While absolutely true and one of the fundamental problems of OpenID, its not really much different without OpenID, since most webpages will happily mail you the password, which means your mail provider has access to all your authentication data anyway.
As I already said: Nothing would stop a page from providing classic username/password in addition or have a third party service that manages your keys if you like.
My point is simply that a secure token would be *more* convenient and *more* secure for most normal usage patterns where you happen to use the same device most of the time. And even if you don't, a flash drive or a web-service could easily fix that.
I disagree, a XO-1 used to cost almost half of what a Eee sold for, it also has plenty of unique features (rotatable screen, sunlight readability, etc.). The OLPC doesn't completly blow the competition out of the water, but it still has plenty of features that no one else has. Now of course the whole uniqueness of the OLPC never really mattered since the OLPC never entered the marketplace in the first place. G1G1 never was competitive in terms of price and was time limited (fixed now) and never made it to Europe (still not fixed).
It made a slow machine even slower and it certainly doesn't encourage practical computer skills.
The slow part is very true. If you launch a good old X11 app via Terminal they will start pretty much instantly, while even a hello-world Sugar app will take near to 10 seconds to start. However I don't buy the 'computer skill' part, Sugar really is not that different, in fact I see most of it to be pretty much the same, the Journal is analog to your average desktop search, an Activity is pretty much just an application, you have copy&paste and plenty of other stuff usual stuff. Having windows launched always in fullscreen really doesn't change much.
Where I think Sugar broke is in backward compatibility, not running Microsoft Windows, ok thats fine, since Linux is rather mature today and free, but Sugar doesn't run Linux application either, it requires special coded Sugar applications. Sugar doesn't have a way to handle normal Linux apps or even normal filesystems, its all their own little version of how the world should be without any way to interoperate with other systems or applications aside from the Terminal Activity. And thats just fatal considering that most of Sugar is just not quite finished and some of it might never be (i.e. no IDE for actually developing new Sugar application is in Sugar).
I don't really see a problem with the XO-2 techspec, I mean thats the goal for the future, its not the device that should be out next month and the XO-1 already comes quite close to those goals anyway.
When the authentication server is your home server, you can pretty well guard against fishing.
Kind of, but most of the public would never do that and be wide open to phising. Authentification should be secure by default, not by fixing it with ducttape yourself on your home box.
Uglier than an email address? Not inherently, no. You're just used to seeing one and not the other.
An email address at least is 'pure', since much of the dispatching is done in the MX record, hidden away from the user, with OpenID you often get lengthy ugly URLs, because provider just slap it into onto their service. Which brings me to another point, OpenID should have used email instead of URLs. Your email account today is already pretty much the same as OpenID tries to do, thanks to those "password reminder" emails almost all services will send out to give you your password or a new password. They should have worked on a way to standardize the syntax of those reminder mails so that they could be handled automatically.
It wouldn't, which it why it would be a fallback or alternative, not the main way to do authentication.
A Physical token? for junk sites? I don't think so.
Its not a physical token, its file you store somewhere on your computer/mobile/netbook. You already do a very similar thing already with coookie.txt, does that bother you too?
Nothing would stop a page from providing classic username/password in addition or have a third party service that manages your keys if you like. They point is that most of the time I log in a webpage from the very same set of machines and it just idiotic to make up random password for each side and having to manually carry them from one machine to the next, when a single secure token would be much more secure and easier to use.
Authentication on the web is kind of messy and annoying, but OpenID is so too. It just doesn't feel right to be pushed from one server to the next to do authentication, since it leaves the door wide open to phising attacks. Also using URL for authentication just looks ugly.
I personally would prefer something that works on the client side and not on some other third server, i.e. store a GPG public key in your browser and have the browser use that to automatically sign blogposts or whatever to authenticate you. To stop spam one could have third parties sign the GPG key to create a web of trust kind of thing.
So you would have a reusable secure token you use for authentication on all pages, instead of having to come up with new passwords all the time. And it would also keep the third party out of the picture, since the token remains only on your client and never leaves it.
The problem with electricity is that how much a device actually uses is pretty well hidden from the user, so most people just don't know it and don't factor it into their buying decisions, so good old free market can't really work. Another thing is that many electronic devices use much more then they have to, stand-by mode is a classic case, its easy to not waste much power on it, yet many devices still do. A little regulation that nocks the makers into the right direction can be a good thing sometimes.
So Israel is supposed to sit there and take the rocket and mortar attacks and watch their civilians with no connection to the military die?
No, but any action they do better be one that doesn't cause more human death. This whole mess needs police work and negotiation, not the military. Fighting evil by doing even larger evil just doesn't make you look much like a good guy.
Sure, the Wii Sports bundle may help move a few more Wiis,
A few? I would say Wii Sport is moving almost *ALL* Wiis, its by far the best show case title for the Wii and aside from Wii Fit and a tiny few other titles there really is very little else that archived similar mainstream media coverage, which along with word of mouth is one of the big reason the Wii is selling like crazy. I am purposefully ignoring all those Zelda, Metroid and Mario games, since if they would have any significant influence on Wii sales, the Gamecube would surely sold a hell of a lot better then it did, since it had all them, tons more, very similar technical capabilities and cost less then the Wii.
takes up less space than a Subversion checkout for the same project
Only if you actually *want* the whole project. If on the other side you just want a single file or subdirectory, say in a large gigabyte size repo with graphics, textures and stuff, you have kind of a problem with git. A git clone always downloads the whole thing, svn on the other side allows you do download just what you want, so the download with SVN can easily become a few orders of magnitude smaller then with git.
git could really use a way to do shallow clones so that only those pieces get downloaded that are actually needed, git-clone --depth is a start, but not quite enough.
Now I haven't read all of that thread, buts its hardly about "seriously lacking in modern development tools". Most of the issues that get mentioned are rather minor and some simply the result of "Linux does it different then Windows". Now that said, Linux certainly has a bunch of problems, its fullscreen and mouse-grab handling isn't pretty and there are a bunch of features that a Visual Studio has, but an Emacs doesn't, but thats not end of the world type of stuff. Thats pretty much the usual things you always get when you try to switch to another operating system.
Starting an engine is easy and there are tons of them out already, getting it into a stage where it is usable for an actually half decent game is a completly different matter on the other side. Most engines out there are lacking a lot of very basic stuff, you sure can import some very basic 3d model into them, but if you ever try to import a more complex one with animation, multiple layers of texture and stuff you are pretty much out of luck, because there is no art pipeline in place to convert the stuff you did in Blender into what the engine except or if there are export scripts, they are badly broken most of the time. Oh, and good luck finding a level editor for that engine.
Artists are pretty easy to come by if you have all the tools ready, just look at the Windows Mod scene, Linux on the other side is largely lacking in that area.
The day someone comes out with a competing cross platform, fast API that is supported in all major coding suites and is easy to develop for, will be the day that linux/mac gaming starts for real.
Its called SDL and has been available for a decade.
Yep, the problem is that games don't push a platform, *exclusive* games do. If you would have a handful of MetalGears and Halos a year exclusive for Linux I bet that it would give a decent push to the platform and make Linux at least a standard dual boot on every gamers PC. Trouble of course is that those games cost millions of dollar to create and nobody that is investing that kind of money is going to do a Linux-only game when he could do a multiplatform release instead and get quite a bit more money, especially today where the PC platform is already not in the best shape.
That of course doesn't mean that Linux gaming should just be given up, I just don't see much hope for native Linux games anytime soon. Wine on the other side is extremely important and gives access to a much bigger range of games then an effort for native Linux games ever could. So any money that goes into Linux gaming should really go into improving Wine, since even when it ends up always being a step behind Windows, thats still a lot better then not being part of the game market in the first place, especially considering that gaming is often the only thing that lets people keep around a Windows for dual boot.
Truth to be told, there simply are no big exclusive native Linux games and there likely won't in the years to come.
The trouble with these social sites is that you do have to use them when you want to stay in contact with all your friends that are also there. Its the whole point of those pages after all, they network their users so that you have a lot of dependencies, so that once you are in, it becomes quite hard to leave without losing a lot. This feels kind of like arguing "Whats wrong with filtering the Internet? You can after all just build up your own independed network...".
Another interesting one is Galapix, an image viewer that allows fluent navigation across tenth of thousands of images. But since I have written that one myself, this of course is nothing more then self advertisment.
Not quite. I have seen more articles gone done the drain by the hand of admins then by vandals. Deletionism is very common, especially in other parts of Wikipedia like the German one. Everything from a Simpson episode list to a page about the Pirateparty page has been axed there, many stuff pops up again after some weeks or month, but there is just way to much energy wasted on these notability discussion and of course there is the whole issue that a user can't undo deletions or even see the history of deleted articles. Some Wikipedia admins seem to have a very hard time to get that Wikipedia isn't printed on paper and that rules are only there as a guideline, not to be applied letter by letter (i.e. the Pirateparty page got into trouble because it wasn't an officially registered party at the time the article was started and the rules for parties said that you have to be an registered one...).
Absolutely true. What I find especially annoying is that how Wikipedia is run differs greatly from what they claim their goal is, i.e. one statement in their plead for donations is:
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's our commitment."
Yeah, well, except that half that knowledge would be deleted on Wikipedia due to not being relevant enough.
Slashdot Mirror
While absolutely true and one of the fundamental problems of OpenID, its not really much different without OpenID, since most webpages will happily mail you the password, which means your mail provider has access to all your authentication data anyway.
As I already said: Nothing would stop a page from providing classic username/password in addition or have a third party service that manages your keys if you like.
My point is simply that a secure token would be *more* convenient and *more* secure for most normal usage patterns where you happen to use the same device most of the time. And even if you don't, a flash drive or a web-service could easily fix that.
Was it the price... no. Was it the specs... no.
I disagree, a XO-1 used to cost almost half of what a Eee sold for, it also has plenty of unique features (rotatable screen, sunlight readability, etc.). The OLPC doesn't completly blow the competition out of the water, but it still has plenty of features that no one else has. Now of course the whole uniqueness of the OLPC never really mattered since the OLPC never entered the marketplace in the first place. G1G1 never was competitive in terms of price and was time limited (fixed now) and never made it to Europe (still not fixed).
It made a slow machine even slower and it certainly doesn't encourage practical computer skills.
The slow part is very true. If you launch a good old X11 app via Terminal they will start pretty much instantly, while even a hello-world Sugar app will take near to 10 seconds to start. However I don't buy the 'computer skill' part, Sugar really is not that different, in fact I see most of it to be pretty much the same, the Journal is analog to your average desktop search, an Activity is pretty much just an application, you have copy&paste and plenty of other stuff usual stuff. Having windows launched always in fullscreen really doesn't change much.
Where I think Sugar broke is in backward compatibility, not running Microsoft Windows, ok thats fine, since Linux is rather mature today and free, but Sugar doesn't run Linux application either, it requires special coded Sugar applications. Sugar doesn't have a way to handle normal Linux apps or even normal filesystems, its all their own little version of how the world should be without any way to interoperate with other systems or applications aside from the Terminal Activity. And thats just fatal considering that most of Sugar is just not quite finished and some of it might never be (i.e. no IDE for actually developing new Sugar application is in Sugar).
I don't really see a problem with the XO-2 techspec, I mean thats the goal for the future, its not the device that should be out next month and the XO-1 already comes quite close to those goals anyway.
When the authentication server is your home server, you can pretty well guard against fishing.
Kind of, but most of the public would never do that and be wide open to phising. Authentification should be secure by default, not by fixing it with ducttape yourself on your home box.
Uglier than an email address? Not inherently, no. You're just used to seeing one and not the other.
An email address at least is 'pure', since much of the dispatching is done in the MX record, hidden away from the user, with OpenID you often get lengthy ugly URLs, because provider just slap it into onto their service. Which brings me to another point, OpenID should have used email instead of URLs. Your email account today is already pretty much the same as OpenID tries to do, thanks to those "password reminder" emails almost all services will send out to give you your password or a new password. They should have worked on a way to standardize the syntax of those reminder mails so that they could be handled automatically.
How is this any better than OpenID?
It wouldn't, which it why it would be a fallback or alternative, not the main way to do authentication.
A Physical token? for junk sites? I don't think so.
Its not a physical token, its file you store somewhere on your computer/mobile/netbook. You already do a very similar thing already with coookie.txt, does that bother you too?
Nothing would stop a page from providing classic username/password in addition or have a third party service that manages your keys if you like. They point is that most of the time I log in a webpage from the very same set of machines and it just idiotic to make up random password for each side and having to manually carry them from one machine to the next, when a single secure token would be much more secure and easier to use.
Authentication on the web is kind of messy and annoying, but OpenID is so too. It just doesn't feel right to be pushed from one server to the next to do authentication, since it leaves the door wide open to phising attacks. Also using URL for authentication just looks ugly.
I personally would prefer something that works on the client side and not on some other third server, i.e. store a GPG public key in your browser and have the browser use that to automatically sign blogposts or whatever to authenticate you. To stop spam one could have third parties sign the GPG key to create a web of trust kind of thing.
So you would have a reusable secure token you use for authentication on all pages, instead of having to come up with new passwords all the time. And it would also keep the third party out of the picture, since the token remains only on your client and never leaves it.
The problem with electricity is that how much a device actually uses is pretty well hidden from the user, so most people just don't know it and don't factor it into their buying decisions, so good old free market can't really work. Another thing is that many electronic devices use much more then they have to, stand-by mode is a classic case, its easy to not waste much power on it, yet many devices still do. A little regulation that nocks the makers into the right direction can be a good thing sometimes.
So Israel is supposed to sit there and take the rocket and mortar attacks and watch their civilians with no connection to the military die?
No, but any action they do better be one that doesn't cause more human death. This whole mess needs police work and negotiation, not the military.
Fighting evil by doing even larger evil just doesn't make you look much like a good guy.
Two wrongs don't make a right, especially not when the death counts of each side are different by orders of magnitude.
Israel, while it has hit civilians is doing it's best to not target civilians
The best way to not kill civilians would be to not start a war. Its really as easy as that.
Sure, the Wii Sports bundle may help move a few more Wiis,
A few? I would say Wii Sport is moving almost *ALL* Wiis, its by far the best show case title for the Wii and aside from Wii Fit and a tiny few other titles there really is very little else that archived similar mainstream media coverage, which along with word of mouth is one of the big reason the Wii is selling like crazy. I am purposefully ignoring all those Zelda, Metroid and Mario games, since if they would have any significant influence on Wii sales, the Gamecube would surely sold a hell of a lot better then it did, since it had all them, tons more, very similar technical capabilities and cost less then the Wii.
takes up less space than a Subversion checkout for the same project
Only if you actually *want* the whole project. If on the other side you just want a single file or subdirectory, say in a large gigabyte size repo with graphics, textures and stuff, you have kind of a problem with git. A git clone always downloads the whole thing, svn on the other side allows you do download just what you want, so the download with SVN can easily become a few orders of magnitude smaller then with git.
git could really use a way to do shallow clones so that only those pieces get downloaded that are actually needed, git-clone --depth is a start, but not quite enough.
How many rovers could you have send to Mars for the price of a human mission? Around a thousand or so I think, puts things into perspective.
Now I haven't read all of that thread, buts its hardly about "seriously lacking in modern development tools". Most of the issues that get mentioned are rather minor and some simply the result of "Linux does it different then Windows". Now that said, Linux certainly has a bunch of problems, its fullscreen and mouse-grab handling isn't pretty and there are a bunch of features that a Visual Studio has, but an Emacs doesn't, but thats not end of the world type of stuff. Thats pretty much the usual things you always get when you try to switch to another operating system.
Starting an engine is easy and there are tons of them out already, getting it into a stage where it is usable for an actually half decent game is a completly different matter on the other side. Most engines out there are lacking a lot of very basic stuff, you sure can import some very basic 3d model into them, but if you ever try to import a more complex one with animation, multiple layers of texture and stuff you are pretty much out of luck, because there is no art pipeline in place to convert the stuff you did in Blender into what the engine except or if there are export scripts, they are badly broken most of the time. Oh, and good luck finding a level editor for that engine.
Artists are pretty easy to come by if you have all the tools ready, just look at the Windows Mod scene, Linux on the other side is largely lacking in that area.
The day someone comes out with a competing cross platform, fast API that is supported in all major coding suites and is easy to develop for, will be the day that linux/mac gaming starts for real.
Its called SDL and has been available for a decade.
Yep, the problem is that games don't push a platform, *exclusive* games do. If you would have a handful of MetalGears and Halos a year exclusive for Linux I bet that it would give a decent push to the platform and make Linux at least a standard dual boot on every gamers PC. Trouble of course is that those games cost millions of dollar to create and nobody that is investing that kind of money is going to do a Linux-only game when he could do a multiplatform release instead and get quite a bit more money, especially today where the PC platform is already not in the best shape.
That of course doesn't mean that Linux gaming should just be given up, I just don't see much hope for native Linux games anytime soon. Wine on the other side is extremely important and gives access to a much bigger range of games then an effort for native Linux games ever could. So any money that goes into Linux gaming should really go into improving Wine, since even when it ends up always being a step behind Windows, thats still a lot better then not being part of the game market in the first place, especially considering that gaming is often the only thing that lets people keep around a Windows for dual boot.
Truth to be told, there simply are no big exclusive native Linux games and there likely won't in the years to come.
The trouble with these social sites is that you do have to use them when you want to stay in contact with all your friends that are also there. Its the whole point of those pages after all, they network their users so that you have a lot of dependencies, so that once you are in, it becomes quite hard to leave without losing a lot. This feels kind of like arguing "Whats wrong with filtering the Internet? You can after all just build up your own independed network...".
Another interesting one is Galapix, an image viewer that allows fluent navigation across tenth of thousands of images. But since I have written that one myself, this of course is nothing more then self advertisment.
However, these cases are few and far between
Not quite. I have seen more articles gone done the drain by the hand of admins then by vandals. Deletionism is very common, especially in other parts of Wikipedia like the German one. Everything from a Simpson episode list to a page about the Pirateparty page has been axed there, many stuff pops up again after some weeks or month, but there is just way to much energy wasted on these notability discussion and of course there is the whole issue that a user can't undo deletions or even see the history of deleted articles. Some Wikipedia admins seem to have a very hard time to get that Wikipedia isn't printed on paper and that rules are only there as a guideline, not to be applied letter by letter (i.e. the Pirateparty page got into trouble because it wasn't an officially registered party at the time the article was started and the rules for parties said that you have to be an registered one...).
Except of course that some people have an incredible narrow view of whats "notable", a view that leads to deletions and is pissing of tons of users.
Absolutely true. What I find especially annoying is that how Wikipedia is run differs greatly from what they claim their goal is, i.e. one statement in their plead for donations is:
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's our commitment."
Yeah, well, except that half that knowledge would be deleted on Wikipedia due to not being relevant enough.