Gaim/Pidgin is broken into two components. It has a library part and a UI part. Most Linux users think of these as one product, but Adium uses the gaimlib backend but then has a very polished Mac frontend that uses it.
It also incorporates OTR messaging, pretty robust logging features, good account-management... all in all, its frontend and UI are far better, IMO anyway, than Gaim's is on Linux or Windows. (And it's better than the vendor-supplied clients, obviously... but sending scraps of your own flesh by carrier pigeon are also better than those bloated nightmares.)
As far as a user is concerned, Adium is an entirely different product from Gaim/Pidgin, because even though it uses the same communication libraries, all the UI is different.
Preface: It IS the governments responsibility to protect it's citizens.
I reject this premise. Saying that the government has a blanket responsibility to "protect" the citizenry from everything is a terrible idea. It's not a "slippery slope" so much as it's just pointing the nose of a plane at the ground and wondering what'll happen. Since you can't ever be 'protected' against everything and still have any semblance of free will, the end result is that government will always begin to intrude, further and further, into private life.
The government has a responsibility to protect citizens from a few, rather specific, types of risks and threats -- not all of them. And certainly protecting people from themselves, when they haven't been deemed incompetent, isn't one of those situations.
So it takes a large wad of cash donated by companies involved in online gambling to get Barney to come around? Looks like someone must've spent a lot of time playing online poker.
I've worked on some pretty big, complex, custom business systems, mostly doing QA.
I've never seen any good metrics or studies on this, but it's been my experience that in some cases, single high-priority problems can sometimes be worked around more easily than large numbers of "low priority" bugs. Sometimes it's preferable (not always, but sometimes) to train users to avoid a large problem, and in the meantime fix a large number of smaller problems, rather than pulling everyone off of everything to fix the 'big' issue.
A smart project manager realizes when it's appropriate to throw a lot of resources on something, when it's better to train the users to avoid it and fix it later, and when some other path is best.
I have no idea if this is what's going on with FF, but it's just something I've come across in the past.
That page is either oversimplifying, or just wrong. I'm not sure which.
MPEG-4 is a group of specifications. It's not just one video format, or one codec. Just talking about "MPEG-4 video" is bad, because it could refer to any one of several video formats, and any of those formats could have been produced with a variety of codecs.
Within "MPEG-4," you have multiple "parts" which are actual specifications for video encodings. Wikipedia explains slightly:
MPEG-4 is still a developing standard and is divided into a number of parts. Unfortunately the companies promoting MPEG-4 compatibility do not always clearly state which "part" level compatibility. The key parts to be aware of are MPEG-4 part 2 (MPEG-4 SP/ASP, used by codecs such as DivX, XviD and 3ivx and by Quicktime 6) and MPEG-4 part 10 (MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, used by the x264 codec, by Quicktime 7, and by next-gen DVD formats like HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc).
So basically, you have two common flavors of MPEG-4. One is Part 2, also called ASP, for "Advanced Simple Profile." This is, I think, either the same or very close to "H.263". Usually when people talk about "MPEG-4 video," they mean ASP-encoded content. So this is what's probably being discussed in the article you linked to.
The other Part of MPEG-4 that's widely used is Part 10. MPEG-4 Part 10 is also called "Advanced Video Profile," or AVP. Part 10 is H.264 (at least, I think so -- I think the MPEG-4 P10 and H.264 standards are developed in parallel and kept in synchronization).
There are also, as the numbering implies, a whole bunch of 'parts' within MPEG-4 that aren't widely used. I have no idea what MPEG-4 Part 7 would be, but doubtless if you bought the standard you could find out. I also don't know whether most "MPEG-4 decoders" support anything besides Part 2 and Part 10. I kinda suspect not.
Anyway, so to sum up, you have "MPEG-4," which is sort of a broad specification for a container (.mp4 files) and various video formats that can be put into that container (the 'Parts'). The two common parts are Part 2, ASP, and Part 10, AVC. AVC is the newer, more sophisticated, more processor-intensive, and higher-quality encoding. Either type of video can be produced by many different codecs. XviD is an ASP codec, for example; x264 is an AVC one. But you can also produce AVC video with Apple's Quicktime H.264 codec -- just like you can produce MP3 files with LAME or Fraunhaufer, and play it back anywhere.
Anyway, this is my understanding after reading the Wikipedia articles; there seems to be a lot of confusion regarding MPEG-4 floating around, but WP is at least consistent.
XviD is an H.263, aka MPEG-4 Part 2 "Advanced Simple Profile" (ASP) encoder, no?
This is quite different from the newer H.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10 "Advanced Video Profile" (AVP)) encoders like x264 (which is part of ffmpeg, at least recently, I believe). H.264 is a much better match for high-definition video that's going to be played back on HD equipment.
I think it's been known since the AVP codecs arrived on the scene that they pretty much kicked the crap out of the ASP ones; their only major downside is the processing requirements both to encode and decode, and (more true in the past than now) limited installed base of people with the codecs.
She actually had to tell them (after I found out by opening my laptop while waiting for her in the parking lot) that an open wireless network is a BAD idea.
I'm with them. Why is it a bad idea, if there's no neighbors to worry about siphoning the connection?
Just put the AP in the DMZ and ratelimit; no screwing around with configuration or encryption necessary. People who need security should be using a VPN anyway.
If you don't want to block Flash completely, adding "*/commercials/*" to Adblock Plus' blocklist gets rid of that hideous thing on the right side (which, if you had your speakers on, comes up with sound automatically).
Depends on the card, I think. You apparently either knew what you were doing when you purchased, or were very lucky. Not everyone has a flawless experience like that; there are a ton of video-encoder related horror stories in the MythTV-users archives.
I'm glad that the pcHDTV card has in-tree drivers now; when I started building my MythTV system about a year or so ago, it didn't seem like things were nearly as stable. I wanted to support the pcHDTV guys because I like their philosophy and what they're trying to do, but I ended up going with a Hauppauge instead because there seemed to be a greater chance that it would work without configuration hell. (And there was still configuration hell, although mostly on the video output end.)
Anyway, glad to hear that the situation is improving, but I still think that the HDHomeRun is a better, more flexible solution, with the potential for fewer driver issues.
Re:RTFM = Best Evar.. BASIC, etc, etc
on
The Apple II At 30
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The BEST thing about starting with the Apple ][ was the manuals. They explained clearly and with examples how to use the computer and write BASIC programs. Nothing since has been as comprehensive, or easy to use.
Totally agree. I actually keep a set of Apple ][c manuals around on my bookshelf, as an example/reminder of what good technical writing (and illustrating!) is.
The authors of those manuals managed to take a subject that was completely and utterly foreign to many of their readers, and make it comprehensible, un-intimidating, even a little fun to read. They didn't assume that the reader knew much going in, but they didn't treat them as a mental incompetent, either.
Modern computer manuals are burned toast to the early Apple manuals' filet mignon. They may serve the same essential function, but the old Apple ones did it so much more pleasantly.
Nothing else really comes close. Yeah, you can get HD tuner cards for a little less money, but they're a pain in the ass to work with and generally are less functional. An HDHomeRun is not just a tuner (actually, it's two tuners), but it's networked, so you can do everything with it that you can with a PCI tuner, but you can do it from any computer in the house.
It's a pretty brilliant little box.
Oh, and it works well with Linux, MythTV in particular. Once you start using that, you'll never go back to watching realtime TV.
Why bother with the identification layer at all, for people like your mom?
Just say "This message was signed by jdoe@jdoecorp.com". Does that mean it was signed by John Doe? Maybe. Maybe it was his secretary. Who knows; but it was signed by someone using his email address (that's easy enough to verify). That doesn't require PKI or WoT.
Centralized PKI is at least as problematic as webs of trust, probably more. Nobody's been able to do it well, and a lot of time and money has been spent trying to get it to work. It makes email and communication in general expensive. It creates single points of failure. It creates avenues for corruption (both of data/keys and money). And very few people need what it offers, except when they're conducting financial transactions.
Most users don't need rigorous authentication. All they need is channel encryption, with some modicum of security against MITM, and even then, the latter is only for hardcore paranoids.
The significant difference between you and a typical Bush-supporting Republican in this scope is that your interpretation of documents and information made public relating to Islamic terrorism lead you to believe it is not a threat worth of limitation of various freedoms.
Well, yes. But that's not a difference that I think you should so blithely understate. IMO, the GP is saying "I'm open to the possibility and historically the necessity of temporarily granting government broad powers, but I'm unconvinced that anything going on today makes it necessary." That's a pretty reasonable position, I think.
I can think of all sorts of examples where most people would want the government to act outside of its normal role. Probably not concentration-camp style, but if someone's about to unload a lot of Ebola into a concert hall, they're willing to let the rules get bent slightly.
Now, I'm not sure that using the Civil War as a historical example is a great idea. (Mostly, because even as a Northerner, I'm not sure that the Civil War was exactly just. But that's a discussion for another day.) But it does demonstrate that powers granted to government are not always irreversibly given. You just have to be very, very judicious, and I think the GP's argument -- and I tend to agree with him -- is that the current government has not been judicious in their use, and has not given the public any convincing justifications for why they should act outside normal procedure.
Too bad for you that you don't understand it. Instead you believe what Fox would have you believe - that they're merely centrist, or almost so whereas the rest is made up of raving loony lefties. It's too bad that you fell for it.
Going for the baseless ad hominem really doesn't help make your point of view look any more reasonable.
However, it mirrors most discussions, particularly about Fox, on Slashdot. Say anything rational that might be perceived as borderline pro-Fox, and clearly you're just a part of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.
Brother seems to be turning out some decent gear lately. I'm more familiar with their laser printers than their all-in-ones, but their printers are good (far better than Samsung's recent models) at speaking PostScript, and they're upfront about which models they have Mac and Linux drivers for. (Which is most of them, and the Linux drivers are open-source.)
I've made some pretty bad calls on hardware purchases in the past; mostly stuff that I bought when I was strapped for cash and in a hurry. Pretty much everything I ever bought like that, has come back to haunt me, and been painstakingly replaced with stuff that doesn't suck. In the process I developed three rules of thumb:
1. Hardware that uses a standard interface and no drivers, or widely-available generic ones, is better than the best vendor/model-specific drivers. 2. Open source drivers matter, even when you don't think you care. (E.g., I bought a Samsung laser printer after seeing that Mac drivers existed for it. But later on, Samsung pulled the Mac drivers, and retracted the claims of non-Windows compatibility. I got lucky -- there were OSS drivers. I could have been unlucky and just been SOL.) Proprietary drivers get EOLed in order to sell hardware; OSS doesn't die until people lose interest, which is generally after the hardware dies. 3. Hardware companies write shit software. Sometimes great hardware comes bundled with absolute crap. In order to get the most utility out of a package of hardware+software, sometimes it's best to look at it as two separate products, not just one. But this really only works if you have standards-compliant hardware.
The problem is that the Republican party, as of the last decade or so, isn't precisely conservative at all. The Republicans have abandoned just about every "conservative" value or position, including small government (or at least opposing its increase), states' rights, individual freedoms, etc. (About the only thing an actual 'conservative' and a modern Republican would agree on is their stance on gun control.)
They are no longer, and haven't been for some time, "conservative." In fact they seem to want to change quite a lot. They're probably best described as 'authoritarian,' particularly on the social side. And IMO, "social conservatives" aren't conservatives at all; the title is a complete misnomer. They're not trying to prevent some sort of drastic change to the social fabric, they're trying to induce a drastic change. They are, by many objective definitions, actually quite radical. (Of course, they tend not to think so -- they prefer to think of themselves as trying to take the country back to some 1950s idyll that never existed outside their own imaginations.)
The actual conservative wing of the Republican party died with Barry Goldwater; what remains has nothing to do with conservatism and everything to do with pushing a transformative agenda. It's just a different transformative agenda than what the more far-left elements of the Democratic party want.
Well, this is because all-in-one devices are almost universally shit. They're an example of cut-rate hardware/software engineering. They almost always tend to use proprietary interfacing schemes, making them inseparable from their Windows drivers, and usually the drivers are genuine turd piles anyway. The world would be a better place if they just went away.
I say this as someone who has struggled with several of them since they got popular. They're not even that great on Windows -- I've found them to be balky and fragile, not to mention expensive to do much printing on.
About the only thing I can say in their favor is that they're usually about the cheapest possible way to get a flatbed scanner with an automatic document feeder (ADF), but even then, some of them have such shitty driver/interface issues that they're not worth even that.
Xandros had a reputation -- pre-Ubuntu, anyway -- of being the most "polished" Linux distro. I think they've used up most of their cachet, but there was a point a few years back when I suspect, had you asked Joe Random Linux User what the best hope of "Linux on the Desktop" was, they probably would have mentioned Xandros at some point in their response.
I think Ubuntu pulled the rug out from under them, in large part, though; I haven't used any of their stuff lately, but last time I looked there just wasn't anything that made me want to fork over for one of their supported versions, that I didn't think I could get with Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu. (It *might* have some proprietary multimedia codecs -- e.g. MP3 or Divx -- pre-installed, but I'm not 100% clear on this.)
Company 'N' produces chips. Some come out great when tested. Some have minor failures when tested. They use software to disable features of the hardware so that the broken bits don't fail since they're not being used. Then you have a premium card and a 'value' card that's cheaper. But sometimes stuff works and they disable it in software anyway so they can still sell 'value' cards and premium cards at different price points. If you were to look at the source, you'd see this and just re-enable those bits to see if they worked, and possibly get a 'better' card than the arbitrarily-disabled one you'd paid for.
I agree this is an issue. However, I think it's more of a marketing problem than anything. E.g.: Foo, Inc., makes a device called the Widget. The produce two versions; the Widget Jr. and the Widget Pro. The Pro model is advertised as performing x, y, and z; the Jr. only does x. If Foo, Inc. opens its hardware interface to outside developers, they just need to make it clear that even if the Widget Jr. can do y and z, this isn't a supported feature, just an accident. Might they lose a few sales here and there, to hackers who'll purchase the Jr model, with the intention of enabling the unsupported features in hardware? Sure. But most companies aren't kept alive by the 'hacker' market. People want support; they want to know that what they bought is going to work.
As long as you differentiate your produces in sales and advertising, and give software developers a way to sense what version of the hardware they're working with (so that they can enable the right set of features by default), I don't think that the dilemma you're talking about is world-ending.
Just to continue more generally: an example of hardware design that I like, would be older serial modems. They had a nice clear line between the hardware and the software, and they interacted over a well-known and widely-supported interface. The hardware guys could make the modem work however they wanted; but it was going to interface with the computer over RS232, take ASCII commands ("ATDT", etc.), and interface to the POTS system on the other end. It's not the greatest example -- the standard command set was just a de facto standard because of the popularity of Hayes-brand modems, and lots of models had different command strings, but you rarely had to worry about actual driver or firmware issues, like you might for a "Winmodem" PCI card today. (And of course, sometimes the modems couldn't agree on the communication protocol for the POTS side of the equation -- anyone remember K56flex vs X2?) But in general, by abstracting the hardware at a fairly high level, and using a standard communications interface, using different types of modems was easy and seldom required actual recoding. That's the goal that hardware designers ought to be aiming for.
One thing that is CERTAINLY true is that most email users have zero interest in maintaining a web of trust. That means PGP is right out.
You don't really need the web of trust for PGP. You can use it without any of that quite easily. You grab the keys from a keyserver, and then if you're paranoid or worried about MITM attacks, you verify the fingerprint with the recipient through a side-channel (voice phone, whatever). It's just like PGPfone.
Unfortunately, PGP and the 'web of trust' are often conflated, but you can have webs of trust in a S/MIME model (Thawte's free certificates are like this), and you can do centralized authentication in PGP.
Honestly, I think that fans of PGP need to stop pushing the WoT model, because it's too cumbersome for normal users, who really only want about the same level of security offered by landline phones. It's available, for people who want to participate in it, but it's not an essential feature for most users.
Those are the core services that I think governments -- particularly local ones -- should spend more time focusing on. But except when times get tough, they usually don't. (And even then, they generally don't until they start to break down, because they've squandered too much money on peripheral stuff.) Too often, people get into government, and realize the power they have to muck around with things. They tend to put what ought to be their main focus -- maintaining the public's infrastructrure, providing essential services, etc. -- on the back burner, focusing instead on more glamorous, self-aggrandizing projects.
I've lived in a few places where horrible mismanagement was 'solved' by just throwing more and more money onto the problem; it wasn't until they money supply dried up, that the full extent of the mismanagement was discovered and rooted out -- if you don't do that every few years, it just becomes more and more painful when it inevitably happens.
What I'm saying is that I don't trust the government to use this new revenue for any productive purpose. Certainly not for body armor for the troops. (And this is setting aside that the 'internet taxes' that are really at issue here are State taxes; I'm speaking hypothetically about new Federal taxes.) And most certainly not productively enough to offset the cost and inherent inefficiencies that arise when you forcibly take resources away from someone and reallocate it elsewhere, rather than letting them spend it as they would have otherwise.
I might have a different opinion on some hypothetical tax, if the tax were firmly earmarked for a specific purpose, in such a way so that the money couldn't be reallocated later, and that once that purpose had been served, it would have to effectively disappear.
However, since I don't think that's the case of the example we were discussing, I have zero faith in the Federal -- or even in my State -- government to do anything useful with any additional revenue that might be generated.
My point regarding body armor is that, compared to the size of the Federal budget, the cost of doing it would be so small, that the simple fact that it's not already done, indicates that it is very far down on the government's list of priorities. And I believe that further up on their list of priorities, are goals and programs that are so impossible to achieve that they're veritable black holes for money, time, and scarce resources -- meaning that even if you gave them many times more resources than they have now, they'd probably still never get around to it. (Unless, perhaps, there was some sort of ulterior motive; e.g. paying back a quid pro quo from some manufacturer of body armor somewhere.)
You say "There's more than enough money to buy food to feed, clothe, and house every person on Earth. There's more than enough money to put a colony on Mars. There's more than enough money to cure cancer." I appreciate your optimistic outlook and apparent faith. I think there's probably enough resources to do those things too, with truly well-meaning and effective leadership, which is right up there with saying 'it's possible if aliens come and help us.' Before I give the current system access to more resources, I'd want some assurance that they're not going to just pour it down one more bottomless pit, which is what I feel they do with a giant portion of the resources made available to them without many strings attached.
(An aside: The U.S. Government is a near-complete cesspool of waste, bureaucracy, and incompetence. However, I'm also not sure that there are any better models, any better extant examples, for what they're trying to do. Every day, the Federal government gets slightly bigger, in terms of the resources that it has under its jurisdiction. And in so doing, every day, despite the unfathomable quantities of waste it creates, it does something that's never, in the history of human civilization, been done before. In some ways, it's a little surprising that the whole thing works at all. There's no easy solutions there; I certainly don't have some magic bullet. But that said, I'm unconvinced that just scaling the thing bigger and bigger is a good idea, and that's what new taxes do.)
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you should put it that negatively.
... all in all, its frontend and UI are far better, IMO anyway, than Gaim's is on Linux or Windows. (And it's better than the vendor-supplied clients, obviously ... but sending scraps of your own flesh by carrier pigeon are also better than those bloated nightmares.)
Gaim/Pidgin is broken into two components. It has a library part and a UI part. Most Linux users think of these as one product, but Adium uses the gaimlib backend but then has a very polished Mac frontend that uses it.
It also incorporates OTR messaging, pretty robust logging features, good account-management
As far as a user is concerned, Adium is an entirely different product from Gaim/Pidgin, because even though it uses the same communication libraries, all the UI is different.
Preface: It IS the governments responsibility to protect it's citizens.
I reject this premise. Saying that the government has a blanket responsibility to "protect" the citizenry from everything is a terrible idea. It's not a "slippery slope" so much as it's just pointing the nose of a plane at the ground and wondering what'll happen. Since you can't ever be 'protected' against everything and still have any semblance of free will, the end result is that government will always begin to intrude, further and further, into private life.
The government has a responsibility to protect citizens from a few, rather specific, types of risks and threats -- not all of them. And certainly protecting people from themselves, when they haven't been deemed incompetent, isn't one of those situations.
So it takes a large wad of cash donated by companies involved in online gambling to get Barney to come around? Looks like someone must've spent a lot of time playing online poker.
There, fixed that for you.
I've worked on some pretty big, complex, custom business systems, mostly doing QA.
I've never seen any good metrics or studies on this, but it's been my experience that in some cases, single high-priority problems can sometimes be worked around more easily than large numbers of "low priority" bugs. Sometimes it's preferable (not always, but sometimes) to train users to avoid a large problem, and in the meantime fix a large number of smaller problems, rather than pulling everyone off of everything to fix the 'big' issue.
A smart project manager realizes when it's appropriate to throw a lot of resources on something, when it's better to train the users to avoid it and fix it later, and when some other path is best.
I have no idea if this is what's going on with FF, but it's just something I've come across in the past.
Anything that suggests Microsoft is doing something good is immediately shot down.
I fail to see how "pay us and we won't crush you" qualifies as 'doing something good.'
By that metric, the Mafia must be the best guys ever! All they want is your money, and they'll be ever so nice to you.
MPEG-4 is a group of specifications. It's not just one video format, or one codec. Just talking about "MPEG-4 video" is bad, because it could refer to any one of several video formats, and any of those formats could have been produced with a variety of codecs.
Within "MPEG-4," you have multiple "parts" which are actual specifications for video encodings. Wikipedia explains slightly:
So basically, you have two common flavors of MPEG-4. One is Part 2, also called ASP, for "Advanced Simple Profile." This is, I think, either the same or very close to "H.263". Usually when people talk about "MPEG-4 video," they mean ASP-encoded content. So this is what's probably being discussed in the article you linked to.
The other Part of MPEG-4 that's widely used is Part 10. MPEG-4 Part 10 is also called "Advanced Video Profile," or AVP. Part 10 is H.264 (at least, I think so -- I think the MPEG-4 P10 and H.264 standards are developed in parallel and kept in synchronization).
There are also, as the numbering implies, a whole bunch of 'parts' within MPEG-4 that aren't widely used. I have no idea what MPEG-4 Part 7 would be, but doubtless if you bought the standard you could find out. I also don't know whether most "MPEG-4 decoders" support anything besides Part 2 and Part 10. I kinda suspect not.
Anyway, so to sum up, you have "MPEG-4," which is sort of a broad specification for a container (.mp4 files) and various video formats that can be put into that container (the 'Parts'). The two common parts are Part 2, ASP, and Part 10, AVC. AVC is the newer, more sophisticated, more processor-intensive, and higher-quality encoding. Either type of video can be produced by many different codecs. XviD is an ASP codec, for example; x264 is an AVC one. But you can also produce AVC video with Apple's Quicktime H.264 codec -- just like you can produce MP3 files with LAME or Fraunhaufer, and play it back anywhere.
Anyway, this is my understanding after reading the Wikipedia articles; there seems to be a lot of confusion regarding MPEG-4 floating around, but WP is at least consistent.
Those people really took their smoking/chewing and their God seriously.
Guess they're in a hurry to meet him, eh?
XviD is an H.263, aka MPEG-4 Part 2 "Advanced Simple Profile" (ASP) encoder, no?
This is quite different from the newer H.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10 "Advanced Video Profile" (AVP)) encoders like x264 (which is part of ffmpeg, at least recently, I believe). H.264 is a much better match for high-definition video that's going to be played back on HD equipment.
I think it's been known since the AVP codecs arrived on the scene that they pretty much kicked the crap out of the ASP ones; their only major downside is the processing requirements both to encode and decode, and (more true in the past than now) limited installed base of people with the codecs.
She actually had to tell them (after I found out by opening my laptop while waiting for her in the parking lot) that an open wireless network is a BAD idea.
I'm with them. Why is it a bad idea, if there's no neighbors to worry about siphoning the connection?
Just put the AP in the DMZ and ratelimit; no screwing around with configuration or encryption necessary. People who need security should be using a VPN anyway.
If you don't want to block Flash completely, adding "*/commercials/*" to Adblock Plus' blocklist gets rid of that hideous thing on the right side (which, if you had your speakers on, comes up with sound automatically).
I'm using Adblock Plus with the US-English filterset subscription and it got through, with popups disabled in Firefox.
I think it got through because it's not really a "popup" window, it uses Javascript and CSS to do its thing.
Disabling Javascript killed it, though.
Depends on the card, I think. You apparently either knew what you were doing when you purchased, or were very lucky. Not everyone has a flawless experience like that; there are a ton of video-encoder related horror stories in the MythTV-users archives.
I'm glad that the pcHDTV card has in-tree drivers now; when I started building my MythTV system about a year or so ago, it didn't seem like things were nearly as stable. I wanted to support the pcHDTV guys because I like their philosophy and what they're trying to do, but I ended up going with a Hauppauge instead because there seemed to be a greater chance that it would work without configuration hell. (And there was still configuration hell, although mostly on the video output end.)
Anyway, glad to hear that the situation is improving, but I still think that the HDHomeRun is a better, more flexible solution, with the potential for fewer driver issues.
The BEST thing about starting with the Apple ][ was the manuals. They explained clearly and with examples how to use the computer and write BASIC programs. Nothing since has been as comprehensive, or easy to use.
Totally agree. I actually keep a set of Apple ][c manuals around on my bookshelf, as an example/reminder of what good technical writing (and illustrating!) is.
The authors of those manuals managed to take a subject that was completely and utterly foreign to many of their readers, and make it comprehensible, un-intimidating, even a little fun to read. They didn't assume that the reader knew much going in, but they didn't treat them as a mental incompetent, either.
Modern computer manuals are burned toast to the early Apple manuals' filet mignon. They may serve the same essential function, but the old Apple ones did it so much more pleasantly.
HDHomeRun
Nothing else really comes close. Yeah, you can get HD tuner cards for a little less money, but they're a pain in the ass to work with and generally are less functional. An HDHomeRun is not just a tuner (actually, it's two tuners), but it's networked, so you can do everything with it that you can with a PCI tuner, but you can do it from any computer in the house.
It's a pretty brilliant little box.
Oh, and it works well with Linux, MythTV in particular. Once you start using that, you'll never go back to watching realtime TV.
Why bother with the identification layer at all, for people like your mom?
Just say "This message was signed by jdoe@jdoecorp.com". Does that mean it was signed by John Doe? Maybe. Maybe it was his secretary. Who knows; but it was signed by someone using his email address (that's easy enough to verify). That doesn't require PKI or WoT.
Centralized PKI is at least as problematic as webs of trust, probably more. Nobody's been able to do it well, and a lot of time and money has been spent trying to get it to work. It makes email and communication in general expensive. It creates single points of failure. It creates avenues for corruption (both of data/keys and money). And very few people need what it offers, except when they're conducting financial transactions.
Most users don't need rigorous authentication. All they need is channel encryption, with some modicum of security against MITM, and even then, the latter is only for hardcore paranoids.
The significant difference between you and a typical Bush-supporting Republican in this scope is that your interpretation of documents and information made public relating to Islamic terrorism lead you to believe it is not a threat worth of limitation of various freedoms.
Well, yes. But that's not a difference that I think you should so blithely understate. IMO, the GP is saying "I'm open to the possibility and historically the necessity of temporarily granting government broad powers, but I'm unconvinced that anything going on today makes it necessary." That's a pretty reasonable position, I think.
I can think of all sorts of examples where most people would want the government to act outside of its normal role. Probably not concentration-camp style, but if someone's about to unload a lot of Ebola into a concert hall, they're willing to let the rules get bent slightly.
Now, I'm not sure that using the Civil War as a historical example is a great idea. (Mostly, because even as a Northerner, I'm not sure that the Civil War was exactly just. But that's a discussion for another day.) But it does demonstrate that powers granted to government are not always irreversibly given. You just have to be very, very judicious, and I think the GP's argument -- and I tend to agree with him -- is that the current government has not been judicious in their use, and has not given the public any convincing justifications for why they should act outside normal procedure.
Too bad for you that you don't understand it. Instead you believe what Fox would have you believe - that they're merely centrist, or almost so whereas the rest is made up of raving loony lefties. It's too bad that you fell for it.
Going for the baseless ad hominem really doesn't help make your point of view look any more reasonable.
However, it mirrors most discussions, particularly about Fox, on Slashdot. Say anything rational that might be perceived as borderline pro-Fox, and clearly you're just a part of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.
Interesting.
Brother seems to be turning out some decent gear lately. I'm more familiar with their laser printers than their all-in-ones, but their printers are good (far better than Samsung's recent models) at speaking PostScript, and they're upfront about which models they have Mac and Linux drivers for. (Which is most of them, and the Linux drivers are open-source.)
I've made some pretty bad calls on hardware purchases in the past; mostly stuff that I bought when I was strapped for cash and in a hurry. Pretty much everything I ever bought like that, has come back to haunt me, and been painstakingly replaced with stuff that doesn't suck. In the process I developed three rules of thumb:
1. Hardware that uses a standard interface and no drivers, or widely-available generic ones, is better than the best vendor/model-specific drivers.
2. Open source drivers matter, even when you don't think you care. (E.g., I bought a Samsung laser printer after seeing that Mac drivers existed for it. But later on, Samsung pulled the Mac drivers, and retracted the claims of non-Windows compatibility. I got lucky -- there were OSS drivers. I could have been unlucky and just been SOL.) Proprietary drivers get EOLed in order to sell hardware; OSS doesn't die until people lose interest, which is generally after the hardware dies.
3. Hardware companies write shit software. Sometimes great hardware comes bundled with absolute crap. In order to get the most utility out of a package of hardware+software, sometimes it's best to look at it as two separate products, not just one. But this really only works if you have standards-compliant hardware.
The problem is that the Republican party, as of the last decade or so, isn't precisely conservative at all. The Republicans have abandoned just about every "conservative" value or position, including small government (or at least opposing its increase), states' rights, individual freedoms, etc. (About the only thing an actual 'conservative' and a modern Republican would agree on is their stance on gun control.)
They are no longer, and haven't been for some time, "conservative." In fact they seem to want to change quite a lot. They're probably best described as 'authoritarian,' particularly on the social side. And IMO, "social conservatives" aren't conservatives at all; the title is a complete misnomer. They're not trying to prevent some sort of drastic change to the social fabric, they're trying to induce a drastic change. They are, by many objective definitions, actually quite radical. (Of course, they tend not to think so -- they prefer to think of themselves as trying to take the country back to some 1950s idyll that never existed outside their own imaginations.)
The actual conservative wing of the Republican party died with Barry Goldwater; what remains has nothing to do with conservatism and everything to do with pushing a transformative agenda. It's just a different transformative agenda than what the more far-left elements of the Democratic party want.
Well, this is because all-in-one devices are almost universally shit. They're an example of cut-rate hardware/software engineering. They almost always tend to use proprietary interfacing schemes, making them inseparable from their Windows drivers, and usually the drivers are genuine turd piles anyway. The world would be a better place if they just went away.
I say this as someone who has struggled with several of them since they got popular. They're not even that great on Windows -- I've found them to be balky and fragile, not to mention expensive to do much printing on.
About the only thing I can say in their favor is that they're usually about the cheapest possible way to get a flatbed scanner with an automatic document feeder (ADF), but even then, some of them have such shitty driver/interface issues that they're not worth even that.
Xandros had a reputation -- pre-Ubuntu, anyway -- of being the most "polished" Linux distro. I think they've used up most of their cachet, but there was a point a few years back when I suspect, had you asked Joe Random Linux User what the best hope of "Linux on the Desktop" was, they probably would have mentioned Xandros at some point in their response.
I think Ubuntu pulled the rug out from under them, in large part, though; I haven't used any of their stuff lately, but last time I looked there just wasn't anything that made me want to fork over for one of their supported versions, that I didn't think I could get with Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu. (It *might* have some proprietary multimedia codecs -- e.g. MP3 or Divx -- pre-installed, but I'm not 100% clear on this.)
I agree this is an issue. However, I think it's more of a marketing problem than anything. E.g.: Foo, Inc., makes a device called the Widget. The produce two versions; the Widget Jr. and the Widget Pro. The Pro model is advertised as performing x, y, and z; the Jr. only does x. If Foo, Inc. opens its hardware interface to outside developers, they just need to make it clear that even if the Widget Jr. can do y and z, this isn't a supported feature, just an accident. Might they lose a few sales here and there, to hackers who'll purchase the Jr model, with the intention of enabling the unsupported features in hardware? Sure. But most companies aren't kept alive by the 'hacker' market. People want support; they want to know that what they bought is going to work.
As long as you differentiate your produces in sales and advertising, and give software developers a way to sense what version of the hardware they're working with (so that they can enable the right set of features by default), I don't think that the dilemma you're talking about is world-ending.
Just to continue more generally: an example of hardware design that I like, would be older serial modems. They had a nice clear line between the hardware and the software, and they interacted over a well-known and widely-supported interface. The hardware guys could make the modem work however they wanted; but it was going to interface with the computer over RS232, take ASCII commands ("ATDT", etc.), and interface to the POTS system on the other end. It's not the greatest example -- the standard command set was just a de facto standard because of the popularity of Hayes-brand modems, and lots of models had different command strings, but you rarely had to worry about actual driver or firmware issues, like you might for a "Winmodem" PCI card today. (And of course, sometimes the modems couldn't agree on the communication protocol for the POTS side of the equation -- anyone remember K56flex vs X2?) But in general, by abstracting the hardware at a fairly high level, and using a standard communications interface, using different types of modems was easy and seldom required actual recoding. That's the goal that hardware designers ought to be aiming for.
One thing that is CERTAINLY true is that most email users have zero interest in maintaining a web of trust. That means PGP is right out.
You don't really need the web of trust for PGP. You can use it without any of that quite easily. You grab the keys from a keyserver, and then if you're paranoid or worried about MITM attacks, you verify the fingerprint with the recipient through a side-channel (voice phone, whatever). It's just like PGPfone.
Unfortunately, PGP and the 'web of trust' are often conflated, but you can have webs of trust in a S/MIME model (Thawte's free certificates are like this), and you can do centralized authentication in PGP.
Honestly, I think that fans of PGP need to stop pushing the WoT model, because it's too cumbersome for normal users, who really only want about the same level of security offered by landline phones. It's available, for people who want to participate in it, but it's not an essential feature for most users.
Those are the core services that I think governments -- particularly local ones -- should spend more time focusing on. But except when times get tough, they usually don't. (And even then, they generally don't until they start to break down, because they've squandered too much money on peripheral stuff.) Too often, people get into government, and realize the power they have to muck around with things. They tend to put what ought to be their main focus -- maintaining the public's infrastructrure, providing essential services, etc. -- on the back burner, focusing instead on more glamorous, self-aggrandizing projects.
I've lived in a few places where horrible mismanagement was 'solved' by just throwing more and more money onto the problem; it wasn't until they money supply dried up, that the full extent of the mismanagement was discovered and rooted out -- if you don't do that every few years, it just becomes more and more painful when it inevitably happens.
What I'm saying is that I don't trust the government to use this new revenue for any productive purpose. Certainly not for body armor for the troops. (And this is setting aside that the 'internet taxes' that are really at issue here are State taxes; I'm speaking hypothetically about new Federal taxes.) And most certainly not productively enough to offset the cost and inherent inefficiencies that arise when you forcibly take resources away from someone and reallocate it elsewhere, rather than letting them spend it as they would have otherwise.
I might have a different opinion on some hypothetical tax, if the tax were firmly earmarked for a specific purpose, in such a way so that the money couldn't be reallocated later, and that once that purpose had been served, it would have to effectively disappear.
However, since I don't think that's the case of the example we were discussing, I have zero faith in the Federal -- or even in my State -- government to do anything useful with any additional revenue that might be generated.
My point regarding body armor is that, compared to the size of the Federal budget, the cost of doing it would be so small, that the simple fact that it's not already done, indicates that it is very far down on the government's list of priorities. And I believe that further up on their list of priorities, are goals and programs that are so impossible to achieve that they're veritable black holes for money, time, and scarce resources -- meaning that even if you gave them many times more resources than they have now, they'd probably still never get around to it. (Unless, perhaps, there was some sort of ulterior motive; e.g. paying back a quid pro quo from some manufacturer of body armor somewhere.)
You say "There's more than enough money to buy food to feed, clothe, and house every person on Earth. There's more than enough money to put a colony on Mars. There's more than enough money to cure cancer." I appreciate your optimistic outlook and apparent faith. I think there's probably enough resources to do those things too, with truly well-meaning and effective leadership, which is right up there with saying 'it's possible if aliens come and help us.' Before I give the current system access to more resources, I'd want some assurance that they're not going to just pour it down one more bottomless pit, which is what I feel they do with a giant portion of the resources made available to them without many strings attached.
(An aside: The U.S. Government is a near-complete cesspool of waste, bureaucracy, and incompetence. However, I'm also not sure that there are any better models, any better extant examples, for what they're trying to do. Every day, the Federal government gets slightly bigger, in terms of the resources that it has under its jurisdiction. And in so doing, every day, despite the unfathomable quantities of waste it creates, it does something that's never, in the history of human civilization, been done before. In some ways, it's a little surprising that the whole thing works at all. There's no easy solutions there; I certainly don't have some magic bullet. But that said, I'm unconvinced that just scaling the thing bigger and bigger is a good idea, and that's what new taxes do.)