Most commenters seem to be missing the fact that this news is unequivocally bad. There were efforts to adopt open source instead of closed source software, but this senator (probably sponsored by Microsoft) managed to talk them into focusing on open formats instead. This coincides nicely with Microsoft's new XML formats for their office products, and lets Massachusetts continue using Microsoft products while paying lip-service to the fans of "open" solutions.
The problem is, even if Aurora Borealis was treated as an English phrase, Aurora is still the subject, and that's what should be pluralized. Sure, we don't pluralize adjectives in English, so we might say Aurorae Borealis instead of Aurorae Boreales, but pluralizing just the adjective would be about the wrongest thing you could do.
Not to mention the fact that even if you did manage to set everything to 777, you still wouldn't be in trouble at all, as long as you a) are the only one with access to your computer and b) aren't running any buggy software.
Of course, the second requirement is exceedingly hard to guarantee, but it still beats the Windows situation where no bugs are required to provide the attacker with an entry point.
Unless you consider ActiveX a bug in itself. Which you probably should.
You seem to have already sent the email, so in this case the "peer review" you're submitting to will necessarily come too late to make any sort of a difference. But I'll give you my opinion anyway: If anything, your letter is making the situation worse.
There may be a few esoteric points of open-source philosophy and ideology that the article author is "not getting", but given the audience I hardly think emphasising those aspects of the issue would have been a good thing for him to do. Actually, reading the article it strikes me as quite possible that the author in fact does "get it", and just chose to gloss over a few points to focus on what the article was meant to be: A product review.
You, on the other hand, show with your letter that there are many other much more important things that *you* are "not getting". For example, you seem to have no idea what ActiveX is, or alternatively no idea what ASP is, yet you choose to discuss them as if you did.
You're also "not getting" what the article author himself is saying: Your annoyingly snotty-sounding dismantling of his article ends off with a long ramble brought on by an upbraiding of his calling the lack of ActiveX support a bug, when he in fact did no such thing. Notice the critical "also" in the second sentence you quote under your "thirdly" point. He is saying that Firefox has bugs, and that it *also* can't run ActiveX programs. In other words, he recognizes that the problem is not a bug, but it's quite patently true that the lack of ActiveX support will be a problem for a significant percentage of potential users.
And to top it all off your letter is terribly badly written, not to mention inflammatory in an "i'm better than you because I use Linux" sort of way (Windows and Mac obsolete? Come on!). Basically you come off as a perfect example of the MS-bashing kid in parent's basement stereotype.
To everyone who's trying to interpret the "intentions" behind this "new move" from Redhat: This is basically what they've been planning all along - they've just been dreadfully slow going about it.
Only "good" in the stupid bumbling-giant way, if that. Someone over there needs to get a clue and realize RUP will die a slow death before ever being accepted in the real world.
Having just the past four months learning a new language (six weeks of intensive Spanish course, then normal computer engineering college studies, all in Spain), I honestly can't think of anything that would beat the low-tech approach with small groups, many teachers, and lots of plain old-fashioned *speaking*. Of course some of this might not translate perfectly to a language like Japanese where the normal western student will have very few "hooks" in the form of similarities to their native language, but I don't see how these differences could mean there would be any *less* of a need for actual human communication in every part of the learning experience.
Really, if you have a tech budget, consider spending it on some basic internet-enabled terminals for your students to use in the breaks. The language schools I've seen are sorely underequipped in this area, leading to everyone spending their breaks queuing up just to get a chance to check their email for two minutes.
Yes, I regularly achieve the practical max of my connection, and sustaining it is never a problem. I do realize there are wildly varying levels of quality in the ADSL offerings out there though.
As for swarming making it tougher, have you ever actually used BitTorrent? I have never seen any sort of evidence of that. Although of course that would depend entirely on the quality and number of seeders in your particular torrent, so I guess once again there are people less lucky than myself.
But what I'm trying to say is that "swarmstreaming" movies in real time is perfectly technically possible for me, and I'm pretty average with no "crazy tricked out" connection. The only thing that's stopping me from doing it right now is that the defacto standard is BitTorrent, which requires you to wait for the entire download to finish before watching.
What exactly is your definition of "crazy tricked out"? You can easily stream movies in real-time on a common megabit ADSL connection.
(Most movie releases these days are Xvid-encoded to fit on a single CD. Assume 93 minutes of movie and 700 megabyte file size, and it works out to just about exactly 1Mbps.)
Um... they're also available when I play a video directly from my hard drive, so what? The features mentioned are trivial when there's a single data source.
Either you missed the word "swarming" here, or I've missed what exactly the QuickTime Streaming Server does.
This only worked for cellphones because they were heavily subsidized by the carriers, who got their money back through monthly subscriptions and call rates.
Who's going to subsidize the DVD players? Blockbuster? Netflix? It's not going to happen.
Reading your originial post again, I can't for the life of me see how it could be construed to have been making the point you're making now. But ok, either way, the point is valid to a certain degree.
I don't think that means many Europeans will settle for 60mph-max cars though. Case in point: I'm not sure how much you've seen of the traffic in countries like Spain and Italy, but I can tell you people do not care at all about in-city speed limits. They'll hurtle down narrow sidewalk-lined streets as fast as physically possible. And what about pedestrians, you ask? Well they'll just have to learn to watch their step, and hope the cars at least stay off the sidwalks:)
What? No, it means they get an only slightly less shockingly poor 18.014245 MPG where G = imperial gallon. Your argument about the stupidity of SUVs still applies though.
Ahem.. you do realize Europe contains, for example, Germany? Where the Autobahn has no speed limits whatsoever, and the traffic flows accordingly? And the most common maximum highway speed limit in other European countries is, in my experience, 120 km/h, which is 75 mph.
Cool is a matter of opinion, obviously. I happen to agree with you, the Smart marketed by Zap (aka the fortwo) is not cool-looking. You should have a look at the forfour and roadster versions they're selling over here in Europe though. Maybe not the coolest cars I've seen, but especially the roadster sure is a whole lot better than the fortwo.
I haven't actually been inside one though. Looking at these cars from the outside gives me a sneaking feeling that at six feet I might not even fit, much less fit comfortably.
Slashdot Mirror
Most commenters seem to be missing the fact that this news is unequivocally bad. There were efforts to adopt open source instead of closed source software, but this senator (probably sponsored by Microsoft) managed to talk them into focusing on open formats instead. This coincides nicely with Microsoft's new XML formats for their office products, and lets Massachusetts continue using Microsoft products while paying lip-service to the fans of "open" solutions.
The problem is, even if Aurora Borealis was treated as an English phrase, Aurora is still the subject, and that's what should be pluralized. Sure, we don't pluralize adjectives in English, so we might say Aurorae Borealis instead of Aurorae Boreales, but pluralizing just the adjective would be about the wrongest thing you could do.
Good thing you didn't go for Erlang, that'd simply be LAME.
Not to mention the fact that even if you did manage to set everything to 777, you still wouldn't be in trouble at all, as long as you a) are the only one with access to your computer and b) aren't running any buggy software.
Of course, the second requirement is exceedingly hard to guarantee, but it still beats the Windows situation where no bugs are required to provide the attacker with an entry point.
Unless you consider ActiveX a bug in itself. Which you probably should.
You seem to have already sent the email, so in this case the "peer review" you're submitting to will necessarily come too late to make any sort of a difference. But I'll give you my opinion anyway: If anything, your letter is making the situation worse.
There may be a few esoteric points of open-source philosophy and ideology that the article author is "not getting", but given the audience I hardly think emphasising those aspects of the issue would have been a good thing for him to do. Actually, reading the article it strikes me as quite possible that the author in fact does "get it", and just chose to gloss over a few points to focus on what the article was meant to be: A product review.
You, on the other hand, show with your letter that there are many other much more important things that *you* are "not getting". For example, you seem to have no idea what ActiveX is, or alternatively no idea what ASP is, yet you choose to discuss them as if you did.
You're also "not getting" what the article author himself is saying: Your annoyingly snotty-sounding dismantling of his article ends off with a long ramble brought on by an upbraiding of his calling the lack of ActiveX support a bug, when he in fact did no such thing. Notice the critical "also" in the second sentence you quote under your "thirdly" point. He is saying that Firefox has bugs, and that it *also* can't run ActiveX programs. In other words, he recognizes that the problem is not a bug, but it's quite patently true that the lack of ActiveX support will be a problem for a significant percentage of potential users.
And to top it all off your letter is terribly badly written, not to mention inflammatory in an "i'm better than you because I use Linux" sort of way (Windows and Mac obsolete? Come on!). Basically you come off as a perfect example of the MS-bashing kid in parent's basement stereotype.
Since the article is pretty much a copy/paste job from the lkml, why not link directly to the thread in question?
To everyone who's trying to interpret the "intentions" behind this "new move" from Redhat: This is basically what they've been planning all along - they've just been dreadfully slow going about it.
IBM are still the "good guys", aren't they?
Only "good" in the stupid bumbling-giant way, if that. Someone over there needs to get a clue and realize RUP will die a slow death before ever being accepted in the real world.
Um... since when was the set of plausible things not a subset of the set of possible things?
Ack.. you call Xian (aka Christian Antkow) "someone"? What sort of a geek are you?
What does that word mean? That one in your subject? No, not "material", the other one...
-1, Flamebait.
:)
Not that it's impossible that this is useful/good software, but to suggest so to slashdot? Come on..
Having just the past four months learning a new language (six weeks of intensive Spanish course, then normal computer engineering college studies, all in Spain), I honestly can't think of anything that would beat the low-tech approach with small groups, many teachers, and lots of plain old-fashioned *speaking*. Of course some of this might not translate perfectly to a language like Japanese where the normal western student will have very few "hooks" in the form of similarities to their native language, but I don't see how these differences could mean there would be any *less* of a need for actual human communication in every part of the learning experience.
Really, if you have a tech budget, consider spending it on some basic internet-enabled terminals for your students to use in the breaks. The language schools I've seen are sorely underequipped in this area, leading to everyone spending their breaks queuing up just to get a chance to check their email for two minutes.
Yes, I regularly achieve the practical max of my connection, and sustaining it is never a problem. I do realize there are wildly varying levels of quality in the ADSL offerings out there though.
As for swarming making it tougher, have you ever actually used BitTorrent? I have never seen any sort of evidence of that. Although of course that would depend entirely on the quality and number of seeders in your particular torrent, so I guess once again there are people less lucky than myself.
But what I'm trying to say is that "swarmstreaming" movies in real time is perfectly technically possible for me, and I'm pretty average with no "crazy tricked out" connection. The only thing that's stopping me from doing it right now is that the defacto standard is BitTorrent, which requires you to wait for the entire download to finish before watching.
What exactly is your definition of "crazy tricked out"? You can easily stream movies in real-time on a common megabit ADSL connection.
(Most movie releases these days are Xvid-encoded to fit on a single CD. Assume 93 minutes of movie and 700 megabyte file size, and it works out to just about exactly 1Mbps.)
Um... they're also available when I play a video directly from my hard drive, so what? The features mentioned are trivial when there's a single data source.
Either you missed the word "swarming" here, or I've missed what exactly the QuickTime Streaming Server does.
This only worked for cellphones because they were heavily subsidized by the carriers, who got their money back through monthly subscriptions and call rates.
Who's going to subsidize the DVD players? Blockbuster? Netflix? It's not going to happen.
... or have read Slashdot lately. But oh wait, we're all supergeniuses here, right? :)
Sure they're below replacement rate, but if the parents never die, what are we replacing?
I hope they're not deterministic though, that would make for a boring museum experience.
But my point remains valid
:)
Reading your originial post again, I can't for the life of me see how it could be construed to have been making the point you're making now. But ok, either way, the point is valid to a certain degree.
I don't think that means many Europeans will settle for 60mph-max cars though. Case in point: I'm not sure how much you've seen of the traffic in countries like Spain and Italy, but I can tell you people do not care at all about in-city speed limits. They'll hurtle down narrow sidewalk-lined streets as fast as physically possible. And what about pedestrians, you ask? Well they'll just have to learn to watch their step, and hope the cars at least stay off the sidwalks
What? No, it means they get an only slightly less shockingly poor 18.014245 MPG where G = imperial gallon. Your argument about the stupidity of SUVs still applies though.
Perhaps in Europe
Ahem.. you do realize Europe contains, for example, Germany? Where the Autobahn has no speed limits whatsoever, and the traffic flows accordingly? And the most common maximum highway speed limit in other European countries is, in my experience, 120 km/h, which is 75 mph.
Oh, and just in case you didn't click through to it already, the roadster BRABUS is actually an extremely nice-looking car.
Cool is a matter of opinion, obviously. I happen to agree with you, the Smart marketed by Zap (aka the fortwo) is not cool-looking. You should have a look at the forfour and roadster versions they're selling over here in Europe though. Maybe not the coolest cars I've seen, but especially the roadster sure is a whole lot better than the fortwo.
I haven't actually been inside one though. Looking at these cars from the outside gives me a sneaking feeling that at six feet I might not even fit, much less fit comfortably.