It's "Business Objects" (company name) that is joining, not 'Business that objects'. But I'm pretty sure you're not the only one who misreads that headline, I had to look twice too to be sure what it said.
And mods: parent isn't 'flamebait', it's just a somewhat confusing headline.
The most popular newsgroup? alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.teen.female.
Possibly, but aren't you confusing 'most popular' with 'generating the most traffic'? I suspect there's plenty newsgroups that are just as popular (or more so), but simply lighter on the data pipes.
Same with other types of internet usage. Things like e-mail and IM can take a small share of all bandwidth, but still be among the most popular applications.
Regardless, I would still be curious if that many craft in the air would be an eyesore, or something we adapt to. There is anecdotal evidence resistance to these kinds of things can be quite strong even with benefits to the population (case in point -- wind farms). (And there is STILL resistance to and legal activity around where and how cell-towers can be erected.)
You can be pretty sure that a mostly transparent balloon, flying at these altitudes, is as good as invisible to the naked eye. And a tiny dot in the sky is much less an eyesore than a large windfarm just off the coast. Not that I think that's an eyesore, BTW.
I wonder whether planes aren't more practical than ballons for this purpose. A balloon slowly leaks out gas, so how long it can stay up there is limited by that leakage.
How long a plane can stay up there, is limited by fuel. Now if you use a solar cell powered plane (NASA built one some time ago), the time it can stay up there is mostly limited by wear and tear of mechanical parts. That might be much longer than a leaking balloon.
I'm not sure how this balloon is kept in the same place, for a plane that would be easy. And you'll probably need some additional energy to power the communication equipment. A solar-powered plane would already have solar cells for that.
Looks nice either way. One of the problems with satellite communication is high latency (due to the sheer height of geo-stationary orbit). A 'satellite' in the stratosphere makes that problem go away.
The Earth's resources are dwindling and if we intend to survive the next two thousand years, we're going to have to find resources elsewhere to sustain ourselves.
Hmm, so because we might make our own planet a shitty place to live in, you suggest we go out and look for other planets to fuck up, instead of fixing things here? Newsflash: a fresh new world 10 lightyears out won't help shit back on Earth, and everybody who's not an astronaut (or filthy rich) will be stuck here anyway.
As for resources: there's plenty of those. Mankind is mostly burning away fossil fuels, which can be replaced with other energy sources. Most other materials and energy sources found on earth are constant. A heavy metal mine depleted? Well, all that metal didn't disappear, just shipped around the globe and turned into something else (and thrown away after use). Today's landfill = tomorrow's goldmine.
Water? Covers 2/3 of the planet. Food? We're producing enough to feed ~10 billion people today, we could grow plenty more if we needed to, and world population may stabilize before it reaches that mark. Energy? Solar power will be around for a couple of years more, I think.
We don't need far away worlds to survive. Unless some 100+ km. asteroid hits our planet, mankind will be just fine - if we CHOOSE to be.
From the summary: "The charter calls for evidence-based policy, and a balance between rights protection and the public domain."
Who says there needs to be a balance at all? You have 2 extremes when it comes to intellectual 'property': a) none, read: no IP protection of any kind, and b) the kind that would give **AA bosses a wet dream. You think (what is best for society as a whole) is somewhere in between? Personally, I doubt it. I seriously doubt that the whole concept of intellectual 'property' has ANY net postive effect for society as a whole. I think it's more like DRM: good for some, but mostly a net negative, overhead, 'red tape'.
Now since around the same time that the concept of IP was introduced, there's been an explosion in literature, music, scientific advances etc. And proponents of IP protection like to say that's cause and result. I think that's bull, and pure coincidence. Anyone think the world would never have seen beautiful animated movies like those coming from the Disney studios, had there been 0 IP protection? Or that MP3 audio format would never have been developed?
We'll never know, since there's no way to find out what our world would be like if IP protections hadn't existed. But I do know one thing for sure: the overhead that IP protections cause, exist. No doubt about that. Drawing up licenses costs money, enforcing them costs money, fighting over them in court costs money, destroying 100,000 counterfeit CD's is waste (of energy and production capacity), reading EULA's takes people's time. Anyone ever tried to make an estimate how big a cost to society this all adds up to?
For me it's been clear for a while: I fundamentally don't like the concept of intellectual property (even for what I might produce myself), and simply try to ignore it as much as I can get away with. Like so many people do in practice. Oh and BTW: that doesn't mean none of my money goes to creative folks like musicians etc. It's just not IP laws that make me do that.
From the summary: "But newer keyloggers now also take screenshots"
Well duhh... why not use the obvious solution to prevent reading password information from the screen, like it's been done for ages: use * in place of readable characters. I for one, welcome our new multiple-choice password selection!
Please click your password:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(* replaced with x to please Slashdot junk filter)
Eat that! Good look trying to discover the real password!
IMO Microsoft made computing cheap (as in $) well before Linux was a twinkle in Linus' eye. And MS still makes computing cheap relative to all other commercial offerings.
No, it's the Chinese and Taiwanese who did that, by producing zillions of cheap motherboards, CD drives and video cards. And (mostly) AMD and Intel, by producing CPU's that anyone can afford. And countless other companies that produce commodity hardware. And researchers, who made this all possible by figuring out how to put yet more transistors on a silicon wafer or more bits on a harddisk platter.
If you give MS credit for cheap computing, you implicitly assume that software to use that hardware is a bottleneck. I think it's the other way round. Hardware developments drive the industry forward, and software eagerly waits to consume that newly created computing power.
I used to give MS credit for introducing the masses to things like DOS and the GUI. But in hindsight, I think their monolopy play to suck as much $$ as possible from licenses, has done more damage than good. Suppose the Free/Open Source software 'revolution' that we see today, had started around Win3.1/95 times. Imagine what today's computing landscape would like in that case.
No need to love or hate MS for any of this. It's just a (big) player in a quickly changing world.
Assuming you are referring to number of infected machines as reported to/by anti-malware companies: this has little to do with the botnet size.
Those AV companies don't have real-time botnet-size counters, they only have some 'listening ears' and reports of infected machines coming in. These botnet operators were using often-updated variants of this worm to infect machines, do you think this low reported number includes all variations? Most zombie machine owners don't even know they're infected, and very few of those infections are reported to AV companies. A low number of reports may even help to keep a botnet 'under the radar' long enough to grow to a significant size.
I submitted this story days ago, but anyway: 100,000 = big? I suppose we haven't seen nothing yet. Stay tuned, more to come.
You may be right bashing Sony here, but it's not just them. I've noticed that many consumer electronics products over the last years have come to boast more features, better functionality/price ratio, but also lower quality. Products just aren't built to last anymore.
Just this week, I ditched my computer keyboard because it was giving weird responses to some keypresses. Thoroughly cleaned it out, checked the inside, contacts etc., conclusion: problem was with the (single) controller IC, one of the very few electronic components. Killed by a static discharge? Who knows. I can't remember ever having needed to replace a keyboard, it was always a matter of cleaning or replacing with a nicer looking model.
Now this keyboard was 3 or 4 years old, only used by me, and damnit, it's the fscking electronics that die instead of contacts or pieces breaking off. I'm now using an older one that's probably seen 3 or more owners, twice as old (and doesn't look as nice), but it still works. I've had similar experiences with other equipment.
The root cause? I suspect it's simply first-to-market and pricing pressures that forces manufacturers to strip down Quality Control to the lowest level the market will bear. Manufacturing processes may be optimised to make single components very cheap, and very likely to outlast the warranty period, but that's about it. When something is 3+ years old, you're expected to look for a replacement.
Like it or not, that's the way things are. But what pisses me off mostly, is that there's little you can do to seek out quality. Brand names say nothing about their latest products. Extensive customer reviews give hints about features and support, but say nothing about how durable a product is built. And price bears little relation with quality either.
As for these 'low-end' digital camera's: own a Canon Powershot A70 myself (and happy with it sofar). It may be considered low-end in the digital camera market, but it cost me somewhere around $400 when I bought it. Nothing low-end about that, I consider that a lot of money for a photo-making device. Am I wrong to expect a product in return that keeps working for more than just 2 or 3 years?
As the time-to-exploit of security flaws continually decreases, I see only one solution: Writing code which is correct in the first place.
I totally agree, and hope that Slashdot readers grasp the importance of above statement. BTW: it applies to reliable software in general, not just security-related.
In every software-security flamewar, you'll see some statement like "product X is better because bugs are fixed in no-time, the exploit is discussed now but see: a patch was out yesterday!". Now back to the real world: patch must be applied to source code. Source code must be compiled. Compiled code must be distributed (for Gentoo users: order reversed, but compiling+distribution both still needs to be done). Code on disk (or in memory) needs to be replaced with patched version. Every step introduces a delay, or may not be performed at all. Not every patch is a correct fix for a problem. Not everyone patches their system. Fully up-to-date does not equal bug-free. The latest version does not equal 'all issues fixed'. And software patched does not equal 'no problem', since problem may already have occured (eg. your system already compromised, sensitive data leaked, $$ damage done).
Basically: put out flawed code, and users will suffer. Possibly many users, possibly much suffering. No matter how streamlined the software-upgrading process is. The only way to avoid it, is to get it right the very first time (as parent stated).
Ofcourse as long as most important software is coded in unsafe languages like C, and testing means "see if it runs and looks okay", this is just shouting in the desert.
From the linked bbc.co.uk article: "Mr Wells and Leonardo feature in The Secret of Drawing which begins on BBC Two on October 8."
Checked it on BBC text, that's today 20:10 UK time, just under 5 hours from time of this posting. Description: "The secret of drawing (new series): Andrew Graham-Dixon explores the influence that drawing has had on culture". No mention of Leonardo though, guess it's just a small part of the subject matter.
-- This message will self-destruct in 5 sec... ehm, hours.
I must admit, it makes it look more like they're providing a serious product rather than something made by a group of hippies and slackers.
One might think it's weird how much the quality of some products seems to be judged based on the looks of the box it comes in. But wait - maybe these are related?
I can't help to think that any quality product needs 1 thing at least: not suck badly in any aspect. Meaning it doesn't need to shine in every aspect, but if it really sucks in any department, overal quality is affected.
Why? Because this signals bad attention to details. And it's exactly attention to details that makes great products. Many developers working for months on useability-features, bugfixes and performance improvements for a desktop OS? And then they fail to pick some nice-looking backdrop(s) and meaningful icons to finish it off? Or fail to properly document how it works? Says more about overal project quality than developers would like to admit, IMHO.
Lesson to be learned: if you have something great, make it look good as well. Get some HTML coders and graphic designers onboard, besides C coders and beta testers.
I wonder - does "Ubuntu vs. Mandriva" sound like a knock-off of a Japanese monster movie to anyone else? Or is this a "friendly" competition between linux distros?
No, that's really a knock-off of another innovation in the software industry, known as "Microsoft Patch Day". Which is expected around the same date - coincidence, you think?
Ofcourse with Linux, patches are streamed directly from developers' keyboards to your machine for beta-testing, you get a lot more patches for less money, and you can make your own if you feel like it;-)
-- Sig generator version 20050721/dot-pre18u2. Send bug reports to:
And that's the fundamental problem. Most people these days not only don't think they have to learn, they don't think they should have to learn.
Sure some people are too lazy to learn anything, but that's too negative a view of people in general. Show me someone who has never used some fancy tech gadget, gets one, and is not willing to spend even 10 minutes on getting to know what it is, and how to work the thing. Not gonna happen, people are curious by nature.
The problem is not in the learning curve, but in the number of things to learn, and the amount of things to learn about each individual item.
Image teaching someone to use a regular, old-style phone in say, 1960. There's a dial, numbers 0-9, a speaker/mic thing you can pick up and hold next to your ear. Every other phone's got a unique number, pick up the 'earpiece', dial the number of that other phone, wait for connection, and place earpiece back when conversation ends. Easy enough to explain to anyone, and once explained, this knowledge holds for the next 50 years or so.
Fast forward to today: the cellphone. Each model looks different, has changed/new functions, sometimes does basic work differently from its predecessor, comes with a 100+ page manual, and people change phones (and numbers!) yearly as a fashion statement. 90% of any details you learn about your phone, doesn't hold anymore for your next model. And then there's carriers, pricing structures, GSM, GPRS, UMTS, Bluetooth,...
And there's cellphones, computers, VCR's, television sets, microwave oven's, cars, electronic thermostats, ATM's, pincodes/passwords to remember, PDA's, the WWW, e-mail, instant messaging, equipment/software at the workplace, and your average pile of paperwork (taxes, employer, health insurance,...) to deal with.
There's only so much you can learn in a day. Let's face it: our society is growing in complexity very rapidly. Technology can help us deal with that complexity (the pocket calculator comes to mind), but it's clear that this help is outpaced by the speed of complexity growth itself. Life may be getting easier, more fun or comfortable, but it sure isn't getting any simpler. Keywords: "Information overload".
Anyone who claims people are too lazy to read the manual for their latest gadget, is misinformed. It's just that people have better things to do than read manuals. Technology is supposed to make our lives easier and more fun, remember? Good design is when people can use a gadget without going through a 500+ page manual.
Does anyone have an objection to Linus holding the trademark to the "Linux"? If so why?
Not at all, but: IMHO Linus' reason(s) for pursuing trademark protection for the Linux name is flawed. Here's why:
If I understand correctly, the main reason was to establish Linux as a sort of 'quality stamp', saying "if it says Linux on the box, then you can expect Linux-like quality software inside". Read 'box' as 'website' or 'vendor' if you like. Note: I'm not saying anything about how bad or excellent quality that may be. The 'quality stamp' just serves to indicate that content matches an established 'reference level'. Or that content comes from Linus and his team, not from some 3rd party that tries to piggy-back its own crap on the Linux name.
The fatal flaw in this scheme: the GPL. The GPL gives anyone the freedom to modify the software, and distribute such modified versions. That includes the freedom to distribute versions that were modified such, that all original goodness is destroyed: the freedom to distribute totally crappy versions. In this case, the Linux name doesn't serve to tell apart the original goodness from the modified crap. It's both Linux. An original/good one, and a 3rd party crappy version derived from it. You can't (and probably wouldn't want to) use trademark protection here to force the 3rd party to clean up its act: by slapping the GPL on it, Linus himself gave that 3rd party the freedom to produce a crappy version of Linux.
You don't need a Linux trademark to protect the integrity of upstream releases. Copyright law, the GPL, and digital signatures give you everything you need to tell apart kernel.org products from "the others".
Does a Linux trademark help to fight rogue websites that abuse the name, but have nothing to do with Linux? IMHO: no. It's easy to tell apart Linux-based quality community projects from anything else that happens to boast "Linux" on the box. Again: peer review (by users!), trusted/established distribution channels/vendors, and digital signatures are all you need.
So what does Linus think he needs Linux trademark protection for? It's a mystery to me. Besides, trademarks smell like "commercial interests". May help to give Linux a serious image and get business on board, but might just as well do damage in the long run (by tainting the 'Free Software' aspect). Given that acoording to Linus, this trademark thing is a money-losing adventure anyway, me thinks Linus can find much better ways to spend his time.
Oh, the article is about Debian. Anyway, same reasoning applies.
-- Don't bother to search. There isn't any pr0n hiding in this sig. Anywhere. Really!
Look like it. And you know what's really weird? None of these stories even mentioned boats, guns, or tools for navigating/communicating on the high seas.
What's next? Equalling "pirates" to "terrorists"? Oh wait...
I'm sure this is explained elsewhere nicely, but IMHO what sets spyware apart from other crapware is the lack of user knowledge and approval.
A common scenario would be a user clicking 'Ok' on an EULA which somewhere, buried in a heap of legal speak, mentions "includes <insert favorite crapware here> from <insert favorite crapware company here>". Whatever happens next, that user did agree to installation of this crapware, and could have know about it before installing (if he/she would bother to read the EULA).
I guess what makes this legally a gray area is the 'bundling' aspect. If user agrees to install A, and B comes bundled with A, did user agree to install B as well, or not? What if B is regarded as an essential component of A (not as a separate item B)? What if B is one very small part of a large software suite A? Does it need mentioning at all in that case? How about software that upgrades itself to include new 'functionality'? Very tricky all this.
If not bundled (like installed through a browser vulnerability), it's not much different from installing a rootkit on someone else's machine. Without user approval, THAT is very much illegal where I live (comparable to cracking systems). YMMV, but ofcourse these things are very, very difficult to prove in court.
Maybe that Gator thingie of yours looked like spyware but did get mentioned in an EULA that users had to click through ('upgrading' it to adware)?
(..) yet names no particular application, makes no specific claims that can be countered and provides no specific evidence of his position whatsoever.
Why should such an unsupported post rate a "5" on SlashDot? Who would mod up such unsupported claims? What is "interesting" about such unsupported claims?
If I had any mod points to spend, I'd rather mod down your comment than grandparent's. Not based on personal opinion, but because grandparent a) raises an interesting (or even "informative") point, and b) because (unfortunately) GP is right. You want support for claims made? Then try the following:
Pick any large repository of Free/OSS. I suggest SourceForge, 100,000+ projects to choose from. Choose a number (say, 10, or 100) of projects at random. Evaluate these extensively, and tell me if they have a) a 'licked' user interface, b) excellent documentation, AND c) are well maintained. I can almost guarantee you'll find the opposite.
For a vast majority of projects, chances are they're unmaintained/dead, alpha stage, or come with very poor documentation (if any).
That said, that's exactly why these projects won't be popular, aren't used as part of bigger projects, and generally nobody cares about them. More popular projects are exactly the ones that are well maintained, documented and/or with a decent UI (or they are, because they have many users/supporters).
A problem with FOSS in general? I don't think so, it's just that crappy OSS projects remain available on the web for a long time, while piles of closed-source crap never makes it out there, or disappears quickly from company websites. Yes, it would be nice if Free/OSS authors would ask themselves more often if the world really needs what they're cooking.
I find, when walking down the street - that I've got my iPod's volume up to the highest level. It's not because I really like the song, and want to hear it really loudly, but rather, I can't hear it if I turn it down at all. Simply because of the passing traffic is so noisy.
And you know what is really sad? If, after some years (or decades, if you're lucky) you find that your hearing has suffered irreversible, non-repairable damage, that a big (if not the biggest) part of it was inflicted upon yourself, by yourself. Say what?
You turn the volume up to 'overpower' the background noise, right? In order for that to work, the volume will have to be at least equally strong as the background noise. It helps that you use earphones (which greatly reduce the background noise), but from the sound that enters your ears, most was produced by yourself. And so will any hearing damage that results from it.
To avoid long-term hearing damage, there's only 1 way: reduce that background level. And you don't have to be kind to the ones causing it - it's your health and well-being (and that of many others) they are damaging. Maybe not as bad, but no different from someone pouring a container with poison into a local park.
Is the world itself getting noisier?
I'd argue not (see subject). It's more that people are making lots of noise wherever they go. The noisiest places are often the same as those with large concentrations of people (big cities, pop concerts). And mostly there's little you can do about it. You want peace and quiet? Then put some distance between yourself and your fellow human beings.
Checking out FreeBSD's ideas page, my eye was caught by this: "UFS Journaling: Add transaction journaling and playback to the UFS filesystem. The goal is to increase the reliability of the filesystem and greatly reduce the need for a full 'fsck' after a crash or power loss."
If I'm not mistaken, all major BSD's (Free, Open, and Net) support a feature called 'soft updates'. Basically, re-ordering filesystem updates in such a way, that the filesystem remains in a consistent state, even in the event of a badly-timed crash or powerout. All this to avoid the need for a full fsck on reboot.
Quote from the FreeBSD features page: "Soft Updates allows improved filesystem performance without sacrificing safety and reliability. It analyzes meta-data filesystem operations to avoid having to perform all of those operations synchronously. Instead, it maintains internal state about pending meta-data operations and uses this information to cache meta-data, rewrite meta-data operations to combine subsequent operations on the same files, and reorder meta-data operations so that they may be processed more efficiently. Features such as background filesystem checking and file system snapshots are built on the consistency and performance foundations of soft updates."
From the NetBSD site: "Soft Updates permit metadata writes to be ordered to achieve close to asynchronous disk performance without risk of metadata corruption. This significantly improves the performance of FFS file systems."
You might still do a full fsck later (as regular maintenance), perhaps even as background task, but it wouldn't be needed for a reliable restart.
Journaling is another way to do this, by adding an extra 'log' of the latest updates to a filesystem. Then in the event of a crash, you don't need to check the entire filesystem, but can bring it back into a consistent state by 'replaying' those latest updates from the journal.
Now here's what I don't understand: why add journalling to a filesystem, when you're already updating it in a 'crash-proof' manner (soft updates)? What's the point? Seems rather like a step back to me, with soft updates looking like a smarter way to archieve crash-proof filesystem handling.
I assume that this soft updates feature is limited to certain OS/filesystem combo's. And maybe journaling provides some thing(s) that soft updates doesn't? Can some knowledgable BSD user shed some light on all this?
-- This sig just wasted another 0.x seconds of your precious time. Supporting banning sigs!
A company could now run a batch job that opens.doc files and saves them in OO format. MS Word converts all the company documents into OO format. Company then throws away MS Word, and happily uses OO.
Next up: TCOOO (Total Cost of Open Office Ownership) studies.
And compared to the firefox story, which just hurts freely given away IE, and people still use MS windows as platform, so not costing any profits, and uptake of 10% in OpenOffice would really hurt the bottomline of MS.
Moderators, parent clearly deserves some 'insightful' points here, since known cash cows for MS are Windows, and Office. But:
If users ditch Office for a free alternative, clearly MS's bottomline gets hurt. Not so with Firefox? I disagree: IE is a way to lock users into the Windows platform. If you need IE, you need Windows (in general). If you need Firefox, you need Windows OR (enter you favorite Firefox-capable OS here). So ditching IE in favor of Firefox, is one way to reduce your dependence on the Windows platform. And a good reason for MS to give away IE for free, I think.
So increased use of OO may eat directly into MS's bottomline, but increased use of Firefox makes it easier for MS's bottomline to get eaten into.
My view is that MS not supporting open standards is simply to make it harder to switch platforms, to increase the cost & effort of a switch. Another example: why doesn't MS itself provide support for Linux ext2 or BSD filesystems? It's technically feasible (others have done it), many dual-booting folks would like it, and there aren't any licensing problems that I can see (as long as MS would write their own, or build on BSD-licensed code). So why? Simple: without it, dual-booting folks have to look themselves for ext2/BSD filesystem drivers for Windows. More hassle, higher cost of moving to Linux/*BSD.
MS says it cares about interoperability, but it's actions often say otherwise. Not supporting OO document format in Office is just another example of that. Anyway, I think managers that decide between MS Office or OO, Firefox or IE, Windows, Linux or Mac OSX on company desktops, matter more here than home users.
Slashdot Mirror
It's "Business Objects" (company name) that is joining, not 'Business that objects'. But I'm pretty sure you're not the only one who misreads that headline, I had to look twice too to be sure what it said.
And mods: parent isn't 'flamebait', it's just a somewhat confusing headline.Possibly, but aren't you confusing 'most popular' with 'generating the most traffic'? I suspect there's plenty newsgroups that are just as popular (or more so), but simply lighter on the data pipes.
Same with other types of internet usage. Things like e-mail and IM can take a small share of all bandwidth, but still be among the most popular applications.You can be pretty sure that a mostly transparent balloon, flying at these altitudes, is as good as invisible to the naked eye. And a tiny dot in the sky is much less an eyesore than a large windfarm just off the coast. Not that I think that's an eyesore, BTW.
I wonder whether planes aren't more practical than ballons for this purpose. A balloon slowly leaks out gas, so how long it can stay up there is limited by that leakage.
How long a plane can stay up there, is limited by fuel. Now if you use a solar cell powered plane (NASA built one some time ago), the time it can stay up there is mostly limited by wear and tear of mechanical parts. That might be much longer than a leaking balloon.
I'm not sure how this balloon is kept in the same place, for a plane that would be easy. And you'll probably need some additional energy to power the communication equipment. A solar-powered plane would already have solar cells for that.
Looks nice either way. One of the problems with satellite communication is high latency (due to the sheer height of geo-stationary orbit). A 'satellite' in the stratosphere makes that problem go away.Hey, that's just an example of "know your enemy"...
Hmm, so because we might make our own planet a shitty place to live in, you suggest we go out and look for other planets to fuck up, instead of fixing things here? Newsflash: a fresh new world 10 lightyears out won't help shit back on Earth, and everybody who's not an astronaut (or filthy rich) will be stuck here anyway.
As for resources: there's plenty of those. Mankind is mostly burning away fossil fuels, which can be replaced with other energy sources. Most other materials and energy sources found on earth are constant. A heavy metal mine depleted? Well, all that metal didn't disappear, just shipped around the globe and turned into something else (and thrown away after use). Today's landfill = tomorrow's goldmine.
Water? Covers 2/3 of the planet. Food? We're producing enough to feed ~10 billion people today, we could grow plenty more if we needed to, and world population may stabilize before it reaches that mark. Energy? Solar power will be around for a couple of years more, I think.
We don't need far away worlds to survive. Unless some 100+ km. asteroid hits our planet, mankind will be just fine - if we CHOOSE to be.Sure, if one *wrongfully* assumes that law-making is in any way, form or manner a process based on logic.
Who says there needs to be a balance at all? You have 2 extremes when it comes to intellectual 'property': a) none, read: no IP protection of any kind, and b) the kind that would give **AA bosses a wet dream. You think (what is best for society as a whole) is somewhere in between? Personally, I doubt it. I seriously doubt that the whole concept of intellectual 'property' has ANY net postive effect for society as a whole. I think it's more like DRM: good for some, but mostly a net negative, overhead, 'red tape'.
Now since around the same time that the concept of IP was introduced, there's been an explosion in literature, music, scientific advances etc. And proponents of IP protection like to say that's cause and result. I think that's bull, and pure coincidence. Anyone think the world would never have seen beautiful animated movies like those coming from the Disney studios, had there been 0 IP protection? Or that MP3 audio format would never have been developed?
We'll never know, since there's no way to find out what our world would be like if IP protections hadn't existed. But I do know one thing for sure: the overhead that IP protections cause, exist. No doubt about that. Drawing up licenses costs money, enforcing them costs money, fighting over them in court costs money, destroying 100,000 counterfeit CD's is waste (of energy and production capacity), reading EULA's takes people's time. Anyone ever tried to make an estimate how big a cost to society this all adds up to?
For me it's been clear for a while: I fundamentally don't like the concept of intellectual property (even for what I might produce myself), and simply try to ignore it as much as I can get away with. Like so many people do in practice. Oh and BTW: that doesn't mean none of my money goes to creative folks like musicians etc. It's just not IP laws that make me do that.Well duhh... why not use the obvious solution to prevent reading password information from the screen, like it's been done for ages: use * in place of readable characters. I for one, welcome our new multiple-choice password selection!
Please click your password:
(* replaced with x to please Slashdot junk filter)
Eat that! Good look trying to discover the real password!
No, it's the Chinese and Taiwanese who did that, by producing zillions of cheap motherboards, CD drives and video cards. And (mostly) AMD and Intel, by producing CPU's that anyone can afford. And countless other companies that produce commodity hardware. And researchers, who made this all possible by figuring out how to put yet more transistors on a silicon wafer or more bits on a harddisk platter.
If you give MS credit for cheap computing, you implicitly assume that software to use that hardware is a bottleneck. I think it's the other way round. Hardware developments drive the industry forward, and software eagerly waits to consume that newly created computing power.
I used to give MS credit for introducing the masses to things like DOS and the GUI. But in hindsight, I think their monolopy play to suck as much $$ as possible from licenses, has done more damage than good. Suppose the Free/Open Source software 'revolution' that we see today, had started around Win3.1/95 times. Imagine what today's computing landscape would like in that case.
No need to love or hate MS for any of this. It's just a (big) player in a quickly changing world.Those AV companies don't have real-time botnet-size counters, they only have some 'listening ears' and reports of infected machines coming in. These botnet operators were using often-updated variants of this worm to infect machines, do you think this low reported number includes all variations? Most zombie machine owners don't even know they're infected, and very few of those infections are reported to AV companies. A low number of reports may even help to keep a botnet 'under the radar' long enough to grow to a significant size.
I submitted this story days ago, but anyway: 100,000 = big? I suppose we haven't seen nothing yet. Stay tuned, more to come.Just this week, I ditched my computer keyboard because it was giving weird responses to some keypresses. Thoroughly cleaned it out, checked the inside, contacts etc., conclusion: problem was with the (single) controller IC, one of the very few electronic components. Killed by a static discharge? Who knows. I can't remember ever having needed to replace a keyboard, it was always a matter of cleaning or replacing with a nicer looking model.
Now this keyboard was 3 or 4 years old, only used by me, and damnit, it's the fscking electronics that die instead of contacts or pieces breaking off. I'm now using an older one that's probably seen 3 or more owners, twice as old (and doesn't look as nice), but it still works. I've had similar experiences with other equipment.
The root cause? I suspect it's simply first-to-market and pricing pressures that forces manufacturers to strip down Quality Control to the lowest level the market will bear. Manufacturing processes may be optimised to make single components very cheap, and very likely to outlast the warranty period, but that's about it. When something is 3+ years old, you're expected to look for a replacement.
Like it or not, that's the way things are. But what pisses me off mostly, is that there's little you can do to seek out quality. Brand names say nothing about their latest products. Extensive customer reviews give hints about features and support, but say nothing about how durable a product is built. And price bears little relation with quality either.
As for these 'low-end' digital camera's: own a Canon Powershot A70 myself (and happy with it sofar). It may be considered low-end in the digital camera market, but it cost me somewhere around $400 when I bought it. Nothing low-end about that, I consider that a lot of money for a photo-making device. Am I wrong to expect a product in return that keeps working for more than just 2 or 3 years?I totally agree, and hope that Slashdot readers grasp the importance of above statement. BTW: it applies to reliable software in general, not just security-related.
In every software-security flamewar, you'll see some statement like "product X is better because bugs are fixed in no-time, the exploit is discussed now but see: a patch was out yesterday!". Now back to the real world: patch must be applied to source code. Source code must be compiled. Compiled code must be distributed (for Gentoo users: order reversed, but compiling+distribution both still needs to be done). Code on disk (or in memory) needs to be replaced with patched version. Every step introduces a delay, or may not be performed at all. Not every patch is a correct fix for a problem. Not everyone patches their system. Fully up-to-date does not equal bug-free. The latest version does not equal 'all issues fixed'. And software patched does not equal 'no problem', since problem may already have occured (eg. your system already compromised, sensitive data leaked, $$ damage done).
Basically: put out flawed code, and users will suffer. Possibly many users, possibly much suffering. No matter how streamlined the software-upgrading process is. The only way to avoid it, is to get it right the very first time (as parent stated).
Ofcourse as long as most important software is coded in unsafe languages like C, and testing means "see if it runs and looks okay", this is just shouting in the desert.Checked it on BBC text, that's today 20:10 UK time, just under 5 hours from time of this posting. Description: "The secret of drawing (new series): Andrew Graham-Dixon explores the influence that drawing has had on culture". No mention of Leonardo though, guess it's just a small part of the subject matter.
-- This message will self-destruct in 5 sec... ehm, hours.I must admit, it makes it look more like they're providing a serious product rather than something made by a group of hippies and slackers.
One might think it's weird how much the quality of some products seems to be judged based on the looks of the box it comes in. But wait - maybe these are related?
I can't help to think that any quality product needs 1 thing at least: not suck badly in any aspect. Meaning it doesn't need to shine in every aspect, but if it really sucks in any department, overal quality is affected.
Why? Because this signals bad attention to details. And it's exactly attention to details that makes great products. Many developers working for months on useability-features, bugfixes and performance improvements for a desktop OS? And then they fail to pick some nice-looking backdrop(s) and meaningful icons to finish it off? Or fail to properly document how it works? Says more about overal project quality than developers would like to admit, IMHO.
Lesson to be learned: if you have something great, make it look good as well. Get some HTML coders and graphic designers onboard, besides C coders and beta testers.I wonder - does "Ubuntu vs. Mandriva" sound like a knock-off of a Japanese monster movie to anyone else? Or is this a "friendly" competition between linux distros?
No, that's really a knock-off of another innovation in the software industry, known as "Microsoft Patch Day". Which is expected around the same date - coincidence, you think?
Ofcourse with Linux, patches are streamed directly from developers' keyboards to your machine for beta-testing, you get a lot more patches for less money, and you can make your own if you feel like it ;-)
-- Sig generator version 20050721/dot-pre18u2. Send bug reports to:Parent screwed up link, try Squeak.org
Sure some people are too lazy to learn anything, but that's too negative a view of people in general. Show me someone who has never used some fancy tech gadget, gets one, and is not willing to spend even 10 minutes on getting to know what it is, and how to work the thing. Not gonna happen, people are curious by nature.
The problem is not in the learning curve, but in the number of things to learn, and the amount of things to learn about each individual item.
Image teaching someone to use a regular, old-style phone in say, 1960. There's a dial, numbers 0-9, a speaker/mic thing you can pick up and hold next to your ear. Every other phone's got a unique number, pick up the 'earpiece', dial the number of that other phone, wait for connection, and place earpiece back when conversation ends. Easy enough to explain to anyone, and once explained, this knowledge holds for the next 50 years or so.
Fast forward to today: the cellphone. Each model looks different, has changed/new functions, sometimes does basic work differently from its predecessor, comes with a 100+ page manual, and people change phones (and numbers!) yearly as a fashion statement. 90% of any details you learn about your phone, doesn't hold anymore for your next model. And then there's carriers, pricing structures, GSM, GPRS, UMTS, Bluetooth, ...
And there's cellphones, computers, VCR's, television sets, microwave oven's, cars, electronic thermostats, ATM's, pincodes/passwords to remember, PDA's, the WWW, e-mail, instant messaging, equipment/software at the workplace, and your average pile of paperwork (taxes, employer, health insurance, ...) to deal with.
There's only so much you can learn in a day. Let's face it: our society is growing in complexity very rapidly. Technology can help us deal with that complexity (the pocket calculator comes to mind), but it's clear that this help is outpaced by the speed of complexity growth itself. Life may be getting easier, more fun or comfortable, but it sure isn't getting any simpler. Keywords: "Information overload".
Anyone who claims people are too lazy to read the manual for their latest gadget, is misinformed. It's just that people have better things to do than read manuals. Technology is supposed to make our lives easier and more fun, remember? Good design is when people can use a gadget without going through a 500+ page manual.Not at all, but: IMHO Linus' reason(s) for pursuing trademark protection for the Linux name is flawed. Here's why:
If I understand correctly, the main reason was to establish Linux as a sort of 'quality stamp', saying "if it says Linux on the box, then you can expect Linux-like quality software inside". Read 'box' as 'website' or 'vendor' if you like. Note: I'm not saying anything about how bad or excellent quality that may be. The 'quality stamp' just serves to indicate that content matches an established 'reference level'. Or that content comes from Linus and his team, not from some 3rd party that tries to piggy-back its own crap on the Linux name.
The fatal flaw in this scheme: the GPL. The GPL gives anyone the freedom to modify the software, and distribute such modified versions. That includes the freedom to distribute versions that were modified such, that all original goodness is destroyed: the freedom to distribute totally crappy versions. In this case, the Linux name doesn't serve to tell apart the original goodness from the modified crap. It's both Linux. An original/good one, and a 3rd party crappy version derived from it. You can't (and probably wouldn't want to) use trademark protection here to force the 3rd party to clean up its act: by slapping the GPL on it, Linus himself gave that 3rd party the freedom to produce a crappy version of Linux.
You don't need a Linux trademark to protect the integrity of upstream releases. Copyright law, the GPL, and digital signatures give you everything you need to tell apart kernel.org products from "the others".
Does a Linux trademark help to fight rogue websites that abuse the name, but have nothing to do with Linux? IMHO: no. It's easy to tell apart Linux-based quality community projects from anything else that happens to boast "Linux" on the box. Again: peer review (by users!), trusted/established distribution channels/vendors, and digital signatures are all you need.
So what does Linus think he needs Linux trademark protection for? It's a mystery to me. Besides, trademarks smell like "commercial interests". May help to give Linux a serious image and get business on board, but might just as well do damage in the long run (by tainting the 'Free Software' aspect). Given that acoording to Linus, this trademark thing is a money-losing adventure anyway, me thinks Linus can find much better ways to spend his time.
Oh, the article is about Debian. Anyway, same reasoning applies.
-- Don't bother to search. There isn't any pr0n hiding in this sig. Anywhere. Really!Is today "anti-anti-piracy day" at Slashdot?
Look like it. And you know what's really weird? None of these stories even mentioned boats, guns, or tools for navigating/communicating on the high seas.
What's next? Equalling "pirates" to "terrorists"? Oh wait...A common scenario would be a user clicking 'Ok' on an EULA which somewhere, buried in a heap of legal speak, mentions "includes <insert favorite crapware here> from <insert favorite crapware company here>". Whatever happens next, that user did agree to installation of this crapware, and could have know about it before installing (if he/she would bother to read the EULA).
I guess what makes this legally a gray area is the 'bundling' aspect. If user agrees to install A, and B comes bundled with A, did user agree to install B as well, or not? What if B is regarded as an essential component of A (not as a separate item B)? What if B is one very small part of a large software suite A? Does it need mentioning at all in that case? How about software that upgrades itself to include new 'functionality'? Very tricky all this.
If not bundled (like installed through a browser vulnerability), it's not much different from installing a rootkit on someone else's machine. Without user approval, THAT is very much illegal where I live (comparable to cracking systems). YMMV, but ofcourse these things are very, very difficult to prove in court.
Maybe that Gator thingie of yours looked like spyware but did get mentioned in an EULA that users had to click through ('upgrading' it to adware)?Why should such an unsupported post rate a "5" on SlashDot? Who would mod up such unsupported claims? What is "interesting" about such unsupported claims?
If I had any mod points to spend, I'd rather mod down your comment than grandparent's. Not based on personal opinion, but because grandparent a) raises an interesting (or even "informative") point, and b) because (unfortunately) GP is right. You want support for claims made? Then try the following:
Pick any large repository of Free/OSS. I suggest SourceForge, 100,000+ projects to choose from. Choose a number (say, 10, or 100) of projects at random. Evaluate these extensively, and tell me if they have a) a 'licked' user interface, b) excellent documentation, AND c) are well maintained. I can almost guarantee you'll find the opposite.
For a vast majority of projects, chances are they're unmaintained/dead, alpha stage, or come with very poor documentation (if any).
That said, that's exactly why these projects won't be popular, aren't used as part of bigger projects, and generally nobody cares about them. More popular projects are exactly the ones that are well maintained, documented and/or with a decent UI (or they are, because they have many users/supporters).
A problem with FOSS in general? I don't think so, it's just that crappy OSS projects remain available on the web for a long time, while piles of closed-source crap never makes it out there, or disappears quickly from company websites. Yes, it would be nice if Free/OSS authors would ask themselves more often if the world really needs what they're cooking.And you know what is really sad? If, after some years (or decades, if you're lucky) you find that your hearing has suffered irreversible, non-repairable damage, that a big (if not the biggest) part of it was inflicted upon yourself, by yourself. Say what?
You turn the volume up to 'overpower' the background noise, right? In order for that to work, the volume will have to be at least equally strong as the background noise. It helps that you use earphones (which greatly reduce the background noise), but from the sound that enters your ears, most was produced by yourself. And so will any hearing damage that results from it.
To avoid long-term hearing damage, there's only 1 way: reduce that background level. And you don't have to be kind to the ones causing it - it's your health and well-being (and that of many others) they are damaging. Maybe not as bad, but no different from someone pouring a container with poison into a local park.
Is the world itself getting noisier?
I'd argue not (see subject). It's more that people are making lots of noise wherever they go. The noisiest places are often the same as those with large concentrations of people (big cities, pop concerts). And mostly there's little you can do about it. You want peace and quiet? Then put some distance between yourself and your fellow human beings.If I'm not mistaken, all major BSD's (Free, Open, and Net) support a feature called 'soft updates'. Basically, re-ordering filesystem updates in such a way, that the filesystem remains in a consistent state, even in the event of a badly-timed crash or powerout. All this to avoid the need for a full fsck on reboot.
Quote from the FreeBSD features page: "Soft Updates allows improved filesystem performance without sacrificing safety and reliability. It analyzes meta-data filesystem operations to avoid having to perform all of those operations synchronously. Instead, it maintains internal state about pending meta-data operations and uses this information to cache meta-data, rewrite meta-data operations to combine subsequent operations on the same files, and reorder meta-data operations so that they may be processed more efficiently. Features such as background filesystem checking and file system snapshots are built on the consistency and performance foundations of soft updates."
From the NetBSD site: "Soft Updates permit metadata writes to be ordered to achieve close to asynchronous disk performance without risk of metadata corruption. This significantly improves the performance of FFS file systems."
You might still do a full fsck later (as regular maintenance), perhaps even as background task, but it wouldn't be needed for a reliable restart.
Journaling is another way to do this, by adding an extra 'log' of the latest updates to a filesystem. Then in the event of a crash, you don't need to check the entire filesystem, but can bring it back into a consistent state by 'replaying' those latest updates from the journal.
Now here's what I don't understand: why add journalling to a filesystem, when you're already updating it in a 'crash-proof' manner (soft updates)? What's the point? Seems rather like a step back to me, with soft updates looking like a smarter way to archieve crash-proof filesystem handling.
I assume that this soft updates feature is limited to certain OS/filesystem combo's. And maybe journaling provides some thing(s) that soft updates doesn't? Can some knowledgable BSD user shed some light on all this?
-- This sig just wasted another 0.x seconds of your precious time. Supporting banning sigs!A company could now run a batch job that opens .doc files and saves them in OO format. MS Word converts all the company documents into OO format. Company then throws away MS Word, and happily uses OO.
Next up: TCOOO (Total Cost of Open Office Ownership) studies.Moderators, parent clearly deserves some 'insightful' points here, since known cash cows for MS are Windows, and Office. But:
If users ditch Office for a free alternative, clearly MS's bottomline gets hurt. Not so with Firefox? I disagree: IE is a way to lock users into the Windows platform. If you need IE, you need Windows (in general). If you need Firefox, you need Windows OR (enter you favorite Firefox-capable OS here). So ditching IE in favor of Firefox, is one way to reduce your dependence on the Windows platform. And a good reason for MS to give away IE for free, I think.
So increased use of OO may eat directly into MS's bottomline, but increased use of Firefox makes it easier for MS's bottomline to get eaten into.
My view is that MS not supporting open standards is simply to make it harder to switch platforms, to increase the cost & effort of a switch. Another example: why doesn't MS itself provide support for Linux ext2 or BSD filesystems? It's technically feasible (others have done it), many dual-booting folks would like it, and there aren't any licensing problems that I can see (as long as MS would write their own, or build on BSD-licensed code). So why? Simple: without it, dual-booting folks have to look themselves for ext2/BSD filesystem drivers for Windows. More hassle, higher cost of moving to Linux/*BSD.
MS says it cares about interoperability, but it's actions often say otherwise. Not supporting OO document format in Office is just another example of that. Anyway, I think managers that decide between MS Office or OO, Firefox or IE, Windows, Linux or Mac OSX on company desktops, matter more here than home users.