PCs come "jailbroken" by default. It didn't void the warranty on my PC when I installed Linux on it. Why should smartphones (which are just pocket sized computers) be any different?
Since HP already own 3COM, who spun off Palm in 2000 (with a first day valuation of something like 30 times what they are paying for it today), one could almost say that Palm is being bought back after 10 (not so happy) years as an independent company.
I don't think this characterization is fair, and I think you would have a hard time finding somebody who actually worked on Freenet to agree with you. Ian's orginal technical ideas for Freenet - as well as his vision - are very much still a big part of the architecture, and he could never be said to have abandoned it. In fact, time has vindicated many of his ideas to a far greater extent than I expected when we started working with them. You are right that the project has not yet solved the problems it set out to solve - but since it has wildly high ambitions, that should hardly be surprising. I think it has made a positive contribution all the same, if only to our understanding of many of the issues involved.
It is true that the press has had a tendency to paint Ian as the lone father of the project, but that is just the way to press works, and I have never seen Ian taking credit for other peoples work. And, to be honest, after you have done it a few times, you start realizing that dealing with the press isn't nearly as fun as it is cracked up to be, and that Ian has a knack for communication that most nerds, myself included, do not. I think Freenet has been very well served by Ian's ability to effectively communicate it's goals and gain attention -- among other things it has allowed several coders, of whom I was the first but not the last, to work full time for the project for certain periods. That said, I was a bit disappointed when the NYTimes ran a cover story on a presentation Ian and I held at Defcon and forgot to mention me at all, but I got over it:-).
I've spent the last 11 years at various math institutions and conferences all over the world. I think I qualify as a "math nerd", and I have a PhD to prove it. I find the question dumb, and somewhat insulting.
Firstly the whole idea that their is a single "math nerd" type is ridiculous. Very few mathematicians I know fit into the high pants and thick glasses type. A lot of people at my institution are musicians, several play in rock bands at night, some dance, some are training buffs, one guy I know is combining his PhD with playing professional sports and is on his way to Olympics. While most are still guys, a growing portion are girls: some are straight, some are gay, some are single, quite many are married. In fact the variety is probably the only defining feature I can find.
And when it comes to partying, the only special way I can think of that mathematicians like to party is hard. I can remember from many times the surprise of "numerotypicals" after having partyed till dawn with a bunch of mathematicians. While there are certainly the "study and never leave the lab" types - most math nerds know are more like the opposite. The reason for this is probably that math is high stress occupation (try having as your job to push your mind to the very limit of its ability every day) which tends to lead to hard partying behavior. The stress is also the reason why many mathematicians are creatively worn out by 35-40.
So, seriously, stop the silly patronizing and just organize a good party. With lots of booze.
Slashdotters are all convinced that they know how to run a publication for absolutely nothing. Save your breath. They simply don't want to understand that regularly producing a quality journal has costs, time, and effort associated with it. Here is a completely free journal that is among the most reputable in its field. I guess it doesn't exist.
Elsevier made a profit of 850 million USD off academic publishing last year, a more than 25% profit margin.
The Jungle is a novel (and an activist novel at that), not really a reliable source. According to Wikipedia (which of course isn't a reliable source either): "Ironically, the only claim that was unsubstantiated by the report was the claim that workers, whom had fallen into the giant lard vats, were left in these vats and were consequently being made into Durham's Pure Leaf Lard- by far the most influential, revolting, and striking passage in the book."
What Jobs seemed to be claiming wasn't that having fewer implementations would make it harder to crack (he admitted that it can always be cracked), but rather that it made it easier and faster to release new versions when the old ones had been cracked.
But I'll be honest that my eyes just glazed over when I hit by changing your repositories in the Synaptic upgrade tool from Dapper to Edgy. It didn't get much better after that.
I think a bigger problem is that of misinformation. In fact, changing the repositories is the absolutely wrong way to upgrade Ubuntu - there is a program called update-manager which will handle the process correctly, and as it happens, yes it has a GUI.
Don't you feel a little silly about your long rant now?
According to wikipedia it's a network where "users only connect to people they trust". If that's the case then that's different than what the linked article in the/. summary is talking about.
Well, in some sense it does fall under that defenition, since you have to trust the service provider to use it, and they are the only people you connect directly to (they act as an anonymizing proxy to talk to anybody else). Of course, having one large centralized anonymizer is not at all within the spirit of the definition, which rather means things like WASTE or Freenet where everybody has their own circle of trusted peers.
The service they are providing is usually referred to as as anonymous proxy. The reason they are using the term Darknet is probably that I have been bounced around Swedish media using the term with regards to Freenet, so it is a term that a lot people here have heard meaning "file sharing they can't stop" to them.
Comments like this are so stupid. Have you ever considered how much the google guys advanced society while making that money?
The couple of billion dollars that they have earned is a pitence compared to the wealth that they have added to society. Researchers use google to better communicate their ideas, consumers use it to make sure they are getting the best product, innovators with new products and ideas use it to reach their audience, and people in less democratic and pluralist countries use it to find new ideas.
There are no ills in society - ANYWHERE - that are caused by a lack of money. People are poor when they are prevented from using their resources in an efficient manner, and this is exactly what technology like Google helps against.
I think the problem with specialized devices like this is that everybody is going to miss that one feature that _they_ really need. So in the end, to please anybody, the device ends uphaving to be a complete computer like the OQO. And then people complain about feature creep, and why they have to spend money on all those features that _they_ didn't need.
My missing feature: video out. With video out, I could bring this device instead of a laptop when I travel, and connect use it to run to presentations from when giving talks. Without video out, I need to drag along a laptop anyways.
The kit includes "30 minutes of Skype's premium service"! One has to wonder how they can throw in something so valuable. I mean, SkypeOut currently charges, umm, 1.7 euro cent per minute for calls. So 30 minutes is a stunning 51 euro cents of value (~$0.65)!
Deals like this don't come along every day!// oskar
This is possibly because it got very, very little cinema exposure.
Not so. It opened in over 2000 theatres, but had a very weak first weekend (only a little over $4000 per theatre, when a solid movie with lots of media exposure and buzz should be earned >> $10000 per theatre). The reason it was pulled fast was because it did so bad, not the other way around. Similarly, I think we have to accept the show didn't do badly because it was moved around and given strange timespots. It was moved around and given bad spots because it did badly.
I loved the show, and I am sure I will like the movie when I get to see it (it was pulled from cinema release in this country after it flopped stateside), but we all know there is a pretty big gap between what is good and what is popular. Despite all the geek attention, Firefly/Serenity simply doesn't sell to any larger audience. Sorry guys.
Before everyone here starts oozing with happiness about Serenity, it should be noted that IT FLOPPED. Despite a lot of attention, lots of dedicated fans, and great reviews, it was not even able to recap production costs at the box office. Look at this years yearly box office to get an idea of just how badly it did (for those tired of scrolling, it is in place 77).
Now, with DVD sales I am sure the studio won't end up in the red when all is said and done, but $25 million for a high budget high profile movie is terrible. Serenity will probably be pointed to in the future as a good reason not to use cult DVD followings as a reason to greenlight films. Sorry to tell ya all.
I don't see anywhere in the article that indicates they're using undocumented internal com.sun.* classes. The problem seems to be that some key functionality in OpenOffice is implemented with Java, and that Java itself is not free.
Whether they say it in the article or not, it happens to be the case. Here is a post by the main Kaffe developer about it. I quote:
Not implemented and most probably won't be. These are the JDK 1.1 undocumented (actually sun mentions them in an example in the java security architecture paper, but explicitely recommends staying away from it) key management apis. Sun has deprecated the corresponding classes in java.security with java 1.2, and uses different key management facilities. Open office developers should know better, as they are supposed to be using java 1.3, right?;)
[lots of other imports of sun.* and sunw.* classes]
Anyone using sun.* classes doesn't _want_ to be portable accross VM releases/implementations. Someone (either the open office developers, or the debian developers wanting to build open office using free software) should clean up the sun.* mess. I wouldn't want to implement sun.* classes just to suit someone else's bad programming style, and I don't know anyone who does;)
The problem is not that it uses Java, the problem is that it uses a bunch of classes that in the com.sun hierarchy - classes that are NOT part of the standard Java library, and that bind it explicitely to Sun's proprietary (source code available does not make it Free - many people have the source code for Windows) JVM. The developers have made zero effort to try to make it possible for Kaffe, GCJ, or the upcoming Harmony to be used for OpenOffice.
And yes, this is their right. If they wanted to drop everything but the Windows version, that would be their right too. If they wanted to stop development all together, or decide that future versions would be entirely proprietary, that would be their right too.
But you know what, it is perfectly reasonable to try to bring up that this is a glaring problem in the presentation of OpenOffice as a non-prorietary open office suite. The people who do so are not whining, or demanding, and they aren't being rude ASSHOLES (that would be you). They are simply putting light on a rather crucial issue.
Slashdot Mirror
PCs come "jailbroken" by default. It didn't void the warranty on my PC when I installed Linux on it. Why should smartphones (which are just pocket sized computers) be any different?
Since HP already own 3COM, who spun off Palm in 2000 (with a first day valuation of something like 30 times what they are paying for it today), one could almost say that Palm is being bought back after 10 (not so happy) years as an independent company.
I don't think this characterization is fair, and I think you would have a hard time finding somebody who actually worked on Freenet to agree with you. Ian's orginal technical ideas for Freenet - as well as his vision - are very much still a big part of the architecture, and he could never be said to have abandoned it. In fact, time has vindicated many of his ideas to a far greater extent than I expected when we started working with them. You are right that the project has not yet solved the problems it set out to solve - but since it has wildly high ambitions, that should hardly be surprising. I think it has made a positive contribution all the same, if only to our understanding of many of the issues involved.
It is true that the press has had a tendency to paint Ian as the lone father of the project, but that is just the way to press works, and I have never seen Ian taking credit for other peoples work. And, to be honest, after you have done it a few times, you start realizing that dealing with the press isn't nearly as fun as it is cracked up to be, and that Ian has a knack for communication that most nerds, myself included, do not. I think Freenet has been very well served by Ian's ability to effectively communicate it's goals and gain attention -- among other things it has allowed several coders, of whom I was the first but not the last, to work full time for the project for certain periods. That said, I was a bit disappointed when the NYTimes ran a cover story on a presentation Ian and I held at Defcon and forgot to mention me at all, but I got over it :-).
I've spent the last 11 years at various math institutions and conferences all over the world. I think I qualify as a "math nerd", and I have a PhD to prove it. I find the question dumb, and somewhat insulting.
Firstly the whole idea that their is a single "math nerd" type is ridiculous. Very few mathematicians I know fit into the high pants and thick glasses type. A lot of people at my institution are musicians, several play in rock bands at night, some dance, some are training buffs, one guy I know is combining his PhD with playing professional sports and is on his way to Olympics. While most are still guys, a growing portion are girls: some are straight, some are gay, some are single, quite many are married. In fact the variety is probably the only defining feature I can find.
And when it comes to partying, the only special way I can think of that mathematicians like to party is hard. I can remember from many times the surprise of "numerotypicals" after having partyed till dawn with a bunch of mathematicians. While there are certainly the "study and never leave the lab" types - most math nerds know are more like the opposite. The reason for this is probably that math is high stress occupation (try having as your job to push your mind to the very limit of its ability every day) which tends to lead to hard partying behavior. The stress is also the reason why many mathematicians are creatively worn out by 35-40.
So, seriously, stop the silly patronizing and just organize a good party. With lots of booze.
Well, round 17 didn't end, and the bid for the C block didn't change.
2kw per day
To lower my carbon emissions, I am now only driving my car 35 miles per hour per day!
Elsevier made a profit of 850 million USD off academic publishing last year, a more than 25% profit margin.
There is no such thing as negative trust.
(Once you accept that, the rest isn't so hard.)
Cote d'Or is owned by Kraft Foods.
The Jungle is a novel (and an activist novel at that), not really a reliable source. According to Wikipedia (which of course isn't a reliable source either): "Ironically, the only claim that was unsubstantiated by the report was the claim that workers, whom had fallen into the giant lard vats, were left in these vats and were consequently being made into Durham's Pure Leaf Lard- by far the most influential, revolting, and striking passage in the book."
Where is "Brazil"? Where is "12 Monkeys"?
"Serenity" was fun and all, but those are good films...
What Jobs seemed to be claiming wasn't that having fewer implementations would make it harder to crack (he admitted that it can always be cracked), but rather that it made it easier and faster to release new versions when the old ones had been cracked.
But I'll be honest that my eyes just glazed over when I hit by changing your repositories in the Synaptic upgrade tool from Dapper to Edgy. It didn't get much better after that.
I think a bigger problem is that of misinformation. In fact, changing the repositories is the absolutely wrong way to upgrade Ubuntu - there is a program called update-manager which will handle the process correctly, and as it happens, yes it has a GUI.
Don't you feel a little silly about your long rant now?
According to wikipedia it's a network where "users only connect to people they trust". If that's the case then that's different than what the linked article in the /. summary is talking about.
Well, in some sense it does fall under that defenition, since you have to trust the service provider to use it, and they are the only people you connect directly to (they act as an anonymizing proxy to talk to anybody else). Of course, having one large centralized anonymizer is not at all within the spirit of the definition, which rather means things like WASTE or Freenet where everybody has their own circle of trusted peers.
The service they are providing is usually referred to as as anonymous proxy. The reason they are using the term Darknet is probably that I have been bounced around Swedish media using the term with regards to Freenet, so it is a term that a lot people here have heard meaning "file sharing they can't stop" to them.
Comments like this are so stupid. Have you ever considered how much the google guys advanced society while making that money?
The couple of billion dollars that they have earned is a pitence compared to the wealth that they have added to society. Researchers use google to better communicate their ideas, consumers use it to make sure they are getting the best product, innovators with new products and ideas use it to reach their audience, and people in less democratic and pluralist countries use it to find new ideas.
There are no ills in society - ANYWHERE - that are caused by a lack of money. People are poor when they are prevented from using their resources in an efficient manner, and this is exactly what technology like Google helps against.
Its dangers, not to be disregarded, are at least 99.9% chemical in nature. Radioactivity has precisely nothing to do with it
So what is the last 0.1% of the dangers?
You think so three dimensionally.
(Consider relativity...)
I think the problem with specialized devices like this is that everybody is going to miss that one feature that _they_ really need. So in the end, to please anybody, the device ends uphaving to be a complete computer like the OQO. And then people complain about feature creep, and why they have to spend money on all those features that _they_ didn't need.
My missing feature: video out. With video out, I could bring this device instead of a laptop when I travel, and connect use it to run to presentations from when giving talks. Without video out, I need to drag along a laptop anyways.
The kit includes "30 minutes of Skype's premium service"! One has to wonder how they can throw in something so valuable. I mean, SkypeOut currently charges, umm, 1.7 euro cent per minute for calls. So 30 minutes is a stunning 51 euro cents of value (~$0.65)!
Deals like this don't come along every day!
This is possibly because it got very, very little cinema exposure.
Not so. It opened in over 2000 theatres, but had a very weak first weekend (only a little over $4000 per theatre, when a solid movie with lots of media exposure and buzz should be earned >> $10000 per theatre). The reason it was pulled fast was because it did so bad, not the other way around. Similarly, I think we have to accept the show didn't do badly because it was moved around and given strange timespots. It was moved around and given bad spots because it did badly.
I loved the show, and I am sure I will like the movie when I get to see it (it was pulled from cinema release in this country after it flopped stateside), but we all know there is a pretty big gap between what is good and what is popular. Despite all the geek attention, Firefly/Serenity simply doesn't sell to any larger audience. Sorry guys.
I'm sure there of hundreds of stories like mine.
Before everyone here starts oozing with happiness about Serenity, it should be noted that IT FLOPPED. Despite a lot of attention, lots of dedicated fans, and great reviews, it was not even able to recap production costs at the box office. Look at this years yearly box office to get an idea of just how badly it did (for those tired of scrolling, it is in place 77).
Now, with DVD sales I am sure the studio won't end up in the red when all is said and done, but $25 million for a high budget high profile movie is terrible. Serenity will probably be pointed to in the future as a good reason not to use cult DVD followings as a reason to greenlight films. Sorry to tell ya all.
What do you think a Cat 4 hurricane would do to Venice?
I don't see anywhere in the article that indicates they're using undocumented internal com.sun.* classes. The problem seems to be that some key functionality in OpenOffice is implemented with Java, and that Java itself is not free.
;)
;)
Whether they say it in the article or not, it happens to be the case. Here is a post by the main Kaffe developer about it. I quote:
>import sun.security.provider.*;
>import sun.security.provider.SystemIdentity;
>import sun.security.provider.SystemSigner;
Not implemented and most probably won't be. These are
the JDK 1.1 undocumented (actually sun mentions them
in an example in the java security architecture paper,
but explicitely recommends staying away from it) key
management apis. Sun has deprecated the corresponding
classes in java.security with java 1.2, and uses
different key management facilities. Open office
developers should know better, as they are supposed to
be using java 1.3, right?
[lots of other imports of sun.* and sunw.* classes]
Anyone using sun.* classes doesn't _want_ to be
portable accross VM releases/implementations. Someone
(either the open office developers, or the debian
developers wanting to build open office using free
software) should clean up the sun.* mess. I wouldn't
want to implement sun.* classes just to suit someone
else's bad programming style, and I don't know anyone
who does
The problem is not that it uses Java, the problem is that it uses a bunch of classes that in the com.sun hierarchy - classes that are NOT part of the standard Java library, and that bind it explicitely to Sun's proprietary (source code available does not make it Free - many people have the source code for Windows) JVM. The developers have made zero effort to try to make it possible for Kaffe, GCJ, or the upcoming Harmony to be used for OpenOffice.
And yes, this is their right. If they wanted to drop everything but the Windows version, that would be their right too. If they wanted to stop development all together, or decide that future versions would be entirely proprietary, that would be their right too.
But you know what, it is perfectly reasonable to try to bring up that this is a glaring problem in the presentation of OpenOffice as a non-prorietary open office suite. The people who do so are not whining, or demanding, and they aren't being rude ASSHOLES (that would be you). They are simply putting light on a rather crucial issue.