Try an IBM Stealth TrackPoint Keyboard. You can keep your fingers on the keyboard. It's great for keyboard-unfriendly environments like MacOS, Windows, web browsers, and certain Linux programs. It's also compact and has a nice feel to it, and if you want, you can still use a regular mouse in addition to it (say, for games). There are also PS/2 versions.
The thought of having my computer taken over by something that controls the keyboard and screen through DRI/DirectX and that has an Internet-based marketing company at the other hand isn't exactly pleasant.
At least with a web browser, I still have some control...
Yes, indeed, if you move into a mountain cabin in Montana and live off rabbits you hunt yourself, you may be able to avoid invasions of your privacy. However, the rest of us would like to participate in social life, we just want to be able to do it in a way that protects us against unscrupulous businesses and criminals.
(Of course, in this particular case, I think underage drinking restrictions should just be abolished altogether. It's the parents' problem when and how much their children drink.)
News Corp. and Walt Disney Co. stepped up their high-profile campaign Wednesday to enlist Washington's help in stopping Internet thievery,
With reporting like that, how can there even be a rational discussion? I mean, no law-abiding citizen could be opposed to "stopping thievery", right?
Since companies like Disney are succeeding in recasting the debate in a form in which the any use of their content that they don't approve of is called "thievery" and "piracy", the debate is already lost.
The real thiefs, of course, are companies like Disney, which have built business empires on reusing public-domain content while at the same time increasingly violating fair use and public domain provisions of copyright, and even paying off legislators to give them special privileges.
Something like "But the notification that Earth will be destroyed for a hyperspace bypass has been available at your local planning office on Alpha Centauri for a decade. If you can't be bothered to get involved in your local affairs, you will just have to live with the consequences."
The US seems to have a really Vogon attitude towards legal notifications. In most countries other than the US, the only notification that is considered acceptable is something that involves independent proof of delivery to the recipient: registered mail, courier, police, etc. In the US, in many cases, it seems to be enough to drop it into a mailbox. Really weird.
It seems to me that the case where only the E-mail address of an accused is available, someone needs to do their homework and track them down physically. Yes, it's a lot of work, and yes, that's unfortunate. But the alternative of establishing a principle that lets people serve legal documents through E-mail just seems much worse.
This is a problem with using outdated technology like driver's licenses and magnetic strips in place of a national ID card. Businesses will use something, anything, in place of a national ID. But using IDs that were never designed for that purpose is exactly what threatens our privacy.
For example, a driver's license is intended to be read by police; of course, the police may get access to personal information that a bar owner shouldn't have access to. For age verification, the bar owner does not need your name or your social security number.
If we had a real, well-designed national ID system, then you could control who gets what information. Either through SmartCard functionality or cryptography, for example, you could ensure that people only get the information they need and use it only in the way the should. It's not trivial to design a good national ID system, but it's the only real choice we have if we value our privacy.
I find it rather irresponsible when people participate in open source projects without a full understanding of their legal obligations to their employers or universities. So, please do your homework. Better yet, get permission from your employer in writing, or at least notify them formally and in writing that you intend to do something on your own time and that they should either object or forever hold their peace. If you fail to take the right precautions and contaminate open source software with non-free code, you aren't just hurting yourself, you are dragging down a lot of people with you.
As for the "revolutionary ideas on NFA's", I would suggest reading up on the last two decades of research in the field. No, a computer science textbook won't even scratch the surface. Optimizing different aspects of finite automata has a lot of different applications, and there has been an enormous amount of work on it.
Are you claiming it _isn't_ a denial of service if you "check if its been fixed" every five minutes?
In short, yes, that's what I'm claiming; see below why.
Once you find out that what you are doing is crashing someone elses system, you should make a good faith effort to stop doing it, or you are commiting a DoS attack.
If I go to some web site that's important to me and it stops responding, of course, I'm going to try again every few minutes to contact it. If the site crashes again and again because of that, from my point of view, it is just down. I would never even know that my string crashed it.
Now, if I deliberately picked a string and used it to crash some site, that might not be particularly nice. But there are so many other innocent and legitimate reasons why I might continue to crash your site that way that even raising the possibility that it might be criminal DoS is chilling and unjustified.
Denial of service attacks are when someone sends 500 requests a second to your host from a dozen different machines. That's something you can't easily do accidentally, and it's something the target can't do anything about given our current (broken) Internet infrastructure. But just about anything else (even sending a lot of requests to one site from one client) is something that can easily happen for legitimate reasons, and it is something that the web site's operator can deal with. It is foolish to criminalize that kind of behavior.
Re:Relay-testing
on
ORBZ Shuts Down
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· Score: 2, Insightful
So, by your reasoning, if my (non-IE) web browser causes your server to spin out of control, I'm supposed to stop using my web browser? And if I'm foolish enough to attempt to get to your web page every now and then, assuming that you might actually to fix your server at some point, then I'm supposed to be responsible for criminal DoS?
That makes no sense. If your software is broken, you need to fix your software, and going into an infinite loop from an occasional malformed request is a bug in your software.
Hey, you're right. That is pretty weird, because choosing the Linux configuration for the 530 appears in a completely different place (try it--the choice is actually kind of funny).
In any case, when we bought our machines, it wasn't a question of web design. We pushed this pretty far, and the official response was "we don't have RedHat Linux on that platform yet". You could only get Linux on the low-end machines at the time, which is all I claimed in my original posting (as well as the fact that we ended up getting charged for Windows licenses we didn't want or need).
As for Microsoft vs. Dell, I think it's pretty clear that the fact that companies like Dell can now ship Linux is because Microsoft lets them, whereas previously they effectively ruled that out through their contracts. And Microsoft only lets them because they are afraid of anti-trust enforcement. It's not a "grand conspiracy", it's just the way things work in this business, and the way they have worked for the last decade.
I used to own an Amiga 1000. It was a great machine: much better graphics than any of the competition, and a much better OS than Atari, Macintosh, or IBM. And the whole thing was cheaper than the competition.
Today, I don't see the "value proposition". I mean, that motherboard is more expensive than a similar PC motherboard, Amiga has no advantage in terms of graphics anymore, and there is plenty of really nice software. So, why would I want one?
Well, it's good to hear that Dell has been shipping Linux on at least some workstations to some people. But we were having problems and our sales rep didn't manage to get us Dell workstations running Linux.
And even today, not all workstations have it. Try going to their workstation page and configure a Precision 340 (one of the two workstations they offer to large customers); I don't see an option for Linux on that machine. In fact, the only Linux workstation I see is a horribly overpriced Xeon-based Precision 530.
Just listen to your little conspiracy theory - Microsoft put Dell up to doing something like that? Why would Dell waste all this money for Microsoft?
I don't see whether Dell wasted any significant amount of money by claiming to ship Linux but not actually doing that much about it.
In any case, "put them up" doesn't mean some vast conspiracy. In the past, Microsoft has simply negotiated contracts that make it essentially impossible for companies like Dell to ship non-Microsoft operating systems (that's a fact--read the court transcripts). All Microsoft needed to do was to loosen their contracts just enough so that Dell would be able to ship Linux on some machines, but not in a way that seriously affected Microsoft's sales. That's not some conspiracy theory, it's just hard-nosed business, the kind Microsoft engages in.
The good news is that a lot of stuff I write about UI is starting to have an impact on the Gnome and KDE people. There's a lot more appreciation for the value of good UI than there used to be in the Linux community
Ah, yes, and Spolsky's widely published notion that it would be good for the sun to rise in the morning also causes the sun to rise.
I guess we can look forward to software on Linux that is just as good as Windows. But, wait, why am I not running Windows, then? Maybe, just maybe, people are running Linux because, unlike Windows, its UI doesn't suck?
But due to chicken-and-egg problems, running Windows apps is probably nonnegotiable for most people,
Wow, what a profound insight. Didn't some court come to the same conclusion? Except, they called the "chicken-and-egg problem" by its real names: "network effects" and "a monopoly".
I don't see anything interesting this guy has to say. He is just repeating the Windows party line, and he is developing the same dull, uninspired Windows desktop software as thousands of other commercial Windows developers. This is not the kind of advice the Linux community needs, unless, of course, you want Linux to become merely a free version of Windows, with the same dull applications on top of it.
If you should never throw away things and start from scratch, why the hell did Microsoft reimplement old technology (NT is basically VMS and UNIX)? And why does his company produce yet another content management and bug tracking system instead of just building on one of the open source ones?
Mandrake should make sure that CDs are in stores at the same time as their official on-line release (or even slightly before). That would give people much more of an incentive to go out and buy them.
Mandrake might also create a high-speed download site for "club members", and maybe start a "club membership" at around $30.
As far as I can tell, Dell has never made much of an effort to sell Linux on their machines.
I have bought several Dell machines through work. You know: "workstations" for engineering and scientific applications. If that isn't where you would run Linux, I don't know where you would. Dell didn't sell Linux pre-installed on those machines. Our sales rep promised to credit us for Windows and ship the machines without an OS, but they ended up shipping with Windows anyway and charging us for it as well. Going through the hassle of sending the stuff back and refusing payment would have cost more than to just pay the Microsoft tax.
If Dell has sold Linux on their PCs at all, it must have been on some low-end or mid-range machines that engineers probably wouldn't want anyway.
As far as I can tell, Dell's Linux efforts were a publicity stunt of no real value. Perhaps Microsoft put them up to it so that they could point to some supposed "competition".
Ok, we stop using Microsoft software. That will require a significant investment in terms of getting new software, possibly new hardware if the switch takes us to another OS, a significant expenditure at least in time if not loads of money to get new people trained, [...]
Oh, nonsense. You don't have to start a revolution or throw out everything. Do things gradually. Outlook and IE change big time every major release. So, just go back to another E-mail client when the next Outlook upgrade comes out. A few months later, you can standardize on another web browser. The software and retraining costs associated with that are likely to be less than if you stay with Microsoft. Also, a lot of business functions can be moved out of MS Office into web-based solutions, making them both easier to administer, easier to train for, and cheaper.
If you pick cross-platform software, once you have moved all your applications to non-Microsoft products, you can then move off the platform entirely and even give your hardware a new lease on life.
From a security point of view, even if the new software you run were no better than Microsoft's software, at the very least it's different and susceptible to fewer viruses.
IT has gotten a free ride up to now because whenever people have said "but switching would be too expensive/risky", management has had to believe it. I think that's changing. Other parts of a company have to undergo painful transitions in order to save money in these times, and IT can as well.
If you use Windows, Outlook, and InternetExplorer, use of the Internet is a big security risk, since those programs are unusally susceptible to viruses and rogue ActiveX components.
However, the solution to that problem is much simpler: just switch to a better mail client and browser. Even better, switch to a different operating system. That also saves on support costs, and it keeps the employees happier.
Yes, that's indeed the way it is. If you don't understand the difference between a fire marshall making such rules and a co-exhibitor complaining, perhaps you weren't paying attention in first grade--in the playground, where people learn such stuff.
I don't hate Microsoft "mindlessly", I dislike them for good reasons--I have used their products for years and have dealt with Microsoft as a business as well. It wouldn't bother me that their software sucks if I had a choice (and I freely admit that some people may legitimately think that Microsoft software is "wonderful"). But what makes Microsoft a problem is that people just can't get away from it. I can choose not to use MacOS. I can choose not to use Linux. I can choose not to use OS/2. I can choose not to use Solaris. But, for practical purposes, just about anybody working in the computer industry ends up having to pay Microsoft money and ends up having to deal with their software. Now, they are moving into Internet access and gadgets, so I have to deal with them even in my home (or become a Luddite). And that's what I dislike so intensely about Microsoft.
I don't mind you eating some of the shit that Slashdot puts out, but don't try shoving it in the mouths of other people.
Funny--that's just how I feel about Microsoft marketing.
Who are you to judge who is getting a poor deal, without knowledge of even what they use?
Oh, stop whining. Imagine what the world is like for people who don't like the junk Microsoft puts out: their software comes bundled with most computer products, they put billboards and advertising everywhere (including Linux journals), and their minions appear at every professional event. If you don't want to hear about alternative opinions, just stop reading Slashdot. It's people who don't like the junk that Microsoft puts out who have no escape: Microsoft has become as omnipresent and intrusive as Big Brother.
Of course, the GPL isn't very useful for end-user software aimed at non-programmers. I mean, the whole point of the GPL is to enable the user to modify the source and share their improvements with others if they like. If the end-users don't program, the GPL isn't going to be very meaningful to them.
But Gordon doesn't seem to understand the purpose of the GPL. He seems to think it's some mastermind plot to undermine Microsoft and commercial software vendors. He seems to think that the main aspiration of Linux is to become just like Windows and used by just the same class of people. But what the GPL really is is a way of giving users the tools to build the environments they find useful; that the software ends up costing nothing in many cases is just a side-effect.
And the fact that Gordon doesn't get it shows in TheKompany's products. Kapital just isn't competitive with Quicken or Money in terms of functionality or support by financial institutions, but it also fails miserably as a flexible, end-user programmable UNIX-style component.
Maybe Linux will become a mainstream desktop platform, and maybe eventually, there will be a significant market for Windows/MacOS style applications on it. But I think that's a long shot, and until that happens, I'll just get the real thing in the few cases where I just want a consumer-grade piece of software.
Slashdot Mirror
Try an IBM Stealth TrackPoint Keyboard. You can keep your fingers on the keyboard. It's great for keyboard-unfriendly environments like MacOS, Windows, web browsers, and certain Linux programs. It's also compact and has a nice feel to it, and if you want, you can still use a regular mouse in addition to it (say, for games). There are also PS/2 versions.
At least with a web browser, I still have some control...
(Of course, in this particular case, I think underage drinking restrictions should just be abolished altogether. It's the parents' problem when and how much their children drink.)
With reporting like that, how can there even be a rational discussion? I mean, no law-abiding citizen could be opposed to "stopping thievery", right?
Since companies like Disney are succeeding in recasting the debate in a form in which the any use of their content that they don't approve of is called "thievery" and "piracy", the debate is already lost.
The real thiefs, of course, are companies like Disney, which have built business empires on reusing public-domain content while at the same time increasingly violating fair use and public domain provisions of copyright, and even paying off legislators to give them special privileges.
The US seems to have a really Vogon attitude towards legal notifications. In most countries other than the US, the only notification that is considered acceptable is something that involves independent proof of delivery to the recipient: registered mail, courier, police, etc. In the US, in many cases, it seems to be enough to drop it into a mailbox. Really weird.
It seems to me that the case where only the E-mail address of an accused is available, someone needs to do their homework and track them down physically. Yes, it's a lot of work, and yes, that's unfortunate. But the alternative of establishing a principle that lets people serve legal documents through E-mail just seems much worse.
For example, a driver's license is intended to be read by police; of course, the police may get access to personal information that a bar owner shouldn't have access to. For age verification, the bar owner does not need your name or your social security number.
If we had a real, well-designed national ID system, then you could control who gets what information. Either through SmartCard functionality or cryptography, for example, you could ensure that people only get the information they need and use it only in the way the should. It's not trivial to design a good national ID system, but it's the only real choice we have if we value our privacy.
As for the "revolutionary ideas on NFA's", I would suggest reading up on the last two decades of research in the field. No, a computer science textbook won't even scratch the surface. Optimizing different aspects of finite automata has a lot of different applications, and there has been an enormous amount of work on it.
In short, yes, that's what I'm claiming; see below why.
Once you find out that what you are doing is crashing someone elses system, you should make a good faith effort to stop doing it, or you are commiting a DoS attack.
If I go to some web site that's important to me and it stops responding, of course, I'm going to try again every few minutes to contact it. If the site crashes again and again because of that, from my point of view, it is just down. I would never even know that my string crashed it.
Now, if I deliberately picked a string and used it to crash some site, that might not be particularly nice. But there are so many other innocent and legitimate reasons why I might continue to crash your site that way that even raising the possibility that it might be criminal DoS is chilling and unjustified.
Denial of service attacks are when someone sends 500 requests a second to your host from a dozen different machines. That's something you can't easily do accidentally, and it's something the target can't do anything about given our current (broken) Internet infrastructure. But just about anything else (even sending a lot of requests to one site from one client) is something that can easily happen for legitimate reasons, and it is something that the web site's operator can deal with. It is foolish to criminalize that kind of behavior.
That makes no sense. If your software is broken, you need to fix your software, and going into an infinite loop from an occasional malformed request is a bug in your software.
In any case, when we bought our machines, it wasn't a question of web design. We pushed this pretty far, and the official response was "we don't have RedHat Linux on that platform yet". You could only get Linux on the low-end machines at the time, which is all I claimed in my original posting (as well as the fact that we ended up getting charged for Windows licenses we didn't want or need).
As for Microsoft vs. Dell, I think it's pretty clear that the fact that companies like Dell can now ship Linux is because Microsoft lets them, whereas previously they effectively ruled that out through their contracts. And Microsoft only lets them because they are afraid of anti-trust enforcement. It's not a "grand conspiracy", it's just the way things work in this business, and the way they have worked for the last decade.
Today, I don't see the "value proposition". I mean, that motherboard is more expensive than a similar PC motherboard, Amiga has no advantage in terms of graphics anymore, and there is plenty of really nice software. So, why would I want one?
Quartz is pushing the performance limits even of a G4. I would think it would be no fun on an emulated PPC.
And even today, not all workstations have it. Try going to their workstation page and configure a Precision 340 (one of the two workstations they offer to large customers); I don't see an option for Linux on that machine. In fact, the only Linux workstation I see is a horribly overpriced Xeon-based Precision 530.
I don't see whether Dell wasted any significant amount of money by claiming to ship Linux but not actually doing that much about it.
In any case, "put them up" doesn't mean some vast conspiracy. In the past, Microsoft has simply negotiated contracts that make it essentially impossible for companies like Dell to ship non-Microsoft operating systems (that's a fact--read the court transcripts). All Microsoft needed to do was to loosen their contracts just enough so that Dell would be able to ship Linux on some machines, but not in a way that seriously affected Microsoft's sales. That's not some conspiracy theory, it's just hard-nosed business, the kind Microsoft engages in.
Ah, yes, and Spolsky's widely published notion that it would be good for the sun to rise in the morning also causes the sun to rise.
I guess we can look forward to software on Linux that is just as good as Windows. But, wait, why am I not running Windows, then? Maybe, just maybe, people are running Linux because, unlike Windows, its UI doesn't suck?
But due to chicken-and-egg problems, running Windows apps is probably nonnegotiable for most people,
Wow, what a profound insight. Didn't some court come to the same conclusion? Except, they called the "chicken-and-egg problem" by its real names: "network effects" and "a monopoly".
I don't see anything interesting this guy has to say. He is just repeating the Windows party line, and he is developing the same dull, uninspired Windows desktop software as thousands of other commercial Windows developers. This is not the kind of advice the Linux community needs, unless, of course, you want Linux to become merely a free version of Windows, with the same dull applications on top of it.
If you should never throw away things and start from scratch, why the hell did Microsoft reimplement old technology (NT is basically VMS and UNIX)? And why does his company produce yet another content management and bug tracking system instead of just building on one of the open source ones?
Mandrake might also create a high-speed download site for "club members", and maybe start a "club membership" at around $30.
I have bought several Dell machines through work. You know: "workstations" for engineering and scientific applications. If that isn't where you would run Linux, I don't know where you would. Dell didn't sell Linux pre-installed on those machines. Our sales rep promised to credit us for Windows and ship the machines without an OS, but they ended up shipping with Windows anyway and charging us for it as well. Going through the hassle of sending the stuff back and refusing payment would have cost more than to just pay the Microsoft tax.
If Dell has sold Linux on their PCs at all, it must have been on some low-end or mid-range machines that engineers probably wouldn't want anyway.
As far as I can tell, Dell's Linux efforts were a publicity stunt of no real value. Perhaps Microsoft put them up to it so that they could point to some supposed "competition".
Probably the Solaris box was trying to be the firewall.
Oh, nonsense. You don't have to start a revolution or throw out everything. Do things gradually. Outlook and IE change big time every major release. So, just go back to another E-mail client when the next Outlook upgrade comes out. A few months later, you can standardize on another web browser. The software and retraining costs associated with that are likely to be less than if you stay with Microsoft. Also, a lot of business functions can be moved out of MS Office into web-based solutions, making them both easier to administer, easier to train for, and cheaper.
If you pick cross-platform software, once you have moved all your applications to non-Microsoft products, you can then move off the platform entirely and even give your hardware a new lease on life.
From a security point of view, even if the new software you run were no better than Microsoft's software, at the very least it's different and susceptible to fewer viruses.
IT has gotten a free ride up to now because whenever people have said "but switching would be too expensive/risky", management has had to believe it. I think that's changing. Other parts of a company have to undergo painful transitions in order to save money in these times, and IT can as well.
However, the solution to that problem is much simpler: just switch to a better mail client and browser. Even better, switch to a different operating system. That also saves on support costs, and it keeps the employees happier.
Yes, that's indeed the way it is. If you don't understand the difference between a fire marshall making such rules and a co-exhibitor complaining, perhaps you weren't paying attention in first grade--in the playground, where people learn such stuff.
I don't hate Microsoft "mindlessly", I dislike them for good reasons--I have used their products for years and have dealt with Microsoft as a business as well. It wouldn't bother me that their software sucks if I had a choice (and I freely admit that some people may legitimately think that Microsoft software is "wonderful"). But what makes Microsoft a problem is that people just can't get away from it. I can choose not to use MacOS. I can choose not to use Linux. I can choose not to use OS/2. I can choose not to use Solaris. But, for practical purposes, just about anybody working in the computer industry ends up having to pay Microsoft money and ends up having to deal with their software. Now, they are moving into Internet access and gadgets, so I have to deal with them even in my home (or become a Luddite). And that's what I dislike so intensely about Microsoft.
Funny--that's just how I feel about Microsoft marketing.
Who are you to judge who is getting a poor deal, without knowledge of even what they use?
Oh, stop whining. Imagine what the world is like for people who don't like the junk Microsoft puts out: their software comes bundled with most computer products, they put billboards and advertising everywhere (including Linux journals), and their minions appear at every professional event. If you don't want to hear about alternative opinions, just stop reading Slashdot. It's people who don't like the junk that Microsoft puts out who have no escape: Microsoft has become as omnipresent and intrusive as Big Brother.
But Gordon doesn't seem to understand the purpose of the GPL. He seems to think it's some mastermind plot to undermine Microsoft and commercial software vendors. He seems to think that the main aspiration of Linux is to become just like Windows and used by just the same class of people. But what the GPL really is is a way of giving users the tools to build the environments they find useful; that the software ends up costing nothing in many cases is just a side-effect.
And the fact that Gordon doesn't get it shows in TheKompany's products. Kapital just isn't competitive with Quicken or Money in terms of functionality or support by financial institutions, but it also fails miserably as a flexible, end-user programmable UNIX-style component.
Maybe Linux will become a mainstream desktop platform, and maybe eventually, there will be a significant market for Windows/MacOS style applications on it. But I think that's a long shot, and until that happens, I'll just get the real thing in the few cases where I just want a consumer-grade piece of software.