Windows 1.03, 2, 286, 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, Windows for Workgroups, NT, Windows 95 (and possibly even Windows 98) all did not have a free SDK.
You know, you can slap people around all you want for using "always" inappropriately, or whatever infraction the poor GP is responsible for, but to all the people reading this in their mid-20's, this is entirely irrelevant. Windows has been an open development platform for their entire employable lifetime, and probably as far back as they could type. That is an awful lot of/. readership;)
I hate coming to the defense of Microsoft, but "CTRL-ALT-DEL" hasn't been a hard-reboot sequence since WinME. It's been used in WinNT/2K/XP/V/7 as a way to access the login prompt because IIRC it's a special sequence that only the kernel is allowed to listen for, so you can ostensibly be assured that no program other than the login prompt is accepting your username/password. A soft-keyboard version of "CTRL-ALT-DEL" would defeat that "security" purpose.
Call it a security screen/button then. That's more accurate. Anyone bringing it up from remote desktop sees it as "Security..."
What's a "volume button"? Is that any different than any other button? Does it have a label on it that says "this button only controls volume, and nothing else, always"?
Yes, it consistently does nothing other than change the volume! Yes, it might have a picture of something meant to confer the meaning "affects volume of sound" on or next to it, on account of it being a volume button and all. Amazingly, you can afford to put a specific symbol, with a specific meaning on a button that has a specific meaning. Wonderful concept.
Ha! "Subverts the defined usage of a button". That's very Orwellian of you. Isn't the "defined usage" of a button to be pressed?
It's probably whatever the documentation defines it to be. Documentation is sort of like a machine's Bible, except man created both machine and documentation which lends a little more credence.
Are we really having this discussion, or am I asleep?
What do you think it does? It takes a picture.
Which one, the take picture button? Ever handed a camera to someone and get the "push this button?" look? No, of course not, because you're too young. I think my cell phone even has a camera button with the picture of a freaking camera on it. I guess that's what makes it a camera button.
No need to get all philosophical on us bro, these are just machines, and we made them. The only meaning buttons have is what we give them. The same goes for words, and it's common sense to agree on as few meanings each as possible, make new ones, or make due.
Your keyboard has a button on it near the bottom that's really long and doesn't have a label.
Because we don't have a symbol for empty space between letters? Do you call it anything other than a space bar? Why pick on that one though, how about the a key?
The a key is called the a key because it has an a on it. I expect to produce an a by pressing the a key anywhere typing is allowed. By extension, I suppose I would consider a volume button to change the volume wherever sound is allowed. Are you telling me where sound is allowed Mr Dictator?
This key is only supposed to insert spaces into text, right? Why is it also clicking buttons that you've focused? That's madness! And what's the deal with that TAB button, anyway? Sometimes it inserts a bunch of whitespace, and sometimes it changes focus. How can anyone be expected to make any sense of this? And don't even get me started on a backspace key that would cause my browser to go to the previous page. That totally loses me.
I think we finally agree on something! We could simplify human-computer interaction by reigning in multi purpose buttons where possible and promoting consistency where not.
For example, in the camera app, there would be no need to have music playing
As it just happens, I play music to set the mood while I'm shooting. You are no better than the monster you guys make Steve Jobs out to be. Maybe you should just concede that users suck at user interface design, more than software developers do, and boy do they suck.
I want to add a clause to the GPL forbidding use of software in the State of Texas, until they clear this up, and boycott the state -- with all software products, so Texas will not benefit from the software or technology until they clean up their act, and stop allowing 21st-century robbers to loot the treasuries of successful technlogy firms. Who's with me???
Punish the whole of Texas because you dislike something happening in east Texas?
How about we boycott California because some asshole put ice in his snowballs.
Boycott New York because a bear attacked my uncle?
Providing a great GUI for complex routers or Linux admin is hard. Of course there has to be a CLI, that's how pros get the job done. But a great GUI is one that teaches a new user to eventually graduate to using CLI.
Just about everyone reading this is heavily biased one way or another, and there is too much presumption that a CLI is this or a GUI is that.
Why can't we break this down into what makes any type of interface good or bad, and keep open to the possibility of new types of interfaces or better ways of implementing existing ones? If we can bitch and moan about CLI vs. GUI with little choice in the matter I think the floor's open to made up interfaces too. These are qualities I think any computer interface should have.
Learning curve no steeper than the underlying concepts. Probably even lower. Consistent, and predictable. Expressive, and concise. Integrity. Um.. as in, the state of the machine vs. what's conveyed to the user. Accurate? Available over a network. Can be automated. Online documentation. Of the interface. If you have trouble describing the concepts in your native language, maybe it sucks. Efficient, in the sense of labor involved, but in the sense of learning too, like my first rule.
That's a start anyway. I don't see why any kind of interface can't shoot for those. For sure if you're going to deliver more than one kind if interface they should relate to each other as much as possible. A CLI is dead simple to turn into script, but a GUI could also be. A CLI should map so closely to a corresponding GUI that it effectively IS a script of the GUI. A GUI should convey state information just by looking at it. Duh. If it doesn't HAVE to be an either/or situation, why make it into one?
You do realize that the point of the Open Movies isn't just to show off Blender's capabilities, but to actually improve it, right? Elefant Dreams, Big Buck Bunny and now now Sintel all resulted in a better Blender.
Did you actually read the parent? The point of Open Movies are to improve the fucking tool? The majority of Open Source are completely self centered. This isn't altruism. You just make yourselves feel good about giving something away, with the sole interest of making your own life better. That isn't charity.
To be charitable, you actually have to give something of value (yours) away. You're not doing something for someone else, you're doing it for yourselves and it happens to help others. That is not the same. You people devalue software by insisting it all should be free and open by fiat, instead of holding it up as something to be valued by others, whether you intend to give it away or not. It is impossible to criticize Free Software without getting a snarky "but it's free", or "you fix it".
Upon first hearing of Open Source, and Free Software, most people would think the concepts are driven by non-profit organizations, charities, etc. Amazingly, it isn't. I wonder why. People want VALUE, and the truth is, most people don't value Open Source as much as the "Open Source Community", so you all fix the price to $0, creating a divide by zero error in the value equation. Then you claim whatever you do in the sake of openness is valuable to everyone!!
I should have said this a long time ago. FUCK Open Source Software. Software should be of consistent quality, easy to use, and offer good value. $0 source code is exactly the kind of thing a bunch of amateur programmers would want, it doesn't make the world a better place.
Blender Foundation has developed a reputation for helping our community in significant ways.
What do you mean by "our community" and why do I get the distinct impression from you and other FLOSS supporters that you consider FLOSS an end, not a means? I'm not even sure what goal you'd consider FLOSS to be a means to, frankly.
Non-profits that fund housing for the poor are awesome because they fund housing for the poor, not because they use "open" floor plans that can be freely reused. I think free software is awesome. I'd help any of my neighbors with modest amounts of labor for free, lend my tools, etc, because I think reciprocating good will leads to stronger communities and better overall society to live in. I would never, EVER consider the particular means to be more important than good will towards another.
You minimize the ways in which it is different with your hard to take seriously "kudos".
Blender Foundation's self stated goals are to establish services for Blender users, maintain Blender, and obtain funding for Blender. Maybe if all you can say is "thanks for the free movies and supporting FLOSS", their goals are not as endearing to others as you think.
A short film entitled Sintel was released by the Blender Foundation under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (YouTube link). It was created by an international team of artists working collaboratively using a free, open source piece of 3D rendering software called Blender. No Hollywood studio was involved in its making. Pretty remarkable what can be generated these days with open source software and some dedicated, creative talent. If a short film of this quality can be produced without Hollywood right now, imagine what will appear a few more years down the road.
So which trends are we supposed to extrapolate out a few years? Dedicated, creative talent? Free and open source software?
Sorry, I just don't get the point of this. International, collaborating teams of dedicated, creative people can do amazing things with their bare hands, but I'm not dreaming of a bare hands movement taking over the world. Am I looking at this from the wrong direction? Is the story about amazing free software that brings non-dedicated, non-creative people to par with creative professionals using their own tools of the trade? No, because that would be a lie.
Some talented people did something interesting with some easily accessible tools. Great job guys and gals, seriously, but I'm not thanking the software. I'm not imagining a world where access to free tools is locking up boundless potential, sorry. Keep on dreaming,/. headline writing hippies.
The future will be the most interesting. A kid downloads illegal content... and daddy the freelance software engineer gets shut down. That would be one of the first lawsuits.
If you violate the terms of service, you get service disconnected. What's new about this? Daddies around the world didn't sue AOL when their kids sent IM spam and got the family account banned. I don't get what the uproar is, Internet anonymity is not some fundamental right. It's already a farce, this just automates IP identification for a purpose you guys don't like and cry about it.
Because if Diaspora is dependent on the OSS community their users are screwed.
Isn't that a bit like saying "if getting this building completed is dependent on construction workers, we're screwed"? Why would you make such a disparaging remark about the very people that will be keeping this thing going?
REALLY, I didn't know "OSS community" was synonymous with "paid professionals"
Wouldn't it be a LOT more like "if getting this building completed is dependent on opportunistic volunteers, we're screwed"?
I could see if it was a replacement for something like a notebook ( which I carry around daily ), but current tablets don't do that; the input method is clunky and unwieldy, I can still work significantly faster on my plain old notebook with a pen than a tablet.
I can work significantly faster with a full sized keyboard and mouse, dictating my notes to a live person.
APAAAAARENTLY, there is this crazy trend towards mobile general purpose computing, and the lifetime of a device's battery is inversely proportional to the amount of time it is tethered to the wall. Who knows though, maybe people are evolving smaller hands.
No wonder companies compete so poorly against Apple. Everyone looks at the most obvious thing they to differently, and miss the bigger picture. Their sales are driven by shallow things, brand recognition, flashy advertising, awesome sounding words, but then they actually surprise their users with duh duh daaaaaah, a great experience, and it's all a big mystery as to what they did right. Wow. What an idea.. say just enough marketing BS to get it sold, then _actually_ give the user things they wanted (as opposed to overselling CRAP), and nobody figures the secret out. "... it just works..." As long as they keep doing whatever makes it good, and not telling anybody exactly what that is, they could do this forever. Competitors look at what they "sell" and say "pfft, that's easy", instead of looking at what the users _get_.
Damn, it's almost like how you sell Open Source by giving it away... or maybe I'm wrong and the world is full of software developers, who knows.
I'm seriously waiting for this tablet hysteria to die down. In 2007/2008, it was netbooks and nowadays we barely hear a peep about them.
What? Whaaaat? I can't hear anything over the deafening feedback noise you call the Internet! Maybe you should turn it off and go outside now and then!
No really, turn it off once in a while and look around the real world. What netbook hysteria? What tablet hysteria? Are netbooks profitable? Are tablets? (hint: one of those is defined by its price range, one is not)
Think slower. 2011 is 100% speculation. Please don't irresponsibly extrapolate from Internet memes.
What doesn't get mentioned is that the oracle kernel would invalidate any ISV certifications that oracle's linux might have "inherited" from RHEL...
All the major storage vendors are already lined up for this, it's in Oracle's press release. How else could this matter to anyone using the new kernel to improve Oracle DB performance on an Oracle Machine?
and the winslow assholes that don't understand shit about security and somehow think that this means that GNU/Linux is insecure and as bad as their shitty system, I'm going nuts every time there is a new vuln in the kernel.
Well at least Windows admins don't lash out at YOUR OS every time THEY have a vulnerability to deal with. Why is it every time Linux has a vulnerability you lash out like it's their fault? Who is attacking whom each time a flash, adobe, or core Windows vulnerability is announced? Why the anger?
(I mean, come on, If your service is critical enough that it can't accept 2 minutes of downtime for a reboot, then you have redundancy and can update machines one by one without any real downtime)
Hey theory, come meet practice.
and the winslow assholes that don't understand shit about security
This is funny because there is a 99% chance the Windows admins where you work (you have a job?) already have the infrastructure in place to report & patch & reboot on greater numbers of systems than you have due to the frequency of their critical patches and volume of corporate desktops. Meanwhile, have fun double checking your fstab, init scripts, and 3rd party drivers, and scrapping together a complete list of affected servers. Go brutalize a hundred servers with cat semiuptodatelist | while read s; do ssh -n $s yum -y update; done
If it sounds like I'm bitter, it's because I've been there.
This is a local exploit so I'm not horribly concerned and here is why.
You should always treat your systems as if an exploit already exists for both remote and local connections.
But then we can't stand by our "UNIX (and Linux by extension of magic) is a multi-user operating system designed with security in mind. As opposed to you know, the other guys.
I'm being serious, and I know you are too. If you don't trust your system to protect itself then that's that, it's just not secure for a multiuser environment. Add to that nobody really trusts any x86 hardware enough to run more than one critical application at a time and you end up with buttloads of them. As the number of systems scales up, you have to trust the OS to take care of itself. A handful of admins can't keep up with all of the hundreds of servers they're often tasked with babysitting. Most places don't even have a comprehensive list of all of them.
If someone could compromise an input vector and piggyback the exploit that still wouldn't get them very far. In fact, without knowing key details regarding the network infrastructure they would simply nab a host that could not reach the outside world.
1. Just as breaking into someone's user account is more worthwhile than rooting their desktop, rooting your web tier might be more than enough to steal reams of valuable information. Think about what goes into and out of your web tier. With such an elaborate network setup, I bet you're trying to protect something valuable in the back, huh? 2. Insider. *coughgooglecough*
The Windows geeks obviously will want to paint this as a native Linux vulnerability that they don't have - and it is marginally true. That's fine - but it's an escalation bug, not a remote root, and they've several dozen remote root bugs to close before they point fingers.
Is a preemptive finger point backing really necessary? It's not like Linux hasn't ever rubbed its own users the wrong way before. Believe me, you don't need to be remotely on par with Windows vulnerabilities for people to have a good and justified (Nelson) Haw Haw! at Linux's expense.
Hey, to all the "I don't need to reboot Linux" guys, as you're commenting out exclude=kernel from yum.conf, don't forget to update ocfs, powerpath and God-only-knows what other third party drivers you might have. (with gusto) Haw Haw! You don't have a stable driver (or anything ftm) API!
in the age of internet and digital downloads, the middleman, publisher, is the problem.
So what do you call things like gog.com, eBay, Steam, various smart phone app stores, Amazon, XBox Live store thingy, PSN, etc? Those are not middlemen? They are not all taking a cut?
Have you been paying attention to the Internet over the last decade? It turns out that direct marketing is harder than crapping out a website in Frontpage. The "everyone can set up a virtual storefront" thing was a lie. Look at Google. It, and a whole SEO industry behind it exist because finding crap on the Internet is hard.
I don't know why you're jumping for joy that publishers are being cut out, while at the same time people who actually make things cry that it's hard to draw attention to their work when it's simply thrown into a giant list of others with a user driven rating system.
Publishers, the publicity deals they worked out, the negotiating with retailers, sending copies out to be reviewed, what have we replaced all that with? It might not have been the best system, but there will always be middlemen, and given time they will want a bigger cut. You're going to get just as screwed over dealing with the retailers as you were with the publishers, wait and see.
Most smart people find other work for two reasons:
Well if you're looking at financially motivated crimes (other work?), the smart ones are better at not getting caught and/or keeping to things that aren't crimes _yet_. I would say smart people do this because of two reasons:
1) When you are smart, you have options.
2) Smart people can better understand the risk.
Some criminals are idiots, but if all criminals were idiots, the world wouldn't have organized crime, investment scams, corrupt politicians, politician corruptors?, international drug trade, illegal arms trade, corporate espionage, faux religions, embezzling, forgeries, counterfeiting, art thieves, identity thieves, ebay scams, credit card thieves, etc. I'm not even mentioning lower risk things that SHOULD be crimes, good jesus that would be a huge list.
All those employ a lot of smart people at the top and a LOT of dumb people at the bottom. Just like legitimate work. If you were to unilaterally increase the entire planet's intelligence, crime would no go away. You'd just have some really bizarre crimes, and just as much if not more gray markets and white collar crimes.
They had the change to make something more than a glorified, overpriced, locked-down "phone-without-the-phone."
Didn't we used to call them PDAs, or Tablet PCs, depending on if we're talking about the ipod touch or the ipad? Why do these keep getting compared to the iphone when their inspiration is so obvious. Smartphones early on were certainly more PDA than phone. Apple got the mixture right apparently, but that doesn't make everything else backwards.
Which way makes more sense? phone without a phone VS. PDA with a touch screen, err.. PDA with wireless? phone without a phone the size of a clipboard VS. tablet PC with no keyboard.. like a tablet
These have all traditionally been discrete markets, so whats up with all the iphone +/- a FOO comparisons?
Now let's say you have your TV connected to your Dolby Digital capable receiver/amplifier with an optical (toslink) cable. Do you think you are going to get to enjoy that rich 5.1 sound track to go along with your nice high-def picture? Think again. You won't. You will get, at most, a stereo (2.0) downmix of the audio.
No, you can get 5.1, but not high resolution or uncompressed 7.1. BTW, I don't think you can play 7.1 over toslink anyway.
You might be thinking of the problem where a BD _only_ has a 7.1 track, like Kingdom of Heaven for example, then over toslink your player might only offer to down convert it to stereo. That's a different problem, AFAIK. Maybe it's a compromise, instead of uncompressed 5.1, they convert to uncompressed stereo. If the BD has a (compressed) 5.1 track included, you're all set.
Slashdot Mirror
You win at Slashdot
What the fuck. Revisionist much?
Windows 1.03, 2, 286, 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, Windows for Workgroups, NT, Windows 95 (and possibly even Windows 98) all did not have a free SDK.
You know, you can slap people around all you want for using "always" inappropriately, or whatever infraction the poor GP is responsible for, but to all the people reading this in their mid-20's, this is entirely irrelevant. Windows has been an open development platform for their entire employable lifetime, and probably as far back as they could type. That is an awful lot of /. readership ;)
I hate coming to the defense of Microsoft, but "CTRL-ALT-DEL" hasn't been a hard-reboot sequence since WinME. It's been used in WinNT/2K/XP/V/7 as a way to access the login prompt because IIRC it's a special sequence that only the kernel is allowed to listen for, so you can ostensibly be assured that no program other than the login prompt is accepting your username/password. A soft-keyboard version of "CTRL-ALT-DEL" would defeat that "security" purpose.
Call it a security screen/button then. That's more accurate. Anyone bringing it up from remote desktop sees it as "Security ..."
What's a "volume button"? Is that any different than any other button? Does it have a label on it that says "this button only controls volume, and nothing else, always"?
Yes, it consistently does nothing other than change the volume!
Yes, it might have a picture of something meant to confer the meaning "affects volume of sound" on or next to it, on account of it being a volume button and all. Amazingly, you can afford to put a specific symbol, with a specific meaning on a button that has a specific meaning. Wonderful concept.
Ha! "Subverts the defined usage of a button". That's very Orwellian of you. Isn't the "defined usage" of a button to be pressed?
It's probably whatever the documentation defines it to be. Documentation is sort of like a machine's Bible, except man created both machine and documentation which lends a little more credence.
Are we really having this discussion, or am I asleep?
What do you think it does? It takes a picture.
Which one, the take picture button? Ever handed a camera to someone and get the "push this button?" look? No, of course not, because you're too young. I think my cell phone even has a camera button with the picture of a freaking camera on it. I guess that's what makes it a camera button.
No need to get all philosophical on us bro, these are just machines, and we made them. The only meaning buttons have is what we give them. The same goes for words, and it's common sense to agree on as few meanings each as possible, make new ones, or make due.
Your keyboard has a button on it near the bottom that's really long and doesn't have a label.
Because we don't have a symbol for empty space between letters? Do you call it anything other than a space bar?
Why pick on that one though, how about the a key?
The a key is called the a key because it has an a on it. I expect to produce an a by pressing the a key anywhere typing is allowed. By extension, I suppose I would consider a volume button to change the volume wherever sound is allowed. Are you telling me where sound is allowed Mr Dictator?
This key is only supposed to insert spaces into text, right? Why is it also clicking buttons that you've focused? That's madness! And what's the deal with that TAB button, anyway? Sometimes it inserts a bunch of whitespace, and sometimes it changes focus. How can anyone be expected to make any sense of this? And don't even get me started on a backspace key that would cause my browser to go to the previous page. That totally loses me.
I think we finally agree on something! We could simplify human-computer interaction by reigning in multi purpose buttons where possible and promoting consistency where not.
Zzz...
For example, in the camera app, there would be no need to have music playing
As it just happens, I play music to set the mood while I'm shooting. You are no better than the monster you guys make Steve Jobs out to be.
Maybe you should just concede that users suck at user interface design, more than software developers do, and boy do they suck.
I want to add a clause to the GPL forbidding use of software in the State of Texas, until they clear this up, and boycott the state -- with all software products, so Texas will not benefit from the software or technology until they clean up their act, and stop allowing 21st-century robbers to loot the treasuries of successful technlogy firms. Who's with me???
Punish the whole of Texas because you dislike something happening in east Texas?
How about we boycott California because some asshole put ice in his snowballs.
Boycott New York because a bear attacked my uncle?
Sorry, uhh.. roll the music!
attempts to impede the innovative forces of open source
Thanks, I want to throw up now.
Providing a great GUI for complex routers or Linux admin is hard. Of course there has to be a CLI, that's how pros get the job done. But a great GUI is one that teaches a new user to eventually graduate to using CLI.
Just about everyone reading this is heavily biased one way or another, and there is too much presumption that a CLI is this or a GUI is that.
Why can't we break this down into what makes any type of interface good or bad, and keep open to the possibility of new types of interfaces or better ways of implementing existing ones?
If we can bitch and moan about CLI vs. GUI with little choice in the matter I think the floor's open to made up interfaces too. These are qualities I think any computer interface should have.
Learning curve no steeper than the underlying concepts. Probably even lower.
Consistent, and predictable.
Expressive, and concise.
Integrity. Um.. as in, the state of the machine vs. what's conveyed to the user. Accurate?
Available over a network.
Can be automated.
Online documentation. Of the interface. If you have trouble describing the concepts in your native language, maybe it sucks.
Efficient, in the sense of labor involved, but in the sense of learning too, like my first rule.
That's a start anyway. I don't see why any kind of interface can't shoot for those. For sure if you're going to deliver more than one kind if interface they should relate to each other as much as possible. A CLI is dead simple to turn into script, but a GUI could also be. A CLI should map so closely to a corresponding GUI that it effectively IS a script of the GUI. A GUI should convey state information just by looking at it. Duh. If it doesn't HAVE to be an either/or situation, why make it into one?
You do realize that the point of the Open Movies isn't just to show off Blender's capabilities, but to actually improve it, right? Elefant Dreams, Big Buck Bunny and now now Sintel all resulted in a better Blender.
Did you actually read the parent? The point of Open Movies are to improve the fucking tool? The majority of Open Source are completely self centered. This isn't altruism. You just make yourselves feel good about giving something away, with the sole interest of making your own life better. That isn't charity.
To be charitable, you actually have to give something of value (yours) away. You're not doing something for someone else, you're doing it for yourselves and it happens to help others. That is not the same. You people devalue software by insisting it all should be free and open by fiat, instead of holding it up as something to be valued by others, whether you intend to give it away or not. It is impossible to criticize Free Software without getting a snarky "but it's free", or "you fix it".
Upon first hearing of Open Source, and Free Software, most people would think the concepts are driven by non-profit organizations, charities, etc. Amazingly, it isn't. I wonder why. People want VALUE, and the truth is, most people don't value Open Source as much as the "Open Source Community", so you all fix the price to $0, creating a divide by zero error in the value equation. Then you claim whatever you do in the sake of openness is valuable to everyone!!
I should have said this a long time ago. FUCK Open Source Software. Software should be of consistent quality, easy to use, and offer good value. $0 source code is exactly the kind of thing a bunch of amateur programmers would want, it doesn't make the world a better place.
Few Hollywood movies have that result for FLOSS.
Blender Foundation has developed a reputation for helping our community in significant ways.
What do you mean by "our community" and why do I get the distinct impression from you and other FLOSS supporters that you consider FLOSS an end, not a means? I'm not even sure what goal you'd consider FLOSS to be a means to, frankly.
Non-profits that fund housing for the poor are awesome because they fund housing for the poor, not because they use "open" floor plans that can be freely reused. I think free software is awesome. I'd help any of my neighbors with modest amounts of labor for free, lend my tools, etc, because I think reciprocating good will leads to stronger communities and better overall society to live in. I would never, EVER consider the particular means to be more important than good will towards another.
You minimize the ways in which it is different with your hard to take seriously "kudos".
Blender Foundation's self stated goals are to establish services for Blender users, maintain Blender, and obtain funding for Blender.
Maybe if all you can say is "thanks for the free movies and supporting FLOSS", their goals are not as endearing to others as you think.
A short film entitled Sintel was released by the Blender Foundation under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (YouTube link). It was created by an international team of artists working collaboratively using a free, open source piece of 3D rendering software called Blender. No Hollywood studio was involved in its making. Pretty remarkable what can be generated these days with open source software and some dedicated, creative talent. If a short film of this quality can be produced without Hollywood right now, imagine what will appear a few more years down the road.
So which trends are we supposed to extrapolate out a few years?
Dedicated, creative talent?
Free and open source software?
Sorry, I just don't get the point of this. International, collaborating teams of dedicated, creative people can do amazing things with their bare hands, but I'm not dreaming of a bare hands movement taking over the world. Am I looking at this from the wrong direction? Is the story about amazing free software that brings non-dedicated, non-creative people
to par with creative professionals using their own tools of the trade? No, because that would be a lie.
Some talented people did something interesting with some easily accessible tools. Great job guys and gals, seriously, but I'm not thanking the software. /. headline writing hippies.
I'm not imagining a world where access to free tools is locking up boundless potential, sorry. Keep on dreaming,
Just like tin cans on a string.
The future will be the most interesting. A kid downloads illegal content... and daddy the freelance software engineer gets shut down. That would be one of the first lawsuits.
If you violate the terms of service, you get service disconnected. What's new about this? Daddies around the world didn't sue AOL when their kids sent IM spam and got the family account banned. I don't get what the uproar is, Internet anonymity is not some fundamental right. It's already a farce, this just automates IP identification for a purpose you guys don't like and cry about it.
Because if Diaspora is dependent on the OSS community their users are screwed.
Isn't that a bit like saying "if getting this building completed is dependent on construction workers, we're screwed"? Why would you make such a disparaging remark about the very people that will be keeping this thing going?
REALLY, I didn't know "OSS community" was synonymous with "paid professionals"
Wouldn't it be a LOT more like "if getting this building completed is dependent on opportunistic volunteers, we're screwed"?
I could see if it was a replacement for something like a notebook ( which I carry around daily ), but current tablets don't do that; the input method is clunky and unwieldy, I can still work significantly faster on my plain old notebook with a pen than a tablet.
I can work significantly faster with a full sized keyboard and mouse, dictating my notes to a live person.
APAAAAARENTLY, there is this crazy trend towards mobile general purpose computing, and the lifetime of a device's battery is inversely proportional to the amount of time it is tethered to the wall. Who knows though, maybe people are evolving smaller hands.
No wonder companies compete so poorly against Apple. Everyone looks at the most obvious thing they to differently, and miss the bigger picture. Their sales are driven by shallow things, brand recognition, flashy advertising, awesome sounding words, but then they actually surprise their users with duh duh daaaaaah, a great experience, and it's all a big mystery as to what they did right. Wow. What an idea.. say just enough marketing BS to get it sold, then _actually_ give the user things they wanted (as opposed to overselling CRAP), and nobody figures the secret out. "... it just works ..." As long as they keep doing whatever makes it good, and not telling anybody exactly what that is, they could do this forever. Competitors look at what they "sell" and say "pfft, that's easy", instead of looking at what the users _get_.
Damn, it's almost like how you sell Open Source by giving it away... or maybe I'm wrong and the world is full of software developers, who knows.
I'm seriously waiting for this tablet hysteria to die down. In 2007/2008, it was netbooks and nowadays we barely hear a peep about them.
What? Whaaaat? I can't hear anything over the deafening feedback noise you call the Internet! Maybe you should turn it off and go outside now and then!
No really, turn it off once in a while and look around the real world. What netbook hysteria? What tablet hysteria?
Are netbooks profitable? Are tablets? (hint: one of those is defined by its price range, one is not)
Think slower.
2011 is 100% speculation.
Please don't irresponsibly extrapolate from Internet memes.
What doesn't get mentioned is that the oracle kernel would invalidate any ISV certifications that oracle's linux might have "inherited" from RHEL...
All the major storage vendors are already lined up for this, it's in Oracle's press release.
How else could this matter to anyone using the new kernel to improve Oracle DB performance on an Oracle Machine?
and the winslow assholes that don't understand shit about security and somehow think that this means that GNU/Linux is insecure and as bad as their shitty system, I'm going nuts every time there is a new vuln in the kernel.
Well at least Windows admins don't lash out at YOUR OS every time THEY have a vulnerability to deal with. Why is it every time Linux has a vulnerability you lash out like it's their fault? Who is attacking whom each time a flash, adobe, or core Windows vulnerability is announced? Why the anger?
(I mean, come on, If your service is critical enough that it can't accept 2 minutes of downtime for a reboot, then you have redundancy and can update machines one by one without any real downtime)
Hey theory, come meet practice.
and the winslow assholes that don't understand shit about security
This is funny because there is a 99% chance the Windows admins where you work (you have a job?) already have the infrastructure in place to report & patch & reboot on greater numbers of systems than you have due to the frequency of their critical patches and volume of corporate desktops. Meanwhile, have fun double checking your fstab, init scripts, and 3rd party drivers, and scrapping together a complete list of affected servers. Go brutalize a hundred servers with cat semiuptodatelist | while read s; do ssh -n $s yum -y update; done
If it sounds like I'm bitter, it's because I've been there.
This is a local exploit so I'm not horribly concerned and here is why.
You should always treat your systems as if an exploit already exists for both remote and local connections.
But then we can't stand by our "UNIX (and Linux by extension of magic) is a multi-user operating system designed with security in mind. As opposed to you know, the other guys.
I'm being serious, and I know you are too. If you don't trust your system to protect itself then that's that, it's just not secure for a multiuser environment. Add to that nobody really trusts any x86 hardware enough to run more than one critical application at a time and you end up with buttloads of them. As the number of systems scales up, you have to trust the OS to take care of itself. A handful of admins can't keep up with all of the hundreds of servers they're often tasked with babysitting. Most places don't even have a comprehensive list of all of them.
If someone could compromise an input vector and piggyback the exploit that still wouldn't get them very far. In fact, without knowing key details regarding the network infrastructure they would simply nab a host that could not reach the outside world.
1. Just as breaking into someone's user account is more worthwhile than rooting their desktop, rooting your web tier might be more than enough to steal reams of valuable information. Think about what goes into and out of your web tier. With such an elaborate network setup, I bet you're trying to protect something valuable in the back, huh?
2. Insider. *coughgooglecough*
The Windows geeks obviously will want to paint this as a native Linux vulnerability that they don't have - and it is marginally true. That's fine - but it's an escalation bug, not a remote root, and they've several dozen remote root bugs to close before they point fingers.
Is a preemptive finger point backing really necessary? It's not like Linux hasn't ever rubbed its own users the wrong way before.
Believe me, you don't need to be remotely on par with Windows vulnerabilities for people to have a good and justified (Nelson) Haw Haw! at Linux's expense.
Hey, to all the "I don't need to reboot Linux" guys, as you're commenting out exclude=kernel from yum.conf, don't forget to update ocfs, powerpath and God-only-knows what other third party drivers you might have. (with gusto) Haw Haw! You don't have a stable driver (or anything ftm) API!
in the age of internet and digital downloads, the middleman, publisher, is the problem.
So what do you call things like gog.com, eBay, Steam, various smart phone app stores, Amazon, XBox Live store thingy, PSN, etc? Those are not middlemen? They are not all taking a cut?
Have you been paying attention to the Internet over the last decade? It turns out that direct marketing is harder than crapping out a website in Frontpage. The "everyone can set up a virtual storefront" thing was a lie. Look at Google. It, and a whole SEO industry behind it exist because finding crap on the Internet is hard.
I don't know why you're jumping for joy that publishers are being cut out, while at the same time people who actually make things cry that it's hard to draw attention to their work when it's simply thrown into a giant list of others with a user driven rating system.
Publishers, the publicity deals they worked out, the negotiating with retailers, sending copies out to be reviewed, what have we replaced all that with? It might not have been the best system, but there will always be middlemen, and given time they will want a bigger cut. You're going to get just as screwed over dealing with the retailers as you were with the publishers, wait and see.
Most smart people find other work for two reasons:
Well if you're looking at financially motivated crimes (other work?), the smart ones are better at not getting caught and/or keeping to things that aren't crimes _yet_.
I would say smart people do this because of two reasons:
1) When you are smart, you have options.
2) Smart people can better understand the risk.
Some criminals are idiots, but if all criminals were idiots, the world wouldn't have organized crime, investment scams, corrupt politicians, politician corruptors?, international drug trade, illegal arms trade, corporate espionage, faux religions, embezzling, forgeries, counterfeiting, art thieves, identity thieves, ebay scams, credit card thieves, etc. I'm not even mentioning lower risk things that SHOULD be crimes, good jesus that would be a huge list.
All those employ a lot of smart people at the top and a LOT of dumb people at the bottom. Just like legitimate work. If you were to unilaterally increase the entire planet's intelligence, crime would no go away. You'd just have some really bizarre crimes, and just as much if not more gray markets and white collar crimes.
They had the change to make something more than a glorified, overpriced, locked-down "phone-without-the-phone."
Didn't we used to call them PDAs, or Tablet PCs, depending on if we're talking about the ipod touch or the ipad? Why do these keep getting compared to the iphone when their inspiration is so obvious. Smartphones early on were certainly more PDA than phone. Apple got the mixture right apparently, but that doesn't make everything else backwards.
Which way makes more sense?
phone without a phone VS. PDA with a touch screen, err.. PDA with wireless?
phone without a phone the size of a clipboard VS. tablet PC with no keyboard.. like a tablet
These have all traditionally been discrete markets, so whats up with all the iphone +/- a FOO comparisons?
Now let's say you have your TV connected to your Dolby Digital capable receiver/amplifier with an optical (toslink) cable. Do you think you are going to get to enjoy that rich 5.1 sound track to go along with your nice high-def picture? Think again. You won't. You will get, at most, a stereo (2.0) downmix of the audio.
No, you can get 5.1, but not high resolution or uncompressed 7.1.
BTW, I don't think you can play 7.1 over toslink anyway.
You might be thinking of the problem where a BD _only_ has a 7.1 track, like Kingdom of Heaven for example, then over toslink your player might only offer to down convert it to stereo. That's a different problem, AFAIK. Maybe it's a compromise, instead of uncompressed 5.1, they convert to uncompressed stereo. If the BD has a (compressed) 5.1 track included, you're all set.
But pirating and blaming the seller is OK.