Ha ha, April 1 is really Slashdot appreciation day. There's no real news for nerds here the entire day, so maybe you end up going to http://arstechnica.com/ or http://theregister.co.uk/ or even http://fark.com/ . But inevitably you find that professional reporting is to dry and constrained or too british and sarcastic or the comments are just too much snark, and tomorrow you will inevitably return here, to your usual comfort zone for nerd-upism and troll abuse.
Yeah, Facebook is one of the few apps I don't install on any of my Android devices. I'm generally pretty lax with my private info... However, it's one thing for an app to upload all of my behavior and info to a website, but an app that uploads the personal info of all of the people in my addressbook to their database and actively pimps it out to the rest of my acquaintances... that's a bit more responsibility than I'm prepared to take.
Yeah, the GPL is very pragmatic... the only thing "religious" about it is that once some code converts to GPL, it stays GPL. But that's the point... to prevent people from "stealing" GPL code and making it proprietary again.
RMS came from the background of having to debug crappy proprietary code delivered from vendors. Ever read stories about what things were like in those days? Without the source code and without vendor cooperation, they were having to make binary patches to binary files to fix critical bugs in production executables and libraries. RMS wanted to put an end to that... if you deliver a software product, you need to provide the source code to the user so that user can fix your shit (or give the code to someone else to fix).
That is all. There's nothing in the GPL that explicitly says you have to put the code in the public domain! You just have to deliver the code to whomever you distribute it to. And you can charge money for both! It just so happens that since your customer is free to redistribute your code to whomever for free, that the easiest way to comply with the GPL is to publish your code on a public server... but that is not a firm requirement.
In fact, it seems ideal for banks, government, military, etc. to stipulate that all code they contract for is covered by the GPL... even code that they want to keep secret. They could buy a bunch of code from Company A, and if they mess it up, they're free to give the delivered code to another vendor Company B to fix and maintain. That scenario would be impossible under most proprietary licenses... they'd simply have to throw away just about everything delivered by Company A that they can't recompile or integrate. And the GPL wouldn't make anyone give the source to anyone else (i.e. the public) that doesn't have the binaries. I suppose the only grey area is if they piss off Company B, is Company B allowed to take the "secret" GPL'd code they got from their customer to maintain and put it out for public distribution?
Yeah, I've been a happy T-mobile customer since the Voicestream days. But I've never been to a brick-n-mortar store with all of their trained sales associates. I've always done things online or over the phone. They know you're less of a captive audience there, so they're nicer.
I'm more worried about the crackdown on using alternate identities online. My friends know who I am, but no one else should be able to pull up dirt on me based on random dirt they find associated with my name.
At the same time, if there's an actual crime being investigated, it's takes some pretty trivial sleuthing to trace back an alternate id to a person, but takes some effort just out of reach for a telemarketer or employer or griefer, and could require an approval process and leave a paper trail back to the requester.
So I'm sort of upset that GooTube / Facebook push for realname ids. But for the most part they let you get away with using your alternicks... for now. But that's the right we need to fight to preserve.
I have both... my dad gifted me a Pi B and an Uno. I'm having more fun with the Uno, since it gives you more analog/digital I/O options.
The Pi is certainly more powerful and capable... but anything I try doing with it inevitably leaves me wishing I had dropped a $100 more for an nVidia ION miniITX board that does a much better job pretending to be a "real" PC.
Solid, lots of add-on modules, vibrant hacker community. And it has its own programmable processor so if your application permits you don't even have to have it attached to your PC to collect and process data.
So... we should recommend that mass murders will decrease if we make everyone train with video games, so they'll be better prepared when they're attacked by a video gamer?:-D
I've recently done some on-the-job training on workplace violence. Fortunately for us, all of the "real" research I've seen profiling the character and warning signs for mass murderers (of any weapon, not just guns) makes little to no mention of video games.
They do mention guns... mass murderers tend to have some real or imagined grievance that they intend to correct using something that gives them some form of power. Weapons and guns give you power. Video games... not so much.
Another common thread is that mass murderers do their research. They are found to have researched the "score" and techniques of other mass murderers before they equip for and plan their own jaunt. This is not a game, this is research, and it is also an established pattern. Maybe they'll use some video games as simulators as part of their training and preparation... so does the military. But it's not the video games that make them kill.
So if you don't want to be profiled as a mass murderer... don't research on other mass murderers, and then plan and stockpile weapons;-P
Welcome to your tax dollars at work. There were a ton of mandatory training / accounting / payroll apps that were developed and tested solely on IE6 back in the day, sometimes even as interfaces to mainframe apps.
Just be glad that the 'solution' was not to misspend another fortune redeveloping these large unwieldy government contracts that took years to develop and test to work with browser-du-jour. The 'solution" was to simply mandate that everyone stick to the "company standard" version of IE6 on their desktop. This was actually a big reason that WinXP / IE6 would not die in large corporate / government use, and probably a big reason Firefox was accepted and took off in corporate use as much as it did in order to access modern web apps that IE6 could not handle.
As for the failed IT guys, they got promoted to management, and were recently spouting off their wisdom to "make sure the new app works in Firefox, so we don't get locked into IE". The bright ones might even be champions for funding to test in 2 browsers... at least for long enough so they have something to chop when the next round of budget/efficiency cuts strike.
IE6 in a VM is something a bit beyond their ability. Maybe if they could throw your money at some monthly Citrix licenses to achieve the same thing... yeah, that's much more like what I've seen in practice.
Heh, all they had to do was offer IE6 in a VM to allow all the businesses and government organizations to still run all of the old crappy homegrown locked-in apps to run. Those apps aren't going away (a lot are there to meet contractual/legal obligations and aren't trivial to redevelop / recertify).
Yes, that, and I thought I saw on Fark a week ago that one of the supposed "cyberattacks" was just some internal machine with an outdated antivirus. But maybe it was just one of those snark-to-be-true headlines that happen to fluke sometimes.
But yeah, let's go to war over our own incompetence.
Sure the Greek background sounds nicer, but we don't really have a true direct democracy the way the Greeks and their philosophers practiced it. We're much more closely modeled after the Roman system of governance, with their Constitution and Senate and rotating pair of Consuls. Also the establishment of bureaucracies and focus on taxing the lower classes and other countries to support military empire-building and force projection.
Perhaps we don't try to model ourselves after the autocratic periods of Roman history, but I'm sure you don't have to stretch much to draw some parallels.
I think Larry Gonick expressed it well in his "Cartoon Guide to Genetics".... something about how "the Romans were more obsessed with the technology of death over the philosophy of life."
Just pointing out how we're still similar to Roman ideology. "What kind of culture even HAS a word for 'kill every tenth person'?"
And, chill... The Democrats are part of our government and they do it too... Republicans just made the "brandish a strong military" bit as part of their core platform.
Heh, the rest of our democratic republic is based on the Roman one, so why not?
War is the established Republican method of reducing poverty by eliminating poor people. Once you accept this, then you can pretty much understand why so many of them are draft-dodgers;-)
Try to be more cynical, will you? If anything it won't be due to the DRM, but from poor capacity planning to go with the launch. Actually, even that is too technical, the official reason will probably have something to do with "PR management".
Not to support the original troll, but I'd kind of agree with the (somewhat) expensive part.
My father got me a Pi B which I've been toying around with using RaspBMC. I like the fact that this piece of hackable equipment exists in this form factor, but I can't really think of anything to do with it that wouldn't be done better with something else for not much more money, once you figure in all the "extras" you need to add to make your project work.
For a set-top box, it'd be cheaper and easier just getting a Roku (~$80), which would also let you do Netflix.
A slightly larger ION miniITX box (~$200) that does a much better job pretending to be a full PC and has built-in wifi. Or use an EeePC netbook (also ~$200) if you also want a webcam, mic/speakers, keyboard/trackpad, & small screen to go with it. A cheap android device such as the $200 Nexus 7 would also probably let you do random touchpads / multimedia / remote webcam/VTC endpoints for very little effort, and is still pretty much top-of-the-line as far as tablet hardware specs go.
For remote I/O hardware interfaces, I think the Arduino UNO (~$34) does a good job, and doesn't really need any add-ons to make a functional project.
Heh, speaking of going out on a limb, one of the other security requirements for authentication techniques is having some kind of key revocation mechanism in case the key gets compromised. So in the case of biometric security, if someone manages to duplicate your fingerprint (or your colon), then it's time to revoke it and (somehow) issue you a new one! Snip snip.
What are you talking about? The US does this all the time!
For example, brass knuckles are illegal in most states. Not because they're particularly deadly, but because carrying them around probably means you're a gangster. So they make a law banning brass knuckles, and if the police find them on a gangster, they can arrest the gangster. Otherwise they gotta let them go if they can't find anything else on the guy.
It's probably a similar thing with spies in China and Russia. Sure they can detain tourists all they want, but they can't do anything really bad to them unless they're breaking some useless law, like possession of a GPS. When the laws were enacted, their own citizens probably weren't rich enough to have a lot of GPSs. But catch a tourist with one, and whee, they've got an actual law broken, which increases the bribe they get by a lot.
Yes, Grafitti was great... esp. before they "dumbed it down" in v2 on later devices.
There was hardly any "learning" curve... maybe the trickiest part was writing V backwards to distinguish them from U (unfortunately one of the hacks they got rid of in Graffiti 2, which made it much harder for it to recognize Us and Vs properly).
Word. I held on to my Palm T|X tethered to a "dumbphone" for quite a long time into the iOS + Android era. Still looking for Android apps that are as good as Plucker , HandyShopper (I could even abuse it to track my monthly budget!) , and Progect.
Also still have a red Visor Edge with the big bulky GSM add-on module banging around somewhere, but the antenna's broke:P
On the other hand, the official Palm desktop sync app (as well as jPilot on Linux) could back up your entire PDA and restore the whole damn thing to the exact state you left off. I've yet to see an Android or iOS thing that can do that, which is quite annoying.
I would also say that most Doctors are trained to be pretty good at following an ethical code to prevent conflicts of interest from clouding their judgement. When you self-diagnose based on your symptoms, you can certainly begin looking for more symptoms in yourself that match your desired diagnosis, which might not be the correct one and lead them to miss the actual problem.
Good doctors understand that this is a huge issue, and will go so far as to avoid diagnosing and treating themselves or their immediate family.
Yeah, where's BadCarAnalogyGuy when you need him? I want to hear something about parking your car on top of a steep hill overlooking a lake with only your handbrake on. And maybe a marathon of baby strollers.
Slashdot Mirror
Ha ha, April 1 is really Slashdot appreciation day. There's no real news for nerds here the entire day, so maybe you end up going to http://arstechnica.com/ or http://theregister.co.uk/ or even http://fark.com/ . But inevitably you find that professional reporting is to dry and constrained or too british and sarcastic or the comments are just too much snark, and tomorrow you will inevitably return here, to your usual comfort zone for nerd-upism and troll abuse.
Yeah, Facebook is one of the few apps I don't install on any of my Android devices. I'm generally pretty lax with my private info... However, it's one thing for an app to upload all of my behavior and info to a website, but an app that uploads the personal info of all of the people in my addressbook to their database and actively pimps it out to the rest of my acquaintances... that's a bit more responsibility than I'm prepared to take.
Yeah, the GPL is very pragmatic... the only thing "religious" about it is that once some code converts to GPL, it stays GPL. But that's the point... to prevent people from "stealing" GPL code and making it proprietary again.
RMS came from the background of having to debug crappy proprietary code delivered from vendors. Ever read stories about what things were like in those days? Without the source code and without vendor cooperation, they were having to make binary patches to binary files to fix critical bugs in production executables and libraries. RMS wanted to put an end to that... if you deliver a software product, you need to provide the source code to the user so that user can fix your shit (or give the code to someone else to fix).
That is all. There's nothing in the GPL that explicitly says you have to put the code in the public domain! You just have to deliver the code to whomever you distribute it to. And you can charge money for both! It just so happens that since your customer is free to redistribute your code to whomever for free, that the easiest way to comply with the GPL is to publish your code on a public server... but that is not a firm requirement.
In fact, it seems ideal for banks, government, military, etc. to stipulate that all code they contract for is covered by the GPL... even code that they want to keep secret. They could buy a bunch of code from Company A, and if they mess it up, they're free to give the delivered code to another vendor Company B to fix and maintain. That scenario would be impossible under most proprietary licenses... they'd simply have to throw away just about everything delivered by Company A that they can't recompile or integrate. And the GPL wouldn't make anyone give the source to anyone else (i.e. the public) that doesn't have the binaries. I suppose the only grey area is if they piss off Company B, is Company B allowed to take the "secret" GPL'd code they got from their customer to maintain and put it out for public distribution?
Yeah, come back when you re-implement a troll!
Oh, wait, D'oh!
Yeah, I've been a happy T-mobile customer since the Voicestream days. But I've never been to a brick-n-mortar store with all of their trained sales associates. I've always done things online or over the phone. They know you're less of a captive audience there, so they're nicer.
I'm more worried about the crackdown on using alternate identities online. My friends know who I am, but no one else should be able to pull up dirt on me based on random dirt they find associated with my name.
At the same time, if there's an actual crime being investigated, it's takes some pretty trivial sleuthing to trace back an alternate id to a person, but takes some effort just out of reach for a telemarketer or employer or griefer, and could require an approval process and leave a paper trail back to the requester.
So I'm sort of upset that GooTube / Facebook push for realname ids. But for the most part they let you get away with using your alternicks... for now. But that's the right we need to fight to preserve.
I have both... my dad gifted me a Pi B and an Uno. I'm having more fun with the Uno, since it gives you more analog/digital I/O options.
The Pi is certainly more powerful and capable... but anything I try doing with it inevitably leaves me wishing I had dropped a $100 more for an nVidia ION miniITX board that does a much better job pretending to be a "real" PC.
Ooh, awesome! The IOIO-OTG someone linked to below is the only rev I can find in stock anywhere, though...
Done in one (pun intended)
Solid, lots of add-on modules, vibrant hacker community. And it has its own programmable processor so if your application permits you don't even have to have it attached to your PC to collect and process data.
So... we should recommend that mass murders will decrease if we make everyone train with video games, so they'll be better prepared when they're attacked by a video gamer? :-D
I've recently done some on-the-job training on workplace violence. Fortunately for us, all of the "real" research I've seen profiling the character and warning signs for mass murderers (of any weapon, not just guns) makes little to no mention of video games.
http://www.drtomoconnor.com/4050/4050lect07.htm
They do mention guns... mass murderers tend to have some real or imagined grievance that they intend to correct using something that gives them some form of power. Weapons and guns give you power. Video games... not so much.
Another common thread is that mass murderers do their research. They are found to have researched the "score" and techniques of other mass murderers before they equip for and plan their own jaunt. This is not a game, this is research, and it is also an established pattern. Maybe they'll use some video games as simulators as part of their training and preparation... so does the military. But it's not the video games that make them kill.
So if you don't want to be profiled as a mass murderer... don't research on other mass murderers, and then plan and stockpile weapons ;-P
Welcome to your tax dollars at work. There were a ton of mandatory training / accounting / payroll apps that were developed and tested solely on IE6 back in the day, sometimes even as interfaces to mainframe apps.
Just be glad that the 'solution' was not to misspend another fortune redeveloping these large unwieldy government contracts that took years to develop and test to work with browser-du-jour. The 'solution" was to simply mandate that everyone stick to the "company standard" version of IE6 on their desktop. This was actually a big reason that WinXP / IE6 would not die in large corporate / government use, and probably a big reason Firefox was accepted and took off in corporate use as much as it did in order to access modern web apps that IE6 could not handle.
As for the failed IT guys, they got promoted to management, and were recently spouting off their wisdom to "make sure the new app works in Firefox, so we don't get locked into IE". The bright ones might even be champions for funding to test in 2 browsers... at least for long enough so they have something to chop when the next round of budget/efficiency cuts strike.
IE6 in a VM is something a bit beyond their ability. Maybe if they could throw your money at some monthly Citrix licenses to achieve the same thing... yeah, that's much more like what I've seen in practice.
Heh, all they had to do was offer IE6 in a VM to allow all the businesses and government organizations to still run all of the old crappy homegrown locked-in apps to run. Those apps aren't going away (a lot are there to meet contractual/legal obligations and aren't trivial to redevelop / recertify).
Yes, that, and I thought I saw on Fark a week ago that one of the supposed "cyberattacks" was just some internal machine with an outdated antivirus. But maybe it was just one of those snark-to-be-true headlines that happen to fluke sometimes.
But yeah, let's go to war over our own incompetence.
http://teachergenius.teachtci.com/ancient-greece-and-rome-and-their-influence-on-modern-western-civilization-2/
Sure the Greek background sounds nicer, but we don't really have a true direct democracy the way the Greeks and their philosophers practiced it. We're much more closely modeled after the Roman system of governance, with their Constitution and Senate and rotating pair of Consuls. Also the establishment of bureaucracies and focus on taxing the lower classes and other countries to support military empire-building and force projection.
Perhaps we don't try to model ourselves after the autocratic periods of Roman history, but I'm sure you don't have to stretch much to draw some parallels.
I think Larry Gonick expressed it well in his "Cartoon Guide to Genetics".... something about how "the Romans were more obsessed with the technology of death over the philosophy of life."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/27/bush-war-boosts-the-us-ec_n_592444.html
Just pointing out how we're still similar to Roman ideology. "What kind of culture even HAS a word for 'kill every tenth person'?"
And, chill... The Democrats are part of our government and they do it too... Republicans just made the "brandish a strong military" bit as part of their core platform.
/voted Green, since it sounds like you care.
Heh, the rest of our democratic republic is based on the Roman one, so why not?
War is the established Republican method of reducing poverty by eliminating poor people. Once you accept this, then you can pretty much understand why so many of them are draft-dodgers ;-)
Try to be more cynical, will you? If anything it won't be due to the DRM, but from poor capacity planning to go with the launch. Actually, even that is too technical, the official reason will probably have something to do with "PR management".
Not to support the original troll, but I'd kind of agree with the (somewhat) expensive part.
My father got me a Pi B which I've been toying around with using RaspBMC. I like the fact that this piece of hackable equipment exists in this form factor, but I can't really think of anything to do with it that wouldn't be done better with something else for not much more money, once you figure in all the "extras" you need to add to make your project work.
For a set-top box, it'd be cheaper and easier just getting a Roku (~$80), which would also let you do Netflix.
A slightly larger ION miniITX box (~$200) that does a much better job pretending to be a full PC and has built-in wifi. Or use an EeePC netbook (also ~$200) if you also want a webcam, mic/speakers, keyboard/trackpad, & small screen to go with it. A cheap android device such as the $200 Nexus 7 would also probably let you do random touchpads / multimedia / remote webcam/VTC endpoints for very little effort, and is still pretty much top-of-the-line as far as tablet hardware specs go.
For remote I/O hardware interfaces, I think the Arduino UNO (~$34) does a good job, and doesn't really need any add-ons to make a functional project.
Heh, speaking of going out on a limb, one of the other security requirements for authentication techniques is having some kind of key revocation mechanism in case the key gets compromised. So in the case of biometric security, if someone manages to duplicate your fingerprint (or your colon), then it's time to revoke it and (somehow) issue you a new one! Snip snip.
What are you talking about? The US does this all the time!
For example, brass knuckles are illegal in most states. Not because they're particularly deadly, but because carrying them around probably means you're a gangster. So they make a law banning brass knuckles, and if the police find them on a gangster, they can arrest the gangster. Otherwise they gotta let them go if they can't find anything else on the guy.
It's probably a similar thing with spies in China and Russia. Sure they can detain tourists all they want, but they can't do anything really bad to them unless they're breaking some useless law, like possession of a GPS. When the laws were enacted, their own citizens probably weren't rich enough to have a lot of GPSs. But catch a tourist with one, and whee, they've got an actual law broken, which increases the bribe they get by a lot.
Yes, Grafitti was great... esp. before they "dumbed it down" in v2 on later devices.
There was hardly any "learning" curve... maybe the trickiest part was writing V backwards to distinguish them from U (unfortunately one of the hacks they got rid of in Graffiti 2, which made it much harder for it to recognize Us and Vs properly).
Word. I held on to my Palm T|X tethered to a "dumbphone" for quite a long time into the iOS + Android era. Still looking for Android apps that are as good as Plucker , HandyShopper (I could even abuse it to track my monthly budget!) , and Progect.
Also still have a red Visor Edge with the big bulky GSM add-on module banging around somewhere, but the antenna's broke :P
On the other hand, the official Palm desktop sync app (as well as jPilot on Linux) could back up your entire PDA and restore the whole damn thing to the exact state you left off. I've yet to see an Android or iOS thing that can do that, which is quite annoying.
Mod parent up.
I would also say that most Doctors are trained to be pretty good at following an ethical code to prevent conflicts of interest from clouding their judgement. When you self-diagnose based on your symptoms, you can certainly begin looking for more symptoms in yourself that match your desired diagnosis, which might not be the correct one and lead them to miss the actual problem.
Good doctors understand that this is a huge issue, and will go so far as to avoid diagnosing and treating themselves or their immediate family.
Yeah, where's BadCarAnalogyGuy when you need him? I want to hear something about parking your car on top of a steep hill overlooking a lake with only your handbrake on. And maybe a marathon of baby strollers.