Is there a "features" bug list? I was thinking, we're all registered bug reporters (right?), and if there were an easily accessible list of major "feature" bugs, then we could just cast our votes for the bugs in that list.
(In both cases it would be nice if you could get the link to open in the same window rather than opening in a new window, but we don't have the back end to allow that yet.)
Yeah, if there is a bug filed for that, I'll vote for it...:-)
I've been thinking about what we're loosing to extended copyrights. I'll just write something briefly about it.
Popular culture is designed to be short-lived. They put a record out, after a few weeks, it is gone. Nobody ever hears it anymore. Most of it is even recorded on media that doesn't last more than a few decades. By the time the copyright expires, there will exist no record of it, unless there is somebody out there who has some reason to make copies that'll last longer. Nowadays, even if there were, they wouldn't be permitted.
So, we're loosing our popular culture to the darkness of history. Never before in history has it been so easy to preserve our history for the future, yet, when future historians will look for our history, all they will find is a big, black hole. All this is due to copyrights. I think the future will not judge us lightly.
Ok, so what? Who cares about Brittney Spears anyway. Isn't it just as good that all is lost in the darkness?
Well, my girlfriend dragged me to the Opera (no, not the browser I'm using:-) ) to see Onegin, a ballet by Tchaikovsky. They even had this big-shot in the title role.
Nowadays, the whole thing would have been done in three minutes and would have gone like this "Hey, keep your dirty fingers off my girlfriend! Yeah, sure, get your filthy hands off of her! What if I don't? I'll blow your brains out! Booom. Dead. Oh, she's sad." That's it. And I still wouldn't have bought the record. But this took two hours, and they were jumping around on the stage like mad. I laughed my ass off in the most tragic scenes where they shot at each other, it was just pathetic.
I have to conclude that this was the popular culture, analogous to Brittney Spears, of this past epoch. Some might disagree with this analysis of ballett, but that would only serve to underline my main point:
What if ballett had been lost due to copyright restrictions? That is the kind of harm today's copyright regime will probably do.
However, given the way the NSA has largely backed off any serious efforts to outlaw public-key cryptography, it is likely that they have either the brute force computing power or classified algorithms to crack it
I think it is more probable that they realized it is much easier to attack the passphrase or find some other way of breaking into the computer, install a keystroke logger and so on, than try to decipher a message by brute force.
Or it could just be that somebody actually realized that a country where strong cryptography is readily available to everyone is actually safer for everyone.
Around here (Norway) I have never had a situation with all lines busy. You have to be at some rural place, like in the mountains to get out of service area (whether this is a Good Thing[tm] is an open question).
So, I want to go further. No, I don't picture my cellphone being a small desktop. What I want is e.g. to tell my cellphone what I want for dinner today. The cellphone connects to my home server, which launch an investigation. First it figures out what I have in my fridge. Then, it figures out what I need to buy. Then, it connects to the websites of all the food stores in the vicinity of my location at the time and parse their prize lists. Then it reports back to my cell phone where the closest store that has the stuff at a reasonable prize. Then, I go there. That is what I want the cell phone to do.
Yeah, and if he computer industry hadn't undermined the real ideas behind the web, this would have been reality years ago.
The Norwegian Skolelinux has worked hard and has been tested on some schools, and has received some money in governmental grants, but I guess has yet to really go mainstream.
This is an interesting point. We discussed this to some length at the International Conference for Physics Students this summer.
The core question is: Can a real, working quantum computer be built in secrecy?
IMHO, it is very unlikely. It has to do with how science works. A few things can pop out straight from a brilliant idea, and can be implemented based on that idea alone. This is, however, very, very uncommon. Even the most brilliant minds needs feedback from their peers to get anywhere. You need critisism, even strong opposition, to fine-tune your ideas and your arguments. This is what the greater scientific community provides.
In closed projects, even if you hire the best minds, you'll get inbreed, you will not get the same level of critisism, and soon you will most probably paint yourself into a corner.
So, while there are examples of projects that have been developed in secrecy that actually work well, most real science has to be done in the open.
Arguably, the most advanced project that we know of that was conducted in secrecy is the Manhattan project. However, building a nuclear bomb wasn't really that difficult. All the basic science was well understood in 1941, it was just engineering left. The brilliant minds found it rather boring. It was completed, and it was kept secret because of the war, there existed very strong reasons for the people who developed it to keep it secret. Hardly any such reasons exist today. A quantum computer will be so important to science and technology, I don't think you can have a larger group of brilliant minds keep it secret for very long. They would want to have the advancement of science going, and beside, they want the nobel prize.
I'm not really frightened. I'd really like to see quantum computers. Yeah, it will make PKI as we know it obsolote, and it really needs adressing fast. I'm not aware of any algoritms that can make reasonably strong encryption on a classical computer that can withstand an attack from a quantum computer, but we'll need that to be reasonably safe while we're waiting for quantum computers to be widespread enough for everybody to use. Anybody know of efforts in this regard?
Yeah, I just showed my LaTeXed thesis to my uncle who is a professional typographer, and he said that very few professional typographers would produce something as good as that, these days.
That in contrast to M$ Word, where it is immediately apparent to anyone with a bit of knowledge in typography that it sucks, just look for poor or mostly missing ligatures, improper spaces and so on.
Sure, an M$ Word document looks awfully professional to somebody not knowledgeable in the profession, but equally bad to a real professional.
I've got only two slots on my ASUS mobo, so I didn't want to fill them both, it would make a future upgrade more expensive since I would throw away one chip. Also, when I build this computer, I'm going to have the Micron chip for myself, and let them have the chip I now have...:-)
I really wanted to buy Micron DDR 512MB chips for the computer I built two months ago, because Micron seems to be among the very few companies that are really Good Guys. The problem is that the chips weren't available yet, so I ended up with some chips from a unspecified manufacturer. They were really cheap and they work ok, but I would be happy to pay more for Micron chips if I could get them.
So, Micron really needs to get their products out to the market faster. I hope they've got it out before I build a new computer for my parents.
Yeah, and there are quite a lot of people there who are really strong supporters of the ideas behind Free Software. It is just that it isn't feasible for them to go Free (yet) from a business perspective. I know there at least two Debian developers working there, and the CTO wrote a piece in a Norwegian newspaper some time ago that was a strong advocacy of RMS' ideas. Also, they are strongly opposed to software patents.
Well, the problem is of course that I do solicite e-mail. I've got my e-mail address posted on every web page I make, and it obviously attracts a lot of spam. I've got this how to use a compass pages where I tell people that they may ask me questions.
So, perhaps you could say that I asked for it. I get about 10 spams a day.
But, there is nothing more irritating to surf pages and there is no contact information when you need to contact the publisher if you've got comments.
I'm not going to let spammers dictate that I can't let people send me their questions, thus making the internet less useful for everyone. The spammers are not going to win.
I would say that personlization is Good[tm] if can be done at my computer and nobody else gets to know about my preferences (unless I voluntarily tell them), but Bad[tm] if it's so that a marketdroid can get hold of it.
I think this could be done decentralized with some good thinking about metadata.
Yeah... Besides, if you use Content Negotation, which is a very useful but alas ignored feature, the only indication you will ever have as to the type of file is the MIME type...
Here's a thought from Norway: Around here, we have a law known as "Every man's right". Basically, what it says is that you can walk, camp, pick berries etc. on any man's land, provided you stay well away from houses, drinking water and developed land. We do have quite a lot of undeveloped land here.
Effectively, as I have understood the term "common", the land, or perhaps rather the right to recreation on any land is a common around here.
While this has a very long tradition, the law has come under attack from various groups, often arguing that if no money is invested in preparing recreational areas for people, people will not be able to use the land for recreation.
Would you think that this attitude has some resemblence to the notion that without the labels, no music will be made, as there will be no money to be made from making music?
This was an insightful comment, as it goes right to the core: Within the current paradigm, it is hard to envision that it is possible to make sufficient money to pay for the costs of software development.
However, does it really have to be that way, that the only way to make reasonable profits is by creating artificial scarcity? It's no natural law.
Software is no essential part of living, thus, creating artificial scarcity for software is something that we can live with, at least for some time.
But how about food...? People are starving... Food is a scarce resource, but in a nano-tech world, it doesn't need to be. Then, if people are starving, creating artificial scarcity would be immoral.
You see it with AIDS drugs too. While software is very different from drugs (in the former case, it is not about prize, and the latter case, it is all about prize), it has some of the same issues: How do we ensure that R&D can be continued without enforcing scarcity on the drugs.
I think it is something that needs to be addressed. Really, artificial scarcity must be abandoned on the long term, it just isn't sustainable. I think it is imperative that all good thinkers come together and think about how
continued research and development can be done without creating artificial scarcity.
Indeed, we do not have the solution, and great caution is required in future efforts, but I welcome very much discussions on how to make a world that does not depend on artificial scarcity for profit.
The same struck me when I read this. I think it is a great idea. It is indeed something that should be done, but it doesn't need to be the kernel hackers who write it, it only needs to be somebody understanding the kernel pretty good.
I have been thinking about issues like this and I'll be very interested in what comes of this.
My parents live in a largish appartment, in a small complex with 30 similar appartments. There is some money around, so I was thinking about building a LAN there. A lot have to be digged down into the ground, and I have been thinking about persuading these people to dig down fiber.
Around here, it isn't that infeasible getting fiber all the way.
When thinking about bandwidth, I've been thinking along these lines: If bandwidth is more expensive than CPU, then compression will be common, if CPU is more expensive than bandwidth, things will be transmitted with little or no compression. And this may change quite rapidly, so what is the application I can think of that I might realistically see that takes the most bandwidth? Uncompressed HDTV. And that is, AFAIK, 1.45 Gbits/s, right? I know of no copper that can do that. It stops at about 1.2 Gbits/s, right? So, if we take the expense of digging something down, it can't be copper.
Inside the house, I have planned go get a diskless old box with a Fibrechannel card and use as router and firewall. Then, making conduits inside the house so that other cables can be replaced with not too much effort. From the router in the basement, I'll have a standard copper cable, cat5 or whatever to the server, which is a box that will run whatever I need of e-mail, web, the lot. Then, there will be a similar cable to the main workstation. Finally, there will be a cable to the TV.
Other than that, I'll base it on wireless. People here have voiced concerns about security, and indeed, it must be made in such a way that the firewall isn't made pointless. But putting a lot of wire when you can use Bluetooth (which has been my primary choice, but I don't know), or 802.11 seems a complete waste. You can't wire all the gadgets I want anyway (I want the fridge online! And the washing machine, and the...:-) ) so most things must be on wireless anyway. However, with Bluetooth, I need at least two points in the house, so obviously I need cables from the router in the basement to the points where the senders and transmitters are.
OK, these weren't advices, just a few loose thoughts, but I figured I'd share them.
As previous posters have pointed out, with 150+ countries having email - one single country that doesn't sign off on an international SPAM law will be sufficient to make all SPAM laws moot.
No it will not! The rest of the world will just block that country completely, so they have to make their choice: Either adopt good laws or rot in their own spam hole without being able to communicate with the rest of the world. I think they would get it pretty fast if that happened.
If the US adopted some good laws, I think a lot of people would start blocking a few countries which would then get their eyes opened (Argentina is second on my list of spam countries, after the US).
No legislation would remove spam entirely (as most total solutions requires totalitarian regimes), but if I got one spam a month as opposed to 10 a day, I would say the problem was solved.
Well, european legislators have perhaps a better track record of not totally-clueless legislation. For one thing, Norway's legislation in the area is good. I guess europeans still have a bit more confidence in their legislators, and I understand why USians have none.
I think legislation is the Right Thing[tm] to do right now. I'm not going into details, but the privacy concerns with ISPs stopping their customers from spamming is so great, I wouldn't want my ISP to be able to tell if I spammed.
The most significant problem is that the US is right now a spam haven, as about 90 % of my spam (get about 10 a day) comes from the US. If the US gets some good legislation too, the spam-havens will die, as the rest of the world will block them back to the stone age untill they get some good laws.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there a "features" bug list? I was thinking, we're all registered bug reporters (right?), and if there were an easily accessible list of major "feature" bugs, then we could just cast our votes for the bugs in that list.
Yeah, if there is a bug filed for that, I'll vote for it... :-)
Popular culture is designed to be short-lived. They put a record out, after a few weeks, it is gone. Nobody ever hears it anymore. Most of it is even recorded on media that doesn't last more than a few decades. By the time the copyright expires, there will exist no record of it, unless there is somebody out there who has some reason to make copies that'll last longer. Nowadays, even if there were, they wouldn't be permitted.
So, we're loosing our popular culture to the darkness of history. Never before in history has it been so easy to preserve our history for the future, yet, when future historians will look for our history, all they will find is a big, black hole. All this is due to copyrights. I think the future will not judge us lightly.
Ok, so what? Who cares about Brittney Spears anyway. Isn't it just as good that all is lost in the darkness?
Well, my girlfriend dragged me to the Opera (no, not the browser I'm using :-) ) to see Onegin, a ballet by Tchaikovsky. They even had this big-shot in the title role.
Nowadays, the whole thing would have been done in three minutes and would have gone like this "Hey, keep your dirty fingers off my girlfriend! Yeah, sure, get your filthy hands off of her! What if I don't? I'll blow your brains out! Booom. Dead. Oh, she's sad." That's it. And I still wouldn't have bought the record. But this took two hours, and they were jumping around on the stage like mad. I laughed my ass off in the most tragic scenes where they shot at each other, it was just pathetic.
I have to conclude that this was the popular culture, analogous to Brittney Spears, of this past epoch. Some might disagree with this analysis of ballett, but that would only serve to underline my main point:
What if ballett had been lost due to copyright restrictions? That is the kind of harm today's copyright regime will probably do.
I think it is more probable that they realized it is much easier to attack the passphrase or find some other way of breaking into the computer, install a keystroke logger and so on, than try to decipher a message by brute force.
Or it could just be that somebody actually realized that a country where strong cryptography is readily available to everyone is actually safer for everyone.
So, I want to go further. No, I don't picture my cellphone being a small desktop. What I want is e.g. to tell my cellphone what I want for dinner today. The cellphone connects to my home server, which launch an investigation. First it figures out what I have in my fridge. Then, it figures out what I need to buy. Then, it connects to the websites of all the food stores in the vicinity of my location at the time and parse their prize lists. Then it reports back to my cell phone where the closest store that has the stuff at a reasonable prize. Then, I go there. That is what I want the cell phone to do.
Yeah, and if he computer industry hadn't undermined the real ideas behind the web, this would have been reality years ago.
Anybody got some good regexps I can put in the header check MailMan does for me?
And/or a procmail recipe I can use to filter out this junk?
\usepackage{times}
\usepackage{mathptm}
is all you need to fix that problem.
The Norwegian Skolelinux has worked hard and has been tested on some schools, and has received some money in governmental grants, but I guess has yet to really go mainstream.
The core question is: Can a real, working quantum computer be built in secrecy?
IMHO, it is very unlikely. It has to do with how science works. A few things can pop out straight from a brilliant idea, and can be implemented based on that idea alone. This is, however, very, very uncommon. Even the most brilliant minds needs feedback from their peers to get anywhere. You need critisism, even strong opposition, to fine-tune your ideas and your arguments. This is what the greater scientific community provides.
In closed projects, even if you hire the best minds, you'll get inbreed, you will not get the same level of critisism, and soon you will most probably paint yourself into a corner.
So, while there are examples of projects that have been developed in secrecy that actually work well, most real science has to be done in the open.
Arguably, the most advanced project that we know of that was conducted in secrecy is the Manhattan project. However, building a nuclear bomb wasn't really that difficult. All the basic science was well understood in 1941, it was just engineering left. The brilliant minds found it rather boring. It was completed, and it was kept secret because of the war, there existed very strong reasons for the people who developed it to keep it secret. Hardly any such reasons exist today. A quantum computer will be so important to science and technology, I don't think you can have a larger group of brilliant minds keep it secret for very long. They would want to have the advancement of science going, and beside, they want the nobel prize.
I'm not really frightened. I'd really like to see quantum computers. Yeah, it will make PKI as we know it obsolote, and it really needs adressing fast. I'm not aware of any algoritms that can make reasonably strong encryption on a classical computer that can withstand an attack from a quantum computer, but we'll need that to be reasonably safe while we're waiting for quantum computers to be widespread enough for everybody to use. Anybody know of efforts in this regard?
That in contrast to M$ Word, where it is immediately apparent to anyone with a bit of knowledge in typography that it sucks, just look for poor or mostly missing ligatures, improper spaces and so on.
Sure, an M$ Word document looks awfully professional to somebody not knowledgeable in the profession, but equally bad to a real professional.
I've got only two slots on my ASUS mobo, so I didn't want to fill them both, it would make a future upgrade more expensive since I would throw away one chip. Also, when I build this computer, I'm going to have the Micron chip for myself, and let them have the chip I now have... :-)
So, Micron really needs to get their products out to the market faster. I hope they've got it out before I build a new computer for my parents.
Yeah, and there are quite a lot of people there who are really strong supporters of the ideas behind Free Software. It is just that it isn't feasible for them to go Free (yet) from a business perspective. I know there at least two Debian developers working there, and the CTO wrote a piece in a Norwegian newspaper some time ago that was a strong advocacy of RMS' ideas. Also, they are strongly opposed to software patents.
So, perhaps you could say that I asked for it. I get about 10 spams a day.
But, there is nothing more irritating to surf pages and there is no contact information when you need to contact the publisher if you've got comments.
I'm not going to let spammers dictate that I can't let people send me their questions, thus making the internet less useful for everyone. The spammers are not going to win.
I think this could be done decentralized with some good thinking about metadata.
Yeah... Besides, if you use Content Negotation, which is a very useful but alas ignored feature, the only indication you will ever have as to the type of file is the MIME type...
Yes, indeed, I agree with your points entirely, so these are kind of the answers I expect... :-)
Effectively, as I have understood the term "common", the land, or perhaps rather the right to recreation on any land is a common around here.
While this has a very long tradition, the law has come under attack from various groups, often arguing that if no money is invested in preparing recreational areas for people, people will not be able to use the land for recreation.
Would you think that this attitude has some resemblence to the notion that without the labels, no music will be made, as there will be no money to be made from making music?
However, does it really have to be that way, that the only way to make reasonable profits is by creating artificial scarcity? It's no natural law.
Software is no essential part of living, thus, creating artificial scarcity for software is something that we can live with, at least for some time.
But how about food...? People are starving... Food is a scarce resource, but in a nano-tech world, it doesn't need to be. Then, if people are starving, creating artificial scarcity would be immoral.
You see it with AIDS drugs too. While software is very different from drugs (in the former case, it is not about prize, and the latter case, it is all about prize), it has some of the same issues: How do we ensure that R&D can be continued without enforcing scarcity on the drugs.
I think it is something that needs to be addressed. Really, artificial scarcity must be abandoned on the long term, it just isn't sustainable. I think it is imperative that all good thinkers come together and think about how continued research and development can be done without creating artificial scarcity.
Indeed, we do not have the solution, and great caution is required in future efforts, but I welcome very much discussions on how to make a world that does not depend on artificial scarcity for profit.
The same struck me when I read this. I think it is a great idea. It is indeed something that should be done, but it doesn't need to be the kernel hackers who write it, it only needs to be somebody understanding the kernel pretty good.
My parents live in a largish appartment, in a small complex with 30 similar appartments. There is some money around, so I was thinking about building a LAN there. A lot have to be digged down into the ground, and I have been thinking about persuading these people to dig down fiber. Around here, it isn't that infeasible getting fiber all the way.
When thinking about bandwidth, I've been thinking along these lines: If bandwidth is more expensive than CPU, then compression will be common, if CPU is more expensive than bandwidth, things will be transmitted with little or no compression. And this may change quite rapidly, so what is the application I can think of that I might realistically see that takes the most bandwidth? Uncompressed HDTV. And that is, AFAIK, 1.45 Gbits/s, right? I know of no copper that can do that. It stops at about 1.2 Gbits/s, right? So, if we take the expense of digging something down, it can't be copper.
Inside the house, I have planned go get a diskless old box with a Fibrechannel card and use as router and firewall. Then, making conduits inside the house so that other cables can be replaced with not too much effort. From the router in the basement, I'll have a standard copper cable, cat5 or whatever to the server, which is a box that will run whatever I need of e-mail, web, the lot. Then, there will be a similar cable to the main workstation. Finally, there will be a cable to the TV.
Other than that, I'll base it on wireless. People here have voiced concerns about security, and indeed, it must be made in such a way that the firewall isn't made pointless. But putting a lot of wire when you can use Bluetooth (which has been my primary choice, but I don't know), or 802.11 seems a complete waste. You can't wire all the gadgets I want anyway (I want the fridge online! And the washing machine, and the... :-) ) so most things must be on wireless anyway. However, with Bluetooth, I need at least two points in the house, so obviously I need cables from the router in the basement to the points where the senders and transmitters are.
OK, these weren't advices, just a few loose thoughts, but I figured I'd share them.
No it will not! The rest of the world will just block that country completely, so they have to make their choice: Either adopt good laws or rot in their own spam hole without being able to communicate with the rest of the world. I think they would get it pretty fast if that happened.
If the US adopted some good laws, I think a lot of people would start blocking a few countries which would then get their eyes opened (Argentina is second on my list of spam countries, after the US).
No legislation would remove spam entirely (as most total solutions requires totalitarian regimes), but if I got one spam a month as opposed to 10 a day, I would say the problem was solved.
I think legislation is the Right Thing[tm] to do right now. I'm not going into details, but the privacy concerns with ISPs stopping their customers from spamming is so great, I wouldn't want my ISP to be able to tell if I spammed.
The most significant problem is that the US is right now a spam haven, as about 90 % of my spam (get about 10 a day) comes from the US. If the US gets some good legislation too, the spam-havens will die, as the rest of the world will block them back to the stone age untill they get some good laws.
Frankly, if KPMG doesn't want to be linked to, they should not be on the web.
Whoops, you're right, I meant of course mod(9.3, 3.1). Anyway, try that, you're probably not going to get the correct answer.