You have so missed the point it's hard to respond without sounding patronizing. Here are a few points that don't necessarily map directly to the ones you mention:
She is learning computer culture. What she learns now should gradually and gracefully evolve into what the general adult world does. Children easily learn to use password-protected accounts.
Whether it is Debian, Ubuntu, Mac OS, Windows, etc. is of no importance. The child is learning to have and use a computer account. For today's kids the specific OS is much less important than for today's adults. She will do more or less the same activities no matter what OS she learns, and by age 15 she will have experience in several OSs regardless of whether her siblings are slashdot geeks or not.
If she is inclined to choose things like the GUI and whatnot, she should be encouraged and assisted. If she doesn't give a rat's ass and just wants it to work, that's fine too and her family sysadmin should oblige. She should learn at her own pace, and gradually teaching her is the job of the sysadmin. I doubt she would be inclined to use the command line much any time soon, but if she ever does more power to her.
Learning the rudiments of security at an early age is a very good thing. It will be internalized into second nature by the time she is an adult.
I see a lot of controversy on whether parents should or should not have access to the child's account. Parents or guardians are responsible for the child, regardless of what anyone's personal opinions are. Also, parents or guardians are in effect the system administrators who must maintain the system in any event. If the child forgets or loses the password, or otherwise screws something up, a sysadmin must be there to fix things. That sysadmin will have access to the child's account, though not necessarily to the child's external accounts such as outside-hosted email, IM, etc. Whether it is a parent, guardian, IT-inclined sibling, or the child herself (not likely at age 7) is secondary. A sysadmin must exist or things will eventually get munged up. Not much different from parenting in general.
My kids started having passwords at about that age, maybe even younger. It was never a big issue, and of course their early passwords were things like "horse" or whatever. Not only was that enough, we did try to cultivate respect for each other's accounts, and I don't remember (or was not aware of) any of our three kids surreptitiously hacking each other's accounts. We would have considered it a typical punishable offense along the lines of fighting with each other or deliberately damaging each other's property.
Their passwords evolved into having non-alpha characters, and they do occasionally change them. They are now in mid to late high school, and passwords and such are second nature. How secure are they? I don't really know, but I suspect they are not much more or less secure than those in the wild. Passwords are but one tool in digital security, and it is an ever bigger and rougher world out there.
Of course not! It's nothing! It's peanuts! What an insult! What do you take me for, some kind of fool? One day you'll all look up from the gutter, you will, and see King Zoidberg caressing your fancy box!
This article is a member of that old time/. favorite, taking basic physical phenomena and speculating about completely outlandish commercial products or services that they might in principle make possible. Assuming, of course, that all other laws of physics, biology, economics, etc. are suitably suspended.
Usually they are based on some person's preliminary doctoral research. This time it was based on that perennial nerd baby boomer childhood favorite with a cool name, scramjets.
I applaud your attention and help to your customer(s). I would most certainly prefer to work with someone who can help deal with surges, DDOS, rootkits, and the many other problems that plague web sites. My hat is off to you.
If nothing less, you need to see the picture: it's awesome.
Never put a line like this in a/. summary. Do you want Congress to pass a law classifying/. as some kind of cyber-terror weapon? You can almost see smoke coming out of the ground around these poor bastards' data center.
You are missing the point. I lived in Mexico for many years. It is truly a repressive regime, and most of the population is resigned to chronic hopelessness which will be with their descendants for generations to come. There is no conceivable mechanism for overall improvement, not the least because it requires a colossal entropy change and quantities of material resources that simply do not exist. China is probably worse, but that is hardly comforting. These regimes are everywhere. They have existed forever, and are very, very difficult to correct. To emigrate from such societies is to escape from them. Many try, few succeed.
The purpose of my post was to mock the self-righteousness and folly of the "don't buy things from China" crowd. It won't work because 1) you will never get anything remotely near critical mass, and 2) it will be replaced by another repressive, feudal regime able to provide the cheap human labor we want so that we can continue to buy laptops.
And there's the rub. The problem isn't China, it is our consumerism. The people who piously claim to want to save the Chinese from their dictators by purchasing laptops from somewhere else are the problem, not the dictators. I want a laptop, a cool and powerful car, a cool lifestyle, a fun and pleasant job, health and dental insurance, lots of money, leisure time, my own home, a huge TV, a fast internet connection, lots of gourmet coffee, cheap and plentiful chocolate, an overabundance of food, decent wine, personal entertainment 24/7 with my iPod (or other such gadget), blah blah blah. That's why there are slaves in China, Mexico, and the rest of the Third World, to sell crap to US consumers.
There's no free ride, and boycotting chinese laptops is a fool's errand. Of course, you can close your eyes and pretend that the world is simple, and morality is simple, and all you have to do is something simpleminded like buy a Prius or boycott Chinese laptops. And when some asshole such as myself intrudes with unpleasantries, trot out the old "what if the Nazis [insert peeve of the moment here]" or something equally pretentious and contrived. You can believe that "If we all got together" or "we can all start now" "at least I tried" or some other childish excuse. Then pat yourself on the back for taking the moral high ground and vanquishing the offending slashdot killjoy, and brag about your intrinsic noble character to your friends.
How can Apple possibly consider this as a wise business move? Other phones can be unlocked, eventually (not soon, though) the US will have to migrate away from locked phones. This move will smear shit all over Apples image as a progressive, good faith company associated with coolness. It shouts out "We are First Class Assholes."
What?!! You're thinking logically and taking actual facts into account? What are you, nuts? You're crazy! If we all get together and paint a mural with happy things like flowers and butterflies, everything will be whole again. It will be healed. Democracy will sprout. People will be liberated.
Just imagine how beautiful the world would be if people stopped buying laptops made in China! Their repressive regime would magically vanish! It would inspire the feudal quasi-dictatorships of the rest of Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Eurasia to also disappear, and a New Age of peace and happiness would reign!
Blah blah blah. Good look having anyone pay attention to you. You're being reasonable and realistic, and therefore boring and politically incorrect.
Go to Amazon and look at the one star and two star reviews of this book. This is a wise practice when considering the purchase of any book, not just this one.
Microsoft's marketing machine has always tried to convey the idea that they are the de facto standard for everything, much as IBM tried to do in the 1980s. It didn't last long back then for IBM, and it is wearing thin for Microsoft today. If you really are the de facto standard, you are able to force things down the customers' throats and charge them an arm and a leg for it. When there are alternatives, such as a perfectly serviceable WinXP in this case, it is no longer that easy. Microsoft has to back down because a) XP works perfectly alright for most folks, especially on newer hardware, and b) Mac laptops (and to a much lesser extent GNU/Linux distros like Ubuntu) are distracting eyes and pocketbooks.
It's the natural evolution of a market. Frankly, it took a perversely long time, most likely due to Microsoft's monopolistic hold on pre-installed operating systems. They can't complain. They made a few bucks while it lasted, and are making more still.
It has been known for a while. I saw in one post that it was slated to be included in a kernel upgrade, but someone accidentally overwrote it, or something to that effect.
That was the only problem. Everything else worked out of the box, with much better performance than Vista. Vista tended to reboot spontaneously, and its graphical effects were a real drag on the system. Or at least I imagine they were, it was pretty sluggish in general. That little dialog box asking for permission to do things very quickly overstayed its welcome.
Let's stop the attack and look carefully at his points and address them if necessary.
I agree 100%. Ubuntu is a great system, I use it daily and my teenage non-geek daughter replaced Vista on her laptop with it. The only big snag was that the speakers did not cut out when the earphones were plugged in, and the audio did not go to the earphones. This required the supremely geeky solution of hunting down a specific version of the ALSA driver, compiling it, and installing it, with the potential of having to do it again each time the drivers get updated in the repositories. My daughter was neither amused nor favorably impressed by this, and it marred an otherwise happy transition to Linux. Unlike Mossberg, she was perfectly at ease using the Synaptic Package Manager to install things once she was shown how. Also, there are several good, user-friendly books on using Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is definitely most of the way there, but the remaining roughspots are serious and definitely discouraging to new users. It would be wisest to work towards GNU/Linux distros that are so polished and integrated that Mossberg can't find fault with them. Don't criticize the guy. To most educated people, he is a tech god whose word is law. If he is leveraged as the pass/fail criterion for Linux, there will be an avalanche of new users.
I don't know if this was part of Shuttleworth's plan or not, but it may well be a brilliant strategy to quickly get Ubuntu ready for prime time. If Mossberg raves about it, everybody will rave about it.
Wow! That Bill Gates guy sure is smart. He and Microsoft invented Unix and C, TCP/IP, ethernet, http and HTML, Mosaic, and all the other cool things that set Google up for success. No wonder he's so rich!
Someone knowledgeable please correct my misunderstanding. The destructive force on earth of a nuclear weapon is do to tremendous superheating of the surrounding atmosphere to produce an immensely powerful concussion wave. In space, there is no atmosphere so there will be no concussion wave. Therefore, only the thermal and radiation products of the explosion are available to damage the asteroid. This doesn't sound especially useful if the asteroid is large. As many have pointed out, the mass will still be on its way, very likely on a similar or identical trajectory. Whether it is partly or wholly molten or broken apart doesn't seem like it will make a whit of difference. A shotgun will kill you just as dead as a rifle.
pathetic: inspiring scornful pity; "how silly an ardent and unsuccessful wooer can be especially if he is getting on in years"- Dashiell Hammett
absurd: incongruous;inviting ridicule; "the absurd excuse that the dog ate his homework"; "that's a cockeyed idea"; "ask a nonsensical question and get a nonsensical answer"; "a contribution so small as to be laughable"; "it is ludicrous to call a cottage a mansion"; "a preposterous attempt to turn back the pages of history"; "her conceited assumption of universal interest in her rather dull children was ridiculous"
farcical: broadly or extravagantly humorous; resembling farce; "the wild farcical exuberance of a clown"; "ludicrous green hair"
Once again, your defense puts on airs, to say the least. The Casino is technically not committing a crime. If it is in Nevada, an Indian reservation, or other location where gambling is legal, of course. Otherwise it is indeed committing one. Why is it a crime? Because it is considered defrauding the uncautious. They are indeed swindling their clientele, and yet you defend them because they have organized a formal business model around this sort of fraud. I still claim that this rationale is ridiculous insofar as it is absurd, nonsensical, and laughable, according to the definitions you cite. A person stealing from a gas station is not doing something illegal. Whether it is moral or not is intimately tied to whether the gas station is set up to defraud consumers. Oh wait, they have the full force of the Pentagon defending their properties in the Persian Gulf at taxpayer expense, huge taxpayer-financed subsidies to repair damage to their equipment even in outrageously profitable years, and their business partners in central Asia fund international terrorists to jack up prices, occasionally killing our countrymen in the process. But of course, in your narrow moralistic view that should not be taken into consideration.
Furthermore, I am not anti-gambling, although I do not gamble myself. I do not profess to be a Libertarian, but if people have a burning need to gamble some of their money away, it is largely a matter of personal responsibility. There is a grey area, however between "healthy" gambling and self-destructive obsessive-compulsive gambling.
The Casino places a machine that gives away money on its gambling floor. People take advantage of it. And now, you seem to think it is immoral for gamblers to do so. That is ludicrous. Your moral outrage is poorly founded. If the Casino places a box of money on the floor, only a fool would consider it immoral to take some or all of it. The burden of protecting the Casino's interests is on the Casino, not on the gambler. And yet you defend the Casino's core purpose, to swindle people who don't understand that the Casino is set up expressly to take their money away as quickly and extensively as possible. This you don't seem to find immoral.
Your post is pompous, pious, and utterly ridiculous.
The real purpose is to be able to blame war crimes committed in Iraq on people who watched news reports of them on TV instead of those who ordered them to be committed. Also to blame embezzlement of taxpayer dollars by defense contractors and petroleum interests on the people who paid the taxes in the first place. Then, all types of crime, from misdemeanors to felonies, will be blamed on the first five people who were found to be within 1000 m of the crime during the 24 hr before and after the crime took place (on a first come, first served basis). Eventually, all crimes of any kind involving large amounts of money will be blamed on those who did not receive any of the money, with obligatory waiver of trial and automatic sentencing to maximum allowed by law.
And we haven't even started with standardized testing or credit card billing policies.
Slashdot Mirror
My kids started having passwords at about that age, maybe even younger. It was never a big issue, and of course their early passwords were things like "horse" or whatever. Not only was that enough, we did try to cultivate respect for each other's accounts, and I don't remember (or was not aware of) any of our three kids surreptitiously hacking each other's accounts. We would have considered it a typical punishable offense along the lines of fighting with each other or deliberately damaging each other's property.
Their passwords evolved into having non-alpha characters, and they do occasionally change them. They are now in mid to late high school, and passwords and such are second nature. How secure are they? I don't really know, but I suspect they are not much more or less secure than those in the wild. Passwords are but one tool in digital security, and it is an ever bigger and rougher world out there.
Of course not! It's nothing! It's peanuts! What an insult! What do you take me for, some kind of fool? One day you'll all look up from the gutter, you will, and see King Zoidberg caressing your fancy box!
Usually they are based on some person's preliminary doctoral research. This time it was based on that perennial nerd baby boomer childhood favorite with a cool name, scramjets.
Ho hum.
I applaud your attention and help to your customer(s). I would most certainly prefer to work with someone who can help deal with surges, DDOS, rootkits, and the many other problems that plague web sites. My hat is off to you.
Never put a line like this in a /. summary. Do you want Congress to pass a law classifying /. as some kind of cyber-terror weapon? You can almost see smoke coming out of the ground around these poor bastards' data center.
How much did we pay for this?
And Libertarianism is the practice of making sappy analogies and metaphors and trying to convert them into public policy.
The purpose of my post was to mock the self-righteousness and folly of the "don't buy things from China" crowd. It won't work because 1) you will never get anything remotely near critical mass, and 2) it will be replaced by another repressive, feudal regime able to provide the cheap human labor we want so that we can continue to buy laptops.
And there's the rub. The problem isn't China, it is our consumerism. The people who piously claim to want to save the Chinese from their dictators by purchasing laptops from somewhere else are the problem, not the dictators. I want a laptop, a cool and powerful car, a cool lifestyle, a fun and pleasant job, health and dental insurance, lots of money, leisure time, my own home, a huge TV, a fast internet connection, lots of gourmet coffee, cheap and plentiful chocolate, an overabundance of food, decent wine, personal entertainment 24/7 with my iPod (or other such gadget), blah blah blah. That's why there are slaves in China, Mexico, and the rest of the Third World, to sell crap to US consumers.
There's no free ride, and boycotting chinese laptops is a fool's errand. Of course, you can close your eyes and pretend that the world is simple, and morality is simple, and all you have to do is something simpleminded like buy a Prius or boycott Chinese laptops. And when some asshole such as myself intrudes with unpleasantries, trot out the old "what if the Nazis [insert peeve of the moment here]" or something equally pretentious and contrived. You can believe that "If we all got together" or "we can all start now" "at least I tried" or some other childish excuse. Then pat yourself on the back for taking the moral high ground and vanquishing the offending slashdot killjoy, and brag about your intrinsic noble character to your friends.
Just imagine how beautiful the world would be if people stopped buying laptops made in China! Their repressive regime would magically vanish! It would inspire the feudal quasi-dictatorships of the rest of Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Eurasia to also disappear, and a New Age of peace and happiness would reign!
Blah blah blah. Good look having anyone pay attention to you. You're being reasonable and realistic, and therefore boring and politically incorrect.
I hope he makes a movie about it. Clerks III: Suspicious Behavior.
It's the natural evolution of a market. Frankly, it took a perversely long time, most likely due to Microsoft's monopolistic hold on pre-installed operating systems. They can't complain. They made a few bucks while it lasted, and are making more still.
It has been known for a while. I saw in one post that it was slated to be included in a kernel upgrade, but someone accidentally overwrote it, or something to that effect.
C'est la vie.
That was the only problem. Everything else worked out of the box, with much better performance than Vista. Vista tended to reboot spontaneously, and its graphical effects were a real drag on the system. Or at least I imagine they were, it was pretty sluggish in general. That little dialog box asking for permission to do things very quickly overstayed its welcome.
It's hard not to gloat on those rare occasions where a bunch of corporate assholes get what they deserve.
I agree 100%. Ubuntu is a great system, I use it daily and my teenage non-geek daughter replaced Vista on her laptop with it. The only big snag was that the speakers did not cut out when the earphones were plugged in, and the audio did not go to the earphones. This required the supremely geeky solution of hunting down a specific version of the ALSA driver, compiling it, and installing it, with the potential of having to do it again each time the drivers get updated in the repositories. My daughter was neither amused nor favorably impressed by this, and it marred an otherwise happy transition to Linux. Unlike Mossberg, she was perfectly at ease using the Synaptic Package Manager to install things once she was shown how. Also, there are several good, user-friendly books on using Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is definitely most of the way there, but the remaining roughspots are serious and definitely discouraging to new users. It would be wisest to work towards GNU/Linux distros that are so polished and integrated that Mossberg can't find fault with them. Don't criticize the guy. To most educated people, he is a tech god whose word is law. If he is leveraged as the pass/fail criterion for Linux, there will be an avalanche of new users.
I don't know if this was part of Shuttleworth's plan or not, but it may well be a brilliant strategy to quickly get Ubuntu ready for prime time. If Mossberg raves about it, everybody will rave about it.
What am I missing here?
- pathetic: inspiring scornful pity; "how silly an ardent and unsuccessful wooer can be especially if he is getting on in years"- Dashiell Hammett
- absurd: incongruous;inviting ridicule; "the absurd excuse that the dog ate his homework"; "that's a cockeyed idea"; "ask a nonsensical question and get a nonsensical answer"; "a contribution so small as to be laughable"; "it is ludicrous to call a cottage a mansion"; "a preposterous attempt to turn back the pages of history"; "her conceited assumption of universal interest in her rather dull children was ridiculous"
- farcical: broadly or extravagantly humorous; resembling farce; "the wild farcical exuberance of a clown"; "ludicrous green hair"
Once again, your defense puts on airs, to say the least. The Casino is technically not committing a crime. If it is in Nevada, an Indian reservation, or other location where gambling is legal, of course. Otherwise it is indeed committing one. Why is it a crime? Because it is considered defrauding the uncautious. They are indeed swindling their clientele, and yet you defend them because they have organized a formal business model around this sort of fraud. I still claim that this rationale is ridiculous insofar as it is absurd, nonsensical, and laughable, according to the definitions you cite. A person stealing from a gas station is not doing something illegal. Whether it is moral or not is intimately tied to whether the gas station is set up to defraud consumers. Oh wait, they have the full force of the Pentagon defending their properties in the Persian Gulf at taxpayer expense, huge taxpayer-financed subsidies to repair damage to their equipment even in outrageously profitable years, and their business partners in central Asia fund international terrorists to jack up prices, occasionally killing our countrymen in the process. But of course, in your narrow moralistic view that should not be taken into consideration.Furthermore, I am not anti-gambling, although I do not gamble myself. I do not profess to be a Libertarian, but if people have a burning need to gamble some of their money away, it is largely a matter of personal responsibility. There is a grey area, however between "healthy" gambling and self-destructive obsessive-compulsive gambling.
Your post is pompous, pious, and utterly ridiculous.
And we haven't even started with standardized testing or credit card billing policies.
Abacus? What's wrong with a couple of sheets of scratch paper? Kids these days, always the latest gadgets...