It depends. Are you watching a reasonably large screen and trying to see detail? Show anyone who's not utterly blind a football game on a 50" TV in HD vs SD and they'll sure notice the difference.
Is a dual core really that much better than a single core?
It depends. Are you running a processor bottlenecked multi-threaded application? Let anyone play Crysis or try to compile a large C program on either and they'll sure notice the difference.
Is 100Mbits/sec really better than 20Mbits/s?
It depends. Are you trying to transfer large quantities of data? Send anyone a new DVD image every day and they'll sure notice the difference.
Is a $5000 hifi really better than a $200 one?
No idea.
Once people have something that is "good enough", they don't value an improvement. This is vexing for companies trying to psh consumers to the next level.
When a technical improvement becomes available, everyone is used to things the way they were before. When electricity was first commercially available, many people said they didn't want or need it. This doesn't mean that the people who said "you should get electricity so you can get a refrigerator" were wrong.
It's no more insecure than passing it in a cookie.
Because people paste cookie contents to each other over IM all the time?
URLs are designed to be shared - that's one of the things that users are expected do to with them. Putting identification information there violates the design assumptions of the system, and is therefore innately insecure.
If they want to include a trusted-by-default OpenPGP public key with Firefox, they could.
How would that help? Either they'd have to then use that OpenPGP certificate to sign site certificates (and thus either become a CA or create a new class of OpenPGP CAs out of the certificates that they did sign).
If you know how to do it, do it. Even if you aren't comfortable with network programming, if you can specify a distributed DNS system that works, people will implement it for you. But it's awfully hard to argue that something that no-one has managed to implement is a better solution to a problem with an existing popular solution.
This is a case where you're right, everyone who has thought about it agrees that you're right, and that's still not the design decision that's going to be made.
The issue here is a disagreement on goals. You want to make it so that someone who goes to the necessary effort can be secure against an arbitrary attacker. Others want to make it so that someone who goes to no effort will be secure from one step technical attacks by poorly funded attackers. People who are interested in the second case, which includes all major application developers including Mozilla, dismiss the proof of your point ("what about malicious CAs") as being out of scope.
The only solution to this problem that I can see is to try to provide real security and decentralized infrastructure in as many cases as possible. Why don't we have a Mozilla plugin that uses OpenPGP for SSL with a revolutionary UI that makes it practically useful? Why don't we have distributed DNS? Once we have proof of concept and working code, it'll be much easier to argue that we should be doing these things correctly.
The way it gets the public key of the site today is ridiculously insecure. It trusts a bunch of organizations, several of which have proven to be completely untrustworthy.
I'm pretty sure that the same organizations would be in the chain for DNSSEC.
Why would it be any more difficult than running an automated CA? It's basically the same problem, and automated CAs manage to issue certificates in real time without too much trouble.
Also, if humans make flawed soldiers, then why would human engineers/prgrammers make flawless robots?
You'd have to actually make an argument to support yourself here. By comparison, imagine if you had said "if engineers screw up arithmetic, why would engineers be able to design reliable desk calculators". There may be a difference between the cases, but you'd have to illustrate that difference in order to make a meaningful point.
In general, while there might be some really fine proprietary software out there, most of it is unreliable, nearly unusable trash. Since the makers have abandoned it there's no way to get support. Large-scale, commercially supported projects are the exception to this, such as Microsoft Office and Photoshop. Engaging in a search on Downloads.com for something that might meet your needs is a exercise in futility unless you happen to seriously luck out.
I professionally (and commercially) develop software and work with others who do so as well. I would not choose to hire most of the people that try to sell proprietary programs unless it was to train them as an entry-level programmer that barely knew the anything about programming. Most of these people are hobbyists whose skills need considerable polishing before their work can realistically be used by other people. It's being asked to buy a $30 novel written by someone who learned English last week.
Based on this, I would consider suggesting a business use proprietary software (as a general principal) to be a form of sabotage. They will become reliant on unreliable tools that produce questionable results. Sure, the fancy marketing website is nice, but the results aren't worth it.
Having multiple vendors for business critical goods and services is a basic principle of good business. Custom modified OSI compliant software ensures that *any* software development contracting firm can act as a vendor for software maintenance. Proprietary software ensures that a single vendor has a monopoly on that service.
Dominant people lead. Non-dominant people follow, or are enslaved. Those who refuse to play the game are cast out, or (again) enslaved.
You appear to be responding to technical terms with intuitively comfortable generalizations. That tends to result in the spouting of meaningless nonsense.
You can't feed yourself as an open-source software programmer if the only payment you ever receive for your work is more open-source programs.
People who program for a living get paid by their employers or clients. Companies that solely write software get paid by their clients. In both of these cases, getting more FOSS software means more resources to use to do a better job for those clients.
The primary monetary benefit of FOSS software isn't to people who write software for a living. It's to people who use software. FOSS lets those people get higher quality software, that does more of what they want to do, for less money (but not necessarily no money). As a mechanism for non-software companies to produce a piece of software, collaboration in the commons is more effective and economically efficient than paying a single vendor with a monopoly on the software they produce.
With zillions of OSS license varients out there, there's no way studio legal can approve them all.
There are a very small number of popular FOSS licenses. Any establishment with legal department so dedicated to checking license terms that they have an approval requirement can easily check those - which would cover the vast majority of FOSS software.
In either case, the idealized libertarian society spends 100% of it's taxes on the military and police.
Not only did I never say that I'm a libertarian, I'm certainly not the ideal libertarian that lives (only) in your mind.
Your method of labeling things and then making judgments based on your ideal image of that label doesn't seem to be working out for you, at least not on "libertarian" and "democracy".
from the reviews I'd seen, etc. was that AMD was slightly slower per clock-cycle than Intel, and that the range of available clock speeds didn't go as high, either.
That's all true. Intel's been beating AMD at that for a while now.
Thing is, that's never the question that you want to be asking when you buy a new computer. Who cares which company has the fastest chip at $1000. The important question is: If I spend $90 on a chip, what's the best I can get? What if I spend $150? Is that better than putting $60 somewhere else? How about $200?
In the $75 - $250 range (the range I personally care about), AMD and Intel are pretty much always trading blows. Here's a good chart for illustration: Crysis CPU Benchmark. Note how, for example, the Intel chip at $187 is slower than the AMD chip at $170.
I'd like to say "nothing", but the whole "taken away by force" part is, frankly, a lie you tell yourself. It's like you can't understand that there's a difference between being a part of a democracy and a slave.
How is it a lie? How can a US resident chose not to pay taxes without being imprisoned?
The slave thing is a pointless straw-man argument. Taxes are certainly a lesser evil than slavery, but they're still an evil. As for the idea that anything that the United States government decides is OK because we're a democracy, that's a like that you tell yourself.
And no, I'm not even saying that because taxes are evil in general there shouldn't be any. Taxes may be a reasonable trade-off in some specific case. But, based on this nice biased graph, I'm going to have to go ahead and say that at least the federal income tax is not only evil, it's a bad deal.
What's wrong with wanting to keep one's money rather than have it get taken away by force and then spent by a series of committees (that - in the USA - mostly seem to want to give it to their corporate buddies or use it to bomb brown people)?
By contrast, Cisco Systems has near complete world market domination on routers and such. They were brought to court to see if there was any illegal reason for their success. The court concluded that they were just really good at what they do, and that their products were just better and everyone knows it, without any indiscretion.
Just because they weren't found to be abusing their monopoly doesn't magically make the router market healthy and competitive.
Microsoft's monopolistic certainly put them into a special class, but that doesn't mean that oligopolies in general are suddenly a good thing just because Microsoft is especially bad. *Every* oligopoly create a warped market, and Monopoly a good (if imprecise) term to use for a uniquely dominant Ologiopolist.
Yet another nail in the coffin of your 'argument' is that for male/female ratio for math is about 60% male/40% female and has been more or less constant the last decade; the same is true for engineering. Physical sciences (Astronomy, Chemistry, Physics) actually improved the ratio from about 25% female to 33% female since 1983.
Actually, when considering Physics alone the number of female graduates increased nearly 100% in the years 1983 - 2002...
Those are very interesting statistics. The poster I responded to might have been able to form a much more convincing argument if he had used them. But my post wasn't responding to the argument he could have made.
Slashdot Mirror
1080p at 2' from a 25" display actually looks pretty good, in spite of the fact that that's well above the line on the chart. =P
It depends. Are you watching a reasonably large screen and trying to see detail? Show anyone who's not utterly blind a football game on a 50" TV in HD vs SD and they'll sure notice the difference.
It depends. Are you running a processor bottlenecked multi-threaded application? Let anyone play Crysis or try to compile a large C program on either and they'll sure notice the difference.
It depends. Are you trying to transfer large quantities of data? Send anyone a new DVD image every day and they'll sure notice the difference.
No idea.
When a technical improvement becomes available, everyone is used to things the way they were before. When electricity was first commercially available, many people said they didn't want or need it. This doesn't mean that the people who said "you should get electricity so you can get a refrigerator" were wrong.
Because people paste cookie contents to each other over IM all the time?
URLs are designed to be shared - that's one of the things that users are expected do to with them. Putting identification information there violates the design assumptions of the system, and is therefore innately insecure.
How would that help? Either they'd have to then use that OpenPGP certificate to sign site certificates (and thus either become a CA or create a new class of OpenPGP CAs out of the certificates that they did sign).
If you know how to do it, do it. Even if you aren't comfortable with network programming, if you can specify a distributed DNS system that works, people will implement it for you. But it's awfully hard to argue that something that no-one has managed to implement is a better solution to a problem with an existing popular solution.
This is a case where you're right, everyone who has thought about it agrees that you're right, and that's still not the design decision that's going to be made.
The issue here is a disagreement on goals. You want to make it so that someone who goes to the necessary effort can be secure against an arbitrary attacker. Others want to make it so that someone who goes to no effort will be secure from one step technical attacks by poorly funded attackers. People who are interested in the second case, which includes all major application developers including Mozilla, dismiss the proof of your point ("what about malicious CAs") as being out of scope.
The only solution to this problem that I can see is to try to provide real security and decentralized infrastructure in as many cases as possible. Why don't we have a Mozilla plugin that uses OpenPGP for SSL with a revolutionary UI that makes it practically useful? Why don't we have distributed DNS? Once we have proof of concept and working code, it'll be much easier to argue that we should be doing these things correctly.
I'm pretty sure that the same organizations would be in the chain for DNSSEC.
Why would it be any more difficult than running an automated CA? It's basically the same problem, and automated CAs manage to issue certificates in real time without too much trouble.
You'd have to actually make an argument to support yourself here. By comparison, imagine if you had said "if engineers screw up arithmetic, why would engineers be able to design reliable desk calculators". There may be a difference between the cases, but you'd have to illustrate that difference in order to make a meaningful point.
In general, while there might be some really fine proprietary software out there, most of it is unreliable, nearly unusable trash. Since the makers have abandoned it there's no way to get support. Large-scale, commercially supported projects are the exception to this, such as Microsoft Office and Photoshop. Engaging in a search on Downloads.com for something that might meet your needs is a exercise in futility unless you happen to seriously luck out.
I professionally (and commercially) develop software and work with others who do so as well. I would not choose to hire most of the people that try to sell proprietary programs unless it was to train them as an entry-level programmer that barely knew the anything about programming. Most of these people are hobbyists whose skills need considerable polishing before their work can realistically be used by other people. It's being asked to buy a $30 novel written by someone who learned English last week.
Based on this, I would consider suggesting a business use proprietary software (as a general principal) to be a form of sabotage. They will become reliant on unreliable tools that produce questionable results. Sure, the fancy marketing website is nice, but the results aren't worth it.
Not about me, eh?
You appear to be using the legal definition of legitimate to prove that it's a legal term. That's circular logic.
Having multiple vendors for business critical goods and services is a basic principle of good business. Custom modified OSI compliant software ensures that *any* software development contracting firm can act as a vendor for software maintenance. Proprietary software ensures that a single vendor has a monopoly on that service.
You appear to be responding to technical terms with intuitively comfortable generalizations. That tends to result in the spouting of meaningless nonsense.
People who program for a living get paid by their employers or clients. Companies that solely write software get paid by their clients. In both of these cases, getting more FOSS software means more resources to use to do a better job for those clients.
The primary monetary benefit of FOSS software isn't to people who write software for a living. It's to people who use software. FOSS lets those people get higher quality software, that does more of what they want to do, for less money (but not necessarily no money). As a mechanism for non-software companies to produce a piece of software, collaboration in the commons is more effective and economically efficient than paying a single vendor with a monopoly on the software they produce.
There are a very small number of popular FOSS licenses. Any establishment with legal department so dedicated to checking license terms that they have an approval requirement can easily check those - which would cover the vast majority of FOSS software.
Just remember: When someone more intelligent or knowledgeable than you are, labeling them an elitist doesn't change anything.
Not only did I never say that I'm a libertarian, I'm certainly not the ideal libertarian that lives (only) in your mind.
Your method of labeling things and then making judgments based on your ideal image of that label doesn't seem to be working out for you, at least not on "libertarian" and "democracy".
That's all true. Intel's been beating AMD at that for a while now.
Thing is, that's never the question that you want to be asking when you buy a new computer. Who cares which company has the fastest chip at $1000. The important question is: If I spend $90 on a chip, what's the best I can get? What if I spend $150? Is that better than putting $60 somewhere else? How about $200?
In the $75 - $250 range (the range I personally care about), AMD and Intel are pretty much always trading blows. Here's a good chart for illustration: Crysis CPU Benchmark. Note how, for example, the Intel chip at $187 is slower than the AMD chip at $170.
How is it a lie? How can a US resident chose not to pay taxes without being imprisoned?
The slave thing is a pointless straw-man argument. Taxes are certainly a lesser evil than slavery, but they're still an evil. As for the idea that anything that the United States government decides is OK because we're a democracy, that's a like that you tell yourself.
And no, I'm not even saying that because taxes are evil in general there shouldn't be any. Taxes may be a reasonable trade-off in some specific case. But, based on this nice biased graph, I'm going to have to go ahead and say that at least the federal income tax is not only evil, it's a bad deal.
Computer science is based on the idea of machines that can simulate themselves, and actual computers end up working like that pretty frequently.
Due to the way he phrased his post, he doesn't need to provide any specific evidence in order to be correct.
What's wrong with wanting to keep one's money rather than have it get taken away by force and then spent by a series of committees (that - in the USA - mostly seem to want to give it to their corporate buddies or use it to bomb brown people)?
Just because they weren't found to be abusing their monopoly doesn't magically make the router market healthy and competitive.
Microsoft's monopolistic certainly put them into a special class, but that doesn't mean that oligopolies in general are suddenly a good thing just because Microsoft is especially bad. *Every* oligopoly create a warped market, and Monopoly a good (if imprecise) term to use for a uniquely dominant Ologiopolist.
Those are very interesting statistics. The poster I responded to might have been able to form a much more convincing argument if he had used them. But my post wasn't responding to the argument he could have made.