1 The ability to log in to all our favorite Web sites with one password.
Um, Passport?
Spam blocking for our e-mail accounts.
Since Microsoft doesn't provide the e-mail accounts, I don't see why it should be responsible for blocking spam at the account level. Would it be wise for MS to put some intelligent spam filtering in Outlook Express? Sure.
Calendar sharing with colleagues and friends to schedule meetings.
M Sexchange has done this for at least five years. You can even schedule calendar updates to be distributed to other Outlook users via email if you don't have an MS mail backend.
Automatic address book updates for all our contacts.
This is not a complete feature specification. What triggers an "automatic update"?
A virtual hard drive on the Internet for sharing files, photos, and music with our friends and access to these files via the Internet while traveling anywhere in the world.
The responsibility to provide this belongs to an ISP, or third-party service. Apart from maybe providing hooks in the filesystem to make it easy to access network storage, the OS provider should not have any involvement.
Synchronization of our Internet bookmarks across all our computers.
Again, this is a network provider issue and not an OS provider issue.
Online profiles of personal information that we could choose to share with Web sites and social networks.
Um, Passport?
Regular backup of files to a storage site on the Internet.
Yet again, not an OS issue.
Regular application and system- security updates.
Um, Windows Update?
One-step migration of files and programs to a new computer.
Many major OEMs and integrators provide utilities that can do this. What's wrong with that solution?
What office is this, and can I get a job there? FOr a 40-hour work week, that works out to roughly $200,000/year. More than I make, that's for sure. Probably more than the VP of my department makes.
Why would you have such a bulky looking program as WMP 10, which doesn't organise your music.
Ahem... try clicking the "Media Library" tab sometime.
Is it as clean or useful an interface as iTunes? Probably not. But for many purposes it works just fine -- it's certainly a step up from managing a filesystem hierarchy by hand and creating Winamp playlist after Winamp playlist.
Your inference that people should avoid spyadware by NOT doing stuff on the net seems a little impractical to me.
The smartest thing you can do to avoid getting a malware infection is to use a sane browser as your prophylactic. Firefox is like a reliable name-brand condom; IE at its highest security setting is a no-name rubber out of the vending machine in the men's room. IE with default security settings is no better than covering yourself with Saran wrap.
It's hard to ban software such as WhenU because the users end up agreeing somewhere along the line to a AUP/TOS/EULA that lays out exactly what WhenU is going to do.
Do they? Back when I was a foolish IE user, I used to end up with WhenU installed on my system every few weeks, and I know I wouldn't have agreed to their EULA if it were presented to me.
Best I can figure, the installation was kicked off when I clicked the "close" icon on a Flash overlay ad. Can "go away" be reasonably interpreted to mean "okay"?
The one good thing I will say about WhenU is that their website contains useful instructions for manually removing their software, since their uninstall program is usually too broken to do the job itself.
Computer power buttons - Short period = sleep, Long period = Hard off.
That's not much help if you're trying to cite prior art, though. Such power switches have really only come into use in the past five years or so; double-clicking has been part of the GUI vocabulary for twenty years or more.
I started buying CDs back when there was more QUALITY music than there is now.
Impossible. New quality music can be added to the world, but how can existing quality music disappear?
If you're talking about there being a higher percentage of music worth listening to released within a single year, well, that's a matter of taste, but I'd say the ratio is as good this year as it has been any year since the LP's mid-1970s heyday -- before the very invention of the compact disc.
I agree, this hack is going to be GOOD for sales, if anything.
A professional photographer isn't going to trust her work to a consumer-grade camera with a questionable firmware hack -- she's going to buy the professional model.
On the other hand, the existence of this hack may make it more likely that Slashdot geeks and 1337 case-modders will choose the Canon over other consumer models, for the kewlness factor.
Data sharing is literally essential - computers are only marginally useful if their only info exchange is via keyboard/mouse/monitor.
I dunno, the home computer market did okay without for its first twenty years, when few PCs were "online" and file sharing meant taking a stack of 360KB floppies to your friend's house...
Soy is not the most efficient crop for producing vegetable oil.
No, but it's a much more utilitarian crop than canola is. Press the oil out of soybeans and you have a versatile and high-protein foodstuff leftover, more than fit for human consumption and part of a healthy diet. I don't know what rapeseed by-products are like, but maybe you can feed them to some hogs.
Surely Linus should just accept any code and leave it up to any companys who own and IP it may infringe on to chase it up?
That's a stupid idea. If Linus accepts any stolen code, it's going to immediately come back and bite the entire Linux community in the ass. "See?" they'll say, "we told you! Linux is made up of stolen code after all!"
At least with source control records, there can be damage control, those responsible for contributing the stolen code can be isolated and banished, and the rest of the project can continue relatively untarnished.
Why carry (and recharge every night) two pocket-size electronic devices when you can carry just a single one that does both?
The way I see it, if you're carrying a PDA around all the time anyway, there's no reason it shouldn't be able to serve as your cell phone also. Yes, it is awkward to hold a big flat brick of a PDA up to your ear, but that problem's resolved easily enough with a $9 hands-free earpiece.
Sorry, I like concept albums as much as you apparently do, but I don't think most people would be in agreement with us. With attention spans being what they are today, a single musical work that exceeds five or six minutes is unlikely to find widespread acceptance.
For almost all of the music industry's history, with the possible exception of a period spanning from circa 1967 to 1979, sales have always been driven by the Hit Single, not by the album. Pop music has traditionally been consumed in small chunks -- radio and jukebox play, music videos, MP3 downloads -- and not in the focused, sitting-on-the-floor-with-headphones experience demanded of longer and larger works.
Yes, I would like to see more of the big money companies attempt to be innovative rather than leave the real experimentation to DIY tiny-label acts, but I don't think there's much financial incentive for such a shift to occur.
Well, I can't know for sure because the article is Slashdotted, but I expect the cell phones don't actually contain any gyroscopes -- I know mine doesn't -- so "gyroscopic mouse technology" wouldn't really apply.
It would, I imagine, track the motion of the images captured by the camera to calculate relative motion -- sort of like the way an optical mouse works, but with less precision.
Pretty clever stuff -- this could either be the Killer App for Bluetooth, or the biggest nuisance ever, once anyone nearby will be able to change the channel on your TV using only their cellphone.
I don't believe that the instability of this unit is because of the Linux-based software it runs.
Or to put it another way, the phrase "Linux-based" is so broad as to give no indication of a particular device's reliability or usability.
It's one of the unfortunate drawbacks of many Open Source models -- if you give your work out for anyone to modify as they like, there's little you can do to prevent someone from releasing a modification that reflects poorly on your original work.
Yeah, all you have to do is compromise an enormous, highly sensitive database, and learn enough of its design to query very specific graphical data from it! Oh, and you must be clever enough to not get caught.
That's much more efficient than just driving to the rich part of town and breaking into a house at random, yeah.
how do you reasonably expect the rest of the world to adopt Linux?
The rest of the world is not like IBM. If it were, they'd be developing their own solutions in-house, rather than paying IBM for assistance.
Just because the man who runs the dog food company doesn't eat three bowls of kibble every day doesn't mean that your dog won't think it's delicious.
you could rewrite the apps that you need, and then release them back to the OSS community, and the world will indeed thank you for making a migration from MS possible, for themselves as well.
Unfortunately, IBM shareholders don't much give a damn how many thank-you notes come in to the company. They'd rather see dollars.
What do you think would happen to sales of Macs if the you walked in and saw an IBM POS at the checkout counter at the Apple Store?
How about virtually nothing? I have yet to meet any layperson who actually cares, or even notices, what brand of hardware the cashier is ringing up their purchase on.
As long as it has some sort of connection back to the operations center and serial porta to plug a barcode scanner and magnetic card reader into, it's good enough for practically everything.
What about the wide-open Wi-Fi defense, or the zillion other instances where you just can't prove who was using a specific IP at any given time?
At some point, that IP address was provisioned to a specific individual or organization, almost certainly accompanied by a contract that established who was liable for all traffic generated from that IP address. The "I left my door unlocked and a bad man came in and did all these things" defense is not likely to have any weight.
It may be wrong of me to pirate, but IMHO what they're doing is more wrong than what I'm doing.
"It may be wrong of me to sodomize these prisoners with a glow stick, but IMHO what they did to us on 9/11 is more wrong than what I'm doing."
I admit, my analogy isn't perfect -- for one thing, in my version both acts are illegal, whereas you're undertaking an illegal act to respond to something that's entirely legal.
If you don't want to give your money to RIAA-member companies anymore, don't consume their product anymore! Stop being a jackass.
Slashdot Mirror
1 The ability to log in to all our favorite Web sites with one password.
Um, Passport?
Spam blocking for our e-mail accounts.
Since Microsoft doesn't provide the e-mail accounts, I don't see why it should be responsible for blocking spam at the account level. Would it be wise for MS to put some intelligent spam filtering in Outlook Express? Sure.
Calendar sharing with colleagues and friends to schedule meetings.
M Sexchange has done this for at least five years. You can even schedule calendar updates to be distributed to other Outlook users via email if you don't have an MS mail backend.
Automatic address book updates for all our contacts.
This is not a complete feature specification. What triggers an "automatic update"?
A virtual hard drive on the Internet for sharing files, photos, and music with our friends and access to these files via the Internet while traveling anywhere in the world.
The responsibility to provide this belongs to an ISP, or third-party service. Apart from maybe providing hooks in the filesystem to make it easy to access network storage, the OS provider should not have any involvement.
Synchronization of our Internet bookmarks across all our computers.
Again, this is a network provider issue and not an OS provider issue.
Online profiles of personal information that we could choose to share with Web sites and social networks.
Um, Passport?
Regular backup of files to a storage site on the Internet.
Yet again, not an OS issue.
Regular application and system- security updates.
Um, Windows Update?
One-step migration of files and programs to a new computer.
Many major OEMs and integrators provide utilities that can do this. What's wrong with that solution?
In an office where people earn > $ 100 per hour
What office is this, and can I get a job there? FOr a 40-hour work week, that works out to roughly $200,000/year. More than I make, that's for sure. Probably more than the VP of my department makes.
XP remains perfectly stable for weeks on end.
Sure, unless you run nVidia or ATI video drivers on it. But who does that?
Why would you have such a bulky looking program as WMP 10, which doesn't organise your music.
Ahem... try clicking the "Media Library" tab sometime.
Is it as clean or useful an interface as iTunes? Probably not. But for many purposes it works just fine -- it's certainly a step up from managing a filesystem hierarchy by hand and creating Winamp playlist after Winamp playlist.
I don't see why one's choice of video codec should have any bearing on which mediaplayer(s) one needs to use.
(You hear me, Real? Microsoft? Fukkin Quicktime?)
People get spy/ad-ware by doing stuff on the net.
Your inference that people should avoid spyadware by NOT doing stuff on the net seems a little impractical to me.
The smartest thing you can do to avoid getting a malware infection is to use a sane browser as your prophylactic. Firefox is like a reliable name-brand condom; IE at its highest security setting is a no-name rubber out of the vending machine in the men's room. IE with default security settings is no better than covering yourself with Saran wrap.
It's hard to ban software such as WhenU because the users end up agreeing somewhere along the line to a AUP/TOS/EULA that lays out exactly what WhenU is going to do.
Do they? Back when I was a foolish IE user, I used to end up with WhenU installed on my system every few weeks, and I know I wouldn't have agreed to their EULA if it were presented to me.
Best I can figure, the installation was kicked off when I clicked the "close" icon on a Flash overlay ad. Can "go away" be reasonably interpreted to mean "okay"?
The one good thing I will say about WhenU is that their website contains useful instructions for manually removing their software, since their uninstall program is usually too broken to do the job itself.
Computer power buttons - Short period = sleep, Long period = Hard off.
That's not much help if you're trying to cite prior art, though. Such power switches have really only come into use in the past five years or so; double-clicking has been part of the GUI vocabulary for twenty years or more.
I started buying CDs back when there was more QUALITY music than there is now.
Impossible. New quality music can be added to the world, but how can existing quality music disappear?
If you're talking about there being a higher percentage of music worth listening to released within a single year, well, that's a matter of taste, but I'd say the ratio is as good this year as it has been any year since the LP's mid-1970s heyday -- before the very invention of the compact disc.
I agree, this hack is going to be GOOD for sales, if anything.
A professional photographer isn't going to trust her work to a consumer-grade camera with a questionable firmware hack -- she's going to buy the professional model.
On the other hand, the existence of this hack may make it more likely that Slashdot geeks and 1337 case-modders will choose the Canon over other consumer models, for the kewlness factor.
point to the Open Source site for Open Boot.
Well, since the spec is open, what's stopping someone from writing their own implementation from scratch?
Data sharing is literally essential - computers are only marginally useful if their only info exchange is via keyboard/mouse/monitor.
I dunno, the home computer market did okay without for its first twenty years, when few PCs were "online" and file sharing meant taking a stack of 360KB floppies to your friend's house...
You may have fat chicks chasing down your car.
Don't worry, they won't be able to keep up anymore after a couple hundred feet.
Soy is not the most efficient crop for producing vegetable oil.
No, but it's a much more utilitarian crop than canola is. Press the oil out of soybeans and you have a versatile and high-protein foodstuff leftover, more than fit for human consumption and part of a healthy diet. I don't know what rapeseed by-products are like, but maybe you can feed them to some hogs.
Surely Linus should just accept any code and leave it up to any companys who own and IP it may infringe on to chase it up?
That's a stupid idea. If Linus accepts any stolen code, it's going to immediately come back and bite the entire Linux community in the ass. "See?" they'll say, "we told you! Linux is made up of stolen code after all!"
At least with source control records, there can be damage control, those responsible for contributing the stolen code can be isolated and banished, and the rest of the project can continue relatively untarnished.
I just don't get the whole PDA phone thing
Why carry (and recharge every night) two pocket-size electronic devices when you can carry just a single one that does both?
The way I see it, if you're carrying a PDA around all the time anyway, there's no reason it shouldn't be able to serve as your cell phone also. Yes, it is awkward to hold a big flat brick of a PDA up to your ear, but that problem's resolved easily enough with a $9 hands-free earpiece.
Sorry, I like concept albums as much as you apparently do, but I don't think most people would be in agreement with us. With attention spans being what they are today, a single musical work that exceeds five or six minutes is unlikely to find widespread acceptance.
For almost all of the music industry's history, with the possible exception of a period spanning from circa 1967 to 1979, sales have always been driven by the Hit Single, not by the album. Pop music has traditionally been consumed in small chunks -- radio and jukebox play, music videos, MP3 downloads -- and not in the focused, sitting-on-the-floor-with-headphones experience demanded of longer and larger works.
Yes, I would like to see more of the big money companies attempt to be innovative rather than leave the real experimentation to DIY tiny-label acts, but I don't think there's much financial incentive for such a shift to occur.
Well, I can't know for sure because the article is Slashdotted, but I expect the cell phones don't actually contain any gyroscopes -- I know mine doesn't -- so "gyroscopic mouse technology" wouldn't really apply.
It would, I imagine, track the motion of the images captured by the camera to calculate relative motion -- sort of like the way an optical mouse works, but with less precision.
Pretty clever stuff -- this could either be the Killer App for Bluetooth, or the biggest nuisance ever, once anyone nearby will be able to change the channel on your TV using only their cellphone.
I don't believe that the instability of this unit is because of the Linux-based software it runs.
Or to put it another way, the phrase "Linux-based" is so broad as to give no indication of a particular device's reliability or usability.
It's one of the unfortunate drawbacks of many Open Source models -- if you give your work out for anyone to modify as they like, there's little you can do to prevent someone from releasing a modification that reflects poorly on your original work.
The living room's not. It's been roughly identical in every episode.
You're right that the neighborhood itself fluctuates wildly, though. Even the family's street address has changed several times.
Who knew theft could be so efficient?
Yeah, all you have to do is compromise an enormous, highly sensitive database, and learn enough of its design to query very specific graphical data from it! Oh, and you must be clever enough to not get caught.
That's much more efficient than just driving to the rich part of town and breaking into a house at random, yeah.
Innocent until proven guilty disappeared a few years ago. Due process is up next.
Shut the fuck up. That is not objectively true and you know it.
(Those who modded him up as "Insightful" and are about to mod me down as "Flamebait", stop and think for a second.)
how do you reasonably expect the rest of the world to adopt Linux?
The rest of the world is not like IBM. If it were, they'd be developing their own solutions in-house, rather than paying IBM for assistance.
Just because the man who runs the dog food company doesn't eat three bowls of kibble every day doesn't mean that your dog won't think it's delicious.
you could rewrite the apps that you need, and then release them back to the OSS community, and the world will indeed thank you for making a migration from MS possible, for themselves as well.
Unfortunately, IBM shareholders don't much give a damn how many thank-you notes come in to the company. They'd rather see dollars.
What do you think would happen to sales of Macs if the you walked in and saw an IBM POS at the checkout counter at the Apple Store?
How about virtually nothing? I have yet to meet any layperson who actually cares, or even notices, what brand of hardware the cashier is ringing up their purchase on.
As long as it has some sort of connection back to the operations center and serial porta to plug a barcode scanner and magnetic card reader into, it's good enough for practically everything.
What about the wide-open Wi-Fi defense, or the zillion other instances where you just can't prove who was using a specific IP at any given time?
At some point, that IP address was provisioned to a specific individual or organization, almost certainly accompanied by a contract that established who was liable for all traffic generated from that IP address. The "I left my door unlocked and a bad man came in and did all these things" defense is not likely to have any weight.
It may be wrong of me to pirate, but IMHO what they're doing is more wrong than what I'm doing.
"It may be wrong of me to sodomize these prisoners with a glow stick, but IMHO what they did to us on 9/11 is more wrong than what I'm doing."
I admit, my analogy isn't perfect -- for one thing, in my version both acts are illegal, whereas you're undertaking an illegal act to respond to something that's entirely legal.
If you don't want to give your money to RIAA-member companies anymore, don't consume their product anymore! Stop being a jackass.