Is this really that hard people? This sounds like an author in search of a problem to write about.
Agreed. I didn't RTFA, but after reading the summary I couldn't help but think to myself... if space on the Tivo is the worst of these couples' concerns then...
I don't even know how to finish that sentence!
It's like a middle aged person listening to a bunch of teenagers whine that they have to do homework. The middle aged adult can't help but think to him/herself "just wait until you have to figure out how you're going to make mortgage payments, keep your career growing, keep everyone in your family as happy, maintain repairs to your property, keep your kids clothed and make sure that they do their homework despite their whining etc."
As for these couples, it's like "just wait until one of you gets bored and has a fling outside the marriage, or when one of you loses his/her job, or heck something even simpler and more likely to happen in the near future for almost any couple - one of you starts to lets yourself go, physically."
I'm not trying to whine and complain about my marriage, we make things work. But oh how I wish our major concerns revolved around the bloody Tivo!
It's too bad Caldera was bought by (or merged with?) SCO:(
I remember when Caldera released the very first graphical installer. It had a little tetris game you could play while it copied the files. It felt like such a huge push forward for Linux on the desktop at the time.
It's all how you look at it. Linus began the kernel for the purpose of creating a free unix-like operating system for the 386. In other words he wanted "unix for his desktop". Of course it started out as a hacker project, but what open source software doesn't ?
Linus also said in recent days (when responding to Con's claims that big money was coming in to push server development and thus taking away focus from Linux on the desktop) something along the lines of [paraphrased]: "The idea that Linux is being developed solely for servers is absurd. Every kernel developer uses Linux on the desktop and so that's what every kernel developer cares about. I wouldn't want anyone who didn't use Linux on his desktop ever touching the Kernel".
So while you're right that "destroying Microsoft" was never the primary goal, for a lot of people having those commercial applications will make a much better desktop experience. I still keep a Windows install for games and I'm forced to run VMWare for a few Windows apps that I can't live without, and for which there are no alternatives for Linux available. I own just about every Loki title that was released 7 - 8 years ago and I would love to have more 'big game titles' available for Linux.
I realize that "MythBusters" is just a tv show and doesn't always accurately represent reality. However, they did an episode on biometric fingerprint devices and they had the same results that we've been seeing article after article on/. and the like claim. They were able to beat every single one.
They even had a "state of the art expensive" door with a scanner that the company selling claimed had never been broken. In fact, that was the only one that they were able to beat with a simple photocopy of the guy's finger print IIRC.
Again, just a tv show, grain of salt yadda yadda... but the message is still clear and seems to echo what I've heard from other sources.
And as for "no one will reconstruct your face", people have gone to greater lengths. I worked with a software engineer about 10 years ago. This is a guy that I still admire greatly to this day. One of the most brilliant programmers and software architects that I have ever met, although a little arrogant at times. We were working at an early dot-com company and a white-hat security guy e-mailed us with a proof of concept exploit to a buffer overflow bug that he had found in our product. The software engineer actually dismissed it without even examining the proof of concept, saying "it is not only VERY unlikely that someone could exploit a buffer overflow in such a manner as to allow for code execution, but it is equally unlikely that someone could actually find such a bug or would even take the time to look... it's absolutely absurd".
I wouldn't be surprised, based on the early finger print scanners, if many of the early systems could be fooled by a simple plastic mask etc. Plus, as technology gets better and 3d scanners become cheaper and more house holds get them it could become very easy, in theory, for the 'average' computer user to create detailed plastic / rubber masks based on 2d digital photos. After all, we already have applications that can create detailed 3d models based on light levels of 2d photos etc. So it's not completely inconceivable.
Linux is for hackers and various niche environments.
While I agree that what I am about to describe can very much be considered a "niche environment", pretty much every single kernel developer develops Linux for his own desktop. Linus created Linux in the beginning so that he could have a full Unix-like OS on a 386.
So Linux' entire existence is for the desktop. It has proven to be a very great server OS as well. And a lot of people develop it for that purpose. But Linus himself, when responding to Con's claims of big money pushing server development away from desktop development was something along the lines of (paraphrased): "every single developer that I have trusted to maintain parts of the kernel run Linux on the desktop, care primarily about the desktop and I wouldn't want anyone who didn't run Linux on their desktop to ever touch the kernel".
Of course there is still the paradox. No games = no gamers. No gamers = no money for game developers = no games = no gamers and so on. But every one who has worked to made Linux what it is today wants to see it thrive on the desktop. So while your opinion is certainly valid and you're entitled to it. I don't believe that it is shared by the very people who develop Linux.
Besides, the biggest barrier to 3d games in Linux is video card drivers (ATI, I'm looking at you!) as 3D drivers in Linux, even the proprietary ones, have tended to be unstable.
I would think that the biggest barrier to 3d games in Linux would be the inherent paradox concerning the lack of 3d games.
No gamers = No profit for game companies = No games being produced. No games = No gamers = No profit for game companies.
The one thing that I would agree on is that video card support brings game developers and gamers closer to a certain extent. Having better drivers might get both gamers and developers to consider Linux a *little* more. However, even if Linux had terrific video card drivers that were just as good or better than the Windows drivers I still wouldn't consider Linux for games just because there's very few good games available.
Better drivers can only help. But I can't consider that the "biggest" problem. The biggest problem is that there are too few people who use Linux. So video card manufacturers don't care about Linux. Game developers don't care about Linux and lastly (most) gamers don't care about Linux.
I realize there was a lot of bad management decisions involved, but look at what happened to the last company that tried to make a business out of porting titles to Linux (*cough* Loki *cough). I have just about every Loki title that was developed and I really wish they had stayed afloat. Maybe it was bad business decisions and maybe it was just that there was no profit in porting titles to Linux. The situation might be different today and I hope that someone has the desire, balls and money to step up and try what Loki tried 7 or 8 years ago. But Loki's fate did send a clear message. There's no profit in Linux games. John Carmack also said back then that releasing Q3A for Linux saw no profit.
Hopefully as more desktop companies, like Dell, jump on board and push Linux then maybe both the game developers and video card manufacturers will start to see the potential for profit and a result gamers will jump on board. But even Mac has suffered from the same problem for 20 years, and there's way more profit in developing for Mac than Linux. And it shows. There are more commercial Mac games than there are Linux. But both Linux and Mac have next to no games at all when you compare to the titles available for Windows.
And as to the tools who claim the ACLU is just interested in freeing criminals, I'd remind you that the ACLU simply cares about rights, even though sometimes that's unpopular. They're willing to fight to let you quote the Bible in your yearbook, to prevent 13 year olds from being arrested for writing on their desks and as this article notes, they are also against recorded surveillance of innocent drivers.
I usually agree with the actions of the ACLU and I am rather passionate about privacy issues. I will also admit that I did not RTFA so I'm probably missing something rather important.
However, the one thing that strikes me about this is that your license plates are not private. When you go out and drive your car your license plates are in plain view of the entire public. Any police officer (or civilian for that matter) can read your license plate with his/her own eyes and do whatever the heck they want with that information that you were openly advertising in plain public view. So why does scanning license plates automatically create any privacy issues ? After all, if you don't want people to read your license plate and use that information in any conceivable way what-so-ever, then you shouldn't be driving. Let alone on public roads.
While I do agree with your overall sentiment, that a day is not required and if people appreciate you they should just let you know when they feel like it etc. (I feel the same way about certain holidays)....
I think the parent lumping the two scenarios into a single paragraph created some ambiguity. What I believe he actually meant was:
1) Data is salable so if someone sees tape drives they don't have to be too particularly savvy to realize that *something* of value might be on them.
2) Or at the VERY LEAST even a crackhead could see "ah that's something to do with computers!" and head over to the local pawn shop to get a "few bucks" (his words) for them.
But still, you're right that you will need to completely replace your pc to upgrade though, and while quite annoying, it's not the end of the world.
That was my only point. The fact that I got the ATX vs. BTX situation wrong implies ignorance, not stupidity.
As for the rest, the last time I went in to a local shop to get the absolute lowest end bare-bones hardware that I could to put a cheap PC together for my wife they were no longer selling 32-bit CPUs. I can't stick SDRAM on a new motherboard. I'll have to ditch my perfectly good AGP card for a PCI-e that I don't need just to upgrade my CPU and RAM.
You put a lot of emphasis on games but there are more uses for newer hardware than just games. My current PC is feeling sluggish with the applications that I need. For my business I do a lot of video encoding and image processing etc. Of course that justifies upgrading and you're right, it's not the end of the world. But it means spending a lot more on newer hardware that I don't need just to get the few upgrades that I do. That was the only point I was trying to make.
I'm glad it wasn't forced on the market within a year like the AGP to PCIe seemed to be. Sure, you could get AGP cards but the standard was relegated to second class treatment almost immediately.
Indeed. I was one of the poor unfortunate clods who went and upgraded his video card during the transition from AGP to PCI-e. I could have gotten a PCI-e version of my card but I only wanted to upgrade my video card, not my mother board etc. so I went AGP. I guess by now (about 2 years later) I got some good use out of it. But I'm the type of guy who likes to upgrade one component at a time as priority demands. Problem now is, in the last 2 - 3 years so many standards have changed so quickly. Much faster than I remember them changing (though that could just be due to aging). My current PC is pretty ok for my needs. But I'm starting to feel obsolete. It's single-core. 2Ghz. 1GB Ram. AGP card. IDE drives. When I upgrade I'm going to have to ditch this PC entirely and go BTX, dual or quad core, SATA, PCI-e etc. It will be an investment of a grand or two when I'm used to just investing a hundred or two here or there to upgrade what needs it.
I strongly believe that the main reason so many people are stuck with ancient old PCs from the mid - late 90's is price above anything else. Yes computer prices have come down dramatically. You can buy a PC for a couple hundred now. But a lot of people have WAY more important things to spend a couple hundred on. Like bills and food etc. And if their PCs fulfill their basic requirements then there's no reason to go brand spanking new. Right now we seem to be at a point where it's brand new or nothing. Simply because so many standards have been ditched for new ones in such a short period of time (ATX to BTX, 32-bit to 64-bit, single core to multi, IDE to SATA, DDR to DDR2 just off the top of my head).
Even if most of the standards have existed for some time, it's the manufacturers who, all of a sudden, decided to force the new ones all at once. That's how it feels from a budget conscious consumer.
When I was talking about Quake I was talking purely about single player mode. Quake III arena didn't have much in terms of single player and that was the game that really introduced me to online playing, which is why I singled it out as being different.
With Quake and Quake 2 I only got into the single player. Quake's graphics were great at the time... but the game play was downright boring. That was my only point.
I love FPS games, but Quake and Quake II just seemed too pointless and lacking in any kind of reward.
Quake III Arena was much different because it was multi player and the point was more to compete and develop your "skills" (pardon the term, I just can't think of anything more appropriate) against other human players.
But Quake and Quake II had absolutely no rewards. The protagonist was not someone that you could relate to. The monsters seemed rather random. There was no hot chick waiting for you to save her at the end of the game. The game play didn't progress in any interesting fashion. Nothing really happened. It was just point, shoot, kill for absolutely no reason.
The graphics were better than Doom but I found Doom to be more fun. The levels were shorter, and I guess it was just new. With Quake/QuakeII it was like Doom but with better graphics and different weapons and aliens. Been there. Done that.
So yeah... I think story lines are essential to a fun FPS even when (correction: especially when) the main activity is just pointing and shooting.
And what are the odds that the wikipedia will last longer than paper from the 1900s?
There is a website that I created (on fortunecity of all places) 10 years ago for this crappy little teenage band that I was in. It's still online. There's nothing I can do about it. I don't have the username or password to access the account and take it down.
I realize that 10 years vs. 100 years is an extremely unfair comparison and means nothing. But the point I'm trying to make is that things get mirrored and copied and saved for long periods of time. You would think that fortune city would delete inactive accounts but apparently they don't. Even so, I'm sure archive.org has got it cached and there's other caches out there as well. Of course hard drives fail and given their current standard of quality it's pretty far fetched to imagine a drive from today remaining in tact for 100 years. But as hard drive space gets cheaper and cheaper and large data centers full of file servers get set up specifically to store and archive data, I think that modern information stands a better chance of remaining in tact for 100's of years than paper which degrades.
Obviously no one is in a position to reliably predict the future. Those who have tried in the past have usually been pretty far off. Yet I tend to believe that as the Internet moves forward and technology improves people won't just delete old data. The Internet, like most technology, is built on what was previously there. I also don't see the Internet going anywhere. Even in 100 years. Simply because of how much it has changed our lives and how much we rely on having a network that instantly connects any two people anywhere in the world. The way we access the network could be radically different. The things that it will enable us to do could be beyond our current imagination or comprehension. We may not even point to one recognizable network of networks and call it the Internet anymore. But the concept of being able to "tap in" to a network that brings every single human together in such a convenient way, not to mention the instant accessibility of almost any information, is not something that humans are likely to give up.
So, considering that the Internet of 100 years from now (even 10 years from now) will be powered much more efficiently due to the technology that will become available, coupled with people who value the preservation of such data, I can easily envision a network that exists in 100 years where the vast majority of data dating back 100 years is archived and easily obtainable.
Heh... I just imagined some historian reading this post in 100 years time and making not of the linguistic differences and the fact that every guess at what the future may hold is forcibly within the boundaries our current technology and culture.
I think the real issue there is that people have become accustomed to those EULAs and being so long they don't even bother to read them. It's an anticipated step required to install new software and most people just hit "next".
Once said software has been installed, however, when an action on an unknown piece of software triggers a dialog box (that most people coming from windows have learned to associate with an error message) and the text is not extremely long then people read it, absorb the message and will most likely not really understand what to make of it. The words "illegal" and "against the law" etc. will strike fear especially when all they want to do is play their MP3s that played fine in Windows ever since they first started using computers 5 - 10 years ago.
Take my grandmother for example. She is terrified to experiment with her computer because she thinks that she will break something. Thus her actions on a computer are very uniform. She's learned what to do to produce the desired results and she never strays unless she needs a new feature. In such cases she asks a relative to help her. Thus when she does have a new program to learn how to use she is very very nervous and unsure of herself the first few times using it. Such a dialog box would freak her out in a big way. Of course this is an extreme example because no one in his right mind would attempt to get my grandmother to switch operating systems. However, she is representative of a group of people that like to know what to expect of their machines. Such dialog boxes would surely scare such people whereas EULAs fit right into what they expect.
While I'm not saying that software patents are not an important issue at all, there are issues that affect the average citizen on a day to day basis FAR more than software patents. I think that abandoning your country and moving elsewhere is a little drastic for something that has such little bearing on the day to day lives of the average person.
I condemn laws allowing software to be patented and I support legislation to prohibit it. I would gladly write my MP (I'm Canadian) to express my concern if the issue arose here, but that issue is one of the last issues that would get me to leave my country and it's also an issue that probably wouldn't cross my mind while voting for a representative either. The only way that I could vote based on something as moot as software patents is if I had two competing representatives who both satisfied all of my concerns on issues like fundamental human rights (defined in the Canadian Charter), health care, employment opportunities, economics, education, taxes, property law and all other issues that actually have some kind of impact on my day to day life within this country, and software patents were the one thing that they were in disagreement over.
That's actually my argument against piracy: top 50 music, expensive full release films and television shows are heavily advertised already, to the point where you practically have to live in a cave to avoid them;
I guess I live in a cave. I own somewhere around 500 legitimately purchased DVDs. The VAST majority of them I had no idea existed before I purchased them. I use peer recommendations and the Internet to get suggestions and then go read a bunch of reviews so see if I think I would like it. I buy them because I like the idea of collecting them and because I work long hours during the week and like to sit at home during the weekend watching movies in the comfort of my living room.
Movies move to DVD so fast now that they're usually hyped up heavily for 2 weeks and then you never hear from them again. They're advertised on television and in movie theaters. The last movie I saw in a theater was "Clerks II" and the last movie before that was over 2 years before. I don't watch very much TV at all and when I do I flip channels during the commercials.
Also, the majority of movies that get hyped up heavily are huge hollywood blockbusters. I do admit to enjoying and owning a few of them but most of my collection doesn't fit into that category. Although I would still call it "mainstream": movies like Dare Devil, Sin City, Rounders, The Bourne Identity, Spanglish etc. all in my collection and all of which I did not know existed until they were out on DVD.
mainstream media also accounts for the bulk of material on file sharing networks. I can watch Lost on free-to-air or cable, I can record it if I can't see it when broadcast or even buy the DVDs, so why do I need to be able to download it via any one of fifty P2P networks as well, and why should commercial production companies get free advertising using other people's resources?
The more important question, IMO, is why should commercial production companies COMPLAIN when they get free advertising on other people's resources ? As a self employed business owner I can tell you that I only dream of that kind of free exposure.
I'm typing this from my own Ubuntu desktop and I agree that, for my desktop, it "just worked". However, there are still some usability issues that I have. One example is that when you click on an item in the doc / notification area, such as the update manager when there's updates, the cursor does not change to inform you that your click was registered. This has resulted in me opening more than one update manager at a time when it takes a while to load.
Also, as for "just working", I was at my cousin's house a little while ago and I downloaded the Ubuntu live cd to show it to him on his laptop. Ubuntu could not connect to his Wifi network automatically, and I spent about an hour trying to get it connected manually to no avail. The oddest part is that 'lspci' showed his network card was detected. I also know for a fact that the hardware was functional and his Wifi network was configured properly because we used that exact same laptop minutes before to download and burn the Ubuntu CD.
FWIW - I used to work as a *nix admin, though that was almost 10 years ago now and I admit I've never set up a wireless network as I've never had a need to. But I'm more than at home using the command line, vi etc. I've configured countless wired networks and know my way around a *nix system. I suspect that, despite the fact that Ubuntu did detect something, the card in the laptop wasn't actually supported. Either way it kind of kills the "just works" and it's not like it was some rare, obscure hardware (though I can't remember the vendor / model).
Then send the kid to play outside, with... toy guns and weapons..
I remember when I was a child of 6 or 7 (it would have been around 1988), when 'violent' video games were, for the most part, limited to Duck Hunt and Mario stomping on little mushroom people many mothers, including my own, despised the idea of their sons playing with toy guns.
My violent entertainment at the time was WWF wrestling and Teenage Mutant Ninja turtles. It created a personal problem for my mother who didn't like me watching those shows and I remember TMNT creating a political problem for the primary school that I attended. It as actually prohibited at my school from "playing TMNT" and if I recall correctly we weren't allowed to bring toy guns to school either.
I've always tested my sites in IE, Firefox and Opera. I've seriously considered buying a Mac just so that I could test in Safari, but I couldn't bring myself to cough up that kind of cash. Now I don't have to. This is really, REALLY good news for me and for Mac users who visit my sites.
I knew Guantanamo was going to pop up in a response.
I have no personal opinion or comment except that I strongly feel those inmates deserve fair trials and immediately. If you're going to detain someone via the justification of public safety without a guilty conviction from a fair trial then it is your responsibility, as I see it, to ensure that they are brought to trial quickly (after all, if you had enough evidence to believe they were a threat to public safety surely you have enough evidence to convict them of their crimes ?).
But that doesn't make anything that I said less valid. It just means that the system is far from perfect and there are slip ups. And don't confuse that with forgiveness or complacency. It just means that 200 years ago prostitutes and petty thieves were deported to foreign penal colonies where they had very little chance of survival. Now we're just doing that to people who are suspected enemies of the state. It's not ok but by all accounts it's still better than where we've come from. We have a long way to go but I would still rather live in present day than 200 years ago.
"Yeah, but during the Spanish Inquisition she would have been burned at the stake for showing porn to her students! 40 years isn't that bad at all!"
Well, that wasn't the logic I was trying to apply at all. I completely agree that 40 years is ridiculously excessive and comparing today's actions to those 600 years ago as a way of making the present not look so bad is counter productive to making positive changes in the present.
But even in the last 100 years... we're not sending people to places like Alcatraz anymore and some states are still executing people. It's hard to get any worse than condemning people to death (unless it's death by torture).
So while yes, 40 years is downright shockingly excessive for the crime and yes I agree that there have been some rather striking indications of a shift in the last 25 - 30 years in the direction of "cracking down", I think in the greater scheme of things we have done far more good than harm. Of course things can always get better and I will continue to oppose any laws that I deem unfair or downright idiotic.
As far as I can tell, sentences almost never become more lenient, they just get progressively harsher and more draconian.
Capital and corporal punishment have been abolished in many places. Even in systems where it still exists we're no longer burning people alive or crucifying them.
We're no longer sentencing people to deportation to foreign over seas penal colonies where they will be forced to work as slave labourers.
It is also no longer a crime in most countries to have religious beliefs that oppose that of the government. I was tempted to say that we don't convict people for such 'crimes' but I just know I'll get a few responses bringing up detainees of Muslims post-9/11 so I chose my words carefully. Point being: regardless of how you feel regarding the current US legislation's behaviour, it is not a crime in most countries to believe what you want whereas even as recently as the 1800's you could still be convicted of heresy in Italy (for example) etc.
I agree that the last few years have seen some very ridiculous FUD from various places that have resulted in some very ridiculous laws and harsh sentences etc. I am not supporting those instances and I will always believe that there is room for improvement. But step back and look at the big picture. I'm not talking about as far back as a thousand or more years... but just two *hundred* to five hundred years or so and say that punishments are getting worse. Honestly...
I remember in '99/2000 I was working as a developer for a small dot-bomb startup. We installed and configured test machines all the time and so we didn't really care about security on those test boxes. I remember once we installed Redhat 9 and left it for 15 minutes and it was rooted.
Windows desktops make great zombie machines and they're a fairly sure thing for botnets etc. but script kiddies still exist who scan random *nix boxes to use them as irc servers, ftp servers, file storage etc.
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Is this really that hard people? This sounds like an author in search of a problem to write about.
... if space on the Tivo is the worst of these couples' concerns then ...
Agreed. I didn't RTFA, but after reading the summary I couldn't help but think to myself
I don't even know how to finish that sentence!
It's like a middle aged person listening to a bunch of teenagers whine that they have to do homework. The middle aged adult can't help but think to him/herself "just wait until you have to figure out how you're going to make mortgage payments, keep your career growing, keep everyone in your family as happy, maintain repairs to your property, keep your kids clothed and make sure that they do their homework despite their whining etc."
As for these couples, it's like "just wait until one of you gets bored and has a fling outside the marriage, or when one of you loses his/her job, or heck something even simpler and more likely to happen in the near future for almost any couple - one of you starts to lets yourself go, physically."
I'm not trying to whine and complain about my marriage, we make things work. But oh how I wish our major concerns revolved around the bloody Tivo!
It's too bad Caldera was bought by (or merged with?) SCO :(
I remember when Caldera released the very first graphical installer. It had a little tetris game you could play while it copied the files. It felt like such a huge push forward for Linux on the desktop at the time.
Troll much ?
I'll bite.
It's all how you look at it. Linus began the kernel for the purpose of creating a free unix-like operating system for the 386. In other words he wanted "unix for his desktop". Of course it started out as a hacker project, but what open source software doesn't ?
Linus also said in recent days (when responding to Con's claims that big money was coming in to push server development and thus taking away focus from Linux on the desktop) something along the lines of [paraphrased]: "The idea that Linux is being developed solely for servers is absurd. Every kernel developer uses Linux on the desktop and so that's what every kernel developer cares about. I wouldn't want anyone who didn't use Linux on his desktop ever touching the Kernel".
So while you're right that "destroying Microsoft" was never the primary goal, for a lot of people having those commercial applications will make a much better desktop experience. I still keep a Windows install for games and I'm forced to run VMWare for a few Windows apps that I can't live without, and for which there are no alternatives for Linux available. I own just about every Loki title that was released 7 - 8 years ago and I would love to have more 'big game titles' available for Linux.
I realize that "MythBusters" is just a tv show and doesn't always accurately represent reality. However, they did an episode on biometric fingerprint devices and they had the same results that we've been seeing article after article on /. and the like claim. They were able to beat every single one.
They even had a "state of the art expensive" door with a scanner that the company selling claimed had never been broken. In fact, that was the only one that they were able to beat with a simple photocopy of the guy's finger print IIRC.
Again, just a tv show, grain of salt yadda yadda... but the message is still clear and seems to echo what I've heard from other sources.
And as for "no one will reconstruct your face", people have gone to greater lengths. I worked with a software engineer about 10 years ago. This is a guy that I still admire greatly to this day. One of the most brilliant programmers and software architects that I have ever met, although a little arrogant at times. We were working at an early dot-com company and a white-hat security guy e-mailed us with a proof of concept exploit to a buffer overflow bug that he had found in our product. The software engineer actually dismissed it without even examining the proof of concept, saying "it is not only VERY unlikely that someone could exploit a buffer overflow in such a manner as to allow for code execution, but it is equally unlikely that someone could actually find such a bug or would even take the time to look... it's absolutely absurd".
I wouldn't be surprised, based on the early finger print scanners, if many of the early systems could be fooled by a simple plastic mask etc. Plus, as technology gets better and 3d scanners become cheaper and more house holds get them it could become very easy, in theory, for the 'average' computer user to create detailed plastic / rubber masks based on 2d digital photos. After all, we already have applications that can create detailed 3d models based on light levels of 2d photos etc. So it's not completely inconceivable.
Linux is for hackers and various niche environments.
While I agree that what I am about to describe can very much be considered a "niche environment", pretty much every single kernel developer develops Linux for his own desktop. Linus created Linux in the beginning so that he could have a full Unix-like OS on a 386.
So Linux' entire existence is for the desktop. It has proven to be a very great server OS as well. And a lot of people develop it for that purpose. But Linus himself, when responding to Con's claims of big money pushing server development away from desktop development was something along the lines of (paraphrased): "every single developer that I have trusted to maintain parts of the kernel run Linux on the desktop, care primarily about the desktop and I wouldn't want anyone who didn't run Linux on their desktop to ever touch the kernel".
Of course there is still the paradox. No games = no gamers. No gamers = no money for game developers = no games = no gamers and so on. But every one who has worked to made Linux what it is today wants to see it thrive on the desktop. So while your opinion is certainly valid and you're entitled to it. I don't believe that it is shared by the very people who develop Linux.
Besides, the biggest barrier to 3d games in Linux is video card drivers (ATI, I'm looking at you!) as 3D drivers in Linux, even the proprietary ones, have tended to be unstable.
I would think that the biggest barrier to 3d games in Linux would be the inherent paradox concerning the lack of 3d games.
No gamers = No profit for game companies = No games being produced.
No games = No gamers = No profit for game companies.
The one thing that I would agree on is that video card support brings game developers and gamers closer to a certain extent. Having better drivers might get both gamers and developers to consider Linux a *little* more. However, even if Linux had terrific video card drivers that were just as good or better than the Windows drivers I still wouldn't consider Linux for games just because there's very few good games available.
Better drivers can only help. But I can't consider that the "biggest" problem. The biggest problem is that there are too few people who use Linux. So video card manufacturers don't care about Linux. Game developers don't care about Linux and lastly (most) gamers don't care about Linux.
I realize there was a lot of bad management decisions involved, but look at what happened to the last company that tried to make a business out of porting titles to Linux (*cough* Loki *cough). I have just about every Loki title that was developed and I really wish they had stayed afloat. Maybe it was bad business decisions and maybe it was just that there was no profit in porting titles to Linux. The situation might be different today and I hope that someone has the desire, balls and money to step up and try what Loki tried 7 or 8 years ago. But Loki's fate did send a clear message. There's no profit in Linux games. John Carmack also said back then that releasing Q3A for Linux saw no profit.
Hopefully as more desktop companies, like Dell, jump on board and push Linux then maybe both the game developers and video card manufacturers will start to see the potential for profit and a result gamers will jump on board. But even Mac has suffered from the same problem for 20 years, and there's way more profit in developing for Mac than Linux. And it shows. There are more commercial Mac games than there are Linux. But both Linux and Mac have next to no games at all when you compare to the titles available for Windows.
And as to the tools who claim the ACLU is just interested in freeing criminals, I'd remind you that the ACLU simply cares about rights, even though sometimes that's unpopular. They're willing to fight to let you quote the Bible in your yearbook, to prevent 13 year olds from being arrested for writing on their desks and as this article notes, they are also against recorded surveillance of innocent drivers.
I usually agree with the actions of the ACLU and I am rather passionate about privacy issues. I will also admit that I did not RTFA so I'm probably missing something rather important.
However, the one thing that strikes me about this is that your license plates are not private. When you go out and drive your car your license plates are in plain view of the entire public. Any police officer (or civilian for that matter) can read your license plate with his/her own eyes and do whatever the heck they want with that information that you were openly advertising in plain public view. So why does scanning license plates automatically create any privacy issues ? After all, if you don't want people to read your license plate and use that information in any conceivable way what-so-ever, then you shouldn't be driving. Let alone on public roads.
While I do agree with your overall sentiment, that a day is not required and if people appreciate you they should just let you know when they feel like it etc. (I feel the same way about certain holidays) ....
:((((((
:(
I WANT A FREAKIN' MUG DAMMIT!
No one ever buys me a mug
I think the parent lumping the two scenarios into a single paragraph created some ambiguity. What I believe he actually meant was:
1) Data is salable so if someone sees tape drives they don't have to be too particularly savvy to realize that *something* of value might be on them.
2) Or at the VERY LEAST even a crackhead could see "ah that's something to do with computers!" and head over to the local pawn shop to get a "few bucks" (his words) for them.
But still, you're right that you will need to completely replace your pc to upgrade though, and while quite annoying, it's not the end of the world.
That was my only point. The fact that I got the ATX vs. BTX situation wrong implies ignorance, not stupidity.
As for the rest, the last time I went in to a local shop to get the absolute lowest end bare-bones hardware that I could to put a cheap PC together for my wife they were no longer selling 32-bit CPUs. I can't stick SDRAM on a new motherboard. I'll have to ditch my perfectly good AGP card for a PCI-e that I don't need just to upgrade my CPU and RAM.
You put a lot of emphasis on games but there are more uses for newer hardware than just games. My current PC is feeling sluggish with the applications that I need. For my business I do a lot of video encoding and image processing etc. Of course that justifies upgrading and you're right, it's not the end of the world. But it means spending a lot more on newer hardware that I don't need just to get the few upgrades that I do. That was the only point I was trying to make.
I'm glad it wasn't forced on the market within a year like the AGP to PCIe seemed to be. Sure, you could get AGP cards but the standard was relegated to second class treatment almost immediately.
Indeed. I was one of the poor unfortunate clods who went and upgraded his video card during the transition from AGP to PCI-e. I could have gotten a PCI-e version of my card but I only wanted to upgrade my video card, not my mother board etc. so I went AGP. I guess by now (about 2 years later) I got some good use out of it. But I'm the type of guy who likes to upgrade one component at a time as priority demands. Problem now is, in the last 2 - 3 years so many standards have changed so quickly. Much faster than I remember them changing (though that could just be due to aging). My current PC is pretty ok for my needs. But I'm starting to feel obsolete. It's single-core. 2Ghz. 1GB Ram. AGP card. IDE drives. When I upgrade I'm going to have to ditch this PC entirely and go BTX, dual or quad core, SATA, PCI-e etc. It will be an investment of a grand or two when I'm used to just investing a hundred or two here or there to upgrade what needs it.
I strongly believe that the main reason so many people are stuck with ancient old PCs from the mid - late 90's is price above anything else. Yes computer prices have come down dramatically. You can buy a PC for a couple hundred now. But a lot of people have WAY more important things to spend a couple hundred on. Like bills and food etc. And if their PCs fulfill their basic requirements then there's no reason to go brand spanking new. Right now we seem to be at a point where it's brand new or nothing. Simply because so many standards have been ditched for new ones in such a short period of time (ATX to BTX, 32-bit to 64-bit, single core to multi, IDE to SATA, DDR to DDR2 just off the top of my head).
Even if most of the standards have existed for some time, it's the manufacturers who, all of a sudden, decided to force the new ones all at once. That's how it feels from a budget conscious consumer.
When I was talking about Quake I was talking purely about single player mode. Quake III arena didn't have much in terms of single player and that was the game that really introduced me to online playing, which is why I singled it out as being different.
... but the game play was downright boring. That was my only point.
With Quake and Quake 2 I only got into the single player. Quake's graphics were great at the time
... solely for that reason.
... I think story lines are essential to a fun FPS even when (correction: especially when) the main activity is just pointing and shooting.
I love FPS games, but Quake and Quake II just seemed too pointless and lacking in any kind of reward.
Quake III Arena was much different because it was multi player and the point was more to compete and develop your "skills" (pardon the term, I just can't think of anything more appropriate) against other human players.
But Quake and Quake II had absolutely no rewards. The protagonist was not someone that you could relate to. The monsters seemed rather random. There was no hot chick waiting for you to save her at the end of the game. The game play didn't progress in any interesting fashion. Nothing really happened. It was just point, shoot, kill for absolutely no reason.
The graphics were better than Doom but I found Doom to be more fun. The levels were shorter, and I guess it was just new. With Quake/QuakeII it was like Doom but with better graphics and different weapons and aliens. Been there. Done that.
So yeah
And what are the odds that the wikipedia will last longer than paper from the 1900s?
... I just imagined some historian reading this post in 100 years time and making not of the linguistic differences and the fact that every guess at what the future may hold is forcibly within the boundaries our current technology and culture.
There is a website that I created (on fortunecity of all places) 10 years ago for this crappy little teenage band that I was in. It's still online. There's nothing I can do about it. I don't have the username or password to access the account and take it down.
I realize that 10 years vs. 100 years is an extremely unfair comparison and means nothing. But the point I'm trying to make is that things get mirrored and copied and saved for long periods of time. You would think that fortune city would delete inactive accounts but apparently they don't. Even so, I'm sure archive.org has got it cached and there's other caches out there as well. Of course hard drives fail and given their current standard of quality it's pretty far fetched to imagine a drive from today remaining in tact for 100 years. But as hard drive space gets cheaper and cheaper and large data centers full of file servers get set up specifically to store and archive data, I think that modern information stands a better chance of remaining in tact for 100's of years than paper which degrades.
Obviously no one is in a position to reliably predict the future. Those who have tried in the past have usually been pretty far off. Yet I tend to believe that as the Internet moves forward and technology improves people won't just delete old data. The Internet, like most technology, is built on what was previously there. I also don't see the Internet going anywhere. Even in 100 years. Simply because of how much it has changed our lives and how much we rely on having a network that instantly connects any two people anywhere in the world. The way we access the network could be radically different. The things that it will enable us to do could be beyond our current imagination or comprehension. We may not even point to one recognizable network of networks and call it the Internet anymore. But the concept of being able to "tap in" to a network that brings every single human together in such a convenient way, not to mention the instant accessibility of almost any information, is not something that humans are likely to give up.
So, considering that the Internet of 100 years from now (even 10 years from now) will be powered much more efficiently due to the technology that will become available, coupled with people who value the preservation of such data, I can easily envision a network that exists in 100 years where the vast majority of data dating back 100 years is archived and easily obtainable.
Heh
I think the real issue there is that people have become accustomed to those EULAs and being so long they don't even bother to read them. It's an anticipated step required to install new software and most people just hit "next".
Once said software has been installed, however, when an action on an unknown piece of software triggers a dialog box (that most people coming from windows have learned to associate with an error message) and the text is not extremely long then people read it, absorb the message and will most likely not really understand what to make of it. The words "illegal" and "against the law" etc. will strike fear especially when all they want to do is play their MP3s that played fine in Windows ever since they first started using computers 5 - 10 years ago.
Take my grandmother for example. She is terrified to experiment with her computer because she thinks that she will break something. Thus her actions on a computer are very uniform. She's learned what to do to produce the desired results and she never strays unless she needs a new feature. In such cases she asks a relative to help her. Thus when she does have a new program to learn how to use she is very very nervous and unsure of herself the first few times using it. Such a dialog box would freak her out in a big way. Of course this is an extreme example because no one in his right mind would attempt to get my grandmother to switch operating systems. However, she is representative of a group of people that like to know what to expect of their machines. Such dialog boxes would surely scare such people whereas EULAs fit right into what they expect.
While I'm not saying that software patents are not an important issue at all, there are issues that affect the average citizen on a day to day basis FAR more than software patents. I think that abandoning your country and moving elsewhere is a little drastic for something that has such little bearing on the day to day lives of the average person.
I condemn laws allowing software to be patented and I support legislation to prohibit it. I would gladly write my MP (I'm Canadian) to express my concern if the issue arose here, but that issue is one of the last issues that would get me to leave my country and it's also an issue that probably wouldn't cross my mind while voting for a representative either. The only way that I could vote based on something as moot as software patents is if I had two competing representatives who both satisfied all of my concerns on issues like fundamental human rights (defined in the Canadian Charter), health care, employment opportunities, economics, education, taxes, property law and all other issues that actually have some kind of impact on my day to day life within this country, and software patents were the one thing that they were in disagreement over.
That's actually my argument against piracy: top 50 music, expensive full release films and television shows are heavily advertised already, to the point where you practically have to live in a cave to avoid them;
I guess I live in a cave. I own somewhere around 500 legitimately purchased DVDs. The VAST majority of them I had no idea existed before I purchased them. I use peer recommendations and the Internet to get suggestions and then go read a bunch of reviews so see if I think I would like it. I buy them because I like the idea of collecting them and because I work long hours during the week and like to sit at home during the weekend watching movies in the comfort of my living room.
Movies move to DVD so fast now that they're usually hyped up heavily for 2 weeks and then you never hear from them again. They're advertised on television and in movie theaters. The last movie I saw in a theater was "Clerks II" and the last movie before that was over 2 years before. I don't watch very much TV at all and when I do I flip channels during the commercials.
Also, the majority of movies that get hyped up heavily are huge hollywood blockbusters. I do admit to enjoying and owning a few of them but most of my collection doesn't fit into that category. Although I would still call it "mainstream": movies like Dare Devil, Sin City, Rounders, The Bourne Identity, Spanglish etc. all in my collection and all of which I did not know existed until they were out on DVD.
mainstream media also accounts for the bulk of material on file sharing networks. I can watch Lost on free-to-air or cable, I can record it if I can't see it when broadcast or even buy the DVDs, so why do I need to be able to download it via any one of fifty P2P networks as well, and why should commercial production companies get free advertising using other people's resources?
The more important question, IMO, is why should commercial production companies COMPLAIN when they get free advertising on other people's resources ? As a self employed business owner I can tell you that I only dream of that kind of free exposure.
I'm typing this from my own Ubuntu desktop and I agree that, for my desktop, it "just worked". However, there are still some usability issues that I have. One example is that when you click on an item in the doc / notification area, such as the update manager when there's updates, the cursor does not change to inform you that your click was registered. This has resulted in me opening more than one update manager at a time when it takes a while to load.
Also, as for "just working", I was at my cousin's house a little while ago and I downloaded the Ubuntu live cd to show it to him on his laptop. Ubuntu could not connect to his Wifi network automatically, and I spent about an hour trying to get it connected manually to no avail. The oddest part is that 'lspci' showed his network card was detected. I also know for a fact that the hardware was functional and his Wifi network was configured properly because we used that exact same laptop minutes before to download and burn the Ubuntu CD.
FWIW - I used to work as a *nix admin, though that was almost 10 years ago now and I admit I've never set up a wireless network as I've never had a need to. But I'm more than at home using the command line, vi etc. I've configured countless wired networks and know my way around a *nix system. I suspect that, despite the fact that Ubuntu did detect something, the card in the laptop wasn't actually supported. Either way it kind of kills the "just works" and it's not like it was some rare, obscure hardware (though I can't remember the vendor / model).
Then send the kid to play outside, with ... toy guns and weapons..
I remember when I was a child of 6 or 7 (it would have been around 1988), when 'violent' video games were, for the most part, limited to Duck Hunt and Mario stomping on little mushroom people many mothers, including my own, despised the idea of their sons playing with toy guns.
My violent entertainment at the time was WWF wrestling and Teenage Mutant Ninja turtles. It created a personal problem for my mother who didn't like me watching those shows and I remember TMNT creating a political problem for the primary school that I attended. It as actually prohibited at my school from "playing TMNT" and if I recall correctly we weren't allowed to bring toy guns to school either.
Same old story.
I've always tested my sites in IE, Firefox and Opera. I've seriously considered buying a Mac just so that I could test in Safari, but I couldn't bring myself to cough up that kind of cash. Now I don't have to. This is really, REALLY good news for me and for Mac users who visit my sites.
D'oh ... I meant 6.1
Talk about a bad typo.
I knew Guantanamo was going to pop up in a response.
I have no personal opinion or comment except that I strongly feel those inmates deserve fair trials and immediately. If you're going to detain someone via the justification of public safety without a guilty conviction from a fair trial then it is your responsibility, as I see it, to ensure that they are brought to trial quickly (after all, if you had enough evidence to believe they were a threat to public safety surely you have enough evidence to convict them of their crimes ?).
But that doesn't make anything that I said less valid. It just means that the system is far from perfect and there are slip ups. And don't confuse that with forgiveness or complacency. It just means that 200 years ago prostitutes and petty thieves were deported to foreign penal colonies where they had very little chance of survival. Now we're just doing that to people who are suspected enemies of the state. It's not ok but by all accounts it's still better than where we've come from. We have a long way to go but I would still rather live in present day than 200 years ago.
"Yeah, but during the Spanish Inquisition she would have been burned at the stake for showing porn to her students! 40 years isn't that bad at all!"
... we're not sending people to places like Alcatraz anymore and some states are still executing people. It's hard to get any worse than condemning people to death (unless it's death by torture).
Well, that wasn't the logic I was trying to apply at all. I completely agree that 40 years is ridiculously excessive and comparing today's actions to those 600 years ago as a way of making the present not look so bad is counter productive to making positive changes in the present.
But even in the last 100 years
So while yes, 40 years is downright shockingly excessive for the crime and yes I agree that there have been some rather striking indications of a shift in the last 25 - 30 years in the direction of "cracking down", I think in the greater scheme of things we have done far more good than harm. Of course things can always get better and I will continue to oppose any laws that I deem unfair or downright idiotic.
As far as I can tell, sentences almost never become more lenient, they just get progressively harsher and more draconian.
... but just two *hundred* to five hundred years or so and say that punishments are getting worse. Honestly ...
Capital and corporal punishment have been abolished in many places. Even in systems where it still exists we're no longer burning people alive or crucifying them.
We're no longer sentencing people to deportation to foreign over seas penal colonies where they will be forced to work as slave labourers.
It is also no longer a crime in most countries to have religious beliefs that oppose that of the government. I was tempted to say that we don't convict people for such 'crimes' but I just know I'll get a few responses bringing up detainees of Muslims post-9/11 so I chose my words carefully. Point being: regardless of how you feel regarding the current US legislation's behaviour, it is not a crime in most countries to believe what you want whereas even as recently as the 1800's you could still be convicted of heresy in Italy (for example) etc.
I agree that the last few years have seen some very ridiculous FUD from various places that have resulted in some very ridiculous laws and harsh sentences etc. I am not supporting those instances and I will always believe that there is room for improvement. But step back and look at the big picture. I'm not talking about as far back as a thousand or more years
I remember in '99/2000 I was working as a developer for a small dot-bomb startup. We installed and configured test machines all the time and so we didn't really care about security on those test boxes. I remember once we installed Redhat 9 and left it for 15 minutes and it was rooted.
Windows desktops make great zombie machines and they're a fairly sure thing for botnets etc. but script kiddies still exist who scan random *nix boxes to use them as irc servers, ftp servers, file storage etc.