Well, according to the same "factbook", China seems to have Suffrage at 18 years of age, universal, when the people really have no say in choosing their leaders.
The facts in this book are almost always skewed one way or another no matter how objective it is.
It is true that webmail usually has a frontend (the part that you see via your browser) that is secured with SSL, but the problem is, the server must recieve your message SOMEHOW. That is still through SMTP, and it is plaintext.
You simply can't compare PGP to SSL because they are not used for the same thing. PGP is used for the secure transmission of the mail AND the final delivery, but SSL only protects the final delivery. To that extent, a lot of webmail providers don't even give you a choice to use PGP. Because the transmission is still through SMTP, and it is not secured by PGP, your information is not protected even if you use webmail.
It might because SCO is lacking the funds to make Gatner say what they want to say anymore.
Either that or the fact that SCO's claims are not making sense anymore(like they ever had). Imagine all the readers of a newspaper getting sued because the publisher ALLEDGEDLY put another paper's article in it. There is a limit to how far liability goes, and it certianly does not extend down to the consumers in this case. Saying that AIX or Linux is "dangerous" to use not only makes no sense, but is just giving into the BS and unproven claims of SCO that have never been proven in a court of law.
Out of the box, there are bound to be some major qwirks that will take some time to get used to in KDE, as well as major problems and annoyances, but one thing that they do not mention is the fact that even without modifying source, KDE is very configuarble, to the point where you can tweak the very basic elements of the UI.
I admit that Windows is rather universal, and its made for a variety of tastes, but after using my version of KDE for all this time, there are many annoyances in Windows (like double clicking the titlebar to shade instead of maximze/minimize), that I simply cannot get rid of. In the rare circumstance that I must use Windows for some reason, I must get used to it, not the other way around, which is what I prefer.
You're putting it like it was an intentional attack on these institutions by a hacker, but really, it wasn't a hack, it was a virus, which should, more or less, indiscriminately deal damage. It was probably not the intention of the virus' author to infect nothing but government institutions.
You really should read the article (yeah, its been/.ed beyond belief) but, this deivce is nothing more than a wipe attached to a motor, nothing else. It does no vaccuming at all, and just goes around pushing dirt around it because the clearence is so low that no dirt actually gets to the wipe anyway. So, essentially its nothing more than a motor.
Maybe they'll recall these things because they "forgot" to put in its "intelligence."
Then why do they wish not to be disclosed? They probably just got paid off by SCO in order to buy token licenses for like $1.
Even IF, in the unlikely case that SCO code DID make it into Linux, it is NOT WORTH the $699 licensing fee that SCO is trying to extort.
Think about it, the entire suit makes no sense. This is like a publishing company that's suing another publishing company because it alledgedly steals one quote from a book of the former, then that company threatens all users who have bought the book, and makes them pay full price for that one quote, without even saying which quote it really is, or giving any evidence at all.
Every day, I keep wondering if this is a SERIOUS LAWSUIT involving SANE PEOPLE, or an experiment to see how impressionable and ignorant some people are, or how fast people are to jump to conclusions.
Still, they are to be controlled by western corps.
on
China to Be Laptop Leader
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Though the simple task of manufacture has been handed down to the Chinese, it is still the western companies that design and market the devices.
I think that we all know that mainland China manufactures a lot of stuff, but what does this prove? That cheap labor attracts business? It comes to me not as any suprise that this was eventually going to happen. A major leap forward would be that China has the most laptop users in the world or possibly that a Chinese computer company has outsold one of western counterparts, but this is really no big suprise.
Nowadays, when most computer and networking components are dirt cheap, its hard to see why anyone would even bother to buy a used router or computer when there are new ones for not much more. Moreover, technology is being developed so fast that when someone wants to sell their router/computer, there is always something better on the market for not much more.
The fact is, not a lot of people still buy used technological commodity hardware. It may be cheaper, but it probably is obsolete already, and may be even less reliable than a new one.
You have assumed that SCO actually has code in the Linux kernel. However, who knows if that is even true or not? Because of the fact that none of this ever went into cout, and all they are doing right now is blabbering on and on about it without showing anyone the evidence, I don't think it is wise to assume such things.
The best way to say it is: SCO has no proof that it has any code in the Linux kernel, and even if they did, then it would be nullified because of the fact that they distributed Linux, and STILL distriubtes the Linux kernel, even AFTER they have threatened to sue for months now.
Their original claim was that they own some parts of RCU and SMP in UNIX, which was supposedly put into Linux by IBM, but all that stuff, which is probably false anyway, is about the business features, and its my understanding that embedded Linux applications like TiVo have nothing more than a core of the Linux kernel... that's all.
If this contiunes, they can go on trying to extort licensing fees from every user of an embedded Linux device, including Linksys routers. I think that they can't go on much longer with this because they simply have gone too far. First it was licensing/IP problem with IBM, then its threaten every commercial Linux user, then every device that is equipped with any version of Linux (even though their claims don't even extend that far into 2.2 and earlier, which is what many of these embedded devices use).
Their case is like building a skyscraper on sand without a foundation. Very soon, it will topple.
Holding companies do nothing more than brainstorm very general ideas and then patent them, but the consumers get no benefit from an idea without a product. This is another example of how broad patents really don't benefit consumers.
I agree that a company that has designed and created a working implementaion of a product would be entitled to sue another company that has created the same product. However, in this partictular case, it seems that the company that is being sued is the one that has created a successful working implementation, and the only reason why NTP actually gets anything is the simple fact that they got to the very general idea first. The patenting of the very concept of wireless e-mail is just whacked.
This lawsuit is good only for one company: NTP, and terrible for RIM and the consumers. NTP is merely a holding company that creates no innovation, just hogs ideas before other companies who have intention to make a working implementation and create a functional product. The consumer market would be held back from a good product if RIM goes out of business, and the Blackberry may very well rise in price if they don't.
Fingerprints are created by cellular residue rubbing off from the skin, and this process collects these in order to extract the DNA. However, why would this be labeled exclusively in use for fingerprints? Couldn't the process be used for almost any surface that a person has had direct contact with? This might also have many problems with contamination with the DNA of other cellular residue.
This is important, especially now that most of the major stations have turned to crap, at least here in the US. While good radio stations that offer classical music or electronica are turning to all the music that kids like these days (rap is crap... who the hell likes "hip-hop"?), at least there are these microstations that are commercial free and are not contaminated with this.
Many of the ideas you have just mentioned weren't Microsoft's in the first place. KDE has truly an innovative system that is far more configurable and intuitive than Microsoft's Windows UI will ever be. As for OpenOffice, last time I checked, Microsoft didn't invent the concept of the "word processor", and for Evolution, M$ didn't exactly make the first e-mail client either.
Try making an OS without having SOME similar features to Windows, or some other existing system for that matter. The truth is, sometimes, users want stability. As bad as it is, the Windows UI is a de facto standard, and so is, to a lesser extent, that of Mac OS.
If you want people to convert to Linux or BSD, don't give them cryptic software that will take them lots of time to retrain on, like VIM/LaTeX/TeX, and give them a familliar interface that they already know how to use, like that of OpenOffice, which usually takes most MS office users a few seconds to figure out.
Althoungh the ruling party has the name "Communist" the system behind it all is no longer in effect. In almost all matters in urban areas, capatilism reigns. As a matter of fact, even the government has regarded the nation as a "Socialist" nation for some time now, which is more correct in the sense that there is now much free enterprise with not much government regulation to prevent people from being merchants.
As state industries continue to close down and more private companies take their place, it becomes more of a misnomer to refer to China as "Communist", just because the government there is called the "Communist" party.
Did they really say that? I think that the owner of MP3, which I think is Thompson Multimedia, should sue for such a deframatory statement implying their product has no legit use.
Remember when eMachines tried to copy Apple's iMac into their own thing and ended up with a terrible product that ended up being discontinued when Apple sued?
This is a lot like that, except without the suing, and a lot more laughing at such a half-assed attempt to clone Apple's success in this field.
The thing is, if they want to make DRM for their music, they should at LEAST make a good client for it. According to the link, this person obviously had to click through MANY buttons and had to reenter the username/password MANY times in order to even get the song to play, due to the fact that BuyMusic dosn't even give a client.
iTunes, on the other hand, gives the user EVERYTHING in a neat little package. The connection to the music store is seamless, and you can play, sort, and burn from a single app, without any of this DRM related business, or privacy concerns. If a company expects users to use their service, they could at LEAST make it easy to use, and from this account, that is probably the last thing that it is.
I have visited their site and would like to say that it feels very hollow, and dosn't have a whole lot of content. iTunes offers clip samples that are full quality and 30 seconds long(guarenteed to work because everything is done in a nice, streamlined client). I couldn't even get BuyMusic to even play the sample because of the problems with all the external player stuff. Two more things that piss me off include the fact that BuyMusic has neglected to even catagorize my favroite genre: Electronica, and the fact that it only works with Windows, and seems that they have no plans for the rest of us, and I had to access it from a public terminal because all I have at home is a mac and some Linux boxes. At least Apple is trying to port iTunes to Windows, so I could probably get it to work with WINE.
It clearly is their fault for not providing practical means to accomplish reasonable ends.
Well, why do some people still use silly units like the "foot", the "mile", the "gallon", the "foot-pound", or the "footcandle"? These units are harder to convert as the numbers that are required for the conversions seem to be more or less arbitrary, and their names (when you get to more complex measurements) are totally whacked.
That's because there's a standard outside the scientific field. Scientists in the US are supposed to use SI for ease of calculation, but there's a whole other field out there that uses their own units, and have an established standard for measuring things in their own industries.
The battery industry, apparretly, is set using the ampere*hour standard because its just easier for the consumer to figure things out. For example, in the specifications of certain electronics, the current is always measured in ampres, and not columb per hour. As a matter of fact, most people who never took an electronics or physics course would probably not even know what a columb has to do with an ampere.
The SI is not for everyone to use, and is not always the easiest system to use. Its just a convention that some people agreed on. (Like... why Gauss over Tesla? I think that a Tesla makes much more sense when figuring magnetic flux )
Also remember that there is more riding on the sucess of this chip than its speed. China is trying to decrease its reliance on foreign technologies, and has been all along, which explains the huge amounts of revenue that have gone into the research for a better fighter plane when they could have purchased some Soviet MiGs all along.
This nation has never before manufactured a computer processor of this power before, and even though processors from the US could easily beat it, its still a good bargain for the users and a good start for the country. Moreover, not everybody is a gamer, and sometimes, older processors do fine for everyday work tasks. For example, I have seen a lot of server boxes that still use Pentium II class processors and work fine. I still sometimes use my P II desktop, which uses SuSE Linux 7.3, and I think that its just about as fast as my Athlon 1700 when it comes to word processing and simple GUI tasks.
Remember that Rayovac sells rechargable akaline batteries as well, and like Ni-MH, are not AS bad for the environment as Ni-CAD.
Moreover, they do have a distinct advantage: they're cheap and of high capacity, though not good for many recharge cycles. While a pair of Ni-MHs cost about $8, a pack of 4 rechargable akalines costs about the same price. Like regular akaline batteries, they have pretty high capacity (about 2200(I think) mAh for a AA, compared with the low 1000's range for most Ni-MHs), and actually come charged, with a long shelf life without discharging itself.
I use these batteries for most of the things that don't work with Ni-MH (graphing calculator, small electronic devices), as these have the usual 1.5 volt, instead of the 1.2 volt on most rechargables. Their downside is the fact that they can only be charged 10-20 times before they leak (the package said 40).
Imagine a lab of these...
on
Lindows Webstation
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Yes, that would make it ideal for use in kiosks and some computer labs, as if a user was to install any software on it, the second that the user logs off and unplugs the flash disk, the machine is essntially restored to its origional state.
Imagine a public computer lab that was filled with these thin clients (for the lack of a better term). People would have to buy specially made USB memory keychains that would be programmed with their user information, and then they could plug it into a terminal to use it and save their data to it. That would be both secure for the user, as they literally can't leave anything behind, and more convinent for the maintanance of the lab, as there is nothing that the user can do short of physically bashing the computer to actually damage it.
Slashdot Mirror
The facts in this book are almost always skewed one way or another no matter how objective it is.
You simply can't compare PGP to SSL because they are not used for the same thing. PGP is used for the secure transmission of the mail AND the final delivery, but SSL only protects the final delivery. To that extent, a lot of webmail providers don't even give you a choice to use PGP. Because the transmission is still through SMTP, and it is not secured by PGP, your information is not protected even if you use webmail.
Either that or the fact that SCO's claims are not making sense anymore(like they ever had). Imagine all the readers of a newspaper getting sued because the publisher ALLEDGEDLY put another paper's article in it. There is a limit to how far liability goes, and it certianly does not extend down to the consumers in this case. Saying that AIX or Linux is "dangerous" to use not only makes no sense, but is just giving into the BS and unproven claims of SCO that have never been proven in a court of law.
I admit that Windows is rather universal, and its made for a variety of tastes, but after using my version of KDE for all this time, there are many annoyances in Windows (like double clicking the titlebar to shade instead of maximze/minimize), that I simply cannot get rid of. In the rare circumstance that I must use Windows for some reason, I must get used to it, not the other way around, which is what I prefer.
You're putting it like it was an intentional attack on these institutions by a hacker, but really, it wasn't a hack, it was a virus, which should, more or less, indiscriminately deal damage. It was probably not the intention of the virus' author to infect nothing but government institutions.
Maybe they'll recall these things because they "forgot" to put in its "intelligence."
Even IF, in the unlikely case that SCO code DID make it into Linux, it is NOT WORTH the $699 licensing fee that SCO is trying to extort.
Think about it, the entire suit makes no sense. This is like a publishing company that's suing another publishing company because it alledgedly steals one quote from a book of the former, then that company threatens all users who have bought the book, and makes them pay full price for that one quote, without even saying which quote it really is, or giving any evidence at all.
Every day, I keep wondering if this is a SERIOUS LAWSUIT involving SANE PEOPLE, or an experiment to see how impressionable and ignorant some people are, or how fast people are to jump to conclusions.
I think that we all know that mainland China manufactures a lot of stuff, but what does this prove? That cheap labor attracts business? It comes to me not as any suprise that this was eventually going to happen. A major leap forward would be that China has the most laptop users in the world or possibly that a Chinese computer company has outsold one of western counterparts, but this is really no big suprise.
The fact is, not a lot of people still buy used technological commodity hardware. It may be cheaper, but it probably is obsolete already, and may be even less reliable than a new one.
The best way to say it is: SCO has no proof that it has any code in the Linux kernel, and even if they did, then it would be nullified because of the fact that they distributed Linux, and STILL distriubtes the Linux kernel, even AFTER they have threatened to sue for months now.
If this contiunes, they can go on trying to extort licensing fees from every user of an embedded Linux device, including Linksys routers. I think that they can't go on much longer with this because they simply have gone too far. First it was licensing/IP problem with IBM, then its threaten every commercial Linux user, then every device that is equipped with any version of Linux (even though their claims don't even extend that far into 2.2 and earlier, which is what many of these embedded devices use).
Their case is like building a skyscraper on sand without a foundation. Very soon, it will topple.
I agree that a company that has designed and created a working implementaion of a product would be entitled to sue another company that has created the same product. However, in this partictular case, it seems that the company that is being sued is the one that has created a successful working implementation, and the only reason why NTP actually gets anything is the simple fact that they got to the very general idea first. The patenting of the very concept of wireless e-mail is just whacked.
This lawsuit is good only for one company: NTP, and terrible for RIM and the consumers. NTP is merely a holding company that creates no innovation, just hogs ideas before other companies who have intention to make a working implementation and create a functional product. The consumer market would be held back from a good product if RIM goes out of business, and the Blackberry may very well rise in price if they don't.
Fingerprints are created by cellular residue rubbing off from the skin, and this process collects these in order to extract the DNA. However, why would this be labeled exclusively in use for fingerprints? Couldn't the process be used for almost any surface that a person has had direct contact with? This might also have many problems with contamination with the DNA of other cellular residue.
This is important, especially now that most of the major stations have turned to crap, at least here in the US. While good radio stations that offer classical music or electronica are turning to all the music that kids like these days (rap is crap... who the hell likes "hip-hop"?), at least there are these microstations that are commercial free and are not contaminated with this.
If you give the people what they want to hear, regardless of it being true or false, not many would bother to even question whether it is true or not.
By stability, I meant consistency.
Try making an OS without having SOME similar features to Windows, or some other existing system for that matter. The truth is, sometimes, users want stability. As bad as it is, the Windows UI is a de facto standard, and so is, to a lesser extent, that of Mac OS.
If you want people to convert to Linux or BSD, don't give them cryptic software that will take them lots of time to retrain on, like VIM/LaTeX/TeX, and give them a familliar interface that they already know how to use, like that of OpenOffice, which usually takes most MS office users a few seconds to figure out.
As state industries continue to close down and more private companies take their place, it becomes more of a misnomer to refer to China as "Communist", just because the government there is called the "Communist" party.
Did they really say that? I think that the owner of MP3, which I think is Thompson Multimedia, should sue for such a deframatory statement implying their product has no legit use.
This is a lot like that, except without the suing, and a lot more laughing at such a half-assed attempt to clone Apple's success in this field.
iTunes, on the other hand, gives the user EVERYTHING in a neat little package. The connection to the music store is seamless, and you can play, sort, and burn from a single app, without any of this DRM related business, or privacy concerns. If a company expects users to use their service, they could at LEAST make it easy to use, and from this account, that is probably the last thing that it is.
I have visited their site and would like to say that it feels very hollow, and dosn't have a whole lot of content. iTunes offers clip samples that are full quality and 30 seconds long(guarenteed to work because everything is done in a nice, streamlined client). I couldn't even get BuyMusic to even play the sample because of the problems with all the external player stuff. Two more things that piss me off include the fact that BuyMusic has neglected to even catagorize my favroite genre: Electronica, and the fact that it only works with Windows, and seems that they have no plans for the rest of us, and I had to access it from a public terminal because all I have at home is a mac and some Linux boxes. At least Apple is trying to port iTunes to Windows, so I could probably get it to work with WINE.
It clearly is their fault for not providing practical means to accomplish reasonable ends.
That's because there's a standard outside the scientific field. Scientists in the US are supposed to use SI for ease of calculation, but there's a whole other field out there that uses their own units, and have an established standard for measuring things in their own industries.
The battery industry, apparretly, is set using the ampere*hour standard because its just easier for the consumer to figure things out. For example, in the specifications of certain electronics, the current is always measured in ampres, and not columb per hour. As a matter of fact, most people who never took an electronics or physics course would probably not even know what a columb has to do with an ampere.
The SI is not for everyone to use, and is not always the easiest system to use. Its just a convention that some people agreed on. (Like... why Gauss over Tesla? I think that a Tesla makes much more sense when figuring magnetic flux )
This nation has never before manufactured a computer processor of this power before, and even though processors from the US could easily beat it, its still a good bargain for the users and a good start for the country. Moreover, not everybody is a gamer, and sometimes, older processors do fine for everyday work tasks. For example, I have seen a lot of server boxes that still use Pentium II class processors and work fine. I still sometimes use my P II desktop, which uses SuSE Linux 7.3, and I think that its just about as fast as my Athlon 1700 when it comes to word processing and simple GUI tasks.
Moreover, they do have a distinct advantage: they're cheap and of high capacity, though not good for many recharge cycles. While a pair of Ni-MHs cost about $8, a pack of 4 rechargable akalines costs about the same price. Like regular akaline batteries, they have pretty high capacity (about 2200(I think) mAh for a AA, compared with the low 1000's range for most Ni-MHs), and actually come charged, with a long shelf life without discharging itself.
I use these batteries for most of the things that don't work with Ni-MH (graphing calculator, small electronic devices), as these have the usual 1.5 volt, instead of the 1.2 volt on most rechargables. Their downside is the fact that they can only be charged 10-20 times before they leak (the package said 40).
Imagine a public computer lab that was filled with these thin clients (for the lack of a better term). People would have to buy specially made USB memory keychains that would be programmed with their user information, and then they could plug it into a terminal to use it and save their data to it. That would be both secure for the user, as they literally can't leave anything behind, and more convinent for the maintanance of the lab, as there is nothing that the user can do short of physically bashing the computer to actually damage it.