I think Mother Theresa would choose not to print anything. She was a friend of poverty, not of the poor, and considered suffering to be a state of grace. She was a rather nasty piece of work, who kept the poor in poverty, and prevented many dying people from getting access to medicine. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WQ0i3nCx60
How about a "Privacy-Reqiurement In Principle Act", mandating that all devices should be secured to protect the user's privacy so that EVEN Law enforcement cannot ever get access. Backdooring should be a criminal offense, as should excess logging, and facilitating wiretapping. Product safety laws should be updated to treat software vulnerabilities the same way as toxic components.
Then instead of going around with the fantasy that law enforcement can fix problems, politicians might devote some more energy to fixing the underlying causes (such as foreign policies that cause "blowback" and the war on drugs). It will also make the country much safer against "cyber war".
Sometimes, a program can be dead because it's obsolete. Others can appear dead because they have simply been completed. For example, I'd guess that xclock hasn't been updated in many years... but it's still widely used for testing X11.
It would be OK if there were an option to pay for the app and have no advertising. Or even if google play let me filter the apps by their funding model.
I absolutely do not want ads on my phone, under any circumstances. I'd rather pay the developer.
I agree. Having been given an unwanted present of an iPad (and now I can't get myself a real tablet for fear of offense), I'd really like to see a port of Firefox to Cydia. Actually, given that the GNU utils and X server already exist, why not port a window-manager too, and run a real OS on it?
Rather than buying a new TV, consider doing what I did: find a nice large LCD monitor, take off the plastic, and take it to a picture-framers. Then get it framed in the style you like. I now have an antique gilded-frame that plays DVDs:-)
Also, get a NAS unit in your basement, then make sure all your computing hardware is dead silent. It's so nice that way!
Almond milk is too expensive, and imho, soy milk is unspeakable (I'd rather not have milk at all). But seriously, why use a cow, which is such an inefficient bioreactor?
It *is* really awkward - I agree, and especially it's hard to accurately distinguish left-arrow from down-arrow. But if you have hands in typing position (eg for a trackpoint-style keyboard), then the minimal movement of the hands is to use RH pinky. It's the finger I probalby use most, for shift, and the 4 arrow keys. [Btw, none of my keyboards, either desktop or laptop, have a numeric keypad]
If we can take grain + yeast and get beer, then why can't we design a yeast-variant that produces milk? After all, grass and wheat are very similar. Of course we might not get all the complex proteins and enzymes required to make good cheese - but it should be possible to get a perfectly decent product for putting in coffee, making ice-cream, and pouring over cereal. A cow is a terribly inefficient way to convert grass into milk - we should be able to do better.
What do you do when you want to use Linux software raid, but the server only comes with a hardware raid controller, and won't let you have direct disk access? This has been the case with all my recent IBM and HP servers.
I see why it's hard to run another distro natively. But why not run a small Linux inside a VM, and connect to it fullscreen with VNC or X? That would be almost as good, and shouldn't be that hard to do - the compilers already exist for the apps, and both VNC client and X11 client (technically, server) programs exist already. If I were Samsung, I think I'd fund such a porting effort out of pique!
Is there any chance to put another OS on the iPad? It would be a great way to get an Android tablet with a proper 4:3 display and good speakers. Or why not run X11 on it, and LOCAL applications (or VNC and a local install of android or a regular Linux).
Also, once jailbroken, is there a way to make the Music/Video/Photo apps recognise files that were loaded on using SSH rather than iTunes?
Interesting point about the Office 365. The problem with the MS viewers is that they can't save the document in a non MS-format. And LibreOffice can't perfectly import the more awkward bits of MS documents.
This is the question. What I'm trying to do is arrange the "5 MS machines in a corner, walk over there and take your turn" approach, but without the walking. The company would generally have zero users making use of MSO; it just needs to know that all 100 of them could, if they had to, have occasional access. The Windows machine could be a single-user box, running a single shared "public" account.
Otherwise, what would it take to have a system that could script MS Office, to provide, say, a web-service that could take in an awkward powerpoint, and spit out a PDF, in a compatible way?
What I'd like to know is whether we can have a way to time-share Windows applications. Consider an office of 100 people. At the moment, they all of MS Office installed, just in case they get an attachment that LibreOffice can't handle. That's 100 copies of the MSO license.
We'd like to move them to Linux, and LO, but still need that MSO capability just occasionally. So the obvious way is to set up 100 free desktops, and put 5 Windows+MSO machines in the corner, people can then walk over, queue up, and use the MSO machines if they really must. Result: only pay MS for 5 licenses, and start escaping lock-in.
But that's really ugly. Is there any elegant way to do this seamlessly for the end user, with VNC or similar? We need to ensure that 100 people can all (potentially) access MSO in their own environmnent (own PC, own view of the fileshare, if possible, own preferences), but with some sort of queuing system that shares out the access.
I'm aware of the ugliness if 6 people need MSO at the same time, and that this might not work well for video, or advanced powerpoint. But otherwise, how might it be done? (And given that MS might not *like* it, how do we stay legally covered. IMHO, this is perfectly fair, because MSO is only ever installed on 5 PCs, and only ever used by 5 people at a time).
In Bash, the $ sign is a unary operator that means "replace NAME by its VALUE". That's why, in Bash, assignment of variables is done without $ signs. For example: fruit=apple; echo $fruit. It's also why the bash shell allows $ to do so many things, such as ${filename%.extn} (strip off the extension from a filename).
In PHP, $ isn't an operator, but a symbol that means "variable". This is useful for clarity, especially when there are so many keywords around, and when a variable could be auto-vivified (and shouldn't be confused with a constant, or an unknown keyword).
Also, interestingly, $1 and $2 etc are meaningful in Bash and Perl, but in PHP, they are NOT variables. They get used in SQL query parameters, but otherwise, the $ is considered literal. Eg echo "this is $1"
Perl distinguishes variable scope between scalar/array/hash. PHP allows a variable to be either (and sometimes to swap types), and considers "array" and "hash" to be basically the same thing.
Linux fonts always have been rather a nightmare. There are really only 4 solutions:
1. Learn to live with blurry antialiased fonts. In my experience, about 80% of people actually prefer them that way. Windows defaults to "cleartype". [Some people (like you and I) really don't like them this way, and hate the colour-fringing from sub-pixel antialiasing; we'd rather have clear and sharp letters than care about the glyphs looking different in different typefaces]
2. Go back to the old (2000-era) 75-dpi and 100-dpi fixed (non-scalable) fonts.
3. Get a very high DPI screen. (I got a 2048x1536 15" LCD panel); this makes the antialiasing work OK becasue you can't see the pixels.
4. Choose your fonts very carefully, turn on hinting, disable antialiasing below 15 pt. (You may need to change your libfreetype for one with the bytecode interpreter enabled - software patent). Personally, I use Terminus for the terminal, and 8-point Tahoma everywhere else.
How is that different from an ordinary server cert? I just got a cert for my own domain; that doesn't let me masquerade as a bank. If I get my browser from Mozilla, how do I know that my ISP isn't snooping? If I'm reading you correctly, you're saying that the entire HTTPS spec is a total wreck, and we'd be better off without it than a false illusion of security?
Isn't that the whole point of HTTPS, to ensure that a man-in-the-middle attack (in this case, a probably benign proxy) is impossible? Also, why? Doesn't every website now compress html/css/js with mod_gzip?
I'd like to suggest that online dating is an example of a cloud service, where freedom # -1 applies, namely:
the freedom to interact with all other USERS of a social network, and portability of the communications.
One of the major problems with Internet dating now is that the market has fragmented - we need a single, global site where ALL single people can be found, and which is free and searchable. We don't want a monopoly of service providers, but we need a single common standard and interface. Otherwise, every site has the incentive to lock in its own users and to do the whole bait-and-switch thing (aka "free to join, pay to reply").
Incidentally, I run one such site, and I posed this very problem to RMS.... his response was very insightful (though not very helpful): he said "not every social problem can be fixed with a software license".
I want a really good camera (at least 12 Mpx, and a decent lens). Something that will obsolete my normal $250 digital camera at least in good lighting. [I know of the Samsung Galaxy Camera; sadly it doesn't actually get good photos - the sensor is very very noisy]
Also, a sunlight-readable display, and a microphone which can be used to record musical performances credibly.
Lastly, *please* can we have a 4:3 Android tablet, with all 4 buttons (back, home, menu and search) as hardware ones. Enough with the silly short-screens.
If you and I independently solve the same problem and I publish it first, either voluntarily or in exchange for a patent, then when you later come along and do the same thing, how does society benefit? You aren't adding anything to the public domain, because I've already done that. Why should society give you anything or allow you to benefit from the embarrassment of a monopoly, when you've given nothing to society in exchange?
Well, that might be true, excepting that no engineers ever read patents (they'd get hit for triple damages). Patent applications are usually phrased in a way which makes their coverage broad, and their utility as documentation low. Also, usually multiple people solve the problem at the same time. The one who gets the patent is frequently the least "deserving". [The "not obvious to one skilled in the art" test should kill most of the patents, but it doesn't].
Improvements are inventions, too. It's that "better" part of "build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door."
Of course. You took my mousetrap and improved it...so you can sell yours. I can then improve your mousetrap (and you shouldn't be able to stop me selling it, though you should be able to improve upon it again).
In fact, with tech companies, frequently their only real value is in their intellectual property.
Which is a major problem. VC's hugely over-value worthless stuff. And when a company like Kodak hits the wall, its patents become a source of severe intellectual pollution: Google etc pay billions to mop them up and take them out of circulation.
Patents are bad in practice, but they are wrong in theory too. The philosohpical problems are: independent invention, and the shoulders of giants.
* If you and I independently solve the same problem and create a product, then we should both have the right to make our businesses from it. Just because I filed first doesn't mean that you stole my idea, nor should it give me the right to crush your business.
* If I invent something, I maybe did 0.001% of the work. Everything else was drawn from the public domain, my education, and from the scientific community. That invention isn't truly "mine", and it's certainly not "mine and mine alone".
Thomas Jefferson was right when he said: "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. "
Aside: my point about lawyers here was that patents help *only* lawyers. In contract law, the lawyers help ordinary people to do what they want. Patent lawyers are the only people who benefit from, promote, and strengthen the patent system - practically every engineer wishes the system would just go away.
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I think Mother Theresa would choose not to print anything.
She was a friend of poverty, not of the poor, and considered suffering to be a state of grace.
She was a rather nasty piece of work, who kept the poor in poverty, and prevented many dying people from getting access to medicine.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WQ0i3nCx60
What about migration from Organiser? Is there anything out there that can replace it, preferably by importing the data format?
How about a "Privacy-Reqiurement In Principle Act", mandating that all devices should be secured to protect the user's privacy so that EVEN Law enforcement cannot ever get access. Backdooring should be a criminal offense, as should excess logging, and facilitating wiretapping. Product safety laws should be updated to treat software vulnerabilities the same way as toxic components.
Then instead of going around with the fantasy that law enforcement can fix problems, politicians might devote some more energy to fixing the underlying causes (such as foreign policies that cause "blowback" and the war on drugs). It will also make the country much safer against "cyber war".
Sometimes, a program can be dead because it's obsolete. Others can appear dead because they have simply been completed.
For example, I'd guess that xclock hasn't been updated in many years... but it's still widely used for testing X11.
It would be OK if there were an option to pay for the app and have no advertising.
Or even if google play let me filter the apps by their funding model.
I absolutely do not want ads on my phone, under any circumstances. I'd rather pay the developer.
I agree. Having been given an unwanted present of an iPad (and now I can't get myself a real tablet for fear of offense), I'd really like to see a port of Firefox to Cydia. Actually, given that the GNU utils and X server already exist, why not port a window-manager too, and run a real OS on it?
Rather than buying a new TV, consider doing what I did: find a nice large LCD monitor, take off the plastic, and take it to a picture-framers. Then get it framed in the style you like. I now have an antique gilded-frame that plays DVDs :-)
Also, get a NAS unit in your basement, then make sure all your computing hardware is dead silent. It's so nice that way!
Almond milk is too expensive, and imho, soy milk is unspeakable (I'd rather not have milk at all). But seriously, why use a cow, which is such an inefficient bioreactor?
It *is* really awkward - I agree, and especially it's hard to accurately distinguish left-arrow from down-arrow. But if you have hands in typing position (eg for a trackpoint-style keyboard), then the minimal movement of the hands is to use RH pinky. It's the finger I probalby use most, for shift, and the 4 arrow keys.
[Btw, none of my keyboards, either desktop or laptop, have a numeric keypad]
The right pinky is used all the time for the arrow keys! And these get pressed multiple times to move around.
If we can take grain + yeast and get beer, then why can't we design a yeast-variant that produces milk? After all, grass and wheat are very similar.
Of course we might not get all the complex proteins and enzymes required to make good cheese - but it should be possible to get a perfectly decent product for putting in coffee, making ice-cream, and pouring over cereal. A cow is a terribly inefficient way to convert grass into milk - we should be able to do better.
What do you do when you want to use Linux software raid, but the server only comes with a hardware raid controller, and won't let you have direct disk access? This has been the case with all my recent IBM and HP servers.
I see why it's hard to run another distro natively. But why not run a small Linux inside a VM, and connect to it fullscreen with VNC or X? That would be almost as good, and shouldn't be that hard to do - the compilers already exist for the apps, and both VNC client and X11 client (technically, server) programs exist already.
If I were Samsung, I think I'd fund such a porting effort out of pique!
Is there any chance to put another OS on the iPad?
It would be a great way to get an Android tablet with a proper 4:3 display and good speakers. Or why not run X11 on it, and LOCAL applications (or VNC and a local install of android or a regular Linux).
Also, once jailbroken, is there a way to make the Music/Video/Photo apps recognise files that were loaded on using SSH rather than iTunes?
Interesting point about the Office 365. The problem with the MS viewers is that they can't save the document in a non MS-format. And LibreOffice can't perfectly import the more awkward bits of MS documents.
This is the question. What I'm trying to do is arrange the "5 MS machines in a corner, walk over there and take your turn" approach, but without the walking. The company would generally have zero users making use of MSO; it just needs to know that all 100 of them could, if they had to, have occasional access. The Windows machine could be a single-user box, running a single shared "public" account.
Otherwise, what would it take to have a system that could script MS Office, to provide, say, a web-service that could take in an awkward powerpoint, and spit out a PDF, in a compatible way?
What I'd like to know is whether we can have a way to time-share Windows applications. Consider an office of 100 people. At the moment, they all of MS Office installed, just in case they get an attachment that LibreOffice can't handle. That's 100 copies of the MSO license.
We'd like to move them to Linux, and LO, but still need that MSO capability just occasionally. So the obvious way is to set up 100 free desktops, and put 5 Windows+MSO machines in the corner, people can then walk over, queue up, and use the MSO machines if they really must. Result: only pay MS for 5 licenses, and start escaping lock-in.
But that's really ugly. Is there any elegant way to do this seamlessly for the end user, with VNC or similar? We need to ensure that 100 people can all (potentially) access MSO in their own environmnent (own PC, own view of the fileshare, if possible, own preferences), but with some sort of queuing system that shares out the access.
I'm aware of the ugliness if 6 people need MSO at the same time, and that this might not work well for video, or advanced powerpoint. But otherwise, how might it be done? (And given that MS might not *like* it, how do we stay legally covered. IMHO, this is perfectly fair, because MSO is only ever installed on 5 PCs, and only ever used by 5 people at a time).
Interestingly, that's not the whole story.
In Bash, the $ sign is a unary operator that means "replace NAME by its VALUE". That's why, in Bash, assignment of variables is done without $ signs. For example:
fruit=apple; echo $fruit. It's also why the bash shell allows $ to do so many things, such as ${filename%.extn} (strip off the extension from a filename).
In PHP, $ isn't an operator, but a symbol that means "variable". This is useful for clarity, especially when there are so many keywords around, and when a variable could be auto-vivified (and shouldn't be confused with a constant, or an unknown keyword).
Also, interestingly, $1 and $2 etc are meaningful in Bash and Perl, but in PHP, they are NOT variables. They get used in SQL query parameters, but otherwise, the $ is considered literal. Eg echo "this is $1"
Perl distinguishes variable scope between scalar/array/hash. PHP allows a variable to be either (and sometimes to swap types), and considers "array" and "hash" to be basically the same thing.
Linux fonts always have been rather a nightmare. There are really only 4 solutions:
1. Learn to live with blurry antialiased fonts. In my experience, about 80% of people actually prefer them that way. Windows defaults to "cleartype".
[Some people (like you and I) really don't like them this way, and hate the colour-fringing from sub-pixel antialiasing; we'd rather have clear and sharp letters than care about the glyphs looking different in different typefaces]
2. Go back to the old (2000-era) 75-dpi and 100-dpi fixed (non-scalable) fonts.
3. Get a very high DPI screen. (I got a 2048x1536 15" LCD panel); this makes the antialiasing work OK becasue you can't see the pixels.
4. Choose your fonts very carefully, turn on hinting, disable antialiasing below 15 pt. (You may need to change your libfreetype for one with the bytecode interpreter enabled - software patent). Personally, I use Terminus for the terminal, and 8-point Tahoma everywhere else.
To fetch the latter, first install cabextract, then: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/ && mv -f tahoma*ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/ && /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/tahoma* && fc-cache -v && rm -f IELPKTH.CAB
wget http://download.microsoft.com/download/ie6sp1/finrel/6_sp1/W98NT42KMeXP/EN-US/IELPKTH.CAB &&
cabextract -F 'tahoma*ttf' IELPKTH.CAB &&
mkdir -p
chmod 644
HTH
How is that different from an ordinary server cert? I just got a cert for my own domain; that doesn't let me masquerade as a bank. If I get my browser from Mozilla, how do I know that my ISP isn't snooping? If I'm reading you correctly, you're saying that the entire HTTPS spec is a total wreck, and we'd be better off without it than a false illusion of security?
Isn't that the whole point of HTTPS, to ensure that a man-in-the-middle attack (in this case, a probably benign proxy) is impossible?
Also, why? Doesn't every website now compress html/css/js with mod_gzip?
I'd like to suggest that online dating is an example of a cloud service, where freedom # -1 applies, namely:
the freedom to interact with all other USERS of a social network, and portability of the communications.
One of the major problems with Internet dating now is that the market has fragmented - we need a single, global site where ALL single people can be found, and which is free and searchable. We don't want a monopoly of service providers, but we need a single common standard and interface. Otherwise, every site has the incentive to lock in its own users and to do the whole bait-and-switch thing (aka "free to join, pay to reply").
Incidentally, I run one such site, and I posed this very problem to RMS.... his response was very insightful (though not very helpful): he said "not every social problem can be fixed with a software license".
I want a really good camera (at least 12 Mpx, and a decent lens). Something that will obsolete my normal $250 digital camera at least in good lighting.
[I know of the Samsung Galaxy Camera; sadly it doesn't actually get good photos - the sensor is very very noisy]
Also, a sunlight-readable display, and a microphone which can be used to record musical performances credibly.
Lastly, *please* can we have a 4:3 Android tablet, with all 4 buttons (back, home, menu and search) as hardware ones. Enough with the silly short-screens.
If you and I independently solve the same problem and I publish it first, either voluntarily or in exchange for a patent, then when you later come along and do the same thing, how does society benefit? You aren't adding anything to the public domain, because I've already done that. Why should society give you anything or allow you to benefit from the embarrassment of a monopoly, when you've given nothing to society in exchange?
Well, that might be true, excepting that no engineers ever read patents (they'd get hit for triple damages). Patent applications are usually phrased in a way which makes their coverage broad, and their utility as documentation low. Also, usually multiple people solve the problem at the same time. The one who gets the patent is frequently the least "deserving". [The "not obvious to one skilled in the art" test should kill most of the patents, but it doesn't].
Improvements are inventions, too. It's that "better" part of "build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door."
Of course. You took my mousetrap and improved it...so you can sell yours. I can then improve your mousetrap (and you shouldn't be able to stop me selling it, though you should be able to improve upon it again).
In fact, with tech companies, frequently their only real value is in their intellectual property.
Which is a major problem. VC's hugely over-value worthless stuff. And when a company like Kodak hits the wall, its patents become a source of severe intellectual pollution: Google etc pay billions to mop them up and take them out of circulation.
Patents are bad in practice, but they are wrong in theory too. The philosohpical problems are: independent invention, and the shoulders of giants.
* If you and I independently solve the same problem and create a product, then we should both have the right to make our businesses from it. Just because I filed first doesn't mean that you stole my idea, nor should it give me the right to crush your business.
* If I invent something, I maybe did 0.001% of the work. Everything else was drawn from the public domain, my education, and from the scientific community. That invention isn't truly "mine", and it's certainly not "mine and mine alone".
Thomas Jefferson was right when he said:
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. "
Aside: my point about lawyers here was that patents help *only* lawyers. In contract law, the lawyers help ordinary people to do what they want. Patent lawyers are the only people who benefit from, promote, and strengthen the patent system - practically every engineer wishes the system would just go away.