Well, if you want to play x264, you can just use quicktime, which is one of the things your parent mentioned. If you want to play Ogg Theora, then you can install that, although I don't think it's really that popular. I can count on one hand the number of videos i've downloaded that were encoded using Ogg Theora. And they weren't anything that was really worth seeing.
Although that's a little bit extreme, you can't possibly read and understand the source code for every single program you run, it makes a lot of sense. If they are willing to put the source code out there, then they are most likely not going to try and fool you. If they do, then you have the evidence of what they are doing. This is why the first place I go to look for software is Sourceforge. Because everything there is open source, I can be pretty sure that there's no adware, spyware, or other malicious things lurking around. Also, it's the best way to get full featured tools without paying anything. Searching for freeware using google or any other means other than sourceforge/freshmeat, means I have to take a lot of care to figure out what's spyware, and what's not, and which ones will expire in 15 days.
How do you encrypt a file before you've created it, without encrypting the entire partition? My guesses.
Only use a special program to make your files, which creates them encrypted in the first place
When using an application like MS Word, create a blank file, then go encrypt that, and then start working on it. The blank file may be left encrypted, but it's blank anyway, so who cares.
Make one folder encrypted, and put all your files in there. Kind of the same as an encrypted partition, or an encrypted home directory. Which is necessary if you want to make sure you encrypt everything.
All these solutions seem like they require an extra step that you may or may not forget to encrypt the file. And it leaves out the other possible things like, I got something in my email that I think should be encrypted, but it's already been downloaded to my computer and stored unencrypted. Or, I opened my encrypted file in MS word, and it created an unencrypted backup file while I was working on it. Unless you're encrypting your home partition, there's a lot of ways that information may end up unencrypted and sitting on your hard drive. Maybe you don't care, but a lot of people do.
We often used to throw our controllers when we were kids. Never ended up breaking them. On a related note, I remember one time, I got mad, and made a whipping motion with the controller cord, the end of the cord somehow ended up hitting the reset button. That's one way to ensure you don't lose.
prevent someone from ever needing to modify a script or enter a terminal window if they didn't want to
The other side of the coin is, don't make the terminal window hard to get to. I've seen a few Linux Distros and MacOS that put the terminal window buried in some menu somewhere, in order to pretend that it doesn't exist, and hide it from the regular users. The terminal window really is the best way to get some things done, and shouldn't be hidden just because some people think it's old fashioned or hard to use.
First, you'll want to ensure you encrypt your swap file, so that there isn't little bits and pieces of your sensitive data sitting unencrypted in there. Second of all, encrypting files after the have already been written to the hard drive is not a good idea, since journaling file systems like NTFS (I think?), don't necessarily overwrite the original file when you go and encrypt it. Maybe you don't require encryption to this level, but many people do. Also, I hope, and am pretty sure, that there would be a way to clear the drive and use a new key if you happened to lose the password, or if you just wanted to get rid of the data and start over.
But the way windows is typically set up, to have everything on one partition, including the swap, entire disk encryption is the only good solution. No point in encrypting your home folder/partition if you swap space is filled with sensitive data.
Why are you waiting for Vista when you can encrypt your data now with TrueCrypt? I would trust something like this a lot more than Bitlocker from a recovery standpoint. With bitlocker, you have to rely on Windows to unlock the data. With Truecrypt, you could hook the drive up to a Linux machine and still be able to read the data. I'm not trying to start a Windows/Linux war here, I'm just saying you'd be much better off not trusting MS to properly encrypting your data without any back doors, and being allowed to access it when you want. It would also make things a lot easier to manange if you later moved to using both Windows and Linux machines. You wouldn't have to support both BitLocker and TruCrypt.
They have the RIP Act in the UK that says you have to turn over your crypto keys on request. I don't know how well a law like that would fly in the United States. It kind of goes against the idea of not testifying against yourself, and having the right to remain silent. I don't know how the law got passed in the UK, but I imagine that the same could happen in the US.
I'm pretty sure that they'd store a hash of the password on the board and compare against that. It's much harder to break that. Also, the security of almost all encryption software is only as powerful as the password protecting the key. If you use an insecure password, then that's your own fault.
I think it's much better to use something like truecrypt for hard drive compression, because you can scrutinize the code, and know that what you're getting is a secure product. However, I think it would be nice to have something like this if it would speed up the disk access. If there's a dedicated cryptoprocessor on the drive, to encrypt and decrypt the data, then performance could be a lot better than using your plain old CPU for the task.
Well, because the PVR you get is tied to the digital cable/satellite company, you don't really get to pick and choose your PVR in most cases. Because of this, they have no reason to offer features that may get them in trouble. However, if you buy your PVR on the free market, separate from your cable provider, I could see a lot more features being offered to try to woo buyers to buy one PVR over the other.
But if businesses decide that there's savings to be had by moving to an open source database, I don't exactly see how Oracle providing their own version of Linux will stop that. It's not like Oracle will be offering Postgres as a supported option for the database. People will still be saving money by moving to an open source database. I would also like to point out that I never said that what Oracle was doing was illegal, or against the GPL, I simply said it was a bad idea. If Oracle wants to fork they can, but they haven't. They're just taking redhat and rebranding it, without doing any work. And I think that may bite them back. If Redhat has nobody using Oracle directly on Redhat, then they have no reason to ensure that it works. And that means a lot of extra work for Oracle.
I know the GPL License says you can do this, I'm not saying what they're doing is illegal, I'm saying they have made a bad decision. Now they will have to shoulder the responsibility of creating a quality distro. Redhat was doing a lot of work to make sure they had a quality distro. I'm sure there was also a lot of work being done to make sure Oracle worked correctly (because many people buy Redhat to run Oracle). If nobody is buying Redhat to run oracle, then they certainly don't have any reason to continue to make sure Oracle runs well. I think that Oracle may end up regreting this, because they are thinking that there's little work required in maintaining an enterprise level distro.
But then where will Oracle get their Linux from. Right now, they're just kind of taking Redhat, removing all the logos and trademark stuff, ala CentOS, and calling it their own. If Redhat stops producing Linux, or stops producing versions of Redhat that work well with Oracle, then I think Oracle is going to have a very hard time maintain their own distro, since they don't really have any experience with that. I think that Redhat should start to move into the database market by really pushing PostgreSQL and Redhat.
I think that Oracle is making a bad move here. Instead of partnering with Redhat, to provide a really stable and well working solution, they have chosen to just rape Redhat of all their hard work, brand it as their own, and cut Redhat out of the profits. I think that this may backfire on them. Many users of Redhat use it because it works well with Oracle. However, at this point, if nobody is using Redhat for Oracle, then Redhat may just stop being produced. If it doesn't go that far, we may see Oracle not working so well on Redhat, and the Oracle team, having to make tons of changes to Unbreakable Linux (haven't they got in trouble for making such claims before), just to get their Database to work. What is Oracles plan for providing updates? They can't just pass the updates on the second after Redhat releases them, as they will have to test them on their own distro. I don't think users will take the story that it's Redhat's fault when they release a patch that hoses their system. So, they have to test the updates for a week, then users will be waiting an extra week for the updates. I think it's a little underhanded to try to cut out the people making the operating system that made your product so strong in the first place.
I was just pointing out how resource intensive this program really was. I mean, sure you could use this program for compression (i'm interested on how it would perform on other pieces of data, or whether or not there was specific hacks put in for the data set), but it consumes a ton of resources and doesn't really give you something that much better than using gzip. At least not good enough that it's worth spending 5 hours decompressing 100 MB worth of data. Oh, and you could fit very large numbers in a very small space, as long as you use the correct notation. For instance, If I wanted to store the number 3.4028236692093846346337460743177e+38, you could store it as I've shown, or as a really long integer, (which I'm not going to write out) or you could store it as (2^64)^2, which is would use much less space.
It's funny that you mention Peter Pan, there's a little bit of a discrepency there. Disney has been trying to put Peter Pan into the public domain, and deny the children at Great Ormond Street Hospital (who owns the rights), of money that is rightly their's. They are publishing a sequel because the original work is going out of copyright (already out of copyright in certain places), and they need another way to make money. I think it's a noble thing to do. Since copyright lasts must longer than any person could bother to use the money, they donate the work to charity, and have them make the royalties. I wonder if J.K. Rowling would be willing to do something similar with the Harry Potter series. I mean, she already has a billion dollars, not like she needs much more.
Accoring to somebody who posted above (he probably read it in the article, but i'm not about to look there), the program took, 5 hours and 900MB of RAM. I find it's interesting that he only got down to 17MB, while consuming all those resources. It makes it seem like it isn't even worth it. I'm sure you could find some pretty small program that would compute pi to some very large number of digits, and find the wikipedia excerpt in the results, but It would take a very long time to run.
What BestBuy are you talking about? The only bestbuy I know sells computer/electronics products. I don't seriously see how they could be blamed for making people fat. Oh, they sell TVs, which people sit in front of and get fat. They also sell MP3 players which people may use while going for a jog.
I don't think professionals use regular PCs either, So I don't think it reall makes a difference which sound card you get. People who buy sound card like that are the same people who buy equipment like this
Did slashdot ask for her to review the site, or did she just up and review it for us, because it's so hugely popular, even though, without even knowing what Vastu is, I can tell you that it isn't the best designed site out there. Here's a question, what does the perfect site look like according to Vastu?
I always thought Google bought YouTube so they could kill it. They have Google Video, which is pretty much the same thing, yet for some reason, is not as popular as YouTube is. So, they buy it, and then slowly replace it with Google Video. I don't see any problems here. Business as usual. And of course, Google is not evil.
A lot of people claim that you can't trust the masses, which I don't really believe
I don't believe it either. Simply put, I trust wikipedia a lot more than most other sites on the internet, simply because anyone can edit them. If you have a non-wiki site, then there may be something that's wrong with no way to fix it. However, on wikipedia, there is.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you want to play x264, you can just use quicktime, which is one of the things your parent mentioned. If you want to play Ogg Theora, then you can install that, although I don't think it's really that popular. I can count on one hand the number of videos i've downloaded that were encoded using Ogg Theora. And they weren't anything that was really worth seeing.
Although that's a little bit extreme, you can't possibly read and understand the source code for every single program you run, it makes a lot of sense. If they are willing to put the source code out there, then they are most likely not going to try and fool you. If they do, then you have the evidence of what they are doing. This is why the first place I go to look for software is Sourceforge. Because everything there is open source, I can be pretty sure that there's no adware, spyware, or other malicious things lurking around. Also, it's the best way to get full featured tools without paying anything. Searching for freeware using google or any other means other than sourceforge/freshmeat, means I have to take a lot of care to figure out what's spyware, and what's not, and which ones will expire in 15 days.
- Only use a special program to make your files, which creates them encrypted in the first place
- When using an application like MS Word, create a blank file, then go encrypt that, and then start working on it. The blank file may be left encrypted, but it's blank anyway, so who cares.
- Make one folder encrypted, and put all your files in there. Kind of the same as an encrypted partition, or an encrypted home directory. Which is necessary if you want to make sure you encrypt everything.
All these solutions seem like they require an extra step that you may or may not forget to encrypt the file. And it leaves out the other possible things like, I got something in my email that I think should be encrypted, but it's already been downloaded to my computer and stored unencrypted. Or, I opened my encrypted file in MS word, and it created an unencrypted backup file while I was working on it. Unless you're encrypting your home partition, there's a lot of ways that information may end up unencrypted and sitting on your hard drive. Maybe you don't care, but a lot of people do.We often used to throw our controllers when we were kids. Never ended up breaking them. On a related note, I remember one time, I got mad, and made a whipping motion with the controller cord, the end of the cord somehow ended up hitting the reset button. That's one way to ensure you don't lose.
First, you'll want to ensure you encrypt your swap file, so that there isn't little bits and pieces of your sensitive data sitting unencrypted in there. Second of all, encrypting files after the have already been written to the hard drive is not a good idea, since journaling file systems like NTFS (I think?), don't necessarily overwrite the original file when you go and encrypt it. Maybe you don't require encryption to this level, but many people do. Also, I hope, and am pretty sure, that there would be a way to clear the drive and use a new key if you happened to lose the password, or if you just wanted to get rid of the data and start over.
But the way windows is typically set up, to have everything on one partition, including the swap, entire disk encryption is the only good solution. No point in encrypting your home folder/partition if you swap space is filled with sensitive data.
Why are you waiting for Vista when you can encrypt your data now with TrueCrypt? I would trust something like this a lot more than Bitlocker from a recovery standpoint. With bitlocker, you have to rely on Windows to unlock the data. With Truecrypt, you could hook the drive up to a Linux machine and still be able to read the data. I'm not trying to start a Windows/Linux war here, I'm just saying you'd be much better off not trusting MS to properly encrypting your data without any back doors, and being allowed to access it when you want. It would also make things a lot easier to manange if you later moved to using both Windows and Linux machines. You wouldn't have to support both BitLocker and TruCrypt.
They have the RIP Act in the UK that says you have to turn over your crypto keys on request. I don't know how well a law like that would fly in the United States. It kind of goes against the idea of not testifying against yourself, and having the right to remain silent. I don't know how the law got passed in the UK, but I imagine that the same could happen in the US.
I'm pretty sure that they'd store a hash of the password on the board and compare against that. It's much harder to break that. Also, the security of almost all encryption software is only as powerful as the password protecting the key. If you use an insecure password, then that's your own fault.
I think it's much better to use something like truecrypt for hard drive compression, because you can scrutinize the code, and know that what you're getting is a secure product. However, I think it would be nice to have something like this if it would speed up the disk access. If there's a dedicated cryptoprocessor on the drive, to encrypt and decrypt the data, then performance could be a lot better than using your plain old CPU for the task.
Well, because the PVR you get is tied to the digital cable/satellite company, you don't really get to pick and choose your PVR in most cases. Because of this, they have no reason to offer features that may get them in trouble. However, if you buy your PVR on the free market, separate from your cable provider, I could see a lot more features being offered to try to woo buyers to buy one PVR over the other.
But if businesses decide that there's savings to be had by moving to an open source database, I don't exactly see how Oracle providing their own version of Linux will stop that. It's not like Oracle will be offering Postgres as a supported option for the database. People will still be saving money by moving to an open source database. I would also like to point out that I never said that what Oracle was doing was illegal, or against the GPL, I simply said it was a bad idea. If Oracle wants to fork they can, but they haven't. They're just taking redhat and rebranding it, without doing any work. And I think that may bite them back. If Redhat has nobody using Oracle directly on Redhat, then they have no reason to ensure that it works. And that means a lot of extra work for Oracle.
I know the GPL License says you can do this, I'm not saying what they're doing is illegal, I'm saying they have made a bad decision. Now they will have to shoulder the responsibility of creating a quality distro. Redhat was doing a lot of work to make sure they had a quality distro. I'm sure there was also a lot of work being done to make sure Oracle worked correctly (because many people buy Redhat to run Oracle). If nobody is buying Redhat to run oracle, then they certainly don't have any reason to continue to make sure Oracle runs well. I think that Oracle may end up regreting this, because they are thinking that there's little work required in maintaining an enterprise level distro.
But then where will Oracle get their Linux from. Right now, they're just kind of taking Redhat, removing all the logos and trademark stuff, ala CentOS, and calling it their own. If Redhat stops producing Linux, or stops producing versions of Redhat that work well with Oracle, then I think Oracle is going to have a very hard time maintain their own distro, since they don't really have any experience with that. I think that Redhat should start to move into the database market by really pushing PostgreSQL and Redhat.
I think that Oracle is making a bad move here. Instead of partnering with Redhat, to provide a really stable and well working solution, they have chosen to just rape Redhat of all their hard work, brand it as their own, and cut Redhat out of the profits. I think that this may backfire on them. Many users of Redhat use it because it works well with Oracle. However, at this point, if nobody is using Redhat for Oracle, then Redhat may just stop being produced. If it doesn't go that far, we may see Oracle not working so well on Redhat, and the Oracle team, having to make tons of changes to Unbreakable Linux (haven't they got in trouble for making such claims before), just to get their Database to work. What is Oracles plan for providing updates? They can't just pass the updates on the second after Redhat releases them, as they will have to test them on their own distro. I don't think users will take the story that it's Redhat's fault when they release a patch that hoses their system. So, they have to test the updates for a week, then users will be waiting an extra week for the updates. I think it's a little underhanded to try to cut out the people making the operating system that made your product so strong in the first place.
I was just pointing out how resource intensive this program really was. I mean, sure you could use this program for compression (i'm interested on how it would perform on other pieces of data, or whether or not there was specific hacks put in for the data set), but it consumes a ton of resources and doesn't really give you something that much better than using gzip. At least not good enough that it's worth spending 5 hours decompressing 100 MB worth of data. Oh, and you could fit very large numbers in a very small space, as long as you use the correct notation. For instance, If I wanted to store the number 3.4028236692093846346337460743177e+38, you could store it as I've shown, or as a really long integer, (which I'm not going to write out) or you could store it as (2^64)^2, which is would use much less space.
It's funny that you mention Peter Pan, there's a little bit of a discrepency there. Disney has been trying to put Peter Pan into the public domain, and deny the children at Great Ormond Street Hospital (who owns the rights), of money that is rightly their's. They are publishing a sequel because the original work is going out of copyright (already out of copyright in certain places), and they need another way to make money. I think it's a noble thing to do. Since copyright lasts must longer than any person could bother to use the money, they donate the work to charity, and have them make the royalties. I wonder if J.K. Rowling would be willing to do something similar with the Harry Potter series. I mean, she already has a billion dollars, not like she needs much more.
Accoring to somebody who posted above (he probably read it in the article, but i'm not about to look there), the program took, 5 hours and 900MB of RAM. I find it's interesting that he only got down to 17MB, while consuming all those resources. It makes it seem like it isn't even worth it. I'm sure you could find some pretty small program that would compute pi to some very large number of digits, and find the wikipedia excerpt in the results, but It would take a very long time to run.
While this is not article on the Hutter Prize itself, you will be relieved to know that it is mentioned in the article on Marcus Hutter
What BestBuy are you talking about? The only bestbuy I know sells computer/electronics products. I don't seriously see how they could be blamed for making people fat. Oh, they sell TVs, which people sit in front of and get fat. They also sell MP3 players which people may use while going for a jog.
I don't think professionals use regular PCs either, So I don't think it reall makes a difference which sound card you get. People who buy sound card like that are the same people who buy equipment like this
Did slashdot ask for her to review the site, or did she just up and review it for us, because it's so hugely popular, even though, without even knowing what Vastu is, I can tell you that it isn't the best designed site out there. Here's a question, what does the perfect site look like according to Vastu?
I always thought Google bought YouTube so they could kill it. They have Google Video, which is pretty much the same thing, yet for some reason, is not as popular as YouTube is. So, they buy it, and then slowly replace it with Google Video. I don't see any problems here. Business as usual. And of course, Google is not evil.