If one were to feel really evil, it's also quite possible to make a browser that simulates clicks and opens the result in an invisible tab. That of course goes counter to the general motivation of removing tracking and lowering bandwidth and CPU usage. But it could be done.
My point here is that if the war escalates, the users hold the nuclear option: they can break both the pay per view and the pay per click models completely, if they feel motivated enough, and mostly break CPA indirectly.
If done well, the advertiser can't retaliate, as both seen and unseen ads look the same server-side. That breaks PPV. The only measurable result is changing the click ratio. PPC can then be easily broken by submitting fake clicks, so that the one paying for the ad can never be sure if their money really results in anybody seeing the ad or not. CPA can be partly broken because it's the only remaining workable model, not fit for all products. And with fewer views there will be fewer purchases, so any ad will have to be kept in rotation longer.
I suspect things don't escalate further because ad blocking has the nuclear option: doing everything as if the ad was showing, but without showing it.
There's nothing that makes it impossible to move ad blocking to the browser itself, where the blocking mechanism sets a "don't render" property on the element. Then it doesn't matter much what the advertiser does, the DOM is the same, as far as JS can tell it's all there, the server logs are identical.
Now how do you think advertisers will react when the advertising network can tell them "this ad was delivered on 10000 pages, but we have no clue how many of those people actually saw it"?
"Inviting" them back before shooting them is the only PR problem I see in the GP's plan.
And that's my entire point, really: the grandparent is a nutjob that seems to think that inviting somebody to do something, then shooting when they do is an acceptable way to do things.
It's as if s/he thinks that everybody else is also so consumed by a blinding hatred of GP that they'd ignore the balant illegality. I was pointing out that in the real world, such tactics backfire horribly, and amount to giving whoever you attacked a huge political win, as well as making heads roll on your side.
Ironically it seems the French government's/security forces' fear of bad PR is what prevented the protestors being shot down which would have solved the security "problem" before they could hang their banners.
I don't see why "no shooting" automatically implies allowing to hang banners. What, they have absolutely no other way to handle things? They're physically unable to walk out and confront the infiltrators and just sat there watching the protesters walk towards the fence, climb the fence, the building, and hanging the banners?
IMO the more likely possibility is that the reason why "no shooting" resulted in banners being hung is because they didn't notice anything until people were already climbing the building. Which wouldn't speak well of their security.
You mean that when asked not to shoot the guards just sat there and waited for them to put up the banner, instead of coming closer and arresting them?
Somehow that doesn't sound very likely. AFAIK the banners aren't everywhere. What would make more sense is that they didn't shoot those they caught, and the ones that managed to hang the banner made in unnoticed.
The French government has no need to underscore how mean they can be to Greenpeace
Looking at the wikipedia article, that looks like a huge net win for GP.
PR disaster for France, resignation of defense minister, some of the involved convicted, 8 million in extra funding for GP. I think screwing it up worse than that would have been difficult.
You'll now see them inside the N-plants. Well played GP.
If you're trying to be sarcastic, you're failing pretty badly. That seems precisely the intention. Plus, the result to a point validates GP's position.
It creeps me how young geeks hand out all their personal data to the first free provider they happen to come across.
Yeah, it's a bit of a pain sometimes, but the benefit of having the data where I want it, dealt with how I want it, outweighs the cost IMO. It also makes for good system administration practice if you have an interest in that kind of thing.
The way I understand it, the idea is that since they're unable to obtain or write open firmware, they'll isolate it from the main CPU instead. So if the firmware has something in it that for instance monitors the user, or does something that interfers with the kernel, it's not able to do anything of the sort because it has no way to.
As a phone, it's very good. The performance is perfect, everything is smooth and works well. There are a few things lacking in a few places, like the lack of ability to create a Jabber account from the GUI, though it can be done from the commandline. Things like that seem to be because the release was somewhat rushed.
For commandline stuff, the on-screen keyboard isn't very good. If you're going to type a lot, get a N900. The N9 currently seems to lack bluetooth keyboard support for some reason, though it seems trivial to add if you flash the kernel (see below on that)
The N900 is rather slow in comparison to the N9, but if you want a pocket sized Linux box, it's exactly the thing to get. It also has more applications available. For instance OpenVPN isn't yet on the N9. Also, there's none of the aegis stuff I describe below on it, so you're quite free to do whatever you want.
Regarding root access: the anon misses a few things. Yes, it's easy to get root (enable develper mode, ssh in as developer@, devel-su, "rootme"). However, you don't really get root access that way.
There's this thing called "aegis", which is a combination of an permissions system, integrity checker, and encryption.
The permissions system means that even as root, you can't do some things like loading modules.
The integrity checker means that if you manage to bypass the security and change one of the protected binaries, the phone will notice and brick itself. It's fixable by reflashing, though.
The encryption part means that some applications have encrypted data stores. You can flash the phone with a custom kernel where aegis is disabled, however the bootloader will notice it's not official. As a result the keys it uses will change (or are not available at all, I'm not sure about the specifics yet), and the encrypted data stores become unreadable. This gets you real root on the device, with loading modules and all, but it seems you will lose a good part of the official applications. In my understanding this is not all that critical, and if one was determined enough, the missing functionality could be replaced.
That's what Mer is for. It is a fork of MeeGo that intends to retain compatibility with MeeGo and eventually Tizen. As for something truly usable, Nemo and Cordia HD are based upon Mer and provide UIs of their own (as Mer does not supply one.) Beyond that, making changes to the base packages and getting them pushed upstream is one of the benefits of truly being FOSS based.
Awesome, thanks a lot. You just saved me some time:-)
Now that my N900 isn't my main phone anymore I can experiment with it a lot more, so I'll be giving that a try.
If you want to talk to people about it, there are mailing lists and IRC channels (freenode.net, #mer, #nemomobile) though you will need to keep in mind that many of the leads are in Europe.
Cool, thanks. And that works just fine for me, I'm in Europe too.
I don't think 200MHz make that much of a difference. The main downside to the N900 in my experience is that it only has 256MB RAM, and needs every drop of it. It also uses a swap partition.
If it had say, 512MB it'd probably work much better. That can be seen on the N9, which is silky smooth and has 1GB RAM, most of which seems to go on simply keeping the base system preloaded to make the basic apps start faster.
I'm considering that, yes. I've been actually trying to figure out if there's anything to contribute to, as in my understanding Meego was a corporate driven project, and I'm not sure if I have it in me to fork an entire distribution.
Sure, I still have the N900. I'd say the largest problem with it is RAM, it's really got the bare minimum for what it does. I got a N9 recently and things are much smoother. And also a lot more locked down, which is providing some motivation for trying to find something else N900-like.
I really liked the Maemo OS. It was very open, and worked like a normal Linux system. Android looks very unappealing in the way it replaces pretty much all of the base system and requires coding specifically for it.
So I'd be quite willing to support a project along these lines, so long a few minimum requirements are fulfilled:
1. It's usable. Not necessarily 100% polished, but at a minimum boots up, charges, and makes and receives phone calls, with acceptable performance and no random crashes.
I considered getting a Freerunner back when it was new, but it I needed it to work as a phone, and the state at the time seemed to involve things like the inability to charge the battery if it was ever fully discharged.
2. It works like a normal Linux system. I want something like the N900, where I can compile, debug and run programs just like on my own box.
All of that doesn't amount to much, and still loses jobs.
It's quite trivial: If the manufacture, storage, maketing, and so on for say, an excavator cost the same or more than the amount of people needed to dig a ditch with shovels, then we'd go for the shovels.
The profits from the sale of the machine have to pay for all the costs of manufacturing, storage and so on, and companies wouldn't buy them if it didn't mean a cost savings on the long run.
From that it's trivial to see that any machine that doesn't result in a net loss for the customer and the manufacturer necessarily has to do more work than what would be done by the people you could hire with the same amount of money. This means less jobs.
Now, Star Trek utopia? Sure, that'd be awesome. But, the problem is what happens in the middle. Where do all the people who used to dig ditches for a living go in the transitionary period when people still need to find a job?
The best way of making things cheaper is automation.
If you want to resurface a road for instance, the cheapest way would be with a machine that can do it pretty much on its own. But that doesn't help with unemployment in the slightest.
So I'm having a hard time understanding, what would all those people you imagine being employed be doing?
Yeah, 1 billion might be a big number. But that number is much smaller than the total that would result from 1000
small datacenters that would provide the same capacity. Building a huge datacenter saves money, and needs fewer people to run. That's why they build things like that in the first place.
Large companies at first look seem to employ a lot of people. But the amount of people they employ is much smaller than you'd expect.
If a small company needs a sysadmin, accountant and receptionist, then that's 3 people that are employed. If there are 3 such companies, then each needs their own, so that's 9 people employed.
But what if they merge? All those people are probably not working at their limit at the new company. The sysadmin that managed 10 servers probably can manage 30. The new company is not so huge as to have more than one door, so only one receptionist is needed. The accountant can handle a bit more work. And so it's quite likely that 6 people will be laid off.
If the objective is creating jobs then what you want is creating inefficiency: lots of small companies that employ people below their full capacity. Large companies are experts at employing as few people as possible. If there's one thing that would be counterproductive towards that goal, it's them.
I'm in the process of disassembling my espresso machine and sticking an Arduino into it. The Apple-like interface doesn't appeal to me at all. It will be done when keeps temperature properly, has a status display, and is accessible by wifi.
I have tried some Apple stuff. Yeah, it's sorta pretty for a while, but at least for me it gets outright maddening the moment I bump into one of the annoying limitations, and there's a lot of those.
Ugh, yeah. Another cool project is going to be held back by Java.
Way back, this happened with Freenet. I thought it was a cool idea, but the darn thing wasn't happy with all the 256MB I could give it. Even now, Java is still a considerable load on laptops with 4GB RAM.
I think that for best adoption they should have concentrated on making it small and light. If it can be run in say, 64MB RAM then you can install it anywhere. And it's quite likely that a good part of why Freenet was so horrible when I tried it, is because it made a lot of the machines it ran on swap like crazy.
There are lots of things one can photograph without needing anything special. It's certainly possible to take a striking photo even with a cell phone. It can look good, if the conditions are right.
Now, that's assuming you don't have special needs. If you want to take photos in challenging conditions, you probably want to get a DSLR. Challenging conditions include: low light (that includes indoors), things that are very far away (say, wildlife photography), things that are very small, long exposures, when you want a shallow depth of field, and situations that require something better than the on-camera flash.
You can try to do most of that with a point and shoot, but even if you choose your composition wonderfully it still won't look very good. DSLRs produce much better results, and also have the huge advantage of being able to choose the lens. I think for most basic things the actual DSLR isn't all that important, as you already gain a huge amount of flexibility from just being able to use a different lens.
Explain consciousness from the atheistic worldview... or how reason, logic, and information come from matter. (and those are just a start)
I'm not sure about how to answer that, but "God did it" strikes me as an useless answer.
To put it more simply, atheism as a worldview does't match reality as well as Christianity (by quite a bit).
Ha. You just admitted in another post that the bible needs an "interpretive key". When taken literally it disagrees badly with the available evidence, so for anything that doesn't fit you have to come up with an explanation of why if you squint at this part just so, you can sort of reconcile a discrepancy. And you need to do this many, many times to arrive at an interpretation that doesn't seem completely crazy in the modern world.
Also, if christianity was such a great fit, there wouldn't be so many different interpretations of it.
To me this looks like you're spending a great amount of effort on hammering a square peg into a round hole, and then pretending that the hole was square in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not real root. Try using insmod to see what I mean.
Now on N900, there things work like they should.
You can't click something you can't see.
If one were to feel really evil, it's also quite possible to make a browser that simulates clicks and opens the result in an invisible tab. That of course goes counter to the general motivation of removing tracking and lowering bandwidth and CPU usage. But it could be done.
My point here is that if the war escalates, the users hold the nuclear option: they can break both the pay per view and the pay per click models completely, if they feel motivated enough, and mostly break CPA indirectly.
If done well, the advertiser can't retaliate, as both seen and unseen ads look the same server-side. That breaks PPV. The only measurable result is changing the click ratio. PPC can then be easily broken by submitting fake clicks, so that the one paying for the ad can never be sure if their money really results in anybody seeing the ad or not. CPA can be partly broken because it's the only remaining workable model, not fit for all products. And with fewer views there will be fewer purchases, so any ad will have to be kept in rotation longer.
I suspect things don't escalate further because ad blocking has the nuclear option: doing everything as if the ad was showing, but without showing it.
There's nothing that makes it impossible to move ad blocking to the browser itself, where the blocking mechanism sets a "don't render" property on the element. Then it doesn't matter much what the advertiser does, the DOM is the same, as far as JS can tell it's all there, the server logs are identical.
Now how do you think advertisers will react when the advertising network can tell them "this ad was delivered on 10000 pages, but we have no clue how many of those people actually saw it"?
And that's my entire point, really: the grandparent is a nutjob that seems to think that inviting somebody to do something, then shooting when they do is an acceptable way to do things.
It's as if s/he thinks that everybody else is also so consumed by a blinding hatred of GP that they'd ignore the balant illegality. I was pointing out that in the real world, such tactics backfire horribly, and amount to giving whoever you attacked a huge political win, as well as making heads roll on your side.
I don't see why "no shooting" automatically implies allowing to hang banners. What, they have absolutely no other way to handle things? They're physically unable to walk out and confront the infiltrators and just sat there watching the protesters walk towards the fence, climb the fence, the building, and hanging the banners?
IMO the more likely possibility is that the reason why "no shooting" resulted in banners being hung is because they didn't notice anything until people were already climbing the building. Which wouldn't speak well of their security.
Been tried before. I don't think a huge PR problem, sentences, resignation of the defense minister and $8M donation to GP qualify as a win, though.
You're just one of those sad people who thinks their "tough" talk on the internet that completely ignores reality impresses somebody.
You mean that when asked not to shoot the guards just sat there and waited for them to put up the banner, instead of coming closer and arresting them?
Somehow that doesn't sound very likely. AFAIK the banners aren't everywhere. What would make more sense is that they didn't shoot those they caught, and the ones that managed to hang the banner made in unnoticed.
Looking at the wikipedia article, that looks like a huge net win for GP.
PR disaster for France, resignation of defense minister, some of the involved convicted, 8 million in extra funding for GP. I think screwing it up worse than that would have been difficult.
If you're trying to be sarcastic, you're failing pretty badly. That seems precisely the intention. Plus, the result to a point validates GP's position.
It creeps me how young geeks hand out all their personal data to the first free provider they happen to come across.
Yeah, it's a bit of a pain sometimes, but the benefit of having the data where I want it, dealt with how I want it, outweighs the cost IMO. It also makes for good system administration practice if you have an interest in that kind of thing.
The way I understand it, the idea is that since they're unable to obtain or write open firmware, they'll isolate it from the main CPU instead. So if the firmware has something in it that for instance monitors the user, or does something that interfers with the kernel, it's not able to do anything of the sort because it has no way to.
As a phone, it's very good. The performance is perfect, everything is smooth and works well. There are a few things lacking in a few places, like the lack of ability to create a Jabber account from the GUI, though it can be done from the commandline. Things like that seem to be because the release was somewhat rushed.
For commandline stuff, the on-screen keyboard isn't very good. If you're going to type a lot, get a N900. The N9 currently seems to lack bluetooth keyboard support for some reason, though it seems trivial to add if you flash the kernel (see below on that)
The N900 is rather slow in comparison to the N9, but if you want a pocket sized Linux box, it's exactly the thing to get. It also has more applications available. For instance OpenVPN isn't yet on the N9. Also, there's none of the aegis stuff I describe below on it, so you're quite free to do whatever you want.
Regarding root access: the anon misses a few things. Yes, it's easy to get root (enable develper mode, ssh in as developer@, devel-su, "rootme"). However, you don't really get root access that way.
There's this thing called "aegis", which is a combination of an permissions system, integrity checker, and encryption.
The permissions system means that even as root, you can't do some things like loading modules.
The integrity checker means that if you manage to bypass the security and change one of the protected binaries, the phone will notice and brick itself. It's fixable by reflashing, though.
The encryption part means that some applications have encrypted data stores. You can flash the phone with a custom kernel where aegis is disabled, however the bootloader will notice it's not official. As a result the keys it uses will change (or are not available at all, I'm not sure about the specifics yet), and the encrypted data stores become unreadable. This gets you real root on the device, with loading modules and all, but it seems you will lose a good part of the official applications. In my understanding this is not all that critical, and if one was determined enough, the missing functionality could be replaced.
Awesome, thanks a lot. You just saved me some time :-)
Now that my N900 isn't my main phone anymore I can experiment with it a lot more, so I'll be giving that a try.
Cool, thanks. And that works just fine for me, I'm in Europe too.
I don't think 200MHz make that much of a difference. The main downside to the N900 in my experience is that it only has 256MB RAM, and needs every drop of it. It also uses a swap partition.
If it had say, 512MB it'd probably work much better. That can be seen on the N9, which is silky smooth and has 1GB RAM, most of which seems to go on simply keeping the base system preloaded to make the basic apps start faster.
I'm considering that, yes. I've been actually trying to figure out if there's anything to contribute to, as in my understanding Meego was a corporate driven project, and I'm not sure if I have it in me to fork an entire distribution.
Sure, I still have the N900. I'd say the largest problem with it is RAM, it's really got the bare minimum for what it does. I got a N9 recently and things are much smoother. And also a lot more locked down, which is providing some motivation for trying to find something else N900-like.
I really liked the Maemo OS. It was very open, and worked like a normal Linux system. Android looks very unappealing in the way it replaces pretty much all of the base system and requires coding specifically for it.
So I'd be quite willing to support a project along these lines, so long a few minimum requirements are fulfilled:
1. It's usable. Not necessarily 100% polished, but at a minimum boots up, charges, and makes and receives phone calls, with acceptable performance and no random crashes.
I considered getting a Freerunner back when it was new, but it I needed it to work as a phone, and the state at the time seemed to involve things like the inability to charge the battery if it was ever fully discharged.
2. It works like a normal Linux system. I want something like the N900, where I can compile, debug and run programs just like on my own box.
All of that doesn't amount to much, and still loses jobs.
It's quite trivial: If the manufacture, storage, maketing, and so on for say, an excavator cost the same or more than the amount of people needed to dig a ditch with shovels, then we'd go for the shovels.
The profits from the sale of the machine have to pay for all the costs of manufacturing, storage and so on, and companies wouldn't buy them if it didn't mean a cost savings on the long run.
From that it's trivial to see that any machine that doesn't result in a net loss for the customer and the manufacturer necessarily has to do more work than what would be done by the people you could hire with the same amount of money. This means less jobs.
Now, Star Trek utopia? Sure, that'd be awesome. But, the problem is what happens in the middle. Where do all the people who used to dig ditches for a living go in the transitionary period when people still need to find a job?
The best way of making things cheaper is automation.
If you want to resurface a road for instance, the cheapest way would be with a machine that can do it pretty much on its own. But that doesn't help with unemployment in the slightest.
So I'm having a hard time understanding, what would all those people you imagine being employed be doing?
You're looking at the wrong thing.
Yeah, 1 billion might be a big number. But that number is much smaller than the total that would result from 1000
small datacenters that would provide the same capacity. Building a huge datacenter saves money, and needs fewer people to run. That's why they build things like that in the first place.
Yes. I mean, if your goal is keeping a lot of people busy, efficiency is the one thing you don't want.
If two distros have their own people working on packages, then that's twice as many people being employed as if there was just one.
Large companies at first look seem to employ a lot of people. But the amount of people they employ is much smaller than you'd expect.
If a small company needs a sysadmin, accountant and receptionist, then that's 3 people that are employed. If there are 3 such companies, then each needs their own, so that's 9 people employed.
But what if they merge? All those people are probably not working at their limit at the new company. The sysadmin that managed 10 servers probably can manage 30. The new company is not so huge as to have more than one door, so only one receptionist is needed. The accountant can handle a bit more work. And so it's quite likely that 6 people will be laid off.
If the objective is creating jobs then what you want is creating inefficiency: lots of small companies that employ people below their full capacity. Large companies are experts at employing as few people as possible. If there's one thing that would be counterproductive towards that goal, it's them.
Bah, what a boring world view.
I'm in the process of disassembling my espresso machine and sticking an Arduino into it. The Apple-like interface doesn't appeal to me at all. It will be done when keeps temperature properly, has a status display, and is accessible by wifi.
I have tried some Apple stuff. Yeah, it's sorta pretty for a while, but at least for me it gets outright maddening the moment I bump into one of the annoying limitations, and there's a lot of those.
Ugh, yeah. Another cool project is going to be held back by Java.
Way back, this happened with Freenet. I thought it was a cool idea, but the darn thing wasn't happy with all the 256MB I could give it. Even now, Java is still a considerable load on laptops with 4GB RAM.
I think that for best adoption they should have concentrated on making it small and light. If it can be run in say, 64MB RAM then you can install it anywhere. And it's quite likely that a good part of why Freenet was so horrible when I tried it, is because it made a lot of the machines it ran on swap like crazy.
So, I tried the portal and searched for slashdot.
1. geek.net ...
2. slashdot tags
3. ostg.com
4. slashdot.org/favicon.ico
main page nowhere to be seen.
Second try, antirely different results: ...
1. microsoft.slashdot.org
2. slashdot.org
Seems very erratic so far. Then maybe it needs some time to stabilize a bit.
I think free speech is a must for a democracy to work. How can you vote for what you want when it's illegal to say it?
There are lots of things one can photograph without needing anything special. It's certainly possible to take a striking photo even with a cell phone. It can look good, if the conditions are right.
Now, that's assuming you don't have special needs. If you want to take photos in challenging conditions, you probably want to get a DSLR. Challenging conditions include: low light (that includes indoors), things that are very far away (say, wildlife photography), things that are very small, long exposures, when you want a shallow depth of field, and situations that require something better than the on-camera flash.
You can try to do most of that with a point and shoot, but even if you choose your composition wonderfully it still won't look very good. DSLRs produce much better results, and also have the huge advantage of being able to choose the lens. I think for most basic things the actual DSLR isn't all that important, as you already gain a huge amount of flexibility from just being able to use a different lens.
I'm not sure about how to answer that, but "God did it" strikes me as an useless answer.
Ha. You just admitted in another post that the bible needs an "interpretive key". When taken literally it disagrees badly with the available evidence, so for anything that doesn't fit you have to come up with an explanation of why if you squint at this part just so, you can sort of reconcile a discrepancy. And you need to do this many, many times to arrive at an interpretation that doesn't seem completely crazy in the modern world.
Also, if christianity was such a great fit, there wouldn't be so many different interpretations of it.
To me this looks like you're spending a great amount of effort on hammering a square peg into a round hole, and then pretending that the hole was square in the first place.