Cases like these are almost the opposite of the tragedy of the commons because the FOSS public resource generally improves with more users. Having to keep infrastructure running at a university with NO budget during a financial crisis is the reason I started developing a solid expertise on FOSS, and having some knowledge up front saved my bacon. The "choice" the school has made is a false one, and being exposed to two office suites instead of one is just better from an educational standpoint in any case. FOSS adoption might also help if brutal cuts rain down from "on high"... certainly did for me.
I've talked myself into thinking this way a few times, but have been left with a sick feeling and less money. FOSS often lacks the fashionable shiny paint but is very often superior, especially for technically competent users. I certainly admit that there are exceptions, and this case is possibly one... but I have no idea because I don't need this, and in generally FOSS is often the best option for me. For those jobs where it needs improvement I'll help out in the small ways I can because I want to give back, and proprietary licensing is just so bloody annoying.:)
You may dislike it on aesthetic, functional or even ideological grounds, but if you work in the tech industry it's helping to keep a floor under your wages and conditions even if you're working on proprietary and/or non-GPL software. If it wasn't for this "militant jihad" (as you put it) the big players would be sitting on stagnant monopolies closing out new competitors and we'd have an IE6 situation. Why do the big players even collaborate with competitors and the community on BSD code? It's a defence against the FOSS community and associated players... they know what it's like to ignore the GNU patent-and-cost-free zone after Google, Amazon etc...
I can't understand the complete negativity towards everything GNU. It's like Hollywood fans raging against independant film, or agribusiness hating on permiculture. GNU/FSF is more successful than those examples so perhaps that's the problem? It certainly has been an equaliser for the little guy, and the incubator for more than a few successful companies. I'm sure a lot less inhouse development would happen outside the software industry without GNU also.
As a sometime contributor and beneficiary of the GNU ecosystem I send my thanks, and an intention to provide more contributions in future.:)
Oooh... must be cutting close to the bone here.;) I could see why someone might want to keep their "eye in" on other platforms, but why work full time on a platform you're not fussed on? Oh, that's right - it's "work" and not fun. How is that not an MBA or market-droid attitude? I could see a tech making a temporary sacrifice while looking for the job they REALLY want, but the guys who are passionate about what they do rarely have to do that.
You're either a know-nothing or a shill. The Pirate Party is the fourth largest party in Sweden. It reached this size from a membership surge following the conviction of those other Pirate Bay guys. A significant proportion of Swedish people get angry politically active over this kind of thing - we could all learn something from them.
In the ideal world I think most people, no matter their position on his innocence, would want to see him tried and for justice to be done. The unfortunate fact is that even feminists who want to see him tried can see that this case is politically motivated. Aside from the soft nature of the evidence, in many juristictions the case would be thrown out because of prejudicial media attention.
Distracted by this sideshow you Americans don't realise the danger you're in. We Australians had our own bumbling George W Bush, the premier of Queensland Joh Bjelke-Petersen. His only mistake was to stay in state politics too long. His bid for Prime Minister was cleverly outmaneuvered with a snap election, and then the smug superiority in the rest of the nation was replaced by fear of what would happen if he got into power. Much energy was expended in prosecuting him, and it was frightening how completely corrupted the police force, judiciary and many other arms of government had become during his time in power. You guys have got rid of GWB but you must know in your bones how deeply wounded your democracy has been, and the influence of the USA worldwide is wounding other democracies by extension. The special persuit of a publisher (Assange) WAY beyond what is normal in a case of this kind by multiple democracies (USA, Sweden, UK, and abandoned by his own country Australia) is a symptom. Who knows what other criticism or leaks have been chilled as a direct result already... the stereotypical journalist is a drinking, smoking womaniser after all. If you want to emotionally "get" how a journalist would feel, and why Americans and by extension everyone should be afraid watch this.
Poor you... throwing a tanti because you're not working on your preferred platform. Perhaps you might have managed it if you thought more like a tech and less like a market-droid.;)
Still, we lack solid data on the particulars of this. I might see if I can get my local LUG to give collecting data on this a half-assed try and submit it to Slashdot and get criticised for our methodology. Hopefully this will encourage others to do it a lot better.;) Actually, is there any data already out there? Perhaps someone should create a slashdot poll... anyone?
This story is spreading circumstantial evidence very thin, and is definitely on the other side of the "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" boundary. In the Assange case there are so many strange facts that the burden of proof has been shifted... not so here.
I moved just as my old suburb was getting connected, and a friend had her house burn down after she had enjoyed the sweetness for half a year or so (no joke!). Another friend lives about fifty paces beyond the current active area in my city. I'm still waiting for a trench to come past my new place with bated breath.
I'll be glad to get rid of my crackly copper line. I've already been using VoIP for outgoing calls for years so I'm not as leery as some about moving off copper as some of my more conservative nerdy friends, though I'm sure widespread VoIP will have its own special problems. VPN bandwidth may actually become acceptable over a standard connection, and I know a few businesses looking forward to this. I have mixed feelings about the cloud services goldrush that will inevitably follow, but I guess this will make things more "efficient" ie. centralised. Still it will also make hosting your own services at a reasonable speed easy, and I'll certainly be taking advantage of this.
Am I the only one who doesn't believe iPads are easier? My experience supporting these devices doesn't jive with the meme and I'm beginning to think it's the Jobs "reality distortion field" at work - hear me out on this!
I was expecting the i-magic when my mother got one, but no. I thought perhaps my mother must have been an incurable luddite, but my experience supporting others has shown me no difference between the iPad and other modern OS's... people still stumble, get lost and ask questions to similar degrees - I really can't percieve a difference. My theory is the "easy iPad" is a myth that has "truthiness" because:
1) the iPad is a tool people apply to fewer and more limited tasks, and
2)...people believe the "iPads are easy" meme, which means Joe Sixpack is willing to give computing on this device a genuine try.
Am I the only one who has reached this conclusion?
Aren't the Ur-Quan meant to come from that part of space? We are so screwed.;)
BTW, Star Control II (or the open source Ur-Quan Masters) is a great game and is part of many Linux repos, and also has Win32 binaries. Download it plus a cheat map (it's too hard otherwise) and lose a weekend... it's a great game, universe and story, and it has a quirky sense of humour. Make sure you download the full music and speech, and persist through the early game - it's a little slow.
You're just jealous you aren't getting your manfeel.;) Don't worry... you will if/when you have something worthwhile to say.
Security, encryption etc... requires a special kind of braindamage - it's like the rest of I.T except worse. I'm glad ANYONE with some knowledge can maintain eye contact let alone communicate semi-effectively with the public.
And Mr a/c... as far as being a "blowhard" - you'd better hope people don't write you off as one if you're pulled aside by the TSA and they get excited about the pen knife you forgot was in your bag. It doesn't seem like it would take much of a misunderstanding for someone to disappear* for a long time these days, and entraping blowhards seems to be the new sport.
* - I was going to provide links to one of the many "terrorist plots" that were revealed to be obviously ridiculous delusions of jumpy security people (see "The Power of Nightmares" for some early examples) but after a hard search the few online links I found made things sound like those involved escaped on a technicality. I guess all those letdowns don't make the news leaving the impression of a multitude of foiled terror plots, and that's leaving aside the shady entrapment and peer pressure that has been going on recently to make those other blowhards look like terrorists.
There were plenty of total surprises eg. revelations about US contractor involvement in child prostitution, but I don't see how rock solid confirmation of suspected shadowy dealings is bad either - what citizen in ANY country wants their government acting as if scrutiny isn't even possible? I've also demonstrated above how these revelation helped precipitate important world events.
Regarding Assange - perhaps you don't realise what's at stake here. There are reporters who've already said they'll start self censoring if another reporter is declared an enemy combatant and jailed indefinitely. Also, perhaps you aren't aware of how much circumstantial evidence on the trumped up nature of this case exists. For example Karl Rove, the same guy who resigned from the Bush administration after suspected corruption of the Department of Justice ie. sacking US prosecutors over not persuing political cases "correctly"... yeah, that guy... well, he works for the Swedish Prime Minister these days.
You know Karl Rove, right? The guy that resigned from the Bush administration under a cloud after being accused of trying to corrupt the Department of Justice ie. sacking US prosecutors for not persuing cases in a 'party political' manner? Guess who he's working for these days - the Prime Minister of Sweden.
That's just one of the bad smells around this whole thing.
Look up Tunisia and wikileaks... basically the whole arab spring was in part crystalised out of the leaked cables, in particular the disclosure that America didn't particularly like or support their current dictator... and confirmation of the theft of vast amounts of resources by the ruling family. This is according to the BBC.
I have grandparents who were in camps in Poland during WWII, a great-uncle priest who was "disappeared" in soviet Russia, a flatmate whos grandparents survived fascist Italy. Naomi Wolf is a reporter who in this 2007 talk gives a chilling argument on how she thinks the fascist playbook is being replayed in America. It's a list of steps that's predictive, and she says she'll start self-censoring when another reporter is declared an enemy combatant. She HAS spoken very recently on Assange. Lets hope he doesn't get imprisoned - the integrity of the media will start self-censoring otherwise (or at least the few corners still up and batting on this stuff).
Every individual and every nation has both good and evil within... this whitehat/blackhat stuff is nonsense. I'm an atheist, but didn't Jesus speak on just this ie. "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone", the parable of the Good Samaritan etc? ie. parables on this issue at both at the individual and national level?
If you want to know about the theories NeoCons and the ruling elite subscribe to search "Leo Strauss" look at his philosophies. His students became the founders of the Neo Conservative movement and applied these theories. To summarise : the nation should get simplified "whitehat/blackhat" versions of issues that aren't necessarily even true - it's just a glue to hold society together. The elites know the truth, but hide it from the people when they deem it necessary. Sound democratic?
There's no "safe option" here. It's a tradeoff between extra security for security operatives (the amount of extra info in the scrubbed cables can be debated) vs the security of civilians at home in the context of a less accountable government and security establishment ie. erosion of democracy.
...would have been PERFECT, but strange things seem to have happened to this project. It may still be useful though.
It was purchased and closed sourced, but forked into a project called Adito, which was later renamed to OpenVPN SSH... but looking at this page the project seems to have since languished.
It is a web based VPN with a noob friendly "desktop" on which you can include multiple links to eg. intranet web apps and/or Java apps such as a preconfigured VNC client - it would seem easy enough to fashion a point-and-click solution for what you want to do, even if both "customer" and "support" are remote to the VPN+etc server. NOTHING needs to be installed on client machines (unless you're just using it as a vanilla VPN). It's really a shame that this project seems to have stalled... it had a "wow factor" and it was in the back of my head just waiting for a deployment opportunity.
...listen, I knew someone who was on a mission (regular army, but secret), and it became obvious that their cover was blown - they actually heard politicians denying their mission on the news, though it soon became public knowledge. If you think they were upset or angry you'd be wrong. I get the impression that they WANT people to know things like this, argue and hash it out in a democratic fashion. Usually though soldiers have to live the dirty war while the voters see the clean coverage - how is that disconnect healthy?
Still, after everything they didn't get away-pay... as far as the paymasters were concerned they were home the whole time and things were still top secret.
Slashdot Mirror
Cases like these are almost the opposite of the tragedy of the commons because the FOSS public resource generally improves with more users. Having to keep infrastructure running at a university with NO budget during a financial crisis is the reason I started developing a solid expertise on FOSS, and having some knowledge up front saved my bacon. The "choice" the school has made is a false one, and being exposed to two office suites instead of one is just better from an educational standpoint in any case. FOSS adoption might also help if brutal cuts rain down from "on high"... certainly did for me.
I've talked myself into thinking this way a few times, but have been left with a sick feeling and less money. FOSS often lacks the fashionable shiny paint but is very often superior, especially for technically competent users. I certainly admit that there are exceptions, and this case is possibly one... but I have no idea because I don't need this, and in generally FOSS is often the best option for me. For those jobs where it needs improvement I'll help out in the small ways I can because I want to give back, and proprietary licensing is just so bloody annoying. :)
You may dislike it on aesthetic, functional or even ideological grounds, but if you work in the tech industry it's helping to keep a floor under your wages and conditions even if you're working on proprietary and/or non-GPL software. If it wasn't for this "militant jihad" (as you put it) the big players would be sitting on stagnant monopolies closing out new competitors and we'd have an IE6 situation. Why do the big players even collaborate with competitors and the community on BSD code? It's a defence against the FOSS community and associated players... they know what it's like to ignore the GNU patent-and-cost-free zone after Google, Amazon etc...
I can't understand the complete negativity towards everything GNU. It's like Hollywood fans raging against independant film, or agribusiness hating on permiculture. GNU/FSF is more successful than those examples so perhaps that's the problem? It certainly has been an equaliser for the little guy, and the incubator for more than a few successful companies. I'm sure a lot less inhouse development would happen outside the software industry without GNU also.
As a sometime contributor and beneficiary of the GNU ecosystem I send my thanks, and an intention to provide more contributions in future. :)
Oooh... must be cutting close to the bone here. ;) I could see why someone might want to keep their "eye in" on other platforms, but why work full time on a platform you're not fussed on? Oh, that's right - it's "work" and not fun. How is that not an MBA or market-droid attitude? I could see a tech making a temporary sacrifice while looking for the job they REALLY want, but the guys who are passionate about what they do rarely have to do that.
You're either a know-nothing or a shill. The Pirate Party is the fourth largest party in Sweden. It reached this size from a membership surge following the conviction of those other Pirate Bay guys. A significant proportion of Swedish people get angry politically active over this kind of thing - we could all learn something from them.
...more bicycles were sold worldwide than family cars*. Pundits hail the passing of the family car era.
Pffft... hogwash.
* - I have no idea how many bicycles or family cars are sold, but it's at least plausible.
In the ideal world I think most people, no matter their position on his innocence, would want to see him tried and for justice to be done. The unfortunate fact is that even feminists who want to see him tried can see that this case is politically motivated. Aside from the soft nature of the evidence, in many juristictions the case would be thrown out because of prejudicial media attention.
Distracted by this sideshow you Americans don't realise the danger you're in. We Australians had our own bumbling George W Bush, the premier of Queensland Joh Bjelke-Petersen. His only mistake was to stay in state politics too long. His bid for Prime Minister was cleverly outmaneuvered with a snap election, and then the smug superiority in the rest of the nation was replaced by fear of what would happen if he got into power. Much energy was expended in prosecuting him, and it was frightening how completely corrupted the police force, judiciary and many other arms of government had become during his time in power. You guys have got rid of GWB but you must know in your bones how deeply wounded your democracy has been, and the influence of the USA worldwide is wounding other democracies by extension. The special persuit of a publisher (Assange) WAY beyond what is normal in a case of this kind by multiple democracies (USA, Sweden, UK, and abandoned by his own country Australia) is a symptom. Who knows what other criticism or leaks have been chilled as a direct result already... the stereotypical journalist is a drinking, smoking womaniser after all. If you want to emotionally "get" how a journalist would feel, and why Americans and by extension everyone should be afraid watch this.
Poor you... throwing a tanti because you're not working on your preferred platform. Perhaps you might have managed it if you thought more like a tech and less like a market-droid. ;)
Yes, I believe this is a large part of why.
Still, we lack solid data on the particulars of this. I might see if I can get my local LUG to give collecting data on this a half-assed try and submit it to Slashdot and get criticised for our methodology. Hopefully this will encourage others to do it a lot better. ;) Actually, is there any data already out there? Perhaps someone should create a slashdot poll... anyone?
This story is spreading circumstantial evidence very thin, and is definitely on the other side of the "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" boundary. In the Assange case there are so many strange facts that the burden of proof has been shifted... not so here.
I WOULD say it's possible though. It's not like the Swedish administration isn't hiring an ex Bush administration official who resigned under a cloud after trying to corrupt US Department of Justice.
Women might be impressed with bulletproof wood, but transparent?
With transparent they'd be surprised.
So in other words it would be considered rape in Sweden?
I moved just as my old suburb was getting connected, and a friend had her house burn down after she had enjoyed the sweetness for half a year or so (no joke!). Another friend lives about fifty paces beyond the current active area in my city. I'm still waiting for a trench to come past my new place with bated breath.
I'll be glad to get rid of my crackly copper line. I've already been using VoIP for outgoing calls for years so I'm not as leery as some about moving off copper as some of my more conservative nerdy friends, though I'm sure widespread VoIP will have its own special problems. VPN bandwidth may actually become acceptable over a standard connection, and I know a few businesses looking forward to this. I have mixed feelings about the cloud services goldrush that will inevitably follow, but I guess this will make things more "efficient" ie. centralised. Still it will also make hosting your own services at a reasonable speed easy, and I'll certainly be taking advantage of this.
Am I the only one who doesn't believe iPads are easier? My experience supporting these devices doesn't jive with the meme and I'm beginning to think it's the Jobs "reality distortion field" at work - hear me out on this!
I was expecting the i-magic when my mother got one, but no. I thought perhaps my mother must have been an incurable luddite, but my experience supporting others has shown me no difference between the iPad and other modern OS's... people still stumble, get lost and ask questions to similar degrees - I really can't percieve a difference. My theory is the "easy iPad" is a myth that has "truthiness" because :
1) the iPad is a tool people apply to fewer and more limited tasks, and
2) ...people believe the "iPads are easy" meme, which means Joe Sixpack is willing to give computing on this device a genuine try.
Am I the only one who has reached this conclusion?
Aren't the Ur-Quan meant to come from that part of space? We are so screwed. ;)
BTW, Star Control II (or the open source Ur-Quan Masters) is a great game and is part of many Linux repos, and also has Win32 binaries. Download it plus a cheat map (it's too hard otherwise) and lose a weekend... it's a great game, universe and story, and it has a quirky sense of humour. Make sure you download the full music and speech, and persist through the early game - it's a little slow.
You're just jealous you aren't getting your manfeel. ;) Don't worry... you will if/when you have something worthwhile to say.
Security, encryption etc... requires a special kind of braindamage - it's like the rest of I.T except worse. I'm glad ANYONE with some knowledge can maintain eye contact let alone communicate semi-effectively with the public.
And Mr a/c... as far as being a "blowhard" - you'd better hope people don't write you off as one if you're pulled aside by the TSA and they get excited about the pen knife you forgot was in your bag. It doesn't seem like it would take much of a misunderstanding for someone to disappear* for a long time these days, and entraping blowhards seems to be the new sport.
* - I was going to provide links to one of the many "terrorist plots" that were revealed to be obviously ridiculous delusions of jumpy security people (see "The Power of Nightmares" for some early examples) but after a hard search the few online links I found made things sound like those involved escaped on a technicality. I guess all those letdowns don't make the news leaving the impression of a multitude of foiled terror plots, and that's leaving aside the shady entrapment and peer pressure that has been going on recently to make those other blowhards look like terrorists.
There were plenty of total surprises eg. revelations about US contractor involvement in child prostitution, but I don't see how rock solid confirmation of suspected shadowy dealings is bad either - what citizen in ANY country wants their government acting as if scrutiny isn't even possible? I've also demonstrated above how these revelation helped precipitate important world events.
Regarding Assange - perhaps you don't realise what's at stake here. There are reporters who've already said they'll start self censoring if another reporter is declared an enemy combatant and jailed indefinitely. Also, perhaps you aren't aware of how much circumstantial evidence on the trumped up nature of this case exists. For example Karl Rove, the same guy who resigned from the Bush administration after suspected corruption of the Department of Justice ie. sacking US prosecutors over not persuing political cases "correctly"... yeah, that guy... well, he works for the Swedish Prime Minister these days.
An aside...
You know Karl Rove, right? The guy that resigned from the Bush administration under a cloud after being accused of trying to corrupt the Department of Justice ie. sacking US prosecutors for not persuing cases in a 'party political' manner? Guess who he's working for these days - the Prime Minister of Sweden.
That's just one of the bad smells around this whole thing.
Look up Tunisia and wikileaks... basically the whole arab spring was in part crystalised out of the leaked cables, in particular the disclosure that America didn't particularly like or support their current dictator... and confirmation of the theft of vast amounts of resources by the ruling family. This is according to the BBC.
I have grandparents who were in camps in Poland during WWII, a great-uncle priest who was "disappeared" in soviet Russia, a flatmate whos grandparents survived fascist Italy. Naomi Wolf is a reporter who in this 2007 talk gives a chilling argument on how she thinks the fascist playbook is being replayed in America. It's a list of steps that's predictive, and she says she'll start self-censoring when another reporter is declared an enemy combatant. She HAS spoken very recently on Assange. Lets hope he doesn't get imprisoned - the integrity of the media will start self-censoring otherwise (or at least the few corners still up and batting on this stuff).
Every individual and every nation has both good and evil within... this whitehat/blackhat stuff is nonsense. I'm an atheist, but didn't Jesus speak on just this ie. "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone", the parable of the Good Samaritan etc? ie. parables on this issue at both at the individual and national level?
If you want to know about the theories NeoCons and the ruling elite subscribe to search "Leo Strauss" look at his philosophies. His students became the founders of the Neo Conservative movement and applied these theories. To summarise : the nation should get simplified "whitehat/blackhat" versions of issues that aren't necessarily even true - it's just a glue to hold society together. The elites know the truth, but hide it from the people when they deem it necessary. Sound democratic?
Sooo... are the amount of mutations constant over time eg. compare a 40yr old father vs a 40yr old grandfather whos son reproduces at 20.
There's no "safe option" here. It's a tradeoff between extra security for security operatives (the amount of extra info in the scrubbed cables can be debated) vs the security of civilians at home in the context of a less accountable government and security establishment ie. erosion of democracy.
...and if you want to see why I'm really sad that this project isn't vibrantly being developed see this video.
...would have been PERFECT, but strange things seem to have happened to this project. It may still be useful though.
It was purchased and closed sourced, but forked into a project called Adito, which was later renamed to OpenVPN SSH... but looking at this page the project seems to have since languished.
It is a web based VPN with a noob friendly "desktop" on which you can include multiple links to eg. intranet web apps and/or Java apps such as a preconfigured VNC client - it would seem easy enough to fashion a point-and-click solution for what you want to do, even if both "customer" and "support" are remote to the VPN+etc server. NOTHING needs to be installed on client machines (unless you're just using it as a vanilla VPN). It's really a shame that this project seems to have stalled... it had a "wow factor" and it was in the back of my head just waiting for a deployment opportunity.
...listen, I knew someone who was on a mission (regular army, but secret), and it became obvious that their cover was blown - they actually heard politicians denying their mission on the news, though it soon became public knowledge. If you think they were upset or angry you'd be wrong. I get the impression that they WANT people to know things like this, argue and hash it out in a democratic fashion. Usually though soldiers have to live the dirty war while the voters see the clean coverage - how is that disconnect healthy?
Still, after everything they didn't get away-pay... as far as the paymasters were concerned they were home the whole time and things were still top secret.