It's actually better than the zoom. The zoom itself is excellent, but it resets on each page turn, making it virtually worthless for the thing I use zoom for most: zooming in to remove margins in PDF tech books.
Way to go attacking someone, yet completely missing the point.
The argument was about freeware vs open-source software... freeware as in free as beer, but closed-source. Since it's closed-source, it can (and often will) contain loads of spyware and other crap.
So yes, it is not economically auditable, as opposed to open-source where you can have someone check the source.
Freeware really is the worst of both worlds: no source to check and use for support and/or changes, and no vendor to get support from.
Under US law you're probably right, but it's not the same everywhere.
For example, here in the Netherlands it's legal to download content like music and movies, but illegal to upload or distribute it. BREIN has been trying to come up with things like "purchase-replacing downloads", which are illegal according to them, but AFAIK it hasn't been proven in court.
Using bittorent means that you're also uploading while you download, making it illegal. Downloading from things like RapidShare is legal though, regardless of whether you pay money to do so.
The main difference would be that they can't actually prove that you have a second key, so it's a lot harder to convict you for refusing to give it.
The people mentioned in the original article were convicted because they refused to give their main encryption key. Since it was easily provable that they had encryption on their machines, it was enough to get them convicted.
It really depends what you're trying to protect yourself from: TrueCrypt or a similar solution may be enough to keep you from getting convicted in a trial, but it probably won't offer much protection from organizations willing to use torture, blackmail, etc. In a trial you need evidence, in the other case suspicion will do.
I have to second that, I absolutely lived the over-the-top B-movie atmosphere. The only thing missing were boobies;)
I also picked up the House of the Dead II and III for the Wii, mostly for the extra gun... so I've been having a great time shooting zombies with the mrs... looking forward to what else Sega comes up with!
From the pictures in the article it seems to mostly consist of small metal pipes, with pieces of plastic connecting them.... from what I gather it's only able to print the plastic connection parts, so I'm not sure how this counts as "self-replicating".
Also it has a big bunch of wires coming out the back, which I bet are not replicated either... so someone was jumping the gun a bit while writing this article:)
Still... this is some seriously cool technology... if the resulting plastic parts are strong / durable enough it could certainly have a huge impact... essentially being able to download physical objects from the internet...
This is exactly why I own both an iPod shuffle and a Classic... for jogging I want a tiny player, and I mostly use a limited collection of "high-energy" music, so the shuffle is the ideal solution.
I use my 80G classic almost daily at work, since I can't put my music collection on my work machine. It saves me of having to decide in advance what I'll be listening to that day.
I did find though that I spend more of my time listening to podcasts than to my music collection these days...
I've heard this story on Slashdot quite often... and it's completely true: it just misses some points.
Yes, Linux is fine for the completely computer-illiterate user that just surfs a bit, reads some mails and looks at pictures... I've tried this myself by installing Ubuntu on my mom's old PC. She was completely happy with it, since she was used to using Firefox and Thunderbird already, and once she knew where to find the icons everything was OK again. I even got a very proud call a while after saying she'd installed Supertux and loved it:)
So, yes... in that scenario Linux works fine. On the other end of the spectrum we have the code-loving geeks such as myself, that love to have control of their system and know how to fix the mess they've created.... Linux shines there too.
The problem however is with the semi-experienced user. The one who likes to install programs and mess with settings... download stuff, watch movies and probably plug some el-cheapo, weird-ass USB devices in too... These folks very soon find themselves deep down in a hole they can't get out of anymore. For us geeks, that's the point where we start to poke around to see how stuff works and how we can fix it... for these users this is the point where the computer learns some new swear-words or gets a crash-course in physical violence...
Windows has a strong focus on explorative learning... it may be patronizing to geeks, but for most other people it works. It allows them to at least click around in search of an answer or in the worst case restore the system to an earlier configuration.
I find that a small dose of valerian (that's the herbal extract, not be confused with Valium) does wonders to keep the "running in 5 directions" under control. I started taking a small amount of valerian in the morning and at lunch, and I find I can focus a lot better now.
Disclaimer: I was put on Ritalin for about 1 week as a kid, and never touched it again after that... it changed me personality to the point I didn't feel like "me" anymore. Oh, and my desk is still a mess... valerian or no:-)
I know a bunch of idiots who'll drink Heineken like it's the best thing since sliced bread but wouldn't touch a VB or a XXXX if they were dying of thirst.
That's pretty funny actually, since here in the Netherlands (where Heineken originally comes from), it's considered "decent if you're thirsty, but nothing special by a long shot". Most people that enjoy a good beer turn to the Belgian beers.
At the risk of starting a Holy Beer War here, I'll take a de Koninck or a decent Tripel any day;-)
Here in the Netherlands the overwhelming majority of payments is made with direct-debit cards, so credit cards are not used as much. Whenever you do want to pay with a credit card, they require some form of ID for any payment over 50 euros.
My autograph is pretty small and ugly and worst of all I've never really gotten the hang of getting it consistant. I've been called on it a number of times when I wanted to pay with my credit card. One store actually went so far as to hand me a notepad and have me write down my signature a couple of times, to check the variations with my card and my driver's license.
Now most stores aren't this paranoid, but credit cards are thoroughly checked around here...
nearly all non trivial Java programs depend on non portable C++ libraries to do the critical stuff
This is a beauty... always nice to hear that all the work I did the last couple of years is trivial.... do me a favour, and keep this insight under wraps.... I have a family to feed.
Now another thought: what if... (big if), somehow the religious extreme right gets into power and decides that all donkey-sex lovers are perverts and deviants. You might find yourself fired, imprisonned or "re-educated".
It's really not so hard to find yourself in a group you'd rather not be associated with.
Your girlfriend obviously isn't into Anime... I double the storage space of our home fileserver every year or so, since my wife's collection of Anime and manga's keeps growing. I'm not really a good example though, since she also runs Linux since MPlayer and Xine tend to handle all the different codecs used in Anime better...;-)
The upside is: if she ever wanted to leave me, she'd first have to find another geek to maintain her PC for her.... or so she tells me:-P
I was actually considering something like this: with LVM or RAID you can cluster several physical harddrive partitions into one big "resource-pool" on top of which you can then create virtual partitions again.
Now, wouldn't it be great to apply this principle to servers? We'd bundle a group of physical machines into one big super-computer which could then run an arbitrary number of virtual servers. To stay in the old Slashdot tradition: "imagine a Beowolf cluster of...":-)
Feel free to verbally smack me if this already exists, just musing here...
Do you happen to have a link for the bluetooth attachment?
My dad has a BAHA as well, but he still has problems talking on cellphones. A bluetooth link would be the perfect solution.
The sad thing is that a lot of the stuff that gets thrown away really isn't all that bad.
My inlaws bought a new pc a while ago because the old one was "broken". What they meant was that the machine was completely bogged down with spyware and crap that Windows had slowed to a crawl. They bought a new machine without asking me, or I could have told them that all they needed was a new Windows install...
I put a fresh install on it and gave it to my neighbour who needed a basic browsing / MS Office machine. (No, I did not put Linux on it... I'm sure I'll burn in Hell for that);-)
Seeing the amount of hardware that is tossed out by non-geeks way before the end of it's usuable life-cycle, it sounds like a very good idea to have a bunch of geeks just check the machines and rebuild them into workable systems for students / people that cannot afford their own pc. I'm not sure about putting Linux on it: it's a good way to spread "the word", but it might be a bit too optimistic.
This is actually how I used my MD recorders way back when: I got a sound card that supported S/PDIF out, and recorded loads of albums off MP3 to MD. I am showing how long ago this was, since that was when an MD could store 74 minutes of music, and the more expensive ones 80 minutes:-)
Hey, my first open-source project was an XMMS plugin to send the track titles through Lirc to my deck while recording... (not going to plug it here, project is long dead though I think it's still on the xmms site).
I have long since stopped using my portable MD player in favor of a HDD player now though, since carrying a stack of disks around is just too damn inconvenient. I'm not sure what I'll do when my home deck dies, since I still have a huge library of music on MD, some of which may be quite hard to find again.
Minidisc was great for it's time, but technology has just caught up with it.
Depends on what you define as paradise really... around here we "lovingly" refer to the VS.NET Gui builder as "The Blob Generator".
All you anti-patterns folks, you know what I mean.
"slackware is nither simple or clean, although it does put things in the filesystem where they belong unlike debian,redhat,mandrake and suse.. so reading that man file on apache makes sense. but simple?? no it forces you you actually learn how to config a linux system."
So in order to learn how to use Linux you have to... learn how to use Linux?
But seriously: by simple I didn't mean easy to use, or easy to learn, but more set up in a simple way. Just plain text files in the place they should be. Yes, you actually have to understand how things work, but that's why I said that Slackware isn't for Joe Sixpack, but more for the person interested in computers and willing to spend time learning things in order to gain more control over their system.
Slackware is not, and was never meant to be a migration path for Joe Sixpack coming from Windows. We have loads of distros that handle that task a million times better.
What Slackware is great for is people who like a simple, clean UNIX-like OS on their home machine, and don't want to bother with all sorts of distro-specific tools. It's also great if you prefer to compile your software from source, without having to be afraid to mess up you package management DB. Using Linux is much like riding a bike: try it with training wheels first, move on when you're ready.
Finally, if we really want to get grandma's, sisters and Joe Sixpack off of Windows, we should probably start promoting KDE as the "OS". It's what they see anyway, and it shouldn't really matter if it runs on top of Linux, BSD, Solaris, whatever...
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it does.
It's actually better than the zoom. The zoom itself is excellent, but it resets on each page turn, making it virtually worthless for the thing I use zoom for most: zooming in to remove margins in PDF tech books.
Way to go attacking someone, yet completely missing the point.
The argument was about freeware vs open-source software... freeware as in free as beer, but closed-source. Since it's closed-source, it can (and often will) contain loads of spyware and other crap.
So yes, it is not economically auditable, as opposed to open-source where you can have someone check the source.
Freeware really is the worst of both worlds: no source to check and use for support and/or changes, and no vendor to get support from.
Under US law you're probably right, but it's not the same everywhere.
For example, here in the Netherlands it's legal to download content like music and movies, but illegal to upload or distribute it. BREIN has been trying to come up with things like "purchase-replacing downloads", which are illegal according to them, but AFAIK it hasn't been proven in court.
Using bittorent means that you're also uploading while you download, making it illegal. Downloading from things like RapidShare is legal though, regardless of whether you pay money to do so.
The main difference would be that they can't actually prove that you have a second key, so it's a lot harder to convict you for refusing to give it.
The people mentioned in the original article were convicted because they refused to give their main encryption key. Since it was easily provable that they had encryption on their machines, it was enough to get them convicted.
It really depends what you're trying to protect yourself from: TrueCrypt or a similar solution may be enough to keep you from getting convicted in a trial, but it probably won't offer much protection from organizations willing to use torture, blackmail, etc. In a trial you need evidence, in the other case suspicion will do.
One thing I can think of is completely cross-platform gaming...
I have to second that, I absolutely lived the over-the-top B-movie atmosphere. The only thing missing were boobies ;)
I also picked up the House of the Dead II and III for the Wii, mostly for the extra gun... so I've been having a great time shooting zombies with the mrs... looking forward to what else Sega comes up with!
From the pictures in the article it seems to mostly consist of small metal pipes, with pieces of plastic connecting them.... from what I gather it's only able to print the plastic connection parts, so I'm not sure how this counts as "self-replicating".
:)
Also it has a big bunch of wires coming out the back, which I bet are not replicated either... so someone was jumping the gun a bit while writing this article
Still... this is some seriously cool technology... if the resulting plastic parts are strong / durable enough it could certainly have a huge impact... essentially being able to download physical objects from the internet...
This is exactly why I own both an iPod shuffle and a Classic... for jogging I want a tiny player, and I mostly use a limited collection of "high-energy" music, so the shuffle is the ideal solution.
I use my 80G classic almost daily at work, since I can't put my music collection on my work machine. It saves me of having to decide in advance what I'll be listening to that day.
I did find though that I spend more of my time listening to podcasts than to my music collection these days...
I've heard this story on Slashdot quite often... and it's completely true: it just misses some points.
:)
Yes, Linux is fine for the completely computer-illiterate user that just surfs a bit, reads some mails and looks at pictures... I've tried this myself by installing Ubuntu on my mom's old PC. She was completely happy with it, since she was used to using Firefox and Thunderbird already, and once she knew where to find the icons everything was OK again. I even got a very proud call a while after saying she'd installed Supertux and loved it
So, yes... in that scenario Linux works fine. On the other end of the spectrum we have the code-loving geeks such as myself, that love to have control of their system and know how to fix the mess they've created.... Linux shines there too.
The problem however is with the semi-experienced user. The one who likes to install programs and mess with settings... download stuff, watch movies and probably plug some el-cheapo, weird-ass USB devices in too... These folks very soon find themselves deep down in a hole they can't get out of anymore. For us geeks, that's the point where we start to poke around to see how stuff works and how we can fix it... for these users this is the point where the computer learns some new swear-words or gets a crash-course in physical violence...
Windows has a strong focus on explorative learning... it may be patronizing to geeks, but for most other people it works. It allows them to at least click around in search of an answer or in the worst case restore the system to an earlier configuration.
I find that a small dose of valerian (that's the herbal extract, not be confused with Valium) does wonders to keep the "running in 5 directions" under control. I started taking a small amount of valerian in the morning and at lunch, and I find I can focus a lot better now.
:-)
Disclaimer: I was put on Ritalin for about 1 week as a kid, and never touched it again after that... it changed me personality to the point I didn't feel like "me" anymore. Oh, and my desk is still a mess... valerian or no
I know a bunch of idiots who'll drink Heineken like it's the best thing since sliced bread but wouldn't touch a VB or a XXXX if they were dying of thirst.
;-)
That's pretty funny actually, since here in the Netherlands (where Heineken originally comes from), it's considered "decent if you're thirsty, but nothing special by a long shot". Most people that enjoy a good beer turn to the Belgian beers.
At the risk of starting a Holy Beer War here, I'll take a de Koninck or a decent Tripel any day
Here in the Netherlands the overwhelming majority of payments is made with direct-debit cards, so credit cards are not used as much. Whenever you do want to pay with a credit card, they require some form of ID for any payment over 50 euros.
My autograph is pretty small and ugly and worst of all I've never really gotten the hang of getting it consistant. I've been called on it a number of times when I wanted to pay with my credit card. One store actually went so far as to hand me a notepad and have me write down my signature a couple of times, to check the variations with my card and my driver's license.
Now most stores aren't this paranoid, but credit cards are thoroughly checked around here...
nearly all non trivial Java programs depend on non portable C++ libraries to do the critical stuff
This is a beauty... always nice to hear that all the work I did the last couple of years is trivial.... do me a favour, and keep this insight under wraps.... I have a family to feed.
Now another thought: what if... (big if), somehow the religious extreme right gets into power and decides that all donkey-sex lovers are perverts and deviants. You might find yourself fired, imprisonned or "re-educated". It's really not so hard to find yourself in a group you'd rather not be associated with.
I run AdSense on my (Open Source) camchat-site, and so far Google has always paid up nice and on time.
Not saying that they may not be closing accounts without proper reason, but they are certainly NOT closing accounts as some kind of evil strategy.
Your girlfriend obviously isn't into Anime... I double the storage space of our home fileserver every year or so, since my wife's collection of Anime and manga's keeps growing. I'm not really a good example though, since she also runs Linux since MPlayer and Xine tend to handle all the different codecs used in Anime better... ;-)
:-P
The upside is: if she ever wanted to leave me, she'd first have to find another geek to maintain her PC for her.... or so she tells me
I was actually considering something like this: with LVM or RAID you can cluster several physical harddrive partitions into one big "resource-pool" on top of which you can then create virtual partitions again.
:-)
Now, wouldn't it be great to apply this principle to servers? We'd bundle a group of physical machines into one big super-computer which could then run an arbitrary number of virtual servers. To stay in the old Slashdot tradition: "imagine a Beowolf cluster of..."
Feel free to verbally smack me if this already exists, just musing here...
If you can't remember the other tricks, Midnight Commander (http://www.ibiblio.org/mc/) is your friend.
Should be installed by default on most Linux distros, and doesn't require X.
Do you happen to have a link for the bluetooth attachment? My dad has a BAHA as well, but he still has problems talking on cellphones. A bluetooth link would be the perfect solution.
The sad thing is that a lot of the stuff that gets thrown away really isn't all that bad.
;-)
My inlaws bought a new pc a while ago because the old one was "broken". What they meant was that the machine was completely bogged down with spyware and crap that Windows had slowed to a crawl. They bought a new machine without asking me, or I could have told them that all they needed was a new Windows install...
I put a fresh install on it and gave it to my neighbour who needed a basic browsing / MS Office machine. (No, I did not put Linux on it... I'm sure I'll burn in Hell for that)
Seeing the amount of hardware that is tossed out by non-geeks way before the end of it's usuable life-cycle, it sounds like a very good idea to have a bunch of geeks just check the machines and rebuild them into workable systems for students / people that cannot afford their own pc. I'm not sure about putting Linux on it: it's a good way to spread "the word", but it might be a bit too optimistic.
This is actually how I used my MD recorders way back when: I got a sound card that supported S/PDIF out, and recorded loads of albums off MP3 to MD. I am showing how long ago this was, since that was when an MD could store 74 minutes of music, and the more expensive ones 80 minutes :-)
Hey, my first open-source project was an XMMS plugin to send the track titles through Lirc to my deck while recording... (not going to plug it here, project is long dead though I think it's still on the xmms site).
I have long since stopped using my portable MD player in favor of a HDD player now though, since carrying a stack of disks around is just too damn inconvenient. I'm not sure what I'll do when my home deck dies, since I still have a huge library of music on MD, some of which may be quite hard to find again.
Minidisc was great for it's time, but technology has just caught up with it.
The funniest thing was the official procedure recommended for getting rid of the machine: pounding it with a sledge hammer ;-)
Depends on what you define as paradise really... around here we "lovingly" refer to the VS.NET Gui builder as "The Blob Generator". All you anti-patterns folks, you know what I mean.
"slackware is nither simple or clean, although it does put things in the filesystem where they belong unlike debian,redhat,mandrake and suse.. so reading that man file on apache makes sense. but simple?? no it forces you you actually learn how to config a linux system."
So in order to learn how to use Linux you have to... learn how to use Linux?
But seriously: by simple I didn't mean easy to use, or easy to learn, but more set up in a simple way. Just plain text files in the place they should be. Yes, you actually have to understand how things work, but that's why I said that Slackware isn't for Joe Sixpack, but more for the person interested in computers and willing to spend time learning things in order to gain more control over their system.
OK, I'll feed this troll...
;-)
Slackware is not, and was never meant to be a migration path for Joe Sixpack coming from Windows. We have loads of distros that handle that task a million times better.
What Slackware is great for is people who like a simple, clean UNIX-like OS on their home machine, and don't want to bother with all sorts of distro-specific tools. It's also great if you prefer to compile your software from source, without having to be afraid to mess up you package management DB. Using Linux is much like riding a bike: try it with training wheels first, move on when you're ready.
Finally, if we really want to get grandma's, sisters and Joe Sixpack off of Windows, we should probably start promoting KDE as the "OS". It's what they see anyway, and it shouldn't really matter if it runs on top of Linux, BSD, Solaris, whatever...
OK, done ranting now... feel so much better