Actually it can lie all the way up to 1920x1200, the resolution of the 17" MBP or my 24" iMac.
If your code editor uses Lion's text rendering APIs but is not aware that the display is high DPI, Lion will lie to it and tell it that it's on a lower resolution screen so the text isn't ridiculously small.
My first gen iPad doesn't have a camera so I can't attest to resolution or field of view, but using my iPhone's camera it only needs to be about a foot from a letter size page to capture the page completely.
You could rig up a stand which held an iPad a reasonable distance from the reading material, maybe with a light for the source material, maybe with a periscope-like arrangement of mirrors.
Not sure if the pinch-to-zoom gesture would be a challenge, but hardware-wise a tablet with a decent camera seems like the easiest place to start.
agreed that the lack of filesystem exposed to the user is one of the most striking desktop PC metaphors omitted from iOS. at least for someone who understands filesystems. I'm the kind of person that used to hand-curate my mp3 collection according to very a specific file naming scheme. you probably are too. (now I'm pretty happy to let iTunes do that.) my coworkers' computers, on the other hand, have APPALLING desktops. piles and piles of files and folders, so buried that they can't find anything, yet that's where they habitually continue to save every file they collect, despite my having shown them how to make their browsers download to other folders by default, etc. the smarter among them have fallen back on exclusively using the search feature in file picker dialogs to find files they can't remember where they saved. (so pretty much everything.)
having used both Android and iOS, Android apps seem to be pretty messy with where they store files. iOS apps might be too, but I couldn't tell, so at least it didn't bother me. as other commenters have noted, the example of the Photo Library is a model that could be extended for passing other kinds of files between apps.
iOS doesn't show a filesystem to the user because it was designed for my coworkers. I think Apple made the right choice. it's one of the things that makes iOS feel unlike a computer, that liberation from the hopelessly disorganized desktop and home folders that most people can't help but spawn.
People who send email newsletters (not spam) that people have signed up to receive, want to have analytics data on who reads their messages. Perfectly normal, not dastardly companies that offer email marketing platforms like Constant Contact, MailChimp, CampaignMonitor, etc. all include such recipient tracking by default. Not only by noticing whether or not somebody downloads an image in an HTML email, but also by rewriting all URLs linked in the message so that individual clicks can be registered. These are all recorded uniquely to each subscriber so the sender can tell who is interested in what content. Anyone who is surprised about this is out of the loop. This kind of information is very useful for the nonprofit I work for to understand which of our opt-in subscribers are interested in what content and how we can make our emails more useful for their work.
Apple, what about offering the Server hardware with OS X client, as a midpoint between the two choices?
How about selling the included Server license for something less than its $499 retail price, buying a $29 copy of consumer Snow Leopard, and pocketing the difference?
The Server configuration of this rev almost looks like a loss leader.
Open Atrium is a multipurpose intranet/project management system built with the open source CMS Drupal. It's easy on the eyes and since it's just a fancy distribution of Drupal it can potentially be extended in almost any direction. Worth a look, sounds like it could address all your needs.
But then again it also sounds like Microsoft Office Live Workspace could also meet your needs. I'm not sure how complicated you want to get.
We have a few licenses that used to be managed through eOpen, I never received any notification about its disappearance, but happened to discover the switch to Volume License Service Center on Friday when trying to login to eOpen. VLSC was definitely up and running at that point, I could log in and manage the same licenses that I used to with eOpen.
That said, the initial terms of agreement screen that appeared after logging into to VLSC was terribly confusing. A blank window with no instructions, I was expected to figure out that I needed to manually select my region and language from a non-obvious drop-down menu, then click a button labeled "Go", causing the terms of agreement to appear in English on the screen. There is a box below in which you are meant to type your name and click "I agree", however this button was not clickable until figuring out how to make the agreement appear above, and there were no instructions to indicate this. I spent several minutes feeling very foolish as I typed in my name, couldn't click the button to proceed, clicked "Cancel" instead, got to the VLSC dashboard to find that all the functions were disabled because I hadn't accepted the agreement, logged out and back in to make the terms window appear again, repeat a few times. Grrr.
This was a big thing a few years back, when everyone seemed to want a small Mac desktop in a "pizza box" form factor. I guess this was pre-Mac Mini. You would get a PowerMac G4 logic board and power supply, and add your own case and accessories. Someone even came up with a concept for a ready made kit called the iBox which was a bring-your-own-logic-board PowerMac system. Not sure if that ever really saw the light of day. I really wanted one.
Complete "anonymity" online is a pipe dream... eventually They will track you down. Using encryption, you can hide in plain sight.
My advice would be to skip looking "offshore" and just find a local, reputable hosting company that will defend your rights to the maximum legal extent (perhaps one such as Riseup that intentionally keeps minimal logs), then rent a VPS or (probably better yet) colocate your own machine, use a completely encrypted filesystem on the server, and only support SSL connections.
With an encrypted filesystem, even if evil authority figures seize the machine, in theory they could not read your data without your private key. Keep minimal or sanitized logs. Run an encrypted email server, an anonymizing web proxy, a Tor router, an OpenVPN server... the possibilities are endless.
Linode offers great VPS hosting starting at only $20/month, with support for encrypted filesystem images.
Thanks for the Verisign links, they were (frighteningly) informative.
I guess I'll wait until the GPGMail plugin is Leopard compatible. I was pretty impressed with Mail.app otherwise, but perhaps I'll just have to go back to old "reliable" Thunderbird, its Enigmail extension seems well-regarded.
"Whoever recommended you use S/MIME instead of GPG, probably considered security to be a very, very distant second priority"
I guess you must be right... but I wondered as I was reading such guides... what other priorities could there be?
I heard about this a few days ago, when I was in the process of trying to figure out the easiest way to encrypt my mail using Apple's Mail.app on Leopard. Most everyone writing online recommended using S/MIME instead of GPG, and getting a no-cost certificate from the South African company Thawte to use for signing as well as encrypting email.
The question I could not answer is how trustworthy is this Thawte-issued "certificate"? One blogger claimed that the key was actually generated in my own browser, and then only the public key transmitted to Thawte to store, thereby theoretically keeping my private key private. But this is certainly not how it appeared. I submitted a "request" for a certificate and then 5 minutes later it was emailed to me from Thawte as an attachment, which was picked up by Keychain and that was that. As far as I could tell, they generated my key for me.
Is encrypting my email this way vulnerable to the same flaws as the Hushmail service? I really don't trust Thawte to keep whatever information they might have about me away from the Feds, if they ever came knocking. Hell, I don't even know if Thawte IS the Feds! If this certificate-issuing system is indeed flawed, can anyone recommend a better process to use strong encryption with Leopard's Mail?
Banshee has an interface very similar to Rhythmbox, but Guide/DAPs/MTP">uses libmtp to support many more digital audio players. I find the Amarok interface a bit cluttered, and it's a KDE app anyway. Something like Gnomad2 would not be as well-integrated with your music library as Banshee. Give it a try.
Why not try leaving everything behind? Seriously - what do you really need to live? Buy extra clothes and a toothbrush when you get there. In many places, the necessities will be cheaper than they were at home. Isn't the whole point of travelling to see what life is like in other places? Try making do with whatever is available elsewhere. That's my travelling ideal.
Forget the gadgets - every place in the world that travellers go has an internet cafe of some kind, more like twenty. Wifi access is always more expensive than using their provided computers.
If your experience of different parts of the world is mediated through the same familiar technology... you haven't really gone anywhere at all. You've stayed behind your computer screen.
Senator Clinton voted for the PATRIOT Act in 2001, and again for its reauthorization in 2006. While this was likely a move to appear "strong on defense", it certainly destroys any claim that she is interested in Americans' privacy.
um, guys, why should you care if *Apple Computer* is being sued for infringing a stupid software patent?
have we all forgotten Apple's stupid patent for the iTunes interface? (patent #20040055446)
I don't think they've wielded it against anyone, but there's nothing stopping them, especially since the interface has been so widely copied it would be like shooting fish in a barrel.
sounds to me like a case of chickens coming home to roost...
Your role in the hacker community
on
Ask Neal Stephenson
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
In my view, In the Beginning Was the Command Line is one of the most important documents of hacker culture ever produced -- it endows hackers with a sort of technological cosmology, explaining our activity in terms of broader cultural trends (in the real world) and consequently giving us a rather privileged position in the universe. I periodically re-read it, devotionally, as if it were a religious text. I sent a copy to a non-technical writer and she described it as "downright erotic".
Apart from the sacred text, your novels also serve as a shared hacker mythology, honestly capturing the experience of being a geek in the midst of stories that are just really really good.
Contrasted with the works of more consciously self-important hackers (eg. esr), your writings seem even more important because you don't seem to intend them to be. If hacking is a meritocracy, then so is writing about hacking, and your place in the pantheon has undoubtedly been earned.
My question, then, is how you view your own relationship to the "hacker community", especially vis-a-vis esr and others who explicitly position themselves as "hacker anthropologists", and whether you consciously conceive of your role as storyteller and mythmaker... or whether you're just an geek who writes geeky things and happily discovered that other people wanted to read them.
While we're on the topic of bashing the Mozilla installers, let me complain that unattended/silent installations of Firefox/Tbird are completely broken. The installer's config file promises to allow silent installs, but in practice it pays no attention to that option. Silent installations are necessary for deployment to lots of systems with proper settings and without user intervention.
The only ways I can see to accomplish a silent install are either:
rewrite the installer so it actually does work (pain in the ass)
or use the.zip version and completely re-implement the install process in a batch script (even more annoying)
This is another one of those "enterprise" necessities that the developers seem not to have figured out.
I am also a student at a small liberal arts college, and I work in the academic computer support department. We're implementing a similar policy, without the "phoning home" bit.
registration of MAC address tied with student ID, contingent upon:
mandatory XP SP2, with Automatic Updates on and installing without prompting
mandatory use of site-licensed Symantec Anti-Virus (in "unmanaged" mode)
system initially scanned by staff and certified virus-free
Blaster hit us really hard last year, the network was essentially unusable for close to a week. Terminals in the library, students, everyone got infected.
We're not using any kind of remote administration tools, and we don't really want that responsibility. But the majority of users simply aren't knowledgable enough about security, patching, worms, and so on to leave the fate of the campus network in their hands. Capable users will still manage their computers as they see fit (which is realistically probably the biggest threat: overconfidence), but Joe Luser will have good defaults.
Several colleges in my region recently held a conference to deal exactly with the back-to-school Windows worm problem, and I was amazed that about half of them had the same approach as your institution: don't trust the user, consolidate your own administrative power, sacrifice a little liberty for a little security. Interestingly, these people also tended to be the most in bed with Microsoft. The other half seemed to be taking necessary precautions, but not overstepping their boundaries. My impression is that it's simply really easy to get burned out and cynical in this business.
Of course, as a user the way to avoid all this is to simply not use Windows. We're a primarily Mac campus, and Mac OS X users are only asked to keep Software Update checking weekly for updates. Anti-virus on OSX at this point is a bit like snake oil. And it goes without saying that Linux users are simply left alone. poster: if you don't like the draconian Windows security policy, use a secure OS!
(just teasing, your question seemed more philosophical than practical.)
um, no, actually most of their product is GPL, and they *actively encouraged* a completely free version of NX. on their site is a HOWTO run an NX session using only GPL components. they've advertised for months on their frontpage that KDE wants to make a Free version of NX. they give away for free their proprietary servers to any open source developer, even if their stated purpose is "just to play around" -- it literally says that on their website.
yes, they did get exactly what they deserved: widespread adoption of their own technology that will boost their credibility and sales. sheesh.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually it can lie all the way up to 1920x1200, the resolution of the 17" MBP or my 24" iMac.
If your code editor uses Lion's text rendering APIs but is not aware that the display is high DPI, Lion will lie to it and tell it that it's on a lower resolution screen so the text isn't ridiculously small.
My first gen iPad doesn't have a camera so I can't attest to resolution or field of view, but using my iPhone's camera it only needs to be about a foot from a letter size page to capture the page completely.
You could rig up a stand which held an iPad a reasonable distance from the reading material, maybe with a light for the source material, maybe with a periscope-like arrangement of mirrors.
Not sure if the pinch-to-zoom gesture would be a challenge, but hardware-wise a tablet with a decent camera seems like the easiest place to start.
agreed that the lack of filesystem exposed to the user is one of the most striking desktop PC metaphors omitted from iOS. at least for someone who understands filesystems. I'm the kind of person that used to hand-curate my mp3 collection according to very a specific file naming scheme. you probably are too. (now I'm pretty happy to let iTunes do that.) my coworkers' computers, on the other hand, have APPALLING desktops. piles and piles of files and folders, so buried that they can't find anything, yet that's where they habitually continue to save every file they collect, despite my having shown them how to make their browsers download to other folders by default, etc. the smarter among them have fallen back on exclusively using the search feature in file picker dialogs to find files they can't remember where they saved. (so pretty much everything.)
having used both Android and iOS, Android apps seem to be pretty messy with where they store files. iOS apps might be too, but I couldn't tell, so at least it didn't bother me. as other commenters have noted, the example of the Photo Library is a model that could be extended for passing other kinds of files between apps.
iOS doesn't show a filesystem to the user because it was designed for my coworkers. I think Apple made the right choice. it's one of the things that makes iOS feel unlike a computer, that liberation from the hopelessly disorganized desktop and home folders that most people can't help but spawn.
People who send email newsletters (not spam) that people have signed up to receive, want to have analytics data on who reads their messages. Perfectly normal, not dastardly companies that offer email marketing platforms like Constant Contact, MailChimp, CampaignMonitor, etc. all include such recipient tracking by default. Not only by noticing whether or not somebody downloads an image in an HTML email, but also by rewriting all URLs linked in the message so that individual clicks can be registered. These are all recorded uniquely to each subscriber so the sender can tell who is interested in what content. Anyone who is surprised about this is out of the loop. This kind of information is very useful for the nonprofit I work for to understand which of our opt-in subscribers are interested in what content and how we can make our emails more useful for their work.
http://www.mailchimp.com/features/reports
Apple, what about offering the Server hardware with OS X client, as a midpoint between the two choices?
How about selling the included Server license for something less than its $499 retail price, buying a $29 copy of consumer Snow Leopard, and pocketing the difference?
The Server configuration of this rev almost looks like a loss leader.
You can mount iPhones as disks for free on Mac with "Disk for iPhone" http://code.google.com/p/iphonedisk/ or "Phone Disk" http://www.macroplant.com/phonedisk/
I do it all the time!
Open Atrium is a multipurpose intranet/project management system built with the open source CMS Drupal. It's easy on the eyes and since it's just a fancy distribution of Drupal it can potentially be extended in almost any direction. Worth a look, sounds like it could address all your needs.
But then again it also sounds like Microsoft Office Live Workspace could also meet your needs. I'm not sure how complicated you want to get.
We have a few licenses that used to be managed through eOpen, I never received any notification about its disappearance, but happened to discover the switch to Volume License Service Center on Friday when trying to login to eOpen. VLSC was definitely up and running at that point, I could log in and manage the same licenses that I used to with eOpen.
That said, the initial terms of agreement screen that appeared after logging into to VLSC was terribly confusing. A blank window with no instructions, I was expected to figure out that I needed to manually select my region and language from a non-obvious drop-down menu, then click a button labeled "Go", causing the terms of agreement to appear in English on the screen. There is a box below in which you are meant to type your name and click "I agree", however this button was not clickable until figuring out how to make the agreement appear above, and there were no instructions to indicate this. I spent several minutes feeling very foolish as I typed in my name, couldn't click the button to proceed, clicked "Cancel" instead, got to the VLSC dashboard to find that all the functions were disabled because I hadn't accepted the agreement, logged out and back in to make the terms window appear again, repeat a few times. Grrr.
This was a big thing a few years back, when everyone seemed to want a small Mac desktop in a "pizza box" form factor. I guess this was pre-Mac Mini. You would get a PowerMac G4 logic board and power supply, and add your own case and accessories. Someone even came up with a concept for a ready made kit called the iBox which was a bring-your-own-logic-board PowerMac system. Not sure if that ever really saw the light of day. I really wanted one.
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/news/2003/04/58310
Complete "anonymity" online is a pipe dream... eventually They will track you down. Using encryption, you can hide in plain sight.
My advice would be to skip looking "offshore" and just find a local, reputable hosting company that will defend your rights to the maximum legal extent (perhaps one such as Riseup that intentionally keeps minimal logs), then rent a VPS or (probably better yet) colocate your own machine, use a completely encrypted filesystem on the server, and only support SSL connections.
With an encrypted filesystem, even if evil authority figures seize the machine, in theory they could not read your data without your private key. Keep minimal or sanitized logs. Run an encrypted email server, an anonymizing web proxy, a Tor router, an OpenVPN server... the possibilities are endless.
Linode offers great VPS hosting starting at only $20/month, with support for encrypted filesystem images.
A perfect time to mention...
Zfone - free (as in beer) encrypted VoIP.
Get it while it's still legal!
Thanks for the Verisign links, they were (frighteningly) informative.
I guess I'll wait until the GPGMail plugin is Leopard compatible. I was pretty impressed with Mail.app otherwise, but perhaps I'll just have to go back to old "reliable" Thunderbird, its Enigmail extension seems well-regarded.
"Whoever recommended you use S/MIME instead of GPG, probably considered security to be a very, very distant second priority"
I guess you must be right... but I wondered as I was reading such guides... what other priorities could there be?
I heard about this a few days ago, when I was in the process of trying to figure out the easiest way to encrypt my mail using Apple's Mail.app on Leopard. Most everyone writing online recommended using S/MIME instead of GPG, and getting a no-cost certificate from the South African company Thawte to use for signing as well as encrypting email.
The question I could not answer is how trustworthy is this Thawte-issued "certificate"? One blogger claimed that the key was actually generated in my own browser, and then only the public key transmitted to Thawte to store, thereby theoretically keeping my private key private. But this is certainly not how it appeared. I submitted a "request" for a certificate and then 5 minutes later it was emailed to me from Thawte as an attachment, which was picked up by Keychain and that was that. As far as I could tell, they generated my key for me.
Is encrypting my email this way vulnerable to the same flaws as the Hushmail service? I really don't trust Thawte to keep whatever information they might have about me away from the Feds, if they ever came knocking. Hell, I don't even know if Thawte IS the Feds! If this certificate-issuing system is indeed flawed, can anyone recommend a better process to use strong encryption with Leopard's Mail?
Banshee has an interface very similar to Rhythmbox, but Guide/DAPs/MTP">uses libmtp to support many more digital audio players. I find the Amarok interface a bit cluttered, and it's a KDE app anyway. Something like Gnomad2 would not be as well-integrated with your music library as Banshee. Give it a try.
Why not try leaving everything behind? Seriously - what do you really need to live? Buy extra clothes and a toothbrush when you get there. In many places, the necessities will be cheaper than they were at home. Isn't the whole point of travelling to see what life is like in other places? Try making do with whatever is available elsewhere. That's my travelling ideal.
Forget the gadgets - every place in the world that travellers go has an internet cafe of some kind, more like twenty. Wifi access is always more expensive than using their provided computers.
If your experience of different parts of the world is mediated through the same familiar technology... you haven't really gone anywhere at all. You've stayed behind your computer screen.
Egregiously Trivial Conversation?
Senator Clinton voted for the PATRIOT Act in 2001, and again for its reauthorization in 2006. While this was likely a move to appear "strong on defense", it certainly destroys any claim that she is interested in Americans' privacy.
see her voting record at Project Vote Smart
um, hello? have these people NOT played Resident Evil?
I guess this would be a case where NOT playing video games leads to moral decay.
My small liberal arts college gives every one of its Mac-loving students a shell account with Pine already configured for them.
Every time I hear someone complain about the bloated IMP (Horde) Webmail we use, I say "No... there is another...."
um, guys, why should you care if *Apple Computer* is being sued for infringing a stupid software patent?
have we all forgotten Apple's stupid patent for the iTunes interface? (patent #20040055446)
I don't think they've wielded it against anyone, but there's nothing stopping them, especially since the interface has been so widely copied it would be like shooting fish in a barrel.
sounds to me like a case of chickens coming home to roost...
In my view, In the Beginning Was the Command Line is one of the most important documents of hacker culture ever produced -- it endows hackers with a sort of technological cosmology, explaining our activity in terms of broader cultural trends (in the real world) and consequently giving us a rather privileged position in the universe. I periodically re-read it, devotionally, as if it were a religious text. I sent a copy to a non-technical writer and she described it as "downright erotic".
Apart from the sacred text, your novels also serve as a shared hacker mythology, honestly capturing the experience of being a geek in the midst of stories that are just really really good.
Contrasted with the works of more consciously self-important hackers (eg. esr), your writings seem even more important because you don't seem to intend them to be. If hacking is a meritocracy, then so is writing about hacking, and your place in the pantheon has undoubtedly been earned.
My question, then, is how you view your own relationship to the "hacker community", especially vis-a-vis esr and others who explicitly position themselves as "hacker anthropologists", and whether you consciously conceive of your role as storyteller and mythmaker... or whether you're just an geek who writes geeky things and happily discovered that other people wanted to read them.
Here's the real download from the M$ website... it's the full administrator version:
a milyId=049C9DBE-3B8E-4F30-8245-9E368D3CDB5A&displa ylang=en
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?F
I found this link through windowsbeta.microsoft.com, which let me sign up even though I have no valid reason to do so. Enjoy!
The only ways I can see to accomplish a silent install are either:
- rewrite the installer so it actually does work (pain in the ass)
- or use the
.zip version and completely re-implement the install process in a batch script (even more annoying)
This is another one of those "enterprise" necessities that the developers seem not to have figured out.- registration of MAC address tied with student ID, contingent upon:
- mandatory XP SP2, with Automatic Updates on and installing without prompting
- mandatory use of site-licensed Symantec Anti-Virus (in "unmanaged" mode)
- system initially scanned by staff and certified virus-free
Blaster hit us really hard last year, the network was essentially unusable for close to a week. Terminals in the library, students, everyone got infected.We're not using any kind of remote administration tools, and we don't really want that responsibility. But the majority of users simply aren't knowledgable enough about security, patching, worms, and so on to leave the fate of the campus network in their hands. Capable users will still manage their computers as they see fit (which is realistically probably the biggest threat: overconfidence), but Joe Luser will have good defaults.
Several colleges in my region recently held a conference to deal exactly with the back-to-school Windows worm problem, and I was amazed that about half of them had the same approach as your institution: don't trust the user, consolidate your own administrative power, sacrifice a little liberty for a little security. Interestingly, these people also tended to be the most in bed with Microsoft. The other half seemed to be taking necessary precautions, but not overstepping their boundaries. My impression is that it's simply really easy to get burned out and cynical in this business.
Of course, as a user the way to avoid all this is to simply not use Windows. We're a primarily Mac campus, and Mac OS X users are only asked to keep Software Update checking weekly for updates. Anti-virus on OSX at this point is a bit like snake oil. And it goes without saying that Linux users are simply left alone. poster: if you don't like the draconian Windows security policy, use a secure OS!
(just teasing, your question seemed more philosophical than practical.)
um, no, actually most of their product is GPL, and they *actively encouraged* a completely free version of NX. on their site is a HOWTO run an NX session using only GPL components. they've advertised for months on their frontpage that KDE wants to make a Free version of NX. they give away for free their proprietary servers to any open source developer, even if their stated purpose is "just to play around" -- it literally says that on their website.
yes, they did get exactly what they deserved: widespread adoption of their own technology that will boost their credibility and sales. sheesh.