On the positive side, if anyone beats you up and breaks your nose, they can now be sued for aiding and abetting terrorism by making the 'nose database' useless...
That coming from a computer user - I bet, most people zoning out in front of the TV will object to your analysis......likely even claim, that zoning out in front of the TV teaches you more than zoning out in front of World of Warcraft...;-)
Neither would automatically be right, but it's just the reflex action assuming it's the other side who is the more stupid one.
I am using fail2ban, but I do not think it's a particularly great tool when you see how many different IP addresses the attacks come from, so you're somewhere stuck in the middle trying to optimise how to make fail2ban more effective, while not being a problem for your own users:
- you configure blocking from 1 login attempt and a long block time cuts down on most of the outside attacks, but if some legitimate user mistypes his password, he'll be locked out for that same long block time... - you configure several wrong password attempts and/or shorter blocking times - then the attacks do not get slowed quite as much, but it hinders your users less.
There are some things you might consider, though -
- if you can, and your users always access the system from their own computers/laptops, force the use of public-key authentication and disable use of password logins; then outside access attempts via password cannot succeed.
- if you can't do this, at least force root to use public key (and/or su/sudo from another login. (sshd_config either
'PermitRootLogin without-password' (to allow root access through authorized_keys, but not through password, or
'PermitRootLogin no' to block root access via ssh-login altogether.
- if there are only specific accounts you might want to allow access to, look into pam_require, then limit to those users in pam's ssh
config: 'account required pam_require.so @ssh-users myaccount' (allows user 'myaccount' and all users in group 'ssh-users'
to log in via ssh - everyone else will be kicked out, even with a valid password).
- keep an eye on the log to see whether it's actual users that get hit, or whether you see access attempts to non-existent users
(many of the attacks are basically dictionary based). If you find one of the valid accounts gets hit too much, consider renaming that
user account.
Obviously, yes, there are those people claiming hypersensitivity, basing it simply on their fear of the radiation getting to their bodies.
But, I wouldn't go as far as saying that there is no danger at all because of them, much the same way I wouldn't conclude the radiation being dangerous if non of these people claimed hypersensitivity.
The question to me comes down to long-term exposure damage, which we cannot much about yet - and it would be difficult to force companies into very long term safety tests before being allowed to market their devices. But I do feel that the subject should stay under investigation for longer.
In the time after WW-II, US armed forces tested how their troops could fight near the blast of a nuclear weapon - and, hey, pretty much everyone was healthy in the first tests afterwards. Cancers don't measurably spring up within hours of a test. Still, you have claims from soldiers claiming their cancers were caused by those events decades later...
In Germany, soldiers working on mobile radars are trying to get compensations for tumors they seem to have received by operating the radar devices. Yet, I bet you, on the first tests of those, there were no permanent health problems reported in the days/weeks after the initial tests.
Most famously, big tobacco - your first cigarette isn't clearly measurable the one killing you. Neither is the second, third, twenty-first or onehundredfifthyfourths the lethal one. There is no doubt left about cigarettes being lethal now, but big tobacco made lots of profits over the years by claiming that cigarettes are safe, and that noone could ever link any individual cigarette to lung cancer. And it's still the argument used now by smokers against 'too heavy handed' anti-smoking legislation - why should smoking be banned in pubs. Let non-smokers go somewhere else. Or - more ridiculously, smokers in some countries (like the UK) actually claiming it's breaching their human rights if you prohibited them from lighting up in public. (Who cares about the human rights of the non-smoker next to him, if noone can prove it was 'my' cigarette that gave him lung cancer)?
Neither of those examples can obviously prove whether there is cellphone tower radiation is harmful; much the way that the luddites trying to raise panic about them can prove their harmful, nor that their existence proves cell phone radiation harmless.
What I would wish for - is that the subject stays under some form of independent investigation - without any lobbying from either side. (don't see though, how that could ever happen)
Sure, these kinds of tricks always work so well...
It wasn't torture, we just blindfolded him... Oh - and occasionally, out of pure care for the prisoner, gave him a splash of water while he was lying down there blindfolded... It was just due to budgetary constraints, that we felt unable to first untie him, take off his blindfold, and sit him at a table with the glass of water in front of him to drink at his own leisure... There - waterboarding isn't torture, it's perfectly legal - it's just giving someone access to water under heavy budgetary constraints, that was the problem - hardly anything illegal...
Well, it may be that because they are a public institution they want to keep everything above board......even if you thought, our laws were wrong, that wouldn't mean it would reflect well on you to, say, murder someone and keep quiet about it for 100 years hoping that the law would be changed in the meantime...
Also, you might want to think about that the British Library started archiving the Internet anyway, keeping it out of public view is one thing - doing it without ever making budged audits cause problems because of money set aside for your secret archive - that's a whole different stunt, after all, you are not just talking about a cheap second hand PC standing in a quiet corner on the cheapest possible broadband connection in order to be able to do it.
That doesn't answer the next question, though - when was the last time you saw a SATA to MFM or even USB to MFM adapter?...or a non-ISA card that can still use an MFM disk?
Mayhe he needs a whole machine from the XT/AT/386/486 era...
I do not have first hand experience of many other countries, but this is just a stepping stone for the government - it will not deter the government from continuing in the same direction. In the last decade or so, it has been my distinct impression that there has been rise of cases where the German government first pushes through some (partially harsh) legislation, only to have it challenged at the Bundesverfassungsgericht and just continuing on with however much the judges let them get away with.
All this leads to is the politicians just putting the burden of finding out what the maximum restrictive law can be to the judges of the highest court.
No attempt is made at trying to find workable laws, but instead they try and overreach 'in the name' of terrorism or child porn in trying to control what people can do.
I laud the judges for their rebuke of the law, but I also mourn that our politicians still aren't considering educating themselves of what is possible, what is useful, what is sensible; or trying to find other ways of mitigating problems rather than just following the first impulse of prohibiting whatever the problem is perceived to be.
Germany, to me, is not that far off needing to take some guidance from a recent TED talk: 4 ways to fix a broken legal system:
Hmm - if exposure to cigarette smoke was of any danger to public health, you'd never have seen them anywhere......what's 'of any danger to public health' is a relative term - even if the managers of todays companies would be aware of any problems, trust me that this information would only begin to see the light of day after their golden parachutes got deployed, and some new Chief-Idiot-Officer has been in his position long enough so blame won't be attributed to any of the 'current' CEOs...
Big tobacco has played this game masterfully for decades; everyone just has to deny ANY problem whatsoever until AFTER their departure from any high-paying job at the company...
"Killer Apartment Vs. Persistent Microwave Exposure"?
If the 'persistent microwave exposure' turns out a bad thing, the place may indeed be a 'killer apartment'...;-)
Re re-saleability - even if you plan to stay there in the long term, you should still make your offer reflect the antennae......after all, your current vendor already faces a lower sellability on the place because of the antennae. Bid lower and leave it to the vendor to decide whether and how much more time to invest to try and line up another buyer...
I can see the different pin-outs and baud rates being an issue - though, this could at least be 'fixed' going forward - hardly anyone nowadays uses 7bit + parity + 2 stop bits or similar setups - devices requiring these have been pretty much phased out; the parity bits and low baud rates still being a remnant of the days of 'longer' distance communication over the wires. For now, we can probably do to just limit the access to the higher baud rates and (basic) 8N1 with hardware handshake as opposed to XON/XOFF.
The argument of longer times for updating firmware via serial I would consider only partially valid, as you can update most devices through 'other' means as well, and the serial update is only there for absolute emergencies.
As for switching to USB - nice idea, but how long is USB going to last? I would rather suggest we keep 'backward' old serial for emergency consoles, so we can retain the option of dropping lower speeds on USB in future upgrades - otherwise, you would again lose access to your error console if your version of USB (say, 1.1) will no longer be supported by most newer chipsets. As USB is still being worked on, do not use it for such 'emergency' access issues.
Strangely enough, nobody screamed outrage when bans against games, graphics, etc. depicting child-p*rn were brought in...
So - where do you draw the line in which crimes should be 'legal' as game subjects, and which ones should not be?
Personally, I am somewhat sympathetic towards banning acts considered serious crimes in real life from being the subject of a game (by which I mean games requiring players to act out these types of crimes).
On the other hand - the games industry is a bit lazy as well - obviously, for them it's less of an 'intellectual leap' releasing one first person shooter after another, with graphics becoming ever more spectacular (and gruesome)... Why aren't we seeing any games manufacturer try for a push in games that aren't quite as destructive?
They could probably make any grade after the 2nd optional, really......you don't really need much more than very basic addition/subtraction skills and very limited literacy to utter 'You want fries with that?'...
All the rest of the education is simply wasted on kids who end up working for fast food joints or similarly low-skilled employment...
Just imagine how much money it would save the education board, and picture how much less fast food joints could pay their even younger 'operators'.
Seriously, it's an interesting question on whether to make the senior year optional or not - and I don't know the US educational system well enough to say, but here in Europe we already have secondary education with differing 'final' years, depending on whether you want to go on studying or not. (In Germany, the 'lowest' form of secondary school also makes the 10th year optional)...
I think the matter that people get paid, nor that most of those working on the same area are from the same company will help in making Linus's Law 'more true'.
Yes, in general, the more people look at an issue, the more likely it is that someone will spot a bug, if there is one.
But - I give you the following caveats to this:
* people working closely together might reduce design flaws, but not necessarily implementation flaws - knowing specifically what a piece of code is doing CAN stand in your way of spotting subtle bugs in it (because the code more or less reads like what you expect). So, it helps to have more 'independent' pairs of eyeballs looking at the code.
* people not knowing the subject matter inside out are not on par with people who do. People who know how buffer overruns come about may figure out potential buffer overruns more likely than others. On the other hand, if, say, these people were to look at encryption code, they may see a potential for a buffer overrun, but not necessarily, whether the implementation of the encryption routines has a (not totally obvious) security flaw in the way it handles its keys; or whether any s-boxes may be good or not.
So, the more 'subject-matter-aware' eyeballs, which work independently of each other, look at a given code, the more likely you are getting a better review of the code.
I don't think I'm a bad C developer, but I don't think I could spot the majority of the linux kernel flaws because I do not know enough of the design of the kernel and potential interaction of areas of code.
I think some of these things come down to integration - sure, app switching might be an issue if you do it very often. On the other hand, if it's integrated well, it does not pose much of a problem, e.g. see the integration with the components in the iphone's address book - you tap on the phone number, it calls the person; you tap on an email address, it switches to the mail to write an email to that contact; you tap on an address, it switches to google maps for that particular address.
As for books and address lookups - it probably depends on what books and what addresses, and then coming down to whether the book is being read by an inquisitive kind of person who, like you or me, might be curious about the map; or whether it's some John Doe who would just like to read the book and have a very simple and straightforward reading experience - without overburdened user interfaces.
Take the iphone - the phone does have its shortcomings, but overall it's a great device and does what it says on the tin and a lot more on top of it. It's elegantly designed both physically as well as in its usability - so much so, that while it's a phone a lot of geeks have, it's also the kind of phone I'm comfortable recommending to my mother without being afraid that she will call me every day to ask how to do this or that.
As for your example of switching back and forth between the word processor and the browser - yes, I do that quite a lot to - at times, but usually not when I am commuting somewhere. I do not think the ipad is a serious contender for a desktop or normal laptop - the screen size not being the least of its handicaps when it comes to comparing it to a normal machine. It's the next larger step up from a phone, but not quite a laptop yet - similar like the switch from a normal phone texting to writing texts on the iphone; in the same fashion, I expect the ipad to be easier to write on, but still not replacing a normal PC/Mac for this purpose.
I might look at documents on it, even do some changes on those documents, but I do not envisage writing the next 'Dan Brown'-like novel on it while constantly flipping back and forth between my book-draft, wikipedia, Nasa, and google maps. That's what I have my desktop machine and my laptop for.
Hearing some people rant about how the ipad can never take the same workload as the laptop does, I do wonder where these people are in normal life. I've never heard anyone complain to GM that their SUVs do not travel at 150 mph, nor to a Ferrari dealership that the Ferrari sucks for off-road; nor bitching that neither of
Apparently not the kind of jobs you're interested in. End of story for you there, got it.
As for me, I'm considering it as an ebook reader.
Otherwise - there is still gaming, surfing the web, datebooks,...
I even have some other ideas where it might also fit in (as in, some other app for which I don't think an app yet exists), but would like to see the actual device first.
So, for myself, I'm probably more likely than not to buy one - the only question is whether to go for the 3G model (yet another data subscription) - or whether I'll be happy just preloading it with read-it-later pages to read for when I commute to and from work...
What is the bl**dy obsession with whether it multitasks or not?
For this kind of device, in my opinion, multi-tasking is almost meaningless. The iphone's notification system could use some improvement, but real multitasking? Come on folks, it's not meant to replace your desktop or be your little Mersenne prime hunt in a pocket.
It was the same when the Zaurus was released - great it has Linux on it, yea! But apart from that, it sucked, compared to a lowly palm-pilot, which was just made to get the stuff done it was built for.
If I look at what I want from a device in that form factor, book reader, organizer, the fact that it DOES ITS JOB, and that it is well integrated with my stuff comes up WAAAYYY higher than multitasking.
Priorities, people - priorities!
If it had multitasking, 100 different chat clients for all chat systems ever written, could run gimp and do some powerful image processing, run all my databases (including SQL stored proc support), do some folding@home (or is that folding-on-the-road?) in the backgroup and everything else you might want to think up, it would neither be this small and light, nor likely very responsive, nor run as long as it does......and - most importantly, it would no longer be the device that MOST people can use easily: Apple isn't just thinking of the slashdot crowd as its potential customer base...
Sure, Apple's had some really bad products over time - but what do you expect from a company that big which survived that long?
And - how many open source projects died, never making it...
Apple, like any other company, doesn't always just launch brilliant products - but, at least, they're not afraid to try new things and see how they pan out...
Overall I think it's good that the DO dare making something entirely new; and more often than not fail with their products. Sometimes they even failed commercially, while still making a product people still care about (e.g. Newton).
For myself, I know many people are critical of the iPad, on the other hand, I think I will still buy one - it looks like a cool ebook reader - whether it has multi-tasking or not.
I think just looking at the stars is not nearly as great as trying to find out how much you can infer from observations.
Astronomy is the probably the science which requires the highest level of skill in inferring information, or trying to get at information in a bit round-about way, as it's kind of difficult to actually modify the universe on a large scale just to test a theory. And in my experience, I'd say inference is a skill not nearly taught enough nowadays - astronomy could be the subject for it.
If you have access to them, the BBC showed a program series called rough science which had a couple of interesting little experiments you could do - like calculating the diameter of a crater on the moon - with the most trivial of things at your disposal, and also trying to come up with a useful margin of error for their own measurements.
In the same program, they then also had a different group trying to measure the diameter of another crater here on earth (which they took the team to), by making the triangulate a point on the other side of the crater (if no crater at hand, you could do a practice session, trying to find the distance from the current position to a landmark nearby -- without allowing the students to actually just walk/drive over and measure the distance, but to gain that information from their own vantage points. (again, also get them to come up with a margin of error).
In both cases, in the end compare the student-found results with actual data...
I like the fact 'the US has threatened to withhold cooperation on terrorist intelligence if the bank data deal now in place is cancelled'.
At the Munich security conference today they stated that this data is important and it already helped stopping attacks...
EU politicians would like some evidence of this......since the 'US cooperation' so far has never led to them actually give any indication of this.
Strange kind of cooperation...
I'm kind of siding with EU politicians who say that this has already opened the door to some degree of industrial espionage, when the US can trace what kind of money flows exist between various companies.
For me it's the non-fiction that will go onto the reader, as I want a search function, which paper books have only in a very limited way (table of contents + index -- and I need to pick up any potentially interesting books first, then one by one go through their tocs/indices)...
I did not mean that Murdoch represents the Edison model - it's closer to the ebook model (ebooks cheaper, therefore only 'rich' will buy them on paper), i.e. the printed book is becoming the 'niche' product to read (just as candles are now almost a 'niche' product to provide lighting).
Murdoch is not simply the old dinosaur; this is merely another case of one form of extremism (loads of cheap ebooks) begets another (kill ebooks).
Both models have their place, or in the words of Thomas Edison
"We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles."
Personally, I can't wait to find a decent ebook reader - don't like what I have seen in the Sony ones available in Europe. Might go for the iPad instead. But on the other hand, I still want paper books - I find there is something very calming in holding and reading a paper book, on a medium where you neither have to worry about power (eventually) running out, nor do you have the temptation of quite as easily switching back and forth between different books,... It's more effort to change the (physical) book, and hence I find it more likely to actually stick to it. For work-related/reference books I want the ebook reader, for novels etc. I don't. But unlike Murdoch (or people wishing the end of paper books), I won't go for eliminating either form, as I can see the advantages of both.
Not mentioned that often in the context of ebooks - I remember reading a short story as part of my school English lessons, which seemed to predict 'ebooks' - and it was written in the 50s: Isaac Asimov's The Fun They Had ( http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/funtheyhad.html )
Slashdot Mirror
On the positive side, if anyone beats you up and breaks your nose, they can now be sued for aiding and abetting terrorism by making the 'nose database' useless...
No - then you'll only rot your attention span, before your intelligence goes...
Books like The Pomodoro Technique didn't come out of nowhere - in complete praise about what today's internet lifestyle is doing to us.
That coming from a computer user - I bet, most people zoning out in front of the TV will object to your analysis... ...likely even claim, that zoning out in front of the TV teaches you more than zoning out in front of World of Warcraft... ;-)
Neither would automatically be right, but it's just the reflex action assuming it's the other side who is the more stupid one.
I am using fail2ban, but I do not think it's a particularly great tool when you see how many different IP addresses the attacks come from, so you're somewhere stuck in the middle trying to optimise how to make fail2ban more effective, while not being a problem for your own users:
- you configure blocking from 1 login attempt and a long block time cuts down on most of the outside attacks, but if some legitimate user mistypes his password, he'll be locked out for that same long block time...
- you configure several wrong password attempts and/or shorter blocking times - then the attacks do not get slowed quite as much, but it hinders your users less.
There are some things you might consider, though -
- if you can, and your users always access the system from their own computers/laptops, force the use of public-key authentication and disable use of password logins; then outside access attempts via password cannot succeed.
- if you can't do this, at least force root to use public key (and/or su/sudo from another login. (sshd_config either
'PermitRootLogin without-password' (to allow root access through authorized_keys, but not through password, or
'PermitRootLogin no' to block root access via ssh-login altogether.
- if there are only specific accounts you might want to allow access to, look into pam_require, then limit to those users in pam's ssh
config: 'account required pam_require.so @ssh-users myaccount' (allows user 'myaccount' and all users in group 'ssh-users'
to log in via ssh - everyone else will be kicked out, even with a valid password).
- keep an eye on the log to see whether it's actual users that get hit, or whether you see access attempts to non-existent users
(many of the attacks are basically dictionary based). If you find one of the valid accounts gets hit too much, consider renaming that
user account.
Obviously, yes, there are those people claiming hypersensitivity, basing it simply on their fear of the radiation getting to their bodies.
But, I wouldn't go as far as saying that there is no danger at all because of them, much the same way I wouldn't conclude the radiation being dangerous if non of these people claimed hypersensitivity.
The question to me comes down to long-term exposure damage, which we cannot much about yet - and it would be difficult to force companies into very long term safety tests before being allowed to market their devices. But I do feel that the subject should stay under investigation for longer.
In the time after WW-II, US armed forces tested how their troops could fight near the blast of a nuclear weapon - and, hey, pretty much everyone was healthy in the first tests afterwards. Cancers don't measurably spring up within hours of a test. Still, you have claims from soldiers claiming their cancers were caused by those events decades later...
In Germany, soldiers working on mobile radars are trying to get compensations for tumors they seem to have received by operating the radar devices. Yet, I bet you, on the first tests of those, there were no permanent health problems reported in the days/weeks after the initial tests.
Most famously, big tobacco - your first cigarette isn't clearly measurable the one killing you. Neither is the second, third, twenty-first or onehundredfifthyfourths the lethal one. There is no doubt left about cigarettes being lethal now, but big tobacco made lots of profits over the years by claiming that cigarettes are safe, and that noone could ever link any individual cigarette to lung cancer. And it's still the argument used now by smokers against 'too heavy handed' anti-smoking legislation - why should smoking be banned in pubs. Let non-smokers go somewhere else. Or - more ridiculously, smokers in some countries (like the UK) actually claiming it's breaching their human rights if you prohibited them from lighting up in public. (Who cares about the human rights of the non-smoker next to him, if noone can prove it was 'my' cigarette that gave him lung cancer)?
Neither of those examples can obviously prove whether there is cellphone tower radiation is harmful; much the way that the luddites trying to raise panic about them can prove their harmful, nor that their existence proves cell phone radiation harmless.
What I would wish for - is that the subject stays under some form of independent investigation - without any lobbying from either side. (don't see though, how that could ever happen)
Sure, these kinds of tricks always work so well...
It wasn't torture, we just blindfolded him... Oh - and occasionally, out of pure care for the prisoner, gave him a splash of water while he was lying down there blindfolded... It was just due to budgetary constraints, that we felt unable to first untie him, take off his blindfold, and sit him at a table with the glass of water in front of him to drink at his own leisure...
There - waterboarding isn't torture, it's perfectly legal - it's just giving someone access to water under heavy budgetary constraints, that was the problem - hardly anything illegal...
Well, it may be that because they are a public institution they want to keep everything above board... ...even if you thought, our laws were wrong, that wouldn't mean it would reflect well on you to, say, murder someone and keep quiet about it for 100 years hoping that the law would be changed in the meantime...
Also, you might want to think about that the British Library started archiving the Internet anyway, keeping it out of public view is one thing - doing it without ever making budged audits cause problems because of money set aside for your secret archive - that's a whole different stunt, after all, you are not just talking about a cheap second hand PC standing in a quiet corner on the cheapest possible broadband connection in order to be able to do it.
That doesn't answer the next question, though - when was the last time you saw a SATA to MFM or even USB to MFM adapter? ...or a non-ISA card that can still use an MFM disk?
Mayhe he needs a whole machine from the XT/AT/386/486 era...
I do not have first hand experience of many other countries, but this is just a stepping stone for the government - it will not deter the government from continuing in the same direction. In the last decade or so, it has been my distinct impression that there has been rise of cases where the German government first pushes through some (partially harsh) legislation, only to have it challenged at the Bundesverfassungsgericht and just continuing on with however much the judges let them get away with.
All this leads to is the politicians just putting the burden of finding out what the maximum restrictive law can be to the judges of the highest court.
No attempt is made at trying to find workable laws, but instead they try and overreach 'in the name' of terrorism or child porn in trying to control what people can do.
I laud the judges for their rebuke of the law, but I also mourn that our politicians still aren't considering educating themselves of what is possible, what is useful, what is sensible; or trying to find other ways of mitigating problems rather than just following the first impulse of prohibiting whatever the problem is perceived to be.
Germany, to me, is not that far off needing to take some guidance from a recent TED talk: 4 ways to fix a broken legal system:
http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_howard.html
Hmm - if exposure to cigarette smoke was of any danger to public health, you'd never have seen them anywhere... ...what's 'of any danger to public health' is a relative term - even if the managers of todays companies would be aware of any problems, trust me that this information would only begin to see the light of day after their golden parachutes got deployed, and some new Chief-Idiot-Officer has been in his position long enough so blame won't be attributed to any of the 'current' CEOs...
Big tobacco has played this game masterfully for decades; everyone just has to deny ANY problem whatsoever until AFTER their departure from any high-paying job at the company...
"Killer Apartment Vs. Persistent Microwave Exposure"?
If the 'persistent microwave exposure' turns out a bad thing, the place may indeed be a 'killer apartment'... ;-)
Re re-saleability - even if you plan to stay there in the long term, you should still make your offer reflect the antennae... ...after all, your current vendor already faces a lower sellability on the place because of the antennae. Bid lower and leave it to the vendor to decide whether and how much more time to invest to try and line up another buyer...
Hmm -- phased out, but what for?
I can see the different pin-outs and baud rates being an issue - though, this could at least be 'fixed' going forward - hardly anyone nowadays uses 7bit + parity + 2 stop bits or similar setups - devices requiring these have been pretty much phased out; the parity bits and low baud rates still being a remnant of the days of 'longer' distance communication over the wires. For now, we can probably do to just limit the access to the higher baud rates and (basic) 8N1 with hardware handshake as opposed to XON/XOFF.
The argument of longer times for updating firmware via serial I would consider only partially valid, as you can update most devices through 'other' means as well, and the serial update is only there for absolute emergencies.
As for switching to USB - nice idea, but how long is USB going to last? I would rather suggest we keep 'backward' old serial for emergency consoles, so we can retain the option of dropping lower speeds on USB in future upgrades - otherwise, you would again lose access to your error console if your version of USB (say, 1.1) will no longer be supported by most newer chipsets. As USB is still being worked on, do not use it for such 'emergency' access issues.
Strangely enough, nobody screamed outrage when bans against games, graphics, etc. depicting child-p*rn were brought in...
So - where do you draw the line in which crimes should be 'legal' as game subjects, and which ones should not be?
Personally, I am somewhat sympathetic towards banning acts considered serious crimes in real life from being the subject of a game (by which I mean games requiring players to act out these types of crimes).
On the other hand - the games industry is a bit lazy as well - obviously, for them it's less of an 'intellectual leap' releasing one first person shooter after another, with graphics becoming ever more spectacular (and gruesome)... Why aren't we seeing any games manufacturer try for a push in games that aren't quite as destructive?
They could probably make any grade after the 2nd optional, really... ...you don't really need much more than very basic addition/subtraction skills and very limited literacy to utter 'You want fries with that?'...
All the rest of the education is simply wasted on kids who end up working for fast food joints or similarly low-skilled employment...
Just imagine how much money it would save the education board, and picture how much less fast food joints could pay their even younger 'operators'.
Seriously, it's an interesting question on whether to make the senior year optional or not - and I don't know the US educational system well enough to say, but here in Europe we already have secondary education with differing 'final' years, depending on whether you want to go on studying or not. (In Germany, the 'lowest' form of secondary school also makes the 10th year optional)...
I think the matter that people get paid, nor that most of those working on the same area are from the same company will help in making Linus's Law 'more true'.
Yes, in general, the more people look at an issue, the more likely it is that someone will spot a bug, if there is one.
But - I give you the following caveats to this:
* people working closely together might reduce design flaws, but not necessarily implementation flaws - knowing specifically what a piece of code is doing CAN stand in your way of spotting subtle bugs in it (because the code more or less reads like what you expect). So, it helps to have more 'independent' pairs of eyeballs looking at the code.
* people not knowing the subject matter inside out are not on par with people who do. People who know how buffer overruns come about may figure out potential buffer overruns more likely than others. On the other hand, if, say, these people were to look at encryption code, they may see a potential for a buffer overrun, but not necessarily, whether the implementation of the encryption routines has a (not totally obvious) security flaw in the way it handles its keys; or whether any s-boxes may be good or not.
So, the more 'subject-matter-aware' eyeballs, which work independently of each other, look at a given code, the more likely you are getting a better review of the code.
I don't think I'm a bad C developer, but I don't think I could spot the majority of the linux kernel flaws because I do not know enough of the design of the kernel and potential interaction of areas of code.
I think some of these things come down to integration - sure, app switching might be an issue if you do it very often. On the other hand, if it's integrated well, it does not pose much of a problem, e.g. see the integration with the components in the iphone's address book - you tap on the phone number, it calls the person; you tap on an email address, it switches to the mail to write an email to that contact; you tap on an address, it switches to google maps for that particular address.
As for books and address lookups - it probably depends on what books and what addresses, and then coming down to whether the book is being read by an inquisitive kind of person who, like you or me, might be curious about the map; or whether it's some John Doe who would just like to read the book and have a very simple and straightforward reading experience - without overburdened user interfaces.
Take the iphone - the phone does have its shortcomings, but overall it's a great device and does what it says on the tin and a lot more on top of it. It's elegantly designed both physically as well as in its usability - so much so, that while it's a phone a lot of geeks have, it's also the kind of phone I'm comfortable recommending to my mother without being afraid that she will call me every day to ask how to do this or that.
As for your example of switching back and forth between the word processor and the browser - yes, I do that quite a lot to - at times, but usually not when I am commuting somewhere. I do not think the ipad is a serious contender for a desktop or normal laptop - the screen size not being the least of its handicaps when it comes to comparing it to a normal machine. It's the next larger step up from a phone, but not quite a laptop yet - similar like the switch from a normal phone texting to writing texts on the iphone; in the same fashion, I expect the ipad to be easier to write on, but still not replacing a normal PC/Mac for this purpose.
I might look at documents on it, even do some changes on those documents, but I do not envisage writing the next 'Dan Brown'-like novel on it while constantly flipping back and forth between my book-draft, wikipedia, Nasa, and google maps. That's what I have my desktop machine and my laptop for.
Hearing some people rant about how the ipad can never take the same workload as the laptop does, I do wonder where these people are in normal life. I've never heard anyone complain to GM that their SUVs do not travel at 150 mph, nor to a Ferrari dealership that the Ferrari sucks for off-road; nor bitching that neither of
Apparently not the kind of jobs you're interested in. End of story for you there, got it.
As for me, I'm considering it as an ebook reader.
Otherwise - there is still gaming, surfing the web, datebooks, ...
I even have some other ideas where it might also fit in (as in, some other app for which I don't think an app yet exists), but would like to see the actual device first.
So, for myself, I'm probably more likely than not to buy one - the only question is whether to go for the 3G model (yet another data subscription) - or whether I'll be happy just preloading it with read-it-later pages to read for when I commute to and from work...
What is the bl**dy obsession with whether it multitasks or not?
For this kind of device, in my opinion, multi-tasking is almost meaningless. The iphone's notification system could use some improvement, but real multitasking? Come on folks, it's not meant to replace your desktop or be your little Mersenne prime hunt in a pocket.
It was the same when the Zaurus was released - great it has Linux on it, yea! But apart from that, it sucked, compared to a lowly palm-pilot, which was just made to get the stuff done it was built for.
If I look at what I want from a device in that form factor, book reader, organizer, the fact that it DOES ITS JOB, and that it is well integrated with my stuff comes up WAAAYYY higher than multitasking.
Priorities, people - priorities!
If it had multitasking, 100 different chat clients for all chat systems ever written, could run gimp and do some powerful image processing, run all my databases (including SQL stored proc support), do some folding@home (or is that folding-on-the-road?) in the backgroup and everything else you might want to think up, it would neither be this small and light, nor likely very responsive, nor run as long as it does... ...and - most importantly, it would no longer be the device that MOST people can use easily: Apple isn't just thinking of the slashdot crowd as its potential customer base...
Sure, Apple's had some really bad products over time - but what do you expect from a company that big which survived that long?
And - how many open source projects died, never making it...
Apple, like any other company, doesn't always just launch brilliant products - but, at least, they're not afraid to try new things and see how they pan out...
Overall I think it's good that the DO dare making something entirely new; and more often than not fail with their products. Sometimes they even failed commercially, while still making a product people still care about (e.g. Newton).
For myself, I know many people are critical of the iPad, on the other hand, I think I will still buy one - it looks like a cool ebook reader - whether it has multi-tasking or not.
I think just looking at the stars is not nearly as great as trying to find out how much you can infer from observations.
Astronomy is the probably the science which requires the highest level of skill in inferring information, or trying to get at information in a bit round-about way, as it's kind of difficult to actually modify the universe on a large scale just to test a theory. And in my experience, I'd say inference is a skill not nearly taught enough nowadays - astronomy could be the subject for it.
If you have access to them, the BBC showed a program series called rough science which had a couple of interesting little experiments you could do - like calculating the diameter of a crater on the moon - with the most trivial of things at your disposal, and also trying to come up with a useful margin of error for their own measurements.
In the same program, they then also had a different group trying to measure the diameter of another crater here on earth (which they took the team to), by making the triangulate a point on the other side of the crater (if no crater at hand, you could do a practice session, trying to find the distance from the current position to a landmark nearby -- without allowing the students to actually just walk/drive over and measure the distance, but to gain that information from their own vantage points. (again, also get them to come up with a margin of error).
In both cases, in the end compare the student-found results with actual data...
Not implemented in 8 years...
Hmmm - does that mean, Microsoft is one of those (patent-troll-like) 'non-practising entities'? ;-)
I like the fact 'the US has threatened to withhold cooperation on terrorist intelligence if the bank data deal now in place is cancelled'.
At the Munich security conference today they stated that this data is important and it already helped stopping attacks...
EU politicians would like some evidence of this... ...since the 'US cooperation' so far has never led to them actually give any indication of this.
Strange kind of cooperation...
I'm kind of siding with EU politicians who say that this has already opened the door to some degree of industrial espionage, when the US can trace what kind of money flows exist between various companies.
For me it's the non-fiction that will go onto the reader, as I want a search function, which paper books have only in a very limited way (table of contents + index -- and I need to pick up any potentially interesting books first, then one by one go through their tocs/indices)...
You got it the wrong way round -
I did not mean that Murdoch represents the Edison model - it's closer to the ebook model (ebooks cheaper, therefore only 'rich' will buy them on paper), i.e. the printed book is becoming the 'niche' product to read (just as candles are now almost a 'niche' product to provide lighting).
Murdoch is not simply the old dinosaur; this is merely another case of one form of extremism (loads of cheap ebooks) begets another (kill ebooks).
Both models have their place, or in the words of Thomas Edison
"We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles."
Personally, I can't wait to find a decent ebook reader - don't like what I have seen in the Sony ones available in Europe. Might go for the iPad instead. But on the other hand, I still want paper books - I find there is something very calming in holding and reading a paper book, on a medium where you neither have to worry about power (eventually) running out, nor do you have the temptation of quite as easily switching back and forth between different books, ... It's more effort to change the (physical) book, and hence I find it more likely to actually stick to it. For work-related/reference books I want the ebook reader, for novels etc. I don't.
But unlike Murdoch (or people wishing the end of paper books), I won't go for eliminating either form, as I can see the advantages of both.
Not mentioned that often in the context of ebooks - I remember reading a short story as part of my school English lessons, which seemed to predict 'ebooks' - and it was written in the 50s: Isaac Asimov's The Fun They Had ( http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/funtheyhad.html )