Linux users have the option of choosing a different desktop environment or window manager.
I predict that 2014 will be the Year of the Linux Desktops.;-)
unlike on Windows or OS X, where there is only one path forward, at best having some kludge solution that may or may not be reliable.
As a recent victim of Windows 8, I've just tried the"Start 8" add-on, and it looks promising. I hear that "Classic Shell" also is good. So, it looks like we have multiple paths forward. I don't know if the add-on approach is what you mean by "kludge", but that seems to be quite popular in other cases, e.g. Firefox. Since I'm used to the Windows 7 interface nd basically like it, it's nice to have a form of choice that helps me get back to where I once belonged.
OTOH, every time I try out a Linux distro, one of the first questions to think about is "Gnome or KDE"? I've tried both in the past, and I still don't know the answer to that question - even for just me. Sometimes having only one path forward (with some options) ain't all bad.
You can endlessly polish your elegant solutions for decades (see Hurd) while the rest of the world happily uses "technologies that are just barely able to solve the problem".
Which got me thinking...since the Mythbusters recently proved that you can polish a "Hurd", I guess the GNU folks can retire their experiment now.
It sounds like an external password database was hacked and all the usernames + 'yahoo.com' and the matching passwords were tried against Yahoo Mail.
It doesn't seem like Yahoo could have done anything more about this. It is a case of password reuse, not Yahoo's password storage.
Right. Evidently it's easier to go for knee-jerk Yahoo bashing than to read TFA. I wonder if the folks who do that also save time and energy by reusing passwords?;-)
the opinions and rhetoric on either side has only grown more strident and inflexible
It's a good thing that doesn't happen around here. Luckily, extreme opinions here are moderated by moderate moderators whose moderation moderately moderates the most immoderate opinions and rhetoric, no mater how strident and inflexible they may be modulated.
leaving no room for nuanced opinions or the possibility that Snowden perhaps is neither a traitor nor a hero but something else entirely
Can Snowden be called anything but a first-class patriotic hero of the highest order? Say what you will, but I, for one, ain't ever gonna buy it.
(Note for immoderate moderators: the preceding was satire, not trolling. Please don't take it personally.)
This suggests that flash media would need to come down in cost by more than a factor of 20 to be competitive with HDDs and cheaper media. Also, Compact Flash seemed to be more expensive per GB than SSDs.
Although flash prices may drop, other media likely will also, so a relative drop by a factor of 20 seems unlikely. Factors other than cost may be a consideration, but if I were running things at Facebook, it would be pretty hard to pay 20x as much per GB just to save space.
Though I can imagine that Blue-rays may be economical for cold storage in some sort of jukebox format, it's hard to imagine how flash could be, either now or in the forseeable future. Flash storage currently is significantly more expensive than hard drive storage (ask anyone who's bought an SSD lately), and it's unlikely to get much cheaper due to fundamental limitations on the size of circuitry needed to hold enough charge to store data reliably.
Isn't Microsoft the company that made billions selling software (and now services) on a very popular open platform, the PC? So, maybe there's no evil agenda here (say it isn't so!): maybe it's as simple as opening up something they don't plan to sell - server hardware designs - in order to reduce costs by increasing economies of scale, or to get the benefits of free improvements from the community. (Hey, I thought you folks liked that kind of thing...) Put in those terms, it doesn't sound much different than the motives many other companies have to open-source select portions of their IP.
Just because there's a business value in something doesn't mean it's part of an evil conspiracy. Although Microsoft has plenty of history of embracing and extending in the past, they seem to be doing much less of it in the last several years, not because they've suddenly gotten religion but because that technique simply doesn't work in these post-monopoly days when competition makes such tactics ineffective.
I wonder how many people who once hated one of those keyboards that had poor tactile feedback now type away merrily on their phone and pad touchscreens?
FWIW, in my story, by "time", I really meant "moves". As for literal time, the guy was playing multiple games at the same time, and he didn't always move instantly. He probably divided his time among the number of players just to make it all fit together. I don't remember him ever just standing around with nothing to do, though maybe he could have done that and still beat all of us.
I see on my comment moderation page that this one got marked down one point as a "Troll". That seems to happen every time I express my honest opinion about Richard Stallman and his movement. Sorry that I'm on the "Them" side of his little "Us versus Them" holy war. Judging by the comments on this article, I'm not the only one here, but maybe we're just in the minority. The rest of you should feel free to continue to vigorously quash us conscientious objectors. After all, isn't that what "freedom" is all about? (Ooops! I'm expressing my honest opinion again...that's defined here as "trolling" - moderators, do your worst...)
All Gates-bashing aside, I'm a little surprised that the win was so fast. I once played chess against a much better player at a Renaissance fair. He was playing many people at once. He didn't cream me (or anyone else around the table) instantly. Instead, I think he played the same sort of strong, deliberate chess game that he would have played against a better player. Basically, he systematically built up a stronger position until I was so overpowered that he could force checkmate. Though I never stood a chance, it took him awhile to do the deed.
From that angle, in the "71 seconds" scenario, we can assume that either Gates is an extremely poor chess player, he let the kid win in 71 seconds, or maybe he just fell into some sort of textbook trap that Carlsen knew. But since Gates is an accomplished bridge player and seems to have been an effective strategist at Microsoft (it ain't easy to put together a monopoly), he's probably not an extremely poor chess player.
Or, maybe the guy at the Renaissance fair was just taking it easy on me (us) to make it more fun.
For those of you who don't see Anonymous Coward posts, here's some good info about how smart cards work from the AC parent:
You upload details of a transaction to the smart card which signs that specific transaction with a unique, card specific key that cannot be (cost effectively) read without destroying the card. This changes the economics of hacking credit card transactions greatly, meaning the average hacker would rather give up and get a day job than waste the effort required to obtain the secret keys guarding a significant number of credit cards.
You might not agree with Stallman's view on ethics - many don't - but it is a little sad to see how much [expletive] he gets even for suggesting that people should stop to consider ethics before reaching for "a bigger pie for everybody".
In all honesty, it's hard for me to see Stallman's rhetoric as anything other than shameless self-promotion, though I recognize that you (and maybe even he) genuinely believe that he's promoting some form "ethics". However, ethics is a personal/subjective thing. From the point of view of my personal ethics, he's doing an evil by using a clever viral licensing scheme and the bully pulpit he's created for himself to try to restrict the freedom of people to use open-source software in any way they please.
I admire his cleverness and his zeal but overall, Stallman seems a tragic figure. On the one hand, he's accomplished a great deal, both on a technical and social level. He's even founded a religion - which ain't easy to do. But he now finds himself an obsolete visionary, supplanted by others, notably Linus Torvalds, who doesn't seem to entirely believe in Stallman's credo. The technical seeds Stallman has planted have grown and flowered, but now are controlled by others, or are even being made obsolete (evidently even in Stallman's own view) in the case of GCC.
So what has he got left? Little but shameless self promotion, flagellating endlessly as the prophet of the strange little cult he founded to protect us from slavery-via-software (get real...), droning on about how we must protect ourselves from the evil barbarians who want to take away our "freedom" by letting everyone use software in any way they like. Sad, ain't it?
The "Us and Them" thing has been the classic technique of demagogues, dictators, and cult leaders throughout history. Yet the gullible still fall for it in large numbers. Go figure.
The existence of LLVM is a terrible setback for our community precisely because it is not copylefted and can be used as the basis for nonfree compilers — so that all contribution to LLVM directly helps proprietary software as much as it helps us.
Isn't it sad the way he sees this as a loss in the war of "Us versus Them" rather than as a "technically superior compiler" resulting in a bigger pie for everybody?
I would only point out two broad areas where Microsoft seems to be a little weaker than some of its big competitors: innovation and quality control.
Maybe they can hire away Tim Cook from Apple to solve their innovation problem.;-)
Regarding quality, I guess I'm in the minority in terms of being quite impressed with their quality overall. Sure, they make dumb UI mistakes like Metro, but considering how complex most of their stuff is, I think it works extremely well overall. For example, I think the fact that plug-and-play works as well as it does is a small miracle. It's a wonderful luxury to just plug something in and it magically works. (Which is the main reason I don't use a certain other OS that's quite popular around here...I'm quite happy to pay for something that "just works".)
The embarrassing part, though, is that Microsoft seems to let some little obvious stuff get out the door. For example, I use Visual Studio 2008 and sometimes the buttons don't repaint as needed. That's just obvious. How did they not notice - and fix - that?
Microsoft also has done a fantastic job with backwards compatibility over the years, which I think they recognize as one of the keys to their empire (especially back when they were a monopoly). It's amazing to me that current 64-bit Windows systems will run DOS software written literally decades ago, as well as software written a few years ago for 32-bit systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux users have the option of choosing a different desktop environment or window manager.
I predict that 2014 will be the Year of the Linux Desktops. ;-)
unlike on Windows or OS X, where there is only one path forward, at best having some kludge solution that may or may not be reliable.
As a recent victim of Windows 8, I've just tried the"Start 8" add-on, and it looks promising. I hear that "Classic Shell" also is good. So, it looks like we have multiple paths forward. I don't know if the add-on approach is what you mean by "kludge", but that seems to be quite popular in other cases, e.g. Firefox. Since I'm used to the Windows 7 interface nd basically like it, it's nice to have a form of choice that helps me get back to where I once belonged.
OTOH, every time I try out a Linux distro, one of the first questions to think about is "Gnome or KDE"? I've tried both in the past, and I still don't know the answer to that question - even for just me. Sometimes having only one path forward (with some options) ain't all bad.
You can endlessly polish your elegant solutions for decades (see Hurd) while the rest of the world happily uses "technologies that are just barely able to solve the problem".
Which got me thinking...since the Mythbusters recently proved that you can polish a "Hurd", I guess the GNU folks can retire their experiment now.
Good enough is perfect.
That's a concise and interesting twist on the old adage Perfect is the enemy of good. Well done!
It sounds like an external password database was hacked and all the usernames + 'yahoo.com' and the matching passwords were tried against Yahoo Mail.
It doesn't seem like Yahoo could have done anything more about this. It is a case of password reuse, not Yahoo's password storage.
Right. Evidently it's easier to go for knee-jerk Yahoo bashing than to read TFA. I wonder if the folks who do that also save time and energy by reusing passwords? ;-)
It was just a joke. Why so nasty?...does somebody need to take his widdle nap?...
That looks like a factor of two, not an order of magnitude. Maybe you should spell it out next time...
Like it or not, pictures are still a more efficient way of communicating data than text. By an order of magnitude.
You've lost me on that...can you show me a graph?
the opinions and rhetoric on either side has only grown more strident and inflexible
It's a good thing that doesn't happen around here. Luckily, extreme opinions here are moderated by moderate moderators whose moderation moderately moderates the most immoderate opinions and rhetoric, no mater how strident and inflexible they may be modulated.
leaving no room for nuanced opinions or the possibility that Snowden perhaps is neither a traitor nor a hero but something else entirely
Can Snowden be called anything but a first-class patriotic hero of the highest order? Say what you will, but I, for one, ain't ever gonna buy it.
(Note for immoderate moderators: the preceding was satire, not trolling. Please don't take it personally.)
"A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money."
- Senator Everett Dirksen
They paid $12.5B for Motorola and got $3.2B back, so that's $9.3B for patents. Is that the part that's a bargain?
First they overpay for Motorola Mobility. Now they're overpaying for Nest. Is Eric Schmidt still available to provide "adult supervision"?
At least this will even out their recent cash flow: $3.2B out for Nest, $2.9B in for Motorola. Well, almost - they're still down by a mere $300M.
FWIW, I did a little quick research on Amazon and came up with the dollars/GB of various media as shown below:
Compact Flash: $1.06 / GB
SSD: $0.68 / GB
HDD: $0.04 / GB
Blu-ray: $0.04 / GB
DVD: $0.08 / GB
Data tape: $0.02 / GB
This suggests that flash media would need to come down in cost by more than a factor of 20 to be competitive with HDDs and cheaper media. Also, Compact Flash seemed to be more expensive per GB than SSDs.
Although flash prices may drop, other media likely will also, so a relative drop by a factor of 20 seems unlikely. Factors other than cost may be a consideration, but if I were running things at Facebook, it would be pretty hard to pay 20x as much per GB just to save space.
Though I can imagine that Blue-rays may be economical for cold storage in some sort of jukebox format, it's hard to imagine how flash could be, either now or in the forseeable future. Flash storage currently is significantly more expensive than hard drive storage (ask anyone who's bought an SSD lately), and it's unlikely to get much cheaper due to fundamental limitations on the size of circuitry needed to hold enough charge to store data reliably.
OK, I'll bite. Here's my "devil's advocacy".
Isn't Microsoft the company that made billions selling software (and now services) on a very popular open platform, the PC? So, maybe there's no evil agenda here (say it isn't so!): maybe it's as simple as opening up something they don't plan to sell - server hardware designs - in order to reduce costs by increasing economies of scale, or to get the benefits of free improvements from the community. (Hey, I thought you folks liked that kind of thing...) Put in those terms, it doesn't sound much different than the motives many other companies have to open-source select portions of their IP.
Just because there's a business value in something doesn't mean it's part of an evil conspiracy. Although Microsoft has plenty of history of embracing and extending in the past, they seem to be doing much less of it in the last several years, not because they've suddenly gotten religion but because that technique simply doesn't work in these post-monopoly days when competition makes such tactics ineffective.
I wonder how many people who once hated one of those keyboards that had poor tactile feedback now type away merrily on their phone and pad touchscreens?
Tribal people shave with flint to this day.
Very impressive. But can they shave with six blades at the same time?...
FWIW, in my story, by "time", I really meant "moves". As for literal time, the guy was playing multiple games at the same time, and he didn't always move instantly. He probably divided his time among the number of players just to make it all fit together. I don't remember him ever just standing around with nothing to do, though maybe he could have done that and still beat all of us.
I see on my comment moderation page that this one got marked down one point as a "Troll". That seems to happen every time I express my honest opinion about Richard Stallman and his movement. Sorry that I'm on the "Them" side of his little "Us versus Them" holy war. Judging by the comments on this article, I'm not the only one here, but maybe we're just in the minority. The rest of you should feel free to continue to vigorously quash us conscientious objectors. After all, isn't that what "freedom" is all about? (Ooops! I'm expressing my honest opinion again...that's defined here as "trolling" - moderators, do your worst...)
All Gates-bashing aside, I'm a little surprised that the win was so fast. I once played chess against a much better player at a Renaissance fair. He was playing many people at once. He didn't cream me (or anyone else around the table) instantly. Instead, I think he played the same sort of strong, deliberate chess game that he would have played against a better player. Basically, he systematically built up a stronger position until I was so overpowered that he could force checkmate. Though I never stood a chance, it took him awhile to do the deed.
From that angle, in the "71 seconds" scenario, we can assume that either Gates is an extremely poor chess player, he let the kid win in 71 seconds, or maybe he just fell into some sort of textbook trap that Carlsen knew. But since Gates is an accomplished bridge player and seems to have been an effective strategist at Microsoft (it ain't easy to put together a monopoly), he's probably not an extremely poor chess player.
Or, maybe the guy at the Renaissance fair was just taking it easy on me (us) to make it more fun.
I bet Magnus Carlsen can give himself a haircut faster than Bill Gates.
For those of you who don't see Anonymous Coward posts, here's some good info about how smart cards work from the AC parent:
You upload details of a transaction to the smart card which signs that specific transaction with a unique, card specific key that cannot be (cost effectively) read without destroying the card. This changes the economics of hacking credit card transactions greatly, meaning the average hacker would rather give up and get a day job than waste the effort required to obtain the secret keys guarding a significant number of credit cards.
That's all well and good, but what about the spec that really matters: does it beat Google Glass on dorkiness?
You might not agree with Stallman's view on ethics - many don't - but it is a little sad to see how much [expletive] he gets even for suggesting that people should stop to consider ethics before reaching for "a bigger pie for everybody".
In all honesty, it's hard for me to see Stallman's rhetoric as anything other than shameless self-promotion, though I recognize that you (and maybe even he) genuinely believe that he's promoting some form "ethics". However, ethics is a personal/subjective thing. From the point of view of my personal ethics, he's doing an evil by using a clever viral licensing scheme and the bully pulpit he's created for himself to try to restrict the freedom of people to use open-source software in any way they please.
I admire his cleverness and his zeal but overall, Stallman seems a tragic figure. On the one hand, he's accomplished a great deal, both on a technical and social level. He's even founded a religion - which ain't easy to do. But he now finds himself an obsolete visionary, supplanted by others, notably Linus Torvalds, who doesn't seem to entirely believe in Stallman's credo. The technical seeds Stallman has planted have grown and flowered, but now are controlled by others, or are even being made obsolete (evidently even in Stallman's own view) in the case of GCC.
So what has he got left? Little but shameless self promotion, flagellating endlessly as the prophet of the strange little cult he founded to protect us from slavery-via-software (get real...), droning on about how we must protect ourselves from the evil barbarians who want to take away our "freedom" by letting everyone use software in any way they like. Sad, ain't it?
The "Us and Them" thing has been the classic technique of demagogues, dictators, and cult leaders throughout history. Yet the gullible still fall for it in large numbers. Go figure.
The existence of LLVM is a terrible setback for our community precisely because it is not copylefted and can be used as the basis for nonfree compilers — so that all contribution to LLVM directly helps proprietary software as much as it helps us.
Isn't it sad the way he sees this as a loss in the war of "Us versus Them" rather than as a "technically superior compiler" resulting in a bigger pie for everybody?
I would only point out two broad areas where Microsoft seems to be a little weaker than some of its big competitors: innovation and quality control.
Maybe they can hire away Tim Cook from Apple to solve their innovation problem. ;-)
Regarding quality, I guess I'm in the minority in terms of being quite impressed with their quality overall. Sure, they make dumb UI mistakes like Metro, but considering how complex most of their stuff is, I think it works extremely well overall. For example, I think the fact that plug-and-play works as well as it does is a small miracle. It's a wonderful luxury to just plug something in and it magically works. (Which is the main reason I don't use a certain other OS that's quite popular around here...I'm quite happy to pay for something that "just works".)
The embarrassing part, though, is that Microsoft seems to let some little obvious stuff get out the door. For example, I use Visual Studio 2008 and sometimes the buttons don't repaint as needed. That's just obvious. How did they not notice - and fix - that?
Microsoft also has done a fantastic job with backwards compatibility over the years, which I think they recognize as one of the keys to their empire (especially back when they were a monopoly). It's amazing to me that current 64-bit Windows systems will run DOS software written literally decades ago, as well as software written a few years ago for 32-bit systems.