end machine. Although I perceive it as relatively snappy once it's started, it's hard to overcome that initial negative perception they get when it takes, say, a minute to start up.
There are a lot of really stupid IT policies out there that, in the name of security, in fact merely hinder getting work done.
I teach at a community college. Their current AUP is fairly reasonable, but Academic Computing has been trying to impose new rules that would make it a firing offense to (1) use a keychain drive on one of their machines, or (2) bring my laptop to work and plug it in to their network, or (3) do anything that might be interpreted as disparaging anyone based on a long list of things, including political opinions. #2 is kind of silly, since the science division has been telling us for years that they don't have money to provide computer systems in the classrooms, so if we want to do powerpoint or project web-based stuff on a screen, they expect us to bring in our own laptops. #3 would seem to prohibit students or faculty in political science classes from reading the wikipedia articles on Hitler and Stalin. Although my college so far seems to have decided not to implement the stricter policy, at least for the moment, a lot of it seems to be boilerplate language that is becoming more and more standard throughout the public education system. My kids' grade school has exactly the same overly broad language about disparagement in their AUP. I can't fathom how this kind of stuff can be reconciled with academic freedom, especially at the college level.
Re:The probem with these types of books is that...
on
The Official Ubuntu Book
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think you and the GP are talking about different classes of printer, [...] It's the cheapie inkjets that you get for free with a $500 computer that don't work right in Linux.
Just to clarify, I'm the GP poster, and I have a laser printer, not an inkjet. What's kicking my butt time after time is network printing, not printing locally. I think part of the problem may be that the cups developers and the Ubuntu developers are on different wavelengths about security. I keep seeing cases where the default in cups is supposed to be easy, but ubuntu has disabled the easy functionality for security reasons. IIRC, they disabled the entire web browser interface for a while, and the problem I'm currently having is that between Fiesty and Gutsy there's been a regression in network printing functionality, which seems to be security related. IMO there ought to be a button in the cups browser interface that you can click that says "Goddamn it, I'm on a home network behind a router, and the router has a built-in firewall. Stop breaking all my functionality in the name of security, and let my wife and kids print on this printer!"
Re:The probem with these types of books is that...
on
The Official Ubuntu Book
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Some things change more rapidly than others. I have a student who's trying to get started with Linux on an old machine his family had around. He's asking me questions like, "Where can you learn how to do that command line stuff?" and "What's a window manager?" The answers to those questions aren't going to change in six months.
From my point of view as a relatively experienced Linux user, the usefulness of such a book is probably a lot less. I have a big, long set of notes on Unix that I maintain in a personal wiki, and I doubt that there's very much in the intersection of {things I need to know} & {things I don't have in my notes} & {things that are in this book}. The main thing that's kicking my butt with ubuntu these days is cups and network printing; every time I manage to get it working, it takes a couple of weekends of pulling my hair out, and then it breaks again at the next upgrade. For that, the book is certain to be useless to me because of obsolescence, and also probably because the issue with cups seems to have more to do with poor design and integration into the distro. Another big problem a lot of people are suffering from is difficulties wifi and laptop power management. (Personally, wifi Just Works for me these days, and power management Just Doesn't Work). The book won't help with those issues, because they're fundamentally related to the proprietary nature of the hardware (e.g., hardware manaufacturers not publicly documenting the registers that need to be saved when you put your machine to sleep).
There are also certain categories of specialized, advanced knowledge that won't change anytime soon, but that most people don't need to know. For instance, I have a copy of "The Debian System" by Krafft, and although I can't recommend the book in general, it does have a reasonably intelligible and detailed discussion of the debian packaging system, which for me has turned out to be a lot more helpful than the various online descriptions (which are poorly written, disorganized, incomplete, and never up to date).
One of the big advantages of FreeBSD over Linux, IMO, is that FreeBSD is a single complete operating system, not a kernel that's packaged in a whole bunch of different distros, so you can buy a book on FreeBSD, and it will document the actual system you're using.
I didn't know the ISS had such a big despun platform. On uncrewed satellites, despun platforms have historically been a source of catastrophic failures. If the bearing suddenly locks up, the whole satellite starts spinning wildly out of control. I assume the ISS wasn't designed so that the failure of this bearing would kill eveyone aboard, but then what does happen if it fails? The article in today's NY Times says there are backup motors, but how does a backup motor help you if the bearing completely seizes?
Miguel's stated that, as a standard, OOXML is alright, but also shuddered at dealing with the way Microsoft abused binary segments in the format. The reason Novell et the GNOME foundation are so involved is for simple compatibility reasons. What better way to lure Windows users away than to provide support for the formats their existing documents are probably already in?
Looking at some of
de Icaza's
recent posts on slashdot, I find them hard to reconcile with that innocent interpretation. His public statements about OOXML are wildly disingenuous; I can't see how anybody who understands the nature of the criticisms of OOXML could fail to see them as pure FUD.
IMO, it would indicate a problem with GNOME if GNOME couldn't tolerate dissent on this issue, but it would also indicate a problem with the community if the community couldn't see through de Icaza's reality distortion field, and understand that he's saying ridiculous things because he has commercial ties to MS.
In the OSS world, it's all about whuffie. De Icaza earned a lot of whuffie by founding GNOME and writing a lot of code. In my eyes, he's lost it all by failing to be forthright.
If you look at Apple's description of the time machine functionality, it's not possible for it to work the way they claim. Suppose my backup drive has a capacity of 80 Gb, and so does my primary drive. I record 79 Gb of data onto my primary disk. I run out of space, delete all of that video, and then record 79 more Gb of video, filling the disk again. Then let's say I go through the cycle for a third time. They're claiming that I can then go back in time and get back my first or second video. No way. I don't have enough total disk space to store all three videos. So realistically, there are implementation limits, which they conveniently don't mention. Their description makes it sound as if everything Just Works, and will never fail to let you recover old files. In reality, it will Just Do Its Defaults, which may or may not be what you would have liked. Does it default to deleting the oldest files first? If so, then that's probably not what you would have liked in many cases, because you probably care more about preserving the 500 kb manuscript of your novel than about preserving the 70 Gb video of your kids' soccer games. Maybe it has some heuristics, so it tends to delete bigger files first, or files of a certain type first. Well, maybe that's what you wanted, but maybe it's not. Or maybe it asks you to make the decision whenever the backup drive fills up. Well, maybe that's what you want and maybe it's not, but it wouldn't be the same thing as the zero-work solution that Apple claims in their description.
In reality, I think you can have some, but not all, of the following:
The system takes zero work to configure and maintain.
The system has minimal impact on performance.
The system has simple, highly predictable behavior (such as always deleting older versions first).
The system has behavior that is what you choose.
The system doesn't require buying an expensive external drive that takes up space on you desk.
The system automatically gives you an off-site backup in case your house burns down.
Personally, what works for me is the unison file synchronizer (I use it on Linux, but it's cross-platform), plus monthly backups on CD or DVD. Using the network file synchronization takes care of two things: (1) I have an off-site backup that's always fairly up to date; (2) it makes it easy to undo mistakes like "oh no, I didn't want to delete that file." The CD backups let me (3) go back in time and get very old versions of files. I'm not saying that my solution is right for everyone. No solution is right for everyone. However, my OSS solution works much better for me than Apple's expensive, proprietary system would work for me.
Since IMSLP is down, I haven't been able to see how big their collection was or what it was like, but it sounds like it was scans of PD sheet music. While that could be very useful, it's obviously preferable to have your music in a format such as lilypond that you can edit. For example, I'm a violist, and right now I'm working on the prelude from one of the Bach cello suites. Once the score was in lilypond format, it was trivial to transpose it up an octave and put it in C clef. Then I was able to change the bowings and fingerings and get high-quality printed output. The Mutopia project collects scores in lilypond format. Werner Icking Music Archive has a lot of very high quality scores in musixtex format. I've posted some of my own PD scores here. Sure it's a lot more work than collecting scans, but in the long run it's the right way to go. I think the main barrier has been the lack of open-source music typesetting software that is a gui but can produce output as high in quality as lilypond ot musixtex can. Rosegarden (a gui that uses lilypond as a back end for typesetting) wasn't quite there the last time I looked, although it seems like the developers are working hard on it.
This particular story has to do with a security hole in the computer software, but in general, my understanding of the logic of the game is that online poker is potentially the only way to get a guaranteed honest game with strangers. In a meatspace game with strangers, the problem that basically can't be solved is collusion. Player A and player B both walk into the casino, and pretend they don't know each other. In reality, they've arranged certain secret signals in advance, to be used in hands where the pot gets big. One signal might mean "I'm bluffing," and another might mean "I'm not bluffing." Over time, this gives them a huge systematic advantage. An online poker system, on the other hand, can at least potentially be set up so that A and B can't get themselves into the same game together -- you just have to have a large enough pool of users, and assign them randomly to games. The other reason I'd never play in a casino game is that the house's take is big enough that you're practically guaranteed to lose money in the long run, unless you somehow manage to get into games where your skills are extremely high in comparison to your competitors'.
This didn't work for me. When I did "Add CD-ROM," I got "unable to locate package files, perhaps this is not a debian disc." The other replies are all talking about using the alternate install disk, rather than the regular installer, which is what I downloaded.
As people start doing more and more things with their web browsers, I see them shifting more and more toward proprietary software and formats. There was an interview in Newsweek recently with Adobe's CEO, and he was saying things like (paraphrased from memory): "People use Adobe software all the time, and they don't even realize it. Virtually every web site has flash, and that means you're using our product. Every time you read a pdf file, you're using our product." Now a lot of this was semi-bogus (there isn't flash on virtually every web site *I* visit, and personally when I view a pdf, I usually use xpdf or evince), but there's an element of truth to it. The browser wars created a giant sucking sound in terms of open standards for having your browser do something more than render static html. Netscape and MS screwed around with their nonstandard, incompatible versions of the "embed" tag, while the w3c pushed "object," which nobody ever bothered to support properly. Meanwhile, users just wanted to watch videos, play games, etc., and they found out that they could do that using flash. Unfortunately, flash is highly proprietary. (Yes, I know about gnash, haxe, etc., but they're severely limited in what they can do, because the codecs are all proprietary, and so is various other flash stuff like the standard gui widgets described in books on flash.) Now take a look around at ajax-based web apps. They're almost all proprietary. The basic model seems to be that you're supposed to do all your work using software that you don't own, and aren't even licensing -- half the code isn't even running on the client, it's running on the server. Sure, there are a few GPL'd ajax apps (fckeditor, kupu,...), but the vast majority of these apps bear the same relationship to OSS as antimatter bears to matter. I like the idea of web apps, my kids love to play flash games, etc., --- but we have to watch out how this is all implemented, because it could very easily take us backward into a dark age for open source. As soon as javascript was first introduced, developers who Just Didn't Get It about open source started complaining that javascript was an interpreted language, so everyone would be able to see their code. Never mind that users might actually feel that they had a right to know what code was being run automatically on their machine when they clicked on a link and landed on a web site -- the closed-source mentality was that this was a bad thing, because people would steal the code, etc. Well, ajax is creating a situation that caters to exactly that closed-source mentality, because the js code on the client is only one part of the app, and the rest of the code is securely hidden on a server -- along with the user's own data, which he no longer really owns.
There have been other attacks using the same "drive-by download" (find a plugin with weak security and local filesystem access, use javascript to make it drop and execute a malware downloader) technique.
I see. So does switching from IE to FF even help, if it's actually a vulnerability in a plugin? I guess it would help if it was a plugin that the user didn't actually need, and that wasn't implemented in FF.
Hmm...thanks for the link, but it tends to reinforce my impression that this whole thing is only an issue on machines with very old, unpatched configurations, and can be fixed easily either by applying the default security patches that MS puts out, or by switching from IE to Firefox.
but that sort of javascript shenanigans that download and execute files without the user's knowledge are still being used to spead malware.
The javascript security model doesn't allow client-side javascript to read or write files on the client's machine.
Presumably they shouldn't work in Vista's IE sandbox, since they depend on IE being able to call outside executables, but I don't know for sure.
Hmm... well, the exploit described at your link apparently only worked on an unpatched machine in 2004, presumably because there was an error in IE's implementation of the javascript security model, an error that had already been patched by 2004.
I keep seeing statements, including one in the PDF report from TFA, that Win+IE users can get their machines infected with malware just by visiting a web site, without even clicking their mouse on anything in the site. However, these statements always seem to come from people who make money in the security business, and they never seem to say anything about what the actual IE vulnerabilities are. I'm very skeptical, although I haven't run Windows in a decade, so maybe I'm just naive. Can any slashdotters with expertise in Win+IE security explain more about this? Does this only apply to IE6, not IE7? Versions earlier than Vista? Does it apply to a default install of Windows, or only to misconfigured systems? When a home user buys a machine with Windows these days, doesn't it basically come configured so that security updates are offered automatically, and all the user has to do is click OK? Are these vulnerabilities in ActiveX? Are they buffer overflows? Flaws in the basic Windows security model? In any case, the whole thing seems faintly ridiculous to me -- if IE+Win security is really this bad, you'd have to be an idiot not to switch to Firefox, and yet many security companies are proposing that users do expensive and/or time-consuming things to work around vulnerabilities in Win+IE.
You're only going to get a Distro Upgrade option if there's one available. This has been true for for Edgy -> Feisty, for each Gutsy beta release, and probably for Feisty -> Gutsy.
Right. When I say that it doesn't consistently offer you the option, I'm talking about cases where there is an upgrade available. (I recently upgraded three ubuntu machines, and observed different behavior, even when they all had a distribution upgrade available.)
Ubuntu won't tell you to upgrade, unless you run update-manager --dist-upgrade. AFAIR there's no point & click way to do this.
I've observed that doing GNOME, System -> Administration -> Update Manager will sometimes, but not always, offer you the option of upgrading your distro. Sometimes it won't offer you the option unless you run update manager twice in a row. A lot of this behavior may be hard to reproduce, because, e.g., Dapper, Edgy, Fiesty, etc. may all have different versions of update manager, which behave slightly differently. (If you've decided you want to upgrade your system, and want to do it using the GNOME gui, the surefire way to get it to offer you the option is to do a gksu "update-manager -c".)
I've written a series of three articles (the first two of which ran on slashdot) about free books. The first article (from 2000) discusses the fact that a lot of free books were getting written, but almost none of them by open collaborations with lots of people in them (but almost none != zero). The third one (from 2005) discusses wikibooks, which has utterly failed at the group authoring model for college textbooks (which was its initially stated goal), but has done well with some other genres, such as game guides.
I think the opinion of "bad versus good" falls nearly directly in how in-bed the writer was with the old media. [...] I'm a firm believer that the Internet is GOOD for writers.
I'm one data-point in favor of what you're saying. I've been working for the last several years on breaking into science fiction writing. I just made my first sale of a short story, and it was to an electronic magazine. If the internet hadn't existed, I wouldn't have made that sale. The three big dead-tree SF magazines in the U.S. have been experiencing shrinking circulations for many years (and that trend was already well underway before the internet started luring away any significant number of eyeballs). The print magazines' response has been (a) to keep their word rates constant at $.05/word, which means a reduction in real dollars, and (b) to shrink their yearly page counts, which causes a proportionate decrease in a new writer's chances of breaking in. The electronic magazine I made my sale to paid me $.06/word, and for stories by established pros they pay as much as $.25/word. The way they can afford the higher rates by eliminating all the overhead costs associated with dead-tree publishing. (And BTW I think it's very cool that they don't use DRM.)
Slashdot Mirror
I kept checking the local walmarts for availability via the online inventory interface, and they were always out of stock. Checked SF, Chicago, NY, ... same deal. I wonder if there's been unexpectedly strong demand. The customer reviews on the walmart site look very positive. I finally ordered one via walmart's service where you can get it shipped to the store for free, and they'll you email when it arrives. This is for my young daughter to play flash games on, read wikipedia articles, etc. Not sure if I'll want to keep gOS or just install standard ubuntu. I guess I'll try installing gnome and seeing whether the performance is acceptable. The monitor and keyboard will probably end up costing more than the machine itself. I love the low power consumption, so I don't have to nag her to turn it off.
Oops, sorry, there was one mistake in what I said in the previous reply. The problem with square roots not being displayed correctly was my mistake -- I didn't have the mathematica fonts installed. However, the other two errors (nagging dialog box, extremely buggy printing) are still there once I do all the things you suggest.
Hmmm...thanks for the post, but of the two steps you posted, 1 is what I'd already done, and doing step 2 doesn't help with any of the problems I've experienced. This is all in firefox 2.0.0.8, ubuntu gutsy. With this setup, I get the dialog box every time, square roots look goofy, and printing is extremely buggy.
There's nothing new about being able to produce good-looking math output using free software and free fonts; people have been doing that for decades using tex/latex, and the relevant fonts are free enough that they can be distributed with linux distributions.
What's really new and important about STIX is that it will work better with technologies other than latex, especially web browsers. Mathml has been kicking around since 1999, but browser supported has always sucked to high heaven. One of the things holding browsers back from implementing mathml well has been the issue of fonts. Mathml is xml, so it naturally should use unicode. Latex dates back to long before the creation of unicode, so all its fonts are in obscure non-unicode encodings. The approach so far has been to cobble together something that works by building a Frankenstein's monster made out of various fonts that weren't designed to look good together, and that come from various sources. Even though Firefox now has mathml enabled by default, and I have the recommended witches' brew of fonts installed on my linux box, firefox still nags me about its fonts every time it needs to render mathml. The only way this is going to get better is with the STIX fonts.
For an example of how screwed up things have been, take a look at the archives of the Wikiproject Mathematics talk page on Wikipedia. WP's software uses software that renders LaTeX math into bitmaps, and that software has only very limited mathml output functionality, which is not actually being used. There was a project by a math grad student at harvard to make something better, called blahtex, which would have allowed mathml to be output as well. A user who was interested in mathematical topics, and who had Firefox, could set a preference on his WP account so that math would always be displayed to him in mathml, which would look much better (both on the screen and on paper) than the crappy screen-resolution bitmaps. Well, he wrote the thing, got it working great, tested it extensively on a huge number of equations harvested from actual WP pages, built support for it among WP editors. And when all was said and done, the Mediawiki developers wouldn't take his code. Basically the reasoning seems to have been that browser support for mathml sucked, so there was no point in disturbing mediawiki's codebase for a feature nobody cared about.
Ouch.
It's been a real chicken-and-egg thing. Since mathml support in IE requires a plugin, nobody's bothered to put much effort into making mathml content. MS's motivation for building mathml support into IE has been low, because nobody was using mathml, and the fonts weren't available. Although firefox has mathml support, it's extremely buggy, and the motivation to fix the bugs has been low, because nobody was using mathml, and the fonts weren't available. The fact that STIX is finally coming out may finally generate some excitement among developers about making mathml into a going concern on the web.
Anothing thing holding everyone back is that people are still expecting to be able to write html as if it was 1995, with no quotes around attributes, unbalanced tags, etc. That isn't going to work for xml-based technologies like mathml, and in fact firefox won't render mathml if it occurs on a page that's not valid xhtml. That seems to have been one of the big factors holding back adoption of mathml by mediawiki, for example, because the html code generated by mediawiki isn't valid xml.
I'm really hoping that sometime soon square roots won't look messed up on the screen in firefox's rendering of mathml, and a printed mathml web page won't look so horrible.
I agree with you that MS has a point, but I actually think the present incarnation of JS is quite a nice language. It's elegant how they made it possible to do OO techniques using prototypes, with a minimum of cruft. Unfortunately TFA doesn't have any information about the actual changes, but IIRC the planned changes have to do with making it more like java, with classes rather than prototypes. Well, I don't see any evidence that the current version of JS is broken and needs to be fixed. I think the problem, if there is one, is that a lot of people go to college these days and learn that OO programming, as embodied in Java, is the One True Way. It's true that if you want to write really huge js applications, you have to adopt a certain level of discipline, but it's no big deal; the O'Reilly rhino book, for example, shows techniques for avoiding the pollution of namespaces, and you just have to be disciplined enough to use those techniques. Perl is going through similar conniptions with the perl 5->perl 6 transition, but at least in the case of perl there's some good justification for a major redesign, since OO really is a hassle in perl 5.
Here are my notes: http://www.lightandmatter.com/cgi-bin/meki?computer_unix#Debian,CUPS,_printing,_Brother_printer The answer to your question is that currently, I don't have network printing working. My notes describe how I got it working in Breezy. When I upgraded to Fiesty, it broke, and to fix it I had to bring back my old cups config file. When I upgraded to Gutsy, it broke again, and restoring the old config file didn't help.
One interesting thing to note is that the language in the article implies that the computer will actually be on the shelf in stores. IIRC, previous cheap walmart linux PCs were only available by mail order.
Being able to buy a linux box for $200 is nothing new. I've been buying $180-250 Great Quality machines at Fry's for years. My daughter has one, I have several in the physics lab at the school where I teach, I gave one to my dad, etc. And although the "Great Quality" brand name probably sounds goofy to most people, I have in fact found that the quality of those machines is wonderful. I've never had a single hardware failure on any of them over many years.
In the physics lab, we have 7 Windows boxes supplied by the school, plus 3 Great Quality machines and one nicer linux box donated by a student. Because of that situation, I've had a lot of opportunities to see typical, naive users' first reactions to Linux running on low-end hardware. Basically GNOME and KDE are so similar to Windows that none of them have any issues with that. Many of them don't even realize they're not running Windows. Although GNOME feels dog-slow to me on these machines (especially the one that's five years old), I've never had a student complain about it, presumably because standards for responsiveness in a UI have been slipping over the years, and people are starting to perceive worse and worse performance as normal. (Personally, I'd go nuts trying to use these machines with GNOME, although Fluxbox is fine.) However, when it comes to using OpenOffice for graphing, we get a lot more problems. One problem is that, although in my eyes OOo Calc is actually too bug-for-bug similar to Excel, to many of my students the minor differences seem daunting. The other problem is that OOo is extremely slow to start up on a low-end machine. Although I perceive it as relatively snappy once it's started, it's hard to overcome that initial negative perception they get when it takes, say, a minute to start up.
I teach at a community college. Their current AUP is fairly reasonable, but Academic Computing has been trying to impose new rules that would make it a firing offense to (1) use a keychain drive on one of their machines, or (2) bring my laptop to work and plug it in to their network, or (3) do anything that might be interpreted as disparaging anyone based on a long list of things, including political opinions. #2 is kind of silly, since the science division has been telling us for years that they don't have money to provide computer systems in the classrooms, so if we want to do powerpoint or project web-based stuff on a screen, they expect us to bring in our own laptops. #3 would seem to prohibit students or faculty in political science classes from reading the wikipedia articles on Hitler and Stalin. Although my college so far seems to have decided not to implement the stricter policy, at least for the moment, a lot of it seems to be boilerplate language that is becoming more and more standard throughout the public education system. My kids' grade school has exactly the same overly broad language about disparagement in their AUP. I can't fathom how this kind of stuff can be reconciled with academic freedom, especially at the college level.
Just to clarify, I'm the GP poster, and I have a laser printer, not an inkjet. What's kicking my butt time after time is network printing, not printing locally. I think part of the problem may be that the cups developers and the Ubuntu developers are on different wavelengths about security. I keep seeing cases where the default in cups is supposed to be easy, but ubuntu has disabled the easy functionality for security reasons. IIRC, they disabled the entire web browser interface for a while, and the problem I'm currently having is that between Fiesty and Gutsy there's been a regression in network printing functionality, which seems to be security related. IMO there ought to be a button in the cups browser interface that you can click that says "Goddamn it, I'm on a home network behind a router, and the router has a built-in firewall. Stop breaking all my functionality in the name of security, and let my wife and kids print on this printer!"
Some things change more rapidly than others. I have a student who's trying to get started with Linux on an old machine his family had around. He's asking me questions like, "Where can you learn how to do that command line stuff?" and "What's a window manager?" The answers to those questions aren't going to change in six months.
From my point of view as a relatively experienced Linux user, the usefulness of such a book is probably a lot less. I have a big, long set of notes on Unix that I maintain in a personal wiki, and I doubt that there's very much in the intersection of {things I need to know} & {things I don't have in my notes} & {things that are in this book}. The main thing that's kicking my butt with ubuntu these days is cups and network printing; every time I manage to get it working, it takes a couple of weekends of pulling my hair out, and then it breaks again at the next upgrade. For that, the book is certain to be useless to me because of obsolescence, and also probably because the issue with cups seems to have more to do with poor design and integration into the distro. Another big problem a lot of people are suffering from is difficulties wifi and laptop power management. (Personally, wifi Just Works for me these days, and power management Just Doesn't Work). The book won't help with those issues, because they're fundamentally related to the proprietary nature of the hardware (e.g., hardware manaufacturers not publicly documenting the registers that need to be saved when you put your machine to sleep).
There are also certain categories of specialized, advanced knowledge that won't change anytime soon, but that most people don't need to know. For instance, I have a copy of "The Debian System" by Krafft, and although I can't recommend the book in general, it does have a reasonably intelligible and detailed discussion of the debian packaging system, which for me has turned out to be a lot more helpful than the various online descriptions (which are poorly written, disorganized, incomplete, and never up to date).
One of the big advantages of FreeBSD over Linux, IMO, is that FreeBSD is a single complete operating system, not a kernel that's packaged in a whole bunch of different distros, so you can buy a book on FreeBSD, and it will document the actual system you're using.
I didn't know the ISS had such a big despun platform. On uncrewed satellites, despun platforms have historically been a source of catastrophic failures. If the bearing suddenly locks up, the whole satellite starts spinning wildly out of control. I assume the ISS wasn't designed so that the failure of this bearing would kill eveyone aboard, but then what does happen if it fails? The article in today's NY Times says there are backup motors, but how does a backup motor help you if the bearing completely seizes?
Looking at some of de Icaza's recent posts on slashdot, I find them hard to reconcile with that innocent interpretation. His public statements about OOXML are wildly disingenuous; I can't see how anybody who understands the nature of the criticisms of OOXML could fail to see them as pure FUD.
IMO, it would indicate a problem with GNOME if GNOME couldn't tolerate dissent on this issue, but it would also indicate a problem with the community if the community couldn't see through de Icaza's reality distortion field, and understand that he's saying ridiculous things because he has commercial ties to MS.
In the OSS world, it's all about whuffie. De Icaza earned a lot of whuffie by founding GNOME and writing a lot of code. In my eyes, he's lost it all by failing to be forthright.
If you look at Apple's description of the time machine functionality, it's not possible for it to work the way they claim. Suppose my backup drive has a capacity of 80 Gb, and so does my primary drive. I record 79 Gb of data onto my primary disk. I run out of space, delete all of that video, and then record 79 more Gb of video, filling the disk again. Then let's say I go through the cycle for a third time. They're claiming that I can then go back in time and get back my first or second video. No way. I don't have enough total disk space to store all three videos. So realistically, there are implementation limits, which they conveniently don't mention. Their description makes it sound as if everything Just Works, and will never fail to let you recover old files. In reality, it will Just Do Its Defaults, which may or may not be what you would have liked. Does it default to deleting the oldest files first? If so, then that's probably not what you would have liked in many cases, because you probably care more about preserving the 500 kb manuscript of your novel than about preserving the 70 Gb video of your kids' soccer games. Maybe it has some heuristics, so it tends to delete bigger files first, or files of a certain type first. Well, maybe that's what you wanted, but maybe it's not. Or maybe it asks you to make the decision whenever the backup drive fills up. Well, maybe that's what you want and maybe it's not, but it wouldn't be the same thing as the zero-work solution that Apple claims in their description.
In reality, I think you can have some, but not all, of the following:
Personally, what works for me is the unison file synchronizer (I use it on Linux, but it's cross-platform), plus monthly backups on CD or DVD. Using the network file synchronization takes care of two things: (1) I have an off-site backup that's always fairly up to date; (2) it makes it easy to undo mistakes like "oh no, I didn't want to delete that file." The CD backups let me (3) go back in time and get very old versions of files. I'm not saying that my solution is right for everyone. No solution is right for everyone. However, my OSS solution works much better for me than Apple's expensive, proprietary system would work for me.
Since IMSLP is down, I haven't been able to see how big their collection was or what it was like, but it sounds like it was scans of PD sheet music. While that could be very useful, it's obviously preferable to have your music in a format such as lilypond that you can edit. For example, I'm a violist, and right now I'm working on the prelude from one of the Bach cello suites. Once the score was in lilypond format, it was trivial to transpose it up an octave and put it in C clef. Then I was able to change the bowings and fingerings and get high-quality printed output. The Mutopia project collects scores in lilypond format. Werner Icking Music Archive has a lot of very high quality scores in musixtex format. I've posted some of my own PD scores here. Sure it's a lot more work than collecting scans, but in the long run it's the right way to go. I think the main barrier has been the lack of open-source music typesetting software that is a gui but can produce output as high in quality as lilypond ot musixtex can. Rosegarden (a gui that uses lilypond as a back end for typesetting) wasn't quite there the last time I looked, although it seems like the developers are working hard on it.
This particular story has to do with a security hole in the computer software, but in general, my understanding of the logic of the game is that online poker is potentially the only way to get a guaranteed honest game with strangers. In a meatspace game with strangers, the problem that basically can't be solved is collusion. Player A and player B both walk into the casino, and pretend they don't know each other. In reality, they've arranged certain secret signals in advance, to be used in hands where the pot gets big. One signal might mean "I'm bluffing," and another might mean "I'm not bluffing." Over time, this gives them a huge systematic advantage. An online poker system, on the other hand, can at least potentially be set up so that A and B can't get themselves into the same game together -- you just have to have a large enough pool of users, and assign them randomly to games. The other reason I'd never play in a casino game is that the house's take is big enough that you're practically guaranteed to lose money in the long run, unless you somehow manage to get into games where your skills are extremely high in comparison to your competitors'.
This didn't work for me. When I did "Add CD-ROM," I got "unable to locate package files, perhaps this is not a debian disc." The other replies are all talking about using the alternate install disk, rather than the regular installer, which is what I downloaded.
As people start doing more and more things with their web browsers, I see them shifting more and more toward proprietary software and formats. There was an interview in Newsweek recently with Adobe's CEO, and he was saying things like (paraphrased from memory): "People use Adobe software all the time, and they don't even realize it. Virtually every web site has flash, and that means you're using our product. Every time you read a pdf file, you're using our product." Now a lot of this was semi-bogus (there isn't flash on virtually every web site *I* visit, and personally when I view a pdf, I usually use xpdf or evince), but there's an element of truth to it. The browser wars created a giant sucking sound in terms of open standards for having your browser do something more than render static html. Netscape and MS screwed around with their nonstandard, incompatible versions of the "embed" tag, while the w3c pushed "object," which nobody ever bothered to support properly. Meanwhile, users just wanted to watch videos, play games, etc., and they found out that they could do that using flash. Unfortunately, flash is highly proprietary. (Yes, I know about gnash, haxe, etc., but they're severely limited in what they can do, because the codecs are all proprietary, and so is various other flash stuff like the standard gui widgets described in books on flash.) Now take a look around at ajax-based web apps. They're almost all proprietary. The basic model seems to be that you're supposed to do all your work using software that you don't own, and aren't even licensing -- half the code isn't even running on the client, it's running on the server. Sure, there are a few GPL'd ajax apps (fckeditor, kupu,...), but the vast majority of these apps bear the same relationship to OSS as antimatter bears to matter. I like the idea of web apps, my kids love to play flash games, etc., --- but we have to watch out how this is all implemented, because it could very easily take us backward into a dark age for open source. As soon as javascript was first introduced, developers who Just Didn't Get It about open source started complaining that javascript was an interpreted language, so everyone would be able to see their code. Never mind that users might actually feel that they had a right to know what code was being run automatically on their machine when they clicked on a link and landed on a web site -- the closed-source mentality was that this was a bad thing, because people would steal the code, etc. Well, ajax is creating a situation that caters to exactly that closed-source mentality, because the js code on the client is only one part of the app, and the rest of the code is securely hidden on a server -- along with the user's own data, which he no longer really owns.
There have been other attacks using the same "drive-by download" (find a plugin with weak security and local filesystem access, use javascript to make it drop and execute a malware downloader) technique.
I see. So does switching from IE to FF even help, if it's actually a vulnerability in a plugin? I guess it would help if it was a plugin that the user didn't actually need, and that wasn't implemented in FF.
Hmm...thanks for the link, but it tends to reinforce my impression that this whole thing is only an issue on machines with very old, unpatched configurations, and can be fixed easily either by applying the default security patches that MS puts out, or by switching from IE to Firefox.
but that sort of javascript shenanigans that download and execute files without the user's knowledge are still being used to spead malware.
The javascript security model doesn't allow client-side javascript to read or write files on the client's machine.
Presumably they shouldn't work in Vista's IE sandbox, since they depend on IE being able to call outside executables, but I don't know for sure.
Hmm... well, the exploit described at your link apparently only worked on an unpatched machine in 2004, presumably because there was an error in IE's implementation of the javascript security model, an error that had already been patched by 2004.
I keep seeing statements, including one in the PDF report from TFA, that Win+IE users can get their machines infected with malware just by visiting a web site, without even clicking their mouse on anything in the site. However, these statements always seem to come from people who make money in the security business, and they never seem to say anything about what the actual IE vulnerabilities are. I'm very skeptical, although I haven't run Windows in a decade, so maybe I'm just naive. Can any slashdotters with expertise in Win+IE security explain more about this? Does this only apply to IE6, not IE7? Versions earlier than Vista? Does it apply to a default install of Windows, or only to misconfigured systems? When a home user buys a machine with Windows these days, doesn't it basically come configured so that security updates are offered automatically, and all the user has to do is click OK? Are these vulnerabilities in ActiveX? Are they buffer overflows? Flaws in the basic Windows security model? In any case, the whole thing seems faintly ridiculous to me -- if IE+Win security is really this bad, you'd have to be an idiot not to switch to Firefox, and yet many security companies are proposing that users do expensive and/or time-consuming things to work around vulnerabilities in Win+IE.
You're only going to get a Distro Upgrade option if there's one available. This has been true for for Edgy -> Feisty, for each Gutsy beta release, and probably for Feisty -> Gutsy.
Right. When I say that it doesn't consistently offer you the option, I'm talking about cases where there is an upgrade available. (I recently upgraded three ubuntu machines, and observed different behavior, even when they all had a distribution upgrade available.)
I've observed that doing GNOME, System -> Administration -> Update Manager will sometimes, but not always, offer you the option of upgrading your distro. Sometimes it won't offer you the option unless you run update manager twice in a row. A lot of this behavior may be hard to reproduce, because, e.g., Dapper, Edgy, Fiesty, etc. may all have different versions of update manager, which behave slightly differently. (If you've decided you want to upgrade your system, and want to do it using the GNOME gui, the surefire way to get it to offer you the option is to do a gksu "update-manager -c".)
I've written a series of three articles (the first two of which ran on slashdot) about free books. The first article (from 2000) discusses the fact that a lot of free books were getting written, but almost none of them by open collaborations with lots of people in them (but almost none != zero). The third one (from 2005) discusses wikibooks, which has utterly failed at the group authoring model for college textbooks (which was its initially stated goal), but has done well with some other genres, such as game guides.
See my sig for a catalog of free books, including quite a few free math books.
I think the opinion of "bad versus good" falls nearly directly in how in-bed the writer was with the old media. [...] I'm a firm believer that the Internet is GOOD for writers.
I'm one data-point in favor of what you're saying. I've been working for the last several years on breaking into science fiction writing. I just made my first sale of a short story, and it was to an electronic magazine. If the internet hadn't existed, I wouldn't have made that sale. The three big dead-tree SF magazines in the U.S. have been experiencing shrinking circulations for many years (and that trend was already well underway before the internet started luring away any significant number of eyeballs). The print magazines' response has been (a) to keep their word rates constant at $.05/word, which means a reduction in real dollars, and (b) to shrink their yearly page counts, which causes a proportionate decrease in a new writer's chances of breaking in. The electronic magazine I made my sale to paid me $.06/word, and for stories by established pros they pay as much as $.25/word. The way they can afford the higher rates by eliminating all the overhead costs associated with dead-tree publishing. (And BTW I think it's very cool that they don't use DRM.)