I don't know about "backwards", the XO-1.5 is a just "harware refresh" of the XO-1, giving it more speed, more RAM, and more flash memory, while fixing some of the bugs. Nothing is rolled back, the original innovations (some of which have not yet been matched even by your Mini 10's generation of netbooks) are still there.
Meanwhile, aspects of XO-2's design (two hinged touchscreens) have been widely copied by MS's Courier and others for their next generations of netbooks/tablets.
To summarize the differences from eyeballing the diagrams: - CPU is upgraded from 400MHz AMD Geode to 1GHz Via C7. - The corresponding AMD southbridge is replaced w/ Via VX855 - RAM is upgraded from 256MB DDR to 1GB DDR2 - flash is upgraded from 1GB soldered-on to 4GB microSD in a slot (i.e. replaceable, interesting!) - WLAN is changed from a soldered-on Marvell part to a daughtercard (currently still a Marvell part IIRC). - the Marvell CaFe chip is apparently gone. This provided NAND FLASH and SD interfaces and some camera functions? - audio seems to be upgraded
Some stuff that's the same: - The display controller (Hymax HX8837), that lets the display remain live with the processor suspended. - The embedded controller (KB3700) - external SD slot (though not controlled by CaFe anymore)
Not sure: - battery and charging circuit - other power supply design
Teach cursive, give kids touch enabled computers, and the physical keyboard will fade into oblivion.
It's too bad that the handwriting feature of the OLPC XO-1 was never (to my knowledge) utilized. The hardware feature exists and you can play with it in the firmware diagnostics. The pressure sensitive area is 3x the width of the "mouse" (capacitive-only) part of the touchpad to give a nice writing area. I haven't seen software that makes use of it, I think it was abandoned.
But I like watching the gf enter Chinese characters on her iphone. Considering the world's demographics, and the explosion of touchscreens, I'd say some form of cursive will be around for a long time...
The "full price" you're describing doesn't include the cost of damage to human health and the environment from mercury and other heavy metals, acid rain, greenhouse gases, mountaintop removal, smog, etc.
Some *small* part of that cost is included now via regulation, requiring cleaner smokestack technology e.g., which the utilities pass on to customers. But much of it is *not* regulated or otherwise included in the price the end-user pays.
Efficiency and decoupling have helped California to consume electricity far more thriftily than the rest of America. At the time of the 1973 oil shock, California used about 17 percent less electricity per person than the country at large. Since then, as Rosenfeld likes to point out in a chart that has been dubbed âoethe Rosenfeld Curve,â per capita electricity use in the nation has increased by about 50 percent to about 12,000 kilowatt-hours annually. Meanwhile, over that same period, per capita electricity use in California has remained absolutely flat at about 7,000 kilowatt-hours per year. That means the average Californian today uses about 40 percent less electricity per year than the average American.
James Sweeney, who runs Stanford Universityâ(TM)s Precourt Energy Efficiency Center, has calculated with Anant Sudarshan, a colleague, that much of that difference can be explained by factors such as Californiaâ(TM)s temperate climate, less heavy industry, and even smaller-sized households. But, Sweeney says, the stateâ(TM)s policy decisions still account for a substantial amountâ"roughly one-fifth to one-fourthâ"of the gap in electricity usage between California and the nation. The focus on efficiency has produced huge savings: though per kilowatt electricity rates are higher in California than in most other places, consumers pay lower electricity bills because they use so much less power than people elsewhere. A few years ago, the California Energy Commission calculated that the stateâ(TM)s efficiency efforts had preempted the need for 24 large-scale power plants and saved state consumers $56 billion.
Rosenfeld says the past generationâ(TM)s gains indicate the state can improve its energy intensity (the amount of energy required to produce each dollar of GDP) by about 30 percent every decade. âoeEfficiency,â he says with a twinkle, âoeseems to be a renewable resource.â
And there is the initial lesson from Californiaâ(TM)s energy experience: efficiency is the foundation of any effort to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. As California has learned, the most cost-effective way to replace coal or natural gas or petroleum isnâ(TM)t to rely on solar or wind or biofuels; itâ(TM)s to squeeze more work out of less energy.
In the "run ubuntu on a kindle" story, the guy said the kindle uploads syslogs twice a day. That's probably more about monitoring errors and basic usage than any individual tracking, I hope.
It's a normal part of the kindle's operation to sync the last position read in your books. That's what lets you pick up where you left off on another device tied to the same account.
So in theory they know how fast a reader you are, and more interestingly, they could see for any particular book if there are parts where a lot of readers get bogged down or give up at. No idea whether they keep any of those stats, or whether the privacy policy/TOS permit/allow that.
It's also normal to backup to the cloud any annotations, but you can turn that feature off.
It also has gps, and I have no idea whether it ever sends that back to amazon. But potentially it knows that sometimes I read in the bathroom.
The thing that distinguishes the kindle from any other ereader I've seen is that it fully incorporates the cloud for downloading and backing up books, annotations, blog updates, etc. Which is really really cool, and also an honest potential threat to privacy.
Otherwise, I think we're hitting a breaking point. What more functionality do we really want from our phone? How much more can you accomplish on a small screen?
Breaking point is right. We need to break the concept of online mobile presence being tied only to the phone (personal device) completely. When I get into my car -- hell make that any car -- which has a nice 10" touch display backed by a computer currently used for navigation etc., why not transfer my online presence to that screen? Let me use the web, take a video call, what have you, on that device. Then, when I arrive at the airport (or spaceport if we're lucky) and take my seat on Virgin Galactic, move my session to that display.
Yes I'll still carry a "phone" which will have the capabilities that can be packed into the small form and display, but it's main job will be to carry my mobile presence between other devices which I don't necessarily own.
Bandwidth doesn't have to be tied to the phone either. If I sit down in an airport waiting area and use a seat display, I'm on its fiber. I might be paying to use it according to a data plan tied to my phone. The cost and bandwidth might be different when I get into a car, and it might be different (tiered, etc.) from the guy sitting next to me. But the billing is still tied to the account that my phone presents to the world.
Wifi-enabled phones with a boingo account give some idea of this. At home/office/Starbucks, your iPhone is automatically using wifi instead of 3G. You pay (or not) based on the account in your phone. But in my future scenario the phone just authenticates the local temporary display which then has its own connection to whatever network is appropriate for that particular cafe / airplane / car.
So the phone becomes more like a super bluetooth identity accessory to move your online presence between available displays. And when necessary, it can also be used as a self-contained telecommunications device (mobile phone).
Occam's razor applies here. The rankings prove that using a brazenly partisan cable TV show to direct sheeple to read yet more of the same partisan crap in book/ebook form is far more thought control than furtive tweaking of content could ever be.
I'm a big fan of Amazon but Kindle just rubs me the wrong way. I'm considered to be their target demographic too - a left coast liberal yuppie who loves to read obscure novels by authors who committed suicide.
Actually in the first 5 of Kindle Top Sellers at this moment are Michelle Malkin's "Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies" and Glenn Beck's "Glenn Beck's Common Sense: The Case Against and Out-of-Control Government,...". There isn't a single liberal leaning rant anywhere in the top 30, but I also see Dick Morris and Mark R. Levin from the right. So your assumption about the target demographic might be a tad off.
Unless of course you have a device (like newer macbooks) with nvidia's mobile chipset, which shares system memory and can therefore take advantage of Zero-copy access, in which case there is no transfer penalty because there is no transfer. A limited case, but useful for sure.
Here's one article that tries to put some numbers behind this idea (buying new efficient vs. re-using old clunker). It compares a new Prius (plus its manufacturing energy) vs. a used Corolla (no slouch in mpg). The new Prius wins out (573 million BTUs over its lifetime for gas+production of Prius vs. 701 million BTUs for gas only for Corolla).
There's other data out there support this idea. Obviously it depends on the cars under comparison, but there are some winning scenarios under cash-for-clunkers.
I know it sounds nuts, but I actually want a system like this for personally identifiable information (PII).
If a business has my PII in their records, I want them to tag it with meta-data on how it was collected and what rights *they* have to use/share it. It's not any more enforceable than any other DRM scheme, but it would help to implement privacy policies, which is good for the consumer. And it would help to limit secondary uses of PII which is also good for the businesses that make money by collecting PII.
I'm wanting meta-data with terms like "this was collected with NO permission to re-distribute", or "this was collected with a promise to delete after 6 months", etc.
To make a really bad car analogy, bad marketing didn't kill GM, in fact marketing kept GM on life support for decades *in spite of* their crappy cars.
The XO as delivered during the first G1G1 (and to country projects during that period) was nearly unusable. Hardware functionality was great, but the software didn't measure up at all, in several respects. Software was still experimenting in blue sky when they needed to be delivering on goals.
First, it didn't perform acceptably within the severely limited RAM (severe for non-memory-footprint-optimized software). Most likely running the same software on the XO gen-1.5 refresh will fix that level of performance issues.
Second, the software was not complete, in that promised features were not yet implemented. Some were important in the real world, like the advanced power saving. Things crashed a lot.
Third, the software implemented experimental ideas like the Journal, which were under revision without taking end-user feedback into serious consideration.
[And Fourth, it was damned hard for willing FOSS volunteers to contribute meaningfully. The build you could easily download and run and report bugs on was far obsolete from what the developers were running, and getting in sync with them was tough.]
From what I could see on the developer mailing lists, they had a severe cat-herding problem. Too many smart people going in whatever direction their creativity and youthful self-confidence took them, rather than getting all hands on deck to recognize the shortcomings and get them fixed *now*. I think they undertook this project in the spirit of constructivism, when they needed to switch gears and deliver a product. Too much green hat, not enough blue hat.
This politics of innovation/change in the UI of KDE or even MS Office is interesting to me. The updated version of the Matthew Paul Thomas critique on free software usability that someone mentioned has several points in the ballpark, here's one that's relevant:
13. Release early, release often, get stuck. The common practice of "release early, release often" can cause poor design to accumulate. When a pre-release version behaves a particular way, and testers get used to it behaving that way, they will naturally complain when a later pre-release version behaves differently -- even if the new behavior is better overall. This can discourage programmers from improving the interface, and can contribute to the increase in weird configuration settings.
Solution: Publish design specifications as early as possible in the development process, so testers know what to expect eventually.
Basically, once you've implemented something, some users will strongly resist change even if it is better.
That's one of the things that makes it tough to change the course of a big tanker like a Linux desktop environment, even if you do have someone at the helm punching in coordinates for the promised land.
AIUI, Stallman's position is not against C# as a language, or implementing C# on Linux. FTA:
The problem is not unique to Mono; any free implementation of C# would raise the same issue. The danger is that Microsoft is probably planning to force all free C# implementations underground some day using software patents. (See http://swpat.org/ and http://progfree.org./ This is a serious danger, and only fools would ignore it until the day it actually happens. We need to take precautions now to protect ourselves from this future danger.
I wish some knowledgeable folks would weigh in how possible it would actually be for MS to do this for C# in particular. (Do they already hold relevant patents?)
Whether you like MS and think Stallman needs a shave and a bath or not, it is an indisputable fact that MS has threatened to use patents against Linux in the past.
I'd add a fourth point that to me is even more interesting (and apparently comes from the data):
As a result [*] African populations today have greater genetic diversity -- more variants in more genes -- than Eurasians or East Asians, and Eurasians somewhat more than East Asians.
* [The population split away from Africa 70K years ago, and then that sub-population splitting again 40K years ago into Eurasian and East Asian groups. The African source population is 130K years old.]
"FOSS", as by the age of your slashdot uid I'm sure you know, usually carries with it the implication of more than just an open license per-se. Apple can open the license of all their code ( a great thing), yet Steve Jobs can still dictate that no UI feature is committed that he doesn't approve of. Whereas Shuttleworth is never going to have command-and-control over enough of the user-visible FOSS projects that are glued together in the Ubuntu desktop to just call the shots like Jobs. Call Apple FOSS if you like, but a corporation's necessary "take it or fork it" approach to non-employee commits belies the historically organic and independent politics of the genre. At best we need a better meme, and COSS doesn't quite get there.
Yeah, hence "cat-herder" vs. dictator. I don't know anything about Shuttleworth's management effectiveness, but we agree that an actual Steve Jobs style could not work in FOSS.
But in FOSS-land, Shuttleworth seems to be in the best position to put out a distro unified behind making the end-user experience great, which is what Jobs clearly aims for in his products.
And personally I think Fedora is already shifting some of its focus towards more end-user happiness in response to Ubuntu, where Fedora developers once made manly sport of scoffing at end-user concerns. (Having said that, I'm obliged to point out that Fedora devs have made huge pre-Ubuntu contributions to stuff that "just works" for users, like NetworkManager. Ubuntu has a long way to catch up to contributing actual lines-of-code, but they are ahead in setting the direction and thus gaining users IMO.)
The best of the Apple experience is polished, user-oriented, and "insanely great" because it takes a Steve Jobs to set the vision and make every component answer to that design. That's hard to do in the FOSS world.
So I, for one, am glad Mark Shuttleworth is attempting to put some top-down focus on a user-oriented set of goals into the Ubuntu desktop. Linux has not lacked for technical innovations, it has lacked for a unified vision that elevates the end-user and a chief to get developers to sign on to that vision. Go Mark, go!
Which is why I find it misleading when Amazon shows the price of the kindle version and directly compares it to the price of the deadtree version. They are really two completely different animals, and this hidden download limit is one great example of what makes the comparison false.
(I try to use my kindle and kindle iphone app with open eyes, but I didn't know about this download limit until now.)
The only content creators that will get any fair shake are those writing books, lyrics, etc, as a profession instead of a passion.
I think part of CD's point is that not even professional authors (of which he is obviously one) get a fair shake against a near-monopoly. From TFA:
Publishing is constrained by a tiny number of giant distributors and two major bookstore chains, all of which demand ridiculous terms on the books they carry
Short version: Even if PGP was foolproof, easy, and everywhere, this doesn't solve the issue of meta-data mining. If you're government is determined to invade your privacy, and you're not determined to stand up for your rights, no technical solution will save you for long.
Longer version: From TFA and other articles, the US government is apparently tracking who-calls-who and who-emails-who. (And probably also who-goes-where-when using cell-phone location tracking.) Also it's apparent that they dragnet everyone's communications, and minimizing this tracking to only suspected terrorists and non-US persons is at best a fig leaf of privacy for the innocent.
PGP doesn't hide *who* you communicate with, or *when* (the un-encrypted meta-data as opposed to the encrypted contents). And you might think that using cash pre-paid cellphones and throw-away email accounts would give you anonymity, but analysis of who-contacts-who would break that anonymity in short order for most people.
[You can bet calls/emails to UBL's grandma are scrutinized, even if they come PGP'd from anon-e-mouse@hotmail.com. Knowing who else anon-e-mouse talks to, and what IP address his email came from might be helpful unless he's really really careful. Consider lessons from the AOL's "anonymous" search data fiasco.]
This kind of dossier on every citizen used to be considered the very example of un-American government, all too easily used to enable tyranny. Technology and a newly fearful but long complacent public has made these implementing these communications dragnets dangerously easy.
This is why I can see a defensive reason for Intel wanting Wind River, but no offensive reason.
What about the possibility/perception of weakening support in VxWorks for non-Intel (mainly ARM right now) embedded processors?
Obviously, Wind River's VxWorks OS running on ARM is *the* main competitor to running on Intel in the embedded space. And there are non-ARM up-and-comers (nvidia?) in the embedded space that will require good VxWorks support to really make it. Now they will have to kowtow to their biggest competitor (Intel) or live by Linux and water alone.
Is there any realistic way to prevent something like this in the future? I'm afraid I don't see anything obvious.
Me neither. The Cambridge tech report has some thoughts about what organizations with sensitive data should be doing by way of countermeasures, but to sum it up:
Prevention will be hard. The traditional defence against social malware in government agencies involves expensive and intrusive measures that range from mandatory access controls to tiresome operational security procedures. These will not be sustainable in the economy as a whole. Evolving practical low-cost defences against social-malware attacks will be a real challenge.
In their conclusion they say:
In short, we predict that the criminals who adapt social malware to fraud will enjoy many years of rich pickings.
I wonder how much security improvement would be gained if Thunderbird & Outlook disabled the automatic opening of a browser when you click on a link in email, and made us go back to the old days of copying & pasting links. Would users be more careful if they could more easily see what they're doing?
That wouldn't have helped here.
According to the report, at least some of the phishing was carefully devised with obvious effort made to trick (socially engineer) its specific target into opening an infected Word document.
An example given was an email sent to the office of the Dalai Lama, which was crafted to appear legitimate and relevant, and included an infected attachment whose trojan was detected by only 11 out of 30-odd commercial virus checkers.
As you say, phishing is not new technically speaking, but the researchers conclude that this is clearly a narrow-cast spying effort as opposed to the run-of-the-mill wide-cast steal-your-bank-account operation.
Encryption gives a sometimes false sense of security, and the technology is a hassle. It's better to reinforce societal expectations for privacy where it is due, and let social mechanisms (like laws and market reputation) do the job.
Consider e.g. that if you use https from your workplace and see the happy little lock icon in FF or IE, you probably feel safe.
But some workplaces insert a proxy in between you and gmail (or what have you), having stuffed the proxy's certificate on your (their) work machine through local policy. Unbeknownst to you, your employer then sees the communication which you thought was totally private. Now imagine if an ISP could do that and get away with it.
The point is that even if you do *care*, the technology is hard to keep track of, and there is an arms-race ladder of one-upmanship that makes this a never-ending game, which some nerds can win, and most of us will lose.
What will really keep you safe is to stand up for a reasonable expectation of privacy where it should exist, and create norms and laws that protect this. Saying "NO" to Phorm or other invasions by ISPs is part of that approach, and creates legal and commercial consequences that are more effective than asking every grandma to mess with PGP.
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I don't know about "backwards", the XO-1.5 is a just "harware refresh" of the XO-1, giving it more speed, more RAM, and more flash memory, while fixing some of the bugs. Nothing is rolled back, the original innovations (some of which have not yet been matched even by your Mini 10's generation of netbooks) are still there.
Meanwhile, aspects of XO-2's design (two hinged touchscreens) have been widely copied by MS's Courier and others for their next generations of netbooks/tablets.
For those interested in the hardware differences, here's the XO-1 motherboard and the XO-1.5 motherboard.
To summarize the differences from eyeballing the diagrams:
- CPU is upgraded from 400MHz AMD Geode to 1GHz Via C7.
- The corresponding AMD southbridge is replaced w/ Via VX855
- RAM is upgraded from 256MB DDR to 1GB DDR2
- flash is upgraded from 1GB soldered-on to 4GB microSD in a slot (i.e. replaceable, interesting!)
- WLAN is changed from a soldered-on Marvell part to a daughtercard (currently still a Marvell part IIRC).
- the Marvell CaFe chip is apparently gone. This provided NAND FLASH and SD interfaces and some camera functions?
- audio seems to be upgraded
Some stuff that's the same:
- The display controller (Hymax HX8837), that lets the display remain live with the processor suspended.
- The embedded controller (KB3700)
- external SD slot (though not controlled by CaFe anymore)
Not sure:
- battery and charging circuit
- other power supply design
It's too bad that the handwriting feature of the OLPC XO-1 was never (to my knowledge) utilized. The hardware feature exists and you can play with it in the firmware diagnostics. The pressure sensitive area is 3x the width of the "mouse" (capacitive-only) part of the touchpad to give a nice writing area. I haven't seen software that makes use of it, I think it was abandoned.
But I like watching the gf enter Chinese characters on her iphone. Considering the world's demographics, and the explosion of touchscreens, I'd say some form of cursive will be around for a long time...
The "full price" you're describing doesn't include the cost of damage to human health and the environment from mercury and other heavy metals, acid rain, greenhouse gases, mountaintop removal, smog, etc.
Some *small* part of that cost is included now via regulation, requiring cleaner smokestack technology e.g., which the utilities pass on to customers. But much of it is *not* regulated or otherwise included in the price the end-user pays.
In the meantime, conservation has paid proven dividends in California:
In the "run ubuntu on a kindle" story, the guy said the kindle uploads syslogs twice a day. That's probably more about monitoring errors and basic usage than any individual tracking, I hope.
It's a normal part of the kindle's operation to sync the last position read in your books. That's what lets you pick up where you left off on another device tied to the same account.
So in theory they know how fast a reader you are, and more interestingly, they could see for any particular book if there are parts where a lot of readers get bogged down or give up at. No idea whether they keep any of those stats, or whether the privacy policy/TOS permit/allow that.
It's also normal to backup to the cloud any annotations, but you can turn that feature off.
It also has gps, and I have no idea whether it ever sends that back to amazon. But potentially it knows that sometimes I read in the bathroom.
The thing that distinguishes the kindle from any other ereader I've seen is that it fully incorporates the cloud for downloading and backing up books, annotations, blog updates, etc. Which is really really cool, and also an honest potential threat to privacy.
Breaking point is right. We need to break the concept of online mobile presence being tied only to the phone (personal device) completely. When I get into my car -- hell make that any car -- which has a nice 10" touch display backed by a computer currently used for navigation etc., why not transfer my online presence to that screen? Let me use the web, take a video call, what have you, on that device. Then, when I arrive at the airport (or spaceport if we're lucky) and take my seat on Virgin Galactic, move my session to that display.
Yes I'll still carry a "phone" which will have the capabilities that can be packed into the small form and display, but it's main job will be to carry my mobile presence between other devices which I don't necessarily own.
Bandwidth doesn't have to be tied to the phone either. If I sit down in an airport waiting area and use a seat display, I'm on its fiber. I might be paying to use it according to a data plan tied to my phone. The cost and bandwidth might be different when I get into a car, and it might be different (tiered, etc.) from the guy sitting next to me. But the billing is still tied to the account that my phone presents to the world.
Wifi-enabled phones with a boingo account give some idea of this. At home/office/Starbucks, your iPhone is automatically using wifi instead of 3G. You pay (or not) based on the account in your phone. But in my future scenario the phone just authenticates the local temporary display which then has its own connection to whatever network is appropriate for that particular cafe / airplane / car.
So the phone becomes more like a super bluetooth identity accessory to move your online presence between available displays. And when necessary, it can also be used as a self-contained telecommunications device (mobile phone).
Yeah, maybe they could call it pathfinder.com, and use Time Warner's ex-employees to eat TW's lunch for dumping them and AOL. Payback time baby!
Occam's razor applies here. The rankings prove that using a brazenly partisan cable TV show to direct sheeple to read yet more of the same partisan crap in book/ebook form is far more thought control than furtive tweaking of content could ever be.
Actually in the first 5 of Kindle Top Sellers at this moment are Michelle Malkin's "Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies" and Glenn Beck's "Glenn Beck's Common Sense: The Case Against and Out-of-Control Government,...". There isn't a single liberal leaning rant anywhere in the top 30, but I also see Dick Morris and Mark R. Levin from the right. So your assumption about the target demographic might be a tad off.
Unless of course you have a device (like newer macbooks) with nvidia's mobile chipset, which shares system memory and can therefore take advantage of Zero-copy access, in which case there is no transfer penalty because there is no transfer. A limited case, but useful for sure.
Here's one article that tries to put some numbers behind this idea (buying new efficient vs. re-using old clunker). It compares a new Prius (plus its manufacturing energy) vs. a used Corolla (no slouch in mpg). The new Prius wins out (573 million BTUs over its lifetime for gas+production of Prius vs. 701 million BTUs for gas only for Corolla).
There's other data out there support this idea. Obviously it depends on the cars under comparison, but there are some winning scenarios under cash-for-clunkers.
I know it sounds nuts, but I actually want a system like this for personally identifiable information (PII).
If a business has my PII in their records, I want them to tag it with meta-data on how it was collected and what rights *they* have to use/share it. It's not any more enforceable than any other DRM scheme, but it would help to implement privacy policies, which is good for the consumer. And it would help to limit secondary uses of PII which is also good for the businesses that make money by collecting PII.
I'm wanting meta-data with terms like "this was collected with NO permission to re-distribute", or "this was collected with a promise to delete after 6 months", etc.
To make a really bad car analogy, bad marketing didn't kill GM, in fact marketing kept GM on life support for decades *in spite of* their crappy cars.
The XO as delivered during the first G1G1 (and to country projects during that period) was nearly unusable. Hardware functionality was great, but the software didn't measure up at all, in several respects. Software was still experimenting in blue sky when they needed to be delivering on goals.
First, it didn't perform acceptably within the severely limited RAM (severe for non-memory-footprint-optimized software). Most likely running the same software on the XO gen-1.5 refresh will fix that level of performance issues.
Second, the software was not complete, in that promised features were not yet implemented. Some were important in the real world, like the advanced power saving. Things crashed a lot.
Third, the software implemented experimental ideas like the Journal, which were under revision without taking end-user feedback into serious consideration.
[And Fourth, it was damned hard for willing FOSS volunteers to contribute meaningfully. The build you could easily download and run and report bugs on was far obsolete from what the developers were running, and getting in sync with them was tough.]
From what I could see on the developer mailing lists, they had a severe cat-herding problem. Too many smart people going in whatever direction their creativity and youthful self-confidence took them, rather than getting all hands on deck to recognize the shortcomings and get them fixed *now*. I think they undertook this project in the spirit of constructivism, when they needed to switch gears and deliver a product. Too much green hat, not enough blue hat.
Those are my opinions as a fan of the project.
This politics of innovation/change in the UI of KDE or even MS Office is interesting to me. The updated version of the Matthew Paul Thomas critique on free software usability that someone mentioned has several points in the ballpark, here's one that's relevant:
Basically, once you've implemented something, some users will strongly resist change even if it is better.
That's one of the things that makes it tough to change the course of a big tanker like a Linux desktop environment, even if you do have someone at the helm punching in coordinates for the promised land.
AIUI, Stallman's position is not against C# as a language, or implementing C# on Linux. FTA:
I wish some knowledgeable folks would weigh in how possible it would actually be for MS to do this for C# in particular. (Do they already hold relevant patents?)
Whether you like MS and think Stallman needs a shave and a bath or not, it is an indisputable fact that MS has threatened to use patents against Linux in the past.
I'd add a fourth point that to me is even more interesting (and apparently comes from the data):
* [The population split away from Africa 70K years ago, and then that sub-population splitting again 40K years ago into Eurasian and East Asian groups. The African source population is 130K years old.]
"FOSS", as by the age of your slashdot uid I'm sure you know, usually carries with it the implication of more than just an open license per-se. Apple can open the license of all their code ( a great thing), yet Steve Jobs can still dictate that no UI feature is committed that he doesn't approve of. Whereas Shuttleworth is never going to have command-and-control over enough of the user-visible FOSS projects that are glued together in the Ubuntu desktop to just call the shots like Jobs. Call Apple FOSS if you like, but a corporation's necessary "take it or fork it" approach to non-employee commits belies the historically organic and independent politics of the genre. At best we need a better meme, and COSS doesn't quite get there.
Yeah, hence "cat-herder" vs. dictator. I don't know anything about Shuttleworth's management effectiveness, but we agree that an actual Steve Jobs style could not work in FOSS.
But in FOSS-land, Shuttleworth seems to be in the best position to put out a distro unified behind making the end-user experience great, which is what Jobs clearly aims for in his products.
And personally I think Fedora is already shifting some of its focus towards more end-user happiness in response to Ubuntu, where Fedora developers once made manly sport of scoffing at end-user concerns. (Having said that, I'm obliged to point out that Fedora devs have made huge pre-Ubuntu contributions to stuff that "just works" for users, like NetworkManager. Ubuntu has a long way to catch up to contributing actual lines-of-code, but they are ahead in setting the direction and thus gaining users IMO.)
The best of the Apple experience is polished, user-oriented, and "insanely great" because it takes a Steve Jobs to set the vision and make every component answer to that design. That's hard to do in the FOSS world.
So I, for one, am glad Mark Shuttleworth is attempting to put some top-down focus on a user-oriented set of goals into the Ubuntu desktop. Linux has not lacked for technical innovations, it has lacked for a unified vision that elevates the end-user and a chief to get developers to sign on to that vision. Go Mark, go!
Which is why I find it misleading when Amazon shows the price of the kindle version and directly compares it to the price of the deadtree version. They are really two completely different animals, and this hidden download limit is one great example of what makes the comparison false.
(I try to use my kindle and kindle iphone app with open eyes, but I didn't know about this download limit until now.)
Zerth:
I think part of CD's point is that not even professional authors (of which he is obviously one) get a fair shake against a near-monopoly. From TFA:
Short version:
Even if PGP was foolproof, easy, and everywhere, this doesn't solve the issue of meta-data mining. If you're government is determined to invade your privacy, and you're not determined to stand up for your rights, no technical solution will save you for long.
Longer version:
From TFA and other articles, the US government is apparently tracking who-calls-who and who-emails-who. (And probably also who-goes-where-when using cell-phone location tracking.) Also it's apparent that they dragnet everyone's communications, and minimizing this tracking to only suspected terrorists and non-US persons is at best a fig leaf of privacy for the innocent.
PGP doesn't hide *who* you communicate with, or *when* (the un-encrypted meta-data as opposed to the encrypted contents). And you might think that using cash pre-paid cellphones and throw-away email accounts would give you anonymity, but analysis of who-contacts-who would break that anonymity in short order for most people.
[You can bet calls/emails to UBL's grandma are scrutinized, even if they come PGP'd from anon-e-mouse@hotmail.com. Knowing who else anon-e-mouse talks to, and what IP address his email came from might be helpful unless he's really really careful. Consider lessons from the AOL's "anonymous" search data fiasco.]
This kind of dossier on every citizen used to be considered the very example of un-American government, all too easily used to enable tyranny. Technology and a newly fearful but long complacent public has made these implementing these communications dragnets dangerously easy.
What about the possibility/perception of weakening support in VxWorks for non-Intel (mainly ARM right now) embedded processors?
Obviously, Wind River's VxWorks OS running on ARM is *the* main competitor to running on Intel in the embedded space. And there are non-ARM up-and-comers (nvidia?) in the embedded space that will require good VxWorks support to really make it. Now they will have to kowtow to their biggest competitor (Intel) or live by Linux and water alone.
Me neither. The Cambridge tech report has some thoughts about what organizations with sensitive data should be doing by way of countermeasures, but to sum it up:
In their conclusion they say:
That wouldn't have helped here.
According to the report, at least some of the phishing was carefully devised with obvious effort made to trick (socially engineer) its specific target into opening an infected Word document.
An example given was an email sent to the office of the Dalai Lama, which was crafted to appear legitimate and relevant, and included an infected attachment whose trojan was detected by only 11 out of 30-odd commercial virus checkers.
As you say, phishing is not new technically speaking, but the researchers conclude that this is clearly a narrow-cast spying effort as opposed to the run-of-the-mill wide-cast steal-your-bank-account operation.
Encryption gives a sometimes false sense of security, and the technology is a hassle. It's better to reinforce societal expectations for privacy where it is due, and let social mechanisms (like laws and market reputation) do the job.
Consider e.g. that if you use https from your workplace and see the happy little lock icon in FF or IE, you probably feel safe.
But some workplaces insert a proxy in between you and gmail (or what have you), having stuffed the proxy's certificate on your (their) work machine through local policy. Unbeknownst to you, your employer then sees the communication which you thought was totally private. Now imagine if an ISP could do that and get away with it.
The point is that even if you do *care*, the technology is hard to keep track of, and there is an arms-race ladder of one-upmanship that makes this a never-ending game, which some nerds can win, and most of us will lose.
What will really keep you safe is to stand up for a reasonable expectation of privacy where it should exist, and create norms and laws that protect this. Saying "NO" to Phorm or other invasions by ISPs is part of that approach, and creates legal and commercial consequences that are more effective than asking every grandma to mess with PGP.