Just to clarify, in addition to being an actor, History Channel commentator, and Jack Bauer's onetime nemesis, "Weller also holds a Masters Degree in Roman and Renaissance Art, and is an occasional lecturer at Syracuse University on the subject of Hollywood and the Roman Empire" (or so sayeth the great Wikipedia on the subject).
You have found the very reason why they have not enabled the flag and will not for years to come - way too much old equipment and way too many customers to be pissed off.
So basically... "We're going to hold this gun to your head, here, but don't worry -- we're not going to use it! It's just easier to put the gun there, now, than it would be to do it later...but we don't want to deal with the mess it would make if we used it, so just forget it's even there. Trust us!"
No, thanks. I think that as the media companies become more and more desperate, as it becomes painfully obvious that DRM just doesn't work, they're going to pull out all the stops and go down fighting. If they have a way to make every non-HDCP television in the world suddenly explode, they'll do it; it's just a question of when, and what level of desperation it will require.
Don't ever question what a broke junkie will do for a fix, and don't ever question what an obsolete corporation will do to protect its business model. Even when doomed, both will do ridiculous, irrational, self-defeating things in order to delay the inevitable for as long as possible. You probably don't want either one in your living room.
Oddly enough, there was an article I saw in Wired recently about the actor who played RoboCop; apparently he had a mid-life crisis and is now a professor of Classical Studies at some university. I think his specialty has something to do with Roman aqueducts.
All that Commmie ignorance and the Russians still managed to put a man into space before anyone else.
People seemingly nostalgic for the Red Bear seem to love to belabor the "man in space" point, but also seem to avoid noting that the Soviet Union failed the ultimate intelligence test, when it neglected to ensure its own survival.
If the system was that good, obviously it should have easily managed to hang on -- obviously that would have been the prime national priority. And yet it did not. Perhaps the take-away lesson is that while the system worked admirably on concentrating a lot of resources on a few key problems, it was unable to manage the delegation of a lot of resources, to a lot of smaller problems. (This isn't particularly astute or surprising; control centralization allows for concentration, but at the expense of flexibility.)
String theory has one particle - the string. It has one force which emerges from the very simple dynamics put into it at the outset. A wide spectrum of particles and interactions emerges from it in a natural way. There is little choice for the dimension of spacetime - the theory locks it down from the beginning. Gravity emerges from it naturally - something that doesn't even get mentioned in the standard model. There are close to zero arbitrary constants. And at bottom, the initial assumptions of String Theory are really simple. Simpler than other quantum field theories.
I think much of the debate over string theory is, at heart, irrational. Some people are attracted to its beauty and elegance, while others find it so elegant that it is therefore suspect. (I.e., the subluminiferous aether was actually pretty beautiful as a theory in a certain way, too, as were epicycles, crystal spheres, and any number of now-disregarded theories; some people would hold that string theory is suspiciously similar to other elegant ideas which have ended up on the scrap heap.)
In some ways, the debate is less of a purely scientific one than an ideological battle between idealists and cynics; lacking experimental evidence, the community seems split mostly between idealists who support string theory, in all its theoretical elegance, while on the other side are cynics who think the whole thing is just too cute to be true, and that it owes itself more to wishful thinking than actual physics.
This is to be expected; until someone can come up with an experiment that will disprove part or all of string theory (or until the theoreticians can find some prediction made by string theory which differs materially from that made by a competing theory), it's an un-winnable argument. There really is little besides "gut reaction" (and other not-quite-rational factors, like the reputations of various people who have already taken sides) to pick sides based on.
When I first tried to post this I got a message saying that "This user does not exist, no matter how much you want him to." Anecdotal evidence suggested that I do, in fact, exist, since I think, I think, so I attributed the result to experimental error and reran it; failing to falsify my existence in the process.
Keep running the experiment; eventually you'll get the outcome you expect.
If that's your goal, then you probably need extra dimensions, string theory or not.
It seems like that's the $6,400 question, then. Are we blinding ourselves in seeking a unified theory, in the same way that Copernicus was blinding himself by looking for a geocentric, circular-orbit model? If you take as an assumption that there must be a unified theory, it may well be that many dimensions fall from it as a necessary consequence. Similarly, if you assume that the planets rotate around the Earth, epicycles are an almost immediately necessary consequence of even the most trivial observations (because the planets seem to change speed and occasionally even direction). I'm sure that Copernicus thought that having a universe centered around the earth was just as necessary and desirable as modern physicist think a unified field theory is; a universe without one would just be so ugly.
It's not my area of physics so I have just decided to not hold an opinion, at least at this point, but it does seem as though we need to be constantly vigilant about the assumptions we make, and the goals we set ourselves. It's pretty easy to laugh at the geocentrists, but logically it's almost certain that we today hold views that in a few centuries, will be just as laughable.
And while we're at it, why do so many mini ITX cabinets look like early '70's stereo equipment?
Just a guess, but maybe because people want to use them for various media-serving functions in the living room, so therefore they want ones that match their existing butt-ugly early 70s stereo equipment?
Or maybe they're trying too hard to be retro? Next thing you know, they'll be trying stainless steel, dark wood, and avocado green -- all in the same case.
Sounds like it might be worthwhile.
on
Small Form Factor PCs
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Sounds like a good resource for someone who was planning on building an embedded/SFF PC in the immediate future.
Not sure if it would be of any benefit to the more casual reader, or one on a longer time horizon. It sounds like they make specific hardware recommendations, which would be invaluable to someone building a system today, is probably just going to be a source of frustration in twelve months, when none of the stuff they recommend will be available anymore.
Their choice to produce it as an ebook is probably a smart one, for this reason. They would barely have time to get it out the door in paper format, before the recommendations were less than cutting-edge; by the time it made its way to most readers, they'd have to hunt on eBay to get the particular parts used in the articles.
I can't tell you the number of times I've read various HOWTOs and other 'How to make a...' articles, only to meet frustration when some small key part is out of production, and the currently-produced alternative creates problems that aren't addressed. That's the limitation of HOWTOs: they only tell you how to go down one particular path, not how to survive in the proverbial woods. They're a map, not a survival guide.
So I guess if you're in the market for a 'map,' getting one that's as new as possible is probably a smart idea, and one that's been written and is produced straight to PDF, without months of waiting to be printed and sold, is probably the best thing going.
AdBlock Plus (at least, I think it's AdBlock Plus, maybe it's AdBlock2) does a fairly good job of this; when you enable the blocking, you choose from a list of well-known blacklists with short descriptions (what language/geography they're tailored to, who maintains it, etc.). You can load your own, naturally, but if you just want "zero effort" ad-blocking, it does a fairly good job. Here's the current list.
There would undoubtedly be some wrangling over who's list got to be the default, or at the top of the list of options, but you could order it with some neutral metric (number of unique downloads per day? Google Ranking?) if it became a point of contention.
You don't want to include a blacklist with the software itself, because they become obsolete too quickly, and for obvious reasons you don't want to stick the user with one that's hard to update or change. Using a subscription-based system that lets the user choose between lists is fairly simple, yet powerful, and allows users to move to a different list if they desire a different level or focus on blocking. (E.g., some lists are more minimalist, others take a more expansive interpretation of "ads," and most are tailored to a particular language.)
I only spend about 5 - 6 hours of waking time with my wife a day. It really doesn't say anything about how our lives are spent, just acknowledges that computers are becoming a bigger part of our lives, but they are not necessarily intruding upon our time with our families.
Good point. Twenty or thirty years ago, you could have written a similar piece, talking about how people are spending more time with their desk chair, slide rule, or mechanical pencil (depending on occupation) than with their significant other.
It's really nothing new. When you spend more time at the office than you do at home (of your waking hours), it's to be expected.
I think your numbers are off, or you're only counting white people, or something.
The fertility rate in the U.S. is definitely above replacement rate right now. It's not in all areas -- there are parts of the country becoming depopulated via migrations and "greying out" of the remaining population -- but overall the population is basically stable from births, and increasing due to immigration.
Maybe the suggestion was to make it a built-in option that could be turned on or off?
I just wanted to clarify... I wasn't ever even thinking about an ad-blocker that couldn't be turned off by the user; such a thing would be an annoyance at best and an abomination at worst.
In fact, it's an open question whether such a feature if it were built-in, ought to be on or off by default (my suggestion would be off, since the browser shouldn't remove content from the incoming pages without that choice being made by the user). What I was imagining, was something more like the ad blocking built into recent versions of Konqueror; basically a pane of the preferences dialog which looks suspiciously like AdBlock-the-plugin's control panel (because it is basically, I understand, AdBlock rolled in).
My point was less about AdBlocking per se, than about the apparent conscious choice of the Firefox developers, to not include such a feature in the browser itself (whether on or off by default). Since it's so often installed by users (meaning, obviously, that it does something a lot of people find useful), it would seem to be a pretty clear next step for inclusion in the browser itself; that it's not, suggests to me that the developers have goals different from (although not necessarily irreconcilable with) their users.
There are lots of examples of other places where this occurs; the TiVO was just the closest example I could come up with.
I don't care about whether they include this plugin or that one, I'm talking about ad blocking as a feature. Firefox (and all other browsers) include lots of features that aren't strictly necessary in order to look at HTTP pages: bookmarks, for instance. Why do browsers have bookmarks? Because people like being able to save bookmarks, and find it useful. Same with tabs, search boxes, and other things that have been implemented. They're all there, because people find them handy.
Ad blocking would probably be just as well-received, if not better, than features like tabs and search boxes, which made it in. (And in fact, other browsers have built adblocking in to them.) That Firefox doesn't by default, is rather obviously a conscious decision on the part of the developers. They have decided to include some features in the browser, and left others out, and ad blocking has never been put into the core browser, even though it's (last time I checked) the single most popular Firefox add-on. It's pretty obvious that it's a feature that lots of people use, and if it were built in and didn't require a download, even more people probably would grow to appreciate it. If the development of new features were done purely on the basis of what would be most useful to the greatest number of users, it would be a no-brainer for inclusion. That it's not, shows that there are other considerations at work.
I knew that was going to draw fire from Firefox fans, but I don't really see that as a controversial statement. It reflects the realities of a big, and consequently expensive, (and sue-able) software development project. It is entirely understandable, even natural, that they will have priorities -- including their own corporate survival -- which may lead to decisions that are different from what users would have desired, or found useful.
I think it's because Firefox's developers don't think there's anything inherently wrong with ads.
This is besides the point; it's not about the inherent "rightness" or "wrongness" of ads, it's about whether people want them as part of their browsing experience or not, and whether the technology can deliver that. I think it's safe to say that, given the choice, most people would choose no ads over ads, therefore it would make sense that a browser give them that.
If a whole lot of people wanted white-on-black text, browsers would probably implement that, too. It's not an issue of whether white-on-black is inherently superior to black-on-white, it's just consumer demand.
The Firefox developers are choosing to pass up what could be a big boost to its popularity, because they don't want to give people something that I suspect most people want, or would find useful. I suspect it's because the Firefox project and the Firefox developers themselves draw revenue from advertising, and don't want to cut it off (or come under fire from people who's revenues might be impacted). To put it bluntly, it's a conflict of interest -- I'm not judging them for that, because it may be a necessary consequence of staying afloat as an organization -- but they have goals other than producing "the best browser" possible, which prevent them from putting in such a feature.
It's the same reason that TiVOs don't have automatic commercial skipping, even though such a thing would be possible to implement (and other projecs like MythTV do), and most people would probably think it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. There are other considerations on the part of the manufacturer, which trump what would be best for the consumer.
I was wondering the same thing, and apparently so were a few other people besides. There's another discussion of it further up in the thread, and the quote which seems to be the final answer doesn't seem to be too hot on the idea. Here it is (quoting here from another source):
"...attempts to increase the security of hash functions by concatenating the outputs of two independent functions don't actually increase their theoretical security. For example, defining H(x) = SHA1(x) || RIPEMD160(x) still gives you only about 160 bits of strength, not 320 as you might have hoped. The reason is because you can find a 2^80 multicollision in SHA1 using only 80*2^80 work at most, by the previous paragraph. And among all of these 2^80 values you have a good chance that two of them will collide in RIPEMD160. So that is the total work to find a collision in the construction."
What this means to me is both 'yes,' and 'no.' Yes, using multiple hash algorithms protects against the failure of one algorithm. It avoids putting all your eggs in one basket. However, using multiple algorithms doesn't, in itself, offer any greater security than just using a single algorithm and a longer hash, assuming the algorithm is good. (By 'good,' I mean that it doesn't offer any ways of finding collisions that are significantly faster than brute force.)
Mathematically, using multiple algorithms may not offer much of an advantage, but practically, where you may by necessity have to work with algorithms that have flaws (because you have to pick from algorithms that are well-agreed-upon standards), or that may be discovered to have flaws in the future, it seems like a good way to hedge one's bets. Aside from the added complexity, there doesn't seem to be any compelling reasons not to do it, if time and computational power allow.
As other people have pointed out, I'm not necessarily sure that these competitions really result in a whole lot of new development work per se. Rather, they serve as encouragement to researchers in the field, to take whatever they've been working on for the past few years, tidy it up and make it publishable, and submit it as a candidate for standardization.
The research into new functions progresses more or less on its own in the academic world most of the time. These competitions basically seek to tap into what's going on there, and re-synchronize the commercial/governmental world with whatever the state-of-the-art is in academic cryptography.
Now how does this apply with Ubuntu? There's quite literally a 'Find new applications' button.
I see it as basically parallel to Ubuntu's apt-get GUI wrapper. They're both trying to do the same thing, namely make software installation easier. It's just the Ubuntu took apt-get and wrapped it in a GUI, while Linspire took their repository system (which also includes commercial and non-free software that you can purchase, apparently) and did much the same thing.
That you can get commercial software via CNR, while I doubt apt-get will ever have this capability, might be a big advantage. Although there is not a whole lot of commercial software development aimed at desktop Linux users, CNR at least gives the possibility of an easy online distribution model to someone who wanted to go that route.
I think it's actually fairly simple: they let multiple (widely separated) servers announce themselves on the same IP address, and these propagate into the routing system. When somebody sends a packet to one of these servers, the routers along the way naturally tend to send it to the closest one. Thus if you're in Beijing and send a packet to the IP address for the F nameserver, your packet makes it's way to the box in Beijing, while someone in NYC gets their local one. (There are could be subtleties that I'm missing, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot to it other than that.)
The problem with this (as the WP article points out) is that it's virtually useless for stateful connections like TCP, so it's not useful for load balancing web servers and other things of that nature. But since DNS uses UDP, it doesn't matter if one packet goes to one server, and then the routers decide to send the next one to a different server with the same IP. This means you don't need the usual NAT system that would be required in order to load-balance a HTTP farm: most of that is really only needed because you need to keep the various connections between clients and servers sorted out. When you're using a stateless protocol, it's a lot simpler.
The advantage of CNR over apt-get is that it's not apt-get.
In all seriousness, that's pretty much the crux of it. From TFA:
One of the biggest complaints I hear from MS Windows and Mac users about Linux, is that there are too many distributions, each with their own installation system. Desktop Linux isn't like MS Windows or Mac, where you can simply go hunting on the Internet (or at your local computer store), find a piece of interesting software, and quickly install it. With desktop Linux, you must first find the program, if it's even supported to begin with, then hope they've provided the right files and installation process for "your" particular Linux distribution. (.deb files,.rpm files,.tar.gz files etc.) It's all far too complicated for the average person, and it's no wonder they shy away from Linux.... When we started Linspire, we knew that we'd need to overcome this complexity. This led to Linspire's CNR ("Click 'N Run") technology. CNR does dozens of things to make finding, installing and managing software on your desktop computer extremely easy. CNR makes finding the right piece of software easy with user reviews, charts, screenshots, descriptions, friendly names, and so on. Once you've found what you're looking for, with literally one click, the software is installed to your computer and icons added to your desktop and Launch Menu. CNR then notifies you when updates are available, which you can then install with one click."
Basically, their problem with apt-get is that the tools are harder to use, and that it's distro specific. Their aim, if I'm understanding it right, is to offer one tool that would be the same across distributions, offer the same software to each, and be extremely easy to use. In short, rather than each distro having its own package management system, they could all use CNR and appear the same to the casual user.
If you use apt-get, you probably aren't going to be interested in CNR, or really anything that Linspire is doing, frankly. But I think there are a lot of people not using Linux right now, and who are confused by the differences between distributions (not to mention the very concept of distributions in general) who would probably be receptive to the idea of a standard packaging/installation system that was distribution-agnostic.
I thought his comments about the DNS root servers were interesting.
The DNS root servers appear to be 13 hosts, but are actually many more. They have been under varying, continual, low-level attacks for many years, a process that tends to toughen the defenses and make them quite robust. A few years ago there was a strong attack on the root servers, taking 9 of the 13 down at some point.... There are other root servers, of course. Anyone can run one, it is just a question of getting people to use it. I understand that China is proceeding with root servers of their own. DNSSEC is a way to get the right DNS answer, but its deployment has had problems for at least 10 years.
It's interesting that the system works as well as it does: one would think that with just 13 IP addresses to target, the root servers would melt from DDoS attacks far more often than they do.
Their technique of hiding many geographically-separated servers behind one IP address is interesting. For example, ISC's server at 192.5.5.241 (the "F" server) has over 40 sites, including Ottawa, Palo Alto, New York City, San Francisco, and Madrid. Given the obvious advantages of this configuration, it actually surprised me that there are root servers not doing this: VeriSign, University of Maryland, NASA, the U.S. DoD, the U.S. Army, and ICANN all seem to have single-site root servers. I wonder whether those organizations are taking the responsibility that they hold seriously enough, if cost or level of effort are what's stopping them.
Also, the number of servers that have IPv6 addresses is a bit disappointing (B, F, H, K, M), but I suppose understandable given the slow uptake of that technology. In many ways, the root DNS system is seemingly one of the oldest and least-noticed parts of the Internet's infrastructure; if the network as a whole were a city, it's the stonework aqueducts far beneath the streets, that nobody thinks about as long as the water comes out when you turn the tap.
Actually, part of that 1997 license also said neither service could prevent someone from making a device that received BOTH services.
Very interesting. I, too, have thought that a Sirius/XM combo unit would be nice. In fact, I'd probably run right out and buy one, and I don't have either system right now. (I'm not going to get something that's specific to one network...reminds me of all the dark years I spent buying Verizon-locked cellphones. [Shiver.])
I had always assumed that they had some patented codecs or decryptors that they only licensed out, DVD Consortium-style, to manufacturers of "approved" devices, where "approved" meant "agreed to only make [Sirius/XM] equipment."
If the FCC really requires them to license the critical playback components to a manufacturer who wants to make a cross-compatible receiver, it astounds me that someone hasn't done this already. The draw would be so immediate, I have to think that there's something stopping one from being produced.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to clarify, in addition to being an actor, History Channel commentator, and Jack Bauer's onetime nemesis, "Weller also holds a Masters Degree in Roman and Renaissance Art, and is an occasional lecturer at Syracuse University on the subject of Hollywood and the Roman Empire" (or so sayeth the great Wikipedia on the subject).
You have found the very reason why they have not enabled the flag and will not for years to come - way too much old equipment and way too many customers to be pissed off.
So basically... "We're going to hold this gun to your head, here, but don't worry -- we're not going to use it! It's just easier to put the gun there, now, than it would be to do it later...but we don't want to deal with the mess it would make if we used it, so just forget it's even there. Trust us!"
No, thanks. I think that as the media companies become more and more desperate, as it becomes painfully obvious that DRM just doesn't work, they're going to pull out all the stops and go down fighting. If they have a way to make every non-HDCP television in the world suddenly explode, they'll do it; it's just a question of when, and what level of desperation it will require.
Don't ever question what a broke junkie will do for a fix, and don't ever question what an obsolete corporation will do to protect its business model. Even when doomed, both will do ridiculous, irrational, self-defeating things in order to delay the inevitable for as long as possible. You probably don't want either one in your living room.
Where's robocop when you need him?
Oddly enough, there was an article I saw in Wired recently about the actor who played RoboCop; apparently he had a mid-life crisis and is now a professor of Classical Studies at some university. I think his specialty has something to do with Roman aqueducts.
All that Commmie ignorance and the Russians still managed to put a man into space before anyone else.
People seemingly nostalgic for the Red Bear seem to love to belabor the "man in space" point, but also seem to avoid noting that the Soviet Union failed the ultimate intelligence test, when it neglected to ensure its own survival.
If the system was that good, obviously it should have easily managed to hang on -- obviously that would have been the prime national priority. And yet it did not. Perhaps the take-away lesson is that while the system worked admirably on concentrating a lot of resources on a few key problems, it was unable to manage the delegation of a lot of resources, to a lot of smaller problems. (This isn't particularly astute or surprising; control centralization allows for concentration, but at the expense of flexibility.)
String theory has one particle - the string. It has one force which emerges from the very simple dynamics put into it at the outset. A wide spectrum of particles and interactions emerges from it in a natural way. There is little choice for the dimension of spacetime - the theory locks it down from the beginning. Gravity emerges from it naturally - something that doesn't even get mentioned in the standard model. There are close to zero arbitrary constants. And at bottom, the initial assumptions of String Theory are really simple. Simpler than other quantum field theories.
I think much of the debate over string theory is, at heart, irrational. Some people are attracted to its beauty and elegance, while others find it so elegant that it is therefore suspect. (I.e., the subluminiferous aether was actually pretty beautiful as a theory in a certain way, too, as were epicycles, crystal spheres, and any number of now-disregarded theories; some people would hold that string theory is suspiciously similar to other elegant ideas which have ended up on the scrap heap.)
In some ways, the debate is less of a purely scientific one than an ideological battle between idealists and cynics; lacking experimental evidence, the community seems split mostly between idealists who support string theory, in all its theoretical elegance, while on the other side are cynics who think the whole thing is just too cute to be true, and that it owes itself more to wishful thinking than actual physics.
This is to be expected; until someone can come up with an experiment that will disprove part or all of string theory (or until the theoreticians can find some prediction made by string theory which differs materially from that made by a competing theory), it's an un-winnable argument. There really is little besides "gut reaction" (and other not-quite-rational factors, like the reputations of various people who have already taken sides) to pick sides based on.
When I first tried to post this I got a message saying that "This user does not exist, no matter how much you want him to." Anecdotal evidence suggested that I do, in fact, exist, since I think, I think, so I attributed the result to experimental error and reran it; failing to falsify my existence in the process.
Keep running the experiment; eventually you'll get the outcome you expect.
If that's your goal, then you probably need extra dimensions, string theory or not.
It seems like that's the $6,400 question, then. Are we blinding ourselves in seeking a unified theory, in the same way that Copernicus was blinding himself by looking for a geocentric, circular-orbit model? If you take as an assumption that there must be a unified theory, it may well be that many dimensions fall from it as a necessary consequence. Similarly, if you assume that the planets rotate around the Earth, epicycles are an almost immediately necessary consequence of even the most trivial observations (because the planets seem to change speed and occasionally even direction). I'm sure that Copernicus thought that having a universe centered around the earth was just as necessary and desirable as modern physicist think a unified field theory is; a universe without one would just be so ugly.
It's not my area of physics so I have just decided to not hold an opinion, at least at this point, but it does seem as though we need to be constantly vigilant about the assumptions we make, and the goals we set ourselves. It's pretty easy to laugh at the geocentrists, but logically it's almost certain that we today hold views that in a few centuries, will be just as laughable.
And while we're at it, why do so many mini ITX cabinets look like early '70's stereo equipment?
Just a guess, but maybe because people want to use them for various media-serving functions in the living room, so therefore they want ones that match their existing butt-ugly early 70s stereo equipment?
Or maybe they're trying too hard to be retro? Next thing you know, they'll be trying stainless steel, dark wood, and avocado green -- all in the same case.
Sounds like a good resource for someone who was planning on building an embedded/SFF PC in the immediate future.
Not sure if it would be of any benefit to the more casual reader, or one on a longer time horizon. It sounds like they make specific hardware recommendations, which would be invaluable to someone building a system today, is probably just going to be a source of frustration in twelve months, when none of the stuff they recommend will be available anymore.
Their choice to produce it as an ebook is probably a smart one, for this reason. They would barely have time to get it out the door in paper format, before the recommendations were less than cutting-edge; by the time it made its way to most readers, they'd have to hunt on eBay to get the particular parts used in the articles.
I can't tell you the number of times I've read various HOWTOs and other 'How to make a...' articles, only to meet frustration when some small key part is out of production, and the currently-produced alternative creates problems that aren't addressed. That's the limitation of HOWTOs: they only tell you how to go down one particular path, not how to survive in the proverbial woods. They're a map, not a survival guide.
So I guess if you're in the market for a 'map,' getting one that's as new as possible is probably a smart idea, and one that's been written and is produced straight to PDF, without months of waiting to be printed and sold, is probably the best thing going.
AdBlock Plus (at least, I think it's AdBlock Plus, maybe it's AdBlock2) does a fairly good job of this; when you enable the blocking, you choose from a list of well-known blacklists with short descriptions (what language/geography they're tailored to, who maintains it, etc.). You can load your own, naturally, but if you just want "zero effort" ad-blocking, it does a fairly good job. Here's the current list.
There would undoubtedly be some wrangling over who's list got to be the default, or at the top of the list of options, but you could order it with some neutral metric (number of unique downloads per day? Google Ranking?) if it became a point of contention.
You don't want to include a blacklist with the software itself, because they become obsolete too quickly, and for obvious reasons you don't want to stick the user with one that's hard to update or change. Using a subscription-based system that lets the user choose between lists is fairly simple, yet powerful, and allows users to move to a different list if they desire a different level or focus on blocking. (E.g., some lists are more minimalist, others take a more expansive interpretation of "ads," and most are tailored to a particular language.)
I only spend about 5 - 6 hours of waking time with my wife a day. It really doesn't say anything about how our lives are spent, just acknowledges that computers are becoming a bigger part of our lives, but they are not necessarily intruding upon our time with our families.
Good point. Twenty or thirty years ago, you could have written a similar piece, talking about how people are spending more time with their desk chair, slide rule, or mechanical pencil (depending on occupation) than with their significant other.
It's really nothing new. When you spend more time at the office than you do at home (of your waking hours), it's to be expected.
I think your numbers are off, or you're only counting white people, or something.
The fertility rate in the U.S. is definitely above replacement rate right now. It's not in all areas -- there are parts of the country becoming depopulated via migrations and "greying out" of the remaining population -- but overall the population is basically stable from births, and increasing due to immigration.
Maybe the suggestion was to make it a built-in option that could be turned on or off?
... I wasn't ever even thinking about an ad-blocker that couldn't be turned off by the user; such a thing would be an annoyance at best and an abomination at worst.
I just wanted to clarify
In fact, it's an open question whether such a feature if it were built-in, ought to be on or off by default (my suggestion would be off, since the browser shouldn't remove content from the incoming pages without that choice being made by the user). What I was imagining, was something more like the ad blocking built into recent versions of Konqueror; basically a pane of the preferences dialog which looks suspiciously like AdBlock-the-plugin's control panel (because it is basically, I understand, AdBlock rolled in).
My point was less about AdBlocking per se, than about the apparent conscious choice of the Firefox developers, to not include such a feature in the browser itself (whether on or off by default). Since it's so often installed by users (meaning, obviously, that it does something a lot of people find useful), it would seem to be a pretty clear next step for inclusion in the browser itself; that it's not, suggests to me that the developers have goals different from (although not necessarily irreconcilable with) their users.
There are lots of examples of other places where this occurs; the TiVO was just the closest example I could come up with.
I don't care about whether they include this plugin or that one, I'm talking about ad blocking as a feature. Firefox (and all other browsers) include lots of features that aren't strictly necessary in order to look at HTTP pages: bookmarks, for instance. Why do browsers have bookmarks? Because people like being able to save bookmarks, and find it useful. Same with tabs, search boxes, and other things that have been implemented. They're all there, because people find them handy.
Ad blocking would probably be just as well-received, if not better, than features like tabs and search boxes, which made it in. (And in fact, other browsers have built adblocking in to them.) That Firefox doesn't by default, is rather obviously a conscious decision on the part of the developers. They have decided to include some features in the browser, and left others out, and ad blocking has never been put into the core browser, even though it's (last time I checked) the single most popular Firefox add-on. It's pretty obvious that it's a feature that lots of people use, and if it were built in and didn't require a download, even more people probably would grow to appreciate it. If the development of new features were done purely on the basis of what would be most useful to the greatest number of users, it would be a no-brainer for inclusion. That it's not, shows that there are other considerations at work.
I knew that was going to draw fire from Firefox fans, but I don't really see that as a controversial statement. It reflects the realities of a big, and consequently expensive, (and sue-able) software development project. It is entirely understandable, even natural, that they will have priorities -- including their own corporate survival -- which may lead to decisions that are different from what users would have desired, or found useful.
I think it's because Firefox's developers don't think there's anything inherently wrong with ads.
This is besides the point; it's not about the inherent "rightness" or "wrongness" of ads, it's about whether people want them as part of their browsing experience or not, and whether the technology can deliver that. I think it's safe to say that, given the choice, most people would choose no ads over ads, therefore it would make sense that a browser give them that.
If a whole lot of people wanted white-on-black text, browsers would probably implement that, too. It's not an issue of whether white-on-black is inherently superior to black-on-white, it's just consumer demand.
The Firefox developers are choosing to pass up what could be a big boost to its popularity, because they don't want to give people something that I suspect most people want, or would find useful. I suspect it's because the Firefox project and the Firefox developers themselves draw revenue from advertising, and don't want to cut it off (or come under fire from people who's revenues might be impacted). To put it bluntly, it's a conflict of interest -- I'm not judging them for that, because it may be a necessary consequence of staying afloat as an organization -- but they have goals other than producing "the best browser" possible, which prevent them from putting in such a feature.
It's the same reason that TiVOs don't have automatic commercial skipping, even though such a thing would be possible to implement (and other projecs like MythTV do), and most people would probably think it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. There are other considerations on the part of the manufacturer, which trump what would be best for the consumer.
Mathematically, using multiple algorithms may not offer much of an advantage, but practically, where you may by necessity have to work with algorithms that have flaws (because you have to pick from algorithms that are well-agreed-upon standards), or that may be discovered to have flaws in the future, it seems like a good way to hedge one's bets. Aside from the added complexity, there doesn't seem to be any compelling reasons not to do it, if time and computational power allow.
As other people have pointed out, I'm not necessarily sure that these competitions really result in a whole lot of new development work per se. Rather, they serve as encouragement to researchers in the field, to take whatever they've been working on for the past few years, tidy it up and make it publishable, and submit it as a candidate for standardization.
The research into new functions progresses more or less on its own in the academic world most of the time. These competitions basically seek to tap into what's going on there, and re-synchronize the commercial/governmental world with whatever the state-of-the-art is in academic cryptography.
Maybe he just needs a sandbox to play in?
My conclusion is that government agencies probably work best at a maximum size of European countries or USA states.
A bunch of dead white guys came to the same conclusion about 220 years ago, but we've been ignoring them ever since.
Now how does this apply with Ubuntu? There's quite literally a 'Find new applications' button.
I see it as basically parallel to Ubuntu's apt-get GUI wrapper. They're both trying to do the same thing, namely make software installation easier. It's just the Ubuntu took apt-get and wrapped it in a GUI, while Linspire took their repository system (which also includes commercial and non-free software that you can purchase, apparently) and did much the same thing.
That you can get commercial software via CNR, while I doubt apt-get will ever have this capability, might be a big advantage. Although there is not a whole lot of commercial software development aimed at desktop Linux users, CNR at least gives the possibility of an easy online distribution model to someone who wanted to go that route.
You're evidently just less interesting than Bruce Schneier.
Don't feel bad; same goes for most of us.
I think it's actually fairly simple: they let multiple (widely separated) servers announce themselves on the same IP address, and these propagate into the routing system. When somebody sends a packet to one of these servers, the routers along the way naturally tend to send it to the closest one. Thus if you're in Beijing and send a packet to the IP address for the F nameserver, your packet makes it's way to the box in Beijing, while someone in NYC gets their local one. (There are could be subtleties that I'm missing, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot to it other than that.)
The problem with this (as the WP article points out) is that it's virtually useless for stateful connections like TCP, so it's not useful for load balancing web servers and other things of that nature. But since DNS uses UDP, it doesn't matter if one packet goes to one server, and then the routers decide to send the next one to a different server with the same IP. This means you don't need the usual NAT system that would be required in order to load-balance a HTTP farm: most of that is really only needed because you need to keep the various connections between clients and servers sorted out. When you're using a stateless protocol, it's a lot simpler.
I was pretty impressed with it, too.
In all seriousness, that's pretty much the crux of it. From TFA: Basically, their problem with apt-get is that the tools are harder to use, and that it's distro specific. Their aim, if I'm understanding it right, is to offer one tool that would be the same across distributions, offer the same software to each, and be extremely easy to use. In short, rather than each distro having its own package management system, they could all use CNR and appear the same to the casual user.
If you use apt-get, you probably aren't going to be interested in CNR, or really anything that Linspire is doing, frankly. But I think there are a lot of people not using Linux right now, and who are confused by the differences between distributions (not to mention the very concept of distributions in general) who would probably be receptive to the idea of a standard packaging/installation system that was distribution-agnostic.
Their technique of hiding many geographically-separated servers behind one IP address is interesting. For example, ISC's server at 192.5.5.241 (the "F" server) has over 40 sites, including Ottawa, Palo Alto, New York City, San Francisco, and Madrid. Given the obvious advantages of this configuration, it actually surprised me that there are root servers not doing this: VeriSign, University of Maryland, NASA, the U.S. DoD, the U.S. Army, and ICANN all seem to have single-site root servers. I wonder whether those organizations are taking the responsibility that they hold seriously enough, if cost or level of effort are what's stopping them.
Also, the number of servers that have IPv6 addresses is a bit disappointing (B, F, H, K, M), but I suppose understandable given the slow uptake of that technology. In many ways, the root DNS system is seemingly one of the oldest and least-noticed parts of the Internet's infrastructure; if the network as a whole were a city, it's the stonework aqueducts far beneath the streets, that nobody thinks about as long as the water comes out when you turn the tap.
Actually, part of that 1997 license also said neither service could prevent someone from making a device that received BOTH services.
Very interesting. I, too, have thought that a Sirius/XM combo unit would be nice. In fact, I'd probably run right out and buy one, and I don't have either system right now. (I'm not going to get something that's specific to one network...reminds me of all the dark years I spent buying Verizon-locked cellphones. [Shiver.])
I had always assumed that they had some patented codecs or decryptors that they only licensed out, DVD Consortium-style, to manufacturers of "approved" devices, where "approved" meant "agreed to only make [Sirius/XM] equipment."
If the FCC really requires them to license the critical playback components to a manufacturer who wants to make a cross-compatible receiver, it astounds me that someone hasn't done this already. The draw would be so immediate, I have to think that there's something stopping one from being produced.