First off, there's the obvious "what if I'm an amputee/don't use a keyboard" scenario, which is very valid. And it leads to the second point.
Secondly, any operating system worth using (yes, that includes Windows) will allow you replace input devices either with other input devices or with virtual devices. Some OSes will need more hackery than others, but I can't think of an OS where this would not be possible. So just set up a keystroke logger, pass around the log of you typing to all your friends, and get them to install a keyboard log player-backer.
Finally, they didn't go into the technology side of things, but it sounds a bit iffy. Presumably the data would be encrypted, and your keystroke rhythm would be hashed in some manner in order to get the key to decrypt it? If so, it should (a) not take long for someone to crack the binary (in a similar fashion to the crackers of olde who would modify entry-points, etc. to get past copy protection in Stunts and 4D Boxing and whatnot); and (b) not take long (unless the technology were *REALLY* well thought-out. Considering this is from the NetNanny people, I'd be surprised if their "design" stage consisted of more than a drunken bachelor party) for someone to figure out techniques to "fudge" keystrokes into getting the right hash (me thinks the hashing algorithm would have to be really fuzzy).
It's featured on a bunch of really bad commercials. "Sir, I hear something. 'R-rr-r-roll?' Sir, I think we're Canada". Yes, there actually are commercials like that here.
The only relevant statistic I could find is that there were 24.8% of the 11.6 million households in Canada access the Internet from home. Unfortunately I couldn't find anything that says how many use a cable modem or DSL (or faster).
In my experience (which I won't pretend is representative), the majority of Canadian Internet users use cable modem or ADSL. In cities, cable modem and 56K modem access are about the same price.
So I'm going to say there are around almost one million households who would be the market for this. Mind you if the cable modem, the probably have cable TV. So that brings their market down to about one person, Joe in Windsor, who's too lazy to move his fat ass to the living room to watch his TV.
So I agree with you: there isn't a very big market for this.
Hopefully that standard doesn't last. Linux is a decent free Unix implementation. Many will argue (with merit) that any of the BSDs is a nicer implementation, but nonetheless Linux is pretty decent.
Still, if you've looked at *any* of the research OSes in the past ten years or so, you'll see that Unix is pretty crippled. Linux is fine for the here-and-now people, but it if it ever becomes the standard, it won't last for long. Eros looks like it might be user-usable within the next five years (assuming the developers don't get bored with it); the Hurd is fairly usable right now (I can vouch for this because I use it every now and then...now if only my network card worked in it *grumble*), and Debian GNU/Hurd might hit 1.0 within two or three years; Plan 9 (does this count as a "research OS"?) looks pretty cool, and I understand it is definitely usable, too. There are others (including an exokernel from MIT (?) that looks pretty neat).
The point is: Unix is OK, but it's not great. It's inflexible; it's inconsistent; it's illogical in parts (a large part of it seems to be quick hacks without much thought). The only thing it has going for it is that it's more flexible, more consistent, and more logical than the popular OSes in many respects. And it's free, of course. If it ever becomes a standard, though, you'd better hope it's short term.
Ahh good point. FWIW, I wish it wasn't there (I'm not the one who wants the unnamed operating system there). However, I do use it occasionally to use SSL (since I no longer have Netscape on my SSL partition). Personally I'd prefer if none of the sites used SSL, but I guess that's a little out of my hands:D.
Big deal; you can do that in real life, too. Unless the US has suddenly become a police state and the entire society is based on mistrust, there is no reason for this to be 100% secure.
w3m. If I happen to be in X at the moment I'll use Mozilla. Before Mozilla, I used lynx (this was also before w3m). I did have Netscape around before that too, but I didn't use it unless it was absolutely necessary (e.g. the page had some Javascript that would literally not let you view the page unless you were using IE or Navigator, I needed https, etc.), not because it wasn't free, but mostly because (a) I don't like staying in X for too long for fear of going insane; and (b) it was so unstable that I had to set up a script to automatically restart it when it crashed (it probably crashed at least once an hour).
Yea, there's RMS' dream right there. Personally I don't see what's so great about the GPL. I like BSD'd and public domained and LGPL'd software just the same.
FWIW, Berlin (which AFAIK is the only serious (L?)GPL'd contendor to X) is starting to look OK. It's slower than anything you can imagine (try thinking of Win95 on a 386 with 2MB of RAM and 1.2MB of swap on a 5.25" floppy drive; ya, that's many times faster than Berlin on my computer. Seriously). Mind you I was running it on SVGA framebuffer, so you can't expect it to set any speed records. Anyway, the demo programs are cool. They don't seem to have a window manager yet, and the included widgets are ugliest things I've ever seen (well, third behind Lesstif and XForms maybe).
Bah graphical text editor weird me out (though I must say I was notably impressed by NEdit). I'm running a 100x37 console right now (through framebuffer) and it works wonders. I'm considering stepping up to 1024x768 (I'm at 800x600) just to get more lines of text, but 37 lines is pretty decent to work with.
And besides, X11 (or *any* environment for that matter) will never be *really* usable until they get the scrawl_w font for it (yes, I'm serious). I don't think a windowed environment (which isn't the same thing as a graphical environment) will ever be as good as a non-windowed environment for editing text.
I disagree. My entire ext2 partition right now is free software, with the exception of Mozilla, and I think some people even consider that to be free. I'm fortunate in that I don't need any office applications, though (except for a simple word processor, which AbiWord does a stellar job of).
Personally, I don't see any reason for Debian to include non-free software. It might encourage people to write free replacements sooner, and, well, quite frankly, it gives Debian a reason to exist:) (not to dis Debian, but take away their devotion to free software and they're Yet Another Linux Distribution).
No, I disagree. The scripting system should not be crippled. We should look specifically at how ILOVEYOU (and Melissa et al) worked.
First, it was stupid users, apparently. I've heard that MS Outlook will automatically run the script if the e-mail is viewed in the preview panel; I've heard some Outlook users say that that's false. I've used Outlook all of about twice in my life, so I can't say. If the script is run automatically from the preview panel, then I would say that's bad engineering (and hence bad Microsoft), but it sounds like they've at least fixed the problem.
There's also the question as to whether scripts should be executed automatically by default (e.g. when you double-click or otherwise "activate" them). Personally, I don't care. Turn it off by default, sure, sounds good.
Most importantly, though, I think the users need more control over their scripting. This is one area where KDE and Gnome have been falling down (gently). By far the most annoying thing about Windows and MacOS is that the user has almost no control, either over the OS or the applications. A few years ago I would have almost literally killed for the ability to put some scripting into Netscape that said "yes, Mr. Javascript, you can open a new window, but not when I am viewing a page from Geocities". You can argue that I could have just disabled Javascript (which I did), or made something similar to Junkbuster which would automatically parse and change all Javascript, thereby eliminating the pop-up windows (hah!), but this would have been such a nice solution.
So anyway, back on topic. I think the user should be able to do some metascripting, scripting exactly how the script should behave in certain situations. This is not the same as clicking checkboxes (especially vague ones like "Run untrusted scripts"); I want some actual *control*. If KDE (and Gnome, but they're not important in this article) do not do this, then they're just going to end up as Yet Another Inferior MacOS. I think it's time for Something Actually Different From MacOS.
Virus is latin for 'poison' and it has no formal plural form. Therefore, we use the English plural form (+es) instead of what the Latin plural form might be (-us +i).
Microsoft has had plenty of opportunity to settle out of court already, and, as far as I can see, it hasn't even considered it. The reports coming back from Bill (BTW did anyone see what Bill said on CNN last night?) seem to say that Microsoft still thinks that it hasn't broken any laws. I don't know if this is just selective reading (if I don't know about the law, I'm not breaking it!) or if they still think they can somehow convince (or dare I say bribe?) their way out of it, but it's seems obvious that they're not going to submit to anything willingly within the near future.
And in reference to the department of this story, I'd say it's already about as boring as Napster. One more story about this and I think I'll have reached my tolerance limit. Ya, so sucks to you.
Keep in mind that an exceptionally large proportion (compared to general web users) of Slashdot users are using a text-based browser and/or blocking counters (counters are, in my experience, even more annoying than banner ads). So I wouldn't put any faith in any of the numbers you're getting.
For those of you who use Freenet, I have inserted the HTML version of the ruling with the key text/microsoft/ms-final.html. If there's one thing the Slashdot effect won't affect, it's Freenet. Hopefully:).
Agreed. The only positive aspect of Napster is that it's popular, and that isn't that great. At first it seems great, because we get something like 10TB of music to choose from. Then it slowly dawns on you, oh shit, 9TB of that is Britney Spears.
Seriously, though, Napster has no technical advantage over any of the other distributed filesystems. I don't see any reason for it to exist (and if CNN would shut up about it, maybe it actually *would* die). Mind you I guess Gnutella is already kind of taking over, so maybe it'll die anyway.
Yay for death.
Side note: anyone else here that someone offered Britney Spears 10M US$ or something for sex? Funny stuff.
Indeed. I've got at least two 120V shocks in my life, and I'm still here. Mind you with one of them, the current presumably passed across my body (it went from one hand to the other), and I nearly blacked out, but all's well that ends well.
It's important to note that the amount of damage a current will do depends entirely on where the current goes. IIRC, it only takes one or two milliamps (or maybe less?) across the heart to stop it. Current going from one knuckle to another on the same finger will probably not do anything more than "weird out" some of your nerves and maybe give you burn.
You say in the FAQ that you won't store things which are illegal in the client's country. It seems to me like one of the most important attributes of a data haven would be its ability to let people escape oppresive governments. If they can't do this, then what are they gaining by going to you with their data?
Well this specific incarnation might not be anything to write home about, but I think it shows a step in the right direction.
First off, with the explosion (which will continue in the coming years, especially considering the demographic changes around the world), more and more people are going to be using computers, and I say that energy consumption for those computers should be a huge priority.
Secondly, the Crusoe is very flexible, which makes it k00l.
It doesn't help tremendously, though, because you can't have more than 2GB (or 4GB?) be contiguous. If it's not contiguous, then you can't use it for mmap()ing.
Guess what: nothing in Linux is new. With the exception of maybe framebuffer support (which was created purely out of necessity), I urge you to find a single idea in Linux which has not been implemented umpteen times before. Guess what: almost nothing in the Amiga was new either (in fact I can't think of anything off the top of my head). You seem to be implying that this makes Linux (and therefore Amiga) worse in some way, though I can't for the life of me figure out how.
No, you misunderstand. Namesys is not (to my knowledge) providing any proprietary features.
Client A contacts Namesys and says "I will pay you X dollars to implement feature Y". Namesys accepts. Namesys then takes their X dollars and implements feature Y, which is then *freely available*. This is very similar to the business model Cygnus had going for a while wrt gcc.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. There are so many things wrong with this.
First off, there's the obvious "what if I'm an amputee/don't use a keyboard" scenario, which is very valid. And it leads to the second point.
Secondly, any operating system worth using (yes, that includes Windows) will allow you replace input devices either with other input devices or with virtual devices. Some OSes will need more hackery than others, but I can't think of an OS where this would not be possible. So just set up a keystroke logger, pass around the log of you typing to all your friends, and get them to install a keyboard log player-backer.
Finally, they didn't go into the technology side of things, but it sounds a bit iffy. Presumably the data would be encrypted, and your keystroke rhythm would be hashed in some manner in order to get the key to decrypt it? If so, it should (a) not take long for someone to crack the binary (in a similar fashion to the crackers of olde who would modify entry-points, etc. to get past copy protection in Stunts and 4D Boxing and whatnot); and (b) not take long (unless the technology were *REALLY* well thought-out. Considering this is from the NetNanny people, I'd be surprised if their "design" stage consisted of more than a drunken bachelor party) for someone to figure out techniques to "fudge" keystrokes into getting the right hash (me thinks the hashing algorithm would have to be really fuzzy).
As I understand it, the law refers to content. You cannot change the content. You can do whatever you want with the signal.
It's featured on a bunch of really bad commercials. "Sir, I hear something. 'R-rr-r-roll?' Sir, I think we're Canada". Yes, there actually are commercials like that here.
In my experience (which I won't pretend is representative), the majority of Canadian Internet users use cable modem or ADSL. In cities, cable modem and 56K modem access are about the same price.
So I'm going to say there are around almost one million households who would be the market for this. Mind you if the cable modem, the probably have cable TV. So that brings their market down to about one person, Joe in Windsor, who's too lazy to move his fat ass to the living room to watch his TV.
So I agree with you: there isn't a very big market for this.
Hopefully that standard doesn't last. Linux is a decent free Unix implementation. Many will argue (with merit) that any of the BSDs is a nicer implementation, but nonetheless Linux is pretty decent.
Still, if you've looked at *any* of the research OSes in the past ten years or so, you'll see that Unix is pretty crippled. Linux is fine for the here-and-now people, but it if it ever becomes the standard, it won't last for long. Eros looks like it might be user-usable within the next five years (assuming the developers don't get bored with it); the Hurd is fairly usable right now (I can vouch for this because I use it every now and then...now if only my network card worked in it *grumble*), and Debian GNU/Hurd might hit 1.0 within two or three years; Plan 9 (does this count as a "research OS"?) looks pretty cool, and I understand it is definitely usable, too. There are others (including an exokernel from MIT (?) that looks pretty neat).
The point is: Unix is OK, but it's not great. It's inflexible; it's inconsistent; it's illogical in parts (a large part of it seems to be quick hacks without much thought). The only thing it has going for it is that it's more flexible, more consistent, and more logical than the popular OSes in many respects. And it's free, of course. If it ever becomes a standard, though, you'd better hope it's short term.
Ahh good point. FWIW, I wish it wasn't there (I'm not the one who wants the unnamed operating system there). However, I do use it occasionally to use SSL (since I no longer have Netscape on my SSL partition). Personally I'd prefer if none of the sites used SSL, but I guess that's a little out of my hands :D.
Big deal; you can do that in real life, too. Unless the US has suddenly become a police state and the entire society is based on mistrust, there is no reason for this to be 100% secure.
w3m. If I happen to be in X at the moment I'll use Mozilla. Before Mozilla, I used lynx (this was also before w3m). I did have Netscape around before that too, but I didn't use it unless it was absolutely necessary (e.g. the page had some Javascript that would literally not let you view the page unless you were using IE or Navigator, I needed https, etc.), not because it wasn't free, but mostly because (a) I don't like staying in X for too long for fear of going insane; and (b) it was so unstable that I had to set up a script to automatically restart it when it crashed (it probably crashed at least once an hour).
Yea, there's RMS' dream right there. Personally I don't see what's so great about the GPL. I like BSD'd and public domained and LGPL'd software just the same.
FWIW, Berlin (which AFAIK is the only serious (L?)GPL'd contendor to X) is starting to look OK. It's slower than anything you can imagine (try thinking of Win95 on a 386 with 2MB of RAM and 1.2MB of swap on a 5.25" floppy drive; ya, that's many times faster than Berlin on my computer. Seriously). Mind you I was running it on SVGA framebuffer, so you can't expect it to set any speed records. Anyway, the demo programs are cool. They don't seem to have a window manager yet, and the included widgets are ugliest things I've ever seen (well, third behind Lesstif and XForms maybe).
Bah graphical text editor weird me out (though I must say I was notably impressed by NEdit). I'm running a 100x37 console right now (through framebuffer) and it works wonders. I'm considering stepping up to 1024x768 (I'm at 800x600) just to get more lines of text, but 37 lines is pretty decent to work with.
And besides, X11 (or *any* environment for that matter) will never be *really* usable until they get the scrawl_w font for it (yes, I'm serious). I don't think a windowed environment (which isn't the same thing as a graphical environment) will ever be as good as a non-windowed environment for editing text.
I disagree. My entire ext2 partition right now is free software, with the exception of Mozilla, and I think some people even consider that to be free. I'm fortunate in that I don't need any office applications, though (except for a simple word processor, which AbiWord does a stellar job of).
:) (not to dis Debian, but take away their devotion to free software and they're Yet Another Linux Distribution).
Personally, I don't see any reason for Debian to include non-free software. It might encourage people to write free replacements sooner, and, well, quite frankly, it gives Debian a reason to exist
No, I disagree. The scripting system should not be crippled. We should look specifically at how ILOVEYOU (and Melissa et al) worked.
First, it was stupid users, apparently. I've heard that MS Outlook will automatically run the script if the e-mail is viewed in the preview panel; I've heard some Outlook users say that that's false. I've used Outlook all of about twice in my life, so I can't say. If the script is run automatically from the preview panel, then I would say that's bad engineering (and hence bad Microsoft), but it sounds like they've at least fixed the problem.
There's also the question as to whether scripts should be executed automatically by default (e.g. when you double-click or otherwise "activate" them). Personally, I don't care. Turn it off by default, sure, sounds good.
Most importantly, though, I think the users need more control over their scripting. This is one area where KDE and Gnome have been falling down (gently). By far the most annoying thing about Windows and MacOS is that the user has almost no control, either over the OS or the applications. A few years ago I would have almost literally killed for the ability to put some scripting into Netscape that said "yes, Mr. Javascript, you can open a new window, but not when I am viewing a page from Geocities". You can argue that I could have just disabled Javascript (which I did), or made something similar to Junkbuster which would automatically parse and change all Javascript, thereby eliminating the pop-up windows (hah!), but this would have been such a nice solution.
So anyway, back on topic. I think the user should be able to do some metascripting, scripting exactly how the script should behave in certain situations. This is not the same as clicking checkboxes (especially vague ones like "Run untrusted scripts"); I want some actual *control*. If KDE (and Gnome, but they're not important in this article) do not do this, then they're just going to end up as Yet Another Inferior MacOS. I think it's time for Something Actually Different From MacOS.
Virus is latin for 'poison' and it has no formal plural form. Therefore, we use the English plural form (+es) instead of what the Latin plural form might be (-us +i).
Microsoft has had plenty of opportunity to settle out of court already, and, as far as I can see, it hasn't even considered it. The reports coming back from Bill (BTW did anyone see what Bill said on CNN last night?) seem to say that Microsoft still thinks that it hasn't broken any laws. I don't know if this is just selective reading (if I don't know about the law, I'm not breaking it!) or if they still think they can somehow convince (or dare I say bribe?) their way out of it, but it's seems obvious that they're not going to submit to anything willingly within the near future.
And in reference to the department of this story, I'd say it's already about as boring as Napster. One more story about this and I think I'll have reached my tolerance limit. Ya, so sucks to you.
Keep in mind that an exceptionally large proportion (compared to general web users) of Slashdot users are using a text-based browser and/or blocking counters (counters are, in my experience, even more annoying than banner ads). So I wouldn't put any faith in any of the numbers you're getting.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
For those of you who use Freenet, I have inserted the HTML version of the ruling with the key text/microsoft/ms-final.html. If there's one thing the Slashdot effect won't affect, it's Freenet. Hopefully :).
Agreed. The only positive aspect of Napster is that it's popular, and that isn't that great. At first it seems great, because we get something like 10TB of music to choose from. Then it slowly dawns on you, oh shit, 9TB of that is Britney Spears.
Seriously, though, Napster has no technical advantage over any of the other distributed filesystems. I don't see any reason for it to exist (and if CNN would shut up about it, maybe it actually *would* die). Mind you I guess Gnutella is already kind of taking over, so maybe it'll die anyway.
Yay for death.
Side note: anyone else here that someone offered Britney Spears 10M US$ or something for sex? Funny stuff.
Indeed. I've got at least two 120V shocks in my life, and I'm still here. Mind you with one of them, the current presumably passed across my body (it went from one hand to the other), and I nearly blacked out, but all's well that ends well.
It's important to note that the amount of damage a current will do depends entirely on where the current goes. IIRC, it only takes one or two milliamps (or maybe less?) across the heart to stop it. Current going from one knuckle to another on the same finger will probably not do anything more than "weird out" some of your nerves and maybe give you burn.
You say in the FAQ that you won't store things which are illegal in the client's country. It seems to me like one of the most important attributes of a data haven would be its ability to let people escape oppresive governments. If they can't do this, then what are they gaining by going to you with their data?
Well this specific incarnation might not be anything to write home about, but I think it shows a step in the right direction.
First off, with the explosion (which will continue in the coming years, especially considering the demographic changes around the world), more and more people are going to be using computers, and I say that energy consumption for those computers should be a huge priority.
Secondly, the Crusoe is very flexible, which makes it k00l.
It doesn't help tremendously, though, because you can't have more than 2GB (or 4GB?) be contiguous. If it's not contiguous, then you can't use it for mmap()ing.
Yes, that was great. Thanks!
Guess what: nothing in Linux is new. With the exception of maybe framebuffer support (which was created purely out of necessity), I urge you to find a single idea in Linux which has not been implemented umpteen times before. Guess what: almost nothing in the Amiga was new either (in fact I can't think of anything off the top of my head). You seem to be implying that this makes Linux (and therefore Amiga) worse in some way, though I can't for the life of me figure out how.
No, you misunderstand. Namesys is not (to my knowledge) providing any proprietary features.
Client A contacts Namesys and says "I will pay you X dollars to implement feature Y". Namesys accepts. Namesys then takes their X dollars and implements feature Y, which is then *freely available*. This is very similar to the business model Cygnus had going for a while wrt gcc.