How does it keep you from modifying the local database and replacing the "legitimate" hashes with the hashes for the compromised (cheater) software? It would seem that in order to be secure, the comparison has to be run on a trusted machine, which by definition the machine you're scanning for cheats shouldn't be.
I suppose they can send back a hash of the database to the server or something, but it just seems to me that if what you're describing really is the system, then i's inherently possible to compromise without a decryption-based (or dehashing-based) attack.
Okay, so I'm not a programmer, so feel free to correct me if this is totally stupid. But isn't there some way to figure out if a computer is idle, without each application itself tapping into and tracking the mouse motion itself, looking for movement? I thought that the OS would just provide some sort of handler for idletime -- I know (back in Mac OS 8 or 9) there used to be an Extension, the equivalent of a kernel patch almost, to provide something like this. (IIRC it was just called "IdleTime" and it used to cause no end of shit, but it was required for a lot of things.) It seems redundant to have every application that needs to know the time-since-last-input to have to monitor those streams. Not just IM programs but screensavers, grid computing apps, backup programs, antivirus scanners, maybe even some more exotic stuff that I can't think of right now, all need to know this. I can't imagine that if you were designing an OS that you'd make it necessary for each of them to dig into the raw user input stream, and not provide some service for this.
Yeah this is exactly what I was going to say. I definitely had a whole set of these things: the changes were pretty dramatic, too. I remember one car could go from dark blue to white in less than a second if you dropped it from warm water into ice water.
I wonder why this is such a big deal now? Seems like the Hot Wheels guys had it figured out. Maybe their patent just expired?
I wonder if the paint ever wears out, or stops working after a certain number of cycles or amount of time.
Actually you're correct; the "free computer" offer and the comments made by Sun's CEO are somewhat contradictory. One has you paying for the support and software while getting the hardware free, while McNealy's comments suggest that their new direction will be free (as in beer) software, making up their profit off of hardware and ancillary services.
They do this because they want to sell developers and would-be users on their hardware and support, but know that you and I aren't going to go out and drop a few grand on a Sun box that's basically identical (or nearly so) to something that could be built in a white box for $450 worth of parts. So they allow you to buy it on very nice financial terms, with their fully-supported OS and automatic-updates service, etc., in the hope that you'll like their hardware and cause your company or client to get a higher-end system. And that's where they'll really charge the big bucks.
There wasn't really room to elaborate on this in the article brief, but basically my theory is that (as long as they stick with this plan) we'll see two types of products out of Sun: very inexpensive entry-level products, aggressively competing with Dell and others, that draw people in, and very expensive high-end servers which don't compete price-wise with other manufacturers offerings except in specific situations, but that they hope people will buy anyway because they want to step up from the inexpensive gear. I think it would be unfair to call the inexpensive systems (like the Opteron Ultras and some of those new 1U servers) "loss leaders," but in a way that's what they are. They get you into the 'store,' and Sun hopes once you're there you'll stick with the brand.
What I'm not sure about is whether brand loyalty really counts for anything much in the IT world these days, and whether Sun is staking too much on their name even still.
I'm no fan of MySpace either -- actually the way I heard about the site in the first place was in reference to some cross-site-scripting vulnerability, which isn't exactly anything to inspire confidence -- and I've yet to meet anyone in real life that's into MySpace who isn't fairly obnoxious. However with that said, the site does serve a purpose for the people that use it, and nobody's making me go there. I fail to see how people can get so worked up about the place. If you don't like it and think that the majority of users there are retards, then don't ever go there. Problem solved. It's not as though (to the best of my knowledge) MySpace is aggressively driving other social networking sites out of business or something.
If someone wants to provide a cognizant explanation of why MySpace is worth getting all worked up about because it's so stupid, feel free. But I think a whole lot of things are stupid, and on the list of offensively stupid things, MySpace ranks pretty low.
This is why I said elsewhere in the thread that we should leave these non-geographic TLDs around, because they're great for companies or organizations that are international, or don't have a geographic focus. Slashdot, for instance, is US based but attracts readers from all over the world (the English-speaking world anyway); it makes sense that it has a non-geographic TLD. Same with BASF, IBM, or Volkswagen.
The "problem" (insofar as people think there is one, which I'm not sure there is) comes because you cannot get a ".co.us" domain name. Actually the whole.us TLD is underutilized -- but this is not ICANN's fault. It's just that there's not really any demand for.us subdomain names, because US users and hosts prefer the generic non-geographic ones. However as we start to run out of 'good' non-geographic names, there will be more demand for the country-code TLDs by people who really don't need the non-geographic one and would prefer a shorter, easier to remember name under their country code.
For example, if I ran Joe's Java Shop in Lexington, Kentucky, I could either get joesprettygoodjava.com or joescoffee.co.us. The latter is geographic, but shorter. If I didn't need the non-geographic name, then there's no reason to get it (unless I think that my users wouldn't understand anything that doesn't end in ".com").
There's no regulation or restrictions necessary, I think that as the non-geographic TLDs get longer and more complicated, there will be a stronger incentive for local sites to use ccTLDs, both inside the US and elsewhere, and people will get more used to seeing them.
The people who are getting screwed here (from a certain point of view) are local web-sites in the US, who can't get.co.us domains even if they wanted to. By fixing that, you'd relieve some of the pressure on the.com/org/net TLDs and -- in the long run -- you'd probably see more diversity in the sites under them as well.
Not only is it "regressive," but it probably wouldn't produce any good games.
Can you imagine the crew at ID or Rockstar Games sitting around trying to figure out what kind of a game would sell to women? It would be like writing to Ask Slashdot for dating tips. (Okay, probably worse, since we know at least one person here is probably married.)
If you want to make a product for a certain group of people, having members of that group actually make it will almost always create a superior product (assuming you can find people that have the requisite skills) than just having a group of outsiders make a product for whatever their perception of that group is, and then run it past some focus groups.
You're right of course, although there is Turner's Syndrome, which occurs in persons having only one X chromosome (45,X) and nothing else; as they're female one could describe that as "missing" the other X. (However it could just as easily be described as missing the Y, in which case they'd be a normal male.)
I think if it's from Apple and it's destined for the mass-market consumer, you can pretty safely bet that it will be a hermetically sealed, white box. They might let you upgrade a few things on it, as you can do with the Mac Mini computers, but I think it will be more tightly integrated than them and more like an iPod. You're probably not going to be plugging USB2 drives into the back without some serious hacking, that's for sure.
Upgradability isn't something that most people think about when they're purchasing an appliance, which is basically what this is. We can argue here whether or not we (speaking as geeks/computer enthusiasts/whatever) care, but the majority of America doesn't seem to. After all, iPods sell like hotcakes and you can't even take out their batteries without a special tool and a soldering iron, and batteries (even rechargeable ones) are consumables.
Given that the iPod is Apple's biggest success story since probably the Apple ][, I think it's a pretty safe bet that they'll go down the same design path if they decide to do a DVR: Usability, integration, aesthetics, price. Upgradability or extensibility is not one of their goals.
Then for those cases you keep the regular '.com' TLD alive as the more "generic" one.
For instance, if you were a UK based company looking to reach globally, you could be 'xyz.com' while if you were a more nationally-focused operation, you could get 'xyz.co.uk'. That way if people were searching and only wanted to see local companies, they could search within the '.uk' TLD.
I don't think there's anything prohibiting a UK company, or anyone else for that matter, from going out and getting a regular.com domain name; it's just that a lot of companies don't because that namespace is more crowded and you're more likely to get a short name by going through your country's TLD. It's there choice; I'm sure the domain registrars would be more than happy to sell you a.com,.org. or.net domain even if you're international. They're not, at least to my knowledge, exclusively US addresses. It's just that most of the addresses in that space are for historical reasons US-based. (And because there's no.co.us right now.)
Your suggestion is exactly why we should keep supranational, generic TLDs around: not everyone and everything ought to be country-specific. Big companies, international organizations, and websites that don't have a particular geographic focus all have a need for non-geographic TLDs. It's also reasonable to assume that the supra-national TLD will always be more crowded than the local ones, forcing people to make a decision: "do I want to get 'foobarsbestgadgetsinc.com' or 'foobar.co.ch'?"
The only steps that need to happen are that we need a co.us namespace, so that US-based sites who don't need a.com TLD aren't forced to get one (and I think you'd find that companies will, eventually, use this, as they can get better names) and we need to make sure that international users can buy.com domain names as easily as US users can. Nobody has to force anyone to use any particular TLD (and shouldn't). If you create the system correctly, people will use the TLDs that fit them best.
How about people actually talk to their kids about what is and isn't appropriate for them to be looking at on the internet? Put the computer someplace where they'll actually be surrounded by people when they're using it. In general, how about parents -- oh, I don't know -- parent?
It's a bad idea in the same way that mandatory trigger locks are a bad idea: it fails to encourage parents to do what they ought and need to do, that is, if they're going to have a gun in the house, sit down with their kids and explain what they are, how they're used, and what they should do if they come across one. When you take the illicit curiosity factor out of the equation, a gun is just a piece of metal.
I grew up in a house that had enough guns and ammunition in it to equip a small South American junta, and I never -- not once -- went looking for a gun. I knew what they were, I knew what they did, I had a fair idea of where they were kept, I even knew how to unload one if I found it lying on the ground. And I never was particularly interested in any of it, because there wasn't any mystery to be uncovered. Go through my old man's liquor cabinet -- guilty; go through the gun box? Never bothered. (And in retrospect, if my parents had an attitude on alcohol that was more like they had about firearms, I probably wouldn't have done the former, either.)
You can't legislate good parenting any more than you can legislate common sense. In fact less so, because when you give parents a crutch, they'll tend to use it, especially if it lets them avoid having a meaningful (but often uncomfortable for them) conversation with their child.
Furthermore, I think the "risk of damage" that children incur as a result of simply looking at or reading things, either on the net or elsewhere, is greatly exaggerated by both the media and our society in general. The biggest risk of the internet, IMO, is that a kid will meet some sort of pedophile or stalker, and they're a lot more likely to do that in a teen- or child-oriented forum or on Instant Messenger or email than on a porn site. Are you going to block kids from signing up for GMail accounts? How about lying about their age and joining a bulletin board?
A legal definition of pornography where? As other people have pointed out, and I assume you just ignored, there are lots of definitions of what is pornographic. Every country has their own (or none).
Should we just use the strictest definition of 'pornographic' that's out there? Maybe Iran's?
You can't define pornography on a global level -- hell, we can barely define it on a national level.
There will NEVER be a global consensus on what is 'pornographic,' or even on what is appropriate for children to see. Look at the differences in movie ratings between European countries and the U.S., for instance. There are PG-13 movies in America that are 17+ in some European countries, and movies that would almost certainly get an R or NC-17 here which are 13+ there.
Actually I tend to wonder if this wasn't the intent of the move. People seem to be assuming it was because people were buying them to run opensource firmware, but I think that it's because Linksys wants to know whether people are buying it because of Linux. The difference being, they aren't quite sure, and this is how they'll find out.
If the -L version sells well, then one would expect maybe the bean counters will take note and we'll get more Linux-based stuff in the future.
It is slightly obnoxious however that they are charging such a premium for it, though. Hopefully the people who are suggesting that the increase is because to stores it's a new item and thus not deeply discounted are correct, and it will come down closer to where the old (and identical) version was.
Their "business model" is very controversial, but based on everything I've read they don't seem to be technically violating the GPL, because they do (at least now, although they didn't in the past) distribute the source along with the binaries if you have a subscription and pay. Although there were some versions which were distributed without source, supposedly this is not currently the case.
However, and this is the very shady part, if you republish the source -- as is your right to do, under the GPL -- they terminate your account and refuse to give you any future updates. So essentially if you want to redistribute the source, you have to pay for each version of the binaries+source releases. As obnoxious as that may be, it's legitimate based on the letter of the GPL (if arguably not the spirit).
This is based on fairly old information, plus the Wikipedia article, so it could be out of date. If they're not distributing the source with the binaries again (or a written offer for same) when you buy/subscribe to it, then I think they're cleraly in violation.
Frankly they're IMO a completely shady operation, run by individuals who (when they are not power-tripping by banning people from their silly discussion forum) have abused the open source community at every opportunity. Regardless of their compliance in the narrowest sense, they're not an entity that I would ever do business with.
Speaking more generally, does anyone know who wrote the first version of the WRT54G Linux firmware (who originally GPLed it) and holds the copyright? I think the big problem here is that there's nobody who can really enforce the GPL against Sveasoft, and therefore they take their license obligations less than seriously. They've shown no reluctance to be overtly litigious -- e.g., abusing DMCA takedown notices -- and I don't see why they ought not be due for a suit next time they drag their feet in publishing source.
Yeah, that's the coolest thing I've seen on the list so far. Although hacking one of those $20 CVS cams sounds like fun also (but the catch is that they're only $20 with a coupon).
I wonder whether it uses standard (by which I mean Weller-type) low voltage iron sockets and tips? If I could go out and get a Weller iron and attach it to a $35 base station, and it was anywhere near temperature accurate (actually, hell with that, for the difference in price I can get a non-contact IR thermometer, it just needs to be stable)... that would be slicker than whale shit.
Saying that things should always be transparent (in whatever sense of the word) so that people can always see everything about them is absurd.
Although I speak only for myself, I think that the open source movement is a request (demand?) not for transparency per se, but for the ability to examine something if the user so chooses. In fact many of the "advances" Linux has made in the past few years has actually hidden much of that complexity -- and are great steps forward.
It would be analogous not to having a house full of appliances without any covers and with exposed internals, but to appliances on which the covers can -- with the appropriate tools and basic knowledge -- be removed at all. And perhaps more importantly, even to the user who has no interest in ever taking the cover off themselves, appliances which can be taken to any neighborhood repair shop as opposed to sending it back to the manufacturer for repair.
Although I would certainly like the ability to change the law on my own, that power sadly rests with the Legislature and the Courts. In this particular instance, the difference in applicability of the laws relating to slander comes foremost I believe from common law, but most recently from a Supreme Court decision in 1964.
You'll want to read here, or perhaps more particularly here. (The first is unattributed, the second is written by a lawyer.) Or if you don't trust my sources run your own search on Findlaw or even Google.
From the second article:
Under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, as set forth by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1964 Case, New York Times v Sullivan, where a public figure attempts to bring an action for defamation, the public figure must prove an additional element: That the statement was made with "actual malice". In translation, that means that the person making the statement knew the statement to be false, or issued the statement with reckless disregard as to its truth.
Basically, if you are a public official or public figure, not only does the libel or slander have to be incorrect and damaging, you also have the burden of demonstrating that the defendant acted with malice. This is a significantly higher bar than a 'normal person' would have.
Speaking more generally, if you really think that the law applies to everyone equally regardless of circumstance, you should probably wake up and take a hard look around, because an attitude like that, while no doubt pleasant, is going to put you on a collision course with reality. Although if you're really wed to that point of view, the alternative is to think of it this way: the law applies to each person similarly, but differently depending on our circumstances. E.g., currently I have more protection against libel or slander than George Bush, but if I was the President and George was sitting here writing to you, then he'd have the protection and I wouldn't. It's not personal discrimination in that way, and like it or not, the courts and laws do it all the time.
Outstanding -- thanks for the info. I'll definitely check it out again. I had no idea that had been implemented.
I guess I'm not the only one who thought that was a neat feature in iChat! (And I'm glad to see that Apple wasn't being creepy and keeping the APIs to themselves or something, either.)
That's completely different. Sigenthaler is, by virtue of his notoriety, not entitled to the same level of libel and slander protection that you or I would get.
If you as one simple citizen went around and told people in my town that I, another simple citizen, was a pedophilic drug pusher, it would be slander (unless it's true). However you can get away with a lot more if I was a "public figure" in the context of the community you slandered me in.
There's still a limit (I believe at least with publishing, the standard is acting with "reckless disregard" for the truth), and the 'amplification factor' of new media whereby a single person's opinion can become a major news item if they write it on a blog or newsgroup complicates things somewhat, but in general you can say what you want about celebrities without fear of recourse, unless you have some kind of 'soap box' that elevates your opinion/statement above anyone else's.
In this instance I don't see how Sigenthaler can claim his reputation was in any way damaged by the libelous assertions on Wikipedia, nor am I sure that they were even strictly libelous. In this case although the whole assassination-conspiracy thing seems farfetched, it's not so completely outside the realm of possibility as to be immediately unworthy of discussion. Also, since Wikipedia is designed around the concept of documents which are editable by anyone, even if the information was patently false I doubt it would qualify as "reckless disregard" on the site operators' part. After all, everyone knows -- or ought to, anyway -- that Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, and the information should be taken accordingly.
Basically this whole thing is a non-event; somebody said something unflattering about a celebrity, the celebrity responded by using their own notoriety as a soapbox on which to defend themselves (thereby proving, by being able to so easily get published, that they are in fact a celebrity), end of story. The only hook here is that Sigenthaler somehow thinks we ought to toss out several hundred years of jurisprudence dating back to common law, and create some informational strict-liability horror, because somebody said something he didn't like. Good luck with that, Mr. Sigenthaler.
I'm not sure why you got modded down; you're absolutely right in that I think that paragraph sums up what is apparently his entire worldview nicely.
I think that at the end of the day he and I (and I assume most geeks and a lot of computer users) have a fundamental disagreement over what he's saying. I do not think that people who want to dabble with the way the machine works are a "dying breed" at all, except insofar as the computer hardware and software companies are forcing such tinkerers out of existence through sealed boxes. That impulse to tinker is founded on an essential human characteristic, curiosity, which in itself might be described as a desire to simply understand things. Although it's obvious that curiosity is not something which the author possesses, at least to any appreciable degree, there are lots of people (particularly younger ones) who do.
His philosophy is frankly disgusting to me, because it seems to be embracing what I find most disturbing about our culture: that many people find it acceptable to ridicule another's desire to understand, and on some level we find a desire for ignorance to be a laudable goal.
While the "housewives" and "sorority girls" (I won't even get into his obvious sexism, it's too easy) of the world may have forgotten the solenoid, the scientists, engineers, and probably even doctors and lawyers have not, and I think one should carefully consider the place of his two example groups within the power structure of our society. Speaking only for myself, I would certainly want my children to aspire for and to have the ability to achieve better than that.
> And to the editors, please don't post any more articles fromt this guy. This barely contained anything about OSS (certainly nothing intelligent), and he's not nearly as funny and clever as he seems to think he is.
Seriously. I'm really beginning to think that we need some sort of moderation scheme for the articles. This one reeks of "-1, Flamebait" like nothing I've ever seen.
It's ignorant, it's uninsightful, and frankly we're not doing anybody any favors by giving it the additional publicity rather than letting it just slip off into the ether to be forgotten. I'm all for the whole 'marketplace of ideas' philosophy and debating down bad memes when they come up, but do we really need to have a 500+ post discussion ever time some fucktard has a brain fart aimed at Linux?
The main feature I'm looking for is the cross-referencing of the various instant messaging service nicknames to real names. iChat, for instance, shows one entry for "John Smith", and this can link to any one of several AIM names that are on John Smith's card in my Address Book. (I'm not sure what happens if more than one of his names are online simultaneously; I think iChat uses the one that's listed first on the card.)
The only downside of this approach is that adding people to your buddy list becomes a two-step process (if they aren't already in your address book): create address book card, then add that name to your buddy list, but I think this is well worth it in order to get a list of actual human names instead of handles. Also, the name/handle pairing persists even if you remove them from your buddy list and then add them on later. And if you use.Mac, the Address Book is replicated across computers (and in my case to my mobile device with iSync) so I never have to deal with AIM names for anything.
If Adium actually does this then I'll be quickly reconsidering my choice of AIM app. Last time I checked, it did not and I wasn't about to go back to the AOL client days of pages of cryptic handles ("Who the hell is 'fuzzybear917' again?") or manually enter people's names into a user-specifiable field.
Slashdot Mirror
How does it keep you from modifying the local database and replacing the "legitimate" hashes with the hashes for the compromised (cheater) software? It would seem that in order to be secure, the comparison has to be run on a trusted machine, which by definition the machine you're scanning for cheats shouldn't be.
I suppose they can send back a hash of the database to the server or something, but it just seems to me that if what you're describing really is the system, then i's inherently possible to compromise without a decryption-based (or dehashing-based) attack.
Okay, so I'm not a programmer, so feel free to correct me if this is totally stupid. But isn't there some way to figure out if a computer is idle, without each application itself tapping into and tracking the mouse motion itself, looking for movement? I thought that the OS would just provide some sort of handler for idletime -- I know (back in Mac OS 8 or 9) there used to be an Extension, the equivalent of a kernel patch almost, to provide something like this. (IIRC it was just called "IdleTime" and it used to cause no end of shit, but it was required for a lot of things.) It seems redundant to have every application that needs to know the time-since-last-input to have to monitor those streams. Not just IM programs but screensavers, grid computing apps, backup programs, antivirus scanners, maybe even some more exotic stuff that I can't think of right now, all need to know this. I can't imagine that if you were designing an OS that you'd make it necessary for each of them to dig into the raw user input stream, and not provide some service for this.
Anyone want to confirm/deny my suspicions?
Yeah this is exactly what I was going to say. I definitely had a whole set of these things: the changes were pretty dramatic, too. I remember one car could go from dark blue to white in less than a second if you dropped it from warm water into ice water.
I wonder why this is such a big deal now? Seems like the Hot Wheels guys had it figured out. Maybe their patent just expired?
I wonder if the paint ever wears out, or stops working after a certain number of cycles or amount of time.
Actually you're correct; the "free computer" offer and the comments made by Sun's CEO are somewhat contradictory. One has you paying for the support and software while getting the hardware free, while McNealy's comments suggest that their new direction will be free (as in beer) software, making up their profit off of hardware and ancillary services.
They do this because they want to sell developers and would-be users on their hardware and support, but know that you and I aren't going to go out and drop a few grand on a Sun box that's basically identical (or nearly so) to something that could be built in a white box for $450 worth of parts. So they allow you to buy it on very nice financial terms, with their fully-supported OS and automatic-updates service, etc., in the hope that you'll like their hardware and cause your company or client to get a higher-end system. And that's where they'll really charge the big bucks.
There wasn't really room to elaborate on this in the article brief, but basically my theory is that (as long as they stick with this plan) we'll see two types of products out of Sun: very inexpensive entry-level products, aggressively competing with Dell and others, that draw people in, and very expensive high-end servers which don't compete price-wise with other manufacturers offerings except in specific situations, but that they hope people will buy anyway because they want to step up from the inexpensive gear. I think it would be unfair to call the inexpensive systems (like the Opteron Ultras and some of those new 1U servers) "loss leaders," but in a way that's what they are. They get you into the 'store,' and Sun hopes once you're there you'll stick with the brand.
What I'm not sure about is whether brand loyalty really counts for anything much in the IT world these days, and whether Sun is staking too much on their name even still.
Agreed.
I'm no fan of MySpace either -- actually the way I heard about the site in the first place was in reference to some cross-site-scripting vulnerability, which isn't exactly anything to inspire confidence -- and I've yet to meet anyone in real life that's into MySpace who isn't fairly obnoxious. However with that said, the site does serve a purpose for the people that use it, and nobody's making me go there. I fail to see how people can get so worked up about the place. If you don't like it and think that the majority of users there are retards, then don't ever go there. Problem solved. It's not as though (to the best of my knowledge) MySpace is aggressively driving other social networking sites out of business or something.
If someone wants to provide a cognizant explanation of why MySpace is worth getting all worked up about because it's so stupid, feel free. But I think a whole lot of things are stupid, and on the list of offensively stupid things, MySpace ranks pretty low.
This is why I said elsewhere in the thread that we should leave these non-geographic TLDs around, because they're great for companies or organizations that are international, or don't have a geographic focus. Slashdot, for instance, is US based but attracts readers from all over the world (the English-speaking world anyway); it makes sense that it has a non-geographic TLD. Same with BASF, IBM, or Volkswagen.
.us TLD is underutilized -- but this is not ICANN's fault. It's just that there's not really any demand for .us subdomain names, because US users and hosts prefer the generic non-geographic ones. However as we start to run out of 'good' non-geographic names, there will be more demand for the country-code TLDs by people who really don't need the non-geographic one and would prefer a shorter, easier to remember name under their country code.
.co.us domains even if they wanted to. By fixing that, you'd relieve some of the pressure on the .com/org/net TLDs and -- in the long run -- you'd probably see more diversity in the sites under them as well.
The "problem" (insofar as people think there is one, which I'm not sure there is) comes because you cannot get a ".co.us" domain name. Actually the whole
For example, if I ran Joe's Java Shop in Lexington, Kentucky, I could either get joesprettygoodjava.com or joescoffee.co.us. The latter is geographic, but shorter. If I didn't need the non-geographic name, then there's no reason to get it (unless I think that my users wouldn't understand anything that doesn't end in ".com").
There's no regulation or restrictions necessary, I think that as the non-geographic TLDs get longer and more complicated, there will be a stronger incentive for local sites to use ccTLDs, both inside the US and elsewhere, and people will get more used to seeing them.
The people who are getting screwed here (from a certain point of view) are local web-sites in the US, who can't get
Not only is it "regressive," but it probably wouldn't produce any good games.
Can you imagine the crew at ID or Rockstar Games sitting around trying to figure out what kind of a game would sell to women? It would be like writing to Ask Slashdot for dating tips. (Okay, probably worse, since we know at least one person here is probably married.)
If you want to make a product for a certain group of people, having members of that group actually make it will almost always create a superior product (assuming you can find people that have the requisite skills) than just having a group of outsiders make a product for whatever their perception of that group is, and then run it past some focus groups.
You're right of course, although there is Turner's Syndrome, which occurs in persons having only one X chromosome (45,X) and nothing else; as they're female one could describe that as "missing" the other X. (However it could just as easily be described as missing the Y, in which case they'd be a normal male.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turner_syndrome
closed, locked-down system
I think if it's from Apple and it's destined for the mass-market consumer, you can pretty safely bet that it will be a hermetically sealed, white box. They might let you upgrade a few things on it, as you can do with the Mac Mini computers, but I think it will be more tightly integrated than them and more like an iPod. You're probably not going to be plugging USB2 drives into the back without some serious hacking, that's for sure.
Upgradability isn't something that most people think about when they're purchasing an appliance, which is basically what this is. We can argue here whether or not we (speaking as geeks/computer enthusiasts/whatever) care, but the majority of America doesn't seem to. After all, iPods sell like hotcakes and you can't even take out their batteries without a special tool and a soldering iron, and batteries (even rechargeable ones) are consumables.
Given that the iPod is Apple's biggest success story since probably the Apple ][, I think it's a pretty safe bet that they'll go down the same design path if they decide to do a DVR: Usability, integration, aesthetics, price. Upgradability or extensibility is not one of their goals.
Give it a week, I'm sure Microsoft has a patent application pending right now.
Then for those cases you keep the regular '.com' TLD alive as the more "generic" one.
.com domain name; it's just that a lot of companies don't because that namespace is more crowded and you're more likely to get a short name by going through your country's TLD. It's there choice; I'm sure the domain registrars would be more than happy to sell you a .com, .org. or .net domain even if you're international. They're not, at least to my knowledge, exclusively US addresses. It's just that most of the addresses in that space are for historical reasons US-based. (And because there's no .co.us right now.)
.com TLD aren't forced to get one (and I think you'd find that companies will, eventually, use this, as they can get better names) and we need to make sure that international users can buy .com domain names as easily as US users can. Nobody has to force anyone to use any particular TLD (and shouldn't). If you create the system correctly, people will use the TLDs that fit them best.
For instance, if you were a UK based company looking to reach globally, you could be 'xyz.com' while if you were a more nationally-focused operation, you could get 'xyz.co.uk'. That way if people were searching and only wanted to see local companies, they could search within the '.uk' TLD.
I don't think there's anything prohibiting a UK company, or anyone else for that matter, from going out and getting a regular
Your suggestion is exactly why we should keep supranational, generic TLDs around: not everyone and everything ought to be country-specific. Big companies, international organizations, and websites that don't have a particular geographic focus all have a need for non-geographic TLDs. It's also reasonable to assume that the supra-national TLD will always be more crowded than the local ones, forcing people to make a decision: "do I want to get 'foobarsbestgadgetsinc.com' or 'foobar.co.ch'?"
The only steps that need to happen are that we need a co.us namespace, so that US-based sites who don't need a
Wow, that's the worst idea I've ever heard.
How about people actually talk to their kids about what is and isn't appropriate for them to be looking at on the internet? Put the computer someplace where they'll actually be surrounded by people when they're using it. In general, how about parents -- oh, I don't know -- parent?
It's a bad idea in the same way that mandatory trigger locks are a bad idea: it fails to encourage parents to do what they ought and need to do, that is, if they're going to have a gun in the house, sit down with their kids and explain what they are, how they're used, and what they should do if they come across one. When you take the illicit curiosity factor out of the equation, a gun is just a piece of metal.
I grew up in a house that had enough guns and ammunition in it to equip a small South American junta, and I never -- not once -- went looking for a gun. I knew what they were, I knew what they did, I had a fair idea of where they were kept, I even knew how to unload one if I found it lying on the ground. And I never was particularly interested in any of it, because there wasn't any mystery to be uncovered. Go through my old man's liquor cabinet -- guilty; go through the gun box? Never bothered. (And in retrospect, if my parents had an attitude on alcohol that was more like they had about firearms, I probably wouldn't have done the former, either.)
You can't legislate good parenting any more than you can legislate common sense. In fact less so, because when you give parents a crutch, they'll tend to use it, especially if it lets them avoid having a meaningful (but often uncomfortable for them) conversation with their child.
Furthermore, I think the "risk of damage" that children incur as a result of simply looking at or reading things, either on the net or elsewhere, is greatly exaggerated by both the media and our society in general. The biggest risk of the internet, IMO, is that a kid will meet some sort of pedophile or stalker, and they're a lot more likely to do that in a teen- or child-oriented forum or on Instant Messenger or email than on a porn site. Are you going to block kids from signing up for GMail accounts? How about lying about their age and joining a bulletin board?
A legal definition of pornography where? As other people have pointed out, and I assume you just ignored, there are lots of definitions of what is pornographic. Every country has their own (or none).
Should we just use the strictest definition of 'pornographic' that's out there? Maybe Iran's?
You can't define pornography on a global level -- hell, we can barely define it on a national level.
There will NEVER be a global consensus on what is 'pornographic,' or even on what is appropriate for children to see. Look at the differences in movie ratings between European countries and the U.S., for instance. There are PG-13 movies in America that are 17+ in some European countries, and movies that would almost certainly get an R or NC-17 here which are 13+ there.
Just in case anyone else was curious, here is there price list in USD (they are a Swiss outfit):
http://www.pcengines.ch/order1.php?c=4
Short version:
2 LAN / 2 miniPCI / 128MB = $130
3 LAN / 1 miniPCI / 128MB = $136
1 LAN / 2 miniPCI / 64 MB = $115
1 LAN / 2 miniPCI / 128MB = $122
Not bad, actually. Although if you have the space, you can get a surplus 1U rackmount server for not much more than that, as I recently found out.
Actually I tend to wonder if this wasn't the intent of the move. People seem to be assuming it was because people were buying them to run opensource firmware, but I think that it's because Linksys wants to know whether people are buying it because of Linux. The difference being, they aren't quite sure, and this is how they'll find out.
If the -L version sells well, then one would expect maybe the bean counters will take note and we'll get more Linux-based stuff in the future.
It is slightly obnoxious however that they are charging such a premium for it, though. Hopefully the people who are suggesting that the increase is because to stores it's a new item and thus not deeply discounted are correct, and it will come down closer to where the old (and identical) version was.
Their "business model" is very controversial, but based on everything I've read they don't seem to be technically violating the GPL, because they do (at least now, although they didn't in the past) distribute the source along with the binaries if you have a subscription and pay. Although there were some versions which were distributed without source, supposedly this is not currently the case.
However, and this is the very shady part, if you republish the source -- as is your right to do, under the GPL -- they terminate your account and refuse to give you any future updates. So essentially if you want to redistribute the source, you have to pay for each version of the binaries+source releases. As obnoxious as that may be, it's legitimate based on the letter of the GPL (if arguably not the spirit).
This is based on fairly old information, plus the Wikipedia article, so it could be out of date. If they're not distributing the source with the binaries again (or a written offer for same) when you buy/subscribe to it, then I think they're cleraly in violation.
Frankly they're IMO a completely shady operation, run by individuals who (when they are not power-tripping by banning people from their silly discussion forum) have abused the open source community at every opportunity. Regardless of their compliance in the narrowest sense, they're not an entity that I would ever do business with.
Speaking more generally, does anyone know who wrote the first version of the WRT54G Linux firmware (who originally GPLed it) and holds the copyright? I think the big problem here is that there's nobody who can really enforce the GPL against Sveasoft, and therefore they take their license obligations less than seriously. They've shown no reluctance to be overtly litigious -- e.g., abusing DMCA takedown notices -- and I don't see why they ought not be due for a suit next time they drag their feet in publishing source.
Yeah, that's the coolest thing I've seen on the list so far. Although hacking one of those $20 CVS cams sounds like fun also (but the catch is that they're only $20 with a coupon).
... that would be slicker than whale shit.
I wonder whether it uses standard (by which I mean Weller-type) low voltage iron sockets and tips? If I could go out and get a Weller iron and attach it to a $35 base station, and it was anywhere near temperature accurate (actually, hell with that, for the difference in price I can get a non-contact IR thermometer, it just needs to be stable)
Saying that things should always be transparent (in whatever sense of the word) so that people can always see everything about them is absurd.
Although I speak only for myself, I think that the open source movement is a request (demand?) not for transparency per se, but for the ability to examine something if the user so chooses. In fact many of the "advances" Linux has made in the past few years has actually hidden much of that complexity -- and are great steps forward.
It would be analogous not to having a house full of appliances without any covers and with exposed internals, but to appliances on which the covers can -- with the appropriate tools and basic knowledge -- be removed at all. And perhaps more importantly, even to the user who has no interest in ever taking the cover off themselves, appliances which can be taken to any neighborhood repair shop as opposed to sending it back to the manufacturer for repair.
You'll want to read here, or perhaps more particularly here. (The first is unattributed, the second is written by a lawyer.) Or if you don't trust my sources run your own search on Findlaw or even Google.
From the second article:
Basically, if you are a public official or public figure, not only does the libel or slander have to be incorrect and damaging, you also have the burden of demonstrating that the defendant acted with malice. This is a significantly higher bar than a 'normal person' would have.
Speaking more generally, if you really think that the law applies to everyone equally regardless of circumstance, you should probably wake up and take a hard look around, because an attitude like that, while no doubt pleasant, is going to put you on a collision course with reality. Although if you're really wed to that point of view, the alternative is to think of it this way: the law applies to each person similarly, but differently depending on our circumstances. E.g., currently I have more protection against libel or slander than George Bush, but if I was the President and George was sitting here writing to you, then he'd have the protection and I wouldn't. It's not personal discrimination in that way, and like it or not, the courts and laws do it all the time.
Outstanding -- thanks for the info. I'll definitely check it out again. I had no idea that had been implemented.
I guess I'm not the only one who thought that was a neat feature in iChat! (And I'm glad to see that Apple wasn't being creepy and keeping the APIs to themselves or something, either.)
That's completely different. Sigenthaler is, by virtue of his notoriety, not entitled to the same level of libel and slander protection that you or I would get.
If you as one simple citizen went around and told people in my town that I, another simple citizen, was a pedophilic drug pusher, it would be slander (unless it's true). However you can get away with a lot more if I was a "public figure" in the context of the community you slandered me in.
There's still a limit (I believe at least with publishing, the standard is acting with "reckless disregard" for the truth), and the 'amplification factor' of new media whereby a single person's opinion can become a major news item if they write it on a blog or newsgroup complicates things somewhat, but in general you can say what you want about celebrities without fear of recourse, unless you have some kind of 'soap box' that elevates your opinion/statement above anyone else's.
In this instance I don't see how Sigenthaler can claim his reputation was in any way damaged by the libelous assertions on Wikipedia, nor am I sure that they were even strictly libelous. In this case although the whole assassination-conspiracy thing seems farfetched, it's not so completely outside the realm of possibility as to be immediately unworthy of discussion. Also, since Wikipedia is designed around the concept of documents which are editable by anyone, even if the information was patently false I doubt it would qualify as "reckless disregard" on the site operators' part. After all, everyone knows -- or ought to, anyway -- that Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, and the information should be taken accordingly.
Basically this whole thing is a non-event; somebody said something unflattering about a celebrity, the celebrity responded by using their own notoriety as a soapbox on which to defend themselves (thereby proving, by being able to so easily get published, that they are in fact a celebrity), end of story. The only hook here is that Sigenthaler somehow thinks we ought to toss out several hundred years of jurisprudence dating back to common law, and create some informational strict-liability horror, because somebody said something he didn't like. Good luck with that, Mr. Sigenthaler.
No worries, that's not even slander; the truth is an absolute defense.
I'm not sure why you got modded down; you're absolutely right in that I think that paragraph sums up what is apparently his entire worldview nicely.
I think that at the end of the day he and I (and I assume most geeks and a lot of computer users) have a fundamental disagreement over what he's saying. I do not think that people who want to dabble with the way the machine works are a "dying breed" at all, except insofar as the computer hardware and software companies are forcing such tinkerers out of existence through sealed boxes. That impulse to tinker is founded on an essential human characteristic, curiosity, which in itself might be described as a desire to simply understand things. Although it's obvious that curiosity is not something which the author possesses, at least to any appreciable degree, there are lots of people (particularly younger ones) who do.
His philosophy is frankly disgusting to me, because it seems to be embracing what I find most disturbing about our culture: that many people find it acceptable to ridicule another's desire to understand, and on some level we find a desire for ignorance to be a laudable goal.
While the "housewives" and "sorority girls" (I won't even get into his obvious sexism, it's too easy) of the world may have forgotten the solenoid, the scientists, engineers, and probably even doctors and lawyers have not, and I think one should carefully consider the place of his two example groups within the power structure of our society. Speaking only for myself, I would certainly want my children to aspire for and to have the ability to achieve better than that.
> And to the editors, please don't post any more articles fromt this guy. This barely contained anything about OSS (certainly nothing intelligent), and he's not nearly as funny and clever as he seems to think he is.
Seriously. I'm really beginning to think that we need some sort of moderation scheme for the articles. This one reeks of "-1, Flamebait" like nothing I've ever seen.
It's ignorant, it's uninsightful, and frankly we're not doing anybody any favors by giving it the additional publicity rather than letting it just slip off into the ether to be forgotten. I'm all for the whole 'marketplace of ideas' philosophy and debating down bad memes when they come up, but do we really need to have a 500+ post discussion ever time some fucktard has a brain fart aimed at Linux?
The main feature I'm looking for is the cross-referencing of the various instant messaging service nicknames to real names. iChat, for instance, shows one entry for "John Smith", and this can link to any one of several AIM names that are on John Smith's card in my Address Book. (I'm not sure what happens if more than one of his names are online simultaneously; I think iChat uses the one that's listed first on the card.)
.Mac, the Address Book is replicated across computers (and in my case to my mobile device with iSync) so I never have to deal with AIM names for anything.
The only downside of this approach is that adding people to your buddy list becomes a two-step process (if they aren't already in your address book): create address book card, then add that name to your buddy list, but I think this is well worth it in order to get a list of actual human names instead of handles. Also, the name/handle pairing persists even if you remove them from your buddy list and then add them on later. And if you use
If Adium actually does this then I'll be quickly reconsidering my choice of AIM app. Last time I checked, it did not and I wasn't about to go back to the AOL client days of pages of cryptic handles ("Who the hell is 'fuzzybear917' again?") or manually enter people's names into a user-specifiable field.