What a wonderful idea! Let's formalize the use of nationwide citizen tracking devices, equipped with useless but expensive sensors that try to spy on everybody. Of course, this functionality would have to come with the ability to remotely activate the cell's microphone and cameras "to gather more information about terroristic activities on scene".
The nuclear threat serves only as the official excuse to scare people into compliance with the egregious breaches of privacy and personal safety that are guaranteed to occur. Those sensors won't detect anything useful, but they will mandate a huge surveillance apparatus that can be handily used for comprehensive tracking and spying.
I'm as scared about, say, nuclear terrorism as everybody - but can we please start resisting people who are just using this fear as a pretext to take our rights away? Terrorists and the government have a really nice symbiosis going there, but everybody else just loses out on every step of the way.
From TFA: Ordinary people who are feeling anxious are "much more open with their body movements and their facial expressions as compared to an operational terrorist (thinking) 'I've got to defeat security,' " Maccario said. "We're looking for behavior indicators that show a certain level of stress, fear or anxiety above and beyond that shown by an anxious member of the traveling public."
The level of ignorance and sheer incompetence in this one single paragraph alone is so stunningly below what you can reasonably expect from an individual with an IQ of at least 80, it is downright scary people like that have so much control over everybody's life.
> meaning the same percentage of people would be charged with something if they just picked people at random?
Oh, yes! That's the wonderful thing about rethorics though: doesn't it sound awesome when they say "we arrested 600 evildoers using this spiffy technique"? When in reality that amounts to less than 1% of all those referred to secondary screening; which of course means they could have just picked out people at random and got the same results.
The scary thing is actually that this whole process doesn't seem to involve people with actual functioning brains, so the stunning ineffectiveness (and abusiveness) of this neat surveilance technique is obviously never subjected to any form of quality control at all, ever.
> Only 1.8% of the people they referred for a second screening [11 out of 600] were arrested for something, and not necessarily terrorism.
Ha! If they got even one single terrorism-related arrest out of this, they would have advertised the shit out of that single success! It never happened.
I think it's interesting how we have formalized, absorbed and completely accepted many of the mannerisms that are so popular in dictatorial regimes.
Now, our experience that there is only one index (time) dimension may just mean that the values of moment_in_time and some_other_factor are tightly coupled, preventing us from experiencing them as separate concepts in daily experience Wow, what an utter gibberish sentence. I should sleep more and probably proof-read my posts. But it's clear what I meant, right?
Well, wtf? In relation to which time? It's like saying that the metre standard is bigger 1000 miles from here, measured with itself.
If it makes any sense, it's not as simple as "dt(here)/dt(there)". It may still make some, but I'd need a smarter explanation than yours (no offense.)
That's exactly what I thought.
[...] is like saying that time goes faster this year than in 1997. How would you measure that? In relation to _what_?
But what if you had a window (maybe a portal or something) to look X years into the past? Say, there is a clock on the other side of that portal. If time is running synchronously (and X doesn't shift), and you'd expect it to run at the same speed as a local clock on your end of the portal. However, if time is indeed "slowing down" you'd see the clock in the past speeding up in comparison.
The problem, as you said, is of course that X - the temporal distance between the two ends of the portal - is also subject to that kind of shift. Looking at the light of those very distant objects is exactly like observing this theoretical portal.
Still, the question "relative to what?" remains valid. Could such an effect even exist without the work of at least one additional dimension behind it all? Speaking from the perspective of a computer scientist, all this additional state information has to be stored somewhere, right?
Traditionally, you'd have an atom A and it's position would be defined in time like this
T[moment_in_time] = [Ax, Ay, Az] (disregarding speed/momentum for simplification here)
But with this new theory, time can't be the only index for the state of matter and energy. The "storage system" of the universe's information would have to take at least 2 parameters in order for this slow-down to work, like this:
Like I said, this is strictly from an information theory point of view. Now, our experience that there is only one index (time) dimension may just mean that the values of moment_in_time and some_other_factor are tightly coupled, preventing us from experiencing them as separate concepts in daily experience. However, over cosmic timescales this coupling would be slightly asymmetric, thereby introducing the temporal drift.
When I reflect on my stupid layman's model, it also looks like there wouldn't necessary be a point where time stops completely, because the exact dynamics of the coupling of the two index dimensions is not known (or is it?).
And no, the x/y/z coordinates in the example are not meant to be a complete representation of all state information.
I have. Neither my computer illiterate wife nor her 86-year-old mother have any problems using GNOME. The only people I've seen who've had problems have been people who are used to Windows. Those people have just as much of a hard time with Mac OS X. Oddly, it's users like my mom who have the least difficulties. It's m colleagues at work and a large part of my geeky friends that hit such roadblocks.
I agree that it needs to improve, but the average user doesn't use a multihead configuration. PCs come with one screen. They don't understand why someone would want or need two. Apart from my conviction that multihead usage will go up significantly, I'll grant you that for now this may be my pet peeve. Other people have other problems. But maybe it's time to acknowledge the fact that they do have valid problems and that this is hindering adoption in areas where barriers of entry are really unnecessary.
The only other problem I see is in switching to a graphics card that uses a different driver. This usually involves either A) editing xorg.conf or B) reloading the OS (which avoids editing xorg.conf, but has its own problems). If it was so simple. Believe me, I've had a fair number of workstations with a fair number of different hardware pieces. There were always severe problems, this is not a fringe condition that can be cured by changing some value in xorg.conf.
Both problems can be resolved by the development of a comprehensive xorg.conf editing front-end. I recently considered writing such a front-end using Python and PyGTK, but I'm not sure if others are already doing this work and I don't want to duplicate effort. Obviously there are numerous front-ends, but they don't do the job except in very limited scenarios. I think you should start to roll your own, things can only get better. A part of the problems are architectural though, I'm afraid.
And mom and grandma usually don't care much about what program they use to write letters, so long as they have one. I think a fairly large number of users do have pet applications that they will want to carry over. Sometimes, a corresponding Linux tool is good enough or even better. And sometimes it is not. That's not heresy, just reality.
Here's a business proposition for you:
1) join the Microsoft reseller program for Windows XP and/or Vista, 2) start packaging up pre-built QEMU and/or XEN VMs, each tailored for different purposes. 3) Create a custom front-end for auto-building and installing the approrpriate kernel modules 4) Bundle the whole thing together and start selling it. 5) Profit!!!
See? There's not even a ??? part. I'm not sure there'll be a profit, with market share numbers below one percent on the desktop. Anyway this is the part where I cowardly leave this idea for real businesspeople, such as yourself perhaps?
1. The machine came with Windows, they have no clue that there is an alternative. Much the same as to many people IE is "the internet", for a lot of people Windows is an integral part of the computer and they have no concept of changing it any more than you would change the tube in your TV. (No, that does not make them retards, it makes them uninformed)
2. It is what they know and they are afraid of change. Even when Microsoft dictates change with an upgrade, the changes between two versions of the same bit of software are perceived to be smaller than the jump between different bits of software (whether or not this is true). True, but publicity helps. However, I'm a little afraid that average people (let's get away from the retard image) when they finally say "hey, I'm gonna try this Linux thing" are in for a disappointment. I'm talking for example about people who love to tinker with their computer in their spare time. There are lots of them and they tend to be huge influencers on their social surroundings. And I know we can't win a huge portion of them over, just because nobody cared enough to make this a priority.
3. They are not interested enough to change - their computer does more or less what they want and they don't want to go to the effort of changing (even if the change would make things better for them in the long run). I think there are huge numbers of people who are frustrated with Windows, if only for the sheepish reason that they read about the security problems. But chances are your average users has quite a bit of experience with spyware and viruses and software that you have to sell major organs for to use it legally. That is potential right there. Plus, now that so much stuff is happening on the web, the OS becomes more interchangeable. But for this change to occur, people have to be able to configure their system more effortlessly and a lot of them want to bring their pet application with them when they move in.
Your original post came across as a "Linux sucks compared to Windows because it does $lots_of_things_windows_also_does". I'm all for improving Linux, but citing these sorts of problems as a reason why Windows is "better" (even though Windows has exactly the same problems) seems the wrong attitude. If it came across this way I hereby apologize. And I'll try to hide behind the fact that I'm not a native English speaker.
I think the main way Linux can get into the mainstream is for it to be shipped as standard on machines (similar to what Dell are doing) *where appropriate*. Obviously shipping it to people who need Windows specific software is just going to piss them off, but there are a large group of users for whom Linux does everything they need as standard. I'm not convinced that further improvements to the software itself are going to push Linux much further into the mainstream at this time. Agreed. But it really comes down to momentum. Massive change happens only with momentum. And momentum only happens when opinion makers get in line behind Linux. Instead of telling them to piss off, listening to their concerns may be a necessary evil.
The issue here as always is that people are *used* to windows, the various distros could I suppose mimic XP 10% and be done with it, but I don't think that's a good idea (the XP desktop may be familiar but its hardly the best solution). KDE in particular can do everything XP can do and more (as related to the UI), configuration is easy, it is considerably less resource intensive and potentially much prettier. I agree that the potential is huge. But for average users, accessing this potential is still too painful. And experienced users also come across little obstacles all the time and this frustration adds up to the point where they go off and use something else.
KDE having all these nice features that are burried or misconfigured by default makes it all the more tragic.
Just like when you go and set up XP for a non technical person you install a firewall, anti-virus, anti-malware, anti-spyware and all those programs that they actually need and mess with the various settings to make it nice and simple to use, well you need to do that with Linux as well, after you have installed whatever distro you have chosen (I always go for Debian as it is stable and only takes about 20 minutes to install - no massive updates required.. and what does the distro matter if the user is non technical.) set it up porperly, get that desktop looking welcoming, spend half an hour installing all the various office/graphical/audio applications etc... then purge the kmenu for unneeded cruft and make sure everything works, it will take less time than XP and the end result will be significantly better. This is where experiences vary wildly. When something goes wrong during a Linux install (and things do go wrong), there is often no other choice but to work through horrible text files and cryptic error messages as if you're on some kind of quest, and that can take many hours.
I'm willing to concede the point that my experience may be different because I'm clinically retarded or that my computers are constantly punishing me for my generally low cosmic karma. Anyway, I always seem to come across huge barriers and nothing ever works like it should on first try. On the other hand, installing servers for Linux has always been a breeze in my experience...
Credibility and you just don't get on, do you? Maybe my stupidity knows no bounds but at least I'm not responding with personal attacks by default whenever somebody voices an opinion I don't like.
Virtualbox on Linux is as easy to use as Parallels on Mac. I'll try that out. And if I come back and tell you why it's not user friendly, you can trash me a bit more for having no credibility. Because, you know, that's a good way to respond to criticism.
There are two types of disgruntled users. The first just think something isn't working out and leave quietly in disgust. The second type are the guys who try to tell you that there maybe room for improvement. I'm not sure having all your critics in the first column is a good strategy when you're shooting for widespread adoption. Just a thought.
When was the last time you tried a fresh copy of Ubuntu? 7.10 seems way less cluttered than Vista to me and I think it's quite similar to 7.04 and 6.06 (never tried those, but Screenshots look similar). I must admit that's still on my to do list, but I'll try it out very soon (looking forward to it, actually)
Unfortunately you may be right here. Linus really is focusing on Linux's potential as an "Enterprise" OS, but that's why we need people like ck, Miguel de Icaza and Mark Shuttleworth. And I know there are tons of people who already made a huge difference, but I'm afraid that the developer community's mindset has to change a lot if we are to take this thing to the next level. Making something usable and efficient is not the same as dumbing it down, contrary to community opinion!
You're talking about Windows, right? I'd say Windows is marginally better, but still horrible.
But the majority of people don't need Windows apps - they need a web browser and a word processor. These are things that are available for non-windows platforms - the uptake of OS X (before Parallels appeared) should prove this. I believe we in the open source community have developed quite a bit of complacency around the opinion that if something is alright for me as a geek, it should be perfect for everybody. Or the classical variation: "it certainly runs on MY hardware, so if you got problems you are obviously an idiot".
Fact is, there is still a huge user base out there that hasn't been reached. They are Windows users, lots of them. All I'm saying is maybe there is a reason why they are still on Windows other than the assumption of they being retards?
I have no recent experience of SuSE (although I have heard lots of bad stuff about it and for political reasons I wouldn't use it), but Xen under Fedora 7 is quite usable. I'll try that out then!
Whether or not you agree with Linus's opinions, he does not control the direction that individual distributions take the userland. Granted, but that makes it all the more bizarre that this mindset is so entrenched in the community. Every time somebody talks about usability they get a severe beating. So naturally, there are not many people still around to keep telling you there may be a problem because nobody wants to hear it anyway.
For one thing, even if I have to set up a workstation from scratch it doesn't take days. However, these days I tend to just copy my Beryl and Emerald config onto new workstations so there is no real set up to be done. One thing I _am_ sure of though it that if the OS restricted me as much as Windows does I would waste far more time having to deal with a bad unchangable configuration on a daily basis than I do in configuring a workstation _once_. One of the reasons I use Linux is because I can tweak the config to speed up operations I have to do frequently - Windows does not allow this to the same extent. Somehow I must have come across as a Windows advocate which I'm clearly not, and I'm sorry for the misunderstanding. There are tons of stuff I absolutely love about Linux/KDE/Gnome, but there are also lots of barriers and little frustrations adding up. And since we are talking about "The Next Leap for Linux" here anyway, maybe it's time to acknowledge that these barriers do in fact exist?
Yup, Linux makes people jump through an obscene amount of hoops. Guess what - so does every other OS, get over it. And I hate every single one of them. Somehow, telling users to "get over it" is not exactly the most productive way to go. Pretending something can't be changed because that's the way everybody else does it and because that's the way we've always been doing it... I don't see any potential for growth in this kind of attitude, I'm sorry.
Well, at the risk of losing even more karma even replying to this, but...
What are you talking about? Have you seen a recent GNOME or KDE desktop? Lots of thought and care were put into uncluttering the desktop and making icons and menus make sense -- on both of the major desktops. Personally, I like KDE, I even like Gnome, but I'm a geek. And I'm not denying that desktop environments didn't come a long way towards usability. At the same time, I think it is necessary to refine them relentlessly. Anyone who thinks KDE is ready for their mom or your average office worker is clearly kidding themselves and I invite them to conduct their own study.
It's not. I haven't had to compile a custom kernel in gods-knows-how-long. Most common hardware devices are supported out of the box on modern, polished distros like Ubuntu or Fedora. Huge issues for me are multihead configuration and other graphics integration issues. This stuff shouldn't be so hard. Granted, most distros work fine on a standard single-screen system if the hardware isn't too fancy. Again, we've certainly come a long way here. But this needs to go so much further, up to the point where no user has to even touch a configuration text file, ever again.
Really? Why is that a problem? Notice no one ever says "supporting Windows apps is a huge problem for Mac OS X". It is a big problem because there needs to be legacy support for business apps and other expert software that can't be ported but has to be used for some time to come. Just saying "fuck this, you don't need this app" is not really the solution.
And supporting Windows apps is indeed a problem for Mac OS X, but not a huge one. Why? Because you can install stuff like Parallels even if you are just a mere human.
Two things make even considering Linux for normal users absolutely prohibitive:
Usability is a nightmare. The UI is cluttered with useless, confusing icons and half of the functions behind them don't even work properly. But configuration is the worst problem, why is it so hard to make a system architecture and drivers that don't require constant hand holding regarding even the most basic settings?
Second, supporting Windows apps is a huge problem, too. For all intends and purposes Wine just doesn't work, at least not of you don't know how to tweak and trick it into doing the right thing. At least SuSE comes with XEN, but it's pretty much unusable. The idea of mere users setting up something that works like Parallels on Mac is just completely out of the question with the way this stuff needs to be configured.
Of course it doesn't help that Linus himself is a big antagonist when it comes to making a system that saves the user some time with useful configuration models and efficient UI.
Who has time and energy to spend days setting up his workstation? (Servers are another matter, they're ridiculously easy to set up!) I'm a fairly good developer and I'm under the comforting illusion that I have at least a basic understanding of what goes on under the hood. So when I say that even I am regularly getting discouraged by the obscene amount of hoops Linux/KDE/whatever make their users jumpf through to get anything done, that should mean something.
Microsoft already owns over 230 patents it intends to use against open source projects. This is of course because it is quite simply impossible to write any piece of software without violating at least one patent...
Microsoft has been shopping for deals with major Linux companies lately. A part of every contract has been something like an amnesty for that distro's users in the upcoming court cases.
Now Microsoft is tainting open source developers further, because if a single Mono developer even looked at that.NET code, the whole project is in legal jeopardy.
That said, I'm a bit on the fence as to whether MS will ever actually execute this strategy, because the PR impact would be disastrous (for Linux, too, incidentally. The whole open source community is already successfully branded as a bunch of pirating freeloader terrorists by the general public as it is). So this is obviously a last resort kind of thing...
Our lecture halls are so small, they have to use video broadcasts to reach all the students in the class for many of the lectures. The way this works is they put all the students who could possibly fit into one hall with the lecturer, then film the thing and transmit realtime video to the overflow halls. While this may seem like a nice idea, it would actually be much better if students could watch the lectures on their own time.
Med school is packed with many different classes and has a very tight time table here, plus for some lectures students have to travel to halls that are literally in different parts of the city. It would save a lot of time for everyone if the lectures were just recorded and could be played back later whenever the timing is right. That way, they could also be used for exam preparation.
Somehow I doubt my university would ever go for that...
This is just the latest event in a long series of Germany's attempts to completely regulate any internet activity whatsoever. Germany, which is already not exactly the epicenter of CS innovation, is pushing itself further and further away from reality and relevance. This is following the decades-old scheme of legislating their citizens into submission by what you could call an eloborate undertaking to ensure that nobody can actually live a life that is fully in compliance with the myriad of provisions and laws that rule every day life.
As a German myself, I really don't have an answer as to why this is happening. Sure, there are some hints: We are talking about a culture that has been very hostile towards any change and innovation for a long time now, while at the same time the majority of the people feel oddly comforted by the myriad of confusing laws and provisions that govern all aspects of everyday life. Recently, the people in their enduring wisdom have elected the conservative party to run the country, after a mildly progressive initiative of reform and adaption to the developments of the new century got the old (politically centered) government kicked out of their jobs.
If Germany stays on this course, we are going to become even more irrelevant than we already are. Sadly, laws once issued are rarely revoked at any time in the future, so the only way for Germany is down I'm afraid.
And yes, I believe what you do on your own webserver is nobody's damn business except your own. Every site collects IP addresses and most don't use them at all except for statistics because - hot tech news here - IP addresses are virtually useless! Maybe it's time for Germany to start their own internet instead of trying to convert the existing one to correspond to their views. Heck, they could do that in an alliance with right-wing media companies in the US, the Chinese firewall people and those crazy sheikhs in Saudi Arabia - I think it'd be a good match!
Do not sign such an agreement. Maybe the manager you're currently working with has only the best intentions, but be assured, many people at that large corporation really haven't. And there's always the possibility of your relationship going sour in the end. If something like that happens, you'll get screwed in one of both ways:
Idea harvesting If you're doing anything remotely interesting, they'll harvest your idea and patent it. Chances are, some of your ideas are related to whatever you're doing for the company. So they can not only take your idea away from you, make you hand over anything you've done so far and send you a cease-and-desist letter preventing you from working on a related idea - they can also make a handy amount of money off your work.
Use the stuff you forgot to mention It's nearly impossible to mention anything you ever thought of in this list and do it in a legally binding way. So it's going to be really easy for this company to prove something _you did_ belongs to them, especially if its not mentioned on your list and touches work you did for them in any (however small) way. The implication here is that if something isn't on the list, it's going to be theirs by default.
Also keep in mind, that most NDAs come with an expiration date - after that date passes you'll lose any confidentiality you might have believed you had. The company's ideas, however, remain protected through copyright, trademark and patents. So in essence, the NDA expires unilaterally thereby screwing you further.
Yeah, I know, these are worst cases. Maybe only one in ten programmers will get screwed. But do you really want to gamble around with your intellectual property like that? If you can afford it at all, don't do business with these companies. Do business with their competitors whose NDAs are limited to whatever you're doing while you're working for them. Anything beyond "keep our stuff to secret" is legally superfluous since the company's products and ideas are ALREADY protected by other means.
Don't walk into those legal traps, you're just inviting people to screw you over. Keep contracts and agreements as simple as possible, and you're going to be fine.
The problem is not brainpower, it's creativity. While there are lots of people capable of reverse engineering protocols and emulating the necessary data structures there seems to be a distinct lack of developers with enough vision to create something new from scratch. Likewise, the sky is full of people who _want_ to create something new but can't follow through on a technical level.
Maybe it's also about motivation: create an SWG emulator now and enter the hall of fame, and very possibly be either hired or gruesomely executed by Sony. The alternative: "I helped to create an Open Source MMO before it was forked five times and lost its only player" - just doesn't compare to that.
Well, depending on what kind web apps you develop... we may actually have reached a phase now where more stuff works on Mozilla-based browsers than on IE. Speaking from experience, IE has become the "now we also have to make this work on"-browser, whereas that role was previously inverted.
It's a cyclic thing. I can still remember, when Netscape 4 was the "leading" engine, IE support was a bitch to get working as intended. Then, MS got their shit together and came out on top. For a while, IE was the leading browser regarding functionality, with all the others trailing far behind. Only recently with Mozilla going mainstream, IE may once again be on its way down.
For web developers it even sucks more than for end users, because it just means that much more work to support the trailing platform (currently IE) and it also means to compromise feature-wise. And that's why we really want to have standards, and not because it's fun to have an XML validation fetish. It's so everything can finally expected to just work.
Yeah, riiight. What were the names of those startups again? This isn't more than a half-assed troll, but I'll bite anyway:
First, there is such a thing as a unique idea and it can be important to keep it quiet. Sure not, most ideas are already taken, you should know that. The key is really follow-through, marketing, and appeal of the product. That's where you can shine, and that's where competition can steal from you. Your idea is basically just dead meat by itself.
You certainly need to get your patents filed first. Right, continuing my earlier point: chances are, you'll be able to patent anything. That doesn't mean you're the first to think of it. It just means that you donated money to the USPTO and contributed to the stranglehold this rotting system has over the industry.
The fact that the author suggests otherwise simply means he has never worked in a truly inovative environment. You're talking about the creator of some impressive startups here. Please feel free to let us know about your credentials anytime.
The first mover is important argument is not a truism. In fact, the first mover usually looses. Wow, how's that for a contradiction with what you said just a few lines above! What does that say about the originality of ideas and the sensibility of the USPTO again?
I'd suggest trying a couple more startups. The author can then look back at this article and smile at his naïveté. Just change your subject line to FR1ST P0ST!!1! and you're all set...
Our company has been programming a business "web service" for a global customer for about 1,5 years now and it definitely was not even in a prototype stage in 3 months, few real world projects that have real customer are.
That's interesting, isn't it? I think you and Mark Fletcher are both right. In my experience you're about one order of magnitude faster developing something with no customer in sight at all, while doing something for a classic "b2b" customer can drag on and on forever, sometimes with no or even catastrophic results!
Possible reasons may be: if you're coding according to someone else's ideas, there is always tremendous inefficiency involved just by transporting the idea across. Also, if the customer is a non-developer (like almost always), they tend to have some very strange ideas about the product, thus prolonging and endangering the project. And, the customer is traditionally never satisfied, even if everything is conforming to spec - on the other hand, if you'r a small startup coding for yourself, you have a vision and just go ahead and manifest it, way simpler and faster!
Sorry for posting twice, but I misread your statement about content type. Most applications distinguish what I would call old-fashionedly "file formats" by using a content-type categorization. That's not only video, audio, text - it's more specific like image/jpeg, application/whatever-xml and such.
Anyway, where is the line between a markup format and a file format when they're both on file? What about the serialized object stream that makes up MS Word documents? Isn't that also a markup language for you then?
So if Bezos wants to waste his money on lawyers, good for him.
Not exactly. It's more like Bezos wants other people to waste their money on lawyers, as they are fighting his frivolous patent empire. Basically people like Bezos can patent anything, no matter whether there's prior art, or even if the claim is so vague that it can be applied to almost any current or future system. Like people say, patents will be granted without fact checking 90% of the time.
The dangerous part is that it's believed a frivolous patent won't hold up in court and that the judicial system balances the overall grossness of patent law. It doesn't. In court, the party with the most money wins. And if by some fluke of kismet it doesn't, the 50-50 chance rule of winning applies.
Thus the general belief that the broken patent system can be balanced and overridden by a higher governmental power (capable of executing reasonable judgement) is patently hilarious!
Slashdot Mirror
I don't get it. Why don't they just sell their Fucking signs to anyone who wants one?
What a wonderful idea! Let's formalize the use of nationwide citizen tracking devices, equipped with useless but expensive sensors that try to spy on everybody. Of course, this functionality would have to come with the ability to remotely activate the cell's microphone and cameras "to gather more information about terroristic activities on scene".
The nuclear threat serves only as the official excuse to scare people into compliance with the egregious breaches of privacy and personal safety that are guaranteed to occur. Those sensors won't detect anything useful, but they will mandate a huge surveillance apparatus that can be handily used for comprehensive tracking and spying.
I'm as scared about, say, nuclear terrorism as everybody - but can we please start resisting people who are just using this fear as a pretext to take our rights away? Terrorists and the government have a really nice symbiosis going there, but everybody else just loses out on every step of the way.
From TFA: Ordinary people who are feeling anxious are "much more open with their body movements and their facial expressions as compared to an operational terrorist (thinking) 'I've got to defeat security,' " Maccario said. "We're looking for behavior indicators that show a certain level of stress, fear or anxiety above and beyond that shown by an anxious member of the traveling public."
The level of ignorance and sheer incompetence in this one single paragraph alone is so stunningly below what you can reasonably expect from an individual with an IQ of at least 80, it is downright scary people like that have so much control over everybody's life.
> meaning the same percentage of people would be charged with something if they just picked people at random?
Oh, yes! That's the wonderful thing about rethorics though: doesn't it sound awesome when they say "we arrested 600 evildoers using this spiffy technique"? When in reality that amounts to less than 1% of all those referred to secondary screening; which of course means they could have just picked out people at random and got the same results.
The scary thing is actually that this whole process doesn't seem to involve people with actual functioning brains, so the stunning ineffectiveness (and abusiveness) of this neat surveilance technique is obviously never subjected to any form of quality control at all, ever.
> Only 1.8% of the people they referred for a second screening [11 out of 600] were arrested for something, and not necessarily terrorism.
Ha! If they got even one single terrorism-related arrest out of this, they would have advertised the shit out of that single success! It never happened.
I think it's interesting how we have formalized, absorbed and completely accepted many of the mannerisms that are so popular in dictatorial regimes.
Now, our experience that there is only one index (time) dimension may just mean that the values of moment_in_time and some_other_factor are tightly coupled, preventing us from experiencing them as separate concepts in daily experience
Wow, what an utter gibberish sentence. I should sleep more and probably proof-read my posts.
But it's clear what I meant, right?
Well, wtf? In relation to which time? It's like saying that the metre standard is bigger 1000 miles from here, measured with itself.
If it makes any sense, it's not as simple as "dt(here)/dt(there)". It may still make some, but I'd need a smarter explanation than yours (no offense.)
That's exactly what I thought.
[...] is like saying that time goes faster this year than in 1997. How would you measure that? In relation to _what_?
But what if you had a window (maybe a portal or something) to look X years into the past? Say, there is a clock on the other side of that portal. If time is running synchronously (and X doesn't shift), and you'd expect it to run at the same speed as a local clock on your end of the portal. However, if time is indeed "slowing down" you'd see the clock in the past speeding up in comparison.
The problem, as you said, is of course that X - the temporal distance between the two ends of the portal - is also subject to that kind of shift. Looking at the light of those very distant objects is exactly like observing this theoretical portal.
Still, the question "relative to what?" remains valid. Could such an effect even exist without the work of at least one additional dimension behind it all? Speaking from the perspective of a computer scientist, all this additional state information has to be stored somewhere, right?
Traditionally, you'd have an atom A and it's position would be defined in time like this
T[moment_in_time] = [Ax, Ay, Az] (disregarding speed/momentum for simplification here)
But with this new theory, time can't be the only index for the state of matter and energy. The "storage system" of the universe's information would have to take at least 2 parameters in order for this slow-down to work, like this:
T[moment_in_time, some_other_factor] = [Ax, Ay, Az]
Like I said, this is strictly from an information theory point of view. Now, our experience that there is only one index (time) dimension may just mean that the values of moment_in_time and some_other_factor are tightly coupled, preventing us from experiencing them as separate concepts in daily experience. However, over cosmic timescales this coupling would be slightly asymmetric, thereby introducing the temporal drift.
When I reflect on my stupid layman's model, it also looks like there wouldn't necessary be a point where time stops completely, because the exact dynamics of the coupling of the two index dimensions is not known (or is it?).
And no, the x/y/z coordinates in the example are not meant to be a complete representation of all state information.
1) join the Microsoft reseller program for Windows XP and/or Vista,
2) start packaging up pre-built QEMU and/or XEN VMs, each tailored for different purposes.
3) Create a custom front-end for auto-building and installing the approrpriate kernel modules
4) Bundle the whole thing together and start selling it.
5) Profit!!!
See? There's not even a ??? part. I'm not sure there'll be a profit, with market share numbers below one percent on the desktop. Anyway this is the part where I cowardly leave this idea for real businesspeople, such as yourself perhaps?
2. It is what they know and they are afraid of change. Even when Microsoft dictates change with an upgrade, the changes between two versions of the same bit of software are perceived to be smaller than the jump between different bits of software (whether or not this is true). True, but publicity helps. However, I'm a little afraid that average people (let's get away from the retard image) when they finally say "hey, I'm gonna try this Linux thing" are in for a disappointment. I'm talking for example about people who love to tinker with their computer in their spare time. There are lots of them and they tend to be huge influencers on their social surroundings. And I know we can't win a huge portion of them over, just because nobody cared enough to make this a priority. 3. They are not interested enough to change - their computer does more or less what they want and they don't want to go to the effort of changing (even if the change would make things better for them in the long run). I think there are huge numbers of people who are frustrated with Windows, if only for the sheepish reason that they read about the security problems. But chances are your average users has quite a bit of experience with spyware and viruses and software that you have to sell major organs for to use it legally. That is potential right there. Plus, now that so much stuff is happening on the web, the OS becomes more interchangeable. But for this change to occur, people have to be able to configure their system more effortlessly and a lot of them want to bring their pet application with them when they move in. Your original post came across as a "Linux sucks compared to Windows because it does $lots_of_things_windows_also_does". I'm all for improving Linux, but citing these sorts of problems as a reason why Windows is "better" (even though Windows has exactly the same problems) seems the wrong attitude. If it came across this way I hereby apologize. And I'll try to hide behind the fact that I'm not a native English speaker. I think the main way Linux can get into the mainstream is for it to be shipped as standard on machines (similar to what Dell are doing) *where appropriate*. Obviously shipping it to people who need Windows specific software is just going to piss them off, but there are a large group of users for whom Linux does everything they need as standard. I'm not convinced that further improvements to the software itself are going to push Linux much further into the mainstream at this time. Agreed. But it really comes down to momentum. Massive change happens only with momentum. And momentum only happens when opinion makers get in line behind Linux. Instead of telling them to piss off, listening to their concerns may be a necessary evil.
KDE having all these nice features that are burried or misconfigured by default makes it all the more tragic. Just like when you go and set up XP for a non technical person you install a firewall, anti-virus, anti-malware, anti-spyware and all those programs that they actually need and mess with the various settings to make it nice and simple to use, well you need to do that with Linux as well, after you have installed whatever distro you have chosen (I always go for Debian as it is stable and only takes about 20 minutes to install - no massive updates required.. and what does the distro matter if the user is non technical.) set it up porperly, get that desktop looking welcoming, spend half an hour installing all the various office/graphical/audio applications etc... then purge the kmenu for unneeded cruft and make sure everything works, it will take less time than XP and the end result will be significantly better. This is where experiences vary wildly. When something goes wrong during a Linux install (and things do go wrong), there is often no other choice but to work through horrible text files and cryptic error messages as if you're on some kind of quest, and that can take many hours.
I'm willing to concede the point that my experience may be different because I'm clinically retarded or that my computers are constantly punishing me for my generally low cosmic karma. Anyway, I always seem to come across huge barriers and nothing ever works like it should on first try. On the other hand, installing servers for Linux has always been a breeze in my experience...
There are two types of disgruntled users. The first just think something isn't working out and leave quietly in disgust. The second type are the guys who try to tell you that there maybe room for improvement. I'm not sure having all your critics in the first column is a good strategy when you're shooting for widespread adoption. Just a thought.
Fact is, there is still a huge user base out there that hasn't been reached. They are Windows users, lots of them. All I'm saying is maybe there is a reason why they are still on Windows other than the assumption of they being retards? I have no recent experience of SuSE (although I have heard lots of bad stuff about it and for political reasons I wouldn't use it), but Xen under Fedora 7 is quite usable. I'll try that out then! Whether or not you agree with Linus's opinions, he does not control the direction that individual distributions take the userland. Granted, but that makes it all the more bizarre that this mindset is so entrenched in the community. Every time somebody talks about usability they get a severe beating. So naturally, there are not many people still around to keep telling you there may be a problem because nobody wants to hear it anyway. For one thing, even if I have to set up a workstation from scratch it doesn't take days. However, these days I tend to just copy my Beryl and Emerald config onto new workstations so there is no real set up to be done. One thing I _am_ sure of though it that if the OS restricted me as much as Windows does I would waste far more time having to deal with a bad unchangable configuration on a daily basis than I do in configuring a workstation _once_. One of the reasons I use Linux is because I can tweak the config to speed up operations I have to do frequently - Windows does not allow this to the same extent. Somehow I must have come across as a Windows advocate which I'm clearly not, and I'm sorry for the misunderstanding. There are tons of stuff I absolutely love about Linux/KDE/Gnome, but there are also lots of barriers and little frustrations adding up. And since we are talking about "The Next Leap for Linux" here anyway, maybe it's time to acknowledge that these barriers do in fact exist? Yup, Linux makes people jump through an obscene amount of hoops. Guess what - so does every other OS, get over it. And I hate every single one of them. Somehow, telling users to "get over it" is not exactly the most productive way to go. Pretending something can't be changed because that's the way everybody else does it and because that's the way we've always been doing it... I don't see any potential for growth in this kind of attitude, I'm sorry.
And supporting Windows apps is indeed a problem for Mac OS X, but not a huge one. Why? Because you can install stuff like Parallels even if you are just a mere human.
Two things make even considering Linux for normal users absolutely prohibitive:
Usability is a nightmare. The UI is cluttered with useless, confusing icons and half of the functions behind them don't even work properly. But configuration is the worst problem, why is it so hard to make a system architecture and drivers that don't require constant hand holding regarding even the most basic settings?
Second, supporting Windows apps is a huge problem, too. For all intends and purposes Wine just doesn't work, at least not of you don't know how to tweak and trick it into doing the right thing. At least SuSE comes with XEN, but it's pretty much unusable. The idea of mere users setting up something that works like Parallels on Mac is just completely out of the question with the way this stuff needs to be configured.
Of course it doesn't help that Linus himself is a big antagonist when it comes to making a system that saves the user some time with useful configuration models and efficient UI.
Who has time and energy to spend days setting up his workstation? (Servers are another matter, they're ridiculously easy to set up!) I'm a fairly good developer and I'm under the comforting illusion that I have at least a basic understanding of what goes on under the hood. So when I say that even I am regularly getting discouraged by the obscene amount of hoops Linux/KDE/whatever make their users jumpf through to get anything done, that should mean something.
- Microsoft already owns over 230 patents it intends to use against open source projects. This is of course because it is quite simply impossible to write any piece of software without violating at least one patent...
- Microsoft has been shopping for deals with major Linux companies lately. A part of every contract has been something like an amnesty for that distro's users in the upcoming court cases.
- Now Microsoft is tainting open source developers further, because if a single Mono developer even looked at that
.NET code, the whole project is in legal jeopardy.
That said, I'm a bit on the fence as to whether MS will ever actually execute this strategy, because the PR impact would be disastrous (for Linux, too, incidentally. The whole open source community is already successfully branded as a bunch of pirating freeloader terrorists by the general public as it is). So this is obviously a last resort kind of thing...Our lecture halls are so small, they have to use video broadcasts to reach all the students in the class for many of the lectures. The way this works is they put all the students who could possibly fit into one hall with the lecturer, then film the thing and transmit realtime video to the overflow halls. While this may seem like a nice idea, it would actually be much better if students could watch the lectures on their own time.
Med school is packed with many different classes and has a very tight time table here, plus for some lectures students have to travel to halls that are literally in different parts of the city. It would save a lot of time for everyone if the lectures were just recorded and could be played back later whenever the timing is right. That way, they could also be used for exam preparation.
Somehow I doubt my university would ever go for that...
This is just the latest event in a long series of Germany's attempts to completely regulate any internet activity whatsoever. Germany, which is already not exactly the epicenter of CS innovation, is pushing itself further and further away from reality and relevance. This is following the decades-old scheme of legislating their citizens into submission by what you could call an eloborate undertaking to ensure that nobody can actually live a life that is fully in compliance with the myriad of provisions and laws that rule every day life.
As a German myself, I really don't have an answer as to why this is happening. Sure, there are some hints: We are talking about a culture that has been very hostile towards any change and innovation for a long time now, while at the same time the majority of the people feel oddly comforted by the myriad of confusing laws and provisions that govern all aspects of everyday life. Recently, the people in their enduring wisdom have elected the conservative party to run the country, after a mildly progressive initiative of reform and adaption to the developments of the new century got the old (politically centered) government kicked out of their jobs.
If Germany stays on this course, we are going to become even more irrelevant than we already are. Sadly, laws once issued are rarely revoked at any time in the future, so the only way for Germany is down I'm afraid.
And yes, I believe what you do on your own webserver is nobody's damn business except your own. Every site collects IP addresses and most don't use them at all except for statistics because - hot tech news here - IP addresses are virtually useless! Maybe it's time for Germany to start their own internet instead of trying to convert the existing one to correspond to their views. Heck, they could do that in an alliance with right-wing media companies in the US, the Chinese firewall people and those crazy sheikhs in Saudi Arabia - I think it'd be a good match!
Do not sign such an agreement. Maybe the manager you're currently working with has only the best intentions, but be assured, many people at that large corporation really haven't. And there's always the possibility of your relationship going sour in the end. If something like that happens, you'll get screwed in one of both ways:
Idea harvesting
If you're doing anything remotely interesting, they'll harvest your idea and patent it. Chances are, some of your ideas are related to whatever you're doing for the company. So they can not only take your idea away from you, make you hand over anything you've done so far and send you a cease-and-desist letter preventing you from working on a related idea - they can also make a handy amount of money off your work.
Use the stuff you forgot to mention
It's nearly impossible to mention anything you ever thought of in this list and do it in a legally binding way. So it's going to be really easy for this company to prove something _you did_ belongs to them, especially if its not mentioned on your list and touches work you did for them in any (however small) way. The implication here is that if something isn't on the list, it's going to be theirs by default.
Also keep in mind, that most NDAs come with an expiration date - after that date passes you'll lose any confidentiality you might have believed you had. The company's ideas, however, remain protected through copyright, trademark and patents. So in essence, the NDA expires unilaterally thereby screwing you further.
Yeah, I know, these are worst cases. Maybe only one in ten programmers will get screwed. But do you really want to gamble around with your intellectual property like that? If you can afford it at all, don't do business with these companies. Do business with their competitors whose NDAs are limited to whatever you're doing while you're working for them. Anything beyond "keep our stuff to secret" is legally superfluous since the company's products and ideas are ALREADY protected by other means.
Don't walk into those legal traps, you're just inviting people to screw you over. Keep contracts and agreements as simple as possible, and you're going to be fine.
The problem is not brainpower, it's creativity. While there are lots of people capable of reverse engineering protocols and emulating the necessary data structures there seems to be a distinct lack of developers with enough vision to create something new from scratch. Likewise, the sky is full of people who _want_ to create something new but can't follow through on a technical level.
Maybe it's also about motivation: create an SWG emulator now and enter the hall of fame, and very possibly be either hired or gruesomely executed by Sony. The alternative: "I helped to create an Open Source MMO before it was forked five times and lost its only player" - just doesn't compare to that.
Well, depending on what kind web apps you develop... we may actually have reached a phase now where more stuff works on Mozilla-based browsers than on IE. Speaking from experience, IE has become the "now we also have to make this work on"-browser, whereas that role was previously inverted.
It's a cyclic thing. I can still remember, when Netscape 4 was the "leading" engine, IE support was a bitch to get working as intended. Then, MS got their shit together and came out on top. For a while, IE was the leading browser regarding functionality, with all the others trailing far behind. Only recently with Mozilla going mainstream, IE may once again be on its way down.
For web developers it even sucks more than for end users, because it just means that much more work to support the trailing platform (currently IE) and it also means to compromise feature-wise. And that's why we really want to have standards, and not because it's fun to have an XML validation fetish. It's so everything can finally expected to just work.
But, you mileage may differ.
Yeah, riiight. What were the names of those startups again? This isn't more than a half-assed troll, but I'll bite anyway:
First, there is such a thing as a unique idea and it can be important to keep it quiet.
Sure not, most ideas are already taken, you should know that. The key is really follow-through, marketing, and appeal of the product. That's where you can shine, and that's where competition can steal from you. Your idea is basically just dead meat by itself.
You certainly need to get your patents filed first.
Right, continuing my earlier point: chances are, you'll be able to patent anything. That doesn't mean you're the first to think of it. It just means that you donated money to the USPTO and contributed to the stranglehold this rotting system has over the industry.
The fact that the author suggests otherwise simply means he has never worked in a truly inovative environment.
You're talking about the creator of some impressive startups here. Please feel free to let us know about your credentials anytime.
The first mover is important argument is not a truism. In fact, the first mover usually looses.
Wow, how's that for a contradiction with what you said just a few lines above! What does that say about the originality of ideas and the sensibility of the USPTO again?
I'd suggest trying a couple more startups. The author can then look back at this article and smile at his naïveté.
Just change your subject line to FR1ST P0ST!!1! and you're all set...
Our company has been programming a business "web service" for a global customer for about 1,5 years now and it definitely was not even in a prototype stage in 3 months, few real world projects that have real customer are.
That's interesting, isn't it? I think you and Mark Fletcher are both right. In my experience you're about one order of magnitude faster developing something with no customer in sight at all, while doing something for a classic "b2b" customer can drag on and on forever, sometimes with no or even catastrophic results!
Possible reasons may be: if you're coding according to someone else's ideas, there is always tremendous inefficiency involved just by transporting the idea across. Also, if the customer is a non-developer (like almost always), they tend to have some very strange ideas about the product, thus prolonging and endangering the project. And, the customer is traditionally never satisfied, even if everything is conforming to spec - on the other hand, if you'r a small startup coding for yourself, you have a vision and just go ahead and manifest it, way simpler and faster!
Sorry for posting twice, but I misread your statement about content type. Most applications distinguish what I would call old-fashionedly "file formats" by using a content-type categorization. That's not only video, audio, text - it's more specific like image/jpeg, application/whatever-xml and such.
Anyway, where is the line between a markup format and a file format when they're both on file? What about the serialized object stream that makes up MS Word documents? Isn't that also a markup language for you then?
Oh man, no point in arguing. Whatever is important to you ;-)
But what exactly do *you* think constitutes a file format if not a way to structure information in a file?
So if Bezos wants to waste his money on lawyers, good for him.
Not exactly. It's more like Bezos wants other people to waste their money on lawyers, as they are fighting his frivolous patent empire. Basically people like Bezos can patent anything, no matter whether there's prior art, or even if the claim is so vague that it can be applied to almost any current or future system. Like people say, patents will be granted without fact checking 90% of the time.
The dangerous part is that it's believed a frivolous patent won't hold up in court and that the judicial system balances the overall grossness of patent law. It doesn't. In court, the party with the most money wins. And if by some fluke of kismet it doesn't, the 50-50 chance rule of winning applies.
Thus the general belief that the broken patent system can be balanced and overridden by a higher governmental power (capable of executing reasonable judgement) is patently hilarious!