My laptops Mobility HD 5900 series card works fine in linux (though not its wireless sadly) yet my Radeon HD 6970 has issues
Quick and dirty^W clean laptop wireless has stopped being the norm in Ubuntu for intel cards this past year, so I'm contemplating switching out to Scientific Linux 6. Ever since 10.4, unencrypted *and* WPA connectivity drops erratically or fails to connect though Vista and 9.4 are OK.
Replacing network-manager with wifi-radar helped temporarily, but then further tweaking to get my original WPA2 off the ground killed it. I heard on forums that intel's fixing some microcode problems with ~AGN5000 and ~AGN4000 cards, and I'm not about to stick around for that and the other annoying changes Mark has planned for Gnome.
More on topic, ever since Intel announced it will never touch the dedicated card market, I've lost all hope for games ever working right on anything but AMD / nvidia laptops. Up till when compiz finally worked without tweaking in my distro, I had no use for 3D other than gl-screensavers.
I'm more surprised they have a goal of [...] extension-independent cookie/popup blacklists.
Curse you,/. parser... <50 made you eat my sentences! I wrote that "they have a goal of [less-than glyph] 50ms GUI responses and that I hoped this would take care of recent problems with Tools / Options taking multiple seconds under windows while parsing extension-independent cookie/popup blacklists."
That is a Windows problem: its anti-spyware programs give themselves permission to stick their hand into FF's innards to "immunize" it the same way they violate IE. Much redundancy ensues because said same software also hostfile blocks the same domains so that lookups fail. The end result is that Firefox wastes its time managing growing blacklists that are already unreachable at the OS/DNS level. This is not Mozilla's fault, though.
Waiting till multiprocess tabs sometime FF#unknown
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Firefox 4, A Day Later
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Someone else reminded us of the multiprocess tab project. A year ago, we thought FF 3.7 (now 3.6.4 and up) would unveil Electrolysis' "Multiple content processes" but the wiki has been stranded with no clear timeline updates for 9 months since July 2010.
The main FF4 page mentions JS speed increases, but MCP seems nothing other than some difficult bulletpoint under-the-hood that they can't figure out how to market. It feels like when Vista and Seven cheated us out of a new unhierarchycal database filesystem that was promised several years before 2006. What makes me lose hope is that even FF's summary page for 2011 is mum about MCP. Their detailed roadmap does promise Electrolysis and "Process-per-tab to mitigate effects of crashes." I'm more surprised they have a goal of extension-independent cookie/popup blacklists. It also will hopefully tackle the lag to undisplay current tabs and begin to switch to another, especially when some of them have flash loaded.
Besides implementing WebGL (see google body), FF4 doesn't present a substancial under-the-hood improvement for normal 3.6 users, let alone your average home/office drone. I have an idea! Wait till FF5 comes out in 3 short months, and FF6 in 6 months, or FF7 in December. Meanwhile, I have higher chances of test-driving IE9 to see how much it's grown. FF has reached its aimless teen girl phase, and thinks life is nothing but trying new emo makeup every month:)
Your statements are true. Society currently in their 60s and slightly younger went through a process starting at a discovery. From single inventors (Babagge's differential engine many decades ago) to small teams creating mainframes for the army, to groups creating various implementations, to cautious field-testing and eventual army usage, to deployment of mainframes in large companies (financially difficult, so about 30 years later), then [non-desktop] time-sharing at universities, and finally business adoption, and later home adoption of the desktops. The latter casually began at the very completion stage of that process, sometime in the 80s, but really exploded only in between the late 1990s and the 2001 internet bubble (let's not get started on the whole different internet evolution process and its mysteries to the same society).
Heck, it's true the world still hasn't finished --think of Africa's early OLPC days due to slow desktop adoption. Think of the reason one of our/. memes is "This Ubuntu is so easy your (60+ parents | 80 year old grandma) can use it" when those older people you're mentioning had even harder to use PC's in their youth during darker days of desktops that you seem to claim have been easily available prior to the 80s.
There will always be people of every generation that has nearly no computer experience.
Technically true also, but every decade the 'truth' shifts. It is seen as negligence and already prevents those people from getting office jobs --like using today's reasoning that, "There will always be people of every generation that has nearly no telephone experience."
The bar goes up with or without us and them, especially as people retire later and later. Why? today's teens beat us at our own game of consumer-level acceptance and undestanding because the products have matured now. Eventually some of today's hard-earned knowledge will have the usefulness of a typewriter and typist-only jobs. That day won't wait till we are 60 (say, 30 more years) because young'ns already lack the same patience I'm expected to show to our seniors...just judge how we get shunned by our kids unless we're texting them, FB friending them and replacing text articles by video reports from, say, CNN.
The "rotating ring" style throbber has been around for a bit in other GUIs and has come to replace the old hourglass animation.
I reluctantly agree that it's been a subtle replacement to XP wait. So subtle that I've been experiencing it for 3 years without realizing Vista did kill the hourglass completely. I'm sure all those claims that 'Seven is sooo fast' come from people who just skipped over Vista and had even less time to notice this small (and not the only) subliminal message that no hourglass on the same OS means you have a faster OS. Don't get me wrong, I do accept that some changes are nice, but I've tried all three OS's on this old dual-core laptop and Seven didn't seem faster than XP and Vista; just crisp and lean.
Someone'll need to check me on this, but I actually think the rotating ring came about before Windows started using it as their general "busy" indicator.
Well, I haven't found any article describing the history, but let me be the first. You are referring to an animation based off of the MacOS X "spinning gear". That image's waiting circular concentric circles was an evolution obviously made monocrome after the bad reception its "filled-in" predecesor, the MacOS inadvertently created with their creation of the rainbow ball of doom got. The Jargon file puts it that back to MacOS 10.2 days, it has darker origins. The ball had once been black and white, in the Hypercard or Applescript days and was a quarter divided ball. That goes back to the OS 7 days, prior to 1998.
Funny that MS adopted the new doughnut progress metaphor from Apple, since the latter made a slow evolution away from Windows' hourglass metaphor, from a black and white wristwatch to a pinwheels that ended back as a doughnut marker that MS stole.
Small tab GUI improvements theoretically help, but there's zero improvement on the bottom of the barrel side of non-geeks. People past their fourties who want to go from Zero to Facebook in 6.3 seconds with absolutely no prior computer experience. They just do NOT care to learn and eyes glaze over when anything but 'my stuff!' gets mentioned.
The worst part is you can't force learning on these proverbial babies too blind to even know they can't direct their own steps away from their teachers. Even overlapping and minimized windows are a challenge day after day for people teaching them. That is after I've explained Window buttons to them two or three times.
It's as futile as explaining HD resolutions to someone who doesn't care because the big game is on RIGHT NOW and they only call you if they find a problem. I try to get people to not pin their eyes on one window or tab, and put them through numerous "see Yahoo here? see facebook there? see google? go to one, now the other, now the last... good! now do it again" But they don't know how tabs get there, and the difference between tabs and even their 'Back' button. There's always an endless set of things that can happen while you are instructing these people that requires I just go back to DOS --yes, DOS, and show them why simple GUI ideas must be learnt and understood before going on a web browser.
Hmm, non-radiation disaster news apparently suffer from next-weekend-DVR-session-lag or something... that is interesting by itself: A day or two ago the court already proved all of us wrong by accepting to hear a case for just such a lawsuit
Let's recap first: 'application' <= safe 'web app' <= safe 'app' <= safe And yet "borrowing" 'app store' just got Amazon sued by Apple Inc this week.
Conclusion: Trademark protection is pretty complicated, so the USA isn't a safe place for open source advocates to try to pull stunts they can't back up. They need the same cash-to-lawyer-stream and media support that giants can pull.
We couldn't even 'settle' out of court for a percentage of 'profits' from yearly sales of Firefox.
Sorry, my parentheses confused my meaning when I implied that here in the USA it's "mandatory for cableco service". That's even at large cities with supposedly lots of OTA signals. If you opt for your antenna, then this discussion is moot, though OTA is limited, especially after the reduced coverage post Digital-TV-switch.
Cable is a like your Cat5: a non-optional wire service. Cable is to "entertainment" what ISP's are to "entertainment". It's a delivery alternative to your city's reception of <5 DTV channels. That's home shopping, cooking, science, traffic & weather, PBS educational shows and even the entertainment parts. Let's not forget about the "news" Cable saves us roughly USD$15/month worth of newspapers and give choice of feeds for say, 'Japan disaster news.'
Here's the proper analogy we're forced to submit to: cable subscription plus cablebox is to your TV (if you have one) what a dataplan is to your subsidized smartphone (if you have one)
We still have that system in the form of mandatory per-TV descramblers (cablecos offer most USA programming only to those who own [rent] a descrambler, and hide even basic cable packages behind that paywall) Each costs 5 dollars per month, and each mandatory remote control is 3 dollars more.
For equipment that rarely needs any 'maintenance' and replacement efforts and is barely updated over the wire, it's charged as if it were as irreplaceable as a rental car.
Sprint and Verizon don't use SIM cards and the latter's CDMA might not work with outside phones. You might just switch to one of those small local providers like Virgin Mobile or Boost which thrive on contractless service... I wouldn't switch till the day they e-mail you a new contract or something: no long-term guarantees that anyone is immune to mergers into the Big Four, including Big Four mergers like the threat of Sprint-TMobile just two weeks ago.
Even in recession times, the USA mentality loves the dunking of billions into mergers. Banks like Wachovia => WellsFargo, Merrill Lynch => Bank Of America. Lately, website "purity" has been low because the world's topsites are mostly USA-based and influenced by those same merger-loving companies: Google, Myspace (pre FB), Yahoo, Twitter, LinkedIn, MSN, Bing and Facebook. We see absorptions the like of Yahoo Hotjobs => Monster.com, Youtube => Google and some recent possibility that Twitter might be acquired. There is really no place to run to live away from trouble anymore, so we gotta hand it to slashdot for being mostly an exception.
Slashdot is safe only till we merge with Digg. On that day we'll stop being known as basement virgins because we'll run for the hills.
There's so little noise from underdog use of the DMCA tools, when we expect the abuses to be astronomical in the USA.
I seriously doubt all of the abusers are in China and Russia, so there must be lots of USA-reacable Goliaths getting defeated. But virtually nobody is spreading success stories. It must be that lawyerless geeks can't wield the tools without lawyers, and lawyers are just too expensive without a big corp in our pockets.
It seems the Goliaths of the "legally persecutable" world found good loopholes and WE are settling with them for cash / gag orders.
Just leaving? he'll leave the crook a "winner" who still "owns" his app clone and makes cash off it... and Google no longer has any obligation to pursue damages for an ex-customer (if such unlikely thing as capturing the thieves were to happen down the pipeline.) Worst case, this is the dev's bread and butter.
Vacating an App market's premises isn't as seamless as plunking your website's hard work under new ISP hosting:
Google => Eclipse iPhone/iPad => Objective C MS Phone => Some other he's not interested on learning when the original app already works fine natively.
Besides, the dev risks finding negligence after paying dearly for the porting process, and nobody's going to refund their "market license" fees. There's also only a few smartphone choices left a dev to explore. Really nowhere to go but the market's gatekeeper, since they have the market's keys... sad.
From not owning an iPhone and/. stories all these years I was under the impression that Apple yields to no one, big or small, pre or post crime. We shouldn't clump Apple and Google's App gardens under the same roof. Google is the more oblivious nanny of the app world.
See also: porn, voip over AT&T and "rejection based on perceived dangers to stock iOS" functionality --even others never disclosed to devs are enough to warrant warning-less removal and outright rejection. I'm not sure about accounts suspended and wanton use of kill switches, but other slashdotters can google it...
Matter of fact, with all the fancy true-satellite-GPS, accelerometers, compasses, dual cams and random smarphone tech that appeared into smartphones overnight, quick and reliable business card transfers should have been in someone's business purpose list of immediate itches to scratch. And card-transfers with Wifi should be fast, since infrared beams maxed at ~100kbps IIRC.
Handshake problem: WPS WiFi hardware, or more to the point, Bluetooth's card-exchange's problem is that you must share 5-digit strings and/or beat a timer to connect... I'd rather "clink" my friends' hardware and mine than locate software / hardware buttons that were placed randomly by each manufacturer and require logins to unlock.
Old tech rising up to challenge: Modifying current tech such as the recently cancelled / (or delayed?) iPhone 5's near-field purchase tech could replace the old beam concept with tech that has enterprise strength, accuracy and security.
If the iPhone contact-less tech is too expense, we could rely on some on-demand form of WiFi activated by contact-started tech where you clink two phones (picture wine glasses and people going "cheers!" in the passage of a few milliseconds). Enforcing contact could ensure the partners handshake only each other's keys, and then switch rapidly back to well-known and reliable contact-FREE WPA2 transfers without fear of RFID-tag sniffers that so much scare contactless tech people.
I'm thinking Wikileaks blackpage faxes as I write this. The FBI can't exactly raid all 200,000+ homes worldwide, even though virtually every FB account has public names* had lots more raidable than 4chan. Funny, Anonymous won because it wasn't so Anonymous --it's because it's obvious that something now has to be done with thousands of prankers.
* Plus addresses, GPS data from phone users and other random leads that with statistical certainty some thousands of those kids forgot to hide prior to the party raid prank.
Aah, thought experiments: How deep would the router tree be? Let's raffle it so "every nth guest brings a 4 port router". For a base four tree we have about 8.30 levels of depth, so 4 ^8.30 approaches 100,000. (4 port routers, mean binary-like trees but with branches of four at each node)
If using 16-port routers, the tree would be slightly over 4.15 levels . Those routers are expensive, but we'll save on cabling, admin time and power costs. This way we can get to the actual gameplay quickly... instead of troubleshooting what slightly drunk slashdotter inevitably misrouted a few of the runs at the last minute)
I'm leaving to someone else the hard work of figuring out what is the number of routers to be purchased. I, um, forgot how to work that out. It goes without saying that in the real world the routers would need to be switches, and DHCP overheads, collisions, broadcasts, factoring in wireless routers, bridges and whether we'll allow them and their own interference/collisions... and all that jazz would make this current topology prohibitive, but it's still fun to think about. After all, we always talk about infinite monkeys writing Shakespeare or valid OSs randomly. But SOMEONE has practice designing their LAN unless you'd rather "sneakernet" to each screen and find who's actually got the winning file!
Oh, and... parent poster told me he's bringing all the cat 5 and power strips, even if it's just monkeys there;)
If you changed the default back in the friendster days you must approve the comments your friends wanted to post to your profiles.
Online reviews for brick&mortar stores (ie jr.com) have settings to "prevent abuse" (though the real answer is to prevent the sales-hurting effect of overwhelming numbers of bad reviews.) The technology has been with us for almost a decade. The corporate machinery has always known where to turn it in their favor. Meet facebook.
The increasing variety of exploitable posts/pictures/news/tags/advertisement means fewer people want to use and pay for the rather poor competition found at Windows Live, Google Buzz and Yahoo Pulse.
We're safe. I've used someone else's account and found people tagging my name / aliases. When you're not a member of FB people skip your surname, misspell misspell your first, or misspell the whole thing and add anti-stalking noise.
Facebook isn't yet sharing tag contents with google spiders. Besides, for avoiding tag paranoia alone, the "FB skeptic/outsider" state is better than joining, since once joined, people WILL find your name on google's first hit. For FB members, it takes a single click after autocomplete yields profile-linking names of the people you want to tag... when you're a non-member the GUI puts the effort on the tagger to type the entire name. If they have 30 pictures of you to be tagged, need to type it 30 times.*
* Computer users have little idea about abundant copy-and-paste and rarely train their minds to abuse subtle scenarios. Thankfully, this deters them from making choices like systematically tagging their 200 friends in their personal (Picasa) or FB collections. This will become a problem as facial recognition AI's become cheaper to implement... I'm dreading the day FB just asks them to click 'Yes, THIS is John Smith's face' on each picture.
What the headline promises is how "Big Data" justifies mining personal data, not on what basis it is legal for them to do so
Web 2.0 privacy fears aside, how about comparing Big data's justification to how older people DO expect *all* employers to justify owning us legally to an extent, (NDA's, fair behavior, non-compete agreements) signed with real ink before our first day of work? Even and weeks prior to getting even your first dollar bill for your slavery?
Lets shift a bit: in some locations, earning free state funds toward your college education means you can use that illegally for beer... in others, it goes directly to your bursar and you can be sure it's having the desired effect (of allowing you get educated instead of dropping out due to coming short on forewarned dues). We clearly adapt because we know that even money we don't see is hard at work behind the scenes.
The hard difference is that jobs *always* put money in your bank account. It's hard for ordinary people to conceive the idea of crowdsourcing as business models (and on the employee's side, daily bread bringers), let alone the idea of returning to the ancient system of tribal trades where nobody saw a single gold coin, yet all could receive goods beyond *your* ability to *design* in exchange for other goods beyond "their" ability to *acquire for free.*
So we as a pan-society give up Big Data in exchange for Big Social. Whether this trading system and any other are 100% fair is always the million dollar argument. It's queued up awaiting the mathematical answer to another age-old dilemma: the "Apples-to-Oranges conversion rate.";)
Browser-based Java programs can't modify the host computer.
My Windows Vista and XP internet explorer would have to disagree on this one. I've twice seen the java box running before realizing exactly how Opera and IE have let spyware thru.
I really don't have a daily reason for java, but last I remember it is like 60+MBs to reinstall, and the download licensing you "sign" with Sun Microsystems is annoying to get an offline installer exe, so I stopped uninstalling it for those rainy days when a corporate site requires java.
Slashdot Mirror
My laptops Mobility HD 5900 series card works fine in linux (though not its wireless sadly) yet my Radeon HD 6970 has issues
Quick and dirty^W clean laptop wireless has stopped being the norm in Ubuntu for intel cards this past year, so I'm contemplating switching out to Scientific Linux 6. Ever since 10.4, unencrypted *and* WPA connectivity drops erratically or fails to connect though Vista and 9.4 are OK.
Replacing network-manager with wifi-radar helped temporarily, but then further tweaking to get my original WPA2 off the ground killed it. I heard on forums that intel's fixing some microcode problems with ~AGN5000 and ~AGN4000 cards, and I'm not about to stick around for that and the other annoying changes Mark has planned for Gnome.
More on topic, ever since Intel announced it will never touch the dedicated card market, I've lost all hope for games ever working right on anything but AMD / nvidia laptops. Up till when compiz finally worked without tweaking in my distro, I had no use for 3D other than gl-screensavers.
I'm more surprised they have a goal of [...] extension-independent cookie/popup blacklists.
Curse you, /. parser... <50 made you eat my sentences!
I wrote that "they have a goal of [less-than glyph] 50ms GUI responses and that I hoped this would take care of recent problems with Tools / Options taking multiple seconds under windows while parsing extension-independent cookie/popup blacklists."
That is a Windows problem: its anti-spyware programs give themselves permission to stick their hand into FF's innards to "immunize" it the same way they violate IE. Much redundancy ensues because said same software also hostfile blocks the same domains so that lookups fail. The end result is that Firefox wastes its time managing growing blacklists that are already unreachable at the OS/DNS level. This is not Mozilla's fault, though.
Someone else reminded us of the multiprocess tab project. A year ago, we thought FF 3.7 (now 3.6.4 and up) would unveil Electrolysis' "Multiple content processes" but the wiki has been stranded with no clear timeline updates for 9 months since July 2010.
The main FF4 page mentions JS speed increases, but MCP seems nothing other than some difficult bulletpoint under-the-hood that they can't figure out how to market. It feels like when Vista and Seven cheated us out of a new unhierarchycal database filesystem that was promised several years before 2006. What makes me lose hope is that even FF's summary page for 2011 is mum about MCP. Their detailed roadmap does promise Electrolysis and "Process-per-tab to mitigate effects of crashes." I'm more surprised they have a goal of extension-independent cookie/popup blacklists. It also will hopefully tackle the lag to undisplay current tabs and begin to switch to another, especially when some of them have flash loaded.
Besides implementing WebGL (see google body), FF4 doesn't present a substancial under-the-hood improvement for normal 3.6 users, let alone your average home/office drone. I have an idea! Wait till FF5 comes out in 3 short months, and FF6 in 6 months, or FF7 in December. Meanwhile, I have higher chances of test-driving IE9 to see how much it's grown. FF has reached its aimless teen girl phase, and thinks life is nothing but trying new emo makeup every month :)
No, I didn't imply that Charles Babbage is still alive and 60 years old today. He's been dead for a whole century ;)
Your statements are true. Society currently in their 60s and slightly younger went through a process starting at a discovery. From single inventors (Babagge's differential engine many decades ago) to small teams creating mainframes for the army, to groups creating various implementations, to cautious field-testing and eventual army usage, to deployment of mainframes in large companies (financially difficult, so about 30 years later), then [non-desktop] time-sharing at universities, and finally business adoption, and later home adoption of the desktops. The latter casually began at the very completion stage of that process, sometime in the 80s, but really exploded only in between the late 1990s and the 2001 internet bubble (let's not get started on the whole different internet evolution process and its mysteries to the same society).
Heck, it's true the world still hasn't finished --think of Africa's early OLPC days due to slow desktop adoption. Think of the reason one of our /. memes is "This Ubuntu is so easy your (60+ parents | 80 year old grandma) can use it" when those older people you're mentioning had even harder to use PC's in their youth during darker days of desktops that you seem to claim have been easily available prior to the 80s.
There will always be people of every generation that has nearly no computer experience.
Technically true also, but every decade the 'truth' shifts. It is seen as negligence and already prevents those people from getting office jobs --like using today's reasoning that, "There will always be people of every generation that has nearly no telephone experience."
The bar goes up with or without us and them, especially as people retire later and later. Why? today's teens beat us at our own game of consumer-level acceptance and undestanding because the products have matured now. Eventually some of today's hard-earned knowledge will have the usefulness of a typewriter and typist-only jobs. That day won't wait till we are 60 (say, 30 more years) because young'ns already lack the same patience I'm expected to show to our seniors...just judge how we get shunned by our kids unless we're texting them, FB friending them and replacing text articles by video reports from, say, CNN.
The "rotating ring" style throbber has been around for a bit in other GUIs and has come to replace the old hourglass animation.
I reluctantly agree that it's been a subtle replacement to XP wait. So subtle that I've been experiencing it for 3 years without realizing Vista did kill the hourglass completely. I'm sure all those claims that 'Seven is sooo fast' come from people who just skipped over Vista and had even less time to notice this small (and not the only) subliminal message that no hourglass on the same OS means you have a faster OS. Don't get me wrong, I do accept that some changes are nice, but I've tried all three OS's on this old dual-core laptop and Seven didn't seem faster than XP and Vista; just crisp and lean.
Someone'll need to check me on this, but I actually think the rotating ring came about before Windows started using it as their general "busy" indicator.
Well, I haven't found any article describing the history, but let me be the first. You are referring to an animation based off of the MacOS X "spinning gear". That image's waiting circular concentric circles was an evolution obviously made monocrome after the bad reception its "filled-in" predecesor, the MacOS inadvertently created with their creation of the rainbow ball of doom got. The Jargon file puts it that back to MacOS 10.2 days, it has darker origins. The ball had once been black and white, in the Hypercard or Applescript days and was a quarter divided ball. That goes back to the OS 7 days, prior to 1998.
Funny that MS adopted the new doughnut progress metaphor from Apple, since the latter made a slow evolution away from Windows' hourglass metaphor, from a black and white wristwatch to a pinwheels that ended back as a doughnut marker that MS stole.
Small tab GUI improvements theoretically help, but there's zero improvement on the bottom of the barrel side of non-geeks. People past their fourties who want to go from Zero to Facebook in 6.3 seconds with absolutely no prior computer experience. They just do NOT care to learn and eyes glaze over when anything but 'my stuff!' gets mentioned.
The worst part is you can't force learning on these proverbial babies too blind to even know they can't direct their own steps away from their teachers. Even overlapping and minimized windows are a challenge day after day for people teaching them. That is after I've explained Window buttons to them two or three times.
It's as futile as explaining HD resolutions to someone who doesn't care because the big game is on RIGHT NOW and they only call you if they find a problem. I try to get people to not pin their eyes on one window or tab, and put them through numerous "see Yahoo here? see facebook there? see google? go to one, now the other, now the last... good! now do it again" But they don't know how tabs get there, and the difference between tabs and even their 'Back' button. There's always an endless set of things that can happen while you are instructing these people that requires I just go back to DOS --yes, DOS, and show them why simple GUI ideas must be learnt and understood before going on a web browser.
Hmm, non-radiation disaster news apparently suffer from next-weekend-DVR-session-lag or something... that is interesting by itself:
A day or two ago the court already proved all of us wrong by accepting to hear a case for just such a lawsuit
Let's recap first:
'application' <= safe
'web app' <= safe
'app' <= safe
And yet "borrowing" 'app store ' just got Amazon sued by Apple Inc this week.
Conclusion: Trademark protection is pretty complicated, so the USA isn't a safe place for open source advocates to try to pull stunts they can't back up. They need the same cash-to-lawyer-stream and media support that giants can pull.
We couldn't even 'settle' out of court for a percentage of 'profits' from yearly sales of Firefox.
Sorry, my parentheses confused my meaning when I implied that here in the USA it's "mandatory for cableco service". That's even at large cities with supposedly lots of OTA signals. If you opt for your antenna, then this discussion is moot, though OTA is limited, especially after the reduced coverage post Digital-TV-switch.
Cable is a like your Cat5: a non-optional wire service. Cable is to "entertainment" what ISP's are to "entertainment". It's a delivery alternative to your city's reception of <5 DTV channels. That's home shopping, cooking, science, traffic & weather, PBS educational shows and even the entertainment parts. Let's not forget about the "news" Cable saves us roughly USD$15/month worth of newspapers and give choice of feeds for say, 'Japan disaster news.'
Here's the proper analogy we're forced to submit to:
cable subscription plus cablebox is to your TV (if you have one)
what a dataplan is to your subsidized smartphone (if you have one)
We still have that system in the form of mandatory per-TV descramblers (cablecos offer most USA programming only to those who own [rent] a descrambler, and hide even basic cable packages behind that paywall) Each costs 5 dollars per month, and each mandatory remote control is 3 dollars more.
For equipment that rarely needs any 'maintenance' and replacement efforts and is barely updated over the wire, it's charged as if it were as irreplaceable as a rental car.
Sprint and Verizon don't use SIM cards and the latter's CDMA might not work with outside phones. You might just switch to one of those small local providers like Virgin Mobile or Boost which thrive on contractless service... I wouldn't switch till the day they e-mail you a new contract or something: no long-term guarantees that anyone is immune to mergers into the Big Four, including Big Four mergers like the threat of Sprint-TMobile just two weeks ago.
Even in recession times, the USA mentality loves the dunking of billions into mergers. Banks like Wachovia => WellsFargo, Merrill Lynch => Bank Of America. Lately, website "purity" has been low because the world's topsites are mostly USA-based and influenced by those same merger-loving companies: Google, Myspace (pre FB), Yahoo, Twitter, LinkedIn, MSN, Bing and Facebook. We see absorptions the like of Yahoo Hotjobs => Monster.com, Youtube => Google and some recent possibility that Twitter might be acquired. There is really no place to run to live away from trouble anymore, so we gotta hand it to slashdot for being mostly an exception.
Slashdot is safe only till we merge with Digg. On that day we'll stop being known as basement virgins because we'll run for the hills.
TRINITY: Dodge this, Agent Smith!
There's so little noise from underdog use of the DMCA tools, when we expect the abuses to be astronomical in the USA.
I seriously doubt all of the abusers are in China and Russia, so there must be lots of USA-reacable Goliaths getting defeated. But virtually nobody is spreading success stories. It must be that lawyerless geeks can't wield the tools without lawyers, and lawyers are just too expensive without a big corp in our pockets.
It seems the Goliaths of the "legally persecutable" world found good loopholes and WE are settling with them for cash / gag orders.
Just leaving? he'll leave the crook a "winner" who still "owns" his app clone and makes cash off it... and Google no longer has any obligation to pursue damages for an ex-customer (if such unlikely thing as capturing the thieves were to happen down the pipeline.) Worst case, this is the dev's bread and butter.
Vacating an App market's premises isn't as seamless as plunking your website's hard work under new ISP hosting:
Google => Eclipse
iPhone/iPad => Objective C
MS Phone => Some other he's not interested on learning when the original app already works fine natively.
Besides, the dev risks finding negligence after paying dearly for the porting process, and nobody's going to refund their "market license" fees. There's also only a few smartphone choices left a dev to explore. Really nowhere to go but the market's gatekeeper, since they have the market's keys... sad.
From not owning an iPhone and /. stories all these years I was under the impression that Apple yields to no one, big or small, pre or post crime. We shouldn't clump Apple and Google's App gardens under the same roof. Google is the more oblivious nanny of the app world.
See also: porn, voip over AT&T and "rejection based on perceived dangers to stock iOS" functionality --even others never disclosed to devs are enough to warrant warning-less removal and outright rejection. I'm not sure about accounts suspended and wanton use of kill switches, but other slashdotters can google it...
Matter of fact, with all the fancy true-satellite-GPS, accelerometers, compasses, dual cams and random smarphone tech that appeared into smartphones overnight, quick and reliable business card transfers should have been in someone's business purpose list of immediate itches to scratch. And card-transfers with Wifi should be fast, since infrared beams maxed at ~100kbps IIRC.
Handshake problem: WPS WiFi hardware, or more to the point, Bluetooth's card-exchange's problem is that you must share 5-digit strings and/or beat a timer to connect... I'd rather "clink" my friends' hardware and mine than locate software / hardware buttons that were placed randomly by each manufacturer and require logins to unlock.
Old tech rising up to challenge: Modifying current tech such as the recently cancelled / (or delayed?) iPhone 5's near-field purchase tech could replace the old beam concept with tech that has enterprise strength, accuracy and security.
If the iPhone contact-less tech is too expense, we could rely on some on-demand form of WiFi activated by contact-started tech where you clink two phones (picture wine glasses and people going "cheers!" in the passage of a few milliseconds). Enforcing contact could ensure the partners handshake only each other's keys, and then switch rapidly back to well-known and reliable contact-FREE WPA2 transfers without fear of RFID-tag sniffers that so much scare contactless tech people.
I'm thinking Wikileaks blackpage faxes as I write this.
The FBI can't exactly raid all 200,000+ homes worldwide, even though virtually every FB account has public names* had lots more raidable than 4chan. Funny, Anonymous won because it wasn't so Anonymous --it's because it's obvious that something now has to be done with thousands of prankers.
* Plus addresses, GPS data from phone users and other random leads that with statistical certainty some thousands of those kids forgot to hide prior to the party raid prank.
Aah, thought experiments: How deep would the router tree be? Let's raffle it so "every nth guest brings a 4 port router". For a base four tree we have about 8.30 levels of depth, so 4 ^8.30 approaches 100,000. (4 port routers, mean binary-like trees but with branches of four at each node)
If using 16-port routers, the tree would be slightly over 4.15 levels . Those routers are expensive, but we'll save on cabling, admin time and power costs. This way we can get to the actual gameplay quickly... instead of troubleshooting what slightly drunk slashdotter inevitably misrouted a few of the runs at the last minute)
I'm leaving to someone else the hard work of figuring out what is the number of routers to be purchased. I, um, forgot how to work that out. It goes without saying that in the real world the routers would need to be switches, and DHCP overheads, collisions, broadcasts, factoring in wireless routers, bridges and whether we'll allow them and their own interference/collisions ... and all that jazz would make this current topology prohibitive, but it's still fun to think about. After all, we always talk about infinite monkeys writing Shakespeare or valid OSs randomly. But SOMEONE has practice designing their LAN unless you'd rather "sneakernet" to each screen and find who's actually got the winning file!
Oh, and... parent poster told me he's bringing all the cat 5 and power strips, even if it's just monkeys there ;)
Email: president@whitehouse.gov
Date of birth: 01/01/01
Address: 123 Fake St., Fakesville, ZZ
Phone: 666-HELL
Thanks, Mr. President, sir.
Now we can all run identity fraud!!11!
Perfect.
Because we want'em to inspire part two for the mockumentary.
If you changed the default back in the friendster days you must approve the comments your friends wanted to post to your profiles.
Online reviews for brick&mortar stores (ie jr.com) have settings to "prevent abuse" (though the real answer is to prevent the sales-hurting effect of overwhelming numbers of bad reviews.) The technology has been with us for almost a decade. The corporate machinery has always known where to turn it in their favor. Meet facebook.
The increasing variety of exploitable posts/pictures/news/tags/advertisement means fewer people want to use and pay for the rather poor competition found at Windows Live, Google Buzz and Yahoo Pulse.
We're safe. I've used someone else's account and found people tagging my name / aliases. When you're not a member of FB people skip your surname, misspell misspell your first, or misspell the whole thing and add anti-stalking noise.
Facebook isn't yet sharing tag contents with google spiders. Besides, for avoiding tag paranoia alone, the "FB skeptic/outsider" state is better than joining, since once joined, people WILL find your name on google's first hit. For FB members, it takes a single click after autocomplete yields profile-linking names of the people you want to tag... when you're a non-member the GUI puts the effort on the tagger to type the entire name. If they have 30 pictures of you to be tagged, need to type it 30 times.*
* Computer users have little idea about abundant copy-and-paste and rarely train their minds to abuse subtle scenarios. Thankfully, this deters them from making choices like systematically tagging their 200 friends in their personal (Picasa) or FB collections. This will become a problem as facial recognition AI's become cheaper to implement... I'm dreading the day FB just asks them to click 'Yes, THIS is John Smith's face' on each picture.
What the headline promises is how "Big Data" justifies mining personal data, not on what basis it is legal for them to do so
Web 2.0 privacy fears aside, how about comparing Big data's justification to how older people DO expect *all* employers to justify owning us legally to an extent, (NDA's, fair behavior, non-compete agreements) signed with real ink before our first day of work? Even and weeks prior to getting even your first dollar bill for your slavery?
Lets shift a bit: in some locations, earning free state funds toward your college education means you can use that illegally for beer... in others, it goes directly to your bursar and you can be sure it's having the desired effect (of allowing you get educated instead of dropping out due to coming short on forewarned dues). We clearly adapt because we know that even money we don't see is hard at work behind the scenes.
The hard difference is that jobs *always* put money in your bank account. It's hard for ordinary people to conceive the idea of crowdsourcing as business models (and on the employee's side, daily bread bringers), let alone the idea of returning to the ancient system of tribal trades where nobody saw a single gold coin, yet all could receive goods beyond *your* ability to *design* in exchange for other goods beyond "their" ability to *acquire for free.*
So we as a pan-society give up Big Data in exchange for Big Social. Whether this trading system and any other are 100% fair is always the million dollar argument. It's queued up awaiting the mathematical answer to another age-old dilemma: the "Apples-to-Oranges conversion rate." ;)
Browser-based Java programs can't modify the host computer.
My Windows Vista and XP internet explorer would have to disagree on this one.
I've twice seen the java box running before realizing exactly how Opera and IE have let spyware thru.
I really don't have a daily reason for java, but last I remember it is like 60+MBs to reinstall, and the download licensing you "sign" with Sun Microsystems is annoying to get an offline installer exe, so I stopped uninstalling it for those rainy days when a corporate site requires java.