Got to agree with the parent. Unless it's games you're after; but, to be perfectly frank, you'd be much better off buying a games console {unless you have a good reason not to, such as no TV set}.
Some have mentioned dual-booting Mac OS X and Linux. But there's not a hell of a lot of a point in doing that; OS X is just another flavour of unix, and you've already implied {by mentioning running Windows in the first place} that staying i-tal isn't a requirement. There's even less point in running Cygwin under Windows on an Intel Mac. If you want to run unix applications, run them in Mac OS X!
If you still insist to run Windows, there's plenty of good stuff for you to start with on The Open CD. Can't believe nobody mentioned it already really; but I was browsing with a high threshhold, so maybe I just missed it.
Heh..... it's always Anonymous Cowards that complain about my "zero tolerance, zero compunction" attitude to adverts.
If a product is advertised, I won't buy it. I want the manufacturers to go out of business for having the arrogance to tell me how their brand of crap is better than any of the fifty billion other brands of crap out there. They're all crap, nothing is made properly anymore. But the companies that spend good money on bullshitting the public are obviously spending less on the quality of their products. Not on my shilling, they don't.
If an advertisement comes on while I'm watching telly, I leave the room. If an advertisement comes on while I'm listening to the radio, I change stations {and leave it on the BBC}. If someone tries to advertise to me on the Internet, I add them to my blocked list.
If your business model depends on somebody looking at an advert in order for you to get paid, then what you have is a broken business model. I owe advertisers nothing. I have a right to ignore advertisements.
Right now it is cheaper to mine new metals and process raw oil to make the plastics and wires that make up our disposable electronics.
"Cheaper" in the same way that stealing your neighbour's milk is cheaper than paying the milkman for your own milk. Of course, eventually the neighbour will notice; and the longer the theft goes on, the worse the consequences will be. Solution: impose a tax on "virgin" raw materials wherever it would be viable to use a recycled alternative, so it will be cheaper for manufacturers to buy recycled.
Right now it is cheaper to toss them into a landfill or ship them to China for children to disassemble and extract and recover what's worth recovering.
Then increase the tax on landfill and the export duty on potentially-hazardous shipments, so it becomes cheaper to recycle materials locally.
Right now it is cheaper to drill holes in the ground and dig out the fossil fuels than to figure out a new way to produce energy.
Then increase the tax on fossil fuels and provide subsidies to encourage the use of non-fossil fuels.
When the equation changes, we'll figure out a better way and we'll gradually start doing something different. This pattern hasn't changed for centuries.
The Government have the power to start changing the equation right now, by means of taxation and subsidy. As more environmentally-friendly alternatives come onto line, economies of scale will kick in and the need for subsidies will be lessened. This will offset the reduction in taxes on environmentally-damaging practices which are becoming unfashionable.
Oh, and while you're at it, please ban filament light bulbs {except where being used to illuminate revolving machinery, obviously} and disposable batteries, and exempt lead-acid batteries from pollution control {they're still about the least polluting option, 100% recyclable at end-of-life and lead is expensive enough already to ensure this is done}.
Not out of me, it won't generate any! I have multiple levels of advert blocking. Ad-blocking proxy, list of sites with blocked images, and no flash player. Sweet!
The photos you took of your children growing up won't be viewable on modern equipment.
JPEG? (Okay, I'll admit that I ought to convert the NEFs for storage one of these days.)
Who says they have to use JPEG? Camera manufacturers are already concealing the RAW formats used by their cameras; IMHO this is being done primarily to conceal the true pixel count prior to interpolation {thereby allowing outrageous claims regarding the sensor}. It's possible that future digital cameras might use a brand new, encrypted, DRM file format which can only be viewed with appropriate, closed-source image editing software supplied with the camera -- or a deeply-hooked browser plug-in.
None of the recordings of the band you played in when you were younger will be listenable.
CDDA? MP3?
CDDA has already ceased to exist, to all intents and purposes; replaced by a range of nasty hybrid discs which, more by luck than design, can be read by an audio CD player. Some of these "copy prevention" technologies actually degrade the audio demonstrably and/or shorten the useful lifetime of the disc. And by the time the {unenforcible in Europe and Britain} patents on the MP3 algorithm expire, nobody will be using it. Home recording software will incorporate DRM, so you can store your music on the Internet and access it anywhere -- but nobody else can access it. The usual "without your say-so" bit will be quietly forgotten; in order to give other people permission to listen to your music, you will have to buy a special licence for the record companies' version of the DRM software.
Business letters written just a few years ago won't be readable.
Okay, I'll give you DOC.
The next generation of MS Office software will incorporate DRM features. Ostensibly this will be to protect "sensitive information" in the corporate environment; for example, ensuring an e-mailed memo cannot be opened by anyone save the intended recipients, printed on a printer in a communal area, or that it self-destructs after a set number of readings. The fact that this will be an absolute 'mare to set up and manage properly, means it will most probably be set up and used badly. Home users {expected to be running Office Home Edition, which probably won't have support for DRM initially} will in actual fact probably be running pirated versions of Office Pro. I can't imagine that anybody who tries to lay out a document using spaces would be able to set up DRM properly; so e-mails probably will end up on a "read it three times and then it disappears" basis.
Open standards (or at least easily-licensed enough standards to be on a par with open) are nearly ubiquitous, and widely supported for both reading and writing. With the fact that these formats are open and digital (allowing lossless medium-to-medium copy), anyone who puts forth even a minimal effort to, say, drop all the CD-ROM backups onto whatever nails shut CD-ROM's coffin, there's no reason why most of today's content can't live on far into the future.
But how much of today's content will be relevant in the future?
Aside from the.DOC format, an anomoly, and formats for new and growing technologies, like digital video, things are only getting better in regard to open standardization. I predict that once Internet video has been around for a few years, it will also develop "Lowest-common-denominator" standards just like its predecessors.
Digital video formats are going to be the proving ground for newer and nastier DRM technologies. Look at Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Once there is a suitably robust DRM solution out there, video discs and players will be cheap; it will be the movies themselves which will be pay-per-view. Rewinding and watching a scene again will cost you extra; there won't be a fast-forward button. This will be sold to an ignorant public as thoug
That's why nearly everyone is going to Microsoft. It's one company with lots and lots of money that will **never** go out of business (just how many $B in the bank do they have now?)
In a No Limit Poker game, once one player has more money than all the others put together, they are -- barring extraordinarily bad play -- mathematically certain to walk away with every chip on the table. That's the position Microsoft are in now.
So far, DRM will only lock [the ordinary user] out of some music and movies. At this point in time, this is more of a PITA than a real problem. So far, his photos, documents, and personal recordings are transportable, exportable, and not locked out (in his opinion -- he has not seen the fine print in the licenses for the formats, the restrictions, etc.).
So far, yes. But DRM is coming to Office. It inevitably will end up affecting home users, possibly in ways you cannot imagine now.
Only when DRM bites him in the butt will he take notice (like the new CD that he could not play on his computer or the Sony CD that caused him to take his computer to Geek Squad and pay $100 to fix it).
And he probably will still think this is "just something that happens", as much a part of owning a computer as having to plug it into the mains. All that will come about from cases like this, if anything, is that audio discs in future will be labelled with "DO NOT INSERT THIS DISC INTO A COMPUTER" or somesuch. From Sony's point of view, it's a clear cheese-sandwich-in-the-VCR situation.
Government is different. Their documents need to be available forever. Their documents belong to the people, not some creation called "the Government" (at least here in the US where the Government is for the people, by the people, etc.). The issue is about free and open access to those Government documents. It is about data retention and the ability to read those documents in 10 years, 100 years, 1000 years.
I don't think even governments are bothered enough. We may pay their wages {or get carted off to prison if we don't -- but hey, at least in prison you can still light up}, but that doesn't mean much to them.
If and when government documents become unreadable, the issue in all probabilty will just be shrugged off. Non-computer-owners are "Luddites" {or too cheap to buy a computer or too poor for a government to want to be bothered with}; computer owners who use alternatives to Windows are "Freaks" {or too cheap to buy "proper" software}.
By the time we reach the point where the problem is impacting severely on governments' ability to serve the people, it will be too late. Government officials probably will not even realise that there is a problem, or that there might have been a better way to do things all along. And if they do, they won't dare admit to it.....
CDDA was invented in the mid-to-late 1970s; so even if there ever were any patents covering it, they will have expired by now. However, the "COMPACT disc" trademark is still protected; and no licence will be granted for its use on any equipment or discs that do not meet the published standard as amended. Hence this mark is notably absent from certain digital audio discs which deviate from the Red Book specification.
People of a certain mindset expect things to work together. People of other mindsets do not.
Mass is a property shared by all matter. But people weigh themselves in stones, their babies in pounds, loose produce by asking for pounds or ounces and getting an equivalent amount in grammes, and buy pre-packed goods weighed in [kilo]grammes. It never occurs to them to think that they could weigh everything in kilogrammes and be able to compare their own mass to their baby or a bag of cement or a tub of coleslaw or half a dozen bananas.
So it goes with audio equipment. Up to the 1970s, almost everything with a loudspeaker in it had a 5-pin DIN socket to connect something else to use its amplifier; if it was a tape recorder, the input pins would have been wired up too, so you could record other things onto tape. By the 1980s, these connectors -- much used by a tiny minority and ignored by nearly everyone else -- were disappearing. When I modified a radio-cassette plater to connect up a portable CD player to it, people asked my why I had done it..... my attitude was "why not?" {It was also significantly cheaper, and less wasteful, than buying a new radio/cassette/CD player. There was nothing wrong with either appliance -- apart from the radio's unwillingness to accept an external signal.}
Big Business doesn't like interoperability. Big Business wants you to ditch all your old kit whenever something new comes along. Do you think every TV set, VCR, satellite receiver and DVD player would have a SCART socket -- an international standard -- if it wasn't mandated by law? Manufacturers are really galled by the prospect that you can keep one bit of equipment when you replace another.
Lack of interoperability, in other words vendor lock-in, is what keeps software vendors going. And there is going to be tremendous resistance to change.
Open Standards do not matter at all to the vast majority of people.
Many people, and many businesses, are committing their entire lives to digital storage under a plethora of proprietary, closed standards. One by one, the suppliers who created these standards will cease to exist -- companies will go out of business, or be bought up and asset-stripped.
What does this mean? The photos you took of your children growing up won't be viewable on modern equipment. None of the recordings of the band you played in when you were younger will be listenable. Business letters written just a few years ago won't be readable.
But a generation from now, nobody will even remember that Open Standards ever existed. Everything will be locked up behind proprietary standards, jealously-guarded secrets. If you're allowed to program your own computer at all, you'll be severely restricted in what you can do with it.
And nobody will care. The problem will be thought of as "just one of the unforeseen hazards of trusting electronics", and lived with. By that stage we will already have draconian DRM in documents, and in most cases it will be so badly misconfigured that there will be no cut-and-paste; an operator will end up having to use two computers and two monitors, retyping information from one screen onto the other. All this will just be thought of as the way the world naturally works.
XML is not necessarily open. After all, it's extensible, and extensions can be proprietary. Microsoft could have a container like
<SecretProprietaryExtension>
..... loads of weirdy characters.....
</SecretProprietaryExtension>
and as long as their schema mentioned <SecretProprietaryExtension> as a valid container, then it would be valid XML. If they really wanted to arse it up for their competitors, they could describe the document entirely within the secret proprietary extension; but put in some valid-looking markup that would actually create a less-than-perfect rendering In Real Life.
Microsoft's entire business model revolves around making new versions of Office that are incompatible with previous versions, giving a few copies away for free, and thereby forcing everyone else to upgrade in order to read the files their friends have sent them. Really, it's just a form of built-in obsolescence..... unlike hardware, you can't make software fail after a certain amount of use.
Unix in all its incarnations has always been a highly modular architecture; like a hi-fi system composed of separates rather than a ghetto-blaster. If you know you won't be listening to any LPs or Walkman cassettes, just CDs, you can build a hi-fi system with just a CD player, amplifier and speakers -- and you haven't got the excess baggage of sound sources you won't be using.
The Linux kernel is also modular. You can build device drivers right into the kernel for speed, or have them as loadable modules for convenience.
A distribution's "standard" kernel must by necessity incorporate enough drivers to be able to boot up on a wide variety of hardware, because the distributor can't know in advance what it is being used on. And most distributions don't start by compiling a kernel tailored absolutely to your system. {Gentoo fanboys in 5..... 4..... 3.....} And, of course, everyone experiments with several different applications in the same sphere till they find the ones that suit them. The end result is that almost every GNU/Linux installation ends up containing more than is required: a kernel with unnecessary device drivers, and some applications that never get used.
In that respect Negroponte is spot-on. We're just a bunch of spoilt, lazy westerners who can afford plenty of RAM and drive space. That's a sign that Linux is becoming successful: in the early days, Linux was run mainly on older kit, sometimes even salvaged from skips, because that was the best anyone could afford. Success will change you, however hard you try not to let it.
But since these machines will be electronically identical, it ought to be easy to create a custom kernel with drivers for only the devices actually installed. It might even be worth hacking X so as to support only the built-in display {sure, it's fun running printerdrake to set up someone else's printing from your desktop; but the way these things will be networked wirelessly, chances are they'll be near enough as you can just walk across and sort it out}.
Those who are prepared to take the time, can still shoehorn a lot of functionality into not much space. There are already appliances running customised versions of Linux on microcontrollers; and these are being made in much smaller numbers than the proposed Negroponte laptop. So it will definitely be worth the effort to trim away some of the excess, even if nothing else comes from it that can be applied to other areas.
At the moment, this really isn't much to worry about. It only infects ELF binaries and it can't even do a chdir(). Who has ELF binaries in their mail directory? If you have anything executable in your home directory, the greatest chances are that it's a Bash, Perl or Python script. System stuff is safely tucked away in/usr/bin where only root can access it {and likely subject to checksumming via package management}.
A paranoid security policy
All file systems are encrypted at the device level. Meaningful access is possible only through use of system calls. Checksums of all important system files {using at least two unrelated algorithms} are maintained on a read-only file system, and continuously checked in the background. At the first sign of any change, network connectivity with the outside world is dropped. The process scheduler maintains not only a list of running processes, but also keeps a logfile of terminated processes.
Another idea
No two computers have the same instruction set. For example, the code for "LD AH, n" on one machine might correspond to "RR CL" on another. Binary programs compiled on {or for} a particular computer will only run on that computer; anything else will crash horribly and spectacularly. The "personalisation" is changeable by some process that requires interference with hardware and can only be performed deliberately; nobody except the administrator of a computer need know the personalisation that has been applied to it. The administrator of several computers can personalise them alike if desired, for the sake of convenience.
Malicious binaries can only propagate between computers with the same personalisation, or by knowing the personalisation of the target computer. Potentially-dangerous tools such as the compiler and assembler {into which the CPU personalisation must be coded} are kept on a file system which is not normally mounted.
The only difficulty I can see with this, is actually bootstrapping a system in the first place. I'm sure it's not impossible, though; and if it required some hardware operation that could not be achieved through software to enable this, then the initial bootstrapping process need not be considered a vulnerability.
All this being said, though, there's no substitute for users having a clue about security in the first place.....
Both hands pointing to the six {and an infinity of others, for that matter, but bear with me for now}. When it's half past any hour, the hour hand should always be exactly halfway between two hour marks.
As for the legitimate users..... well, there are by definition fewer of them, so it would be more feasible to contact them individually. And at least they're in a position to deal with it, unlike those with server addresses hard-coded into ROM..... in fact they'll probably go from:( to:> when they hear about it!
In the UK, there's an old law that any clock in sight of the Queen's Highway must be accurate within 2 minutes of the correct time {unless it is stopped, and then the hands must be set to an impossible position}.
But since he isn't in the UK, and the Internet isn't the Queen's Highway, what's to stop him from just running an absolutely bogus timeserver?
Thermodynamics is "just a theory" but I'm willing to bet you expect a fire to warm you up. Gravitation is "just a theory" but you haven't floated away yet. Electromagnetics is "just a theory" but it's keeping your computer going.
Some things can't be proven, only disproven. It's very hard to prove for certain that somebody is a vegetarian..... but you've only got to catch them eating meat once, to prove that they aren't one! But every time you see them eating anything that isn't meat, you get corroboration for the idea, and the more that happens, the more confidence you can have in it being true.
The vast majority of the evidence favours evolution. Furthermore, the introduction of a creator adds needless complication {why couldn't the process that gave rise to a creator who then created the universe just have created a universe?} which tends to disfavour any such hypothesis.
Nah..... that's most probably some tie-wearing d.h. trying to be clever {a link apparently to nowhere, but with an onclick attribute which calls some JavaScript function}, and failing it big-style. Those "links" can't be middle-clicked to open them in a new tab. And they mess up the links browser too}. FCOL, guys, if you're going to do something like that, you may as well use
My preferred browsing style is always to middle-click links, never to overwrite anything straight away. Once I've got more than a dozen tabs on the go, then I'll think about closing some of the unused ones {before a SIGSEGV does it for me}.
What point am I missing? The point that you are making seems to be that you want to keep the Third World dependent upon the West for handouts, forever.
The point I am trying to make is that we have to break that dependency. Of course, this means that one day these countries will no longer be poor; and people like you won't be able to achieve a hit of instant gratification by merely throwing a bit of loose change at the problem.
Science does require that we accept some things as absolute though. For example, we must assume that this world is real and thus its physical laws are set (even if largely unknown.) Actually, I like to joke that science is a religion of itself because we must take a large number of things on faith. Not blind faith, but, faith nonetheless.
Scientists take exactly two things on faith.
The Laws of Nature are Unchangeable.
The Laws of Nature apply to everything in the Universe without prejudice.
Falsifying either of these tenets would undermine a great deal of Science.
The experimental method generally involves studying a small, contrived system and applying the discoveries thus made to a larger system, so is dependent upon (2) for its validity. The knowledge we have accumulated over the years is dependent upon (1) for its continued validity.
Everyday observation continuously reinforces these tenets: we can see incidental evidence all the time for the inverse square law, gravity, pressure in a fluid acting equally in all directions, Newton's third law and many more.
If you believe in Creation, then where did the Creator come from? Where did the Creator get the raw materials for the Universe from? And why favour a two-stage process {1. produce Creator and raw materials for Universe, 2. let Creator get busy with Creating Universe} over a one-stage process {produce Universe}?
The compressibility of encrypted data depends on the encryption algorithm.
Data compression, in any form, basically works by finding a set of rules that can be used to describe things; if the descriptive rules can be expressed more briefly than the things they describe, then the compression works. Non-lossy compression, as used for text and programs, requires that the original data can be recovered exactly; lossy compression, as used for images and sounds, only requires that a good approximation to the original data can be recovered.
This works well for data that already tend to follow rules. For instance, in a program there will be several words -- function and variable names, and the reserved words -- that occur again and again. In an unencrypted text file, there will be some words, and some letters and punctuation marks, that occur more frequently than others. That gives you a hook on which you can base a compression rule.
Encrypted data is had by combining the plaintext with a keystream {a sequence of hopefully as nearly random as possible numbers}. If the output of encryption software repeatably compresses well with different plaintexts, that probably indicates that the keystream is following rules simple enough for the compression software to pick up on them..... and an attacker might be able to deduce what those rules are, and hence recover the plaintext. To be certain that compressibility is not an artefact due to the plaintext, modify the Source Code* of your encryption software to just generate a keystream, without encrypting any plaintext; recompile, and attempt to compress lengths of keystream.
* If you don't have the source code, then your encryption software is already insecure. If you need to ask why, you don't understand security.
Slashdot Mirror
Got to agree with the parent. Unless it's games you're after; but, to be perfectly frank, you'd be much better off buying a games console {unless you have a good reason not to, such as no TV set}.
Some have mentioned dual-booting Mac OS X and Linux. But there's not a hell of a lot of a point in doing that; OS X is just another flavour of unix, and you've already implied {by mentioning running Windows in the first place} that staying i-tal isn't a requirement. There's even less point in running Cygwin under Windows on an Intel Mac. If you want to run unix applications, run them in Mac OS X!
If you still insist to run Windows, there's plenty of good stuff for you to start with on The Open CD. Can't believe nobody mentioned it already really; but I was browsing with a high threshhold, so maybe I just missed it.
Heh ..... it's always Anonymous Cowards that complain about my "zero tolerance, zero compunction" attitude to adverts.
If a product is advertised, I won't buy it. I want the manufacturers to go out of business for having the arrogance to tell me how their brand of crap is better than any of the fifty billion other brands of crap out there. They're all crap, nothing is made properly anymore. But the companies that spend good money on bullshitting the public are obviously spending less on the quality of their products. Not on my shilling, they don't.
If an advertisement comes on while I'm watching telly, I leave the room. If an advertisement comes on while I'm listening to the radio, I change stations {and leave it on the BBC}. If someone tries to advertise to me on the Internet, I add them to my blocked list.
If your business model depends on somebody looking at an advert in order for you to get paid, then what you have is a broken business model. I owe advertisers nothing. I have a right to ignore advertisements.
It's "A haitch-pee copmputer", not "An haitch-pee computer".
Look like dodgy units conversions to me. What's the betting that it's really a five metre hole and a one-gigagramme plume of debris?
So has the original site not got the article anymore, then? If you light a candle off mine, does my room get any darker?
Oh, and while you're at it, please ban filament light bulbs {except where being used to illuminate revolving machinery, obviously} and disposable batteries, and exempt lead-acid batteries from pollution control {they're still about the least polluting option, 100% recyclable at end-of-life and lead is expensive enough already to ensure this is done}.
Not out of me, it won't generate any! I have multiple levels of advert blocking. Ad-blocking proxy, list of sites with blocked images, and no flash player. Sweet!
Who says they have to use JPEG? Camera manufacturers are already concealing the RAW formats used by their cameras; IMHO this is being done primarily to conceal the true pixel count prior to interpolation {thereby allowing outrageous claims regarding the sensor}. It's possible that future digital cameras might use a brand new, encrypted, DRM file format which can only be viewed with appropriate, closed-source image editing software supplied with the camera -- or a deeply-hooked browser plug-in.
CDDA has already ceased to exist, to all intents and purposes; replaced by a range of nasty hybrid discs which, more by luck than design, can be read by an audio CD player. Some of these "copy prevention" technologies actually degrade the audio demonstrably and/or shorten the useful lifetime of the disc. And by the time the {unenforcible in Europe and Britain} patents on the MP3 algorithm expire, nobody will be using it. Home recording software will incorporate DRM, so you can store your music on the Internet and access it anywhere -- but nobody else can access it. The usual "without your say-so" bit will be quietly forgotten; in order to give other people permission to listen to your music, you will have to buy a special licence for the record companies' version of the DRM software.
The next generation of MS Office software will incorporate DRM features. Ostensibly this will be to protect "sensitive information" in the corporate environment; for example, ensuring an e-mailed memo cannot be opened by anyone save the intended recipients, printed on a printer in a communal area, or that it self-destructs after a set number of readings. The fact that this will be an absolute 'mare to set up and manage properly, means it will most probably be set up and used badly. Home users {expected to be running Office Home Edition, which probably won't have support for DRM initially} will in actual fact probably be running pirated versions of Office Pro. I can't imagine that anybody who tries to lay out a document using spaces would be able to set up DRM properly; so e-mails probably will end up on a "read it three times and then it disappears" basis.
But how much of today's content will be relevant in the future?
Digital video formats are going to be the proving ground for newer and nastier DRM technologies. Look at Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Once there is a suitably robust DRM solution out there, video discs and players will be cheap; it will be the movies themselves which will be pay-per-view. Rewinding and watching a scene again will cost you extra; there won't be a fast-forward button. This will be sold to an ignorant public as thoug
If and when government documents become unreadable, the issue in all probabilty will just be shrugged off. Non-computer-owners are "Luddites" {or too cheap to buy a computer or too poor for a government to want to be bothered with}; computer owners who use alternatives to Windows are "Freaks" {or too cheap to buy "proper" software}.
By the time we reach the point where the problem is impacting severely on governments' ability to serve the people, it will be too late. Government officials probably will not even realise that there is a problem, or that there might have been a better way to do things all along. And if they do, they won't dare admit to it
CDDA was invented in the mid-to-late 1970s; so even if there ever were any patents covering it, they will have expired by now. However, the "COMPACT disc" trademark is still protected; and no licence will be granted for its use on any equipment or discs that do not meet the published standard as amended. Hence this mark is notably absent from certain digital audio discs which deviate from the Red Book specification.
People of a certain mindset expect things to work together. People of other mindsets do not.
..... my attitude was "why not?" {It was also significantly cheaper, and less wasteful, than buying a new radio/cassette/CD player. There was nothing wrong with either appliance -- apart from the radio's unwillingness to accept an external signal.}
Mass is a property shared by all matter. But people weigh themselves in stones, their babies in pounds, loose produce by asking for pounds or ounces and getting an equivalent amount in grammes, and buy pre-packed goods weighed in [kilo]grammes. It never occurs to them to think that they could weigh everything in kilogrammes and be able to compare their own mass to their baby or a bag of cement or a tub of coleslaw or half a dozen bananas.
So it goes with audio equipment. Up to the 1970s, almost everything with a loudspeaker in it had a 5-pin DIN socket to connect something else to use its amplifier; if it was a tape recorder, the input pins would have been wired up too, so you could record other things onto tape. By the 1980s, these connectors -- much used by a tiny minority and ignored by nearly everyone else -- were disappearing. When I modified a radio-cassette plater to connect up a portable CD player to it, people asked my why I had done it
Big Business doesn't like interoperability. Big Business wants you to ditch all your old kit whenever something new comes along. Do you think every TV set, VCR, satellite receiver and DVD player would have a SCART socket -- an international standard -- if it wasn't mandated by law? Manufacturers are really galled by the prospect that you can keep one bit of equipment when you replace another.
Lack of interoperability, in other words vendor lock-in, is what keeps software vendors going. And there is going to be tremendous resistance to change.
Open Standards do not matter at all to the vast majority of people.
Many people, and many businesses, are committing their entire lives to digital storage under a plethora of proprietary, closed standards. One by one, the suppliers who created these standards will cease to exist -- companies will go out of business, or be bought up and asset-stripped.
What does this mean? The photos you took of your children growing up won't be viewable on modern equipment. None of the recordings of the band you played in when you were younger will be listenable. Business letters written just a few years ago won't be readable.
But a generation from now, nobody will even remember that Open Standards ever existed. Everything will be locked up behind proprietary standards, jealously-guarded secrets. If you're allowed to program your own computer at all, you'll be severely restricted in what you can do with it.
And nobody will care. The problem will be thought of as "just one of the unforeseen hazards of trusting electronics", and lived with. By that stage we will already have draconian DRM in documents, and in most cases it will be so badly misconfigured that there will be no cut-and-paste; an operator will end up having to use two computers and two monitors, retyping information from one screen onto the other. All this will just be thought of as the way the world naturally works.
Microsoft's entire business model revolves around making new versions of Office that are incompatible with previous versions, giving a few copies away for free, and thereby forcing everyone else to upgrade in order to read the files their friends have sent them. Really, it's just a form of built-in obsolescence
Unix in all its incarnations has always been a highly modular architecture; like a hi-fi system composed of separates rather than a ghetto-blaster. If you know you won't be listening to any LPs or Walkman cassettes, just CDs, you can build a hi-fi system with just a CD player, amplifier and speakers -- and you haven't got the excess baggage of sound sources you won't be using.
..... 4 ..... 3 .....} And, of course, everyone experiments with several different applications in the same sphere till they find the ones that suit them. The end result is that almost every GNU/Linux installation ends up containing more than is required: a kernel with unnecessary device drivers, and some applications that never get used.
The Linux kernel is also modular. You can build device drivers right into the kernel for speed, or have them as loadable modules for convenience.
A distribution's "standard" kernel must by necessity incorporate enough drivers to be able to boot up on a wide variety of hardware, because the distributor can't know in advance what it is being used on. And most distributions don't start by compiling a kernel tailored absolutely to your system. {Gentoo fanboys in 5
In that respect Negroponte is spot-on. We're just a bunch of spoilt, lazy westerners who can afford plenty of RAM and drive space. That's a sign that Linux is becoming successful: in the early days, Linux was run mainly on older kit, sometimes even salvaged from skips, because that was the best anyone could afford. Success will change you, however hard you try not to let it.
But since these machines will be electronically identical, it ought to be easy to create a custom kernel with drivers for only the devices actually installed. It might even be worth hacking X so as to support only the built-in display {sure, it's fun running printerdrake to set up someone else's printing from your desktop; but the way these things will be networked wirelessly, chances are they'll be near enough as you can just walk across and sort it out}.
If you want to see what can be done in not much disk space, check out Slax Popcorn Edition or Damn Small Linux.
Those who are prepared to take the time, can still shoehorn a lot of functionality into not much space. There are already appliances running customised versions of Linux on microcontrollers; and these are being made in much smaller numbers than the proposed Negroponte laptop. So it will definitely be worth the effort to trim away some of the excess, even if nothing else comes from it that can be applied to other areas.
At the moment, this really isn't much to worry about. It only infects ELF binaries and it can't even do a chdir(). Who has ELF binaries in their mail directory? If you have anything executable in your home directory, the greatest chances are that it's a Bash, Perl or Python script. System stuff is safely tucked away in /usr/bin where only root can access it {and likely subject to checksumming via package management}.
.....
A paranoid security policy All file systems are encrypted at the device level. Meaningful access is possible only through use of system calls. Checksums of all important system files {using at least two unrelated algorithms} are maintained on a read-only file system, and continuously checked in the background. At the first sign of any change, network connectivity with the outside world is dropped. The process scheduler maintains not only a list of running processes, but also keeps a logfile of terminated processes.
Another idea No two computers have the same instruction set. For example, the code for "LD AH, n" on one machine might correspond to "RR CL" on another. Binary programs compiled on {or for} a particular computer will only run on that computer; anything else will crash horribly and spectacularly. The "personalisation" is changeable by some process that requires interference with hardware and can only be performed deliberately; nobody except the administrator of a computer need know the personalisation that has been applied to it. The administrator of several computers can personalise them alike if desired, for the sake of convenience.
Malicious binaries can only propagate between computers with the same personalisation, or by knowing the personalisation of the target computer. Potentially-dangerous tools such as the compiler and assembler {into which the CPU personalisation must be coded} are kept on a file system which is not normally mounted.
The only difficulty I can see with this, is actually bootstrapping a system in the first place. I'm sure it's not impossible, though; and if it required some hardware operation that could not be achieved through software to enable this, then the initial bootstrapping process need not be considered a vulnerability.
All this being said, though, there's no substitute for users having a clue about security in the first place
Both hands pointing to the six {and an infinity of others, for that matter, but bear with me for now}. When it's half past any hour, the hour hand should always be exactly halfway between two hour marks.
..... well, there are by definition fewer of them, so it would be more feasible to contact them individually. And at least they're in a position to deal with it, unlike those with server addresses hard-coded into ROM ..... in fact they'll probably go from :( to :> when they hear about it!
As for the legitimate users
In the UK, there's an old law that any clock in sight of the Queen's Highway must be accurate within 2 minutes of the correct time {unless it is stopped, and then the hands must be set to an impossible position}.
But since he isn't in the UK, and the Internet isn't the Queen's Highway, what's to stop him from just running an absolutely bogus timeserver?
Thermodynamics is "just a theory" but I'm willing to bet you expect a fire to warm you up. Gravitation is "just a theory" but you haven't floated away yet. Electromagnetics is "just a theory" but it's keeping your computer going.
..... but you've only got to catch them eating meat once, to prove that they aren't one! But every time you see them eating anything that isn't meat, you get corroboration for the idea, and the more that happens, the more confidence you can have in it being true.
Some things can't be proven, only disproven. It's very hard to prove for certain that somebody is a vegetarian
The vast majority of the evidence favours evolution. Furthermore, the introduction of a creator adds needless complication {why couldn't the process that gave rise to a creator who then created the universe just have created a universe?} which tends to disfavour any such hypothesis.
I think you missed a word somewhere between "method" and "involves".
My preferred browsing style is always to middle-click links, never to overwrite anything straight away. Once I've got more than a dozen tabs on the go, then I'll think about closing some of the unused ones {before a SIGSEGV does it for me}.
What point am I missing? The point that you are making seems to be that you want to keep the Third World dependent upon the West for handouts, forever.
The point I am trying to make is that we have to break that dependency. Of course, this means that one day these countries will no longer be poor; and people like you won't be able to achieve a hit of instant gratification by merely throwing a bit of loose change at the problem.
- The Laws of Nature are Unchangeable.
- The Laws of Nature apply to everything in the Universe without prejudice.
Falsifying either of these tenets would undermine a great deal of Science.The experimental method generally involves studying a small, contrived system and applying the discoveries thus made to a larger system, so is dependent upon (2) for its validity. The knowledge we have accumulated over the years is dependent upon (1) for its continued validity.
Everyday observation continuously reinforces these tenets: we can see incidental evidence all the time for the inverse square law, gravity, pressure in a fluid acting equally in all directions, Newton's third law and many more.
If you believe in Creation, then where did the Creator come from? Where did the Creator get the raw materials for the Universe from? And why favour a two-stage process {1. produce Creator and raw materials for Universe, 2. let Creator get busy with Creating Universe} over a one-stage process {produce Universe}?
The compressibility of encrypted data depends on the encryption algorithm.
..... and an attacker might be able to deduce what those rules are, and hence recover the plaintext. To be certain that compressibility is not an artefact due to the plaintext, modify the Source Code* of your encryption software to just generate a keystream, without encrypting any plaintext; recompile, and attempt to compress lengths of keystream.
Data compression, in any form, basically works by finding a set of rules that can be used to describe things; if the descriptive rules can be expressed more briefly than the things they describe, then the compression works. Non-lossy compression, as used for text and programs, requires that the original data can be recovered exactly; lossy compression, as used for images and sounds, only requires that a good approximation to the original data can be recovered.
This works well for data that already tend to follow rules. For instance, in a program there will be several words -- function and variable names, and the reserved words -- that occur again and again. In an unencrypted text file, there will be some words, and some letters and punctuation marks, that occur more frequently than others. That gives you a hook on which you can base a compression rule.
Encrypted data is had by combining the plaintext with a keystream {a sequence of hopefully as nearly random as possible numbers}. If the output of encryption software repeatably compresses well with different plaintexts, that probably indicates that the keystream is following rules simple enough for the compression software to pick up on them
* If you don't have the source code, then your encryption software is already insecure. If you need to ask why, you don't understand security.