Say what we may about it, generally forcing some software companies to release more often to avoid a 5 year expiration date may not be a good thing for the industry at large.
Of course, the 6.3 release seems to be behind schedule, but they haven't officially missed any 7.0 release milestones yet and the schedule puts it at mid January.
Mostly, a waste of GPU time. But seriously, the expose-ripoff with window title search that compiz has is highly productive when you open lots of windows. Other stuff, pretty much eye candy to me, but I admit I don't try every thing or understand functional benefits some features I relegated to eye candy. There are ways to make use of rendering live to GL manipulated textures that I'm sure will increase (Vista I didn't see make functional use of it, OSX did better, and with all the many different directions people are taking 3D effects in compiz and other projects in the open-source world, some interesting stuff is probably yet to come.
That the probability of the calculations may logically either: increase (so long as mars is a subset of the cone, not necessarily the center) or, ultimately, drop to zero. Of course, since the cross section of mars compared to the scope of uncertainly isn't infinitely small, and other factors are involved, there are some logical situations that would lead to a decrease without totally zeroing.
But, saying that it's nearly certain their estimates will either increase the probability or nearly eliminate it isn't a stretch, depending on how their processes work and the size of the uncertainty 'cone' vs. the cross section of mars (if a cone is an accurate model of how those predictions work, which is how they animate it for the unintiated), it might be a correct characterization..
I think laser eye corrective surgery is a tad different from having a display implanted into your eye. And a far cry from surgical or other means to modify neurology for the sake of interacting with technology. Point taken that people don't find glasses/contacts convenient as they exist today, but biotech may make contact lenses that can be worn for an indefinite period of time (during sleep, less likely to come out, generally more chemically cooperative with the eye). I would guess that would happen before society got anywhere near technologically ready for surgical optical augmentation, or the more severe methods you mention. If you can seamlessly inject data visually, tactilely, aurally, as well as taste/smell at arbitrarily high levels of detail, what's left that our minds are proven capable of grasping? Two motivations I see to this are general discomfort with invasive procedures, and the inability to disconnect without assistance. Who doesn't on occasion intentionally leave their mobile phone in the car when going in somewhere? What if you couldn't honestly claim that you had no power to your devices, or that you left them behind? I know consciously you could achieve the same effect without actually physically leaving it behind, but psychologically, it hasn't panned out that way yet despite the glaringly obvious technical means to cope.
I don't think many people are eager to get their brain rewired to interact more quickly with technology. Even as surgical procedures become safer and less intrusive, I still see it as being mostly relegated to medical reasons with the exceptions that would fall in line with cosmetic surgery of today. Of the people I know, only one in discussions we've had has said 'oh yeah, hook me up', while the rest don't see how much more can be gained that can't be done using our existing senses and physical capabilities. Theoretical capabilities to process data beyond what can be abstracted to our senses aren't exactly things that can be grasped (our minds have never had such an opportunity, thus describing/imagining at least to me boils down to terms of life experience). If we cannot imagine perception beyond our sensory inputs (even telepathy boils down to visual images and hearing when imagined), then why muck around with our neurology when we can front end everything through our existing senses.
I know a lot of people steer cleer of tatoos, implants, and piercings, so it's not like saying those things are universally accepted (I know more people without any of those things than with, even including the not uncommon ear piercing). The common piercings and tatoos don't modify anything deeper than the skin, and from the beginning of time people have not been overly concerned with risks to that organ, so it's not like technological advancement can take credit for people willing to mess with their skin. I don't know personally a single person who has opted for more invasive cosmetic surgery. Though in certain circles it may not be uncommon (marketedly entertainment, for obvious reasons), and those circles are so blatant it may seem that cosmetic surgery is more ubiquitous than it is, I think cosmetic surgery is still not something most people are totally comfortable with.
There was a common theme of 'global warming will destroy NYC'. There also was society losing all freedom for the sake of security, and pining for the days of freedom. There was even the prediction of the largest building being a Starbucks, for god's sake, how much more pessimism do you need.
energy use is at its peak, (during hot, sunny days!) However, energy use also peaks at times of extreme cold. In milder climates, sure, this isn't much of a concern, but I think people in Alaska would disagree with that assertion (but then again, who knows what climate change will occur). Of course, some environments may benefit from a mix of photovoltaic and solar-heated water, but in any event, photovoltaics isn't the universal answer.
And to characterize solar as *currently* being cheap as coal ignores many factors. For one, I don't know what the efficiency of those solar panels, so the surface area needed to be dedicated to power collection/translation is potentially huge. In order to have decentralized power, every family would need a huge house inefficiently using land. The reality is that many apartment buildings and the like exist that could not possibly provide their own energy even if covered in 'dollar-per-watt' photovoltaic cells as things exist today.
Now, advance technology to ubiquitous 40% or better solar panels, have an electrical storage medium with good characteristics of duty cycle to get you through the nights and inclement weather, and have every last technology go to the highly efficient end of the spectrum (i.e. LED lighting), and things will be interesting.
I do agree that a shift will occur from fossil fuels toward nuclear and photovoltaics will happen (hopefully stressing photovoltaics and meeting our needs through a medium that by definition won't be exhausted for earth until earth has much much bigger problems), but if solar power were already that cheap and easy today, it would have already experienced sudden massive deployments.
everyone's eyes will be implanted with tiny displays While I agree that ubiquitous HUD is not an unlikely thing, I personally doubt implantation would be the path. If you can implant it, I would wager a more popular and equally effective method would be contact lens display or glasses. The only possible advantage of implantation would be greater flexibility with respect to power delivery, but power consumption/storage technology would probably make it a moot concern, with lenses charging quickly for up to many-day concurrent usage.
I also doubt you'd be looking at any newspaper if technology were at that level (it's already getting fairly rare where I live). That sort of prediction reminds me of the person who creating an automobile that looked like a carriage, complete with a fake horse head thinking of using technology to advance something not overly different to today.. I also wonder about the necessary intervention between the senses and reality that would be required for real time audio conversations, I think it more likely that two people coming face to face without a common language would use some sort of text input to converse, but I wonder to what extent the possibility of no absolutely ubiquitous language would still be there.
They will be heroes because people will recognize how sanitation workers are keeping the city alive. I doubt sanitation workers would be recognized as heroes, despite the fact that reality will match what was described (reuse to the nth degree). I don't know if an archaeological dig would be seen as informative about their past (our current age). After all, in our age, we don't need to resort to such methods to understand the world of the 1800s, and our record keeping is as meticulous as it ever were. I know about the Ford Model-T, without ever having seen one in person, I know about the emergence of repeat-fire rifles in the 1860s, that the weapons commonly in use in the 1700s were not rifled. I know about the beginnings of heavier-than-air flight in the early 20th century. Archeology doesn't come into play until record/artifact keeping is poor or inhibited by the collapse of a civilization. To say they will study our current age through archaeological means to me implies a really dramatically bad set of circumstances between now and then.
Mostly they keep to realistic projections, a lot of dystopian features abound, and it's hard to say without knowing the external forces whether the optimists or pessimists will be right.
I think the seventh grader is the most insightful (well, except the Jetson's style toilet..) "The Empire State Building will no longer be New York's largest building; it will probably be replaced by a giant Starbucks." Yeah, that about sums it up...
While architecturally it was sufficient, I believe MS held off on 2k being the day of desktop NT kernel due to the lack of the 'compatibility' crud to help a lot of pre-2k apps work (i.e. fake outs to look like Win9x). Note, it's far from perfect (I actually had an easier time running Myst Masterpiece edition under linux through wine than getting it to work on a current XP install), but it's better than what 2k offered. I thought I heard rumors that 2k Professional was originally going to be accompanied by a 2k home, but it just didn't happen (maybe because of home app compatibility issues). It might be why XP was the first MS os to offer that feature, because they had to.
So yes, a lot of power users put 2k professional on their desktop (the first NT release that actually kept up on DirectX), where NT 4 just wasn't cutting it in a particular measure of features, but characterizing the home market as XP being the day MS brought a serious offering intended for the home desktop is accurate. And XP for all the ugly appearances wasn't really significantly different from 2k, so calling Win2k the greatest MS OS at the expense of XP I would theoretically disagree with (I say as I type from an Ubunut box)
They already do h264 in hardware I believe, but without a framework in Linux to take advantage.it currently. Hence my discussion about a replacement being discussed for XvMC (extending XvMC I believe they decided was not feasible, as it wasn't flexibly designed). And I believe that in 2 years time, hardware accelerated 1920x1080 h264 playback will be moot in the face of the processors that wouldn't be the least bit troubled to play that back.
They are still using *round wheels*. They are bound to the philosophy of millenia ago. A superbly polished copy of the original wheels, shinier, but still defined by it.
I think it's really not intelligent to argue that using old concepts is bad *especially* when citing Apple as a shining example of what's *good*, considering they are using a BSD at the core, with an evolved Step based API/interface. The innovations of the GUI have nothing to do with what Linux copies of long ago. What Linux copies from long ago is what every other modern platform copies (save for Windows, which I don't think people hold up as an example of stellar architecture). The GUI portion happens to have the X protocol at the core, but the APIs and behaviors are largely dictated by higher-level toolkits that are nowadays pretty much the same across the board. Compiz is a good example. Yes, there is some blatant rip-off of visual effects from other platforms, but there are new ones as well. Also, they extended the concept of expose to have window title search, which is nice. Yes, it's all an implementation with unix-style paths, with X protocol at the core, but that's a moot point, since all the innovation happens outside that arena across the board regardless of platform.
Your first point is quite valid, they've left legacy in a quagmire, and generally aim to be bleeding edge cannon fodder for the sake of the RHEL releases. If you want a stable long term free distribution in that family, you must go with CentOS. Meanwhile, Ubuntu releases are mostly short term (similar to Fedora), but don't aim to be testing ground for anyone else, and continually makes decisions toward stability forgoing not-yet tested features (i.e. KDE 4, which Ubuntu 8.4 decided to skip, and Fedora 9 will be embracing, a perfect example). They release LTS every so often for CentOS like cycles.
I prefer apt, but yum isn't so bad. It features the same basic functionality, and if you are pedantic, can even maintain the distinction between updating metadata and leaving metadata alone (in apt world, the difference between update and upgrade). I haven't found yum lacking features lately, but was perplexed why it evolved when apt-rpm existed. I was annoyed by the frequent unsolicited metadata updates when I just wanted to install packages and I knew the metadata was fine, but I've learned how to deal with that and the default behavior seems to have gotten more sane.
They are talking about ensuring that in 1 to 2 years time, video acceleration will be architected to be open-source accessible without compromising DRM (if they continue to implement that).
Contrast this to nVidia which for the GeForce 8 series they've decided to stop supporting XvMC in their closed-source driver.
From my perspective, currently if you are buying a new video card, your system is probably already able to keep up with 1920x1080 playback using only the CPU. In a year to two years time, I can't imagine the generation of systems not being able to cope. XvMC only helps for MPEG-2, wasn't updated to be usable for more advanced codecs. I've seen at least discussion toward changing that, but I think the community is in largely a 'what's the point?' sort of mentality.
As much as I'm all for this strategy, if it costs them a significant amount in terms of production cost someway, it may not be worth the benefit, which is relegated mostly to a token gesture now. The 3D acceleration and, by association, the proccesing capabilities of the GPU are far more interesting. It sounds like they face no insurmountable obstacles in releasing those specs (though they have taken their sweet time about it since their announcement a few months ago).
You probably have aGPS. It's GPS that gets most of the satellite data from your Cell tower (which has line of sight guaranteed to a lot of GPS satellites) and uses that in conjunction with GPS satellite data it can pick up directly (even indoors, you can probably get at least one satellite, and aGPS is good with that). An aGPS handset can do ~10 ft precise location, but requires a cell tower for the satellite data it's not likely able to pick up.
It gives a vague couple-mile area that you should be in or around. Google has been working to give this to phones lacking aGPS, but it's not a good excuse for lacking the feature when my zero-charge (one-year contract zero money) phone does have it.
My point was that hypothetically, a reverse dns lookup for an third party's ip address could be misleading without the knowledge of the first party. You sign up for a service with me, and you use www.analytics.example.com as the calling address. Later on, I decide I want to be sneaky, and the reverse lookup for www.analytics.example.com becomes 10.117.1.2O.example.com. Is it your fault I did that? Not really. This isn't the case in Adobe's example, now that I've looked at it, but it's a plausible scenario.
All that aside, going to www.adobe.com in firefox, then doing a view source, ctrl-f for 192.168 reveals that it appears in that form verbatim in the html served from adobe's website. On the surface it does appear to not be the case I described. The only way they'd be unaware of the misleading address is if they include code verbatim on their site from a third party without even reviewing it, which would be a horrible excuse.
It's not necessarily adobe's fault that the address is misleading. Who knows what the code is calling the address, and the filtering application doesn't know either, it just reverse lookups the IP address and gets that answer from DNS. However, the response isn't that reassuring 'why, of course we do it, shut up, big deal, we act just like a web browser does when you connect to our site, so what's the big deal?' ignoring the fact that people aren't explicitly trying to use a web browser, they're rying to use an application.
As to the address, it's certainly suspicious that Omniture chose such a misleading looking domain name for one of their servers. I'm not even sure what they were expecting to pull off. If someone is knowledgeable to recognize that as a private network, they are almost certainly knowledgeable enough to recognize there being no point to connect to such an address (chances are it wouldn't exist), even if they didn't notice the.net. 192.168 is so small it tends only be used in small environments where technical users have a high chance of understanding the full lay of the land, they'd probably know how licensing is working at the site and the point of all the 'server' role systems. They probably would also wonder why they see an ip address instead of the usual DNS lookup in the dialog, prompting noticing the suffix. 10. might have been a riper target, it's generous address space means it might be used in an environment where a technical user could mistake it for an internal company server (i.e. a license server).
Any firewalling rules wouldn't be fooled by such a stunt as well, so trying to trick it into one zone versus another seems a stretch..
I've watched a fair share of CC, and even on non-live programs, I have to wonder if sometimes some dictation software was used then edited. I can hear and can tell when things are omitted, or off base. Sometimes *really* off base. Examples: "Seeing my family is very important to me" was what was said. "Seeing my family is very porn" was the CC. "Miss Universe" was the audio, CCed as: "Miss Urine Verse"
Or it could have been a person who wanted to slip some humor in...
The medical imaging advancements, ok, that's not exactly a huge leap, particularly in the context of recent low-power MRI and fancy CT scan advances.
Cell phone being everything. Internet PCs are like that today without the ubiquitous voice capability and location awareness. It's a logical step as 'smartphones' become the norm, and some countries are already there.
The ability to know everything about the food you eat may be a stretch. I doubt personal sensor systems will develop to test things *non-destructively*, and therefore you are left with whatever the vendor tells you. No tricorders in the next 5 years, I guarantee. While this could be done on-line from the vendor using your cell-phone, why would they be more forthcoming online than the label?
As to driving, it's also not a huge leap. A huge component of that is GPS, which already exists and is being augmented with things like traffic data all the time. Car radar and inter-car communication comprise near-term information for a lot of capability with respect to discouraging bad habits (i.e. tailgating).
In terms of energy-efficiency, I think they've taken their datacenter perception and applied it directly without thinking in a general case. Computers can operate at different capabilities depending on power-consumption and depending on the task, some things may be appropriate. Right now the picture is complex and it pretty much demands administrators to dictate how it should work. In the home, for utility appliances, you turn them on and they should turn off when the task is complete. For lights and television and the like, interacting manually with a cell phone is burdensome, presence detection would be more intelligent. Apple's vision would be less attention-demanding, I'm sure (using presence detection).
It's better than the alternative of all-out access. That's why only one security mechanism isn't enough. In your case, if they managed to exploit ping for raw socket access to arp spoof, they could launch a DoS or start a man-in-the-middle attack. Not much can be done with the DoS, but SSL and ssh protocols should guard against the man-in-the-middle if used correctly.
The point is every facility needs to do it's part to mitigate risk security wise. It may be better to provide a facility to do ICMP echo request and forward replies without administrator privilege somehow (if ICMP weren't designed the way it is, it probably would have existed long ago), but this was merely an easy-to-follow example of risk mitigation through restricted capabilities, showing a reduced exposure over the previous practice, not an eliminated exposure..
In this case, the publisher is making *money* off of it. It's one thing to spout those off for fun on forums and the like, it's another to capitalize on it.
And I have seen at least one commercial recently where he actively participates in a sort of parody. So he isn't shy of the jokes, just doesn't want other people to profit off him without letting him in.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows XP would no longer be copyrighted...
Say what we may about it, generally forcing some software companies to release more often to avoid a 5 year expiration date may not be a good thing for the industry at large.
bash *could* support opening an OpenGL screen to display a 3D model paper clip to help you enter commands...
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.0R/schedule.html
Of course, the 6.3 release seems to be behind schedule, but they haven't officially missed any 7.0 release milestones yet and the schedule puts it at mid January.
Mostly, a waste of GPU time. But seriously, the expose-ripoff with window title search that compiz has is highly productive when you open lots of windows. Other stuff, pretty much eye candy to me, but I admit I don't try every thing or understand functional benefits some features I relegated to eye candy. There are ways to make use of rendering live to GL manipulated textures that I'm sure will increase (Vista I didn't see make functional use of it, OSX did better, and with all the many different directions people are taking 3D effects in compiz and other projects in the open-source world, some interesting stuff is probably yet to come.
That the probability of the calculations may logically either: increase (so long as mars is a subset of the cone, not necessarily the center) or, ultimately, drop to zero. Of course, since the cross section of mars compared to the scope of uncertainly isn't infinitely small, and other factors are involved, there are some logical situations that would lead to a decrease without totally zeroing.
But, saying that it's nearly certain their estimates will either increase the probability or nearly eliminate it isn't a stretch, depending on how their processes work and the size of the uncertainty 'cone' vs. the cross section of mars (if a cone is an accurate model of how those predictions work, which is how they animate it for the unintiated), it might be a correct characterization..
I think laser eye corrective surgery is a tad different from having a display implanted into your eye. And a far cry from surgical or other means to modify neurology for the sake of interacting with technology. Point taken that people don't find glasses/contacts convenient as they exist today, but biotech may make contact lenses that can be worn for an indefinite period of time (during sleep, less likely to come out, generally more chemically cooperative with the eye). I would guess that would happen before society got anywhere near technologically ready for surgical optical augmentation, or the more severe methods you mention. If you can seamlessly inject data visually, tactilely, aurally, as well as taste/smell at arbitrarily high levels of detail, what's left that our minds are proven capable of grasping? Two motivations I see to this are general discomfort with invasive procedures, and the inability to disconnect without assistance. Who doesn't on occasion intentionally leave their mobile phone in the car when going in somewhere? What if you couldn't honestly claim that you had no power to your devices, or that you left them behind? I know consciously you could achieve the same effect without actually physically leaving it behind, but psychologically, it hasn't panned out that way yet despite the glaringly obvious technical means to cope.
I don't think many people are eager to get their brain rewired to interact more quickly with technology. Even as surgical procedures become safer and less intrusive, I still see it as being mostly relegated to medical reasons with the exceptions that would fall in line with cosmetic surgery of today. Of the people I know, only one in discussions we've had has said 'oh yeah, hook me up', while the rest don't see how much more can be gained that can't be done using our existing senses and physical capabilities. Theoretical capabilities to process data beyond what can be abstracted to our senses aren't exactly things that can be grasped (our minds have never had such an opportunity, thus describing/imagining at least to me boils down to terms of life experience). If we cannot imagine perception beyond our sensory inputs (even telepathy boils down to visual images and hearing when imagined), then why muck around with our neurology when we can front end everything through our existing senses.
I know a lot of people steer cleer of tatoos, implants, and piercings, so it's not like saying those things are universally accepted (I know more people without any of those things than with, even including the not uncommon ear piercing). The common piercings and tatoos don't modify anything deeper than the skin, and from the beginning of time people have not been overly concerned with risks to that organ, so it's not like technological advancement can take credit for people willing to mess with their skin. I don't know personally a single person who has opted for more invasive cosmetic surgery. Though in certain circles it may not be uncommon (marketedly entertainment, for obvious reasons), and those circles are so blatant it may seem that cosmetic surgery is more ubiquitous than it is, I think cosmetic surgery is still not something most people are totally comfortable with.
There was a common theme of 'global warming will destroy NYC'. There also was society losing all freedom for the sake of security, and pining for the days of freedom. There was even the prediction of the largest building being a Starbucks, for god's sake, how much more pessimism do you need.
And to characterize solar as *currently* being cheap as coal ignores many factors. For one, I don't know what the efficiency of those solar panels, so the surface area needed to be dedicated to power collection/translation is potentially huge. In order to have decentralized power, every family would need a huge house inefficiently using land. The reality is that many apartment buildings and the like exist that could not possibly provide their own energy even if covered in 'dollar-per-watt' photovoltaic cells as things exist today.
Now, advance technology to ubiquitous 40% or better solar panels, have an electrical storage medium with good characteristics of duty cycle to get you through the nights and inclement weather, and have every last technology go to the highly efficient end of the spectrum (i.e. LED lighting), and things will be interesting.
I do agree that a shift will occur from fossil fuels toward nuclear and photovoltaics will happen (hopefully stressing photovoltaics and meeting our needs through a medium that by definition won't be exhausted for earth until earth has much much bigger problems), but if solar power were already that cheap and easy today, it would have already experienced sudden massive deployments.
I also doubt you'd be looking at any newspaper if technology were at that level (it's already getting fairly rare where I live). That sort of prediction reminds me of the person who creating an automobile that looked like a carriage, complete with a fake horse head thinking of using technology to advance something not overly different to today.. I also wonder about the necessary intervention between the senses and reality that would be required for real time audio conversations, I think it more likely that two people coming face to face without a common language would use some sort of text input to converse, but I wonder to what extent the possibility of no absolutely ubiquitous language would still be there. They will be heroes because people will recognize how sanitation workers are keeping the city alive. I doubt sanitation workers would be recognized as heroes, despite the fact that reality will match what was described (reuse to the nth degree). I don't know if an archaeological dig would be seen as informative about their past (our current age). After all, in our age, we don't need to resort to such methods to understand the world of the 1800s, and our record keeping is as meticulous as it ever were. I know about the Ford Model-T, without ever having seen one in person, I know about the emergence of repeat-fire rifles in the 1860s, that the weapons commonly in use in the 1700s were not rifled. I know about the beginnings of heavier-than-air flight in the early 20th century. Archeology doesn't come into play until record/artifact keeping is poor or inhibited by the collapse of a civilization. To say they will study our current age through archaeological means to me implies a really dramatically bad set of circumstances between now and then.
Mostly they keep to realistic projections, a lot of dystopian features abound, and it's hard to say without knowing the external forces whether the optimists or pessimists will be right.
I think the seventh grader is the most insightful (well, except the Jetson's style toilet..) "The Empire State Building will no longer be New York's largest building; it will probably be replaced by a giant Starbucks." Yeah, that about sums it up...
While architecturally it was sufficient, I believe MS held off on 2k being the day of desktop NT kernel due to the lack of the 'compatibility' crud to help a lot of pre-2k apps work (i.e. fake outs to look like Win9x). Note, it's far from perfect (I actually had an easier time running Myst Masterpiece edition under linux through wine than getting it to work on a current XP install), but it's better than what 2k offered. I thought I heard rumors that 2k Professional was originally going to be accompanied by a 2k home, but it just didn't happen (maybe because of home app compatibility issues). It might be why XP was the first MS os to offer that feature, because they had to.
So yes, a lot of power users put 2k professional on their desktop (the first NT release that actually kept up on DirectX), where NT 4 just wasn't cutting it in a particular measure of features, but characterizing the home market as XP being the day MS brought a serious offering intended for the home desktop is accurate. And XP for all the ugly appearances wasn't really significantly different from 2k, so calling Win2k the greatest MS OS at the expense of XP I would theoretically disagree with (I say as I type from an Ubunut box)
They already do h264 in hardware I believe, but without a framework in Linux to take advantage.it currently. Hence my discussion about a replacement being discussed for XvMC (extending XvMC I believe they decided was not feasible, as it wasn't flexibly designed). And I believe that in 2 years time, hardware accelerated 1920x1080 h264 playback will be moot in the face of the processors that wouldn't be the least bit troubled to play that back.
They are still using *round wheels*. They are bound to the philosophy of millenia ago. A superbly polished copy of the original wheels, shinier, but still defined by it.
I think it's really not intelligent to argue that using old concepts is bad *especially* when citing Apple as a shining example of what's *good*, considering they are using a BSD at the core, with an evolved Step based API/interface. The innovations of the GUI have nothing to do with what Linux copies of long ago. What Linux copies from long ago is what every other modern platform copies (save for Windows, which I don't think people hold up as an example of stellar architecture). The GUI portion happens to have the X protocol at the core, but the APIs and behaviors are largely dictated by higher-level toolkits that are nowadays pretty much the same across the board. Compiz is a good example. Yes, there is some blatant rip-off of visual effects from other platforms, but there are new ones as well. Also, they extended the concept of expose to have window title search, which is nice. Yes, it's all an implementation with unix-style paths, with X protocol at the core, but that's a moot point, since all the innovation happens outside that arena across the board regardless of platform.
Your first point is quite valid, they've left legacy in a quagmire, and generally aim to be bleeding edge cannon fodder for the sake of the RHEL releases. If you want a stable long term free distribution in that family, you must go with CentOS. Meanwhile, Ubuntu releases are mostly short term (similar to Fedora), but don't aim to be testing ground for anyone else, and continually makes decisions toward stability forgoing not-yet tested features (i.e. KDE 4, which Ubuntu 8.4 decided to skip, and Fedora 9 will be embracing, a perfect example). They release LTS every so often for CentOS like cycles.
I prefer apt, but yum isn't so bad. It features the same basic functionality, and if you are pedantic, can even maintain the distinction between updating metadata and leaving metadata alone (in apt world, the difference between update and upgrade). I haven't found yum lacking features lately, but was perplexed why it evolved when apt-rpm existed. I was annoyed by the frequent unsolicited metadata updates when I just wanted to install packages and I knew the metadata was fine, but I've learned how to deal with that and the default behavior seems to have gotten more sane.
They are talking about ensuring that in 1 to 2 years time, video acceleration will be architected to be open-source accessible without compromising DRM (if they continue to implement that).
Contrast this to nVidia which for the GeForce 8 series they've decided to stop supporting XvMC in their closed-source driver.
From my perspective, currently if you are buying a new video card, your system is probably already able to keep up with 1920x1080 playback using only the CPU. In a year to two years time, I can't imagine the generation of systems not being able to cope. XvMC only helps for MPEG-2, wasn't updated to be usable for more advanced codecs. I've seen at least discussion toward changing that, but I think the community is in largely a 'what's the point?' sort of mentality.
As much as I'm all for this strategy, if it costs them a significant amount in terms of production cost someway, it may not be worth the benefit, which is relegated mostly to a token gesture now. The 3D acceleration and, by association, the proccesing capabilities of the GPU are far more interesting. It sounds like they face no insurmountable obstacles in releasing those specs (though they have taken their sweet time about it since their announcement a few months ago).
You probably have aGPS. It's GPS that gets most of the satellite data from your Cell tower (which has line of sight guaranteed to a lot of GPS satellites) and uses that in conjunction with GPS satellite data it can pick up directly (even indoors, you can probably get at least one satellite, and aGPS is good with that). An aGPS handset can do ~10 ft precise location, but requires a cell tower for the satellite data it's not likely able to pick up.
My point was my cheaper phone also has aGPS for 'free'. Apple didn't design it in.
And zooming in on your exact location kinda requires that you already know where you are. If you do, then why do you need location service at all?
It gives a vague couple-mile area that you should be in or around. Google has been working to give this to phones lacking aGPS, but it's not a good excuse for lacking the feature when my zero-charge (one-year contract zero money) phone does have it.
My point was that hypothetically, a reverse dns lookup for an third party's ip address could be misleading without the knowledge of the first party. You sign up for a service with me, and you use www.analytics.example.com as the calling address. Later on, I decide I want to be sneaky, and the reverse lookup for www.analytics.example.com becomes 10.117.1.2O.example.com. Is it your fault I did that? Not really. This isn't the case in Adobe's example, now that I've looked at it, but it's a plausible scenario.
All that aside, going to www.adobe.com in firefox, then doing a view source, ctrl-f for 192.168 reveals that it appears in that form verbatim in the html served from adobe's website. On the surface it does appear to not be the case I described. The only way they'd be unaware of the misleading address is if they include code verbatim on their site from a third party without even reviewing it, which would be a horrible excuse.
It's not necessarily adobe's fault that the address is misleading. Who knows what the code is calling the address, and the filtering application doesn't know either, it just reverse lookups the IP address and gets that answer from DNS. However, the response isn't that reassuring 'why, of course we do it, shut up, big deal, we act just like a web browser does when you connect to our site, so what's the big deal?' ignoring the fact that people aren't explicitly trying to use a web browser, they're rying to use an application.
.net. 192.168 is so small it tends only be used in small environments where technical users have a high chance of understanding the full lay of the land, they'd probably know how licensing is working at the site and the point of all the 'server' role systems. They probably would also wonder why they see an ip address instead of the usual DNS lookup in the dialog, prompting noticing the suffix. 10. might have been a riper target, it's generous address space means it might be used in an environment where a technical user could mistake it for an internal company server (i.e. a license server).
As to the address, it's certainly suspicious that Omniture chose such a misleading looking domain name for one of their servers. I'm not even sure what they were expecting to pull off. If someone is knowledgeable to recognize that as a private network, they are almost certainly knowledgeable enough to recognize there being no point to connect to such an address (chances are it wouldn't exist), even if they didn't notice the
Any firewalling rules wouldn't be fooled by such a stunt as well, so trying to trick it into one zone versus another seems a stretch..
I've watched a fair share of CC, and even on non-live programs, I have to wonder if sometimes some dictation software was used then edited. I can hear and can tell when things are omitted, or off base. Sometimes *really* off base. Examples:
"Seeing my family is very important to me" was what was said.
"Seeing my family is very porn" was the CC.
"Miss Universe" was the audio, CCed as: "Miss Urine Verse"
Or it could have been a person who wanted to slip some humor in...
http://portal.wecreatestuff.com/
For those for whatever reason without the 3D one. Maybe even for those who finished portal...
The medical imaging advancements, ok, that's not exactly a huge leap, particularly in the context of recent low-power MRI and fancy CT scan advances.
Cell phone being everything. Internet PCs are like that today without the ubiquitous voice capability and location awareness. It's a logical step as 'smartphones' become the norm, and some countries are already there.
The ability to know everything about the food you eat may be a stretch. I doubt personal sensor systems will develop to test things *non-destructively*, and therefore you are left with whatever the vendor tells you. No tricorders in the next 5 years, I guarantee. While this could be done on-line from the vendor using your cell-phone, why would they be more forthcoming online than the label?
As to driving, it's also not a huge leap. A huge component of that is GPS, which already exists and is being augmented with things like traffic data all the time. Car radar and inter-car communication comprise near-term information for a lot of capability with respect to discouraging bad habits (i.e. tailgating).
In terms of energy-efficiency, I think they've taken their datacenter perception and applied it directly without thinking in a general case. Computers can operate at different capabilities depending on power-consumption and depending on the task, some things may be appropriate. Right now the picture is complex and it pretty much demands administrators to dictate how it should work. In the home, for utility appliances, you turn them on and they should turn off when the task is complete. For lights and television and the like, interacting manually with a cell phone is burdensome, presence detection would be more intelligent. Apple's vision would be less attention-demanding, I'm sure (using presence detection).
It's better than the alternative of all-out access. That's why only one security mechanism isn't enough. In your case, if they managed to exploit ping for raw socket access to arp spoof, they could launch a DoS or start a man-in-the-middle attack. Not much can be done with the DoS, but SSL and ssh protocols should guard against the man-in-the-middle if used correctly.
The point is every facility needs to do it's part to mitigate risk security wise. It may be better to provide a facility to do ICMP echo request and forward replies without administrator privilege somehow (if ICMP weren't designed the way it is, it probably would have existed long ago), but this was merely an easy-to-follow example of risk mitigation through restricted capabilities, showing a reduced exposure over the previous practice, not an eliminated exposure..
In this case, the publisher is making *money* off of it. It's one thing to spout those off for fun on forums and the like, it's another to capitalize on it.
And I have seen at least one commercial recently where he actively participates in a sort of parody. So he isn't shy of the jokes, just doesn't want other people to profit off him without letting him in.
ls is not equipped (as far as I know) for displaying acls.
$ getfacl .
# file: .
# owner: ownaccount
# group: owngroup
user::rwx
group::r-x
other::r-x
That was default, reflecting:
drwxr-xr-x 2 ownaccount owngroup 4096 2007-12-23 12:28 .
$ setfacl -m mythtv:rw .
$ getfacl .
# file: .
# owner: ownaccount
# group: owngroup
user::rwx
user:mythtv:rw-
group::r-x
mask::rwx
other::r-x
And ls shows:
drwxrwxr-x+ 2 ownuser owngroup 4096 2007-12-23 12:28 .
Note the +. It's enough to indicate acl existance, but not more than that.