Because, physical access or not, you should be stopping it anyway.
And if someone plugs something in and pushes a virus onto the network - how different is that to pulling the fire alarm, or jamming the lifts in a skyscraper? The company should be dealing with it - first by basic prevention (no USB access or even no USB ports if they aren't needed), secondly by policies but most importantly by enforcement. With physical access, if an employee plugs in a USB stick and somehow "makes" it work when you've disabled it as an administrator, then it's not an accidental thing - not an unthinking "Oh, I can't send it over the network, I'll just plug in my personal USB and do it at home"... it's a deliberate, wilful act to insert an unauthorised device into the corporate network. No different to plugging in an unsecured wireless router, or anything else.
The *company* should be taking basic precautions with its customer's and its own business data - that means limiting access to the bare minimum required. Then any violation of that (because it *can* be worked around) is a clear attempt to do something deliberately that can damage the entire corporate network - i.e. bye bye, don't trip up on the tech who's rebuilding your machine from a clean image on the way out...
Pushing it onto "random employees do shit and we can't stop it" could cover all sorts of mistakes that the customers and business end up paying for - oops, the customer database was accidentally attached to that email (Demon Internet in the UK earlier this week)... oh well, too many employees to police *that*... ??? No... someone gets disciplined. And eventually that stops happening, especially if you have the right precautions in place to prevent it happening accidentally.
That took me 2.5 seconds to find. And the PC is probably slower than that in the article. And it's probably nothing more than a fast bootloader and desktop boot on a normal EEEPC BIOS.
So, given the lack of time it took to find this online with only a vague search and stopping at the first entry I found, what's new here?
When it was *released* it was out of date. And it's still the best-selling games console. So what makes you think that the graphics/performance have any effect on *sales* at all? Did you ever seriously believe that game console wars have *ever* been solved by technical prowess and not by games, marketing, gameplay, etc.? At best you could claim that you prefer games with style/content but the sales figures speak for themselves about how bothered the general populous is about the "out-of-date"-ness that the Wii was released with... None.
It's been a wonderful product because it proves the point that I've always maintained - games don't even *need* graphics at all to be great games. It's always been true, but people lost track of that during the last few generations of console wars.
Er... they *all* underwent the same sex and infection-control education courses, according to the BBC article. Medical researchers don't throw people to the wolves just for the sake of science... at least, not any reputable ones whose research they expect to be followed up.
I'm sure every nation on the planet would love to have one country (any country) put a nuclear power station on the moon... especially while most of them are claiming "renewable" energy as the new, big, thing while letting reactors that produce 100's of time more energy at the same environmental cost fall into disrepair.
And the next problem would be... how the hell do you get that kind of infrastructure up there? That's probably gonna weigh more than the total amount of payload the planet's ever put into space up until now, surely? And then you can power the moon, great, if you can get cables, and devices up there etc. Might be useful for fuel production but would probably cost more in fuel than it ever generates in a reasonable time. Vacuum of space, little gravity, low-weight materials, no modern conveniences (including difficulties communicating with the site remotely) - vacuum might well be a good heat-shield, but all that's gonna play with the physics beyond belief and take it back into highly experimental technology again.
Basically you're talking centuries into the future. By then I would hope that banging two bits of uranium together to keep warm will now seem like banging two bits of flint together does - archaic, inefficient, unreliable, etc.
Nobody who contributed to Linux at any point ever agreed to the terms of anything but GPLv2 only (specifically without the automatic upgrade clause of "or any later version of the GPL", which is the licence that the Linux kernel is actually licensed under and basically expressly forbids GPLv3 code inclusion) unless they specifically dual-licensed the code. That's the end of the matter - grace periods or not, you can't just take a perpetual legal agreement and say "if you don't respond by X date, then you've agreed to change all the terms of the contract". It is a legally binding, perpetual contract - in fact not even that, but a license to copyright material that, if breached, removes all rights to use that copyright material at all. No amount of notice will allow Linus to do *anything* with other people's copyright code under a legal contract that does not allow such modifications.
It's like me buying a house, then changing my mortgage terms and saying if the mortgage company doesn't agree to the changes with 180 days, then I get the house... the house isn't even MINE to negotiate on, it's theirs (and the code is not Linus's, or even the Linux Foundation's or any other entity's, but the original author's) and I certainly don't get the house if I change the terms and the letter gets lost in the post.
You seriously misunderstand even the smallest thing about contracts, let alone copyright and certain Open Source licences. At best Linus could say that after 180 days only GPLv3-compatible code will be kept and all else removed... that would leave you with a couple of drivers and pretty much nothing else... no boot code, no driver loaders, no architectures at all, nothing - almost every single piece of code in the kernel is nothing but GPLv2-compatible and would have to be removed. And every single kernel developer would, if this stupid scenario happened, fork and jump ship to the GPL-v2-only fork.
And is also utterly impossible while there is a single line of GPLv2-only code in it that the author doesn't give permission for, or whom is dead. There's quite a lot of code like that, there's a lot that can't be traced to an author, there's a lot of authors that won't give their permission, there's a lot that *can't* give their permission (employers, etc.) and there's so much of it that recreating it from scratch without reference to the original code would actually take longer than just starting a GPLv3 kernel from scratch.
And this has been discussed to death before. Ain't gonna happen - not out of some inate personal reasoning, but sheer impossibility.
"admitted the existence of the NSA spy program... was substantially in the form reported in the press but understandably refused to provide details."
Still no closer to anything that I'm asking for. Admittance of a program is actually *expected*, like I said in all the previous posts. And "substantially" in the same form, and taking "technical" things home from political statements of an attorney general is, again, just wishful-thinking and rumour-mongering. What he "admitted", from what I can work out, is that the US was wiretapping some citizens. That's about it.
"I appreciate a healthy dose of skepticism but this is absolutely not the place to administer it."
Skepticism is borne of lack of substantial evidence.
"Next you'll be telling me that the technical hurdles associated with going to the moon prove that we never landed men there."
No, because we have *extensive* plausible evidence that it actually happened, corroborated among dozens of independent sources and not relying on press statements, politicians or attorney generals to tell us that we did it and what implausible technology we used to do it.
"You seem to have a lot of difficulty believing that any kind of computer exists that's capable of analyzing multi-gigabit data streams at wire speed."
You're not just talking multi-gigabit. You're not just talking packet-shifting. You're not just talking existence but damn near ubiquity at a price point that hides itself among just general budgets. You're not just taking grepping packets for strings. You're not just talking technology - you're talking state-of-the-art and beyond. You're also talking that multi-gigabit stream being either passed-through the machines or duplicated in order to be passively analysed - on the main and most expensive crux of the ISP's connections. Or, say, you could just have a machine that can pump internal routes on request - cost? About £1000 each. Surveillance ability? Pretty much the same.
"You should read about the NarusInsight, the hardware package that the whistleblowers ****say**** the NSA uses."
Rumour. Even down to the specifications. And you're talking AT LEAST one in every ISP. And you're talking MILLIONS and MILLIONS of dollars *each* for that kind of ability. And you're talking knock-on resource demands that are out of this world - power, connectivity, maintenance, etc. etc. etc.
It's pie-in-the-sky until one *technical* person from any of the thousands of ISP's steps forward and says "I have seen a machine in ISP X that intercepts all traffic and performs function Y". Even if that's the rumour of maintenance of those machines being observed, or of fibre duplication to enable that facility, or of something even vaguely along those lines.
Again, "we have the capability to do X on demand" is a very different thing to "we routinely and automatically do X all the time to all traffic in the US (or anywhere else) and use it to pick up on trends for further analysis". And *then* providing any sort of practical reason for actually being able to do X that isn't cancelled out or easily replicated with some basic route-pushing at the ISP level, and monitoring particular and individual broadband connections of known "problematic" people on demand.
"More than a dozen people with positions everywhere"
More than a dozen people in the high reaches of government have later gone on to claim that UFO's stole their washing. Astronauts claim they invented Free Energy, high-level scientists say they've cracked Fermat's Theorems without even understanding what they are. That means *nothing*. A dozen isn't a lot of people compared to the *thousands* (not even including actual government employees of any kind) that took part in or witnessed any such operation, and you can get a dozen people to admit *anything*, especially if, say, you were a large government that wanted its populous to believe it was being monitored - hell, you could even MAKE the people in question believe they've actually set up a program just by getting them to insert equipment into a room and telling them its purpose is "top secret".
And I've never said that they weren't BUILT. I just claim that their purpose/capabilities are different to what you are assuming they are.
"from the NSA itself to AT&T have admitted roles in the construction and operation of the tap rooms."
Construction. Operation. Where do they mention actual real-time processing (not "if we were interested in subject X" but "finding subject X to be interested in") capabilities? That's what I'm challenging here. Not that they could monitor anyone, but that they do monitor everyone. One is easy, the other is fantasy-land even for 1984-style-governments (even China can only intercept, clumsily and publicly, some DNS and maybe search for plaintext strings of, say, "democracy" on websites and block them... and even that's got so many holes in it, it's basically worthless even on the bits it's supposed to work on).
"The fed has repeatedly invoked the state secrets exception to kill lawsuits that even tangentially involve the tap program." "News agencies on every bar of the political rainbow have run reports confirming its existence and the New York Times at least was asked by the government not to go with its story."
Standard operating procedure for anything, I should imagine, especially if the NSA are involved. That doesn't mean they have the *capability* that you're assigning to them - it just means they don't *want* you to know what they are (or more importantly, are not) capable of. Military and national-defence secrets stay secret, even if perfect knowledge of them can't help in any way (e.g. encryption techniques) purely because you don't want people to find out what you're NOT capable of.
"Now I could write a research paper meticulously documenting the outing of the spy program in the press but anyone with access to Google could do the same thing in five minutes."
No-one with a brain writes research papers based on stuff discovered by the press. The press are your LAST source of hard evidence in anything serious, which to me is just another pointer - if the press "know" about this stuff, it's because they are scaremongering themselves or inadvertently being used as a puppet for your government to scare you. It scares *me* that you think that only the press would be a good source or that five minutes on Google is your research - in five minutes on Google, I can "prove" the moon landings didn't happen, aliens run the planet and that Elvis is alive and has dinner with Michael Jackson on every alternate Tuesday. If "only the press" know, then the press don't know.
"It exists."
I don't doubt that the rooms exist. Or the equipment in those rooms exist. Or the program exists. Or even that a plan to *have* real-time analysis of the whole net exists. I doubt that the *capability* to implement it as you seem to think it works even exists anywhere, let alone inside a back room of every ISP.
"The only question remaining is how much data the NSA sifts through and whose,"
And what time machine they invented to cram it all into a reasonable window.
"and the whistleblowers have been pretty clear on the point that the spooks aren't very discriminating."
Sorry, but it's just not enough to "prove" anything.
A photo of a room in a major ISP? So what? And a LOT of people work in ISP's - are you telling me there's a fully-functional, virtually unmaintained (or regularly visited/updated/upgraded by "secret admins" on the ISP's premises?), supercomputer analysing every packet going through every major ISP, when *connectivity*, *latency*, *packet-moving* is their main performance factor? There might be *something* that *might* be able to, say, pump a new route for IP's that are known to be "interesting" and thus reroute particular parts of traffic through a closed system stored at an ISP.
I know people who work in some of the largest datacentres / hosting facilities in the world. Such rooms may well *exist* but you don't just have random "secret joes" that only the datacentre manager knows the purpose of wandering into them all the time, and you certainly *never* have a problem which traces back to those rooms (the damning fact if they were actually monitoring 24/7 and had to actually intercept traffic - things go wrong in even the smallest of networks and causes back-scatter along the networking infrastructure), you never have latency issues, etc. from a supposed room full of *supercomputers* (which are the only things that could ever have the necessary I/O) that are basically sitting there quietly sapping power and working perfectly and presumably remote-admined and which every member of staff turns a blind eye to. Even just read-only tapping at those sorts of speeds is stupid to consider on a large scale, and on a small scale it doesn't exist at all. And for what? To do only plain-text analysis and catch basically no-one because anyone with half a brain knows how to use something that has encryption that's virtually unbreakable with months of analysis?
Most of the major Internet points are actually universities still - a hangover from when they *were* the Internet. They don't have such things and would be strictly opposed to them. Most of the small ISP's do *not* have this. It's conceivable that most of the major international links are monitored in some fashion but it's an *off-line* analysis - not sitting there analysing every packet in real-time... again, it's a *request* based system - "We know this IP is interesting, reroute it through this box so we can capture the full stream" and they find out the IP is interesting not by reading everyone's Facebook posts but by what they've been doing for hundreds of years - real espionage. Basically the I/O required to do constant analysis of *anything* just does not exist on those sorts of scales and certainly not in a closed, secret room in every ISP.
Please don't propagate bullshit rumours without first providing one tiny ounce of proof of *WHAT* is happening rather than "oh, super-secret room, they must be doing...". The rooms, computers, blackboxes may well exist - I give you that. Past that, given the state of any modern government and the technology and the military intelligence communities, I seriously doubt they do more than use it to reroute a tiny number of already chosen IP ranges to their remote systems for analysis. Wikileaks would jump at the chance to host a couple of photos showing the tech's arriving to maintain those things and if you think it'd be impossible to get an illicit photo of someone entering a datacentre when you work in one, you're wrong.
I think there's a major difference between "*potentially could monitor any* unencrypted email, text message, blog post" and "*always monitors every*..."
Lots of people are hugely, sadly confused by this difference and to be honest, I doubt even the first exists all the time so much as "can be put into place if we suspect something". But then, if I was the NSA, I'd love my countrymen to think it was possible just to scare them off doing it and make it look like I was busy. Especially if the reality was that even the simplest of modern encryption and/or obfuscation is enough to defeat years of analysis by experts and supercomputers and could turn out to be you sending some spam over an SSL-encrypted connection to an email server.
Because you're simply placing too much emphasis on natural selection being somehow performed with a destination in mind.
Evolution is mostly accident. The fact that the fatty acids inside a dead corpse happen to put off others has nothing to do with those creatures benefiting from it - it's just the way fatty acids smell when a living thing dies. And any sensible living thing might well benefit from detecting a unique odour that only occurs around rotting corpses so that it can steer clear of the area - the danger might still be present and/or a rotting corpse isn't particularly a good thing to smother yourself in.
However, my question would be more along the lines of: if it's a universal smell, why don't humans smell it... and are vultures and other carrion-eaters put off by it?
LED's are pretty naturally dimmable anyway, I think. It may depend on their exact manufacture, especially an array of them, but most LED's can be dimmed inside a certain range. But yes, even your suggestion is perfectly plausible and takes next-to-nothing to implement. It's just a matter of convincing people that dimmable is better.
Multitouch is niche. Taking a percentage of, say, Windows 7 users: Hardly anybody has the equipment. Hardly anybody has the software to support it(not just OS but applications, etc.). Hardly anybody has a practical use for it - yeah, you can use gestures etc. but one-finger/cursor gestures are just as easy and been around for longer and nobody really uses them at all. The common ground on those three is inherently small.
It's so niche that despite being the "only OS" with it (I would contend that it depends merely on your definition of multitouch - multitouch support in software from a *user's* point of view has been there for years, it may be that Windows now has some *proper* interfacing for the code behind it, that's all) and having API's and trying to get people to use it, not many do.
There just aren't that many practical applications for it that aren't fulfilled more simply, cheaply, efficiently and easily by other means (i.e. just using a normal single-point touchscreen). It might make a cool interface for a Star Trek game. It might let you use *more* gestures if you can be bothered to learn them all, but it certainly does not replace a mouse on the average business desktop, or average home user. I don't even know of any business that *knows* what multitouch is - they don't really care either.
It's a niche piece of technology - like stereoscopic 3D games/movies, like cool Wii controller addons, like £1000 sound systems. Yes, it's fun. Yes, loads of people will play with a demo. No, you're not going to run the world on it and including it in the standard OS is a bit of a waste of development time. Personally, I'd have been happier if MS hadn't spent so much time on it in their main OS and had just released it as a pay-for addon for those who wanted it (public kiosks, possibly? Air-traffic controllers? I don't know).
If you stopped using a mouse, you're really too blinkered. Tell me how one plays a fast-paced FPS effectively on a multitouch screen without breaking their arm? Or drags and drops without rubbing their finger raw and/or dropping things all over the desktop? iPhones, etc. use multitouch because the screen space is limited and gestures are required to save "interface bandwidth" (i.e. the amount of things you can put on the screen at once). Desktops don't have those problems.
It's not even that revolutionary a technology - nowhere NEAR what touchscreen was originally. It's a tiny addition from the user's point of view. I'm really unimpressed, to be honest. I'm actually more impressed by GlovePIE which has had a form of software multitouch for ages (i.e. multiple active cursors on an unmodified Windows desktop, each independently controlled by a vast array of possible hardware).
I work with small businesses. I owned a small business supplying IT services to small businesses. I'm here to explain why Windows 7 won't dominate most markets (I assume you are talking purely small business desktop, and I'll include that too).
"1. Windows 7 does not force a user to edit any configuration files for any normal desktop user."
Nor does my version of Linux. Slackware. *THE* most configuration-file-friendly desktop you'll ever see. Give me an installation, two minutes of work as an admin and you'll never have to edit a configuration file for a normal desktop user ever again. Give me a desktop-friendly OS and I'll do even better than that. This is a >5 year old "problem" that hardly anybody ever encounters anymore except power users (who you don't want messing with config files anyway). Your home desktop is VASTLY different to a small business desktop - you do NOT want people installing drivers and tweaking settings in a business. Login, click icon, do work.
"Windows can run on most hardware. It can run most WINDOWS applications."
I've edited this line for you. Unfortunately Linux runs on more hardware than Windows can imagine, and old hardware that is even incapable of running modern Windows, and terminal servers/clients, etc.. You were really off to a false start here. And of course Windows can run most Windows applications. Tell me, how many Unix programs does it run? Or Mac? None without some sort of emulator? Strange that. That's how Linux works too.
"And you can actually do something once the OS is installed."
Just *had* to pick this one up. Like, erm. Browse the internet (basic pages only until you download a plugin), play minesweeper, manage files? Have you even SEEN how many programs even the most basic of distros come with nowadays? I don't even need an office suite installed - it's usually there already, or a program to work my digital camera, or one to let me scan things in, or one to....
"3. After years and years, there is still no multi-user, end-to-end solution for creating quotes, orders, and invoices, that integrates with an accounting solution to keep track of payables and then print checks to pay them. You are being beaten by a company, ironically called Intuit, that just switched from a flat file system in 2006."
That'd be an application then. And I call bullshit purely on the basis of the accuracy of your previous statements and the fact that most financial institutions are Unix-based or were at one point. There are entire franchises that run on Unix-based systems (which are therefore easily ported to Linux by a simple recompile 99.999% of the time). The applications exist, you just might not know them or be willing to pay for them. But we're back into the Windows *application* arena again - the applications, even if they don't exist, have nothing to do with the operating system.
"I realize a lot of this has to do with driver support."
Erm. Wrong. Linux driver support on the PC architecture taken as a whole far outweighs the Windows driver support. What about that arcane check-printer, or the ISA card that runs the sensors in the factory, etc.etc. Windows won't even be able to TOUCH it without manufacturer support. Driver support is, again, a 5 year old argument. I can find a piece of hardware that doesn't have Linux support - it's not hard. But I can find 100's that you can't get running off the shelf on Windows without support from the original manufacturer. Again, it's just a choice of *application*, not the OS.
"you need to stop pretending that you are doing any better."
Never were truer words said.
"I'm learning Python on the Linux side because it's easier than trying to configure windows for the same task."
I have a one word response to this... irony.
"1. Users are not programmers" - Hence limited user accounts that are REALLY limited user accounts "2. It's the applications, stupid!" - Yep. Sort that out, or have a method to sort that out, and we're all ears. "3. Don't forget about accounting software" - See above. Blame Sage, Intuit, et al for not doing that job, not Linux. "4. Laptops are people too" - Where did this come from?
MINOR? Since when is driving when in a condition that you're SO exhausted you can't even *get* to work or work effectively MINOR?
We're not talking about eating a bag of crisps while you're driving, or listening to MP3's, we're talking about someone who drives for most of their working day who is SO exhausted they are not in any fit state to drive. You can't LEGALLY drive for that length of time even as a long-distance lorry driver - your electronic license will not physically allow it and will refuse to start the engine.
Changed job in the middle of the biggest recession in my country's history to seek out new work because my employer got stroppy with me - nowhere NEAR what this person is currently tolerating, but I did it, with the prospect of having *nothing* coming into the household.
Family & Self respect greater than some idiot that employs you. Certainly greater then your own personal health, which is what this person is endangering. And certainly greater than potentially wiping out someone else's family (or even your own) in a car accident.
If you have ANY brains, self-respect, respect for your family, respect for others you would MOVE ON in this position... hell, being on benefits for a while is better than being asked to kill yourself/others for a living.
You're being forced to work under unreasonable and dangerous conditions. You are risking your life and others on the road (no sleep, exhaustion, skip eating = eventually you will fall asleep and/or pass out on a major motorway). Your employers have absolutely zero care for you at all - to the point where what you have said suggest they are actually, knowingly, breaking several employment laws. That's how much respect they have for you.
What they are doing is *not* shifting the cost - it's called finding some idiot to work his arse off and pay you for doing one page of tax paperwork and not caring about *anything* else that happens to them, including if they kill themselves or others.
Get a brain. Get the hell out. If I knew you, I'd report you AND your employer for a) dangerous driving, b) employment-related offences. That's *not* a job. It's slave labour. Screw the "credit crunch", there are millions of jobs out there that pay the same and don't involve that crap. Where the hell are your brains?
Surely the first reason is because it's their choice and they can do what they like?
I can get people agreeing wholeheartedly with me about the state of proprietary software and how having OS code is helpful in a lot of circumstances etc.etc. but at the end of the day it's up to them if they want to use it. Some, well-rounded, individuals try out OS code on my recommendation. It doesn't mean they have to USE it but it's only sensible that they *try* it.
Anyone who thinks that having an OS equivalent of *any* piece of software is the end of the matter is sadly disillusioned. I do heavily use OS software, but I also heavily use "freeware" and even pay for my games and some other apps on a personal basis. In work? There are OS-only servers running lots of stuff, a lot of OS software on the servers/clients and a lot of freeware too. But the clients run Windows because the software we use runs on Windows and there are no serious alternatives for the main software in my industry (education - and trust me, we use precisely one app that is open source on the client-desktop, and that's TuxPaint for the very-little-un's - even that has it's problems, which I have reported and had some of them fixed).
The point of FOSS is NOT to take over the world and make everyone use it... that would actually be counter-productive to its intentions and would only form the next big monopoly, albeit a "free" one. The point of FOSS is to provide the *choice*. And each time some FOSS advocate says that I can't (or even "shouldn't", but that's less critical) use proprietary software or even freeware, they make me stop listening to them. FOSS saves me money. It saves me time and hassle. It allows me to customise things I would never be able to normally. It allows me to benefit from coder's skills from the world over and not have to recreate smaller apps from scratch. I *do* look forward to the day when I have so MUCH choice that all of my programs and operating systems are OS ones. But that means having several apps of each type and allowing me to *choose* - not telling me that KDE is the only way forward, or that every cd-burning app is going to merge into one.
Software *is* like evolution - Diversity and choice benefit the end user, even if millions of years down the line. And those who crow loudly in the morning but won't let anyone in their nest will eventually die out by those who quietly chirp and build fabulous nests that they allow any female into in order to show how good a builder they are. But it will take years. And the whole *POINT*, the whole impetus, the reason I *use* FOSS is because it gives me a choice when I would otherwise have been forced to use an horrendous piece of software. But my main browser is still Opera, because it does things that I'm prepared to sacrifice access to the source code for. That's not a permanent position and should Firefox, etc. catch up then I will seriously consider a switch - after all, it's my *choice* of browser, not some blind fanaticism.
On the sliding scale, FOSS is better than freeware is better than shareware is better than wholly proprietary. But it's *one* factor and I will slide up and down that scale in order to find my own personal sweet spot. That only occasionally entirely rests inside the FOSS category.
I work in primary schools - the kids can touch type and need no help, certainly not from a hunt-and-peck typist of a teacher which is all I see all day long. The "home keys" nonsense shouldn't be taught how it is. The "don't look at the screen" is a real false-start... the kids will learn to do that over time, like not looking down at the pedals once they know how to pedal a bike.
What they do need to "unlearn" are certain tricks taught early on:
- DO NOT use CapsLock as a one-key shift... CapsLocks, H, Capslock, e, l, l, o. DRIVES ME MAD. And is actually the reasoning behind most people shouting or never using capital letters on instant messengers. - Use multiple keys like shift, ctrl, alt to get used to strange key combinations. - LEARN the key combinations for some programs (don't worry about if they have to "unlearn" them later, it's just to get them used to keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl-S, etc.). - DO NOT use the numeric keypad for single digits - use it only for intense calculations... otherwise you're slowing yourself down by taking your hand away from the QWERTY keys anyway.
Leave the kids to learn, provide some pointers, they'll have learned to "touchtype" within a couple of months of starting at a new school (depending on when they start IT, obviously) with only one or two hours or IT a week. I never had any formal lessons in it (that's a lie: let's say, none before I could type at least 90wpm anyway) and didn't need any. The home key thing STILL bugs me because, yes, I hover them, but it's taught as if taking your fingers from the keyboard is a crime... it's not. And using the wrong finger doesn't matter unless you start to "stumble" all over the keyboard as a result. I never worried about blind-touch-typing, it was a waste of time, and I picked it up anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
So glad, I was worried about customs wanting to probe bottom.me.earth.universe
Because, physical access or not, you should be stopping it anyway.
And if someone plugs something in and pushes a virus onto the network - how different is that to pulling the fire alarm, or jamming the lifts in a skyscraper? The company should be dealing with it - first by basic prevention (no USB access or even no USB ports if they aren't needed), secondly by policies but most importantly by enforcement. With physical access, if an employee plugs in a USB stick and somehow "makes" it work when you've disabled it as an administrator, then it's not an accidental thing - not an unthinking "Oh, I can't send it over the network, I'll just plug in my personal USB and do it at home"... it's a deliberate, wilful act to insert an unauthorised device into the corporate network. No different to plugging in an unsecured wireless router, or anything else.
The *company* should be taking basic precautions with its customer's and its own business data - that means limiting access to the bare minimum required. Then any violation of that (because it *can* be worked around) is a clear attempt to do something deliberately that can damage the entire corporate network - i.e. bye bye, don't trip up on the tech who's rebuilding your machine from a clean image on the way out...
Pushing it onto "random employees do shit and we can't stop it" could cover all sorts of mistakes that the customers and business end up paying for - oops, the customer database was accidentally attached to that email (Demon Internet in the UK earlier this week)... oh well, too many employees to police *that*... ??? No... someone gets disciplined. And eventually that stops happening, especially if you have the right precautions in place to prevent it happening accidentally.
Or here, demonstrating an internet connection in under 15 seconds from boot...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6vSgE8yLmg&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=en-GB&v=SzkQhHaFE0I
That took me 2.5 seconds to find. And the PC is probably slower than that in the article. And it's probably nothing more than a fast bootloader and desktop boot on a normal EEEPC BIOS.
So, given the lack of time it took to find this online with only a vague search and stopping at the first entry I found, what's new here?
You give your own criticism to your own comment.
When it was *released* it was out of date. And it's still the best-selling games console. So what makes you think that the graphics/performance have any effect on *sales* at all? Did you ever seriously believe that game console wars have *ever* been solved by technical prowess and not by games, marketing, gameplay, etc.? At best you could claim that you prefer games with style/content but the sales figures speak for themselves about how bothered the general populous is about the "out-of-date"-ness that the Wii was released with... None.
It's been a wonderful product because it proves the point that I've always maintained - games don't even *need* graphics at all to be great games. It's always been true, but people lost track of that during the last few generations of console wars.
Er... they *all* underwent the same sex and infection-control education courses, according to the BBC article. Medical researchers don't throw people to the wolves just for the sake of science... at least, not any reputable ones whose research they expect to be followed up.
I'm sure every nation on the planet would love to have one country (any country) put a nuclear power station on the moon... especially while most of them are claiming "renewable" energy as the new, big, thing while letting reactors that produce 100's of time more energy at the same environmental cost fall into disrepair.
And the next problem would be... how the hell do you get that kind of infrastructure up there? That's probably gonna weigh more than the total amount of payload the planet's ever put into space up until now, surely? And then you can power the moon, great, if you can get cables, and devices up there etc. Might be useful for fuel production but would probably cost more in fuel than it ever generates in a reasonable time. Vacuum of space, little gravity, low-weight materials, no modern conveniences (including difficulties communicating with the site remotely) - vacuum might well be a good heat-shield, but all that's gonna play with the physics beyond belief and take it back into highly experimental technology again.
Basically you're talking centuries into the future. By then I would hope that banging two bits of uranium together to keep warm will now seem like banging two bits of flint together does - archaic, inefficient, unreliable, etc.
Er... it's *nowhere* near that simple.
Nobody who contributed to Linux at any point ever agreed to the terms of anything but GPLv2 only (specifically without the automatic upgrade clause of "or any later version of the GPL", which is the licence that the Linux kernel is actually licensed under and basically expressly forbids GPLv3 code inclusion) unless they specifically dual-licensed the code. That's the end of the matter - grace periods or not, you can't just take a perpetual legal agreement and say "if you don't respond by X date, then you've agreed to change all the terms of the contract". It is a legally binding, perpetual contract - in fact not even that, but a license to copyright material that, if breached, removes all rights to use that copyright material at all. No amount of notice will allow Linus to do *anything* with other people's copyright code under a legal contract that does not allow such modifications.
It's like me buying a house, then changing my mortgage terms and saying if the mortgage company doesn't agree to the changes with 180 days, then I get the house... the house isn't even MINE to negotiate on, it's theirs (and the code is not Linus's, or even the Linux Foundation's or any other entity's, but the original author's) and I certainly don't get the house if I change the terms and the letter gets lost in the post.
You seriously misunderstand even the smallest thing about contracts, let alone copyright and certain Open Source licences. At best Linus could say that after 180 days only GPLv3-compatible code will be kept and all else removed... that would leave you with a couple of drivers and pretty much nothing else... no boot code, no driver loaders, no architectures at all, nothing - almost every single piece of code in the kernel is nothing but GPLv2-compatible and would have to be removed. And every single kernel developer would, if this stupid scenario happened, fork and jump ship to the GPL-v2-only fork.
And is also utterly impossible while there is a single line of GPLv2-only code in it that the author doesn't give permission for, or whom is dead. There's quite a lot of code like that, there's a lot that can't be traced to an author, there's a lot of authors that won't give their permission, there's a lot that *can't* give their permission (employers, etc.) and there's so much of it that recreating it from scratch without reference to the original code would actually take longer than just starting a GPLv3 kernel from scratch.
And this has been discussed to death before. Ain't gonna happen - not out of some inate personal reasoning, but sheer impossibility.
"admitted the existence of the NSA spy program ... was substantially in the form reported in the press but understandably refused to provide details."
Still no closer to anything that I'm asking for. Admittance of a program is actually *expected*, like I said in all the previous posts. And "substantially" in the same form, and taking "technical" things home from political statements of an attorney general is, again, just wishful-thinking and rumour-mongering. What he "admitted", from what I can work out, is that the US was wiretapping some citizens. That's about it.
"I appreciate a healthy dose of skepticism but this is absolutely not the place to administer it."
Skepticism is borne of lack of substantial evidence.
"Next you'll be telling me that the technical hurdles associated with going to the moon prove that we never landed men there."
No, because we have *extensive* plausible evidence that it actually happened, corroborated among dozens of independent sources and not relying on press statements, politicians or attorney generals to tell us that we did it and what implausible technology we used to do it.
"You seem to have a lot of difficulty believing that any kind of computer exists that's capable of analyzing multi-gigabit data streams at wire speed."
You're not just talking multi-gigabit. You're not just talking packet-shifting. You're not just talking existence but damn near ubiquity at a price point that hides itself among just general budgets. You're not just taking grepping packets for strings. You're not just talking technology - you're talking state-of-the-art and beyond. You're also talking that multi-gigabit stream being either passed-through the machines or duplicated in order to be passively analysed - on the main and most expensive crux of the ISP's connections. Or, say, you could just have a machine that can pump internal routes on request - cost? About £1000 each. Surveillance ability? Pretty much the same.
"You should read about the NarusInsight, the hardware package that the whistleblowers ****say**** the NSA uses."
Rumour. Even down to the specifications. And you're talking AT LEAST one in every ISP. And you're talking MILLIONS and MILLIONS of dollars *each* for that kind of ability. And you're talking knock-on resource demands that are out of this world - power, connectivity, maintenance, etc. etc. etc.
It's pie-in-the-sky until one *technical* person from any of the thousands of ISP's steps forward and says "I have seen a machine in ISP X that intercepts all traffic and performs function Y". Even if that's the rumour of maintenance of those machines being observed, or of fibre duplication to enable that facility, or of something even vaguely along those lines.
Again, "we have the capability to do X on demand" is a very different thing to "we routinely and automatically do X all the time to all traffic in the US (or anywhere else) and use it to pick up on trends for further analysis". And *then* providing any sort of practical reason for actually being able to do X that isn't cancelled out or easily replicated with some basic route-pushing at the ISP level, and monitoring particular and individual broadband connections of known "problematic" people on demand.
"More than a dozen people with positions everywhere"
More than a dozen people in the high reaches of government have later gone on to claim that UFO's stole their washing. Astronauts claim they invented Free Energy, high-level scientists say they've cracked Fermat's Theorems without even understanding what they are. That means *nothing*. A dozen isn't a lot of people compared to the *thousands* (not even including actual government employees of any kind) that took part in or witnessed any such operation, and you can get a dozen people to admit *anything*, especially if, say, you were a large government that wanted its populous to believe it was being monitored - hell, you could even MAKE the people in question believe they've actually set up a program just by getting them to insert equipment into a room and telling them its purpose is "top secret".
And I've never said that they weren't BUILT. I just claim that their purpose/capabilities are different to what you are assuming they are.
"from the NSA itself to AT&T have admitted roles in the construction and operation of the tap rooms."
Construction. Operation. Where do they mention actual real-time processing (not "if we were interested in subject X" but "finding subject X to be interested in") capabilities? That's what I'm challenging here. Not that they could monitor anyone, but that they do monitor everyone. One is easy, the other is fantasy-land even for 1984-style-governments (even China can only intercept, clumsily and publicly, some DNS and maybe search for plaintext strings of, say, "democracy" on websites and block them... and even that's got so many holes in it, it's basically worthless even on the bits it's supposed to work on).
"The fed has repeatedly invoked the state secrets exception to kill lawsuits that even tangentially involve the tap program."
"News agencies on every bar of the political rainbow have run reports confirming its existence and the New York Times at least was asked by the government not to go with its story."
Standard operating procedure for anything, I should imagine, especially if the NSA are involved. That doesn't mean they have the *capability* that you're assigning to them - it just means they don't *want* you to know what they are (or more importantly, are not) capable of. Military and national-defence secrets stay secret, even if perfect knowledge of them can't help in any way (e.g. encryption techniques) purely because you don't want people to find out what you're NOT capable of.
"Now I could write a research paper meticulously documenting the outing of the spy program in the press but anyone with access to Google could do the same thing in five minutes."
No-one with a brain writes research papers based on stuff discovered by the press. The press are your LAST source of hard evidence in anything serious, which to me is just another pointer - if the press "know" about this stuff, it's because they are scaremongering themselves or inadvertently being used as a puppet for your government to scare you. It scares *me* that you think that only the press would be a good source or that five minutes on Google is your research - in five minutes on Google, I can "prove" the moon landings didn't happen, aliens run the planet and that Elvis is alive and has dinner with Michael Jackson on every alternate Tuesday. If "only the press" know, then the press don't know.
"It exists."
I don't doubt that the rooms exist. Or the equipment in those rooms exist. Or the program exists. Or even that a plan to *have* real-time analysis of the whole net exists. I doubt that the *capability* to implement it as you seem to think it works even exists anywhere, let alone inside a back room of every ISP.
"The only question remaining is how much data the NSA sifts through and whose,"
And what time machine they invented to cram it all into a reasonable window.
"and the whistleblowers have been pretty clear on the point that the spooks aren't very discriminating."
Sorry, but it's just not enough to "prove" anything.
A photo of a room in a major ISP? So what? And a LOT of people work in ISP's - are you telling me there's a fully-functional, virtually unmaintained (or regularly visited/updated/upgraded by "secret admins" on the ISP's premises?), supercomputer analysing every packet going through every major ISP, when *connectivity*, *latency*, *packet-moving* is their main performance factor? There might be *something* that *might* be able to, say, pump a new route for IP's that are known to be "interesting" and thus reroute particular parts of traffic through a closed system stored at an ISP.
I know people who work in some of the largest datacentres / hosting facilities in the world. Such rooms may well *exist* but you don't just have random "secret joes" that only the datacentre manager knows the purpose of wandering into them all the time, and you certainly *never* have a problem which traces back to those rooms (the damning fact if they were actually monitoring 24/7 and had to actually intercept traffic - things go wrong in even the smallest of networks and causes back-scatter along the networking infrastructure), you never have latency issues, etc. from a supposed room full of *supercomputers* (which are the only things that could ever have the necessary I/O) that are basically sitting there quietly sapping power and working perfectly and presumably remote-admined and which every member of staff turns a blind eye to. Even just read-only tapping at those sorts of speeds is stupid to consider on a large scale, and on a small scale it doesn't exist at all. And for what? To do only plain-text analysis and catch basically no-one because anyone with half a brain knows how to use something that has encryption that's virtually unbreakable with months of analysis?
Most of the major Internet points are actually universities still - a hangover from when they *were* the Internet. They don't have such things and would be strictly opposed to them. Most of the small ISP's do *not* have this. It's conceivable that most of the major international links are monitored in some fashion but it's an *off-line* analysis - not sitting there analysing every packet in real-time... again, it's a *request* based system - "We know this IP is interesting, reroute it through this box so we can capture the full stream" and they find out the IP is interesting not by reading everyone's Facebook posts but by what they've been doing for hundreds of years - real espionage. Basically the I/O required to do constant analysis of *anything* just does not exist on those sorts of scales and certainly not in a closed, secret room in every ISP.
Please don't propagate bullshit rumours without first providing one tiny ounce of proof of *WHAT* is happening rather than "oh, super-secret room, they must be doing...". The rooms, computers, blackboxes may well exist - I give you that. Past that, given the state of any modern government and the technology and the military intelligence communities, I seriously doubt they do more than use it to reroute a tiny number of already chosen IP ranges to their remote systems for analysis. Wikileaks would jump at the chance to host a couple of photos showing the tech's arriving to maintain those things and if you think it'd be impossible to get an illicit photo of someone entering a datacentre when you work in one, you're wrong.
I think there's a major difference between "*potentially could monitor any* unencrypted email, text message, blog post" and "*always monitors every*..."
Lots of people are hugely, sadly confused by this difference and to be honest, I doubt even the first exists all the time so much as "can be put into place if we suspect something". But then, if I was the NSA, I'd love my countrymen to think it was possible just to scare them off doing it and make it look like I was busy. Especially if the reality was that even the simplest of modern encryption and/or obfuscation is enough to defeat years of analysis by experts and supercomputers and could turn out to be you sending some spam over an SSL-encrypted connection to an email server.
A better Dwarf quote is:
"Go to Red Alert!"
"Are you absolutely sure, sir? It does mean changing the bulb."
Because you're simply placing too much emphasis on natural selection being somehow performed with a destination in mind.
Evolution is mostly accident. The fact that the fatty acids inside a dead corpse happen to put off others has nothing to do with those creatures benefiting from it - it's just the way fatty acids smell when a living thing dies. And any sensible living thing might well benefit from detecting a unique odour that only occurs around rotting corpses so that it can steer clear of the area - the danger might still be present and/or a rotting corpse isn't particularly a good thing to smother yourself in.
However, my question would be more along the lines of: if it's a universal smell, why don't humans smell it... and are vultures and other carrion-eaters put off by it?
LED's are pretty naturally dimmable anyway, I think. It may depend on their exact manufacture, especially an array of them, but most LED's can be dimmed inside a certain range. But yes, even your suggestion is perfectly plausible and takes next-to-nothing to implement. It's just a matter of convincing people that dimmable is better.
I think you miss the point then.
Multitouch is niche. Taking a percentage of, say, Windows 7 users: Hardly anybody has the equipment. Hardly anybody has the software to support it(not just OS but applications, etc.). Hardly anybody has a practical use for it - yeah, you can use gestures etc. but one-finger/cursor gestures are just as easy and been around for longer and nobody really uses them at all. The common ground on those three is inherently small.
It's so niche that despite being the "only OS" with it (I would contend that it depends merely on your definition of multitouch - multitouch support in software from a *user's* point of view has been there for years, it may be that Windows now has some *proper* interfacing for the code behind it, that's all) and having API's and trying to get people to use it, not many do.
There just aren't that many practical applications for it that aren't fulfilled more simply, cheaply, efficiently and easily by other means (i.e. just using a normal single-point touchscreen). It might make a cool interface for a Star Trek game. It might let you use *more* gestures if you can be bothered to learn them all, but it certainly does not replace a mouse on the average business desktop, or average home user. I don't even know of any business that *knows* what multitouch is - they don't really care either.
It's a niche piece of technology - like stereoscopic 3D games/movies, like cool Wii controller addons, like £1000 sound systems. Yes, it's fun. Yes, loads of people will play with a demo. No, you're not going to run the world on it and including it in the standard OS is a bit of a waste of development time. Personally, I'd have been happier if MS hadn't spent so much time on it in their main OS and had just released it as a pay-for addon for those who wanted it (public kiosks, possibly? Air-traffic controllers? I don't know).
If you stopped using a mouse, you're really too blinkered. Tell me how one plays a fast-paced FPS effectively on a multitouch screen without breaking their arm? Or drags and drops without rubbing their finger raw and/or dropping things all over the desktop? iPhones, etc. use multitouch because the screen space is limited and gestures are required to save "interface bandwidth" (i.e. the amount of things you can put on the screen at once). Desktops don't have those problems.
It's not even that revolutionary a technology - nowhere NEAR what touchscreen was originally. It's a tiny addition from the user's point of view. I'm really unimpressed, to be honest. I'm actually more impressed by GlovePIE which has had a form of software multitouch for ages (i.e. multiple active cursors on an unmodified Windows desktop, each independently controlled by a vast array of possible hardware).
Hey troll,
I work with small businesses. I owned a small business supplying IT services to small businesses. I'm here to explain why Windows 7 won't dominate most markets (I assume you are talking purely small business desktop, and I'll include that too).
"1. Windows 7 does not force a user to edit any configuration files for any normal desktop user."
Nor does my version of Linux. Slackware. *THE* most configuration-file-friendly desktop you'll ever see. Give me an installation, two minutes of work as an admin and you'll never have to edit a configuration file for a normal desktop user ever again. Give me a desktop-friendly OS and I'll do even better than that. This is a >5 year old "problem" that hardly anybody ever encounters anymore except power users (who you don't want messing with config files anyway). Your home desktop is VASTLY different to a small business desktop - you do NOT want people installing drivers and tweaking settings in a business. Login, click icon, do work.
"Windows can run on most hardware. It can run most WINDOWS applications."
I've edited this line for you. Unfortunately Linux runs on more hardware than Windows can imagine, and old hardware that is even incapable of running modern Windows, and terminal servers/clients, etc.. You were really off to a false start here. And of course Windows can run most Windows applications. Tell me, how many Unix programs does it run? Or Mac? None without some sort of emulator? Strange that. That's how Linux works too.
"And you can actually do something once the OS is installed."
Just *had* to pick this one up. Like, erm. Browse the internet (basic pages only until you download a plugin), play minesweeper, manage files? Have you even SEEN how many programs even the most basic of distros come with nowadays? I don't even need an office suite installed - it's usually there already, or a program to work my digital camera, or one to let me scan things in, or one to ....
"3. After years and years, there is still no multi-user, end-to-end solution for creating quotes, orders, and invoices, that integrates with an accounting solution to keep track of payables and then print checks to pay them. You are being beaten by a company, ironically called Intuit, that just switched from a flat file system in 2006."
That'd be an application then. And I call bullshit purely on the basis of the accuracy of your previous statements and the fact that most financial institutions are Unix-based or were at one point. There are entire franchises that run on Unix-based systems (which are therefore easily ported to Linux by a simple recompile 99.999% of the time). The applications exist, you just might not know them or be willing to pay for them. But we're back into the Windows *application* arena again - the applications, even if they don't exist, have nothing to do with the operating system.
"I realize a lot of this has to do with driver support."
Erm. Wrong. Linux driver support on the PC architecture taken as a whole far outweighs the Windows driver support. What about that arcane check-printer, or the ISA card that runs the sensors in the factory, etc.etc. Windows won't even be able to TOUCH it without manufacturer support. Driver support is, again, a 5 year old argument. I can find a piece of hardware that doesn't have Linux support - it's not hard. But I can find 100's that you can't get running off the shelf on Windows without support from the original manufacturer. Again, it's just a choice of *application*, not the OS.
"you need to stop pretending that you are doing any better."
Never were truer words said.
"I'm learning Python on the Linux side because it's easier than trying to configure windows for the same task."
I have a one word response to this... irony.
"1. Users are not programmers" - Hence limited user accounts that are REALLY limited user accounts
"2. It's the applications, stupid!" - Yep. Sort that out, or have a method to sort that out, and we're all ears.
"3. Don't forget about accounting software" - See above. Blame Sage, Intuit, et al for not doing that job, not Linux.
"4. Laptops are people too" - Where did this come from?
MINOR? Since when is driving when in a condition that you're SO exhausted you can't even *get* to work or work effectively MINOR?
We're not talking about eating a bag of crisps while you're driving, or listening to MP3's, we're talking about someone who drives for most of their working day who is SO exhausted they are not in any fit state to drive. You can't LEGALLY drive for that length of time even as a long-distance lorry driver - your electronic license will not physically allow it and will refuse to start the engine.
This bloke is going to KILL someone.
Wife - Check.
Kids - Check.
Changed job in the middle of the biggest recession in my country's history to seek out new work because my employer got stroppy with me - nowhere NEAR what this person is currently tolerating, but I did it, with the prospect of having *nothing* coming into the household.
Family & Self respect greater than some idiot that employs you. Certainly greater then your own personal health, which is what this person is endangering. And certainly greater than potentially wiping out someone else's family (or even your own) in a car accident.
If you have ANY brains, self-respect, respect for your family, respect for others you would MOVE ON in this position... hell, being on benefits for a while is better than being asked to kill yourself/others for a living.
When it comes to your employer, that's a very fine line indeed. However, you're right.
Sorry, but you're an idiot.
You're being forced to work under unreasonable and dangerous conditions.
You are risking your life and others on the road (no sleep, exhaustion, skip eating = eventually you will fall asleep and/or pass out on a major motorway).
Your employers have absolutely zero care for you at all - to the point where what you have said suggest they are actually, knowingly, breaking several employment laws. That's how much respect they have for you.
What they are doing is *not* shifting the cost - it's called finding some idiot to work his arse off and pay you for doing one page of tax paperwork and not caring about *anything* else that happens to them, including if they kill themselves or others.
Get a brain. Get the hell out. If I knew you, I'd report you AND your employer for a) dangerous driving, b) employment-related offences. That's *not* a job. It's slave labour. Screw the "credit crunch", there are millions of jobs out there that pay the same and don't involve that crap. Where the hell are your brains?
Surely the first reason is because it's their choice and they can do what they like?
I can get people agreeing wholeheartedly with me about the state of proprietary software and how having OS code is helpful in a lot of circumstances etc.etc. but at the end of the day it's up to them if they want to use it. Some, well-rounded, individuals try out OS code on my recommendation. It doesn't mean they have to USE it but it's only sensible that they *try* it.
Anyone who thinks that having an OS equivalent of *any* piece of software is the end of the matter is sadly disillusioned. I do heavily use OS software, but I also heavily use "freeware" and even pay for my games and some other apps on a personal basis. In work? There are OS-only servers running lots of stuff, a lot of OS software on the servers/clients and a lot of freeware too. But the clients run Windows because the software we use runs on Windows and there are no serious alternatives for the main software in my industry (education - and trust me, we use precisely one app that is open source on the client-desktop, and that's TuxPaint for the very-little-un's - even that has it's problems, which I have reported and had some of them fixed).
The point of FOSS is NOT to take over the world and make everyone use it... that would actually be counter-productive to its intentions and would only form the next big monopoly, albeit a "free" one. The point of FOSS is to provide the *choice*. And each time some FOSS advocate says that I can't (or even "shouldn't", but that's less critical) use proprietary software or even freeware, they make me stop listening to them. FOSS saves me money. It saves me time and hassle. It allows me to customise things I would never be able to normally. It allows me to benefit from coder's skills from the world over and not have to recreate smaller apps from scratch. I *do* look forward to the day when I have so MUCH choice that all of my programs and operating systems are OS ones. But that means having several apps of each type and allowing me to *choose* - not telling me that KDE is the only way forward, or that every cd-burning app is going to merge into one.
Software *is* like evolution - Diversity and choice benefit the end user, even if millions of years down the line. And those who crow loudly in the morning but won't let anyone in their nest will eventually die out by those who quietly chirp and build fabulous nests that they allow any female into in order to show how good a builder they are. But it will take years. And the whole *POINT*, the whole impetus, the reason I *use* FOSS is because it gives me a choice when I would otherwise have been forced to use an horrendous piece of software. But my main browser is still Opera, because it does things that I'm prepared to sacrifice access to the source code for. That's not a permanent position and should Firefox, etc. catch up then I will seriously consider a switch - after all, it's my *choice* of browser, not some blind fanaticism.
On the sliding scale, FOSS is better than freeware is better than shareware is better than wholly proprietary. But it's *one* factor and I will slide up and down that scale in order to find my own personal sweet spot. That only occasionally entirely rests inside the FOSS category.
In the UK, at least one person annoyed by the non-word "retardedly".
I work in primary schools - the kids can touch type and need no help, certainly not from a hunt-and-peck typist of a teacher which is all I see all day long. The "home keys" nonsense shouldn't be taught how it is. The "don't look at the screen" is a real false-start... the kids will learn to do that over time, like not looking down at the pedals once they know how to pedal a bike.
What they do need to "unlearn" are certain tricks taught early on:
- DO NOT use CapsLock as a one-key shift... CapsLocks, H, Capslock, e, l, l, o. DRIVES ME MAD. And is actually the reasoning behind most people shouting or never using capital letters on instant messengers.
- Use multiple keys like shift, ctrl, alt to get used to strange key combinations.
- LEARN the key combinations for some programs (don't worry about if they have to "unlearn" them later, it's just to get them used to keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl-S, etc.).
- DO NOT use the numeric keypad for single digits - use it only for intense calculations... otherwise you're slowing yourself down by taking your hand away from the QWERTY keys anyway.
Leave the kids to learn, provide some pointers, they'll have learned to "touchtype" within a couple of months of starting at a new school (depending on when they start IT, obviously) with only one or two hours or IT a week. I never had any formal lessons in it (that's a lie: let's say, none before I could type at least 90wpm anyway) and didn't need any. The home key thing STILL bugs me because, yes, I hover them, but it's taught as if taking your fingers from the keyboard is a crime... it's not. And using the wrong finger doesn't matter unless you start to "stumble" all over the keyboard as a result. I never worried about blind-touch-typing, it was a waste of time, and I picked it up anyway.