There's an easier way to create folder shortcuts on the desktop, which doesn't involve typing text paths: Right-click on the folder you want a shortcut to. Click "Make link". Drag the link to the desktop. Rename it if desired.
I'm not sure if the lack of "all users"-type functionality is a deficiency in Ubuntu, or an annoyance in Windows. For a single-user desktop, "All Users" is completely unnecessary, and on multi-user desktops I've more often seen it lead to annoyances than actually be useful. Google Chrome's Windows installer actually installs the program to the user desktop only by default, which will become more common as UAC-type enforcement on the Windows desktop becomes more common.
Any flash drive whose "security" involves a required app running on the host system will not be suitable for cross-platform use even if the app is well-written. The only right way to do it is to encrypt the data written to the drive, using well-known secure encryption algorithms run on the host. And for that purpose a cheap, dumb drive works just as well as a super-expensive "secure, tamper-proof" drive.
[in response to the idea that copyright infringement should be explicitly redefined to only cover distribution to another person]
I buy a CD, copy it, then some time later sell the original. According to your revised law I haven't broken the law even though 2 copies now exist.
Yes you have. You distributed a copy and kept a copy. The fact that it was the original copy you distributed is irrelevant -- you've created additional copies and sold a copy to someone else.
Re:Military grade anonymity? Say what?
on
Spying On Tor
·
· Score: 4, Informative
myvirtualid wrote:
clearance at - or above - top secret
There is no clearance above TS, at least in the technical sense. There is TS/SCI ("special compartmented information") clearance, which may or may not include a lifestyle polygraph exam. TS/SCI and TS/SCI + lifestyle poly are not "above" TS in any real sense, they are merely additional qualifiers used as criteria to determine whether you can be allowed access to compartmented info. If you have TS/SCI it makes that process easier, but not having TS/SCI is not an absolute barrier if the right people sign off on it (although for certain information "the right people" may consist of both houses of Congress and the President).
Compartments can be as loose (within the restrictions of TS) or as restrictive as necessary. There can be (and I understand are) compartments with only a handful of people.
In the article one of the enterprise guys is talking about how gigabit is basically a requirement for implementing 802.11n: "'We're mostly "100 meg" to our buildings,' says Michael Dickson, network analyst at University of Massachusetts at Amherst. '[For 11n,], we'll need gigabit switches in the closet with 10-gigabit uplinks. That's a definite cost, almost a necessary cost for 11n.'" This made my eyes cross and my brain squitter at itself confusedly, as last I checked, the size of the local pipe didn't make any difference to the performance of the upstream links; in other words, if it's going to suck with 802.11n, doesn't that mean it actually sucks right now? Is this an actual issue of some sort that's just written about poorly, or has somebody been promoted past his level of competence?
Who the fuck authorized the usage of 2.4 GHZ with wireless routers when the phones already had that spectrum?
The phones didn't "already have" that spectrum. 2.4 GHz is "non-licensed" spectrum, meaning it's open to anyone's use with caveats. Anyone can build a 2.4 Ghz (or 900 MHz or 5 GHz) device as long as it follows certain rules about max power output (see here for details). Originally 900 MHz/2.4 GHz/5 GHz was "industrial, scientific & medical" use -- it wasn't intended for radio transmission at all, it was to designate certain bands off-limits to radio because ISM devices radiated lots of incidental noise in those bands.
You can build a 2.4 GHz white-noise radiator as long as it follows the FCC rules for the spectrum. It'll piss off your neighbors with 802.11 or cordless phones but there's not a damn thing they have a right to do about it.
The idea is, you (some particular user) have already been blessed by the powers that be (possibly also you) to run whatever as root. gksu (or sudo) is now checking to see if you are actually you, as opposed to some random idiot (or malicious person) who has sat down at your terminal while you're away, or maybe somebody who hijacked a session somehow. You can configure them to ask for the root password instead of the user's own, but doing so is not much different in practice than allowing them to just su willy-nilly. The whole point of sudo is to allow more people to do admin stuff without needing to trust them with the root password.
Specifically he complains that when you try to run admin applications, you're prompted for the root password, but it's not accepted. Unfortunately, he's probably being a clueless git here -- by default, gksu asks for your password, not root's (and it's not ambiguous whose password it's asking for), so of course he gets denied when he gives root's password. Likewise when he su -'s, he logs in fine because that's when you're being asked for the root password.
When critiquing the grammar and spelling, remember it's a Slashdot journal entry -- it's unlikely the author had any idea it was going to be seen by the entire Slashdot horde.
I'm not saying the Geode is custom for the OLPC. I'm saying I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that AMD is providing them at a steep discount, but is banking on recovering that money in general goodwill for future consumer purchases. To impugn Intel as "only interested in making money" ignores the reality that AMD no doubt got involved in OLPC for exactly the same reason. Somewhere, some accountant at AMD had to draw up a balance sheet showing the OLPC CPUs as a net profit over time -- to do otherwise would be to risk the near-certainty of a shareholder lawsuit.
Again, Intel is just trying to generate press, "Look at us! Look at how great we are! We are trying to help the poor!"
And AMD wasn't when they inked a deal with OLPC?
Intel would be more advise to give money to the OLPC project so the per-system cost could be lowered. Team work is needed here, not competition.
That would be completely stupid of Intel. First, it would be putting money in the pockets of AMD. Second, AMD press would have an absolute field day -- "If Intel trusts us for the hard stuff, shouldn't you?" The reality is that Intel's choices were roll their own, or stay out completely.
Home audio equipment is okay, but suboptimal on the price/performance curve (e.g. Kenwood generally has better-sounding, better-quality equipment for the same price in my price range).
Don't I know it. A year ago when I went to buy a new stereo head unit for my car, I threw Sony out first thing on the grounds that after they screwed up my wife's computer with Suncomm DRM and cost me two hours fix time, I wasn't going to give them my money without a fight. I bought a Kenwood unit that plays MP3, WMA and non-DRM AAC (basically in this case, iTunes songs ripped from CD). At the time, only two units Crutchfield listed for my car did AAC and both were Kenwoods, so since the wife has everything iTuned up, and I use MP3 exclusively, it made a good fit.
A couple weeks later I wondered if I had spent more than I should -- after all, when I first started looking at this product segment 5 years before, Sony was one of the very few that even did car-stereo MP3 and everyone I knew that had one bought a Sony. So I went back and compared the Kenwood units to the Sony units. No contest -- the Kenwoods got better user reviews, listed better specs and had more features (even discounting AAC) at each price point right down the line.
The last Sony electronics I bought was the Walkman I picked up at Wal-Mart back in 1998. I was disappointed with some of the build quality, but it served (and still does). Nowadays I buy anything but Sony, and couldn't be happier.
Remember ClubIE.com? It was a "fan site" set up by Microsoft ca. mid-1996 for Internet Explorer. Apparently they let it lapse and now it's domain-squatted.
Well damn if you aren't right -- that's what I get for skimming legalese. But I did find a definitive statement from iParadigm on the issue in which they basically assert that fair use protects them even more so than more ordinary uses like parody. I'm not sure I buy it -- they'd be in better shape legally if their user agreement explicitly granted them a license. Then students would have no case against iParadigm, though they might have one against a third party who submitted their work without their consent.
Here's the relevant section of the Turnitin usage terms:
"Your License to Us: Unless otherwise indicated in this Site, including our Privacy Policy or in connection with one of our services, any communications or material of any kind that you e-mail, post, or transmit through the Site (excluding personally identifiable information of students and any papers submitted to the Site), including, questions, comments, suggestions, and other data and information (your "Communications") will be treated as non-confidential and non-proprietary. You grant iParadigms a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, world-wide, irrevocable license to reproduce, transmit, display, disclose, and otherwise use your Communications on the Site or elsewhere for our business purposes.We are free to use any ideas, concepts, techniques, know-how in your Communications for any purpose, including, but not limited to, the development and use of products and services based on the Communications. [bold & italic emphasis mine]
The bold part is what will kill the suit (assuming it predates the filing of the suit), but the italic part is pretty scary too: if your submission is something involving an invention, you just granted Turnitin an unlimited license to use your idea for any purpose.
They actually just did a big donation drive over several weeks. The progress bar was moving pretty steadily -- the last time I noticed it I think it was 3/4 of the way to the goal. Now if the goal was representative of what they actually needed, shouldn't they be in relatively good shape at the moment? I don't understand why they're crying about money after what looked like a very successful pledge drive.
If your product is one thing, don't name it something else.
You can bollock on about WinFS being "a database, not a filesystem" all you want, but the simple fact is it was advertised as a replacement for NTFS, it's called WinFS (not WinDB), it's conceptually a successor to the Object File System and it does the things a filesystem does (i.e. store files on some kind of medium in some fashion). So while it may be a database, it is in fact a filesystem as well. Microsoft can say the FS stands for "Future Storage", just like ISO, AT&T and FedEx can say "our names don't stand for anything", but no one is fooled.
This is the one thing I think falls down in your parallel setup. Last I checked, using iCal files for enterprise calendaring meant subscribing to every iCal file you wanted to see stuff in, which means every time an employee adds a new calendar, everybody else has to subscribe to it or they won't see his/her stuff. Is there some sort of auto-subscribe function that makes this less tedious and error-prone?
Even if there is, this doesn't really scale, as with N people reading each other's calendars you have N^2 file reads going on per calendar refresh period, with the server usage and network traffic that go along with them. If you have a 200-person enterprise with a couple of large groups or committees, you're screwed.
What's needed is not a collection of files, but an actual unified calendar database running on a server. That allows you to instantly look at anyone's calendar you want, without all the tedious subscribing to files. If you've ever used Outlook calendaring, planning a meeting is as easy as telling Outlook who you want to invite and then looking down the timeline at everyone's availability, completely on the fly. That and Palm sync are what people who really use Exchange Server's calendar features want, and those two things together are what no open-source solution gives them that I've been able to find.
My current workplace has been looking for a simple open-source calendar server to replace an ancient installation of Netscape Calendar, and we can't even find an open-source solution that meets the subset of that product's feature set that we actually use. We even looked at web-based calendars, despite the fact that web-based calendars suck, and what we found is that most of them have absolutely no desktop integration (Palm sync) at all. I'm not surprised that a drop-in Exchange Server calendar replacement doesn't exist.
Or maybe I'm completely wrong about how iCal works these days, but I don't think so.
If a Gnome user wants to install something from KDE, say AmaroK, they end up having to install a bunch of libraries from KDE.
I'm betting you didn't pick amaroK by accident -- it's the sole reason any KDE libraries exist on my otherwise stock Ubuntu system, and I know several other Ubuntu users in the same situation. If a GNOME-ified version of amaroK existed, I'd install it in a heartbeat and kiss KDE goodbye.
Slashdot Mirror
There's an easier way to create folder shortcuts on the desktop, which doesn't involve typing text paths: Right-click on the folder you want a shortcut to. Click "Make link". Drag the link to the desktop. Rename it if desired.
I'm not sure if the lack of "all users"-type functionality is a deficiency in Ubuntu, or an annoyance in Windows. For a single-user desktop, "All Users" is completely unnecessary, and on multi-user desktops I've more often seen it lead to annoyances than actually be useful. Google Chrome's Windows installer actually installs the program to the user desktop only by default, which will become more common as UAC-type enforcement on the Windows desktop becomes more common.
You guys mean Pope Benedict XVI, right?
Any flash drive whose "security" involves a required app running on the host system will not be suitable for cross-platform use even if the app is well-written. The only right way to do it is to encrypt the data written to the drive, using well-known secure encryption algorithms run on the host. And for that purpose a cheap, dumb drive works just as well as a super-expensive "secure, tamper-proof" drive.
That (plus plain old bureaucratic incompetence) was jwz's issue, at any rate.
[in response to the idea that copyright infringement should be explicitly redefined to only cover distribution to another person]
I buy a CD, copy it, then some time later sell the original. According to your revised law I haven't broken the law even though 2 copies now exist.
Yes you have. You distributed a copy and kept a copy. The fact that it was the original copy you distributed is irrelevant -- you've created additional copies and sold a copy to someone else.
myvirtualid wrote:
clearance at - or above - top secret
There is no clearance above TS, at least in the technical sense. There is TS/SCI ("special compartmented information") clearance, which may or may not include a lifestyle polygraph exam. TS/SCI and TS/SCI + lifestyle poly are not "above" TS in any real sense, they are merely additional qualifiers used as criteria to determine whether you can be allowed access to compartmented info. If you have TS/SCI it makes that process easier, but not having TS/SCI is not an absolute barrier if the right people sign off on it (although for certain information "the right people" may consist of both houses of Congress and the President).
Compartments can be as loose (within the restrictions of TS) or as restrictive as necessary. There can be (and I understand are) compartments with only a handful of people.
Without knowing what you've looked at, it's hard to give you an intelligent reply, but a friend of mine just bought a Drobo and loves it.
Almost two years ago.
In the article one of the enterprise guys is talking about how gigabit is basically a requirement for implementing 802.11n: "'We're mostly "100 meg" to our buildings,' says Michael Dickson, network analyst at University of Massachusetts at Amherst. '[For 11n,], we'll need gigabit switches in the closet with 10-gigabit uplinks. That's a definite cost, almost a necessary cost for 11n.'" This made my eyes cross and my brain squitter at itself confusedly, as last I checked, the size of the local pipe didn't make any difference to the performance of the upstream links; in other words, if it's going to suck with 802.11n, doesn't that mean it actually sucks right now? Is this an actual issue of some sort that's just written about poorly, or has somebody been promoted past his level of competence?
Who the fuck authorized the usage of 2.4 GHZ with wireless routers when the phones already had that spectrum?
The phones didn't "already have" that spectrum. 2.4 GHz is "non-licensed" spectrum, meaning it's open to anyone's use with caveats. Anyone can build a 2.4 Ghz (or 900 MHz or 5 GHz) device as long as it follows certain rules about max power output (see here for details). Originally 900 MHz/2.4 GHz/5 GHz was "industrial, scientific & medical" use -- it wasn't intended for radio transmission at all, it was to designate certain bands off-limits to radio because ISM devices radiated lots of incidental noise in those bands.
You can build a 2.4 GHz white-noise radiator as long as it follows the FCC rules for the spectrum. It'll piss off your neighbors with 802.11 or cordless phones but there's not a damn thing they have a right to do about it.
The idea is, you (some particular user) have already been blessed by the powers that be (possibly also you) to run whatever as root. gksu (or sudo) is now checking to see if you are actually you, as opposed to some random idiot (or malicious person) who has sat down at your terminal while you're away, or maybe somebody who hijacked a session somehow. You can configure them to ask for the root password instead of the user's own, but doing so is not much different in practice than allowing them to just su willy-nilly. The whole point of sudo is to allow more people to do admin stuff without needing to trust them with the root password.
Maybe not on Linux, but BSD has supported the wheel group since it was invented back in the 70s or 80s....
Specifically he complains that when you try to run admin applications, you're prompted for the root password, but it's not accepted. Unfortunately, he's probably being a clueless git here -- by default, gksu asks for your password, not root's (and it's not ambiguous whose password it's asking for), so of course he gets denied when he gives root's password. Likewise when he su -'s, he logs in fine because that's when you're being asked for the root password.
When critiquing the grammar and spelling, remember it's a Slashdot journal entry -- it's unlikely the author had any idea it was going to be seen by the entire Slashdot horde.
I'm not saying the Geode is custom for the OLPC. I'm saying I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that AMD is providing them at a steep discount, but is banking on recovering that money in general goodwill for future consumer purchases. To impugn Intel as "only interested in making money" ignores the reality that AMD no doubt got involved in OLPC for exactly the same reason. Somewhere, some accountant at AMD had to draw up a balance sheet showing the OLPC CPUs as a net profit over time -- to do otherwise would be to risk the near-certainty of a shareholder lawsuit.
Again, Intel is just trying to generate press, "Look at us! Look at how great we are! We are trying to help the poor!"
And AMD wasn't when they inked a deal with OLPC?
Intel would be more advise to give money to the OLPC project so the per-system cost could be lowered. Team work is needed here, not competition.
That would be completely stupid of Intel. First, it would be putting money in the pockets of AMD. Second, AMD press would have an absolute field day -- "If Intel trusts us for the hard stuff, shouldn't you?" The reality is that Intel's choices were roll their own, or stay out completely.
Home audio equipment is okay, but suboptimal on the price/performance curve (e.g. Kenwood generally has better-sounding, better-quality equipment for the same price in my price range).
Don't I know it. A year ago when I went to buy a new stereo head unit for my car, I threw Sony out first thing on the grounds that after they screwed up my wife's computer with Suncomm DRM and cost me two hours fix time, I wasn't going to give them my money without a fight. I bought a Kenwood unit that plays MP3, WMA and non-DRM AAC (basically in this case, iTunes songs ripped from CD). At the time, only two units Crutchfield listed for my car did AAC and both were Kenwoods, so since the wife has everything iTuned up, and I use MP3 exclusively, it made a good fit.
A couple weeks later I wondered if I had spent more than I should -- after all, when I first started looking at this product segment 5 years before, Sony was one of the very few that even did car-stereo MP3 and everyone I knew that had one bought a Sony. So I went back and compared the Kenwood units to the Sony units. No contest -- the Kenwoods got better user reviews, listed better specs and had more features (even discounting AAC) at each price point right down the line.
The last Sony electronics I bought was the Walkman I picked up at Wal-Mart back in 1998. I was disappointed with some of the build quality, but it served (and still does). Nowadays I buy anything but Sony, and couldn't be happier.
Remember ClubIE.com? It was a "fan site" set up by Microsoft ca. mid-1996 for Internet Explorer. Apparently they let it lapse and now it's domain-squatted.
Well damn if you aren't right -- that's what I get for skimming legalese. But I did find a definitive statement from iParadigm on the issue in which they basically assert that fair use protects them even more so than more ordinary uses like parody. I'm not sure I buy it -- they'd be in better shape legally if their user agreement explicitly granted them a license. Then students would have no case against iParadigm, though they might have one against a third party who submitted their work without their consent.
Here's the relevant section of the Turnitin usage terms:
"Your License to Us: Unless otherwise indicated in this Site, including our Privacy Policy or in connection with one of our services, any communications or material of any kind that you e-mail, post, or transmit through the Site (excluding personally identifiable information of students and any papers submitted to the Site), including, questions, comments, suggestions, and other data and information (your "Communications") will be treated as non-confidential and non-proprietary. You grant iParadigms a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, world-wide, irrevocable license to reproduce, transmit, display, disclose, and otherwise use your Communications on the Site or elsewhere for our business purposes. We are free to use any ideas, concepts, techniques, know-how in your Communications for any purpose, including, but not limited to, the development and use of products and services based on the Communications. [bold & italic emphasis mine]
The bold part is what will kill the suit (assuming it predates the filing of the suit), but the italic part is pretty scary too: if your submission is something involving an invention, you just granted Turnitin an unlimited license to use your idea for any purpose.
Get your hands off me, you damn dirty ape!
They actually just did a big donation drive over several weeks. The progress bar was moving pretty steadily -- the last time I noticed it I think it was 3/4 of the way to the goal. Now if the goal was representative of what they actually needed, shouldn't they be in relatively good shape at the moment? I don't understand why they're crying about money after what looked like a very successful pledge drive.
FFS. How many times has this been said?
If your product is one thing, don't name it something else.
You can bollock on about WinFS being "a database, not a filesystem" all you want, but the simple fact is it was advertised as a replacement for NTFS, it's called WinFS (not WinDB), it's conceptually a successor to the Object File System and it does the things a filesystem does (i.e. store files on some kind of medium in some fashion). So while it may be a database, it is in fact a filesystem as well. Microsoft can say the FS stands for "Future Storage", just like ISO, AT&T and FedEx can say "our names don't stand for anything", but no one is fooled.
a WebDAV folder for posting iCals
This is the one thing I think falls down in your parallel setup. Last I checked, using iCal files for enterprise calendaring meant subscribing to every iCal file you wanted to see stuff in, which means every time an employee adds a new calendar, everybody else has to subscribe to it or they won't see his/her stuff. Is there some sort of auto-subscribe function that makes this less tedious and error-prone?
Even if there is, this doesn't really scale, as with N people reading each other's calendars you have N^2 file reads going on per calendar refresh period, with the server usage and network traffic that go along with them. If you have a 200-person enterprise with a couple of large groups or committees, you're screwed.
What's needed is not a collection of files, but an actual unified calendar database running on a server. That allows you to instantly look at anyone's calendar you want, without all the tedious subscribing to files. If you've ever used Outlook calendaring, planning a meeting is as easy as telling Outlook who you want to invite and then looking down the timeline at everyone's availability, completely on the fly. That and Palm sync are what people who really use Exchange Server's calendar features want, and those two things together are what no open-source solution gives them that I've been able to find.
My current workplace has been looking for a simple open-source calendar server to replace an ancient installation of Netscape Calendar, and we can't even find an open-source solution that meets the subset of that product's feature set that we actually use. We even looked at web-based calendars, despite the fact that web-based calendars suck, and what we found is that most of them have absolutely no desktop integration (Palm sync) at all. I'm not surprised that a drop-in Exchange Server calendar replacement doesn't exist.
Or maybe I'm completely wrong about how iCal works these days, but I don't think so.
If a Gnome user wants to install something from KDE, say AmaroK, they end up having to install a bunch of libraries from KDE.
I'm betting you didn't pick amaroK by accident -- it's the sole reason any KDE libraries exist on my otherwise stock Ubuntu system, and I know several other Ubuntu users in the same situation. If a GNOME-ified version of amaroK existed, I'd install it in a heartbeat and kiss KDE goodbye.