haven't read the whole thing, but what seems odd to me is that they would compare web design with the (tradition-influenced) *architectural / interior* design culture in Japan, rather than popular graphic design, which is the clear inspiration for Japanese web design. Sure, if you look at Japanese interiors (traditional ones, rather than the average kid's bedroom...) and furniture, you might be confused, but if you go look at Japanese magazines or concert fliers or billboard ads or any other facet of modern graphic design you'd probably be a hell of a lot less surprised by the websites.
"Thirdly, the sci-fi notion of underground space cities could become a reality.""
Well, duh. Shockingly enough, many 'sci-fi' writers are fairly smart people who know what they're talking about. Underground space cities aren't usually ideas authors just pulled out of their asses because they though it'd be cool. Mostly they show up because the authors sat down and thought 'hmm, well, if there was _really_ a settlement on a rock with no atmosphere and very little gravity and we wanted to deal with the problems of extreme temperature variations and exposure to radiation and so forth, I wonder what would be a good idea...oh, hey, underground cities!"
It tends to bug me when stories like this get written from a viewpoint (often subconscious) of 'hey, those crazy science fiction writers thought about this fifty years ago, but now someone with letters behind their name wrote about it in a Serious Publication, that makes the thought Real!'
"Sure. But when the advertised fares don't even include the inability to check a single suitcase without paying extra fees then the advertised fear has no bearing on reality"
Uh, no bearing on reality? I travel without checked baggage all the time, even on airlines where it wouldn't cost anything to check a bag (it saves time at the carousel, and avoids the possibility of the airline losing your luggage). I've travelled to Europe for a month with only a carry-on, though admittedly I cheated a bit because I had a few clothes in the place I was going.
I don't actually mind this kind of unbundling, since it actually does make my travel cheaper. I like to travel without checked luggage, print my own ticket and take my own snacks on the plane in lieu of terrible, terrible airline food anyway, so I'm all good with it.
No. It's a levy, not a deposit. It's meant to cover the cost of recycling. The money doesn't go to general taxation, it's paid to the contractor who implements the actual recycling program.
People do dump stuff in the street, yeah, but then they also did that *before* the recycling levies were introduced. Because people who are too lazy to haul their old TV to the garbage dump are also too lazy to haul it to a recycling centre. So no net benefit in terms of those assholes, but no net loss either. For those of us who would've hauled it to a garbage dump before, it's no harder or easier to haul it to a recycling centre instead, so mostly people do.
It works (for a suitably small value of 'works') elsewhere. There's a recycling levy on all consumer electronics where I live (British Columbia). It gets pretty large for big items - complete computers, big TVs, fridges and the like. Several other countries and territories have them now, too. It's technically illegal to put a defined list of electronics in the municipal waste system any more, you take them to retailers who are obliged to accept them for recycling.
It's almost a good system. I say 'almost' because the company that got the contract to do the 'recycling' is one of the big multinational waste disposal companies which, we're fairly sure, just ships it all to China anyway. But hey, nearly made it!
Such a system can certainly work. People will bitch and whine and then just pay the fee anyway because they can't possibly *not* own the latest 89" 3D plasma monstrosity. Rabid consumerism can be made to work both ways, sometimes anyway.
If you want a practical alternative for you personally, most major towns have a Free Geek or similar organization which will take old computers for *genuine* recycling. I believe there's a couple of phone recycling schemes that are on the level too. Not sure beyond that.
In this case, we (RH) don't even really need to be that Good. (Of course, we are - the sun shines out of our ass, etc etc). But in this particular case, as Dave says, RH - corporately - doesn't really care. RH doesn't have a horse in the race, when it comes to graphics on cellphones, after all.
Plenty of people at RH - mostly those of us who are stuck with crappy graphics adapters in our laptops / cellphones... - care about the issue, but RH as a company doesn't really give a rat's ass.
"Governor General has power in a minority. The current one basically does exactly what the prime minister wants and basically shuts down the parliament at every opportunity that Harper finds it "inconvenient". It already happened twice."
Of course the GG prorogues parliament when the Prime Minister asks. That's how the 'constitution' works. Just as the Queen does what the British Prime Minister says. It's how the British constitutional settlement worked out, and Canada inherited it. It's mad as hell, but it keeps the tourists happy. The Queen, or Queen's representative, does not actually exercise discretionary power, in return for which she gets to still be the Queen. It's fairly simple in practice, though ridiculous in theory.
(Now, the really interesting thing would've been to see what happened if the NDP/Liberal coalition deal had actually happened, because constitutionally it would've been the GG's decision whether or not to allow them to form a government, and there's no other authority to refer to, or precedent to follow. But it didn't. Ah, well.)
Yes. Doom 95. It was actually used in a small way by Microsoft to promote Windows 95. It was never particularly popular, though, so I had the same thought as you...the 'authentic' Doom doesn't have any DLL dependencies. Serious Doom players ran the original DOS.exe in Windows. Some still do, but many now run source ports for convenience (it's quite hard to make the original Doom run properly in current versions of Windows, most people who want to do it run it in an emulator).
Wait, what? Where you live all the hookers have to do is drive fast and turn left? I think the hookers in your town may be sort of missing the point of their profession...
"the fast-growing telco supplier's ownership structure is still fascinating, strange and tricky for Western observers to understand."...whereas, of course, the ownership structures of 'Western' companies are *always* beautifully transparent! sheesh.
"Take out a number of transformers and you can really sit back and see that those oddballs insisting on collecting firewood are the survivors while the rest are running around in circles. Especially tough in the middle of the winter."
This is going to derail the discussion massively, but I read a neat article recently which pointed out that survivalists, preparers etc are sort of missing the bigger picture. If the world goes to hell in a handcart and you're the one sitting pretty on a two hundred year supply of tinned goods, what that makes you is a _really juicy target_ for all the people who don't have a two hundred year supply of tinned goods. Sure, the nuttier survivalists have lots of guns, but this is America, right? Not only the survivalists have guns. Wouldn't be hard for an angry mob to get sufficiently tooled-up to take out and subsequently rob the stores of any given well-prepared paranoiac...
so, yeah, in the long run, it's all a bit of a waste of effort =)
the point is that Ubuntu uses one mechanism to provide updates for *all* the software you have installed, as long as you stick to the Ubuntu repos, as is heavily advised and encouraged on all Linux distributions. Windows Update gets you updates to Windows itself, and a few Microsoft applications. For all other applications, you have to use a different mechanism in each individual app, or else you're vulnerable.
(This is an excellent answer to the typical 'why can't I just double-click on an.exe file?!' whine about Linux software installation, BTW.)
For the fifth time, because it means you don't have to run entire programs with root privileges.
You've got a million-line-of-code GUI program which only actually needs root privileges for the two hundred lines of code which deal with application installation. What's safer - running a million lines of code with root privileges, or running two hundred?
Not to mention that it provides a much better user experience; you could, for instance, port Nautilus to PolicyKit. That way if you try to rename a file in/usr/local with nautilus open as a regular user it could simply prompt you for appropriate authentication rather than just not being able to do it and requiring you to run a new instance of Nautilus as root before it'll work. Same applies to any application which can do useful things as a regular user but _also_ do useful things as root.
then you're not reading the responses very well, because that's not at all the plan. the plan has already been explained, multiple times, in this thread.
It's not a layer of functionality at all, it's a tool for defining policies (hence the name). It only _does_ anything if applications choose to use it to do privilege escalation (rather than using su or sudo or something else). They would choose to use PolicyKit for the reasons I indicated: so that they can do privilege escalation on a finer-grained (and hence _safer_) level than that of the entire process, and so they can use a wider range of authentication methods than just 'type someone's password'.
(it's also a far better architecture for typical desktop use than su and sudo, which are essentially console commands with rickety add-on GUI layers).
Amazingly enough, the developers of PolicyKit are aware of the existence of sudo. You wouldn't've thunk it, but they are.
As I've already explained multiple times in this thread, the principle advantage of PolicyKit over sudo (and su) is that it provides a framework through which you can design apps such that only the code that actually _needs_ root privileges gets it. Rather than running the entire GUI as root. The secondary advantage is that it provides far more flexibility and granularity in terms of exactly what authentication methods are used to authorize what operations. As I said to the other guy, please do some research.
it's not a question of 'the f12 release', it was (and still is; the F12 patch is being implemented in F12) the upstream default. I think there was a later discussion about making it the default, but mailing list archives are a pain in the ass to search. That's the most substantive discussion, which is why I've been pointing to it.
I dunno, really, like I said, I haven't tried it:) why not play around with it in a VM - for bonus credit, in several different distros - and write up an article / blog post on the results? I'd sure find that interesting.
From looking at the chatter on the mailing list it seems to me that people on the 'inside' were aware of the ramifications of the change and let it go through.
Not really. To the best of my knowledge, the only 'inside' people who knew about this change before the bug report were Richard Hughes, David Zeuthen and possibly Matthias Clasen.
As I said, the main thing that's likely to come out of this is a better set of guidelines and review process for privilege escalation in packages. Until now it hadn't really been a big issue because little changed much in this area. Now PolicyKit is being implemented throughout the distro there's likely to be a need for a coherent policy about how exactly that should be done, and something like that will probably emerge.
Slashdot Mirror
haven't read the whole thing, but what seems odd to me is that they would compare web design with the (tradition-influenced) *architectural / interior* design culture in Japan, rather than popular graphic design, which is the clear inspiration for Japanese web design. Sure, if you look at Japanese interiors (traditional ones, rather than the average kid's bedroom...) and furniture, you might be confused, but if you go look at Japanese magazines or concert fliers or billboard ads or any other facet of modern graphic design you'd probably be a hell of a lot less surprised by the websites.
"Thirdly, the sci-fi notion of underground space cities could become a reality.""
Well, duh. Shockingly enough, many 'sci-fi' writers are fairly smart people who know what they're talking about. Underground space cities aren't usually ideas authors just pulled out of their asses because they though it'd be cool. Mostly they show up because the authors sat down and thought 'hmm, well, if there was _really_ a settlement on a rock with no atmosphere and very little gravity and we wanted to deal with the problems of extreme temperature variations and exposure to radiation and so forth, I wonder what would be a good idea...oh, hey, underground cities!"
It tends to bug me when stories like this get written from a viewpoint (often subconscious) of 'hey, those crazy science fiction writers thought about this fifty years ago, but now someone with letters behind their name wrote about it in a Serious Publication, that makes the thought Real!'
"Sure. But when the advertised fares don't even include the inability to check a single suitcase without paying extra fees then the advertised fear has no bearing on reality"
Uh, no bearing on reality? I travel without checked baggage all the time, even on airlines where it wouldn't cost anything to check a bag (it saves time at the carousel, and avoids the possibility of the airline losing your luggage). I've travelled to Europe for a month with only a carry-on, though admittedly I cheated a bit because I had a few clothes in the place I was going.
I don't actually mind this kind of unbundling, since it actually does make my travel cheaper. I like to travel without checked luggage, print my own ticket and take my own snacks on the plane in lieu of terrible, terrible airline food anyway, so I'm all good with it.
No. It's a levy, not a deposit. It's meant to cover the cost of recycling. The money doesn't go to general taxation, it's paid to the contractor who implements the actual recycling program.
People do dump stuff in the street, yeah, but then they also did that *before* the recycling levies were introduced. Because people who are too lazy to haul their old TV to the garbage dump are also too lazy to haul it to a recycling centre. So no net benefit in terms of those assholes, but no net loss either. For those of us who would've hauled it to a garbage dump before, it's no harder or easier to haul it to a recycling centre instead, so mostly people do.
I had a Neuros MP3 player back in 2003 which hyped this fairly heavily as a feature...
It works (for a suitably small value of 'works') elsewhere. There's a recycling levy on all consumer electronics where I live (British Columbia). It gets pretty large for big items - complete computers, big TVs, fridges and the like. Several other countries and territories have them now, too. It's technically illegal to put a defined list of electronics in the municipal waste system any more, you take them to retailers who are obliged to accept them for recycling.
It's almost a good system. I say 'almost' because the company that got the contract to do the 'recycling' is one of the big multinational waste disposal companies which, we're fairly sure, just ships it all to China anyway. But hey, nearly made it!
Such a system can certainly work. People will bitch and whine and then just pay the fee anyway because they can't possibly *not* own the latest 89" 3D plasma monstrosity. Rabid consumerism can be made to work both ways, sometimes anyway.
If you want a practical alternative for you personally, most major towns have a Free Geek or similar organization which will take old computers for *genuine* recycling. I believe there's a couple of phone recycling schemes that are on the level too. Not sure beyond that.
So, let me get this straight - we have to decide whether we want to side with ticket touts or Ticketmaster?
Yikes, it's like choosing between an intimate night of passion with Dick Cheney or being fired into the heart of the sun. How do you decide?!
In this case, we (RH) don't even really need to be that Good. (Of course, we are - the sun shines out of our ass, etc etc). But in this particular case, as Dave says, RH - corporately - doesn't really care. RH doesn't have a horse in the race, when it comes to graphics on cellphones, after all.
Plenty of people at RH - mostly those of us who are stuck with crappy graphics adapters in our laptops / cellphones... - care about the issue, but RH as a company doesn't really give a rat's ass.
"Governor General has power in a minority. The current one basically does exactly what the prime minister wants and basically shuts down the parliament at every opportunity that Harper finds it "inconvenient". It already happened twice."
Of course the GG prorogues parliament when the Prime Minister asks. That's how the 'constitution' works. Just as the Queen does what the British Prime Minister says. It's how the British constitutional settlement worked out, and Canada inherited it. It's mad as hell, but it keeps the tourists happy. The Queen, or Queen's representative, does not actually exercise discretionary power, in return for which she gets to still be the Queen. It's fairly simple in practice, though ridiculous in theory.
(Now, the really interesting thing would've been to see what happened if the NDP/Liberal coalition deal had actually happened, because constitutionally it would've been the GG's decision whether or not to allow them to form a government, and there's no other authority to refer to, or precedent to follow. But it didn't. Ah, well.)
"my blood has shed for your cowardice in not serving the good cause of throwing off the colonial yolk."
that's quite possibly the funniest thing I've read all year.
Yes. Doom 95. It was actually used in a small way by Microsoft to promote Windows 95. It was never particularly popular, though, so I had the same thought as you...the 'authentic' Doom doesn't have any DLL dependencies. Serious Doom players ran the original DOS .exe in Windows. Some still do, but many now run source ports for convenience (it's quite hard to make the original Doom run properly in current versions of Windows, most people who want to do it run it in an emulator).
Wait, what? Where you live all the hookers have to do is drive fast and turn left? I think the hookers in your town may be sort of missing the point of their profession...
From the original story:
"the fast-growing telco supplier's ownership structure is still fascinating, strange and tricky for Western observers to understand." ...whereas, of course, the ownership structures of 'Western' companies are *always* beautifully transparent! sheesh.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/27/nlos_ls_chopped/
as I was going to put it, there's another guy with the initials SM who might have something to say about it :)
"Take out a number of transformers and you can really sit back and see that those oddballs insisting on collecting firewood are the survivors while the rest are running around in circles. Especially tough in the middle of the winter."
This is going to derail the discussion massively, but I read a neat article recently which pointed out that survivalists, preparers etc are sort of missing the bigger picture. If the world goes to hell in a handcart and you're the one sitting pretty on a two hundred year supply of tinned goods, what that makes you is a _really juicy target_ for all the people who don't have a two hundred year supply of tinned goods. Sure, the nuttier survivalists have lots of guns, but this is America, right? Not only the survivalists have guns. Wouldn't be hard for an angry mob to get sufficiently tooled-up to take out and subsequently rob the stores of any given well-prepared paranoiac...
so, yeah, in the long run, it's all a bit of a waste of effort =)
the point is that Ubuntu uses one mechanism to provide updates for *all* the software you have installed, as long as you stick to the Ubuntu repos, as is heavily advised and encouraged on all Linux distributions. Windows Update gets you updates to Windows itself, and a few Microsoft applications. For all other applications, you have to use a different mechanism in each individual app, or else you're vulnerable.
(This is an excellent answer to the typical 'why can't I just double-click on an .exe file?!' whine about Linux software installation, BTW.)
"Again: why is finer grained safer?"
For the fifth time, because it means you don't have to run entire programs with root privileges.
You've got a million-line-of-code GUI program which only actually needs root privileges for the two hundred lines of code which deal with application installation. What's safer - running a million lines of code with root privileges, or running two hundred?
Not to mention that it provides a much better user experience; you could, for instance, port Nautilus to PolicyKit. That way if you try to rename a file in /usr/local with nautilus open as a regular user it could simply prompt you for appropriate authentication rather than just not being able to do it and requiring you to run a new instance of Nautilus as root before it'll work. Same applies to any application which can do useful things as a regular user but _also_ do useful things as root.
then you're not reading the responses very well, because that's not at all the plan. the plan has already been explained, multiple times, in this thread.
It's not a layer of functionality at all, it's a tool for defining policies (hence the name). It only _does_ anything if applications choose to use it to do privilege escalation (rather than using su or sudo or something else). They would choose to use PolicyKit for the reasons I indicated: so that they can do privilege escalation on a finer-grained (and hence _safer_) level than that of the entire process, and so they can use a wider range of authentication methods than just 'type someone's password'.
(it's also a far better architecture for typical desktop use than su and sudo, which are essentially console commands with rickety add-on GUI layers).
Amazingly enough, the developers of PolicyKit are aware of the existence of sudo. You wouldn't've thunk it, but they are. As I've already explained multiple times in this thread, the principle advantage of PolicyKit over sudo (and su) is that it provides a framework through which you can design apps such that only the code that actually _needs_ root privileges gets it. Rather than running the entire GUI as root. The secondary advantage is that it provides far more flexibility and granularity in terms of exactly what authentication methods are used to authorize what operations. As I said to the other guy, please do some research.
It's already been pointed out that sudo is not used as the authentication provider for any Fedora component.
it's not a question of 'the f12 release', it was (and still is; the F12 patch is being implemented in F12) the upstream default. I think there was a later discussion about making it the default, but mailing list archives are a pain in the ass to search. That's the most substantive discussion, which is why I've been pointing to it.
I dunno, really, like I said, I haven't tried it :) why not play around with it in a VM - for bonus credit, in several different distros - and write up an article / blog post on the results? I'd sure find that interesting.
From looking at the chatter on the mailing list it seems to me that people on the 'inside' were aware of the ramifications of the change and let it go through.
Not really. To the best of my knowledge, the only 'inside' people who knew about this change before the bug report were Richard Hughes, David Zeuthen and possibly Matthias Clasen.
As I said, the main thing that's likely to come out of this is a better set of guidelines and review process for privilege escalation in packages. Until now it hadn't really been a big issue because little changed much in this area. Now PolicyKit is being implemented throughout the distro there's likely to be a need for a coherent policy about how exactly that should be done, and something like that will probably emerge.