I routinely get calls from people who have been handed MSOffice documents that are broken for their particular version. My usual remedy is to throw them into LibreOffice and re-export them to whatever format is required. Which it does, pretty much faultlessly and without complaining. Your "gazillion dialog boxes telling you that MS file formats should not be used" is something I've never seen, unless you count the *single* dialog box where it offers a range of choices including MS formats.
I could give you the benefit of the doubt and suggest you try a recent version (which you really should anyway), but it has always worked like this even when it went under the name of StarOffice.
You're wrong. For the last five years my wife is a happy CentOS user. And as non technical as you can get it.
Same here. My wife has been running Slackware on her desktop machine since 2003. Sure, I had to set it up (not hard) with an interface she can work with, since her strengths (as a PhD in 17th century history) don't extend to command-line tinkering. But with a bit of know-how, just about any distribution ought to be capable of being run as a desktop system.
A cattle prod might be a bit rough, but in theory it ought to be possible to write a program to optically convert the points of inflection in the curved path of the baton into a signal that can be transmitted to the singer by a haptic "bump" from a device (like a phone, for instance) sitting in the singer's pocket. The only difficulty might be latency (which would have to be imperceptible), so your code would need to be fairly efficient.
Sounds interesting. I might even start doing something with this myself if I find time.
I would actually be quite interested to go through this, given that I don't (and never will) have a Facebook account. Anyone can sue me to their heart's content, but they can't obtain access to something that doesn't exist. Seems to me that this might provide a path for that piece of legislation to be struck down.
Looks like they are finally going to reach their goal of overtaking chrome.
Heh. The first insightful post in this thread.:)
I was a late adopter of Firefox (then Phoenix), since my own custom builds of the mainstream Mozilla browser (minus Communicator, kitchensink and everything else) were faster and better in every way, until the Mozilla trunk got left behind.
More recently, I adopted Chromium for the simple reason that it takes up marginally less real-estate on my laptop's screen. I will be the first to admit that this browser is far from perfect, but every time I revert to FF, I am disappointed by how it has started to hog resources. I have always been firmly of the opinion that if you write your code well in the first place, you never need to rewrite from scratch. But now I wonder if that's what Mozilla needs to do.
Opera lets you have different private browsing tabs mixed in with normal tabs. Do you know if they use the same cookie stores or different ones?
Although your question has been answered in substance, I might raise a pertinent point:
Why?
Your browser is open, and presumably sharing codespace between private and non-private browsing sessions. I would never be entirely confident that cookies could be prevented from "leaking" from one session into another, even if they are using different files.
This is why I force my machine to not keep persistent cookies once all sessions are closed. I do this by creating a symlink from my cookies file to/dev/null. For history students: I don't know what current-version Windows users might do to emulate this, but it used to be possible to do so by creating a directory with the same name as the cookies file (assuming it is a file, not a directory) which had the same result.
There is no "App Bubble". The truth is that going forward, way more people are going to be using tablets and smartphones than use or used computers.
I've read that in some countries (e.g. Japan) that is already happening. I guess if all you do with the device is use it for entertainment, why not? I'm happy enough with my phone (FWIW), but there's no way it replaces my laptop. But my old desktop box is another matter...
But I can see a time when the enthusiasm for apps might wane. I have read prognostications that "traditional" websites will decline as browsers give way to apps, but I don't buy it. A browser is an app, and I can see a time when people might get fed up with having hundreds or thousands of icons to wade through on a handheld device in order to get at the content they need.
I stopped thinking of phones as toys when I realised that in terms of flops, smartphones had overtaken the capacity of the supercomputers I used to work with back in the earlier days of my career. I'm thinking of the Cray X-MP here. (And yes, I'm even older than that.) That beast clocked up somewhere around 80 mflops (depending on whom you ask), while a quick google search pulls up a benchmark for a Samsung Galaxy S2 at 389 mflops. Yes, I do know that they're different machines, with a very different methodology for programming (which is why I suspect the old Cray would still smoke the Android in some tests), but the power is definitely there.
Trouble is, the phones' hardware is maturing faster than its operating system. Because they're aimed for the consumer device market, they don't (yet) have the ruggedness we expect from a properly grown-up operating system. (You might guess that I'm not talking about Windows here. Sorry.) But I guess (or at least hope) it won't be too long.
Phone apps will be no different. Just be sure to have a job during the trough of dissolutionment
...which, surprisingly, pretty much answers the OP's question. So long as you happen to know what dissolutionment is. (Precipitation?)
Some of these apps are just damn silly. Like the people who service my car spending big bucks on TV advertising to spruik their own app that accomplishes nothing that can't be done from any browser on the same phone. Someone really saddled up his brains before charging off there...:-|
But I guess their app "developer" must be happy. Sigh...
The people with Google Glass are going to be survelling other people who have NOT consented in any way to being tracked.
If Google Glass ever becomes popular, I would not be too surprised if sales of cell phone jammers start to proliferate. In my location they would be redundant. I pay Telstra to fuck up the signal for me.:-(
Apologies for the solecism of replying to my own post, but just to clarify...
My facetious remark about nudist beaches might not work if you happen to be an AK-47-wielding member of the Taliban in your customary work attire. Whereas I, as a 50-something white male would probably fit in all too well, and for the worst reasons...:-/
note that Skype may be encrypted but we don't know how well or who has a back door key
Nobody needs a back door key for Skype. If "they" know who they're looking for, chances are they will also know your Skype ID, so they only have to either buy a skype resolver (google that for yourself) or roll their own from an older (5.something) version of skype. That will give an IP address that should give some idea of a physical location.
Sure, Tor might be useful if you can cope with the latency, but (unless I'm completely off-beam) I can't see the P2P nature of Skype working very usefully with that. A vanilla SIP client might work though, provided that you aren't so silly as to attach a dial-in number to the service.
Of course, this is all fairly academic as far as i am concerned. Anyone listening in to my phone conversations is in for a very boring time. But if I had something to say to someone that must go no further, the safest way to do so is in person. At a nudist beach.
I am in a position to offer a perfect solution. Just move to rural Australia and move your phone contract to Telstra. They are so fucking incompetent, nobody will ever succeed in tracking you.
The only downside is that you won't be able to make phone calls either.:-/
Disregarding your jibe about Microsoft (because it's irrelevant and I don't care about them anyway), Apple and just about everybody else is in a bind. They need their services to be available to the individuals who have signed up for them. But those individuals are often too overloaded to take the trouble to use strong passwords and/or multi-factor authentication when available. Even if they do, there's always the risk of interception. At the same time, the service provider has to offer a means to reset credentials when they have been lost or potentially compromised, but users need to do a lot of work to keep track of all the things they've said to them in order to facilitate this.
Sure, wallet systems can take some of the drudgery out of authentication, but these do nothing for you if the provider (or your computer/connection) is compromised.
I know how I feel when I have had to recover signon credentials. The process is tedious, and it pisses me off. And if the service provider makes it too hard for me, it pisses me off even more, even to the extent that I might take my business (FWIW) elsewhere.
I don't have much sympathy for any individual who gets bitten by a virus or phishing exercise, since that is largely a matter for education and common sense, but the service providers definitely need a better means of securing login credentials and user data.
But lower RPM coupled with an IDE interface should eliminate ANY consideration on re-using the drives I'm referring to.
Don't count on it. Some of us geeks are total pack-rats. I still have an old Slackware box running as a mail server which still has an early motherboard and low-rpm IDE drives. The machine doesn't need to have a high spec to still be useful, and I still have lots of spare parts to keep it running for at least another 15 years if I feel like it.
That said, I think I have a foolproof destruction method: in an earlier life I used to be a blacksmith, and I still have my 500lb pneumatic hammer. A few good wallops from that mother will leave even the most sturdy HDD thinner than a bee's dick, and I defy anybody to extract any data from it.
Unfortunately this will break many business apps that are tied to ancient and specific version of IE. Will this cause more hours of work for web developers?
Too bad if it does. Their excuses wore out long ago.
Actually, few *aren't* easy to set up: which have you tried?
Agreed. Although I'm pretty comfortable with basic installers (or none at all for that matter), I remember being quite impressed with RedHat and Mandrake back in the late '90s, and I'm certain it hasn't got any harder in the years since. Mandrake (7.0?) in particular was probably intuitive and bombproof enough for just about any non-geek to install. I would have thought most of the more popular modern distros would well and truly have it together by now. (Though I read recently that Fedora's has taken a turn for the worse, but I hope that might be an exception.)
If Debian stable included a recent version of KDE and the latest NVidia drivers (since I need 310.32 for my card specifically), I'd switch to it immediately. I'm using Fedora now only because a) it includes KDE 4.10 and b) it's not Ubuntu.
You do realise there are other choices of distro, don't you? Your nvidia drivers should install on any system so long as you have the kernel headers. (I haven't needed them for a few years, since the free driver works for me.) I'm running KDE 4.10 on Slackware 14.0 and it's as sweet as I could ask for. Slack is what I started with back in '94, and despite having spent extended periods working with other just about all of the major distros (and even rolled my own LFS for a while), I keep coming back to it.
but why go public without just complaining to your agent/publisher/whatever first?
No, but they might (in my case, do) buy DRM books, strip the DRM and reprocess the publication through Sigil to make sure the formatting is as I like it before I transfer it to my reader device.
Slashdot Mirror
I routinely get calls from people who have been handed MSOffice documents that are broken for their particular version. My usual remedy is to throw them into LibreOffice and re-export them to whatever format is required. Which it does, pretty much faultlessly and without complaining. Your "gazillion dialog boxes telling you that MS file formats should not be used" is something I've never seen, unless you count the *single* dialog box where it offers a range of choices including MS formats.
I could give you the benefit of the doubt and suggest you try a recent version (which you really should anyway), but it has always worked like this even when it went under the name of StarOffice.
You're wrong. For the last five years my wife is a happy CentOS user. And as non technical as you can get it.
Same here. My wife has been running Slackware on her desktop machine since 2003. Sure, I had to set it up (not hard) with an interface she can work with, since her strengths (as a PhD in 17th century history) don't extend to command-line tinkering. But with a bit of know-how, just about any distribution ought to be capable of being run as a desktop system.
A cattle prod might be a bit rough, but in theory it ought to be possible to write a program to optically convert the points of inflection in the curved path of the baton into a signal that can be transmitted to the singer by a haptic "bump" from a device (like a phone, for instance) sitting in the singer's pocket. The only difficulty might be latency (which would have to be imperceptible), so your code would need to be fairly efficient.
Sounds interesting. I might even start doing something with this myself if I find time.
I would actually be quite interested to go through this, given that I don't (and never will) have a Facebook account. Anyone can sue me to their heart's content, but they can't obtain access to something that doesn't exist. Seems to me that this might provide a path for that piece of legislation to be struck down.
Looks like they are finally going to reach their goal of overtaking chrome.
Heh. The first insightful post in this thread. :)
I was a late adopter of Firefox (then Phoenix), since my own custom builds of the mainstream Mozilla browser (minus Communicator, kitchensink and everything else) were faster and better in every way, until the Mozilla trunk got left behind.
More recently, I adopted Chromium for the simple reason that it takes up marginally less real-estate on my laptop's screen. I will be the first to admit that this browser is far from perfect, but every time I revert to FF, I am disappointed by how it has started to hog resources. I have always been firmly of the opinion that if you write your code well in the first place, you never need to rewrite from scratch. But now I wonder if that's what Mozilla needs to do.
Opera lets you have different private browsing tabs mixed in with normal tabs. Do you know if they use the same cookie stores or different ones?
Although your question has been answered in substance, I might raise a pertinent point:
/dev/null. For history students: I don't know what current-version Windows users might do to emulate this, but it used to be possible to do so by creating a directory with the same name as the cookies file (assuming it is a file, not a directory) which had the same result.
Why?
Your browser is open, and presumably sharing codespace between private and non-private browsing sessions. I would never be entirely confident that cookies could be prevented from "leaking" from one session into another, even if they are using different files.
This is why I force my machine to not keep persistent cookies once all sessions are closed. I do this by creating a symlink from my cookies file to
so sometime when most people here are like 50 or 60?
Yes.
Now get off my lawn, whappersnipper.
There is no "App Bubble". The truth is that going forward, way more people are going to be using tablets and smartphones than use or used computers.
I've read that in some countries (e.g. Japan) that is already happening. I guess if all you do with the device is use it for entertainment, why not? I'm happy enough with my phone (FWIW), but there's no way it replaces my laptop. But my old desktop box is another matter...
But I can see a time when the enthusiasm for apps might wane. I have read prognostications that "traditional" websites will decline as browsers give way to apps, but I don't buy it. A browser is an app, and I can see a time when people might get fed up with having hundreds or thousands of icons to wade through on a handheld device in order to get at the content they need.
I stopped thinking of phones as toys when I realised that in terms of flops, smartphones had overtaken the capacity of the supercomputers I used to work with back in the earlier days of my career. I'm thinking of the Cray X-MP here. (And yes, I'm even older than that.) That beast clocked up somewhere around 80 mflops (depending on whom you ask), while a quick google search pulls up a benchmark for a Samsung Galaxy S2 at 389 mflops. Yes, I do know that they're different machines, with a very different methodology for programming (which is why I suspect the old Cray would still smoke the Android in some tests), but the power is definitely there.
Trouble is, the phones' hardware is maturing faster than its operating system. Because they're aimed for the consumer device market, they don't (yet) have the ruggedness we expect from a properly grown-up operating system. (You might guess that I'm not talking about Windows here. Sorry.) But I guess (or at least hope) it won't be too long.
Phone apps will be no different. Just be sure to have a job during the trough of dissolutionment
...which, surprisingly, pretty much answers the OP's question. So long as you happen to know what dissolutionment is. (Precipitation?)
:-|
Some of these apps are just damn silly. Like the people who service my car spending big bucks on TV advertising to spruik their own app that accomplishes nothing that can't be done from any browser on the same phone. Someone really saddled up his brains before charging off there...
But I guess their app "developer" must be happy. Sigh...
The people with Google Glass are going to be survelling other people who have NOT consented in any way to being tracked.
If Google Glass ever becomes popular, I would not be too surprised if sales of cell phone jammers start to proliferate. In my location they would be redundant. I pay Telstra to fuck up the signal for me. :-(
Apologies for the solecism of replying to my own post, but just to clarify...
:-/
My facetious remark about nudist beaches might not work if you happen to be an AK-47-wielding member of the Taliban in your customary work attire. Whereas I, as a 50-something white male would probably fit in all too well, and for the worst reasons...
note that Skype may be encrypted but we don't know how well or who has a back door key
Nobody needs a back door key for Skype. If "they" know who they're looking for, chances are they will also know your Skype ID, so they only have to either buy a skype resolver (google that for yourself) or roll their own from an older (5.something) version of skype. That will give an IP address that should give some idea of a physical location.
Sure, Tor might be useful if you can cope with the latency, but (unless I'm completely off-beam) I can't see the P2P nature of Skype working very usefully with that. A vanilla SIP client might work though, provided that you aren't so silly as to attach a dial-in number to the service.
Of course, this is all fairly academic as far as i am concerned. Anyone listening in to my phone conversations is in for a very boring time. But if I had something to say to someone that must go no further, the safest way to do so is in person. At a nudist beach.
I am in a position to offer a perfect solution. Just move to rural Australia and move your phone contract to Telstra. They are so fucking incompetent, nobody will ever succeed in tracking you.
:-/
The only downside is that you won't be able to make phone calls either.
Seriously, don't use iOS for anything requiring real security.
I hate those FTFY posts, but in this case I believe it's called for:
Don't use a phone of any kind for anything requiring real security.
...customers don't take security seriously.
Disregarding your jibe about Microsoft (because it's irrelevant and I don't care about them anyway), Apple and just about everybody else is in a bind. They need their services to be available to the individuals who have signed up for them. But those individuals are often too overloaded to take the trouble to use strong passwords and/or multi-factor authentication when available. Even if they do, there's always the risk of interception. At the same time, the service provider has to offer a means to reset credentials when they have been lost or potentially compromised, but users need to do a lot of work to keep track of all the things they've said to them in order to facilitate this.
Sure, wallet systems can take some of the drudgery out of authentication, but these do nothing for you if the provider (or your computer/connection) is compromised.
I know how I feel when I have had to recover signon credentials. The process is tedious, and it pisses me off. And if the service provider makes it too hard for me, it pisses me off even more, even to the extent that I might take my business (FWIW) elsewhere.
I don't have much sympathy for any individual who gets bitten by a virus or phishing exercise, since that is largely a matter for education and common sense, but the service providers definitely need a better means of securing login credentials and user data.
The guy just looked at the drive and yelled "Enhance!" and all the data was back.
Only on the shows with microsoft product placement. Mostly they have to type:
...to get it to work. ;)
lkasdfshwbfkljsbdvkjhwdebvkjhbsdfvb
World's most powerful refrigerator magnets?
Well said. I've got lots of those, but my wife keeps bitching about broken fingernails from pulling them off the fridge. ;)
But lower RPM coupled with an IDE interface should eliminate ANY consideration on re-using the drives I'm referring to.
Don't count on it. Some of us geeks are total pack-rats. I still have an old Slackware box running as a mail server which still has an early motherboard and low-rpm IDE drives. The machine doesn't need to have a high spec to still be useful, and I still have lots of spare parts to keep it running for at least another 15 years if I feel like it.
That said, I think I have a foolproof destruction method: in an earlier life I used to be a blacksmith, and I still have my 500lb pneumatic hammer. A few good wallops from that mother will leave even the most sturdy HDD thinner than a bee's dick, and I defy anybody to extract any data from it.
Unfortunately this will break many business apps that are tied to ancient and specific version of IE. Will this cause more hours of work for web developers?
Too bad if it does. Their excuses wore out long ago.
Suffering?
The condition is called priapism. I've heard it's pretty uncomfortable.
There was a time when Everard was not an uncommon first name in the English-speaking world. But I never met anyone called Everard Wang.
Actually, few *aren't* easy to set up: which have you tried?
Agreed. Although I'm pretty comfortable with basic installers (or none at all for that matter), I remember being quite impressed with RedHat and Mandrake back in the late '90s, and I'm certain it hasn't got any harder in the years since. Mandrake (7.0?) in particular was probably intuitive and bombproof enough for just about any non-geek to install. I would have thought most of the more popular modern distros would well and truly have it together by now. (Though I read recently that Fedora's has taken a turn for the worse, but I hope that might be an exception.)
If Debian stable included a recent version of KDE and the latest NVidia drivers (since I need 310.32 for my card specifically), I'd switch to it immediately. I'm using Fedora now only because a) it includes KDE 4.10 and b) it's not Ubuntu.
You do realise there are other choices of distro, don't you? Your nvidia drivers should install on any system so long as you have the kernel headers. (I haven't needed them for a few years, since the free driver works for me.) I'm running KDE 4.10 on Slackware 14.0 and it's as sweet as I could ask for. Slack is what I started with back in '94, and despite having spent extended periods working with other just about all of the major distros (and even rolled my own LFS for a while), I keep coming back to it.
but why go public without just complaining to your agent/publisher/whatever first?
No, but they might (in my case, do) buy DRM books, strip the DRM and reprocess the publication through Sigil to make sure the formatting is as I like it before I transfer it to my reader device.