Yeah, I'm going to have to go with gmail on this one. I used to be against web clients in general, but eventually I caved in and went with it. It's been so much of a hassle running my own mail clients, what with having to shuffle my mail around between hosts al tlhe time.
I certainly wish my ISP or one of my mail services would offer IMAP, but I don't see how that's ever going to happen. Bastards...
If you want to do something quick and dirty without bothering to code in some robust password mechanism (let's say you want to use the same old password every time, hard coded as you say), why not creat a function to generate the static password using deterministic methods? People with access to the source code wil lbe able to spot what you've done, but at least they won't know the password without actually running the code. You could try to obfuscate the function as much as possible and store the generated password in dynamically allocated memory. This way someone who merely disassembles the code can't read the password plainly.
Back then there was a need to prove that the United States was superior to all other nations (especially the Soviet Union), especially in technology.
After landing on the moon and whatnot, that has been accomplished. Yes, the United States really is the most fantastic country in all of history. The Soviet Union gone, the rest of the world struggling to be like us. We made sure our kids knew it. They know it. Space program? We already proved that we are superior, and we have to keep it that way by setting the muslim world straight.
I notice that young people these days still have our core interests at heart. This time the results are different.
The results might be surprising to some readers. While it's generally believed that small startups are better at building efficient solutions, the leaders of the MIT Technology Review are all sites built by Internet giants Yahoo! Answers, MSN Live Q&A and Amazon Askville all ranked above the competing sites.
This comes as no suprise whatsoever. A Q&A site's success depends directly on how many people use it. The more people there are, the more questions and answers there are going to be. The larger the group, the more likely you will come up with unique and intelligent information. These internet giants already have millions of users to draw from, and many of them are the sort of people who are well prepared to participate in a site like that.
Smaller companies face a bigger challenge in attracting users, and without users the site flounders.
I'm reminded of the time I was an aide in my high school's computer lab. Usually the lab was used for drafting and design classes, so you'd expect the kids to have some experience with computers (if you've got to learn AutoCAD, you already know some basic functions).
So one day the teacher in charge asks me to help one student that is trying to log in. He can't figure out what the problem is, and the teacher doesn't want to fix it until he knows what is going on.
I go over there, and the kid just sits there, staring at the login screen. He asks me what to do, so I just read the screen to him; "Enter your username. Enter your password. Click OK." Pretty soon a window pops up that says "incorrect password."
So this kid isn't using the right password, and he can't figure it out even though it says so right on the screen. After I see the message, I try to inform him: "It looks like you don't know your password." The kid hears this and gets angry, "Yes, that IS my password." Actually, it's not his password--the proof was right on the screen. Upon hearing his complaint, I quickly rephrase my statement: "Oh, I'm sorry... the computer doesn't know your password." That makes sense to him, and I go have the password reset by the administrator.
True, lots of people are not "technologically literate" or whatever, but I think for a lot of people the problem is a little deeper than the mere fact that a computer was involved.
When I want a system that's great for coders and tweakers, I use Linux on my desktop. I don't want that experience on my phone - I want a device that JUST WORKS NOW and lets me run the apps I want to run (devices that are closed to open-source or freeware developers fail it.)
I though I read somewhere that PalmOS was being turned into an API for linux, so that new systems would be linux under the hood.
Is anyone left standing? Hey Linux users: see the problem yet? How much longer are you going to foster the illusion that you can get something for nothing?
I've watched the development of GNU/Linux over the years. Yours is a viable criticism, but I think it's a little bit exaggerated to claim that these problems are definite show stoppers that are killing FOSS itself.
For starters, the idea of getting "something for nothing" is not an illusion. I've been using FOSS without paying for many years, and I've noticed too that development is more advanced and rapid now than it ever was before. For me it's a stark reality. I'm getting something for nothing, to be sure, but I'm not the only person in this equation. There are in fact lots of people getting something, and lots of people giving something for something in return. It depends on the somethings--there are a lot of somethings in the world. If you suppose only two somethings exist in the world (software and money), then certainly your model is the most important, but fortunately that's not the case...
How can you sue a company for what is an obvious misuse of their product? You're not supposed to THROW the controller! That's like sueing baseball bat manufacturers because you can let go of the bat while swinging and hit something/someone with it.
Perhaps Nintendo was better off not including any wrist strap. They might base the lawsuit on the claim that the strap provided an illusion of safety but failed. Seems like a silly thing to sue over, though...
In social terms, the individual has always been in control of everything in society. A lot of people are not fully aware of this because it requires a prespective that is rarely generally taught in society (probably because it has its dangers), but generally speaking anything can be changed if individuals just decided it. Of course, they wouldn't all coordinate their behavior by default, so making large scale changes requires massive organization. This phenomenon was primarily taken advantage of and served as the basis for establishing workers movements (such as socialist revolutions) back in the day. That kind of history proves that they knew about this even back then, so Time has not hit on anything new really.
The internet is a fancy new technology that seems novel and unusual to a lot of people, but I think from a sociological perspective this is business as usual. Hardly anything noteworthy...
I agree that Kasparov's knowledge of the game of chess won't help him in politics. But Kasparov has a great deal of experience in self promotion, which is a large part of getting elected. How many chess masters has anyone heard of (aside from Bobby Fisher) before Kasparov? He's used some of his fame in recent years promoting himself in politics as an opponent to Putin. It's also possible that the energy, discipline, and self-drivenness of anyone that's been the at the top of a field might help him in politics.
Well said! I haven't been able to look it from that perspective, but when you put it that way his political career isn't so far fetched.
I can calculate the possibilities as a chess player and I have to be honest and say that our chances are not high.
Don't get me wrong... chess is one of my hobbies too. I also enjoy digging into politics, and I feel like I have enough experience in computer science to be able to identify and analyze systems. First, I can tell you that the game of chess and politics are two very different systems. So different, in fact, that being good at one will not ever help you with the other.
Chess is in fact a simple, deterministic game that is very limited and loses complexity over time. We've written software that can play chess excellently for a very long time. As far as I know, no computer systems have ever been elected to office.
I can tell you right off the bat that Kasparov's edge in politics is not his chess ability--it's his fame. That will attract more attention than anything else. Also, there is the public notion that anyone who is good at chess is some kind of genius, something he can use to his advantage as well. He keeps bringing up the fact that being so good at chess makes him smart enough to do all these things. People don't have trouble believing something like that, so maybe he is a good politician after all.
I too have been concerned by this issue for a long time. I'm not armed with much technical knowledge, but why WLAN?
Maybe I'm missing some major thing here, but a wireless ethernet card is still essentially an ethernet card. You probably have to control it in additional ways in order to locate and establish a connection, but once those procedures are done it should be business as usual, right?
Linux hardware support is amazing now compared to when I used it around the turn of the millennium. With linux (and most free unixes), the network card was probably the one thing you could depend on--there was support for nearly everything. It was important that the support existed because most systems were useless without networking (*nix without a network is a fish out of water). You could get by if your video card or sound card weren't supported. Hell, even my printer didn't work back then, but networking was a show stopper.
I bought a new laptop this past summer, and everything about it was nicely and automatically supported out of the box EXCEPT the wireless card. I had to compromise by using ndiswrapper, which is a great module unless the driver you have doesn't match your processor architecture (I had to downgrade from an amd64 to an i686 system to use the Windows driver).
I am really hoping (keeping my fingers crossed) that wireless support will sink in more in the next year or three. I don't want to see any of that firmware crap, either... I want zereo configuration.
Something which is used extensively gets more flaws discovered than something that is used less. Get this in your heads.
That's assuming that the flaws exist in the first place. It's true that incredibly popular pieces of software a subject to more scrutiny and exploitation, but how much can go wrong is a characteristic unique to the design of the software itself, something that would be the same regardless of how many people used it. It would be rather obtuse to entertain the idea that all pieces of software somehow contain the same number of security flaws, and that's to say nothing about their magnitude.
If the term of the copyright has expired, I don't actually think any kind of license can be enforced anymore. The summary implied that the copyright expired on the works, but is that not true?
The problem with that analogy is that she bought more fuel than she would ever use. With iTunes, she did purchase a couple albums, but it was within reasonable bounds. Also, the fuel is expendable, but the songs are not. She had the idea that she would be able to keep the songs forever and play them as much as she wanted, something the DRM defeats unless one day the DRM itself is defeated. I might also mention that fuel has better resale value. I don't even know if you can resell iTunes songs.
Furthermore, the fact that the DRM'd files don't play on linux is an imposed constraint contrived by Apple. It's not natural. It's a natural characteristic of different kinds of automotive engines to accept only the kind of fuel they were designed for, but it's trivial for a mainstream OS to have software that could decode and play a mainstream audio format.
50 years from now we may no longer have Apple or iTunes. We may not even have any of the machines that used to run this software. As soon as either the hardware or software is lost, the data becomes useless. In our lifetimes, it would still be possible to recreate the software environment (ie find old copies of Windows/MacOS and run them on a virtual machine), but I don't think most people are inclined to run virtuals machines for any reason let alone just to play their music. Also, I'm sure there are some additional complexities that I'm not aware of.
As a lot of other users have mentioned, DRM is probably a big factor when it comes to drops in iTunes sales.
For example, my girlfriend has an iPod. She bought it a while back because it was the sort of thing she always wanted, and she really liked it a lot. It's probably one of her favorite gadgets, and she keeps her favorite music on that. Judging by how much she liked it, I thought that perhaps she would show some brand loyalty to Apple, right? Wrong. After seeing me use linux for a while, she asked if I would switch her laptop over. I made sure she understood clearly the benefits and drawbacks of using linux, and she still wanted to go forward. I thought the migration would be doomed when she started having problems playing her DRM'd music, but rather than blaming linux (like I think most people would), she instead blamed Apple. She's actually quite bitter for ever have paid for iTunes music.
Witnessing her reaction, I can't help but think that other people are going through the same experience. Maybe they didn't switch to linux, but perhaps they bought a new music player or are trying to migrate to some other platform. Once they realize that their data is locked away from them and that their software was designed to betray them at some point, they are no longer happy consumers.
He DOESN'T recommend and disk for archival storage
Actually, it says in the article that he recommends CD-R and DVD+R. He even mentions a specific brand (Taiyo Yuden). You will notice that his two recommendations are missing from his list of items he cautions against. That list does not imply that he does not recommend this type of media.
I'm not sure why this is is modded flamebait. This is something that is on a lot of our minds right now. I can't say I'm very pleased that this game didn't receive the port that most of us wanted.
Yes... where is the economy in giving birth to children? Where is the economy in giving a present to loved ones? Where is the economy in giving education to minors? Where is the economy in giving directions to a stranger in your town? Where is the economy in giving playing cards to someone who is sitting with you at a table? Where is the economy in giving advise or stating opinions on Slashdot?
Is that what you meant? The reasons people have for doing things like giving childbirth and sharing with the poor are complicated and hard to explain. Morals come in to simplify the matter--to say "you should do this just because it's good and it doesn't accomplish anything." Actually, it does accomplish things, and it helps the community to function as a whole. They might not make much sense from an extremely narrow and selfish kind of economy, but for better or worse you are a product of society that society made to preserve itself.
As far as I know, Grace is responsible for a lot of things beside COBOL, but one thing that stands out in my mind is that I was told during a university course that she wrote the first assembler. I'm not really sure about it, though; the wikipedia article doesn't seem to mention assembly language.
why spend time playing through an old game when you have newer ones to dabble with?
You'd be surprised. After a lifetime of gaming, I find myself logging more time in on older titles than I ever did before. Certain games have great replay no matter how old they are.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I'm going to have to go with gmail on this one. I used to be against web clients in general, but eventually I caved in and went with it. It's been so much of a hassle running my own mail clients, what with having to shuffle my mail around between hosts al tlhe time.
I certainly wish my ISP or one of my mail services would offer IMAP, but I don't see how that's ever going to happen. Bastards...
I defy you to name a single hereditary, undetectable health problem in cattle that is the slightest bit dangerous.
Man, you really have us there, naming the undetectable. I mean, how would we know it's there? I guess the joke is on us.
If you want to do something quick and dirty without bothering to code in some robust password mechanism (let's say you want to use the same old password every time, hard coded as you say), why not creat a function to generate the static password using deterministic methods? People with access to the source code wil lbe able to spot what you've done, but at least they won't know the password without actually running the code. You could try to obfuscate the function as much as possible and store the generated password in dynamically allocated memory. This way someone who merely disassembles the code can't read the password plainly.
Back then there was a need to prove that the United States was superior to all other nations (especially the Soviet Union), especially in technology.
After landing on the moon and whatnot, that has been accomplished. Yes, the United States really is the most fantastic country in all of history. The Soviet Union gone, the rest of the world struggling to be like us. We made sure our kids knew it. They know it. Space program? We already proved that we are superior, and we have to keep it that way by setting the muslim world straight.
I notice that young people these days still have our core interests at heart. This time the results are different.
The results might be surprising to some readers. While it's generally believed that small startups are better at building efficient solutions, the leaders of the MIT Technology Review are all sites built by Internet giants Yahoo! Answers, MSN Live Q&A and Amazon Askville all ranked above the competing sites.
This comes as no suprise whatsoever. A Q&A site's success depends directly on how many people use it. The more people there are, the more questions and answers there are going to be. The larger the group, the more likely you will come up with unique and intelligent information. These internet giants already have millions of users to draw from, and many of them are the sort of people who are well prepared to participate in a site like that.
Smaller companies face a bigger challenge in attracting users, and without users the site flounders.
Yeah, I liked the way they showed good old Gnome. That was kind of neat.
I'm reminded of the time I was an aide in my high school's computer lab. Usually the lab was used for drafting and design classes, so you'd expect the kids to have some experience with computers (if you've got to learn AutoCAD, you already know some basic functions).
So one day the teacher in charge asks me to help one student that is trying to log in. He can't figure out what the problem is, and the teacher doesn't want to fix it until he knows what is going on.
I go over there, and the kid just sits there, staring at the login screen. He asks me what to do, so I just read the screen to him; "Enter your username. Enter your password. Click OK." Pretty soon a window pops up that says "incorrect password."
So this kid isn't using the right password, and he can't figure it out even though it says so right on the screen. After I see the message, I try to inform him: "It looks like you don't know your password." The kid hears this and gets angry, "Yes, that IS my password." Actually, it's not his password--the proof was right on the screen. Upon hearing his complaint, I quickly rephrase my statement: "Oh, I'm sorry... the computer doesn't know your password." That makes sense to him, and I go have the password reset by the administrator.
True, lots of people are not "technologically literate" or whatever, but I think for a lot of people the problem is a little deeper than the mere fact that a computer was involved.
When I want a system that's great for coders and tweakers, I use Linux on my desktop. I don't want that experience on my phone - I want a device that JUST WORKS NOW and lets me run the apps I want to run (devices that are closed to open-source or freeware developers fail it.)
I though I read somewhere that PalmOS was being turned into an API for linux, so that new systems would be linux under the hood.
Is anyone left standing? Hey Linux users: see the problem yet? How much longer are you going to foster the illusion that you can get something for nothing?
I've watched the development of GNU/Linux over the years. Yours is a viable criticism, but I think it's a little bit exaggerated to claim that these problems are definite show stoppers that are killing FOSS itself.
For starters, the idea of getting "something for nothing" is not an illusion. I've been using FOSS without paying for many years, and I've noticed too that development is more advanced and rapid now than it ever was before. For me it's a stark reality. I'm getting something for nothing, to be sure, but I'm not the only person in this equation. There are in fact lots of people getting something, and lots of people giving something for something in return. It depends on the somethings--there are a lot of somethings in the world. If you suppose only two somethings exist in the world (software and money), then certainly your model is the most important, but fortunately that's not the case...
How can you sue a company for what is an obvious misuse of their product? You're not supposed to THROW the controller! That's like sueing baseball bat manufacturers because you can let go of the bat while swinging and hit something/someone with it.
Perhaps Nintendo was better off not including any wrist strap. They might base the lawsuit on the claim that the strap provided an illusion of safety but failed. Seems like a silly thing to sue over, though...
In social terms, the individual has always been in control of everything in society. A lot of people are not fully aware of this because it requires a prespective that is rarely generally taught in society (probably because it has its dangers), but generally speaking anything can be changed if individuals just decided it. Of course, they wouldn't all coordinate their behavior by default, so making large scale changes requires massive organization. This phenomenon was primarily taken advantage of and served as the basis for establishing workers movements (such as socialist revolutions) back in the day. That kind of history proves that they knew about this even back then, so Time has not hit on anything new really.
The internet is a fancy new technology that seems novel and unusual to a lot of people, but I think from a sociological perspective this is business as usual. Hardly anything noteworthy...
I agree that Kasparov's knowledge of the game of chess won't help him in politics. But Kasparov has a great deal of experience in self promotion, which is a large part of getting elected. How many chess masters has anyone heard of (aside from Bobby Fisher) before Kasparov? He's used some of his fame in recent years promoting himself in politics as an opponent to Putin. It's also possible that the energy, discipline, and self-drivenness of anyone that's been the at the top of a field might help him in politics.
Well said! I haven't been able to look it from that perspective, but when you put it that way his political career isn't so far fetched.
I can calculate the possibilities as a chess player and I have to be honest and say that our chances are not high.
Don't get me wrong... chess is one of my hobbies too. I also enjoy digging into politics, and I feel like I have enough experience in computer science to be able to identify and analyze systems. First, I can tell you that the game of chess and politics are two very different systems. So different, in fact, that being good at one will not ever help you with the other.
Chess is in fact a simple, deterministic game that is very limited and loses complexity over time. We've written software that can play chess excellently for a very long time. As far as I know, no computer systems have ever been elected to office.
I can tell you right off the bat that Kasparov's edge in politics is not his chess ability--it's his fame. That will attract more attention than anything else. Also, there is the public notion that anyone who is good at chess is some kind of genius, something he can use to his advantage as well. He keeps bringing up the fact that being so good at chess makes him smart enough to do all these things. People don't have trouble believing something like that, so maybe he is a good politician after all.
Great! Now make Gaim do this so I can send files.
I too have been concerned by this issue for a long time. I'm not armed with much technical knowledge, but why WLAN?
Maybe I'm missing some major thing here, but a wireless ethernet card is still essentially an ethernet card. You probably have to control it in additional ways in order to locate and establish a connection, but once those procedures are done it should be business as usual, right?
Linux hardware support is amazing now compared to when I used it around the turn of the millennium. With linux (and most free unixes), the network card was probably the one thing you could depend on--there was support for nearly everything. It was important that the support existed because most systems were useless without networking (*nix without a network is a fish out of water). You could get by if your video card or sound card weren't supported. Hell, even my printer didn't work back then, but networking was a show stopper.
I bought a new laptop this past summer, and everything about it was nicely and automatically supported out of the box EXCEPT the wireless card. I had to compromise by using ndiswrapper, which is a great module unless the driver you have doesn't match your processor architecture (I had to downgrade from an amd64 to an i686 system to use the Windows driver).
I am really hoping (keeping my fingers crossed) that wireless support will sink in more in the next year or three. I don't want to see any of that firmware crap, either... I want zereo configuration.
Something which is used extensively gets more flaws discovered than something that is used less. Get this in your heads.
That's assuming that the flaws exist in the first place. It's true that incredibly popular pieces of software a subject to more scrutiny and exploitation, but how much can go wrong is a characteristic unique to the design of the software itself, something that would be the same regardless of how many people used it. It would be rather obtuse to entertain the idea that all pieces of software somehow contain the same number of security flaws, and that's to say nothing about their magnitude.
If the term of the copyright has expired, I don't actually think any kind of license can be enforced anymore. The summary implied that the copyright expired on the works, but is that not true?
The problem with that analogy is that she bought more fuel than she would ever use. With iTunes, she did purchase a couple albums, but it was within reasonable bounds. Also, the fuel is expendable, but the songs are not. She had the idea that she would be able to keep the songs forever and play them as much as she wanted, something the DRM defeats unless one day the DRM itself is defeated. I might also mention that fuel has better resale value. I don't even know if you can resell iTunes songs.
Furthermore, the fact that the DRM'd files don't play on linux is an imposed constraint contrived by Apple. It's not natural. It's a natural characteristic of different kinds of automotive engines to accept only the kind of fuel they were designed for, but it's trivial for a mainstream OS to have software that could decode and play a mainstream audio format.
50 years from now we may no longer have Apple or iTunes. We may not even have any of the machines that used to run this software. As soon as either the hardware or software is lost, the data becomes useless. In our lifetimes, it would still be possible to recreate the software environment (ie find old copies of Windows/MacOS and run them on a virtual machine), but I don't think most people are inclined to run virtuals machines for any reason let alone just to play their music. Also, I'm sure there are some additional complexities that I'm not aware of.
As a lot of other users have mentioned, DRM is probably a big factor when it comes to drops in iTunes sales.
For example, my girlfriend has an iPod. She bought it a while back because it was the sort of thing she always wanted, and she really liked it a lot. It's probably one of her favorite gadgets, and she keeps her favorite music on that. Judging by how much she liked it, I thought that perhaps she would show some brand loyalty to Apple, right? Wrong. After seeing me use linux for a while, she asked if I would switch her laptop over. I made sure she understood clearly the benefits and drawbacks of using linux, and she still wanted to go forward. I thought the migration would be doomed when she started having problems playing her DRM'd music, but rather than blaming linux (like I think most people would), she instead blamed Apple. She's actually quite bitter for ever have paid for iTunes music.
Witnessing her reaction, I can't help but think that other people are going through the same experience. Maybe they didn't switch to linux, but perhaps they bought a new music player or are trying to migrate to some other platform. Once they realize that their data is locked away from them and that their software was designed to betray them at some point, they are no longer happy consumers.
He DOESN'T recommend and disk for archival storage
Actually, it says in the article that he recommends CD-R and DVD+R. He even mentions a specific brand (Taiyo Yuden). You will notice that his two recommendations are missing from his list of items he cautions against. That list does not imply that he does not recommend this type of media.
I'm not sure why this is is modded flamebait. This is something that is on a lot of our minds right now. I can't say I'm very pleased that this game didn't receive the port that most of us wanted.
Yes... where is the economy in giving birth to children? Where is the economy in giving a present to loved ones? Where is the economy in giving education to minors? Where is the economy in giving directions to a stranger in your town? Where is the economy in giving playing cards to someone who is sitting with you at a table? Where is the economy in giving advise or stating opinions on Slashdot?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
Is that what you meant? The reasons people have for doing things like giving childbirth and sharing with the poor are complicated and hard to explain. Morals come in to simplify the matter--to say "you should do this just because it's good and it doesn't accomplish anything." Actually, it does accomplish things, and it helps the community to function as a whole. They might not make much sense from an extremely narrow and selfish kind of economy, but for better or worse you are a product of society that society made to preserve itself.
I'm waiting for posts about Twilight Princess to start. I can't wait to see what kind of flame wars could arise from such an occasion. :D
As far as I know, Grace is responsible for a lot of things beside COBOL, but one thing that stands out in my mind is that I was told during a university course that she wrote the first assembler. I'm not really sure about it, though; the wikipedia article doesn't seem to mention assembly language.
why spend time playing through an old game when you have newer ones to dabble with?
You'd be surprised. After a lifetime of gaming, I find myself logging more time in on older titles than I ever did before. Certain games have great replay no matter how old they are.