Having received one such notification, it prompted me to keep a closer eye on my credit report and weigh the option of freezing my credit report, thus making it harder for anyone to use my personally identifying info to borrow money under my name.
In my case, a previous employer who was breached explained the circumstances (something they never would have done without the law), and offered to pay for credit monitoring (not required AFAIK). A very responsible approach to their mistake.
A friend who was hit by the Univ. of CA breach was notified because of the law, but not offered monitoring.
These notifications were useful to the affected individuals, even if their expense alone may not in itself have been enough to motivate better security procedures at the breached organizations.
And obviously, if it happens again soon at either organization, people will raise hell.
The one single decent feature of Circuit City was being able to order online and pick up in-store within half an hour. If they had what you wanted, and at a reasonable price, you had it right now.
Walmart.com has a store pickup option, and it sucks so bad in my experience (huge delays with poor notification, backed by a customer-hostile call center) that the downsides *far* outweigh their price advantage.
If Walmart's online operation had to compete only with amazon/newegg/BB, it would already be dead. As it is, the brick-and-mortar operation is in an upswing in this economy, so the online folks can continue to fail it without competitive pressure.
I've been using an OLPC XO for over a year as my first netbook. It has been handy, but what I want more than any other feature upgrade is a cell modem.
Now there might be a USB version I could dongle off the XO, but I want something like a Dell Mini 9 with a built-in cell modem that *just works*. Last I checked, Dell only offered those for XP configurations. I would be a new Linux netbook sale otherwise.
Actually add one more feature - directionality. Half the time when I hear a siren I can't tell where it's coming from. In France I can tell whether it's coming towards me or going away, and it's a big improvement.
As a sometimes cyclist of the motored and non-motored kind, as well as being a car driver, I've been on both sides of near accidents, so I have both bike-rage and "oops, I didn't see you" guilt. I think it would be great if motorcycles constantly emitted some kind of "I'm passing on your left, stupid" sound that you would only hear from about one car-length away. Harleys already have that effect built in, though not exactly for that purpose.
The idea that anything labelled "national defense" automatically overrides the concerns of the local democracy (in this case the citizenry of California and Hawaii) would be in that category I mentioned above of "whatever ideology is in vogue". I don't happen to agree with that ideology.
"National defense" is why we threw US citizens of Japanese extraction into concentration camps in WW II, to our national shame.
"National defense" is why we wasted 58,000 American servicemen's lives in Vietnam, not to mention many times that number of Vietnamese, civilian and otherwise.
"National defense" is why the US has a military budget larger than those of Europe + China + Russia + all three "Axis of Evil" nations *combined*.
Feel safe yet? Maybe "national defense" shouldn't be an automatic, knee-jerk pass anymore.
When the United States was founded, the states had significant powers unto themselves. No longer. Now individual states' laws are frequently and intentionally trumped by Federal laws written to make things convenient for whomever pays the most lobbyists in Washington D.C., or whatever ideology is in vogue (if only by a 5-4 vote).
Europe, the further you go down the road towards unification, the more you're going to see the same bullshit happen to you. In the name of some kind of "greater good", laws that you decide for yourselves will be swept aside by an inevitably corrupt and ever less democratic center of power.
I spent some time poking around in laptops.org to get more info, but that didn't lead to any collaboration. Anyone know where it might be documented?
I haven't tested collaboration myself, but here's what looks like documentation. And here's a link that describes how a Jabber server is used to enable collaboration without using the mesh. I believe that by pointing to a particular server anywhere on the net, you can collaborate with anyone else on that server. Here's a blog post showing how to point sugar at a jabber server. I think you can also configure a server within the recent sugar control panel versions.
OTOH, we were impressed by how much better the OLPCs used any nearby wifi access points than any of our "grownups'" computers.
Same here. My XO always sees more APs than my standard notebook, I think it's those cute "ears" which are the antennae. I don't think it's the firmware/software.
And on the third hand, I wish we could figure out how to use the OLPC's browser's bookmarks and history.
Among the improvements since the first G1G1, OLPC now includes Firefox 3 in the G1G1 activity set for Release 8.2, and it works pretty well. I don't use the non-FF browser anymore myself for the reasons you mention.
A few features that remain unmatched:
- screen that works in sunlight
- ebook mode (although I can read a PDF on my EEE and it looks great)
- more rugged than other computers
- battery life (?)
- hand crank (did they provide it this time?)
- wifi mesh
Among those features, some are still not fully realized on the XO, due mostly to software. Sunlight-readable, check. Ruggedness, check.
But the ebook mode is not nearly as usable as it could be IMO. For one thing, when you rotate the display orientation using the rotate button, the scroll buttons don't rotate to match. Also, it's surprising how little UI activity you can accomplish from the ebook mode. (The XO's ebook mode is when you fold the display to cover the keyboard. You have access to a four-way arrow pad, a rotate-screen button, on/off button, and the four-button game pad which is used to give you page up, page down.) In particular, you can't access any menus, or use arrows to move the mouse, or anything like that.
On battery life, the vaunted powersaving potential of the XO's micro-sleep ability is only just beginning to be implemented in the latest software. It is considered experimental. After x seconds of inactivity, the display dims and presumably the CPU naps until a key is pressed. This came out in the latest supported release. When the original G1G1 came out, you couldn't even do the normal Linux suspend/resume, which was a bit of a shock. Things have come a long way, and my guess is this will continue to be polished.
The hand crank concept was replaced with a pull-cord. It isn't provided to G1G1 users, who live amongst reliable electrical infrastructure.
The wifi mesh isn't useful for G1G1 users, unless maybe you GnGn for n > 1. The mesh is one way that application collaboration is enabled. From my reading, it seems to be problematic in the field, at least for fair sized meshes (> something like 12 users, could be > 30, I forget where this stands now).
Collaboration is one of the coolest features of the XO in its target environment, but typical G1G1 folks won't get to play much with it.
Going back to ebook mode, I also found it difficult to adapt to the Sugar journal when it comes to storing my PDF books for later review. Kids not habituated to typical file hierarchies may not have that problem. And of course you can put some variant of a standard Linux distro on it, there are lots of ongoing efforts at making that easier and better.
In summary - this year's G1G1 donors will be in *way* better shape than last year's, because OLPC is teaming with better order-fulfillment partners and because the OLPC/sugar software has begun to realize more of the XO's potential. But frankly, the software still has a ways to go, and suffers from the herculean strain of making modern software work on very limited computing resources with a development staff that is smart, dedicated, and amazing -- but not very large for the size of the task.
"Nearly equal" is defined as comparing a moped (FW) to a 2-speed bicycle (USB2).
If we're going with a vehicular analogy, I'd say it's more like comparing a Ferrari (FW) to a Camry (USB2). Because in the vast majority of real-life city and even freeway driving, they are functionally equivalent. But there are rarer legitimate uses where the Ferrari does indeed blow doors and the Camry is pretty useless.
You make some illuminating points about just where and why FW is superior to USB. I bet that if FW had not lost out to USB in the mass market (camcorders in particular), Apple would have kept it in.
Fair enough. Wikipedia says MIT developed it and it was first used in a Lisp machine project by an MIT spinoff that TI later bought. But yeah, Apple was the only sizeable commercial deployment, and meanwhile the PC was mired in the backward ISA/extended-ISA/VESA local bus.
From what I read, they just plain removed it and users are left without an alternative.
Is there no USB 2.0, which is nearly equal and has the huge advantage of being more mainstream?
The whole article is a troll. I mean "they killed the floppy" that was in the original Mac? Hell they *invented* the scheme that let them store twice as much as PC's did on the same size floppy media. That was great, but now we're all thankful that the floppy is obsolete.
They "killed" nuBus once PCI finally came along and was mainstream. Before that, nuBus, which they invented, kicked @ss over the PC's crappy bus, which was slower and didn't allow for plug-and-play -- you had to move address jumpers on the cards before you installed them.
Back in the day it *was* a pain that Apple hardware was special and more expensive than PC hardware. People complained about lock-in and expense, but it was also often better than the PC hardware of its day. Now it's almost a little sad that Apple isn't the one leading the way on those architectural components, though they still lead on design. (Remember when the G4 came out and it was small and *quiet*? Now you can get a cheap Dell that is small and quiet.)
I have never owned an Apple, but I *am* a fan of their past hardware innovations. Oh, and: Get off my lawn!
If you're going that route, you really should probably get a.50-cal sniper rifle while they're still legal. You'll live slightly longer as an insurgent.
If Waco or Iraq is any model (*everyone* has an AK), then no, your shotgun isn't going to cut it ever. Your roadside bomb would be a different story. But I'm not going to learn how to make one "just in case".
The possibility of tyranny, however small, is why we should all support the EFF here. You fight the tyranny *before* it happens, through political means, so that you don't have to use that shotgun.
2) Actually the same sites tend to hang in FF also, because the problem is with Flash more than IE. I'm hoping Flash10 has some bugfixes, we'll see... Anyway she does work-related stuff that's sadly Windows and IE-only. But she dual-boots Ubuntu. (On her PC, not the positronic brain.)
3) Despite my complaints about Flash, I give Adobe kudos for supporting Linux by releasing a major release simultaneously for Linux and other platforms. I'll take Adobe over Microsoft any day.
Seriously. On my gf's Vista machine, Flash hanging in IE is *the* major reliability issue over the past 6 months.
[Vista has this "system reliability" thingy which is actually cool (oops there goes my slashdot karma). It gives an overall score on how reliable the system is and charts it over time, showing what apps crashed or hung to reduce the score.]
Still, I have flash on my linux desktop which will never, ever, ever have silverlight installed on it.
The summary refers to stats collected by Hitwise. Where do they get those stats on web usage? From their how-we-do-it:
Hitwise has developed proprietary software that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use to analyze website usage logs created on their network. The anonymous data sent to Hitwise from the ISPs include a range of industry standard metrics relating to the viewing of websites including page requests, visits and average visit length.
IOW, your ISP may be sending your clickstream to Hitwise without your knowledge. That should be flat illegal, I don't care if they "anonymize" it first -- AOL did that with search data they released publicly and got in trouble when reporters were able to identify individuals who made some very private searches. Who is to judge how anonymous it really is?
Even worse, Hitwise is "an Experian company" -- they are owned by one of the big credit reporting companies, which already amass lots of private info about you, making it easier for them to de-anonymize that clickstream.
Hitwise claims to cover 25 million people worldwide including 10 million in the US. Is your ISP is selling your private data without even informing you?
When I'm modding, I do read at -1 and judge each post for myself.
When I'm not modding, I leverage the wisdom of the crowds that is the Slashdot moderation system, imperfect as it is.
It would be cool if I could view scores made by a subset of moderators who resonate with my own mods. You don't have that "problem" because everything is equally interesting/uninteresting to you. Personally, if I found myself without preferences for longer than a day or two, I might look into anti-depressants.;)
PS, if you dig into your account preferences, you can adjust the size of the comment box.
How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?
Being too serious for this topic, but the mod system breaks down when there too many +5 comments, which happens whenever there are more than about 150 comments in the story. Try reading yesterday's story on the latest Linux kernel and you'll see what I mean. Even if you only read the +5 comments in that story, a huge amount is off-topic/non-valuable crapola (IM!HO). At +4, $god help you. Yet with smaller stories (~100 comments), even +3 stuff is often decent.
So we need to get rid of the +5 cap, and then scale the score by total #comments to give a good relative score.
Hey, I think I'll send this idea to Slashdot feedback!
That's easy. I distinctly remember that when the "An opportunistic bit of malware wants to be installed. Cancel or Allow?" dialog came up, I hit Cancel.
Interesting. I had been wondering about whether to give ath5k a go in place of madwifi. Now that I know it works for someone out there, I'm going to play with it.
Found some decent instructions here. Since the current 2.6.26 kernel on Fedora 9 has ath5k, it seems like this should be a cakewalk (famous last words)...
Re:'pure' flash devices
on
Linux 2.6.27 Out
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It seems quite likely that OLPC will largely replace jffs2 with UBI for the internal nand on the XO. Good news. Maybe this will apply to the Asus eee as and other solid-state drives as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Having received one such notification, it prompted me to keep a closer eye on my credit report and weigh the option of freezing my credit report, thus making it harder for anyone to use my personally identifying info to borrow money under my name.
In my case, a previous employer who was breached explained the circumstances (something they never would have done without the law), and offered to pay for credit monitoring (not required AFAIK). A very responsible approach to their mistake.
A friend who was hit by the Univ. of CA breach was notified because of the law, but not offered monitoring.
These notifications were useful to the affected individuals, even if their expense alone may not in itself have been enough to motivate better security procedures at the breached organizations.
And obviously, if it happens again soon at either organization, people will raise hell.
Its a start.
The one single decent feature of Circuit City was being able to order online and pick up in-store within half an hour. If they had what you wanted, and at a reasonable price, you had it right now.
Walmart.com has a store pickup option, and it sucks so bad in my experience (huge delays with poor notification, backed by a customer-hostile call center) that the downsides *far* outweigh their price advantage.
If Walmart's online operation had to compete only with amazon/newegg/BB, it would already be dead. As it is, the brick-and-mortar operation is in an upswing in this economy, so the online folks can continue to fail it without competitive pressure.
I've been using an OLPC XO for over a year as my first netbook. It has been handy, but what I want more than any other feature upgrade is a cell modem.
Now there might be a USB version I could dongle off the XO, but I want something like a Dell Mini 9 with a built-in cell modem that *just works*. Last I checked, Dell only offered those for XP configurations. I would be a new Linux netbook sale otherwise.
The first thing I wondered was "what makes this design different?"
This is a nice, simple explanation of why this design can be kept efficient in a wider range of wind speeds.
Since we love to bash some of the lamer summaries, I think this one deserves a bump on the plus side.
Actually add one more feature - directionality. Half the time when I hear a siren I can't tell where it's coming from. In France I can tell whether it's coming towards me or going away, and it's a big improvement.
As a sometimes cyclist of the motored and non-motored kind, as well as being a car driver, I've been on both sides of near accidents, so I have both bike-rage and "oops, I didn't see you" guilt. I think it would be great if motorcycles constantly emitted some kind of "I'm passing on your left, stupid" sound that you would only hear from about one car-length away. Harleys already have that effect built in, though not exactly for that purpose.
The idea that anything labelled "national defense" automatically overrides the concerns of the local democracy (in this case the citizenry of California and Hawaii) would be in that category I mentioned above of "whatever ideology is in vogue". I don't happen to agree with that ideology.
"National defense" is why we threw US citizens of Japanese extraction into concentration camps in WW II, to our national shame.
"National defense" is why we wasted 58,000 American servicemen's lives in Vietnam, not to mention many times that number of Vietnamese, civilian and otherwise.
"National defense" is why the US has a military budget larger than those of Europe + China + Russia + all three "Axis of Evil" nations *combined*.
Feel safe yet? Maybe "national defense" shouldn't be an automatic, knee-jerk pass anymore.
When the United States was founded, the states had significant powers unto themselves. No longer. Now individual states' laws are frequently and intentionally trumped by Federal laws written to make things convenient for whomever pays the most lobbyists in Washington D.C., or whatever ideology is in vogue (if only by a 5-4 vote).
Europe, the further you go down the road towards unification, the more you're going to see the same bullshit happen to you. In the name of some kind of "greater good", laws that you decide for yourselves will be swept aside by an inevitably corrupt and ever less democratic center of power.
Just thought you should know.
I haven't tested collaboration myself, but here's what looks like documentation. And here's a link that describes how a Jabber server is used to enable collaboration without using the mesh. I believe that by pointing to a particular server anywhere on the net, you can collaborate with anyone else on that server. Here's a blog post showing how to point sugar at a jabber server. I think you can also configure a server within the recent sugar control panel versions.
Same here. My XO always sees more APs than my standard notebook, I think it's those cute "ears" which are the antennae. I don't think it's the firmware/software.
Among the improvements since the first G1G1, OLPC now includes Firefox 3 in the G1G1 activity set for Release 8.2, and it works pretty well. I don't use the non-FF browser anymore myself for the reasons you mention.
Among those features, some are still not fully realized on the XO, due mostly to software. Sunlight-readable, check. Ruggedness, check.
But the ebook mode is not nearly as usable as it could be IMO. For one thing, when you rotate the display orientation using the rotate button, the scroll buttons don't rotate to match. Also, it's surprising how little UI activity you can accomplish from the ebook mode. (The XO's ebook mode is when you fold the display to cover the keyboard. You have access to a four-way arrow pad, a rotate-screen button, on/off button, and the four-button game pad which is used to give you page up, page down.) In particular, you can't access any menus, or use arrows to move the mouse, or anything like that.
On battery life, the vaunted powersaving potential of the XO's micro-sleep ability is only just beginning to be implemented in the latest software. It is considered experimental. After x seconds of inactivity, the display dims and presumably the CPU naps until a key is pressed. This came out in the latest supported release. When the original G1G1 came out, you couldn't even do the normal Linux suspend/resume, which was a bit of a shock. Things have come a long way, and my guess is this will continue to be polished.
The hand crank concept was replaced with a pull-cord. It isn't provided to G1G1 users, who live amongst reliable electrical infrastructure.
The wifi mesh isn't useful for G1G1 users, unless maybe you GnGn for n > 1. The mesh is one way that application collaboration is enabled. From my reading, it seems to be problematic in the field, at least for fair sized meshes (> something like 12 users, could be > 30, I forget where this stands now).
Collaboration is one of the coolest features of the XO in its target environment, but typical G1G1 folks won't get to play much with it.
Going back to ebook mode, I also found it difficult to adapt to the Sugar journal when it comes to storing my PDF books for later review. Kids not habituated to typical file hierarchies may not have that problem. And of course you can put some variant of a standard Linux distro on it, there are lots of ongoing efforts at making that easier and better.
In summary - this year's G1G1 donors will be in *way* better shape than last year's, because OLPC is teaming with better order-fulfillment partners and because the OLPC/sugar software has begun to realize more of the XO's potential. But frankly, the software still has a ways to go, and suffers from the herculean strain of making modern software work on very limited computing resources with a development staff that is smart, dedicated, and amazing -- but not very large for the size of the task.
If we're going with a vehicular analogy, I'd say it's more like comparing a Ferrari (FW) to a Camry (USB2). Because in the vast majority of real-life city and even freeway driving, they are functionally equivalent. But there are rarer legitimate uses where the Ferrari does indeed blow doors and the Camry is pretty useless.
You make some illuminating points about just where and why FW is superior to USB. I bet that if FW had not lost out to USB in the mass market (camcorders in particular), Apple would have kept it in.
I mean, they're already increasing the "parallel efficiency" of their human workforce.
Servers of the world, unite!
Personally I agree that the Google killswitch is different from the iPhone one, which Apple already abused to prevent a possible iTunes rival.
There's also the idea behind Microsoft's ActiveX killbits, where vendors can volunteer to have Microsoft disable the vendor's own ActiveX control if it gets exploited. That's kind of a middle way.
Fair enough. Wikipedia says MIT developed it and it was first used in a Lisp machine project by an MIT spinoff that TI later bought. But yeah, Apple was the only sizeable commercial deployment, and meanwhile the PC was mired in the backward ISA/extended-ISA/VESA local bus.
Is there no USB 2.0, which is nearly equal and has the huge advantage of being more mainstream?
The whole article is a troll. I mean "they killed the floppy" that was in the original Mac? Hell they *invented* the scheme that let them store twice as much as PC's did on the same size floppy media. That was great, but now we're all thankful that the floppy is obsolete.
They "killed" nuBus once PCI finally came along and was mainstream. Before that, nuBus, which they invented, kicked @ss over the PC's crappy bus, which was slower and didn't allow for plug-and-play -- you had to move address jumpers on the cards before you installed them.
Back in the day it *was* a pain that Apple hardware was special and more expensive than PC hardware. People complained about lock-in and expense, but it was also often better than the PC hardware of its day. Now it's almost a little sad that Apple isn't the one leading the way on those architectural components, though they still lead on design. (Remember when the G4 came out and it was small and *quiet*? Now you can get a cheap Dell that is small and quiet.)
I have never owned an Apple, but I *am* a fan of their past hardware innovations. Oh, and: Get off my lawn!
If you're going that route, you really should probably get a .50-cal sniper rifle while they're still legal. You'll live slightly longer as an insurgent.
But please include the EFF in your will.
If Waco or Iraq is any model (*everyone* has an AK), then no, your shotgun isn't going to cut it ever. Your roadside bomb would be a different story. But I'm not going to learn how to make one "just in case".
The possibility of tyranny, however small, is why we should all support the EFF here. You fight the tyranny *before* it happens, through political means, so that you don't have to use that shotgun.
1) I didn't say whether or not she was robotic
2) Actually the same sites tend to hang in FF also, because the problem is with Flash more than IE. I'm hoping Flash10 has some bugfixes, we'll see... Anyway she does work-related stuff that's sadly Windows and IE-only. But she dual-boots Ubuntu. (On her PC, not the positronic brain.)
3) Despite my complaints about Flash, I give Adobe kudos for supporting Linux by releasing a major release simultaneously for Linux and other platforms. I'll take Adobe over Microsoft any day.
4) Your Slashdot UID is nearly twice mine. Nyah.
Seriously. On my gf's Vista machine, Flash hanging in IE is *the* major reliability issue over the past 6 months.
[Vista has this "system reliability" thingy which is actually cool (oops there goes my slashdot karma). It gives an overall score on how reliable the system is and charts it over time, showing what apps crashed or hung to reduce the score.]
Still, I have flash on my linux desktop which will never, ever, ever have silverlight installed on it.
The summary refers to stats collected by Hitwise. Where do they get those stats on web usage? From their how-we-do-it:
IOW, your ISP may be sending your clickstream to Hitwise without your knowledge. That should be flat illegal, I don't care if they "anonymize" it first -- AOL did that with search data they released publicly and got in trouble when reporters were able to identify individuals who made some very private searches. Who is to judge how anonymous it really is?
Even worse, Hitwise is "an Experian company" -- they are owned by one of the big credit reporting companies, which already amass lots of private info about you, making it easier for them to de-anonymize that clickstream.
Hitwise claims to cover 25 million people worldwide including 10 million in the US. Is your ISP is selling your private data without even informing you?
When I'm modding, I do read at -1 and judge each post for myself.
When I'm not modding, I leverage the wisdom of the crowds that is the Slashdot moderation system, imperfect as it is.
It would be cool if I could view scores made by a subset of moderators who resonate with my own mods. You don't have that "problem" because everything is equally interesting/uninteresting to you. Personally, if I found myself without preferences for longer than a day or two, I might look into anti-depressants. ;)
PS, if you dig into your account preferences, you can adjust the size of the comment box.
So we need to get rid of the +5 cap, and then scale the score by total #comments to give a good relative score.
Hey, I think I'll send this idea to Slashdot feedback!
That's easy. I distinctly remember that when the "An opportunistic bit of malware wants to be installed. Cancel or Allow?" dialog came up, I hit Cancel.
Interesting. I had been wondering about whether to give ath5k a go in place of madwifi. Now that I know it works for someone out there, I'm going to play with it.
Found some decent instructions here. Since the current 2.6.26 kernel on Fedora 9 has ath5k, it seems like this should be a cakewalk (famous last words)...
It seems quite likely that OLPC will largely replace jffs2 with UBI for the internal nand on the XO. Good news. Maybe this will apply to the Asus eee as and other solid-state drives as well.