Well, you could cut him a little slack: FORTRAN will probably be just fine. And yes, of course I'm aware that anything that can't be done in FORTRAN can (and should) be done in Assembly. And, of course, that if it can't be done in Assembly then it isn't worth doing...:)
Simply put, to have any chance of privacy at all we need something which has at most limited influence from commercial develpers and must have no influence from Microsoft.
In other words, the best solution for privacy might be to use a cheapie burner phone for making calls, and use a proper computer for doing anything online. Yes, this probably sounds like I'm being a troglodyte, but given the current state of the technology it might still be the better solution than any kind of smartphone - no matter much we might wish otherwise.
Even if you don't care to (or can't*) root your phone, there's always InBrowser, so you don't have to share your browsing activity if you don't want to.
However, there is a caveat that much of the functionality of your android phone comes from being linked to a Google account, so in that sense you have to give up that measure of privacy, but I don't really see that that differs materially from any of the other platforms. However, of course, you don't have to use gmail. I use K9 as my mail client for four email accounts which I access via POP3 in preference to IMAP for the sake of convenience.
* I have an android Sony/Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro which was rooted until the last OS update from Telstra, but since then the damn thing has been impervious to any of my attempts to return the damn thing to its rooted state. If I ever manage to overcome this, I'll install Cyanogenmod and never touch another Telstra update ever again.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but I was under the impression that the Chinese had nobbled most of the world's supplies of the lanthanides used for those cool magnets in disk drives. I would have thought that might be a tougher one to crack.
Heh. The tape drives in the Proneme machines I worked with were notoriously unreliable, so I took the first opportunity to siphon my files off to other formats. My first machine (or rather my employer's) was a Burroughs B3700 back in the late '70s, and I still have FORTRAN, assembly and COBOL source code (plus a few now-useless binaries) dating from then.
i can't remember the last time I had a HDD fail i didn't get ample warning...
I can, since it happened to me not very long ago. The HDD in my last laptop (the MacBook to which I referred in an earlier post) died without warning just a few weeks ago. It was fine one day, then the next it was rattling and banging away, and refusing to let the machine boot.
Worse, it happened at a time when I had got lazy with my backups, so I lost quite a lot of stuff. A bit embarrassing, really, since I'm big on insisting other people take proper backups, so I've had to eat a generous helping of crow.
Plus, I have 3 computers total and only the desktop has a built in optical drive, next time I get a new desktop it won't.
My desktop machine will always have an optical drive for two reasons:
1. I am a troglogyte who still uses a CD player in a moderately high-quality sound system, and
2. It is still useful to burn DVDs of recorded TV shows, since HDD space on my PVR is far from inexhaustible. Also, that device has no other means of making a backup...
OK, a 3rd reason: My desktop machine will only be replaced in its entirety if (or when) component manufacturers abandon the ATX form factor...
My new laptop (a cheapie Asus box replacing a recently-defunct second-hand MacBook) has no optical drive, but other than the minor inconvenience of having to find a spare thumb drive for my ArchLinux install, I don't really care.
I'll second that. I'm currently using KDE4.7.3 with Arch, and once I found out how to use the desktop as a place to drop files as well as widgets (in other words, use it as a real desktop), it's quite workable.
I'm not much of a distro-hopper; I've used used Slackware since it was SLS, with occasional and brief forays into RedHat, Mandrake and Debian and Ubuntu. Arch is comfortable for me, since it's a lot like Slackware, but Mint has been getting a lot of discussion lately, so I'm interested in giving their desktop implementation a go.
I'm not entirely sure what direction the Gnome developers think they're heading, but wherever it is, they have lost me, at least until I can work out how the hell to use the latest versions.
I have been a big fan of Gnome since the '90s, and have put up with (or found workarounds for) occasional instances of asshattery where developers capriciously decided I didn't need this or that feature. Maybe I've just become stupid in my old age, but Gnome 3 has totally floored me. For now, at least, I just don't seem to be able to work out how to use it. I was much more productive with twm.
I never thought I would say this, but (after yet another brief flirtation with xfce and some of the other lightweight DEs) I have embraced KDE, which with a bit of tweaking seems to be working quite well for me this time.
Skype seems to be my *only* real issue with pulseaudio. But it is enough of an issue to be a total showstopper, so I keep PA more or less permanently disabled. Fortunately, ALSA is more than capable of handling the job by itself, but I would be much happier if my distro (Arch) hadn't built PA as a dependency into so many applications.
Good luck ever noticing the difference between that and the CD unless you have a $10k+ sound system.
As it happens, I do. But (FWIW) that amount seems to be a useful limit from the point of view of diminishing returns. I could mortgage my house, life and hypothetical first-born child for a more technologically cool sound setup, without ever realising much perceptible gain in sound quality.
Actually, I guess I'm a liar. A few months ago, I tried out a pair of Monitor Audio RX8 speakers in conjunction with components identical to mine, and the sound was gobsmackingly electrifying, but the upgrade idea didn't pass the wife acceptability test, so it was shitcanned.
OK, I know this is an oldish thread now, but I'll do as I said:
I did indeed end up buying that machine, and everything has worked out of the box with the exception of power management. So far, I haven't been able to suspend/resume properly. There are still a few rabbits to chase down holes there, so I haven't given up...
It's annoying when I want to give a company money for their content, and they don't let me do it.
Agreed. Back in the late '90s I conceived a desire to obtain the complete set of Max Headroom DVDs or whatever was available as downloads, but was frustrated by the copyright holder's (Warner, IIRC) refusal to distribute their material. Since the recordings were then otherwise unobtainable, I paid good money for bootleg (and crap quality NTSC) copies burned to DVD from a commercial Kansas TV station. I have absolutely no ethical qualms about this, since I would have been quite happy to pay a fair price for legitimate recordings.
No, your parent post was right. Some of us around here are still troglodytes who prefer to buy their music on CDs. It's still by far the better way to get decent sound reproduction than those crappy compressed files you might get from iTunes. Of course, there are some outlets who let you download and send you optical media, but I guess they're in the minority...
Seems to me that Firefox is now in the position that its forebear Mozilla was some 10 years ago. Mozilla in its default form was a monstrous behemoth of a thing, and I used to build my own browser-only versions that were a lot smaller, faster and more powerful than the Firefox (or Phoenix, as it was then known) versions.
Of course, I eventually went with the flow and accepted Firefox into my life as support for the earlier codebase fell away, and never regretted it. More recently, however, I have adopted Chromium for its smaller footprint on my screenspace.
However, I find this unnecessary dissing of Firefox a bit tiresome. It has served us well, and still does. If the user insists on keeping 150 tabs open at once, he has no right to complain that the thing is hogging memory. If he can't be bothered keeping track of what he's reading, why should anyone else? Why not simply bookmark tabs, close them and move on?
Maybe I'm just being a troglodite, but if I see a link to a PDF that I actually want to read, I am usually happy enough to save it to my desktop so I can file (or discard) it later.
Actually (with apologies for the solecism of replying to my own post), I might also mention that for the true nerd, there are some fine offerings for watches at the Unemployed Philosophers Guild.
[Unashamed plug because I happen to really like their products...;-)]
Not me, but I will point out that the fine submission (Personally, I'd rather have an IBM watch running Linux) is just a bit silly, since of course Android is Linux.
I sometimes wish that Slashdot would do away with the UID#. A low number always seems to be used (and abused) as some form of implicit authority and seniority, when in reality, of course, it suggests none. An old fool is still a fool.
Incidentally, I am happy to admit that although I might be an old fool, I have had a (long-abandoned) 4-digit UID that presumably should qualify me as a sensei Slashdot poster.
The legal niceties of this will only be settled after enough people have had their fingers burnt.
Seems to me that the only safe strategy is to never present your credit card information in any kind of trackable transaction. How far you want to carry this depends on your level of paranoia, but I just settle for using an "incognito" window in Chromium for any kind of financial transaction.
...the MacBook trackpad has always exactly been a big downside of Apple hardware, because of the absence of 2nd & 3rd buttons.
Although I can't bring myself to pay for another MacBook at the moment, I have found that Apple's trackpad is decidedly awesome. I do not need 2nd or 3rd buttons, since I am equipped with the standard number of fingers. The multi-touch thingy makes those extra buttons entirely redundant.
Slashdot Mirror
One tool to rule them all: Assembly.
Well, you could cut him a little slack: FORTRAN will probably be just fine. And yes, of course I'm aware that anything that can't be done in FORTRAN can (and should) be done in Assembly. And, of course, that if it can't be done in Assembly then it isn't worth doing... :)
Simply put, to have any chance of privacy at all we need something which has at most limited influence from commercial develpers and must have no influence from Microsoft.
In other words, the best solution for privacy might be to use a cheapie burner phone for making calls, and use a proper computer for doing anything online. Yes, this probably sounds like I'm being a troglodyte, but given the current state of the technology it might still be the better solution than any kind of smartphone
- no matter much we might wish otherwise.
Even if you don't care to (or can't*) root your phone, there's always InBrowser, so you don't have to share your browsing activity if you don't want to.
However, there is a caveat that much of the functionality of your android phone comes from being linked to a Google account, so in that sense you have to give up that measure of privacy, but I don't really see that that differs materially from any of the other platforms. However, of course, you don't have to use gmail. I use K9 as my mail client for four email accounts which I access via POP3 in preference to IMAP for the sake of convenience.
* I have an android Sony/Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro which was rooted until the last OS update from Telstra, but since then the damn thing has been impervious to any of my attempts to return the damn thing to its rooted state. If I ever manage to overcome this, I'll install Cyanogenmod and never touch another Telstra update ever again.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but I was under the impression that the Chinese had nobbled most of the world's supplies of the lanthanides used for those cool magnets in disk drives. I would have thought that might be a tougher one to crack.
The computer maker will put it there for us. Dell and HP know what is best! They will choose the holy OS for us all!
Asus likewise. Seems a dumbass idea to me, so the first thing I did with my new laptop was delete that partition, since I don't want Windows anyway.
* Yes, I know HDD prices recently went up about to about $250 for that 2TB drive, but they will go back down once the supplier issues go away.
I haven't been keeping track of prices, but as a matter of interest, what makes you imagine those supplier issues are likely to go away?
Heh. The tape drives in the Proneme machines I worked with were notoriously unreliable, so I took the first opportunity to siphon my files off to other formats. My first machine (or rather my employer's) was a Burroughs B3700 back in the late '70s, and I still have FORTRAN, assembly and COBOL source code (plus a few now-useless binaries) dating from then.
i can't remember the last time I had a HDD fail i didn't get ample warning...
I can, since it happened to me not very long ago. The HDD in my last laptop (the MacBook to which I referred in an earlier post) died without warning just a few weeks ago. It was fine one day, then the next it was rattling and banging away, and refusing to let the machine boot.
Worse, it happened at a time when I had got lazy with my backups, so I lost quite a lot of stuff. A bit embarrassing, really, since I'm big on insisting other people take proper backups, so I've had to eat a generous helping of crow.
Plus, I have 3 computers total and only the desktop has a built in optical drive, next time I get a new desktop it won't.
My desktop machine will always have an optical drive for two reasons:
1. I am a troglogyte who still uses a CD player in a moderately high-quality sound system, and
2. It is still useful to burn DVDs of recorded TV shows, since HDD space on my PVR is far from inexhaustible. Also, that device has no other means of making a backup...
OK, a 3rd reason: My desktop machine will only be replaced in its entirety if (or when) component manufacturers abandon the ATX form factor...
My new laptop (a cheapie Asus box replacing a recently-defunct second-hand MacBook) has no optical drive, but other than the minor inconvenience of having to find a spare thumb drive for my ArchLinux install, I don't really care.
I'll second that. I'm currently using KDE4.7.3 with Arch, and once I found out how to use the desktop as a place to drop files as well as widgets (in other words, use it as a real desktop), it's quite workable.
I'm not much of a distro-hopper; I've used used Slackware since it was SLS, with occasional and brief forays into RedHat, Mandrake and Debian and Ubuntu. Arch is comfortable for me, since it's a lot like Slackware, but Mint has been getting a lot of discussion lately, so I'm interested in giving their desktop implementation a go.
I'm not entirely sure what direction the Gnome developers think they're heading, but wherever it is, they have lost me, at least until I can work out how the hell to use the latest versions.
I have been a big fan of Gnome since the '90s, and have put up with (or found workarounds for) occasional instances of asshattery where developers capriciously decided I didn't need this or that feature. Maybe I've just become stupid in my old age, but Gnome 3 has totally floored me. For now, at least, I just don't seem to be able to work out how to use it. I was much more productive with twm.
I never thought I would say this, but (after yet another brief flirtation with xfce and some of the other lightweight DEs) I have embraced KDE, which with a bit of tweaking seems to be working quite well for me this time.
Skype seems to be my *only* real issue with pulseaudio. But it is enough of an issue to be a total showstopper, so I keep PA more or less permanently disabled. Fortunately, ALSA is more than capable of handling the job by itself, but I would be much happier if my distro (Arch) hadn't built PA as a dependency into so many applications.
Good luck ever noticing the difference between that and the CD unless you have a $10k+ sound system.
As it happens, I do. But (FWIW) that amount seems to be a useful limit from the point of view of diminishing returns. I could mortgage my house, life and hypothetical first-born child for a more technologically cool sound setup, without ever realising much perceptible gain in sound quality.
Actually, I guess I'm a liar. A few months ago, I tried out a pair of Monitor Audio RX8 speakers in conjunction with components identical to mine, and the sound was gobsmackingly electrifying, but the upgrade idea didn't pass the wife acceptability test, so it was shitcanned.
OK, I know this is an oldish thread now, but I'll do as I said:
I did indeed end up buying that machine, and everything has worked out of the box with the exception of power management. So far, I haven't been able to suspend/resume properly. There are still a few rabbits to chase down holes there, so I haven't given up...
It's annoying when I want to give a company money for their content, and they don't let me do it.
Agreed. Back in the late '90s I conceived a desire to obtain the complete set of Max Headroom DVDs or whatever was available as downloads, but was frustrated by the copyright holder's (Warner, IIRC) refusal to distribute their material. Since the recordings were then otherwise unobtainable, I paid good money for bootleg (and crap quality NTSC) copies burned to DVD from a commercial Kansas TV station. I have absolutely no ethical qualms about this, since I would have been quite happy to pay a fair price for legitimate recordings.
No, your parent post was right. Some of us around here are still troglodytes who prefer to buy their music on CDs. It's still by far the better way to get decent sound reproduction than those crappy compressed files you might get from iTunes. Of course, there are some outlets who let you download and send you optical media, but I guess they're in the minority...
My daughter went through 4 phones (Samsung Star, Dell Streak, iPhone 3GS, Samsung i5500)
Sounds like your daughter is a spoilt brat. Sorry. :-|
Seems to me that Firefox is now in the position that its forebear Mozilla was some 10 years ago. Mozilla in its default form was a monstrous behemoth of a thing, and I used to build my own browser-only versions that were a lot smaller, faster and more powerful than the Firefox (or Phoenix, as it was then known) versions.
Of course, I eventually went with the flow and accepted Firefox into my life as support for the earlier codebase fell away, and never regretted it. More recently, however, I have adopted Chromium for its smaller footprint on my screenspace.
However, I find this unnecessary dissing of Firefox a bit tiresome. It has served us well, and still does. If the user insists on keeping 150 tabs open at once, he has no right to complain that the thing is hogging memory. If he can't be bothered keeping track of what he's reading, why should anyone else? Why not simply bookmark tabs, close them and move on?
What's wrong with 1 in 3?
Maybe I'm just being a troglodite, but if I see a link to a PDF that I actually want to read, I am usually happy enough to save it to my desktop so I can file (or discard) it later.
Actually (with apologies for the solecism of replying to my own post), I might also mention that for the true nerd, there are some fine offerings for watches at the Unemployed Philosophers Guild.
;-)]
[Unashamed plug because I happen to really like their products...
any pointers, folks?
Not me, but I will point out that the fine submission (Personally, I'd rather have an IBM watch running Linux) is just a bit silly, since of course Android is Linux.
Sigh...
I sometimes wish that Slashdot would do away with the UID#. A low number always seems to be used (and abused) as some form of implicit authority and seniority, when in reality, of course, it suggests none. An old fool is still a fool.
Incidentally, I am happy to admit that although I might be an old fool, I have had a (long-abandoned) 4-digit UID that presumably should qualify me as a sensei Slashdot poster.
The legal niceties of this will only be settled after enough people have had their fingers burnt.
Seems to me that the only safe strategy is to never present your credit card information in any kind of trackable transaction. How far you want to carry this depends on your level of paranoia, but I just settle for using an "incognito" window in Chromium for any kind of financial transaction.
Although I can't bring myself to pay for another MacBook at the moment, I have found that Apple's trackpad is decidedly awesome. I do not need 2nd or 3rd buttons, since I am equipped with the standard number of fingers. The multi-touch thingy makes those extra buttons entirely redundant.