People making bombs are hardly going to talk about it on Faceshit or other worthless social sites. They are already using encryption - probably one time pads, steganography, shared secret encryption with infinite-length keys and the like and will always be able to continue doing so.
Real spies hate spy tech.
Simply to possess it compounds the risk of exposure.
Real spies network. There is nothing quite so anonymous and reassuring as being a face in the crowd.
I wish they'd stay focused on usability and 'ergonomic' issues, and not waste time on colors and wallpapers and other bubblegum. Too much time wasted on fluff that doesn't matter much.
Design and color are very much a part of usability and "ergonomics." To say nothing of marketing.
If the Win 7 netbook's light blue pastels makes the sale at WalMart and Ubuntu's muddy brown doesn't, Canonical has a problem.
The desktop at work is likely to be locked down tight whatever the operating system. The default choices had better be the right choices because everyone will have to live with them.
It's not a selling point, it's a starting point. It's a sine qua non. For an application like video on the Web, nothing non-free can even enter the conversation.
This takes the geek out of the conversation.
Because he can't stop the entrepreneur from introducing new applications and services that will have mass-market appeal and success.
He can't stop tech from taking gaining a strangle hold outside the web.
Property rights would be one of those. 51% of your neighbors can't simply vote that your house should be bulldozed and turned in to a park. Even 100% of your neighbors can't vote to make that happen. Your rights to your property supersede what the majority happens to want.
The Constitution requires only two things: Just compensation and a taking for a public purpose. Your property can be taken and folded into a public park. The approaches to a bridge.
As long as it's not presenting a danger to neighbors, they should be able to do whatever the hell they want with it.
Living proof that the geek is truly a solitary cellar-dweller.
The reason ordinances like these get passed is to keep peace in the family. To preserve the character and appearance of the street. To protect real [and perceived] property values.
You can't go it alone. You have to get everyone on board.
You have to be willing to make some concessions - the street view matters to your neighbors.
Lawn opponents are taking on more than a rectangle of grass. They're fighting an institution, a way of life, a setting for childhood, a part of the American dream of home ownership.The Tyranny Of The Lawn [Sept 1991]
How many children would you have to rape to get bail set that high? How many people would you have to kill?
Not even one.
"Out on Bail" is a conditional - supervised - pre-trial release.
You will probably - almost certainly - be denied bail on serial rape or murder charge.
How many computer offenses would you have to commit?
You could be charged with only one.
Your eligibility for bail depends on the seriousness of the charge, the risk of flight, the danger you present to the community - and - not least - your willingness to accept the terms and conditions of your release.
Which might well include surrendering control over any data, physical keys, passwords, etc., in your possession.
I personally believe that individuals will make the difference. But people are now starting to feel enough pain - be it software costs, inefficient use of hardware, viruses and other malware, etc. - that Linux and open-source software, generally, are getting plenty of attention. The cure, in other words, now outweighs the effort of applying it. Yes, Microsoft will do its part to thwart this progress,but even so I've seen broad and ever-increasing government adoption of open source
He believes that individuals will make the difference - but the progress he sees is in government adoption of open source.
The top-down solution.
The mandate from on high.
Nothing much seems to be happening at ground level.
In the Net Applications stats, Linux struggles to hold on to a 1% share of the global desktop. Top Operating System Share Trend [March 2 Preview]
In the W3Schools OS Platform Stats W2K held a 42% share in March 03, Linux 2%.
W2K was never a mass market OS.
This February, Win 7 had 13%, Linux 5% and W2K 0%. You could legitimately argue from these stats that Linux hasn't gained much of a grip - on the desktop - even when you look at usage by the pros.
As for the general gaming market, yes, gaming is a weakness on Linux, but addressing that is not a priority for Canonical.
The PC game is the quintessential client app.
The machine that can play games is a powerhouse for all forms of media, interaction and communication. It sets the standard. Games and gaming tech can change the way you think about the PC or the console. How you use it.
It astonishes me that basic audio play and mixing could still be problematical for the Linux user in in 2010.
Open Source is inherently cross-platform. The Windows port is inevitable - and it has visibility. Download.com is one click away. The quality and ease of use of the Linux repository is unknown until you install the OS.
The sample apps on the typical Linux Live CD clearly aren't setting the world on fire.
The hardware manager pops up on first boot and gives you the option to install proprietary drivers for devices it's found on your system (like Nvidia/AMD cards). Also, the first time you try to use a media player you get the option to install proprietary codecs. This has worked for at least the last couple of years.
The OEM system install has been the gold standard in the consumer market for thirty years. The buyer doesn't think "open or closed," he thinks "convenience, power and performance."
Ideally, something he can see demonstrated in-store.
Near the end of its last flirtation with Linux, Walmart.com was posting yellow-bordered banners to warn potential customers that Linux was not Windows. That may have solved some problems with returns, but it was scarcely a boost to sales.
If Chromium includes some huge privacy issue - don't you think someone who HAS gone through the source might have mentioned it?
Chromium Lines of Code
[1,000 lines of code and over]
C++ 1.8 Million C 604 K XML 173 K HTML 169 K Autoconf 115 K JavaScript 97 K Python 82 K Objective-C 59 K shell script 47 K Perl 13 K Make 14 K Tcl 7 K Automake 1 K C# 1 K
You don't have to "trust" their browser at all. The source code for Chrome is freely available. If you find any features that are unfriendly towards privacy, you're free to modify the source.
If - and only if - you can read and understand the source.
If - and only if - you have the programming skills - and the time - to produce a well-behaved modification.
I am tempted to argue that when a program reaches a certain size or complexity the difference between closed and open source becomes academic.
What they want is to pick up the phone, make a call, and have someone tell them what to do. At first, I thought it was them being lazy. However, I now think it is closer to why programmers don't like to be interrupted in the middle of a task.
The task in progress is what has their supervisors breathing down their neck to complete.
That is why you are on one side of the help desk and they are on the other.
You apparently live close enough to a small farm that you can cut out the middleman like this. Most Americans don't.
Most farmers shop the co-op or big store as well. They are producers for a particular market. They tend wheat fields or orchards. Chicken or cattle. They are no more expert outside their own specialty than you are - and they have even less time to shop the boutique "organic" markets.
1/4 of a cow is 200 pounds of meat, entrails and bones. The clock is ticking from the moment you pack your freezer. You are likely to discover after 50 meat loaf suppers that even the family dog has lost lost his taste for beef.
Outside Microsoft, a major use for Silverlight is to stream video with digital restrictions management to make it significantly harder to save to the viewer's PC. Free software is fundamentally incompatible with this DRM.
I don't understand how using "free software" translates into a requirement for "unprotected content."
PPV, thelease or rental model, is considred legitimate in many other contexts. Why does it become illegitimate when the rental is an audio or video recording?
Document management is essential in business.
The free alternative is no alternative if it can't deliver the "DRM" tools your clients expect to see.
Its difficult to get numbers, but Ubuntu alone passed 8m users back in 2008 and has been growing since.
There have been 260 million downloads of AVG's free anti-virus product from CNET. 1.7 million downloads last week. The Adobe Reader for Windows gets about 110,000 hits per week through CNET alone. LimeWire 400,000. Top Freeware in Downloads.
The founding fathers never intended for anyone to be able sit on his laurels and live off a single work for his entire life, much less for three generations of his estate to benefit after his death
That is one interpretation.
The other is that the Founders sought to drive ambition and talent towards the production of new works of art.
For generations of Americans, Japanese Import meant "dime store junk." Japan in its post-war reconstruction went all-out to erase that stereotype forever.
The geek's celebration of the copy, the knock-off - the trivially derivative work - is disheartening. _____
The Founders were eighteenth century men of property.
Estate planning was as a natural to them as breathing. You didn't have a lot of time to make your mark, after all.
Cities are benign?... City living is nothing more than a concentration of workers to benefit industrial interests.
I believe it was 1845 when the editors of American Agriculturist [or perhaps it was The Rural New Yorker] introduced their first issue by explaining why they were based in New York City.
In the city, there were an abundance of talented artists, writers, reporters and engravers, skilled craftsman of every sort.
The city had printers and publishing houses that were already building a national market.
The postal service was good, rail and telegraph services were good.
The wholesale trade was centered there.
For all practical purposes, subsistence farming upstate ended with the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825.The western prairies would be commercial from the beginning.
Farmers have cash crops and real money to spend.
The city put you close to manufacturing - the cotton gin had transformed the South, the steel plow and mechanical harvester were about to transform the north.
The city put you close to commercial breeders, seed companies and nurseries.
The city had become the driving force behind agricultural development. Not the country.
3 Those that have no clue about browsers and pick essentially at random, or belong to one of the above groups and click in error.
It won't be a random choice.
They will choose the browser associated with their operating system:
Microsoft Windows = Microsoft IE 8 for Windows.
The only people where the selection and any possible bias inherent in the implementation of the random() function are the last group, which is also quite possibly the smallest of the three sets.
It is more likely the largest of the three sets.
These aren't geeks shopping for tech, these are ordinary people looking for a familiar and trusted brand name.
The ballot is a bureaucratic perversity that will play to Microsoft's advantage.
When will it finally be seen that the effect civil law has when applied to criminal cases is really rape? The civil law if I'm not mistaken was for big counterfeiters and other corporations screwing each other over.
The civil law is for anyone who has a legitimate grievance.
The P2P guy isn't tossing out 45s from the back of his pick-up truck.
His free samples can be replicated without limit. That makes him more dangerous than if he emptied out the warehouse.
The problem is that she's in court for downloading 16 songs.
You don't really believe she downloaded - and was sharing - only 16 songs, do you?
The downloader collects files like a wool sweater collects lint.
Unless his attorney is a nitwit he will try to prune the list back to the smallest number everyone can live with. He does not want a jury to see a "Shared Files" folder stuffed with 4,600 commercial grade mp3 rips.
Slashdot will post bait stories especially when it comes to anything regarding MS/Apple/YRO where the main purpose is to let people vent. In such cases, I don't really see it as a mistake, or "wrong", partly because anyone with high karma doesn't see ads, so at most it's "pandering", rather than something used to boost page views.
Pandering is pandering. The poster with his high Karma perks doesn't pay the bills. He's there to lend an air of respectability to the proceedings.
Except for one: the average consumer can't get a legal copy of any version of Windows for free.
The consumer wants the system bundle. The factory install. The manufacturer's or dealer's warranty. No OS is free-as-in-beer under those terms of sale.
Slashdot Mirror
People making bombs are hardly going to talk about it on Faceshit or other worthless social sites. They are already using encryption - probably one time pads, steganography, shared secret encryption with infinite-length keys and the like and will always be able to continue doing so.
Real spies hate spy tech.
Simply to possess it compounds the risk of exposure.
Real spies network. There is nothing quite so anonymous and reassuring as being a face in the crowd.
I wish they'd stay focused on usability and 'ergonomic' issues, and not waste time on colors and wallpapers and other bubblegum.
Too much time wasted on fluff that doesn't matter much.
Design and color are very much a part of usability and "ergonomics." To say nothing of marketing.
If the Win 7 netbook's light blue pastels makes the sale at WalMart and Ubuntu's muddy brown doesn't, Canonical has a problem.
The desktop at work is likely to be locked down tight whatever the operating system. The default choices had better be the right choices because everyone will have to live with them.
It's not a selling point, it's a starting point. It's a sine qua non. For an application like video on the Web, nothing non-free can even enter the conversation.
This takes the geek out of the conversation.
Because he can't stop the entrepreneur from introducing new applications and services that will have mass-market appeal and success.
He can't stop tech from taking gaining a strangle hold outside the web.
For example:
The number of AVC/H.264 licensees is rapidly approaching 800.
Property rights would be one of those. 51% of your neighbors can't simply vote that your house should be bulldozed and turned in to a park. Even 100% of your neighbors can't vote to make that happen. Your rights to your property supersede what the majority happens to want.
The Constitution requires only two things: Just compensation and a taking for a public purpose. Your property can be taken and folded into a public park. The approaches to a bridge.
She would have told you to keep her out of this. That she fought her own battles - not yours.
As long as it's not presenting a danger to neighbors, they should be able to do whatever the hell they want with it.
Living proof that the geek is truly a solitary cellar-dweller.
The reason ordinances like these get passed is to keep peace in the family. To preserve the character and appearance of the street. To protect real [and perceived] property values.
You can't go it alone. You have to get everyone on board.
You have to be willing to make some concessions - the street view matters to your neighbors.
Lawn opponents are taking on more than a rectangle of grass. They're fighting an institution, a way of life, a setting for childhood, a part of the American dream of home ownership. The Tyranny Of The Lawn [Sept 1991]
How many children would you have to rape to get bail set that high? How many people would you have to kill?
Not even one.
"Out on Bail" is a conditional - supervised - pre-trial release.
You will probably - almost certainly - be denied bail on serial rape or murder charge.
How many computer offenses would you have to commit?
You could be charged with only one.
Your eligibility for bail depends on the seriousness of the charge, the risk of flight, the danger you present to the community - and - not least - your willingness to accept the terms and conditions of your release.
Which might well include surrendering control over any data, physical keys, passwords, etc., in your possession.
The exceptional PC game almost never slips away entirely.
The latest compatibility update for 32 and 64 Bit Win 7 had fixes for Half-Life. KOTOR.
Reader Rabbit. Carmen San Diego.
I kid you not.
You'll find Commander Keen on Steam, Fallout on Gog.com.
The PC gaming keyboard is still very much alive: Microsoft SideWinder X6 Keyboard [$36]
I personally believe that individuals will make the difference.
But people are now starting to feel enough pain - be it software costs, inefficient use of hardware, viruses and other malware, etc. - that Linux and open-source software, generally, are getting plenty of attention. The cure, in other words, now outweighs the effort of applying it. Yes, Microsoft will do its part to thwart this progress,but even so I've seen broad and ever-increasing government adoption of open source
He believes that individuals will make the difference - but the progress he sees is in government adoption of open source.
The top-down solution.
The mandate from on high.
Nothing much seems to be happening at ground level.
In the Net Applications stats, Linux struggles to hold on to a 1% share of the global desktop. Top Operating System Share Trend [March 2 Preview]
In the W3Schools OS Platform Stats W2K held a 42% share in March 03, Linux 2%.
W2K was never a mass market OS.
This February, Win 7 had 13%, Linux 5% and W2K 0%. You could legitimately argue from these stats that Linux hasn't gained much of a grip - on the desktop - even when you look at usage by the pros.
As for the general gaming market, yes, gaming is a weakness on Linux, but addressing that is not a priority for Canonical.
The PC game is the quintessential client app.
The machine that can play games is a powerhouse for all forms of media, interaction and communication. It sets the standard. Games and gaming tech can change the way you think about the PC or the console. How you use it.
It astonishes me that basic audio play and mixing could still be problematical for the Linux user in in 2010.
All About . . . Sound Cards for Windows [July 1997]
Open Source is inherently cross-platform. The Windows port is inevitable - and it has visibility. Download.com is one click away. The quality and ease of use of the Linux repository is unknown until you install the OS.
The sample apps on the typical Linux Live CD clearly aren't setting the world on fire.
The hardware manager pops up on first boot and gives you the option to install proprietary drivers for devices it's found on your system (like Nvidia/AMD cards). Also, the first time you try to use a media player you get the option to install proprietary codecs. This has worked for at least the last couple of years.
The OEM system install has been the gold standard in the consumer market for thirty years. The buyer doesn't think "open or closed," he thinks "convenience, power and performance."
Ideally, something he can see demonstrated in-store.
Near the end of its last flirtation with Linux, Walmart.com was posting yellow-bordered banners to warn potential customers that Linux was not Windows. That may have solved some problems with returns, but it was scarcely a boost to sales.
If Chromium includes some huge privacy issue - don't you think someone who HAS gone through the source might have mentioned it?
Chromium Lines of Code
[1,000 lines of code and over]
C++ 1.8 Million
C 604 K
XML 173 K
HTML 169 K
Autoconf 115 K
JavaScript 97 K
Python 82 K
Objective-C 59 K
shell script 47 K
Perl 13 K
Make 14 K
Tcl 7 K
Automake 1 K
C# 1 K
Chromium Comment Lines [Over 30,000]
C++ 297 K
C 182 K
JavaScript 42 k
python 38 K
Chromium (Google Chrome
You don't have to "trust" their browser at all. The source code for Chrome is freely available. If you find any features that are unfriendly towards privacy, you're free to modify the source.
If - and only if - you can read and understand the source.
If - and only if - you have the programming skills - and the time - to produce a well-behaved modification.
I am tempted to argue that when a program reaches a certain size or complexity the difference between closed and open source becomes academic.
What they want is to pick up the phone, make a call, and have someone tell them what to do. At first, I thought it was them being lazy. However, I now think it is closer to why programmers don't like to be interrupted in the middle of a task.
The task in progress is what has their supervisors breathing down their neck to complete.
That is why you are on one side of the help desk and they are on the other.
Unless those big dogs wake up soon from their stupor, an unknown startup will sneak behind them and steal their pot of gold.
You are going to need that pot of gold to fund your project.
Research, Engineering. Fabrication. Marketing. The barriers to entry here are not trivial.
You apparently live close enough to a small farm that you can cut out the middleman like this. Most Americans don't.
Most farmers shop the co-op or big store as well. They are producers for a particular market. They tend wheat fields or orchards. Chicken or cattle. They are no more expert outside their own specialty than you are - and they have even less time to shop the boutique "organic" markets.
1/4 of a cow is 200 pounds of meat, entrails and bones. The clock is ticking from the moment you pack your freezer. You are likely to discover after 50 meat loaf suppers that even the family dog has lost lost his taste for beef.
Outside Microsoft, a major use for Silverlight is to stream video with digital restrictions management to make it significantly harder to save to the viewer's PC. Free software is fundamentally incompatible with this DRM.
I don't understand how using "free software" translates into a requirement for "unprotected content."
PPV, thelease or rental model, is considred legitimate in many other contexts. Why does it become illegitimate when the rental is an audio or video recording?
Document management is essential in business.
The free alternative is no alternative if it can't deliver the "DRM" tools your clients expect to see.
Its difficult to get numbers, but Ubuntu alone passed 8m users back in 2008 and has been growing since.
There have been 260 million downloads of AVG's free anti-virus product from CNET. 1.7 million downloads last week. The Adobe Reader for Windows gets about 110,000 hits per week through CNET alone. LimeWire 400,000. Top Freeware in Downloads.
The founding fathers never intended for anyone to be able sit on his laurels and live off a single work for his entire life, much less for three generations of his estate to benefit after his death
That is one interpretation.
The other is that the Founders sought to drive ambition and talent towards the production of new works of art.
For generations of Americans, Japanese Import meant "dime store junk." Japan in its post-war reconstruction went all-out to erase that stereotype forever.
The geek's celebration of the copy, the knock-off - the trivially derivative work - is disheartening.
_____
The Founders were eighteenth century men of property.
Estate planning was as a natural to them as breathing. You didn't have a lot of time to make your mark, after all.
You came of age at 21 and died at 45.
Cities are benign? ... City living is nothing more than a concentration of workers to benefit industrial interests.
I believe it was 1845 when the editors of American Agriculturist [or perhaps it was The Rural New Yorker] introduced their first issue by explaining why they were based in New York City.
In the city, there were an abundance of talented artists, writers, reporters and engravers, skilled craftsman of every sort.
The city had printers and publishing houses that were already building a national market.
The postal service was good, rail and telegraph services were good.
The wholesale trade was centered there.
For all practical purposes, subsistence farming upstate ended with the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825.The western prairies would be commercial from the beginning.
Farmers have cash crops and real money to spend.
The city put you close to manufacturing - the cotton gin had transformed the South, the steel plow and mechanical harvester were about to transform the north.
The city put you close to commercial breeders, seed companies and nurseries.
The city had become the driving force behind agricultural development. Not the country.
3 Those that have no clue about browsers and pick essentially at random, or belong to one of the above groups and click in error.
It won't be a random choice.
They will choose the browser associated with their operating system:
Microsoft Windows = Microsoft IE 8 for Windows.
The only people where the selection and any possible bias inherent in the implementation of the random() function are the last group, which is also quite possibly the smallest of the three sets.
It is more likely the largest of the three sets.
These aren't geeks shopping for tech, these are ordinary people looking for a familiar and trusted brand name.
The ballot is a bureaucratic perversity that will play to Microsoft's advantage.
When will it finally be seen that the effect civil law has when applied to criminal cases is really rape? The civil law if I'm not mistaken was for big counterfeiters and other corporations screwing each other over.
The civil law is for anyone who has a legitimate grievance.
The P2P guy isn't tossing out 45s from the back of his pick-up truck.
His free samples can be replicated without limit. That makes him more dangerous than if he emptied out the warehouse.
It's P2P right? The downloaders are distributors.
Which is why statutory damages come into play.
If it was possible to trace downloads back to their sources, the geek would be the first to scream for a statutory limit on damages.
There have been over 200 million downloads of LimeWire from CNET alone.
The problem is that she's in court for downloading 16 songs.
You don't really believe she downloaded - and was sharing - only 16 songs, do you?
The downloader collects files like a wool sweater collects lint.
Unless his attorney is a nitwit he will try to prune the list back to the smallest number everyone can live with. He does not want a jury to see a "Shared Files" folder stuffed with 4,600 commercial grade mp3 rips.
Slashdot will post bait stories especially when it comes to anything regarding MS/Apple/YRO where the main purpose is to let people vent. In such cases, I don't really see it as a mistake, or "wrong", partly because anyone with high karma doesn't see ads, so at most it's "pandering", rather than something used to boost page views.
Pandering is pandering. The poster with his high Karma perks doesn't pay the bills. He's there to lend an air of respectability to the proceedings.
The consumer wants the system bundle. The factory install. The manufacturer's or dealer's warranty. No OS is free-as-in-beer under those terms of sale.