Please, oh please, don't lecture me about Mozilla's stability. [...] Speaking of problems with OSS software; people who make excuses for it. No, it is not my hardware, and I've got the diagnostics reports on my machines to prove it
Well it's very stable for me. I'm not talking about every versiont they've released, many are "alpha" for a reason. I'm talking about the final releases that I upgrade between. I don't specifically view flash pluggins, but I slashdot, text complex html layout, have megs of docs open, and view 20+ 1MB pictures on a page at once. You're right that I don't use Java, or Flash, but I don't think my usage is trivial.
I'm sure you'll think I'm making it up, but I really do have incredible success with Mozilla. That's not "making excuses". Perhaps if it died every few hours I'd have to make excuses, but it doesn't. The only person I know who didn't have good luck with it was having hardware problems. OOffice is slow, but I dunno about the stability. I don't use it enough to tell. All I do it convert documents with it.
I don't make excuses, if something crashes and loses my work I stop using it.
I don't think MS has the best technical support by a long shot, but when I worked there we weren't a bunch of brain-deads like (some) people think - the only reasoning being it's Microsoft.
I wouldn't assume that. Tech support just often can't help with the advanced problems because there's stuff that only a developer would know. Unless you know what the code looks like inside you're really only going from your experiences, and if you've never seen the problem, you're not going to know what it might be. I've worked both sides of the tech/developer line, and provided support for my own and third-party apps.
I agree that it will be harder to get developer support for Linux as it gets bigger, but luckily you rarely need to ask Linux for kernel help, really anyone who has put time in learning the code can do. Even a low-level developer at MS (those CPR guys you said?) would probably have been able to solve my company's problem. The thing about open source is that there's a larger pool of people at that level because anyone who is interested can get there.
It just gets to me when people are always so "screw M$!" about everything.
Well, I'm pretty "Screw MS". They've done a lot of illegal things that other (smaller, less rich) companies would have been smacked down for and by looking at the management I have to assume these actions are intentional and probably still going on. I just don't have any illusions about other companies. They'd be doing the same thing if they could (or, have and just haven't been caught.)
I'll be happy though if MS is brought down to IBMs level, a huge company, but one that can't dictate to the industry. (I fear waking up one day and finding that non-Palladium "enabled" machines are illegal and open source, because it might be terrorist related (or some other nonsense), can't get signed without jumping through unrealistic hoops.)
Real people work for them.
Yes, but that's not a total defense. If you find yourself contributing to something you wouldn't want, you're partly responsible. Being a tech is one thing, but helping design Palladium is another.
However, all my anti-MS feelings don't mean I have to rant like a loon. I tell my clients about the benefits to open source, instead of telling them not to buy MS because of my personal feelings. And I can seperate my feelings for the management who order the actions from the wage-slaves like myself who end up doing what they're told to put food on the table.
I don't make money from photography as you probably do, but I own a Canon G2 which uses almost exactly the same.CRW format as the D60, and I've written code using GPLed CRW->TIFF converters, so I understand what's going on as well.
I started talking about the web and online news because it *is* and answer to this. If you distributed raw images and a list of photoshop actions to turn that into the final image you really could distribute signed CCD captures and yet let the common person see just the final copy. Sure, RAW images from a D60 are 6MB or more, but this is theoretical. Ideally, a simple right-click on the image and selecting 'properties' would show the tweaks to the image and then you could open the image in an editor with a history buffer, rolling back each change.
With technology like that we could allow pretty much any editing ("double exposures" even) because the news agency would have to be prepared to justify them. You know how photographers bracket for exposure, and how multiple shots can be combined for a greater dynamic range. This is especially useful taking pictures in bright sunlight, war photos for instance, and is legitimate, but the same technique (combining multiple exposures) is how the most gratuitous "photoshops" (as seen on Fark) are made.
My point about color spacing and contrast was that even though these are required, they aren't necessarily "safe" in that they can be used to change the meaning of the picture. Hell, the whole OJ picture scandal was over dodging and burning. Now, I know these are required to print a useful image, but that doesn't mean we can just say "any contrast tweaks, curves adjustments, and dodging/burning is okay" because it's not. The fact that this is annoying doesn't change it. You just can't trust a printed image, and you can only trust a digital one if you can derive it yourself, from published steps, from a signed raw CCD capture. (And then only as much as you trust the framing of the picture, and the tamper-proof hardware in the camera.)
I wasn't the one who sat on the phone, so I can't absolutely verify this, but the guy I worked with had no luck with MS tech. He was quite prepared. By the time he'd called he had gone through all the KB articles he could find relating to the problem and documented exactly what the system was, what had been done, etc.
They referred him to some of the same KB articles he'd already mentioned, despite his telling them that he'd already been there and why it didn't work or wasn't applicable to his solution ("No, KB#xxx is for 2k AS, *with* IIS and Exchange, I don't have IIS installed.") They eventually gave up and told him the problem was at our end, to reinstall and if that failed, that it was probably hardware.
Anyways, when the next service pack came out we tried again and it worked perfectly.
Not to say that MS is the worst, but they seem to be like 98% of the techs out there. Perfectly capable of dealing with 95% of the problems, unplugged servers, un-service packed machines, etc, but incapable of diagnosing anything beyond that. I've had better support from some companies, but usually smaller ones. Some have actually written test code, or sent us a development build with error logging. Big companies read off a script and dump you when your problem gets tough.
You're right, it's not a MS vs Linux issue, it's a "Monolithic uncaring corp vs independent developer who sees a direct financial incentive to help" issue. The only way open source software comes into this is that you can find independent developers who are willing to help tweak or support Apache or Postgres simply by asking on the dev lists. You can find people willing to support IIS or MS-SQL but they can't really do much more than you if the problem isn't trivial.
Don't you just love some cocky asshole with a chip on his shoulder whining about what he gets for free?
It's as much help as I got from Blizzard after shelling out $65 for Diablo 2 and the copy protection not liking my CD-ROM. (Actually, not true. Blizzard told me to buy a new CD-ROM drive.)
This kind of support is a lot more reasonable when you don't pay for it.
Makes perfect sense. A company can get a lot more for their development dollar by paying for an open source developer to work on a specific feature than they could by asking a large commercial software company.
btw, I like your vocab test site, it's nicely done.
Re:one app, one desktop, one united front
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Too Much Free Software
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Take Mozilla [...] Unfortunately, the bloat and overall bugginess/instability of the client make it unuseable for all but the most tolerant among us.
You have stability problems with Mozilla? I frequently have 15+ day uptimes with it, and I'm a *power* user. I've almost always got more than thirty tabs open, all with a full page. (Not hard. I have three windows, home, work, and development at work. Home has threads from Slashdot and dpreview open, work has a few web apps, and webmail open, development has pages of docs, google searches, and whatever app I'm testing.) Mozilla is about as stable a program as I've seen.
But, a friend of mine had problems with Mozilla and Photoshop. Nothing would make these work at anything other than the most trivial tasks. He ended up upgrading his mobo and CPU (not for this) and magically, both worked. It was just some odd hardware problem that only came up with large programs that taxed the system. If Mozilla crashing even every day you may want to try running memtest86 for a few hours and maybe 3DMark 2001 (just as an example of a very taxing app) in a loop overnight.
Seriously; deleting your profile between upgrades to appease the developers for going in a completely new direction? Can I honestly tell five thousand employees to re-create all their browsing and mail preferences because, hey, that's the price of freedom?
Don't upgrade unless you need to. If you don't go from Moz 1.0.x you don't need to recrate your profile. (Well, it works without doing this anyways, I'm using a profile I made at one of the later milestones still and I'm using 1.3 now, but...) Upgrading to every now version of Mozilla is like always upgrading to the latest 2.4.x kernel, technically safe, but with much less testing. People who need safety should stay with the kernel their distro came with unless they need a patch, ditto with Mozilla.
So, those 5000 employees can stick with whatever version of Mozilla the IT dept gave them, when it's time to roll out a new version IT can either test installing over an old profile or importing, whatever they like. Users don't need to do anything, that's what the IT department is for.
There's a difference between thinking people should use Linux and thinking they should use it on their own. In fact, few people should use Windows on their own. This is why we see unused IIS servers, email viruses, word attachments in email, etc. If you setup Linux for someone, just like they get Windows pre-installed, it's just as valid a desktop.
Airport security needs to be designed by people who aren't festering retards. That's, quite simply, the main problem.
They confiscate shoelaces at times, yet god forbid they stop selling commemorative glass plates which can be broken to form a very nasty knife. And what terrorist would bother with a thin cotton garotte when six weeks in a martial arts course can make you fairly effective (against untrained people anyways).
I had twenty examples of this when I flew last. People were being quizzed for bringing large nail clippers, yet nobody bothered to even look through the 300mm lenses this photographer brought on, despite them being metal and thus blocking xrays (and potentially being used to carry any ammount of nasty stuff). They turn on laptops and palmtops, but they don't know what to look for. You could carry an early 90s vintage laptop with the guts from a current slim notebook in it, you'd have space for a ton of stuff. Not to mention that they don't check the battery compartments, even the spare one.
But they freaked about my cellphone. Wow, I could poke someone's eyes out with the little springy arial. But they didn't do anything to ensure I hadn't stuffed the guts of a smaller phone in, to make room for something, they were happy with quizzing me on why I needed to carry it, despite not being able to use it on the flight. (I guess they've never had three hour layovers.)
The security measures they take are nearly useless, but that doesn't stop them from making them really irritating. And what is it with the US arming under-paid security checkers. I don't want someone who's barely a step up from McDonalds packing a gun. At least police officers get training. (Well, this is a general US issue, supermarket guards have guns at some stores... Hello!?)
Not as effective. If it gets out, she'll take steps to make sure all changes have to be accompanied with notarized letters and stuff, the things people do after they've been hit by id theft...
You need to post it in the right places, make sure the next year is hell for her. Then post her details on a private but anonymous webpage for everyone to see. And then she'll realy know what it's like!
That wave of users is irrelevant. If they can't be bothered to ask nicely, we can't be bothered to care what they want.
If they're really so stupid they'd rather pay for broken applications from companies who don't give a shit about them instead of downloading free applications from developers who would listen if they didn't whine, they're free to do so. It doesn't change anything, they didn't contribute either code, bug reports, support, or money, so they don't change the equation to remove.
As for MS... MS is already irrelevant. Linux and BSD, Open Office, Apache, etc, have broken their stranglehold. Anyone who wants (or a company with an IT department) can get away from MS, totally or partially, which means that MS can't dictate to the industry anymore. That's the only problem I have with MS, that they want to strangle the industry in order to control it. (Well, I think they're lying lawbreakers, but so are many companies. That I deal with by just never dealing with them.)
If you don't like Linux, I suggest you buy a Mac, they're really nice looking and Apple puts a lot of snuggle time in, making sure that everyone feels loved. Or, if you try Linux, buy a Redhat support license, and get them to help you.
I think it is you who don't have a clue. Step down off your high-horse and open your mind. If close-minded preachers are what you see infesting Slashdot, I think you may be looking into a mirror.
I didn't say anything about printing. I said online, as in with computers. Print news is getting obsolete. Online news, by definition, involves computers which could perform all the needed transformations. Notice that I also mentioned digital signatures. I'm not enough of a math whiz to suggest that people perform public-key cryptography in their heads, which further suggests that I was talking about computerized news reading.
My point is that once you do *anything* to the output of the CCD you're changing it. Some changes might be required, but whose to say that applying this level of sharpening is okay, and that level not.
Even contrast and sharpening/blurring, some of the most basic tools, can be used to alter the contents of the photo. For example, by increasing the contrast and sharpening you make a scene clearer, but if it was foggy because there really was fog, you're now representing a scene that didn't happen.
Because changes are required, and we can't agree on a safe level of changes, we can either allow any and all changes, provided there's a method of examining these changes to watch for fraud, or we must prohibit all changes.
This (requiring raw CCD captures) isn't that unreasonable. I get all my news online, newspapers are outdated and TV news is largely irrelevent blather. If CNN published the article with raw image output from the digital cameras my browser could process this into a displayable picture, without me having to trust them to do it. Implement digital signing in the cameras, like Canon is looking to offer in their high-end cameras like the 1Ds, and I can trust (as much as I trust secure smart cards and such) that the photo hasn't been tampered with. If the photo requires much adjustment to be viewable they can include notes with the file on how to process it, which I can override if I wish.
Ask any PC gamers, there's a reason we don't all run out and buy consoles.
Even where the games are out on Console (Morrowind on XBox and PC) the depth just doesn't compare. And then there's Neverwinter Nights with how many user-generated maps? Get away from the RPGs into any online action games and it's tilted even more towards PCs. Where's the console equivalent of Counterstrike?
The only thing consoles have going for them is ease, pop in a disc and go. But the graphics, interaction, controls, depth of gameplay, and everything else are worse.
But, keep telling yourself that I'm "an army of one", and that it's all sour grapes. You wouldn't recognize gameplay if you saw it.
All the tools to make Linux a perfect desktop exist. The GNU/Linux operating system and tools are incredibly robust and powerful. The KDE desktop has tons of features, is very pretty, and very easy to use. Mozilla, KMail or Evolution, Open Office, and other apps are just as good as anything in Windows.
Sure, gqview might not properly support cut and paste. But there are picture viewers that do. An admin need only pick one of each class of application and install it on the client machines. How many applications does the average office worker, or your mom, etc?
Where Linux isn't good is the medium-level desktop, users who need more applications (or specialized ones like 3d-Studio or Photoshop) than a one-size-fits-all distro in a company will provide, but who aren't skilled enough to configure the machine themselves. That's not to say that Windows is perfect for them either though, these people are where a majority of the support time is taken in the average company. But they demand slightly more than they can do in a locked down KDE, but not enough to warrant learning Linux.
Mom, and Joe-Average office worker, wouldn't notice what operating system they were on. Someone had to show them "The Blue E" to "get on the internet", they could just as easily click the Mozilla icon, it's just another arbitrary thing to remember.
And for power users, like developers... Many are already switching to Linux. Most of the embedded developers at my old company (those not doing the Windows app) switched to Linux, using VMWare only because they were required to use Outlook. (Today, even that requirement could be met in Linux natively.)
You must realize that, if dropped into a locked room with a PC and a Mandrake 9 install disk, and a WinXP install disk, most users wouldn't be able to figure either of them out. Set the machine up, show them which icon to select, and they'd be okay on either though. KDE is more like Windows than the Mac is, yet users switch between those two without much trouble.
And, even if it's a little harder, does your company care if they can save nearly a grand (WinXP + OfficeXP) per user?
Luckily MS has made a ton of enemies, rich ones like IBM and Sun (well, kinda rich). The companies can afford a lot of OpenOffice-type development as long as it cuts into Microsoft major cash cow. And they can justify it (against charges of dumping) because they need these tools for their own customers, who use their OSes where MS's tools won't work.
It's dirty pool, but it payback and it must gall Billy to no end.
Let them fight, destroying each other in the process. Then we'll have a market with more, smaller, companies.
I don't love IBM, but they're helping tear down MS, and the market today won't support IBM's dominance so it's a win-win for the consumers. Especially with open source software. IBM isn't cutting its own throat, but it is ensuring that it won't be the monopoly it once was. Of course, they're happy as long as nobody else is a monopoly either.
It's high-maintenance to setup a linux server and have a bunch of diskless workstations set to network boot?
It's perfect for standard office work which is pretty much word processing/spread sheets/"databases" and web applications.
For people who need a heavy-weight application on their desktop, give them their own PC, but for the average worker, a network PC is faster, better, and available from any desk.
I don't count the interaction gains towards what you get from school, you get those from being involved with any activity outside of your house. And I honestly learned less in school than on the job, or on my own time.
K-12 is pretty much about turning out robots for low-paying jobs. You're not encouraged to question, or really to think. It's an exercise in memorization and parroting the teacher's ideas. Does the teacher think "The One Ring" is a metaphor for technology? If so, you'll get flunked for saying anything else, despite the fact that Tolkien himself said otherwise. Are your teachers qualified to take the courses they teach? My Comp-Sci 12 AP teacher was a math teacher who took a course in programming over the summer break. The entire class, except me and one other person (both who went into the class knowing the material) flunked the government-run AP exams. I complained to the school that he didn't know the material. I was threatened with expulsion for "attitude" and he was still teaching the class the next year.
University is both better, and worse. It's better, in that you do get access to technical subjects, and the materials are there to enable you to teach yourself. But it's worse in that you pay through the nose for this and the teachers aren't much better than public-school quality, except in some high-level courses. You don't get graded on homework anymore, so teachers call it "projects" and it's just as inane; nothing but examples from the book. Most teachers aren't qualified to answer anything that isn't in the book, if you want to understand something the book doesn't go into you're likely SOL.
I do feel university has some value, but they need to ditch this four-year curriculum and the "Renaissance Man" image. It's just a scam to get people who want/need advanced training in one subject to spend an extra two or three years of tuiton on classes they don't want. If universities were actually designed to teach people they'd let you skip the classes you don't need and go straight to the material you don't know.
This wouldn't be a problem is a university degree wasn't required for nearly all high-paying jobs. We're treating universities like trade school, yet they're teaching the same outdated things, in the same outdated ways, that they taught a hundred years ago.
Compare this to my experiences as an intern. I did valid work, and got paid, yet had access to people with proven skills ("Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.") and actual real-world problems with which to experiment. Actual industry conditions, actual industry tools. Not suprising that it was a good learning experience.
This isn't to say that I don't think anyone can teach me, or that there are no courses worth taking. I really enjoyed high-level comp-sci courses and got a strong knowledge of the theory behind the tools. In one sense this merely lets me write O-notation for various algorithms, but in another it gives me the knowledge to evaluate things for myself, not merely use quicksort because someone told me it was the best. While I may never write a compiler, or a regex engine, the knowledge aquired from this is applicable in other areas. But these classes are what percentage of a full program? Not to mention that I picked up much of this knowledge from reading the textbooks while I was learning on my own during my high-school years.
Cheating hurts the student? Um, no. They get the paper, and that's all that school tends to be worth. If you want any chance of making it in today's job market you pay the school tax. If schools were really about teaching they'd let people challenge classes.
School is really all about milking as much money as they can from the students and the government, and providing an easy out for HR people who don't understand what they're hiring for and want a simple "Ba. CompSci" or similar to look for.
Even sharpening and increasing contrast changes the photo significantly. If I take a picture in the fog I can, by selectively masking and applying contrast tweaks and sharpening, remove most of the fog. This is exactly what I'd have to do to print anything that looked like what I saw on the camera, but it's also what I'd do to remove any trace of inclement weather. We wouldn't say a photo was accurate if a photographer added fog partly obscuring the details, so why is it accurate the other way?
Many photographers auto-bracket for exposure and combine photos (only 1/500th of a second apart perhaps) to make a better picture with wider range. It seems fairly obvious that this should be allowed. It's something that'll be done in-camera in a few years, and obviously only shows a more accurate picture. But this is combining of multiple photos... The extension of this is to composite many photos of a scene, from all angles, and make a 3D model of it at any given time, allowing the viewer to rotate around. Not even just from the position of the camera, but smoothly, by interpolating between cameras and frames.
We must either accept nothing less than the raw output of the CCD, or allow anything that preserves the scene, as the photographer saw it, even if there's no one source photograph that covers it. Perhaps news sources can voluntarily open access to their source photos, and let an industry body (and interested independents) examine how any given output picture was developed.
How about if the lighting was terrible, one person was in direct sunlight and the other was in a dark shadow? No one photo captured both of them, but the photographer bracketed exposure and captures both subjects clearly. Blending them together shows what a person would have seen, if they were there. (Their eye would have adjusted as they looked from one to the other.)
There are other technologies that are blurring our "real photo" definition. Compositing is used to produce effectively higher resolution from a series of still photos.
There's talk of having an array of cameras (perhaps even multiple camera men each with an array) shooting a scene and building a 3D model from it. If you have a front/side image of a politician, should you be able to rotate it (and the background) to produce a 45-degree image from between the photographers? How about to recreate the view from the reporter's position?
How about using the positional data to seperate foreground from background and artificially blur the background? This is the same as setting a low f-stop, a perfectly valid technique. Would it be allowable if you could select only f-stops the camera supported?
Rules about allowable modifications are silly. What we need is for news media to voluntarily make original photos available to other agencies and the public. I don't really care what techniques they use to generate a picture, as long as it represents what I could have seen, if I were at that spot and had perfect vision. When oversight is possible we can let news agencies tweak all they wish, knowing that we can always check the validity of a given picture. (Or, at least, as much as we could check a completely fabricated quote or anything else we trust the media to do.) Then, if news agencies don't make originals available (perhaps in closed situations to prevent copying, or whatever) we know not to trust them.
He sees the central story of the books as the way that no one in Middle Earth can resist the ring, and added the scene of Aragorn being tempted to take the ring.
Well, who can? Other than Bombadil?
People are so upset that Aragorn and Faramir show *any* temptation to take the ring, but this seems reasonable. Both Aragorn and Faramir are smart enough to not take the ring, but that doesn't mean they don't feel its pull. Hell, if Faramir really was so immune to it, why don't they give him the ring and make him destroy it?
The book had thirty or so pages of Frodo and Faramir discussing things. We see that Faramir knows a lot about the ring. In the movie we don't see his reasoning behind not desiring the ring, it would appear to be because he's immune to it (not because he's smart enough not to get close to it). So it's shown as him not ripping it away from Frodo, but by him deciding that he can't make this decision alone. But, as he sees (and we see him see) the immediate danger of the ring, he decides to let it go completely (it was still in his grasp). How is this not a strong thing? Where in here does he appear to be Boromir? Boromir tried to take the ring directly, Faramir didn't.
For example, all that absurdity with the Aragorn/Arwen story that was introduced in TTT
Instead of Jackson barely hinting at a relationship in the first movie, then having one in the third, he builds it slowly. Arwen wasn't actually in the second movie timeline, it was all flashbacks to explain why Aragorn doesn't run off with Eowyn. And, it's a way to explain the sacrifice Arwen makes in staying. I think changing the presentation is perfectly reasonable, especially because it's really only the presentation that changes, they didn't add a love interest or anything. This just keeps it from feeling like an afterthought tacked on at the end.
Showing Arwen rescuing Frodo was a good idea, imho, because it makes her appear useful, not just a simpering love interest. You must assume that Aragorn saw something in her, so show the viewer. Otherwise you've really got to wonder why he doesn't go to Eowyn.
My big complaint was taking Frodo's fight away on Weathertop. He wasn't very effective, but at least he didn't fall down and backpedal away. He seemed too ineffectual.
It's not like people are going to start digitally signing buffer overflow exploits. Windows will still run them, and things like CodeRed will continue to work. Most of the bugs we see these days are exploits of poorly written code, not viruses. As in, the user doesn't have to click on anything.
Palladium will be useless as long as you can trick properly signed software into doing what you want. (Which just means, until Microsoft comes up with a secure OS and has a decent record on fixing new-found exploits....)
Slashdot Mirror
Please, oh please, don't lecture me about Mozilla's stability. [...] Speaking of problems with OSS software; people who make excuses for it. No, it is not my hardware, and I've got the diagnostics reports on my machines to prove it
Well it's very stable for me. I'm not talking about every versiont they've released, many are "alpha" for a reason. I'm talking about the final releases that I upgrade between. I don't specifically view flash pluggins, but I slashdot, text complex html layout, have megs of docs open, and view 20+ 1MB pictures on a page at once. You're right that I don't use Java, or Flash, but I don't think my usage is trivial.
I'm sure you'll think I'm making it up, but I really do have incredible success with Mozilla. That's not "making excuses". Perhaps if it died every few hours I'd have to make excuses, but it doesn't. The only person I know who didn't have good luck with it was having hardware problems. OOffice is slow, but I dunno about the stability. I don't use it enough to tell. All I do it convert documents with it.
I don't make excuses, if something crashes and loses my work I stop using it.
I don't think MS has the best technical support by a long shot, but when I worked there we weren't a bunch of brain-deads like (some) people think - the only reasoning being it's Microsoft.
I wouldn't assume that. Tech support just often can't help with the advanced problems because there's stuff that only a developer would know. Unless you know what the code looks like inside you're really only going from your experiences, and if you've never seen the problem, you're not going to know what it might be. I've worked both sides of the tech/developer line, and provided support for my own and third-party apps.
I agree that it will be harder to get developer support for Linux as it gets bigger, but luckily you rarely need to ask Linux for kernel help, really anyone who has put time in learning the code can do. Even a low-level developer at MS (those CPR guys you said?) would probably have been able to solve my company's problem. The thing about open source is that there's a larger pool of people at that level because anyone who is interested can get there.
It just gets to me when people are always so "screw M$!" about everything.
Well, I'm pretty "Screw MS". They've done a lot of illegal things that other (smaller, less rich) companies would have been smacked down for and by looking at the management I have to assume these actions are intentional and probably still going on. I just don't have any illusions about other companies. They'd be doing the same thing if they could (or, have and just haven't been caught.)
I'll be happy though if MS is brought down to IBMs level, a huge company, but one that can't dictate to the industry. (I fear waking up one day and finding that non-Palladium "enabled" machines are illegal and open source, because it might be terrorist related (or some other nonsense), can't get signed without jumping through unrealistic hoops.)
Real people work for them.
Yes, but that's not a total defense. If you find yourself contributing to something you wouldn't want, you're partly responsible. Being a tech is one thing, but helping design Palladium is another.
However, all my anti-MS feelings don't mean I have to rant like a loon. I tell my clients about the benefits to open source, instead of telling them not to buy MS because of my personal feelings. And I can seperate my feelings for the management who order the actions from the wage-slaves like myself who end up doing what they're told to put food on the table.
I apologize for sniping at you.
.CRW format as the D60, and I've written code using GPLed CRW->TIFF converters, so I understand what's going on as well.
I don't make money from photography as you probably do, but I own a Canon G2 which uses almost exactly the same
I started talking about the web and online news because it *is* and answer to this. If you distributed raw images and a list of photoshop actions to turn that into the final image you really could distribute signed CCD captures and yet let the common person see just the final copy. Sure, RAW images from a D60 are 6MB or more, but this is theoretical. Ideally, a simple right-click on the image and selecting 'properties' would show the tweaks to the image and then you could open the image in an editor with a history buffer, rolling back each change.
With technology like that we could allow pretty much any editing ("double exposures" even) because the news agency would have to be prepared to justify them. You know how photographers bracket for exposure, and how multiple shots can be combined for a greater dynamic range. This is especially useful taking pictures in bright sunlight, war photos for instance, and is legitimate, but the same technique (combining multiple exposures) is how the most gratuitous "photoshops" (as seen on Fark) are made.
My point about color spacing and contrast was that even though these are required, they aren't necessarily "safe" in that they can be used to change the meaning of the picture. Hell, the whole OJ picture scandal was over dodging and burning. Now, I know these are required to print a useful image, but that doesn't mean we can just say "any contrast tweaks, curves adjustments, and dodging/burning is okay" because it's not. The fact that this is annoying doesn't change it. You just can't trust a printed image, and you can only trust a digital one if you can derive it yourself, from published steps, from a signed raw CCD capture. (And then only as much as you trust the framing of the picture, and the tamper-proof hardware in the camera.)
I wasn't the one who sat on the phone, so I can't absolutely verify this, but the guy I worked with had no luck with MS tech. He was quite prepared. By the time he'd called he had gone through all the KB articles he could find relating to the problem and documented exactly what the system was, what had been done, etc.
They referred him to some of the same KB articles he'd already mentioned, despite his telling them that he'd already been there and why it didn't work or wasn't applicable to his solution ("No, KB#xxx is for 2k AS, *with* IIS and Exchange, I don't have IIS installed.") They eventually gave up and told him the problem was at our end, to reinstall and if that failed, that it was probably hardware.
Anyways, when the next service pack came out we tried again and it worked perfectly.
Not to say that MS is the worst, but they seem to be like 98% of the techs out there. Perfectly capable of dealing with 95% of the problems, unplugged servers, un-service packed machines, etc, but incapable of diagnosing anything beyond that. I've had better support from some companies, but usually smaller ones. Some have actually written test code, or sent us a development build with error logging. Big companies read off a script and dump you when your problem gets tough.
You're right, it's not a MS vs Linux issue, it's a "Monolithic uncaring corp vs independent developer who sees a direct financial incentive to help" issue. The only way open source software comes into this is that you can find independent developers who are willing to help tweak or support Apache or Postgres simply by asking on the dev lists. You can find people willing to support IIS or MS-SQL but they can't really do much more than you if the problem isn't trivial.
Don't you just love some cocky asshole with a chip on his shoulder whining about what he gets for free?
It's as much help as I got from Blizzard after shelling out $65 for Diablo 2 and the copy protection not liking my CD-ROM. (Actually, not true. Blizzard told me to buy a new CD-ROM drive.)
This kind of support is a lot more reasonable when you don't pay for it.
Makes perfect sense. A company can get a lot more for their development dollar by paying for an open source developer to work on a specific feature than they could by asking a large commercial software company.
btw, I like your vocab test site, it's nicely done.
You have stability problems with Mozilla? I frequently have 15+ day uptimes with it, and I'm a *power* user. I've almost always got more than thirty tabs open, all with a full page. (Not hard. I have three windows, home, work, and development at work. Home has threads from Slashdot and dpreview open, work has a few web apps, and webmail open, development has pages of docs, google searches, and whatever app I'm testing.) Mozilla is about as stable a program as I've seen.
But, a friend of mine had problems with Mozilla and Photoshop. Nothing would make these work at anything other than the most trivial tasks. He ended up upgrading his mobo and CPU (not for this) and magically, both worked. It was just some odd hardware problem that only came up with large programs that taxed the system. If Mozilla crashing even every day you may want to try running memtest86 for a few hours and maybe 3DMark 2001 (just as an example of a very taxing app) in a loop overnight.
Don't upgrade unless you need to. If you don't go from Moz 1.0.x you don't need to recrate your profile. (Well, it works without doing this anyways, I'm using a profile I made at one of the later milestones still and I'm using 1.3 now, but...) Upgrading to every now version of Mozilla is like always upgrading to the latest 2.4.x kernel, technically safe, but with much less testing. People who need safety should stay with the kernel their distro came with unless they need a patch, ditto with Mozilla.
So, those 5000 employees can stick with whatever version of Mozilla the IT dept gave them, when it's time to roll out a new version IT can either test installing over an old profile or importing, whatever they like. Users don't need to do anything, that's what the IT department is for.
There's a difference between thinking people should use Linux and thinking they should use it on their own. In fact, few people should use Windows on their own. This is why we see unused IIS servers, email viruses, word attachments in email, etc. If you setup Linux for someone, just like they get Windows pre-installed, it's just as valid a desktop.
Airport security needs to be designed by people who aren't festering retards. That's, quite simply, the main problem.
They confiscate shoelaces at times, yet god forbid they stop selling commemorative glass plates which can be broken to form a very nasty knife. And what terrorist would bother with a thin cotton garotte when six weeks in a martial arts course can make you fairly effective (against untrained people anyways).
I had twenty examples of this when I flew last. People were being quizzed for bringing large nail clippers, yet nobody bothered to even look through the 300mm lenses this photographer brought on, despite them being metal and thus blocking xrays (and potentially being used to carry any ammount of nasty stuff). They turn on laptops and palmtops, but they don't know what to look for. You could carry an early 90s vintage laptop with the guts from a current slim notebook in it, you'd have space for a ton of stuff. Not to mention that they don't check the battery compartments, even the spare one.
But they freaked about my cellphone. Wow, I could poke someone's eyes out with the little springy arial. But they didn't do anything to ensure I hadn't stuffed the guts of a smaller phone in, to make room for something, they were happy with quizzing me on why I needed to carry it, despite not being able to use it on the flight. (I guess they've never had three hour layovers.)
The security measures they take are nearly useless, but that doesn't stop them from making them really irritating. And what is it with the US arming under-paid security checkers. I don't want someone who's barely a step up from McDonalds packing a gun. At least police officers get training. (Well, this is a general US issue, supermarket guards have guns at some stores... Hello!?)
Not as effective. If it gets out, she'll take steps to make sure all changes have to be accompanied with notarized letters and stuff, the things people do after they've been hit by id theft...
You need to post it in the right places, make sure the next year is hell for her. Then post her details on a private but anonymous webpage for everyone to see. And then she'll realy know what it's like!
That wave of users is irrelevant. If they can't be bothered to ask nicely, we can't be bothered to care what they want.
If they're really so stupid they'd rather pay for broken applications from companies who don't give a shit about them instead of downloading free applications from developers who would listen if they didn't whine, they're free to do so. It doesn't change anything, they didn't contribute either code, bug reports, support, or money, so they don't change the equation to remove.
As for MS... MS is already irrelevant. Linux and BSD, Open Office, Apache, etc, have broken their stranglehold. Anyone who wants (or a company with an IT department) can get away from MS, totally or partially, which means that MS can't dictate to the industry anymore. That's the only problem I have with MS, that they want to strangle the industry in order to control it. (Well, I think they're lying lawbreakers, but so are many companies. That I deal with by just never dealing with them.)
If you don't like Linux, I suggest you buy a Mac, they're really nice looking and Apple puts a lot of snuggle time in, making sure that everyone feels loved. Or, if you try Linux, buy a Redhat support license, and get them to help you.
I think it is you who don't have a clue. Step down off your high-horse and open your mind. If close-minded preachers are what you see infesting Slashdot, I think you may be looking into a mirror.
I didn't say anything about printing. I said online, as in with computers. Print news is getting obsolete. Online news, by definition, involves computers which could perform all the needed transformations. Notice that I also mentioned digital signatures. I'm not enough of a math whiz to suggest that people perform public-key cryptography in their heads, which further suggests that I was talking about computerized news reading.
My point is that once you do *anything* to the output of the CCD you're changing it. Some changes might be required, but whose to say that applying this level of sharpening is okay, and that level not.
Even contrast and sharpening/blurring, some of the most basic tools, can be used to alter the contents of the photo. For example, by increasing the contrast and sharpening you make a scene clearer, but if it was foggy because there really was fog, you're now representing a scene that didn't happen.
Because changes are required, and we can't agree on a safe level of changes, we can either allow any and all changes, provided there's a method of examining these changes to watch for fraud, or we must prohibit all changes.
This (requiring raw CCD captures) isn't that unreasonable. I get all my news online, newspapers are outdated and TV news is largely irrelevent blather. If CNN published the article with raw image output from the digital cameras my browser could process this into a displayable picture, without me having to trust them to do it. Implement digital signing in the cameras, like Canon is looking to offer in their high-end cameras like the 1Ds, and I can trust (as much as I trust secure smart cards and such) that the photo hasn't been tampered with. If the photo requires much adjustment to be viewable they can include notes with the file on how to process it, which I can override if I wish.
Ask any PC gamers, there's a reason we don't all run out and buy consoles.
Even where the games are out on Console (Morrowind on XBox and PC) the depth just doesn't compare. And then there's Neverwinter Nights with how many user-generated maps? Get away from the RPGs into any online action games and it's tilted even more towards PCs. Where's the console equivalent of Counterstrike?
The only thing consoles have going for them is ease, pop in a disc and go. But the graphics, interaction, controls, depth of gameplay, and everything else are worse.
But, keep telling yourself that I'm "an army of one", and that it's all sour grapes. You wouldn't recognize gameplay if you saw it.
All the tools to make Linux a perfect desktop exist. The GNU/Linux operating system and tools are incredibly robust and powerful. The KDE desktop has tons of features, is very pretty, and very easy to use. Mozilla, KMail or Evolution, Open Office, and other apps are just as good as anything in Windows.
Sure, gqview might not properly support cut and paste. But there are picture viewers that do. An admin need only pick one of each class of application and install it on the client machines. How many applications does the average office worker, or your mom, etc?
Where Linux isn't good is the medium-level desktop, users who need more applications (or specialized ones like 3d-Studio or Photoshop) than a one-size-fits-all distro in a company will provide, but who aren't skilled enough to configure the machine themselves. That's not to say that Windows is perfect for them either though, these people are where a majority of the support time is taken in the average company. But they demand slightly more than they can do in a locked down KDE, but not enough to warrant learning Linux.
Mom, and Joe-Average office worker, wouldn't notice what operating system they were on. Someone had to show them "The Blue E" to "get on the internet", they could just as easily click the Mozilla icon, it's just another arbitrary thing to remember.
And for power users, like developers... Many are already switching to Linux. Most of the embedded developers at my old company (those not doing the Windows app) switched to Linux, using VMWare only because they were required to use Outlook. (Today, even that requirement could be met in Linux natively.)
You must realize that, if dropped into a locked room with a PC and a Mandrake 9 install disk, and a WinXP install disk, most users wouldn't be able to figure either of them out. Set the machine up, show them which icon to select, and they'd be okay on either though. KDE is more like Windows than the Mac is, yet users switch between those two without much trouble.
And, even if it's a little harder, does your company care if they can save nearly a grand (WinXP + OfficeXP) per user?
Luckily MS has made a ton of enemies, rich ones like IBM and Sun (well, kinda rich). The companies can afford a lot of OpenOffice-type development as long as it cuts into Microsoft major cash cow. And they can justify it (against charges of dumping) because they need these tools for their own customers, who use their OSes where MS's tools won't work.
It's dirty pool, but it payback and it must gall Billy to no end.
What does MS do that is so ground-breaking? Office apps were done before, desktops were done before, gaming consoles were done before...
There's really only so much room for lattitude in a word processor, people don't need or want a 3d interface, or any funky new features.
Let them fight, destroying each other in the process. Then we'll have a market with more, smaller, companies.
I don't love IBM, but they're helping tear down MS, and the market today won't support IBM's dominance so it's a win-win for the consumers. Especially with open source software. IBM isn't cutting its own throat, but it is ensuring that it won't be the monopoly it once was. Of course, they're happy as long as nobody else is a monopoly either.
It's high-maintenance to setup a linux server and have a bunch of diskless workstations set to network boot?
It's perfect for standard office work which is pretty much word processing/spread sheets/"databases" and web applications.
For people who need a heavy-weight application on their desktop, give them their own PC, but for the average worker, a network PC is faster, better, and available from any desk.
I don't count the interaction gains towards what you get from school, you get those from being involved with any activity outside of your house. And I honestly learned less in school than on the job, or on my own time.
K-12 is pretty much about turning out robots for low-paying jobs. You're not encouraged to question, or really to think. It's an exercise in memorization and parroting the teacher's ideas. Does the teacher think "The One Ring" is a metaphor for technology? If so, you'll get flunked for saying anything else, despite the fact that Tolkien himself said otherwise. Are your teachers qualified to take the courses they teach? My Comp-Sci 12 AP teacher was a math teacher who took a course in programming over the summer break. The entire class, except me and one other person (both who went into the class knowing the material) flunked the government-run AP exams. I complained to the school that he didn't know the material. I was threatened with expulsion for "attitude" and he was still teaching the class the next year.
University is both better, and worse. It's better, in that you do get access to technical subjects, and the materials are there to enable you to teach yourself. But it's worse in that you pay through the nose for this and the teachers aren't much better than public-school quality, except in some high-level courses. You don't get graded on homework anymore, so teachers call it "projects" and it's just as inane; nothing but examples from the book. Most teachers aren't qualified to answer anything that isn't in the book, if you want to understand something the book doesn't go into you're likely SOL.
I do feel university has some value, but they need to ditch this four-year curriculum and the "Renaissance Man" image. It's just a scam to get people who want/need advanced training in one subject to spend an extra two or three years of tuiton on classes they don't want. If universities were actually designed to teach people they'd let you skip the classes you don't need and go straight to the material you don't know.
This wouldn't be a problem is a university degree wasn't required for nearly all high-paying jobs. We're treating universities like trade school, yet they're teaching the same outdated things, in the same outdated ways, that they taught a hundred years ago.
Compare this to my experiences as an intern. I did valid work, and got paid, yet had access to people with proven skills ("Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.") and actual real-world problems with which to experiment. Actual industry conditions, actual industry tools. Not suprising that it was a good learning experience.
This isn't to say that I don't think anyone can teach me, or that there are no courses worth taking. I really enjoyed high-level comp-sci courses and got a strong knowledge of the theory behind the tools. In one sense this merely lets me write O-notation for various algorithms, but in another it gives me the knowledge to evaluate things for myself, not merely use quicksort because someone told me it was the best. While I may never write a compiler, or a regex engine, the knowledge aquired from this is applicable in other areas. But these classes are what percentage of a full program? Not to mention that I picked up much of this knowledge from reading the textbooks while I was learning on my own during my high-school years.
Cheating hurts the student? Um, no. They get the paper, and that's all that school tends to be worth. If you want any chance of making it in today's job market you pay the school tax. If schools were really about teaching they'd let people challenge classes.
School is really all about milking as much money as they can from the students and the government, and providing an easy out for HR people who don't understand what they're hiring for and want a simple "Ba. CompSci" or similar to look for.
Even sharpening and increasing contrast changes the photo significantly. If I take a picture in the fog I can, by selectively masking and applying contrast tweaks and sharpening, remove most of the fog. This is exactly what I'd have to do to print anything that looked like what I saw on the camera, but it's also what I'd do to remove any trace of inclement weather. We wouldn't say a photo was accurate if a photographer added fog partly obscuring the details, so why is it accurate the other way?
Many photographers auto-bracket for exposure and combine photos (only 1/500th of a second apart perhaps) to make a better picture with wider range. It seems fairly obvious that this should be allowed. It's something that'll be done in-camera in a few years, and obviously only shows a more accurate picture. But this is combining of multiple photos... The extension of this is to composite many photos of a scene, from all angles, and make a 3D model of it at any given time, allowing the viewer to rotate around. Not even just from the position of the camera, but smoothly, by interpolating between cameras and frames.
We must either accept nothing less than the raw output of the CCD, or allow anything that preserves the scene, as the photographer saw it, even if there's no one source photograph that covers it. Perhaps news sources can voluntarily open access to their source photos, and let an industry body (and interested independents) examine how any given output picture was developed.
How about if the lighting was terrible, one person was in direct sunlight and the other was in a dark shadow? No one photo captured both of them, but the photographer bracketed exposure and captures both subjects clearly. Blending them together shows what a person would have seen, if they were there. (Their eye would have adjusted as they looked from one to the other.)
There are other technologies that are blurring our "real photo" definition. Compositing is used to produce effectively higher resolution from a series of still photos.
There's talk of having an array of cameras (perhaps even multiple camera men each with an array) shooting a scene and building a 3D model from it. If you have a front/side image of a politician, should you be able to rotate it (and the background) to produce a 45-degree image from between the photographers? How about to recreate the view from the reporter's position?
How about using the positional data to seperate foreground from background and artificially blur the background? This is the same as setting a low f-stop, a perfectly valid technique. Would it be allowable if you could select only f-stops the camera supported?
Rules about allowable modifications are silly. What we need is for news media to voluntarily make original photos available to other agencies and the public. I don't really care what techniques they use to generate a picture, as long as it represents what I could have seen, if I were at that spot and had perfect vision. When oversight is possible we can let news agencies tweak all they wish, knowing that we can always check the validity of a given picture. (Or, at least, as much as we could check a completely fabricated quote or anything else we trust the media to do.) Then, if news agencies don't make originals available (perhaps in closed situations to prevent copying, or whatever) we know not to trust them.
He sees the central story of the books as the way that no one in Middle Earth can resist the ring, and added the scene of Aragorn being tempted to take the ring.
Well, who can? Other than Bombadil?
People are so upset that Aragorn and Faramir show *any* temptation to take the ring, but this seems reasonable. Both Aragorn and Faramir are smart enough to not take the ring, but that doesn't mean they don't feel its pull. Hell, if Faramir really was so immune to it, why don't they give him the ring and make him destroy it?
The book had thirty or so pages of Frodo and Faramir discussing things. We see that Faramir knows a lot about the ring. In the movie we don't see his reasoning behind not desiring the ring, it would appear to be because he's immune to it (not because he's smart enough not to get close to it). So it's shown as him not ripping it away from Frodo, but by him deciding that he can't make this decision alone. But, as he sees (and we see him see) the immediate danger of the ring, he decides to let it go completely (it was still in his grasp). How is this not a strong thing? Where in here does he appear to be Boromir? Boromir tried to take the ring directly, Faramir didn't.
For example, all that absurdity with the Aragorn/Arwen story that was introduced in TTT
Instead of Jackson barely hinting at a relationship in the first movie, then having one in the third, he builds it slowly. Arwen wasn't actually in the second movie timeline, it was all flashbacks to explain why Aragorn doesn't run off with Eowyn. And, it's a way to explain the sacrifice Arwen makes in staying. I think changing the presentation is perfectly reasonable, especially because it's really only the presentation that changes, they didn't add a love interest or anything. This just keeps it from feeling like an afterthought tacked on at the end.
Showing Arwen rescuing Frodo was a good idea, imho, because it makes her appear useful, not just a simpering love interest. You must assume that Aragorn saw something in her, so show the viewer. Otherwise you've really got to wonder why he doesn't go to Eowyn.
My big complaint was taking Frodo's fight away on Weathertop. He wasn't very effective, but at least he didn't fall down and backpedal away. He seemed too ineffectual.
It's not like people are going to start digitally signing buffer overflow exploits. Windows will still run them, and things like CodeRed will continue to work. Most of the bugs we see these days are exploits of poorly written code, not viruses. As in, the user doesn't have to click on anything.
Palladium will be useless as long as you can trick properly signed software into doing what you want. (Which just means, until Microsoft comes up with a secure OS and has a decent record on fixing new-found exploits....)