The whole premise that some cultures deserve a technology is asinine. Those markets who show an interest will have them. As their utility increases so will the interest in those able markets. Period.
that the FLOSS community does (mostly) realize this. But I also suspect that good interface design is difficult. I used to feel more like you seem to, but after years of watching very smart ideas come together with very mixed results I'm beginning to think that there's a layer to sophisticated design that is very unique. Apple seems to consistently shine here and for whatever reason talented designers don't seem to be as keen on joining OSS efforts. Maybe programmers are more political then designers?
I've been looking into this soft of thing on the related topic of replication which slowly found it's way onto my home system as a great backup solution (in that case PeerSYNC). When you think about it backup really *is* replication, and ideally real-time replication. Under Linux there are a couple of great places to start (rsync may be a good engine, but certainly not the start point unless you want a polling or on demand solution) namely inotify and on older systems dnotify. The idea being to mirror the file system (using whatever means suit) to [device] as immediately as it updates in order to avoid data loss.
The thing Apple seems to have accomplished is making smart backup more then just a smart backup engine including the client in the design, which really is pretty revolutionary.
[BLANK] consumers tend to be indifferent. Political apathy aside, there's a limit to how well the average person should need to understand every tool. After all, I think it's important that some people take up other interests. Some people become doctors and I don't think I should have to know brain surgery myself. I don't fix my car. I can't fly a plane. I can't keep wood for the duration of an adult movie shoot. But I don't think everyone should have to. Can we please stop with the juvenile 'I know technology so everyone should' mind-set? There's a value in variety that should not be overlooked.
So why does 2007 require 6 times as much processing power?
I won't try to argue that the system requirements for anything Microsoft is doing is making sense to me. But I'd guess that in some cases system requirements are derived from reasonable market assumptions based on common hardware (or minimal hardware you'd like to support). Likewise, I'd guess that some bloated software is designed based on reasonable assumptions for the target platform (sometimes right, sometimes wrong). Today we have 1 or 2 GB systems with accelerated graphics and multi-core CPU's. As a developer do you design to take advantage of that or more frugally, to manage resources? I'd guess that you'd have more trouble in the market offering (comparatively) too few features then somewhat too many (although Microsoft seems to have discovered the upper limit).
again, it's features. Your copy of Office 2007 can do a lot more then your original word processor. Same can be said (hesitantly) for Aero and the host of other new features in Microsoft's latest release. Some users fit into the 'less is more' category (at least some of the time) but I'd argue more users like being able to do more even if in some ways that means they have less. Otherwise we'd be running thin clients (smarter) and everyone would be happy.
I think the bloat argument presupposes that engineers and developers are fools, which isn't the (often) the case and pushes the market demands out of the conversation. And everyone's new favorite example (Vista) is really only a good example of Redmonds strangely disconnected view of their own marketplace, which isn't entirely new.
I feel like the bloat argument has been being over-used lately. Yes, computers are more powerful and doing similar tasks. But they also tend to be more user friendly and over all the user experience is much nicer. They also have to cater to a much broader audience then they used to.
So who is kind of a redundant question. As for the over the top fps competitive players or people with disposable income come to mind. I used to team/clan and the players willing to drop more money on their systems got better performance at key moments (like tight combat with lots of effects/explosions). Of course I err on the frugal side myself, but I never gave much thought to anyone over-specing their system.
other people call usability. Not all of us want to use the CLI all the time and some innovations take advantage of the extra power and provide something both sophisticated and useful.
Centos is great and definitely helps drive Redhat on to enterprise. We run mainly Centos on our production systems with Redhat licenses on all the big gear. If Centos wasn't an option we'd run whatever the next most stable free os was and probably get comfortable with *that* then start paying them licenses for the big gear. Centos helps fill a void that keeps Redhat squarely on the radar for business. If we didn't have this option we wouldn't use Redhat at all.
the gee-wiz factor with the Netflix service left me luke-warm. I'll give them credit for shifting the paradigm, but sometimes you just want to browse movies and pick up something THEN, you know, when you're in the mood for it. The in-store exchange kind of gives you the best of both worlds and I've had nothing but good luck with the queue/delivery. And I don't think *either* have my best interests at heart. Just one that works better for me until digital downloads are a reality (sans goofy protection).
If a megabyte is counted as 1024 kilobytes how's your math working? Still 8 bits to a byte right? I mean I thought a byte was a byte, are you telling me a hard disk follows different conventions? Because last time I checked binary units were pretty stable, not a lot of 'wiggle room' in the interpretation.
Okay, I might concede point 1 depending how robust their server management tools are. But point 2 is stupid. While the quality of hardware/drivers argument might hold up with commodity PC, *if* you're going to compare server hardware to server hardware I think you're moving into more even footing. Sun, HP and even Dell's mid-range and up is solidly built and adequately tested to provide reliability on par or even surpassing anything cooked up in Cupertino.
As for your relatively irrelevant point about the problems your admin is having 1) why isn't that server headless anyway 2) and why would he be running what should be considered a beta server distro outside of testing/sandbox?
Won't attack X break Freenet's anonymity?
Short answer: Probably yes.
Long answer:
Freenet does not offer true anonymity in the way that the Mixmaster and cypherpunk remailers do. Most of the non-trivial attacks (advanced traffic analysis, compromising any given majority of the nodes, etc.) that these were designed to counter would probably be successful in identifying someone making requests on Freenet.
On Freenet, whatever you do, your identity is still revealed to the first Freenet Node you talk to, and even if you limit yourself to talk only to trusted nodes (a feature that will be implemented in the future), they will have to talk to the rest of the network at some time or another. The anonymity that Freenet offers is really just obscurity in the fact that it is hard to prove that your node wasn't proxying the request for or insert of data on behalf of somebody else (who might also just have been proxying it).
The problem is that the only way that you can offer true anonymity is if the client can directly control the routing of data, and thus encrypt it with a series of keys of the nodes it will pass through (a la Mixmaster). Freenet's dynamic routing cannot offer that, so to attain true anonymity you have to send the message through an external network of anonymous remailers first (a future SMTP->Freenet bridge would make this possible). There are also plans for doing mixmaster-style injection of requests over the "standard" protocol, however this probably won't be implemented before version 1.0, which is still some way off.
That's a bad thing? Frankly I expect to see a lot of these communities come and go. The only thing I find a little alarming is the hype that surrounds them. If the open source community wants to jump in, great and if not, great. Frankly I don't see the difference. Maybe after the hype has died down some of these sites will have hit on something substantial that can be wrapped into the kind of utility generally provided by the developer community, but until then all I see is a series of social and commercial experiments that frankly aren't that gripping helping people find something on the net.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole premise that some cultures deserve a technology is asinine. Those markets who show an interest will have them. As their utility increases so will the interest in those able markets. Period.
But your comparison is a little off. Is someone sold me a book with a fishy modem and a giant electronic lock strapped to it.
that the FLOSS community does (mostly) realize this. But I also suspect that good interface design is difficult. I used to feel more like you seem to, but after years of watching very smart ideas come together with very mixed results I'm beginning to think that there's a layer to sophisticated design that is very unique. Apple seems to consistently shine here and for whatever reason talented designers don't seem to be as keen on joining OSS efforts. Maybe programmers are more political then designers?
I've been looking into this soft of thing on the related topic of replication which slowly found it's way onto my home system as a great backup solution (in that case PeerSYNC). When you think about it backup really *is* replication, and ideally real-time replication. Under Linux there are a couple of great places to start (rsync may be a good engine, but certainly not the start point unless you want a polling or on demand solution) namely inotify and on older systems dnotify. The idea being to mirror the file system (using whatever means suit) to [device] as immediately as it updates in order to avoid data loss.
The thing Apple seems to have accomplished is making smart backup more then just a smart backup engine including the client in the design, which really is pretty revolutionary.
[BLANK] consumers tend to be indifferent. Political apathy aside, there's a limit to how well the average person should need to understand every tool. After all, I think it's important that some people take up other interests. Some people become doctors and I don't think I should have to know brain surgery myself. I don't fix my car. I can't fly a plane. I can't keep wood for the duration of an adult movie shoot. But I don't think everyone should have to. Can we please stop with the juvenile 'I know technology so everyone should' mind-set? There's a value in variety that should not be overlooked.
It was the first and last time I donated to them. Since it's EFF or donating direct to charities or causes.
18 is also the age of your last year of your traditional basic education. The drinking age seem more arbitrary to me (which I'm well over).
again, it's features. Your copy of Office 2007 can do a lot more then your original word processor. Same can be said (hesitantly) for Aero and the host of other new features in Microsoft's latest release. Some users fit into the 'less is more' category (at least some of the time) but I'd argue more users like being able to do more even if in some ways that means they have less. Otherwise we'd be running thin clients (smarter) and everyone would be happy.
I think the bloat argument presupposes that engineers and developers are fools, which isn't the (often) the case and pushes the market demands out of the conversation. And everyone's new favorite example (Vista) is really only a good example of Redmonds strangely disconnected view of their own marketplace, which isn't entirely new.
I feel like the bloat argument has been being over-used lately. Yes, computers are more powerful and doing similar tasks. But they also tend to be more user friendly and over all the user experience is much nicer. They also have to cater to a much broader audience then they used to.
So who is kind of a redundant question. As for the over the top fps competitive players or people with disposable income come to mind. I used to team/clan and the players willing to drop more money on their systems got better performance at key moments (like tight combat with lots of effects/explosions). Of course I err on the frugal side myself, but I never gave much thought to anyone over-specing their system.
other people call usability. Not all of us want to use the CLI all the time and some innovations take advantage of the extra power and provide something both sophisticated and useful.
Centos is great and definitely helps drive Redhat on to enterprise. We run mainly Centos on our production systems with Redhat licenses on all the big gear. If Centos wasn't an option we'd run whatever the next most stable free os was and probably get comfortable with *that* then start paying them licenses for the big gear. Centos helps fill a void that keeps Redhat squarely on the radar for business. If we didn't have this option we wouldn't use Redhat at all.
the gee-wiz factor with the Netflix service left me luke-warm. I'll give them credit for shifting the paradigm, but sometimes you just want to browse movies and pick up something THEN, you know, when you're in the mood for it. The in-store exchange kind of gives you the best of both worlds and I've had nothing but good luck with the queue/delivery. And I don't think *either* have my best interests at heart. Just one that works better for me until digital downloads are a reality (sans goofy protection).
Now you're making me feel like junk food. :(
Why not. I'm a clean enough energy source.
If a megabyte is counted as 1024 kilobytes how's your math working? Still 8 bits to a byte right? I mean I thought a byte was a byte, are you telling me a hard disk follows different conventions? Because last time I checked binary units were pretty stable, not a lot of 'wiggle room' in the interpretation.
Ah the ports, a fine example of the GNU community hording BSD code and not giving back...
beer. But to each their own reverend, to each their own.
Using a hash would work, but the number of problems with the list far out weight any good reason to have a sensible debate on the top.
Okay, I might concede point 1 depending how robust their server management tools are. But point 2 is stupid. While the quality of hardware/drivers argument might hold up with commodity PC, *if* you're going to compare server hardware to server hardware I think you're moving into more even footing. Sun, HP and even Dell's mid-range and up is solidly built and adequately tested to provide reliability on par or even surpassing anything cooked up in Cupertino.
As for your relatively irrelevant point about the problems your admin is having 1) why isn't that server headless anyway 2) and why would he be running what should be considered a beta server distro outside of testing/sandbox?
Next you'll be telling me my backstage pass WON'T get me laid...the horror!
I imagine Koch would end up in a pickle if they stayed on with every buyer, beyond the point of sale, and failed to report crimes too.
Won't attack X break Freenet's anonymity?
Short answer: Probably yes.
Long answer:
Freenet does not offer true anonymity in the way that the Mixmaster and cypherpunk remailers do. Most of the non-trivial attacks (advanced traffic analysis, compromising any given majority of the nodes, etc.) that these were designed to counter would probably be successful in identifying someone making requests on Freenet.
On Freenet, whatever you do, your identity is still revealed to the first Freenet Node you talk to, and even if you limit yourself to talk only to trusted nodes (a feature that will be implemented in the future), they will have to talk to the rest of the network at some time or another. The anonymity that Freenet offers is really just obscurity in the fact that it is hard to prove that your node wasn't proxying the request for or insert of data on behalf of somebody else (who might also just have been proxying it).
The problem is that the only way that you can offer true anonymity is if the client can directly control the routing of data, and thus encrypt it with a series of keys of the nodes it will pass through (a la Mixmaster). Freenet's dynamic routing cannot offer that, so to attain true anonymity you have to send the message through an external network of anonymous remailers first (a future SMTP->Freenet bridge would make this possible). There are also plans for doing mixmaster-style injection of requests over the "standard" protocol, however this probably won't be implemented before version 1.0, which is still some way off.
That's a bad thing? Frankly I expect to see a lot of these communities come and go. The only thing I find a little alarming is the hype that surrounds them. If the open source community wants to jump in, great and if not, great. Frankly I don't see the difference. Maybe after the hype has died down some of these sites will have hit on something substantial that can be wrapped into the kind of utility generally provided by the developer community, but until then all I see is a series of social and commercial experiments that frankly aren't that gripping helping people find something on the net.