If it means they compress arbitrary random data it is just bullshit. It is easy to prove that there exists some file that will not be compressible, and not much harder to prove that actually there are many more uncompressable random files than compressable ones (read any text about kolmogorov complexity). But of course most computer files are not at all random. Compressing a *randomly picked* computer file is something different altogether therefore, but it still hard to guarantee a certain compression if the type of information stored in the file is not known. Thats the reason why different compression algorithms for different file types exist. All in all their claim is too fuzzy to say anything... better compression is a certain thing of the future, guaranteeing compression for random files is just another cold fusion hoax.
Lets face it: there will always be problems like this, no matter what OS or program is involved. The question is: how can we make living with those problems easier, how can we make sure that even though such problems exist, they wont cause much damage? I think that a radical change of how people "see" what their computers are doing will have to be the key. You cannot expect everybody to become a computer expert. But as much as better GUIs have helped to make it easier for the masses to understand what they are doing when writing text or painting pictures, it will be necessary to give the users a "metaphor" for net connections, program privileges and the like. Until now, these things are consered to be close to the OS and users have been protected from these things by making them "transparent". This is a completely wrong way. Users have be to aware about the fact that programs accept or initiate connections to the outside world, transfer data, execute code that does strange things and so on.
Somebody has to find a way how to integrate these things into a user interaction metaphor that is easy to understand and lets the user control what he wants or not, instead of hiding it away from him. I dont say that this would be the answer to all problems, but I think this should be the way to go. Knowing nothing is bad. Expecting users to be able to define iptables rules is bad too.
personally i dont see why it should be that easy to believe that something was created by some supernatuaral force that came from nothing - it just adds one unnecessary step. when it comes to this, i prefer not to know. but this already is european creationism: most catholics here dont have a problem with evolution, natural laws and stuff, they just insist that the *reason* for the universe is god. i think that is pretty neat, because it wont interefere with logic too much. on the other hand, the US versions of creationism are more about taking the book literally, stating that god put it all there some 5000-odd years ago, complete with fossil scum and algae.
well, *this* is even more bizarre than believing in alien abduction by UFOs.
i hear though, that it is thaught to children in school in some places....
well, finding out about the world, the universe, and everything is not exactly about what is *easy* to believe, rather about what is logical. for instance, it is probably easy to believe that computers work by magic - most people agree though, that things are really a *bit* more complicatet there. the thing is: i have nothing against people who insist on their easy beliefs, i am just amazed by the sheer number of them in the us, or in this forum.
for me as an european what is remarkable here is how many people feel the need to come up with creationism in this forum. what kind of religious fundamentalism is this? or is it just another incarnation of the kind of thought that makes people believe in UFOs or witchcraft? or is this just some kind of geek humor I dont get?
mozilla is getting better, but two problems still remain: there are many features from 4.x still missing, especially in the mailnews component (see bugs marked 4xp in bugzilla as a first aproximation). And there are still a lot of sites that just dont work or that dont get rendered correctly because of web programmers and site designers failing to strictly follow w3 standards (those are the 'tech evangelism' bugs). i still doubt that the market power of mozilla will make those people reconsider.
this discussion is somewhat superfluous since it is clear that people will always have different tastes in metaphors. personally i prefer a metaphor that visualizes computer components as computer components, but others might feel at home with the desktop metaphor. I think it is time to make this customizable: it would be interesting to research into how much of customization with metaphors is actually possible. let people have their garden-hut metaphor or their dungeonanddragon metaphor. more on topic, the problem with the harddisk icon is that it is a symptom of wanting to have two metaphors at once: the desktop and the computer hardware - so you can find the directory representing your desktop in the harddisk and the icon represnting your harddisk on the desktop.
maybe the comparison with OS/2 was not a good
one, but the effect will be there: MS will continue to change their APIs their formats and at some point wine and other software will not be able to keep up with it. thats exactly the game MS has been playing
all along and it will continue to do so to increase their monopoly if we let them.
the issue is not whether
you or i want or are capable of doing it, but
whether anybody in their right minds would even
think of doing it in a situation where MS already
has a de-facto monopoly and keeps the formats
of documents a trade secret.
it doesnt matter whether
some killer app or some great office suite on
linux is open source or not -- as long as
everybody else uses, produces and requires
MS-format documents that program can be 100 times
better and nearly nobody will use it.
i think what really would be needed are competitive native linux apps which people would actually want to buy. a main reason why people want to run windows
apps under linux is that the want to use linux but
they have the necessity to work with word/excel/powerpoint files. these files are all over the place and its a sad fact that there is nearly no way to escape them: even governments or, for example, the european commission, requires reports and other stuff to be supplied in word format.
so the optimal solution for me would be that the antitrust court ruling would require microsoft to make public and stick to a usable document format or at least a usable and fully working interchange format. this would enable competitors to offer their own office applications for whatever operating system without isolating their users.
official standard formats for office documents
would have been even more needed then W3 standards already for some time. the sad thing is that what is called "industrial standard" now is not a standard at all: it is not documented, MS is free to change it at any time, and who knows if they are not even free to sue others who use that format.
sadly, it looks like the latest chance to open up the market has passed unused. any solution that will offer a windows environment under linux or other OSs will eventually face the fate of OS/2.
its illegal to exploit this to do anything bad,
isnt it? anybody who tries, will be hunted
down and punished -- but punished reaal bad --
with the help of the new
anti-terror legislation. i am sure MS has
a reason why it has been designed like this and
probably it is a good reson. maybe they will
even tell us some day what those good reasons
are. maybe it is better for us not to know.
a company that
big with that many programmers working millions
of manyears to improve their state-of-the-art
products certainly doesnt let this happen by oversight.
i therefore assure you: relax, all is well,
there is no need to worry.
please read the article carefully: it states that
pornographic material is linked from portals,
and it states in the next paragraph, that the proposal is to restrict the access to pornographic content to the aforementioned hours unless it is protected by some "locking mechanisms".
why dont they play it safe and guarantee that
such things wont happen in the future? there
is an easy solution for that: just take the site
off the net.
if people wouldnt rush out and buy XP like mad
MS couldnt stop supporting older versions that
easily. the majority of people doesnt seem to
have a problem with activation, doesnt seem to
have a problem with higher costs, huge required
diskspace, enforced digital rights management,
sloppy support for MP3, discontinued support
for older games and applications and more.
its similar to politics: people get the politicians they vote for and they get the
OS they buy.
My impression is that people are too technocentric here:). I think it is more relevant, under what circumstances, by what legal procedures, under what supervision tools like these get used. Law enforcement has always tried to use latest technology and carnivore, viruses, electronic bugs and laser-microphones can all be used to intrude into your privacy. What worries me more is the possibility of these things getting used too easily, the data being gathered being stored too long, nobody supervising and controlling the people using this. It seems that lately exactly these legal issues are at stake in the US (and also here in Europe), no matter what technology they use.
Slashdot Mirror
If it means they compress arbitrary random data it is just bullshit. It is easy to prove that there exists some file that will not be compressible, and not much harder to prove that actually there are many more uncompressable random files than compressable ones (read any text about kolmogorov complexity). But of course most computer files are not at all random. Compressing a *randomly picked* computer file is something different altogether therefore, but it still hard to guarantee a certain compression if the type of information stored in the file is not known. Thats the reason why different compression algorithms for different file types exist. All in all their claim is too fuzzy to say anything ... better compression is a certain thing of the future, guaranteeing compression for random files is just another cold fusion hoax.
Lets face it: there will always be problems like this, no matter what OS or program is involved. The question is: how can we make living with those problems easier, how can we make sure that even though such problems exist, they wont cause much damage? I think that a radical change of how people "see" what their computers are doing will have to be the key. You cannot expect everybody to become a computer expert. But as much as better GUIs have helped to make it easier for the masses to understand what they are doing when writing text or painting pictures, it will be necessary to give the users a "metaphor" for net connections, program privileges and the like. Until now, these things are consered to be close to the OS and users have been protected from these things by making them "transparent". This is a completely wrong way. Users have be to aware about the fact that programs accept or initiate connections to the outside world, transfer data, execute code that does strange things and so on. Somebody has to find a way how to integrate these things into a user interaction metaphor that is easy to understand and lets the user control what he wants or not, instead of hiding it away from him. I dont say that this would be the answer to all problems, but I think this should be the way to go. Knowing nothing is bad. Expecting users to be able to define iptables rules is bad too.
whatever he is smoking, it doesnt have the adverse effects to mind and way of expression of what you seem to be fixing.
personally i dont see why it should be that easy to believe that something was created by some supernatuaral force that came from nothing - it just adds one unnecessary step. when it comes to this, i prefer not to know. but this already is european creationism: most catholics here dont have a problem with evolution, natural laws and stuff, they just insist that the *reason* for the universe is god. i think that is pretty neat, because it wont interefere with logic too much. on the other hand, the US versions of creationism are more about taking the book literally, stating that god put it all there some 5000-odd years ago, complete with fossil scum and algae. well, *this* is even more bizarre than believing in alien abduction by UFOs. i hear though, that it is thaught to children in school in some places ....
well, finding out about the world, the universe, and everything is not exactly about what is *easy* to believe, rather about what is logical. for instance, it is probably easy to believe that computers work by magic - most people agree though, that things are really a *bit* more complicatet there. the thing is: i have nothing against people who insist on their easy beliefs, i am just amazed by the sheer number of them in the us, or in this forum.
for me as an european what is remarkable here is how many people feel the need to come up with creationism in this forum. what kind of religious fundamentalism is this? or is it just another incarnation of the kind of thought that makes people believe in UFOs or witchcraft? or is this just some kind of geek humor I dont get?
mozilla is getting better, but two problems still remain: there are many features from 4.x still missing, especially in the mailnews component (see bugs marked 4xp in bugzilla as a first aproximation). And there are still a lot of sites that just dont work or that dont get rendered correctly because of web programmers and site designers failing to strictly follow w3 standards (those are the 'tech evangelism' bugs). i still doubt that the market power of mozilla will make those people reconsider.
this discussion is somewhat superfluous since it is clear that people will always have different tastes in metaphors. personally i prefer a metaphor that visualizes computer components as computer components, but others might feel at home with the desktop metaphor. I think it is time to make this customizable: it would be interesting to research into how much of customization with metaphors is actually possible. let people have their garden-hut metaphor or their dungeonanddragon metaphor. more on topic, the problem with the harddisk icon is that it is a symptom of wanting to have two metaphors at once: the desktop and the computer hardware - so you can find the directory representing your desktop in the harddisk and the icon represnting your harddisk on the desktop.
maybe the comparison with OS/2 was not a good one, but the effect will be there: MS will continue to change their APIs their formats and at some point wine and other software will not be able to keep up with it. thats exactly the game MS has been playing all along and it will continue to do so to increase their monopoly if we let them.
the issue is not whether you or i want or are capable of doing it, but whether anybody in their right minds would even think of doing it in a situation where MS already has a de-facto monopoly and keeps the formats of documents a trade secret. it doesnt matter whether some killer app or some great office suite on linux is open source or not -- as long as everybody else uses, produces and requires MS-format documents that program can be 100 times better and nearly nobody will use it.
i think what really would be needed are competitive native linux apps which people would actually want to buy. a main reason why people want to run windows apps under linux is that the want to use linux but they have the necessity to work with word/excel/powerpoint files. these files are all over the place and its a sad fact that there is nearly no way to escape them: even governments or, for example, the european commission, requires reports and other stuff to be supplied in word format. so the optimal solution for me would be that the antitrust court ruling would require microsoft to make public and stick to a usable document format or at least a usable and fully working interchange format. this would enable competitors to offer their own office applications for whatever operating system without isolating their users. official standard formats for office documents would have been even more needed then W3 standards already for some time. the sad thing is that what is called "industrial standard" now is not a standard at all: it is not documented, MS is free to change it at any time, and who knows if they are not even free to sue others who use that format. sadly, it looks like the latest chance to open up the market has passed unused. any solution that will offer a windows environment under linux or other OSs will eventually face the fate of OS/2.
its illegal to exploit this to do anything bad, isnt it? anybody who tries, will be hunted down and punished -- but punished reaal bad -- with the help of the new anti-terror legislation. i am sure MS has a reason why it has been designed like this and probably it is a good reson. maybe they will even tell us some day what those good reasons are. maybe it is better for us not to know. a company that big with that many programmers working millions of manyears to improve their state-of-the-art products certainly doesnt let this happen by oversight. i therefore assure you: relax, all is well, there is no need to worry.
please read the article carefully: it states that pornographic material is linked from portals, and it states in the next paragraph, that the proposal is to restrict the access to pornographic content to the aforementioned hours unless it is protected by some "locking mechanisms".
why dont they play it safe and guarantee that such things wont happen in the future? there is an easy solution for that: just take the site off the net.
if people wouldnt rush out and buy XP like mad
MS couldnt stop supporting older versions that
easily. the majority of people doesnt seem to
have a problem with activation, doesnt seem to
have a problem with higher costs, huge required
diskspace, enforced digital rights management,
sloppy support for MP3, discontinued support
for older games and applications and more.
its similar to politics: people get the politicians they vote for and they get the
OS they buy.
My impression is that people are too technocentric here :). I think it is more relevant, under what circumstances, by what legal procedures, under what supervision tools like these get used. Law enforcement has always tried to use latest technology and carnivore, viruses, electronic bugs and laser-microphones can all be used to intrude into your privacy. What worries me more is the possibility of these things getting used too easily, the data being gathered being stored too long, nobody supervising and controlling the people using this. It seems that lately exactly these legal issues are at stake in the US (and also here in Europe), no matter what technology they use.