Can you honestly say that you have no problem with this?
Yes? What's wrong in this - if anything, it will help us create human organs that may prolong our lifespans.
I don't have any problem with this, either, but I'd like to take this thread on a slightly different tack. Maybe you have problems with it, and maybe you don't.
If you are that concerned, remember that nature in and of itself has done these things in the course of evolution. And you're probably killing life everyday by consuming plants and animals.
And most likely, you're consuming genetically engineered plants and animals with added Vitamin C, and lest we forget the Caffeine and other drugs you take to make your head hurt a little less! Science is impacting your life. It's altering your brain, and changing how long you live.
This is no different. You're playing nature and the moral issues associated with it are no different.
Well, moral issues such as killing human embryos are different. The question that many people get stuck on is: At what point does the human embryo get a soul? Does it happen before it shows up on the ultrasound machine? How about after it's born? At what point does our society recognize life as human. If Chimeras are an abomination to our society, and some are released into the wild and brought to light, then do they have legal rights as humans do? Can they keep the fact that they are different hidden, or does it matter? Dogs and Cats have certain rights as protected by the ASPCA, but humans have lots more rights.
Furthermore, I challenge that "all men are created equal". I think that I'm smarter than most men, and I am not as athletic. I think that I'm quite creative compared to the average human, but I'm not as well read. My point is that we aren't equal, and we most certainly weren't created equal. I'm more prone to several kinds of diseases genetically than other people are. I happen to have blood which makes me a universal donor.
If by any chance the chimeras do end up being sentient, we'll find a way of getting rid of that sentience and using them.
I'd much rather hope that we introduce them into society. Just think about how much better off we would be as a "species" if we could engineer our way around the hurdles we are faced with? What if we could engineer a breed of humans with brains 10% larger and redundant organs? What about having organs that could grow back if removed? It would be nice to be able to get a heart transplant from a human with an extra working heart that would grow back after you removed one. What if brain size wasn't the most important factor to intelligence. What if we could build computers interfaces into humans. Imagine being born with computer implants in your brain that as you grew enhanced your ability to grow and understand the world around you. Imagine how your brain might form differently, and how you would be able to communicate and function if your brain patterns could wirelessly connect with other people and computers on the internet.
Now, the definition of species has much to do with being able to successfully reproduce, but I don't think that it would be so bad if we created species which we were genetically incompatible with that were superior in some ways (maybe even all ways). Unless they bred faster than we did, or a plague impacting only our species happened, there would be a mixed population of sentient species of humans and others. Who says that our 100% pure human children are the best evolved? Why not let our science help create more evolved humans. Over time, humanity will be better equipped to survive in the situations we will live in.
How about we make humans with two heads! Two heads are better than one. I'd love to get my head transplanted onto a body which would outlast my own... Just think about all the poorer people looking for
I would think that some of these manufacturers could spend an extra $100-$200 and add a digitizer and Windows Tablet PC Edition to their models of notebook/laptop computer.
I have sworn off buying a laptop until a TabletPC comes out that has the features and price that I'm looking for. The most appealing thing about a TabletPC is that they can actually fit opened on a coach class airline if the person in front of you is reclining without breaking the screen, or making it really hard to read...
I can't be the only one who is disappointed at seeing this new CPU for laptops without a single Tablet PC...
"Yep, it's broken on firefox with me too, running default setup on WinXP."
So right click, and do "View This Page in IE".
"Given the fact that they can't make a simple webpage work with more than one browser makes me wonder how the hell did they manage to put two rovers on an another planet for a year..."
Maybe they actually spend their budget on things which matter (rovers, etc) more than they do on things which don't matter (compatability with Firefox).
People here tout standards and Open Source like they are holy grails. In the real world, market share matters more. Until Firefox is bug-compatible with IE, I expect that a good number of sites will remain broken. It takes a lot of time (time = salary = money) to test web sites with multiple browsers and work around the differences in implementation. I'd rather that NASA spend their money on space travel than on HTML Bug Compatability with browsers that less than 10% of their users use.
Compliance with the standards is not the reason that these sites are broken with Firefox. The reason these sites are broken is that they were not developed and tested with Firefox. How bug-compatible is Forefox with respect to Netscape? I would assume that since Netscape "open sourced" the product, it's pretty close, if not identical.
This message was posted using Firefox. I'm not going to claim that one browser is better than the other, but I will play with Firefox, and I happily click the "View This Page in IE" button when Firefox doesn't work. I'm also noticing that sometimes I click the "View This Page in Firefox" when IE doesn't work...
"Imagine a world where if you didn't legally work for Apple, you couldn't write a program for their computer. If you weren't a licensed and regulated programmer, you wouldn't be able to develop your own software or develop software for other people. With signed code initiatives like TCPA/Palladium, that world could be coming to a planet near you soon."
This is the funniest paranoid schizophrenic thing I've read on/. in a long time. Every little advancement in the computer industry comes from a lot of hard work on the part of a few people. The rest of the industry is simply doing the glue work to connect those bits. Mind you that the glue can be interesting and complicated, it doesn't take a license to code from Microsoft.
The TCPA (if it ever ships -- how many years has it been since the Microsoft Windows team has done that...) is a method to restrict certain apps from running in a specific environment with access to specific resources.
Think of it like an XBox console, only harder to crack. Basically, your PC would have a little XBox inside it which would let MS Signed apps run on a special video overlay (secure video path) and play with special encrypted content and a special digital audio plug (secure audio path).
If the idea actually takes off, which it might not (it all depends on how expensive the modifications are to make to the hardware to support it), it won't be several years before companies wrote software that took advantage of it. Likely Microsoft Office, Windows Media Player, and Adobe Acrobat would be available to take advantage of it shortly after TCPA/Palladium.
But this isn't a big deal. Anyone who didn't use TCPA/Palladium would simply be more likely to have content that would be easier to distribute. Maybe this lets people lock down content/software, or make people pay per use of content/software that they didn't pay for. That doesn't mean that you need to apply DRM to everything, but having the choice is better than not having the choice. Is that really so horrible?
Think of the applications: I'd like to be able to protect my photos so that people can't print them, but I trust IE to show them along a "secure video path". Maybe I sell desktop backgrounds. Maybe I sell wedding photographs. Why can't I chose my business model?
This doesn't just benefit large corporations. It benefits small people who create independent content. Sure, you could bootleg audio, video, documents, or photos just like you could when all the various media duplication forms came out, but the point is that this makes it harder to do so and keep up the quality that you could do with a digital copy. Thus it preserves the value of purchasing a license to use the digital data, and thus it preserves the time honored tradition of paying people who produce the content which you consume. That won't stop people from producing free content or make it any more expensive to produce free content.
Also, it means a great many standards need to be created to carry encrypted content digitally. This may take some time for hardware manufacturers to standardize on and adopt... We'll see how quickly it takes porn to use it, then we'll know that it's here. (Very seriously) Porn is always at the forefront of media technolgy trends. It's the most compelling reason VHS won out over Beta. It's also very interesting that there is no Porn IAA...
So what? Prior art is prior art. If a student can invent something, then certainly one with 20 years experience in the field could invent it. That means the patent doesn't pass the "obviousness" test.
> Third, we as the public do not know the specific Court arguments are, so we can't really say what is what.. I am sure the judge had a good reason to restrict the presentation of Viola as prior art.
There's a reason I don't trust judges in the case of patent law. Judges aren't engineers. I'm all for IP, but I feel that damages have to be proven in court. If you want to protect an idea, you shouldn't be able to sue for damages until you have actually implemented the idea.
My friend tells me that I could patent a technology which I have no hope of building within the lifetime of the patent just to prevent other people from building it. I think that I shouldn't be able to sue them until I build it. Yes, the patent is still valuable. If I sell it to a company that can build it, then they can sue for damages.
Otherwise, the lawsuit is frivolous. Sure, I could patent lots of new technology, then sit on the patents, and wait to sue some big corporations. But I think that's not legitimate. Patents are about protecting inventor's rights to build and sell their inventions. That a patent is valuable is undeniable, but its value should not be able to be realized in a court before it is realized by the inventor.
I'm in favor of fewer, more useful protections on IP. Time to go play with my cats with the laser toy... looks like I'm going to violate someone's patent!
Doesn't anyone think that access to the "unfiltered" net is possible through SSL ecrypted proxy servers in other countries? I imagine that it's highly illegal in China, but I don't think that the Chinese people don't talk amongst themselves over encrypted channels, if not offline.
Can't people organize against the government over there? Or even within the government. I think it's deplorable that Google puts up with their BS. I would think that they would take a stance on the "just aggregating the news". China doesn't own or regulate the internet.
And China certainly can't prevent people in other countries from publicly badmouthing them for trying. Perhaps the press should publish enough bad things about China that the filtered view of their dict^H^H^H^Hpeople's republic doesn't say anything useful...
<apathetic response>Ah well, it's not like anyone really care.</apathy>
There are 3 things that impact image quality in digicams: sensor size/resolution/noise, lens quality, and lens maximum aperture. The Canon and Nikon models have more resolution, larger aperture when wide open, and larger sensors (also more resolution). They both have optical viewfinders and come with more memory than the Casio (memory is cheap). The max aperture enables you to shoot in worse light without a tripod. The sensor size and resolution impact the amount of noise, and the lens quality impacts sharpness.
The LCD size of the Casio is large (by digicam standards), but it's matched by the Canon in size and beaten in resolution by both the Canon and Nikon. So by using ceramics for their weight and hardness, Casio has reduced image quality and lost some max aperture. Maybe this is an acceptable trade-off for reducing the weight by 70 grams (113g compared to 180g). The camera is the same size as the Canon. The Nikon is about twice as thick.
Yes, it was noteworthy that Casio made a ceramic lens, just like it was noteworthy when Kodak created a one-time use camera with a plastic lens... The problem for Casio is that the image quality isn't as good as "still-very-pocketable" offerings from years past. For the same price of a newer model from Canon or Nikon, you don't get as much. Size is the same, it weighs a little less, and it has worse image quality and needs twice as much light.
MtViewGuy wrote: 1. DNG--being a true open format specification--means DNG uncompressed image files could conceivably be read by a GPL image processing software such as GIMP, so it would be very easy to write an update for GIMP with full DNG support.
Since each camera company supports Mac and Windows with their file formats, and there's a free project out there, and many for profit software apps out there already support the raw apps (using Dave Coffin's free as in BSD-style dcraw.c), there already exists the ability to do raw production work, even on Linux/GIMP. I'm sure that there's even a fairly automated way to get dcraw.c into GIMP with some GUI wrapped around it. I'm betting that it will continue to support these "abandonable" file formats well into the future.
2. You're forgetting most of the world's serious digital image processing working is done on Photoshop, the de facto standard for such work. Simplifying processing of uncompressed image files would make the work of professional photographers a LOT easier.
No I'm not, and no it won't. It will just add a step: Use Adobe CRW to DNG file converter. Use Adobe RAW processing on DNG file. The thing about a RAW file is that it needs to be processed. My premise is that the Canons and Nikons of the world don't want the limelight stolen from them by the software makers. That's why they heavily brand their own RAW formats. They won't spend millions upon millions of dollars to make hardware changes that won't help their market. Photoshop will open any file of theirs in time, as will any other app engineered to open the last 5 versions of their RAW files. These companies have legacy. Legacy is the most powerful force in the computing world. Legacy is the reason that 95% of the people running Windows buy another computer with Windows on it.
In order for DNG to be anything but "just another file format", it needs to be adopted by the camera manufacturers. Otherwise, it's just a file format that adds a step in the digital workflow. This step is not a welcome one, unless it provides value. Seriously, anyone who has spent $5000 or more in DSLR equipment and takes a few hundred to a few thousand photos per month tends to minimize the time they spend at the computer. Adding a step is not going to be popular. It wastes time and space.
If indeed, Adobe's RAW->DNG file format converter makes some conversion decisions (with user input) and embeds interesting information from each different RAW format, then it would be Adobe providing value free of charge to people like me who like to play with the code to process RAW files (I have over 40GB of them on my HD, so I know what I'm talking about here).
Yes, it would be nice if the camera industry settled on a standard. Don't expect it to happen. The pressure is on the software makers to improve the photos after the camera makes them, and the pressure is on the camera companies to build better optics, more durable shutters, new methods of stabilising shaky hands, and faster and more accurate auto focus and flash exposure systems. Very few professional photographers are also programmers.
I will take the time to note that Canon and other Japanese camera manufacturers have standards bodies, and these companies have attempted to standardize their industry on their file formats in the past. That's what EXIF came from. There are lots of documents and specs describing the various redundant ways to encode the bits that some group of engineers thinks are important to record about a photograph. Every single spec document I've read reads like Adobe's new "one and best way to record a RAW file". It wasn't new when Canon put out the spec for theirs about 4 or 5 years ago. It certainly isn't new now, and it won't be new when Microsoft does it next year. Microsoft might just barely succeed on the execution by throwing it into Windows and calling it innovation.
{sarcasm} Well, mission accomplished! Write up the press release, Adobe won the file format wars by putting out a spec and a free converter! {/sarcasm}
I'm sure two nerds already had an argument over how to pronounce DNG. Pick a vowel: Dang, Deng, Ding, Dong, Dung, or sometimes Dyng!
I didn't notice any comment about how/why RAW formats come about. Every camera manufacturer produces several hardware components. These components cost money to design, implement, and debug. Unlike Software, hardware can't be patched, isn't free to duplicate, and reusing components yields a measurable (and often substantial) savings.
So Canon has a line of PowerShot Pro, PowerShot S, PowerShot G, and EOS Digital cameras which all use the CRW (Canon RAW) file format. Newer ones use the new CR2 (Canon RAW V 2.0) file format.
Nikon uses NEF, and Kodak uses TIFFs (thumbnails with a proprietary chunk of data). Sigma/Foveon and FujiFulm use others.
It would be nice if they all saved some standard format. The problem is two-fold:
1) Each company wants to use their own secret algorithms to decode their data and get the "best" from their format. It's one of the ways they distinguish themselves.
2) Each company has already invested in the hardware to produce these RAW files.
So the bottom line is that Adobe is a company which makes the world's most popular photo processing app. They want a file format to unify RAW processing. They produce a converter, and a plugin.
If you don't use Photoshop to process your RAW files (say you use Capture One, or Breeze Browser), then you really don't get much benefit from this DNG file format unless third parties (your converter maker) implements it.
Adobe is hoping that 3rd parties (camera makers) will adopt their format. The problem is that it doesn't provide anything new. Why would a camera maker spend a few million dollars in development costs to support a new file format with no additional benefit?
JPEG2000? Maybe, but it doesn't specify Bayer Pattern sensor data compression mechanisms. DNG? No. It doesn't have any advantages over the already existing formats.
If Intel, AMD, Sony, or Canon produced an imaging chip which used new techniques like wavelets to compress RAW data, and sold this to the camera manufacturers, then there would be value in this new standard. As it sits, the Software industry is the tail, and the hardware industry is the dog. The dog wags its tail, not the other way around.
Google already adds the Google Toolbar to IE. What more do you need. Anything Google could put into their own custom web browser they could add as a COM object plugin to IE. There's nothing special to see here.
Heck, Google could even wrap the IE HTML rendering engine with a half-useful interface (strip out all the stupid features) and ship it, and it'd still be just fine. It wouldn't have to be Mozilla.
Or Google could give away a web browser. It doesn't matter. It wouldn't give Google money unless they figured out some way to get advertising into the app in a transparent an unobtrusive way.
Linux is a kernel, GNU is not platform centric
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Is That Pirated Software?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Parent poster wrote: "The problem is that most hackers are rabid about Linux because it's phenonmentally powerful if you code a bit."
So are BSD, MacOS, and (bet you saw this one coming) Windows. Most hackers are rabid about Linux because they got more than they were promised. They weren't promised anything. They didn't pay anything, and they got a whole lot.
I have a few friends that graduated with me from college with varying technical degrees, including CS, Math, Engineering, and Physics (what can I say, I'm a geek and hang out with geeks). Some close friends ended up at Microsoft. And even though they run Windows whatever at work, they still chose vi or emacs as their editor, bash and other shells, and awk and sed in their code along with their C#, C++, and Perl. One of them bought a shiny new laptop with his recent bonus and reused his old desktop (stuffing Linux on it) as a web-connected file server/bridge. He recently told me how he saved one of his machines at work by using a Knoppix CD! Just imagine an MS employee booting Linux, at work, to fix their Windows machine!
GNU isn't just about linux advocacy, it's a philosophical movement centered around the idea that by keeping code "free of ownership" we can advance society. From another perspective, the GPL is a way of saying, "I don't own this code. You don't own this code. The public owns this code. You can't build something from this code and distribute it without the code."
This is quite diametrically opposed to the philosophy that: "I work hard to create a software product of intrinsic value. It is my property. I sell you a license to use that property."
Many people who wrote utilities and published them under the GPL ported their utilities to Windows, BSD, Linux, etc. They also make pure Windows apps under the GPL, and others port these. Basically, it's not the Linux OS that makes for a great hacking experience, it's the fact that it comes with a bunch of GNU tools. But then there's CygWin and other GNU toolsets for Windows and BSD and MacOS.
The reason that Linux may be a threat to Microsoft is that there are a growing number of developers who got hooked on Linux because the development tools came with the OS, and they didn't want to pay MS (or Borland) for tools which promote Windows. Of course, there are also a great many people who still write free software for Windows (using DJGPP or other MSVC++) simply because Windows is the largest target audience of normal users, and they use it. But if the developers market is changing because of the availability of high quality tools, then Microsoft will react. Maybe too late, but it's in the cards.
Indeed, Microsoft already has done some reacting. 57,000 employees, including some of my best friends know that their job is on the line if Microsoft goes under, and from what my friends tell me, working at Microsoft is better than all of their previous jobs. Their reaction: http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/ Is this too little too late, or is it the beginning?
(getting back to original topic of activation, and tying back into the philosophy of property) When I ask my friends about the activation stuff, they tell me that nobody who has a brain expects it to deter piracy, but they have to do something to attempt to prevent it from happening. DRM is an equal joke, but it is another way to protect information as property. Both of these measures do something very specific: they make it so that in order to copy the "property", you need to intentionally remove its "protection". This follows a fundamental principle that property is only owned by someone to the extent that they can defend it.
One more response to the parent poster: "For average folks, it's [Linux] just another alternative." In order for it to be an alternative for me, it needs to do everything that I need it to do. I need it to run the software I use (includes Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop and t
What about blocking the customer from the internet, and redirecting all HTTP traffic into an informational web page, reading something like:
"ISP has detected that your computer has been sending out suspicious network traffic. In order to protect you from the worms, trojans, and viruses, and other dangers which may have infected your computer, please download and run (link to ISP provided virus scanner). If the program detects that you don't have a known problem, it will reactivate your internet connection automatically. Thank you for choosing ISP. We hope this service of protecting our customers is valuable to you, and appreciate your feedback (web form)."
It seems to me that internet service providers should give their customers service to handle the problems that they will get from being connected to the internet. If connecting to the net causes your computer to be probed and attacked, then ISPs should attempt to isolate these attacks and protect against them. Why leave the only security up to the (often ignorant) customer?
By submitting this comment, I am giving up my ability to moderate this discussion.
>> Man, today, it doesn't matter what API you use...
> Yes it does. Some APIs have implementations on multiple platforms, and some don't.
So what you're saying is that Linux and Windows and Mac OSX can run the same application just because it's compiled and linked against OpenGL? No porting involved?
Lets face it, different versions of Linux with different libraries are different platforms. Different versions of Windows and service packs are different platforms. Heck, even the WORA mantra of Sun's Java is a different platform on Windows than it is on Unix, and that platform changed several times.
So which platform is it that is supposed to be the right one? A graphics library is NOT a platform. The reason that DirectX is popular is because it's decent, and comes with the Windows platform. So companies deploying DirectX games are more likely to have an audience capable of running their game without much trouble of additional setup. The game developers will use whatever they need to build the game. Remember that MS Mantra: "Shipping is a feature." If you make games, and you don't ship them, then you don't make games.
Do you need DirectX on Windows to ship a game? No. You don't. But if your game relies on some technology not available in OpenGL, and the graphics cards in your user's machine don't support OpenGL, theny ou have little recourse. This assumes that your users are running Windows... What percentage of the market is that?
This kind of device (portable media devices with 20GB+ HDs) is a must-have for any long trip in a vehicle when the user isn't the driver.
I bought one of these 20GB Portable Storage Devices (PSD for short) that came without any fancy LCD screen or Audio output, but did have USB 2.0 and a CF card so that I could have a 20GB store for all my photos when I was taking pictures on vacation. The total cost of the unit was about $240, but considering that I have no laptop, and didn't want to take a laptop-sized device with me, it fit the bill perfectly.
Now with the Archos GMini and the SmartDisk FlashTrax among these new entrants in the market, there are more uses than just a portable storage device.
I don't know if any of the new portable media centers can or will be able to directly connect to my camera via USB (I imagine it's just a matter of getting the right software on it), but if they want to have my business, they need at least a Compact Flash card, or I'm not getting rid of my Aplux Tripper PSD.
Don't knock the iPod for being a novelty item. It is a very well designed (and well marketed) pocket MP3 player. These new devices competing with Video and Photos and connecting to digital cameras in the same space at competing prices will surely force Apple to invest more in this market.
We are seeing a convergance in small digital devices. I predict that within a decade we will have a digital camera, cell phone, MP3 player, portable storage (20GB is low end, but maybe 20GB in Flash RAM), and Photo viewer in the form factor of a $100 watch.
The only thing preventing most of this today is battery consumption. But Sony, and other large corporations are certainly capable of producing the hardware, and they have designs on the drawing board. Japan will embrace these before the US. After all, what's new over here is 5 years old over there.
It's a lot cooler to do this in private at a friend's house, where it's called a LAN party. Normally, you'd get a group of people with 32" - 36" TVs and take them to a friend's house/apartment which is big enough to host, but it just so happens that a few college friends of mine in the tech field are well off, and they have projectors. We all like to go and hang out on weekends watching anime, playing D&D, and the like; but sometimes we do a Halo LAN party. With 16+ people and 4 projectors (they have upstairs and downstairs living rooms, so we do 8 people per room, using a WiFi bridge), it's pretty crazy.
Amen for Halo LAN parties with portable projectors. It's so much easier than lugging a 32" TV to a friend's place! Projectors have come down in price a lot recently, so you don't need to be rich to get one.
Make sure you pay top dollar for that ring tone. After all, it is _stealing_ if you use a ring tone you didn't pay us extra for, and only _we_ can allow you to add a new ring tone.
Is it just me, or is this rediculous?
First, that there is money to be had in making consumers pay to be able to upload a WAV file into their Cell phone, and second, that the government is breaking into corporate offices over this?
If I could change patent law, I would do the following: Demand proof of damages.
Patents are designed to defend against inventions. If I patent something useful, but don't actually have an implementation, I'm using the system to stifle others, and not really giving anything back.
In order for something to be an invention, it needs to have an implementable form. Sure, I could patent something that I can't make, but if someone else comes along and figures it out independent of me, then I really shouldn't be able to sue them for having the same idea that I did, unless I actually built it.
So IF forgent claims to have a patent, their patent needs to have an implementation which would serve as a test of requiring the patent. Otherwise, it's just an idea without an implementation.
I could try and patent a perpetual motion machine, and might succeed, but if someone else succeeds in building one, they will have figured out the difficult detail that I didn't: how to break the laws of thermodynamics.
And in a completely unrelated note, XP SP2 just finished installing. Only took about 5 minutes. I guess it pre-downloaded today.
Parent poster wrote: "I'm sure visitors would just LOVE to see a site error message "I'm sorry, you must download Mozilla 8.0 to view this website"
Just like I'm sure that web authors would love for 98% of their market go to their competitors who work around IE by using scripting and ActiveX (I take it that your use of the word LOVE was sarcastic). Let's face it, just because there is a standard out there doesn't mean that everyone else implements it and Microsoft loses.
In order for XForms to be a big deal, you need to have good clients and good servers, and especially good authoring. XForms isn't a magic bullet, it is a protocol, and these component software pieces don't just write themselves.
I saw a demo from some Microsoft guys recently of some forms using ASP.NET, and I must say that I was impressed by what they were doing. Their tools are really maturing.
If IE was at 97% and is now 96%, that most definately is a 33% increase in the number of people not using IE. However, the more insightful question is: Are they still using Windows? Because they paid for Windows. They got IE for free just like Firefox. Now, another interesting thing is: How many other web browsers pretend to be IE? Can you accurately measure usage of IE versus usage of other browsers pretending to be IE?
You're at Joe's internet cafe, or in an airport, etc. Suddenly, your internet explorer gets a web page redirect to some random porno movie of 3 guys raping a rather unattractive asian girl, complete with audio... in full screen mode. Since your laptop's audio is on, everyone in the area, including your girlfriend hear, "No don't put it in my pussy. [scream]"... And you're joe blow who doesn't know how to use the keyboard to close the window to save your life.
Yes, it could happen, particularly, if the geek in the corner is sniffing your WiFi traffic, and singles you out.
More serious would be something which noted when you wanted a secure site, such as a bank, and proxied to a full-screen web page image complete with security icons that tricked the user into sending you their password in the clear.
There are malicious 14 year olds with laptops out there that would find this awfully amusing.
>> I hope you like supporting that Linux install... And like fielding questions like: "I just bought a brand new digital camera etc etc
> Of course. Happened just 2 weeks ago. Canon Digital camera. I ssh'd into the box, installed gphoto and gtkam, set up permissions, made sure there was a menu entry, and told them about it. Not so hard. And I've talked people through setting up a print SERVER over the phone.
So have I. It's not all that hard. "Start->Printers and Faxes, right click on printer, go to Sharing, click 'Share this printer'." Yes, I want a medal. I was a helpdesk worker for 2 years in college. It paid a little more than $10 an hour. Best student job on campus. It taught me to appreciate how out-of-touch people are with their computers. People of all ages.
Oh, and for the Canon camera (I have 3 Canon cameras, and 2 of them are digital), all I did was insert the CD and follow the instructions.
> If I actually wanted to write a virus, do you think I'd be so stupid as to post about it here?
Was that a rhetorical question?:P
>> A) What are reasonable steps?
> How about: > - firewall > - antivirus software > - keeping Windows up-to-date
You forgot about the "don't download stuff that can be run by your computer". A firewall doesn't protect you from yourself. AntiVirus software is a good first step, but it needs updating, as do IE, OE, and Windows. Microsoft has made it a lot easier to keep up-to-date with XP SP2. If you didn't learn about this before, you can get yourself the latest RC of SP2 by changing the v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com to v5...
> - no Internet Explorer > - no Outlook / Outlook Express
I run IE and Outlook (and I use OE for newsgroups). My machine automatically downloads patches from MS, and I install the ones I feel are necessary at my leisure. Since I have no open ports on my external firewall, it doesn't bother me to not run firewall software on my computer, but I leave them on anyway, because in XP SP2, it lets you know when programs are trying to open ports to the outside world, and doesn't open the port until you say so.
> Is that so hard. If everyone did that, there would be so few viruses that we wouldn't be talking about it now.
That's where you make a mistake. Viruses come in all flavors and forms. Outlook and IE don't cause viruses, people do. For every kind of self-propagating or social-engineering+computer propagating program, there are approaches to stopping it. User education is not the most effective or practical.
>> B) What is secure? If I get an email from "you" telling me to run the attached security update to my computer, and don't know any better, and I run it, and it is an emailing worm, then I am now hosed. Worms do this all the time. Do I blame you because I thought I could trust you, or do I blame the worm author who masqueraded as you through their program.
> WTF? Dude what I'm talking about is people taking some fucking responsibility and learning about what they have to do to keep their computer secure. I don't really see where this point is coming from.
This point is coming from the host of mass-mailing worms that come in the form of email. Face it, if someone at a store in the back woods country would accept a one-sided, 3 dollar bill, you might not be able to tell a genuine message related to security from an ingenuine attempt at getting into your computer.
Take this challenge, and get back to me. Did you get 10 of 10?
>> Have you ever had your hard disks wiped clean with all of your hard work on them?
> No, because I've taken some responsibility for my computer, and don't get bothered with such garbage. I take it you've had problems though...
The parent poster writes: "I really am sick of viruses. Being an IT professional, I get on average 1 request per week to remove viruses / spyware / browser hijacks etc from people's computers."
Welcome to the IT club. So far, you aren't sounding special.
"Recently I started turning them down, but offer to install Linux on their computer instead of trying to fix their Window installation."
I hope you like supporting that Linux install... And like fielding questions like: "I just bought a brand new digital camera. How do I get my pictures and video into the computer? Oh, and I bought a new printer, too. I want to print my new pictures with my new printer. Oh, oh, and my cellphone has this cool service where I can download ringtones... I want to do that, too. I need to do XYZ with some application I use for XYZ. How do I get it on my Linux PC?" Face it. Linux is still a second-class citizen in the desktop market. Having one or two category apps isn't the same thing as having 99% of the market.
"If I were writing a worm,..."
Then I would hope that you got caught and spent a few years in jail to think about it, and have it on your record for the rest of your life. Maybe you'll be branded as a terrorist! Talking about writing worms doesn't get you my respect. Even hypothetically. It has been done before. It has been discussed to death before. There were viruses that damaged your equipment. There were other viruses that repartitioned your hard drive. Plenty of worms can do these things.
"ALL computer users should take reasonable steps to keep their computers secure. ALL computer users who don't take these steps should have their hard disks wiped clean."
A) What are reasonable steps?
B) What is secure? If I get an email from "you" telling me to run the attached security update to my computer, and don't know any better, and I run it, and it is an emailing worm, then I am now hosed. Worms do this all the time. Do I blame you because I thought I could trust you, or do I blame the worm author who masqueraded as you through their program.
If some application I download to do X has a bug that's exploited and does Y, and I don't know it, is it my fault?
C) Your statements are quite harsh. Have you ever had your hard disks wiped clean with all of your hard work on them? Your statement is akin to saying, "People who get diseases should be shot. That'll teach 'em to get sick!"
I can't believe your post was modded insightful. Flaimbait, yes. Insightful, no.
"Now imagine what a phenomenal product GIMP would be in the eyes of graphic artists who now use photoshop if only the people who had complained about it could be bothered to FIX what they see as problems. A few small years worth of effort in total, very little from each person who has seen something wrong, and the free tool would have surpassed the proprietary one years ago. Instead, all we get are more complaints." The thing you missed is that when Photoshop gets complaints, those complaints come from someone who has paid $500 to Adobe. This is a graphic artist, not a developer. Adobe pays the developer some of that $500 in order to fix the problem. In the OSS world, the user that gives feedback gives exactly that: feedback. But what do the developers of the OSS project care about that feedback? After all, if the user wanted to get their feature implemented right, they could have paid someone else to develop it, or picked up a few books on development. Fundamental assumption: users are not developers. Hence, we have commercial software.
DRM might be an issue, but it isn't going to be at the BIOS level, it will be at a much lower level. Those bits will be in the core of your CPU. Microsoft, Intel, and AMD will hold the special key pieces that unlock the functionality of your media. Since the OS completely foregos the BIOS anyway and directly accesses the CPU and peripherals through encrypted paths, an Open BIOS won't really stop the "DRM Problem".
Then RMS will complain that the blueprints of the CPUs aren't public. The problem with socialism is that while it's very nice in theory, in implementation it's a complete economic failure. If I don't have to pay you for your hard work, I will take the benefit from it, and you will starve.
People who are smart enough and motivated enough to write code need to eat. I much prefer using my talents in a way which puts food on the table for me and my wife and pays the bills and lets me spend extra time playing with Cameras and chatting on/.
RMS's philosophy that the only kind of software is the kind that you can not only have the rights to change and republish but also to tinker with in any way is directly in contrast with the philosophy of Capitalism - I have something of value to you (a program), and you have something of value to me (compensation). We are both better off for making the trade. If my program source was not valuable, then there would be no incentive for you to honor my payment wishes, and I would starve or find a different way to work.
Free software is like charity. It is donated time. Now, I'm not saying anything bad about charity, but I'm going to make an analogy that probably won't go over well here:
Using Linux and GNU is like eating at a soup kitchen or shopping at a goodwill store. Your soup kitchen may serve gourmet soup much like the fancy restaurant down the street, and your goodwill store may have a fine selection of goods, but it is still charity. The OSS community is a socialist community. It is looking rather popular because it is giving away wares to the capitalist community, but it isn't changing the majority of software development, it is just making the line drawn thicker.
The capitalist system will optimize out the industry. I don't drink RMS's cool aid, though. Being able to develop on top of something out there won't give me incentive to do it. It will give me incentive not to look so that I can get compensation for my code. IBM doesn't like Linux because it's a great OS, IBM likes Linux because it means that they can "outsource".
Bottom line: thanks to the donations of many people, many other people will lose the value of their skills.
Of course, it's hard to make it big in any IP industry now -- Music, Movies, TV, etc. You really need marketing and a brand, and customers. Even RMS is unhappy because RMS brand OSS has started to become engulfed in FUD by freeloading companies like RedHat, SCO, and Linspire, not to mention IBM, which pumped billions into marketing it when they did little to develop it beforehand.
Happiness is finding something you really enjoy, and doing it, and being able to live your life the way you want to. I hope that I can continue to support myself and my wife by doing what I love (writing software) for as long as I live. It would kinda suck if the soup kitchens of the world put out the restaurants... I rather like eating out.
Now go ahead and mark me a troll for having an unpopular opinion.
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I don't have any problem with this, either, but I'd like to take this thread on a slightly different tack. Maybe you have problems with it, and maybe you don't.
And most likely, you're consuming genetically engineered plants and animals with added Vitamin C, and lest we forget the Caffeine and other drugs you take to make your head hurt a little less! Science is impacting your life. It's altering your brain, and changing how long you live.
Well, moral issues such as killing human embryos are different. The question that many people get stuck on is: At what point does the human embryo get a soul? Does it happen before it shows up on the ultrasound machine? How about after it's born? At what point does our society recognize life as human. If Chimeras are an abomination to our society, and some are released into the wild and brought to light, then do they have legal rights as humans do? Can they keep the fact that they are different hidden, or does it matter? Dogs and Cats have certain rights as protected by the ASPCA, but humans have lots more rights.
Furthermore, I challenge that "all men are created equal". I think that I'm smarter than most men, and I am not as athletic. I think that I'm quite creative compared to the average human, but I'm not as well read. My point is that we aren't equal, and we most certainly weren't created equal. I'm more prone to several kinds of diseases genetically than other people are. I happen to have blood which makes me a universal donor.
I'd much rather hope that we introduce them into society. Just think about how much better off we would be as a "species" if we could engineer our way around the hurdles we are faced with? What if we could engineer a breed of humans with brains 10% larger and redundant organs? What about having organs that could grow back if removed? It would be nice to be able to get a heart transplant from a human with an extra working heart that would grow back after you removed one. What if brain size wasn't the most important factor to intelligence. What if we could build computers interfaces into humans. Imagine being born with computer implants in your brain that as you grew enhanced your ability to grow and understand the world around you. Imagine how your brain might form differently, and how you would be able to communicate and function if your brain patterns could wirelessly connect with other people and computers on the internet.
Now, the definition of species has much to do with being able to successfully reproduce, but I don't think that it would be so bad if we created species which we were genetically incompatible with that were superior in some ways (maybe even all ways). Unless they bred faster than we did, or a plague impacting only our species happened, there would be a mixed population of sentient species of humans and others. Who says that our 100% pure human children are the best evolved? Why not let our science help create more evolved humans. Over time, humanity will be better equipped to survive in the situations we will live in.
How about we make humans with two heads! Two heads are better than one. I'd love to get my head transplanted onto a body which would outlast my own... Just think about all the poorer people looking for
I would think that some of these manufacturers could spend an extra $100-$200 and add a digitizer and Windows Tablet PC Edition to their models of notebook/laptop computer.
I have sworn off buying a laptop until a TabletPC comes out that has the features and price that I'm looking for. The most appealing thing about a TabletPC is that they can actually fit opened on a coach class airline if the person in front of you is reclining without breaking the screen, or making it really hard to read...
I can't be the only one who is disappointed at seeing this new CPU for laptops without a single Tablet PC...
"Yep, it's broken on firefox with me too, running default setup on WinXP."
So right click, and do "View This Page in IE".
"Given the fact that they can't make a simple webpage work with more than one browser makes me wonder how the hell did they manage to put two rovers on an another planet for a year..."
Maybe they actually spend their budget on things which matter (rovers, etc) more than they do on things which don't matter (compatability with Firefox).
People here tout standards and Open Source like they are holy grails. In the real world, market share matters more. Until Firefox is bug-compatible with IE, I expect that a good number of sites will remain broken. It takes a lot of time (time = salary = money) to test web sites with multiple browsers and work around the differences in implementation. I'd rather that NASA spend their money on space travel than on HTML Bug Compatability with browsers that less than 10% of their users use.
Compliance with the standards is not the reason that these sites are broken with Firefox. The reason these sites are broken is that they were not developed and tested with Firefox. How bug-compatible is Forefox with respect to Netscape? I would assume that since Netscape "open sourced" the product, it's pretty close, if not identical.
This message was posted using Firefox. I'm not going to claim that one browser is better than the other, but I will play with Firefox, and I happily click the "View This Page in IE" button when Firefox doesn't work. I'm also noticing that sometimes I click the "View This Page in Firefox" when IE doesn't work...
"Imagine a world where if you didn't legally work for Apple, you couldn't write a program for their computer. If you weren't a licensed and regulated programmer, you wouldn't be able to develop your own software or develop software for other people. With signed code initiatives like TCPA/Palladium, that world could be coming to a planet near you soon."
/. in a long time. Every little advancement in the computer industry comes from a lot of hard work on the part of a few people. The rest of the industry is simply doing the glue work to connect those bits. Mind you that the glue can be interesting and complicated, it doesn't take a license to code from Microsoft.
This is the funniest paranoid schizophrenic thing I've read on
The TCPA (if it ever ships -- how many years has it been since the Microsoft Windows team has done that...) is a method to restrict certain apps from running in a specific environment with access to specific resources.
Think of it like an XBox console, only harder to crack. Basically, your PC would have a little XBox inside it which would let MS Signed apps run on a special video overlay (secure video path) and play with special encrypted content and a special digital audio plug (secure audio path).
If the idea actually takes off, which it might not (it all depends on how expensive the modifications are to make to the hardware to support it), it won't be several years before companies wrote software that took advantage of it. Likely Microsoft Office, Windows Media Player, and Adobe Acrobat would be available to take advantage of it shortly after TCPA/Palladium.
But this isn't a big deal. Anyone who didn't use TCPA/Palladium would simply be more likely to have content that would be easier to distribute. Maybe this lets people lock down content/software, or make people pay per use of content/software that they didn't pay for. That doesn't mean that you need to apply DRM to everything, but having the choice is better than not having the choice. Is that really so horrible?
Think of the applications: I'd like to be able to protect my photos so that people can't print them, but I trust IE to show them along a "secure video path". Maybe I sell desktop backgrounds. Maybe I sell wedding photographs. Why can't I chose my business model?
This doesn't just benefit large corporations. It benefits small people who create independent content. Sure, you could bootleg audio, video, documents, or photos just like you could when all the various media duplication forms came out, but the point is that this makes it harder to do so and keep up the quality that you could do with a digital copy. Thus it preserves the value of purchasing a license to use the digital data, and thus it preserves the time honored tradition of paying people who produce the content which you consume. That won't stop people from producing free content or make it any more expensive to produce free content.
Also, it means a great many standards need to be created to carry encrypted content digitally. This may take some time for hardware manufacturers to standardize on and adopt... We'll see how quickly it takes porn to use it, then we'll know that it's here. (Very seriously) Porn is always at the forefront of media technolgy trends. It's the most compelling reason VHS won out over Beta. It's also very interesting that there is no Porn IAA...
> First, he was a UC student...
So what? Prior art is prior art. If a student can invent something, then certainly one with 20 years experience in the field could invent it. That means the patent doesn't pass the "obviousness" test.
> Third, we as the public do not know the specific Court arguments are, so we can't really say what is what.. I am sure the judge had a good reason to restrict the presentation of Viola as prior art.
There's a reason I don't trust judges in the case of patent law. Judges aren't engineers. I'm all for IP, but I feel that damages have to be proven in court. If you want to protect an idea, you shouldn't be able to sue for damages until you have actually implemented the idea.
My friend tells me that I could patent a technology which I have no hope of building within the lifetime of the patent just to prevent other people from building it. I think that I shouldn't be able to sue them until I build it. Yes, the patent is still valuable. If I sell it to a company that can build it, then they can sue for damages.
Otherwise, the lawsuit is frivolous. Sure, I could patent lots of new technology, then sit on the patents, and wait to sue some big corporations. But I think that's not legitimate. Patents are about protecting inventor's rights to build and sell their inventions. That a patent is valuable is undeniable, but its value should not be able to be realized in a court before it is realized by the inventor.
I'm in favor of fewer, more useful protections on IP. Time to go play with my cats with the laser toy... looks like I'm going to violate someone's patent!
Doesn't anyone think that access to the "unfiltered" net is possible through SSL ecrypted proxy servers in other countries? I imagine that it's highly illegal in China, but I don't think that the Chinese people don't talk amongst themselves over encrypted channels, if not offline.
Can't people organize against the government over there? Or even within the government. I think it's deplorable that Google puts up with their BS. I would think that they would take a stance on the "just aggregating the news". China doesn't own or regulate the internet.
And China certainly can't prevent people in other countries from publicly badmouthing them for trying. Perhaps the press should publish enough bad things about China that the filtered view of their dict^H^H^H^Hpeople's republic doesn't say anything useful...
<apathetic response>Ah well, it's not like anyone really care.</apathy>
The specs on it are here:_ exs100.asp
m ethod=sidebyside&cameras=canon_sd300%2Ccasio_exs10 0%2Cnikon_cp5200&show=all
m ethod=sidebyside&cameras=casio_exs100%2Ccanon_s410 %2Cnikon_cpsq&camuser=canon_s410&show=all
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/specs/Casio/casio
Now I'm going to compare it by specs with two similar cameras from the digital camera market leaders:
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/compare_post.asp?
There are 3 things that impact image quality in digicams: sensor size/resolution/noise, lens quality, and lens maximum aperture. The Canon and Nikon models have more resolution, larger aperture when wide open, and larger sensors (also more resolution). They both have optical viewfinders and come with more memory than the Casio (memory is cheap). The max aperture enables you to shoot in worse light without a tripod. The sensor size and resolution impact the amount of noise, and the lens quality impacts sharpness.
The LCD size of the Casio is large (by digicam standards), but it's matched by the Canon in size and beaten in resolution by both the Canon and Nikon. So by using ceramics for their weight and hardness, Casio has reduced image quality and lost some max aperture. Maybe this is an acceptable trade-off for reducing the weight by 70 grams (113g compared to 180g). The camera is the same size as the Canon. The Nikon is about twice as thick.
Add another 30 grams and subtract $75, and we can compare with two older and cheaper Canon/Nikon models which are mildly larger, and still beat the new Exilim:
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/compare_post.asp?
Yes, it was noteworthy that Casio made a ceramic lens, just like it was noteworthy when Kodak created a one-time use camera with a plastic lens... The problem for Casio is that the image quality isn't as good as "still-very-pocketable" offerings from years past. For the same price of a newer model from Canon or Nikon, you don't get as much. Size is the same, it weighs a little less, and it has worse image quality and needs twice as much light.
MtViewGuy wrote:
1. DNG--being a true open format specification--means DNG uncompressed image files could conceivably be read by a GPL image processing software such as GIMP, so it would be very easy to write an update for GIMP with full DNG support.
Since each camera company supports Mac and Windows with their file formats, and there's a free project out there, and many for profit software apps out there already support the raw apps (using Dave Coffin's free as in BSD-style dcraw.c), there already exists the ability to do raw production work, even on Linux/GIMP. I'm sure that there's even a fairly automated way to get dcraw.c into GIMP with some GUI wrapped around it. I'm betting that it will continue to support these "abandonable" file formats well into the future.
2. You're forgetting most of the world's serious digital image processing working is done on Photoshop, the de facto standard for such work. Simplifying processing of uncompressed image files would make the work of professional photographers a LOT easier.
No I'm not, and no it won't. It will just add a step: Use Adobe CRW to DNG file converter. Use Adobe RAW processing on DNG file. The thing about a RAW file is that it needs to be processed. My premise is that the Canons and Nikons of the world don't want the limelight stolen from them by the software makers. That's why they heavily brand their own RAW formats. They won't spend millions upon millions of dollars to make hardware changes that won't help their market. Photoshop will open any file of theirs in time, as will any other app engineered to open the last 5 versions of their RAW files. These companies have legacy. Legacy is the most powerful force in the computing world. Legacy is the reason that 95% of the people running Windows buy another computer with Windows on it.
In order for DNG to be anything but "just another file format", it needs to be adopted by the camera manufacturers. Otherwise, it's just a file format that adds a step in the digital workflow. This step is not a welcome one, unless it provides value. Seriously, anyone who has spent $5000 or more in DSLR equipment and takes a few hundred to a few thousand photos per month tends to minimize the time they spend at the computer. Adding a step is not going to be popular. It wastes time and space.
If indeed, Adobe's RAW->DNG file format converter makes some conversion decisions (with user input) and embeds interesting information from each different RAW format, then it would be Adobe providing value free of charge to people like me who like to play with the code to process RAW files (I have over 40GB of them on my HD, so I know what I'm talking about here).
Yes, it would be nice if the camera industry settled on a standard. Don't expect it to happen. The pressure is on the software makers to improve the photos after the camera makes them, and the pressure is on the camera companies to build better optics, more durable shutters, new methods of stabilising shaky hands, and faster and more accurate auto focus and flash exposure systems. Very few professional photographers are also programmers.
I will take the time to note that Canon and other Japanese camera manufacturers have standards bodies, and these companies have attempted to standardize their industry on their file formats in the past. That's what EXIF came from. There are lots of documents and specs describing the various redundant ways to encode the bits that some group of engineers thinks are important to record about a photograph. Every single spec document I've read reads like Adobe's new "one and best way to record a RAW file". It wasn't new when Canon put out the spec for theirs about 4 or 5 years ago. It certainly isn't new now, and it won't be new when Microsoft does it next year. Microsoft might just barely succeed on the execution by throwing it into Windows and calling it innovation.
{sarcasm}
Well, mission accomplished! Write up the press release, Adobe won the file format wars by putting out a spec and a free converter!
{/sarcasm}
I'm sure two nerds already had an argument over how to pronounce DNG. Pick a vowel: Dang, Deng, Ding, Dong, Dung, or sometimes Dyng!
I didn't notice any comment about how/why RAW formats come about. Every camera manufacturer produces several hardware components. These components cost money to design, implement, and debug. Unlike Software, hardware can't be patched, isn't free to duplicate, and reusing components yields a measurable (and often substantial) savings.
So Canon has a line of PowerShot Pro, PowerShot S, PowerShot G, and EOS Digital cameras which all use the CRW (Canon RAW) file format. Newer ones use the new CR2 (Canon RAW V 2.0) file format.
Nikon uses NEF, and Kodak uses TIFFs (thumbnails with a proprietary chunk of data). Sigma/Foveon and FujiFulm use others.
It would be nice if they all saved some standard format. The problem is two-fold:
1) Each company wants to use their own secret algorithms to decode their data and get the "best" from their format. It's one of the ways they distinguish themselves.
2) Each company has already invested in the hardware to produce these RAW files.
So the bottom line is that Adobe is a company which makes the world's most popular photo processing app. They want a file format to unify RAW processing. They produce a converter, and a plugin.
If you don't use Photoshop to process your RAW files (say you use Capture One, or Breeze Browser), then you really don't get much benefit from this DNG file format unless third parties (your converter maker) implements it.
Adobe is hoping that 3rd parties (camera makers) will adopt their format. The problem is that it doesn't provide anything new. Why would a camera maker spend a few million dollars in development costs to support a new file format with no additional benefit?
JPEG2000? Maybe, but it doesn't specify Bayer Pattern sensor data compression mechanisms. DNG? No. It doesn't have any advantages over the already existing formats.
If Intel, AMD, Sony, or Canon produced an imaging chip which used new techniques like wavelets to compress RAW data, and sold this to the camera manufacturers, then there would be value in this new standard. As it sits, the Software industry is the tail, and the hardware industry is the dog. The dog wags its tail, not the other way around.
Google already adds the Google Toolbar to IE. What more do you need. Anything Google could put into their own custom web browser they could add as a COM object plugin to IE. There's nothing special to see here.
Heck, Google could even wrap the IE HTML rendering engine with a half-useful interface (strip out all the stupid features) and ship it, and it'd still be just fine. It wouldn't have to be Mozilla.
Or Google could give away a web browser. It doesn't matter. It wouldn't give Google money unless they figured out some way to get advertising into the app in a transparent an unobtrusive way.
Parent poster wrote:
"The problem is that most hackers are rabid about Linux because it's phenonmentally powerful if you code a bit."
So are BSD, MacOS, and (bet you saw this one coming) Windows. Most hackers are rabid about Linux because they got more than they were promised. They weren't promised anything. They didn't pay anything, and they got a whole lot.
I have a few friends that graduated with me from college with varying technical degrees, including CS, Math, Engineering, and Physics (what can I say, I'm a geek and hang out with geeks). Some close friends ended up at Microsoft. And even though they run Windows whatever at work, they still chose vi or emacs as their editor, bash and other shells, and awk and sed in their code along with their C#, C++, and Perl. One of them bought a shiny new laptop with his recent bonus and reused his old desktop (stuffing Linux on it) as a web-connected file server/bridge. He recently told me how he saved one of his machines at work by using a Knoppix CD! Just imagine an MS employee booting Linux, at work, to fix their Windows machine!
GNU isn't just about linux advocacy, it's a philosophical movement centered around the idea that by keeping code "free of ownership" we can advance society. From another perspective, the GPL is a way of saying, "I don't own this code. You don't own this code. The public owns this code. You can't build something from this code and distribute it without the code."
This is quite diametrically opposed to the philosophy that: "I work hard to create a software product of intrinsic value. It is my property. I sell you a license to use that property."
Many people who wrote utilities and published them under the GPL ported their utilities to Windows, BSD, Linux, etc. They also make pure Windows apps under the GPL, and others port these. Basically, it's not the Linux OS that makes for a great hacking experience, it's the fact that it comes with a bunch of GNU tools. But then there's CygWin and other GNU toolsets for Windows and BSD and MacOS.
The reason that Linux may be a threat to Microsoft is that there are a growing number of developers who got hooked on Linux because the development tools came with the OS, and they didn't want to pay MS (or Borland) for tools which promote Windows. Of course, there are also a great many people who still write free software for Windows (using DJGPP or other MSVC++) simply because Windows is the largest target audience of normal users, and they use it. But if the developers market is changing because of the availability of high quality tools, then Microsoft will react. Maybe too late, but it's in the cards.
Indeed, Microsoft already has done some reacting. 57,000 employees, including some of my best friends know that their job is on the line if Microsoft goes under, and from what my friends tell me, working at Microsoft is better than all of their previous jobs. Their reaction: http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/ Is this too little too late, or is it the beginning?
(getting back to original topic of activation, and tying back into the philosophy of property)
When I ask my friends about the activation stuff, they tell me that nobody who has a brain expects it to deter piracy, but they have to do something to attempt to prevent it from happening. DRM is an equal joke, but it is another way to protect information as property. Both of these measures do something very specific: they make it so that in order to copy the "property", you need to intentionally remove its "protection". This follows a fundamental principle that property is only owned by someone to the extent that they can defend it.
One more response to the parent poster:
"For average folks, it's [Linux] just another alternative."
In order for it to be an alternative for me, it needs to do everything that I need it to do. I need it to run the software I use (includes Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop and t
What about blocking the customer from the internet, and redirecting all HTTP traffic into an informational web page, reading something like:
"ISP has detected that your computer has been sending out suspicious network traffic. In order to protect you from the worms, trojans, and viruses, and other dangers which may have infected your computer, please download and run (link to ISP provided virus scanner). If the program detects that you don't have a known problem, it will reactivate your internet connection automatically. Thank you for choosing ISP. We hope this service of protecting our customers is valuable to you, and appreciate your feedback (web form)."
It seems to me that internet service providers should give their customers service to handle the problems that they will get from being connected to the internet. If connecting to the net causes your computer to be probed and attacked, then ISPs should attempt to isolate these attacks and protect against them. Why leave the only security up to the (often ignorant) customer?
By submitting this comment, I am giving up my ability to moderate this discussion.
You have to get it in the cache before it is Slashdotted... This just doesn't do it. :(
>> Man, today, it doesn't matter what API you use...
> Yes it does. Some APIs have implementations on multiple platforms, and some don't.
So what you're saying is that Linux and Windows and Mac OSX can run the same application just because it's compiled and linked against OpenGL? No porting involved?
Lets face it, different versions of Linux with different libraries are different platforms. Different versions of Windows and service packs are different platforms. Heck, even the WORA mantra of Sun's Java is a different platform on Windows than it is on Unix, and that platform changed several times.
So which platform is it that is supposed to be the right one? A graphics library is NOT a platform. The reason that DirectX is popular is because it's decent, and comes with the Windows platform. So companies deploying DirectX games are more likely to have an audience capable of running their game without much trouble of additional setup. The game developers will use whatever they need to build the game. Remember that MS Mantra: "Shipping is a feature." If you make games, and you don't ship them, then you don't make games.
Do you need DirectX on Windows to ship a game? No. You don't. But if your game relies on some technology not available in OpenGL, and the graphics cards in your user's machine don't support OpenGL, theny ou have little recourse. This assumes that your users are running Windows... What percentage of the market is that?
This kind of device (portable media devices with 20GB+ HDs) is a must-have for any long trip in a vehicle when the user isn't the driver.
I bought one of these 20GB Portable Storage Devices (PSD for short) that came without any fancy LCD screen or Audio output, but did have USB 2.0 and a CF card so that I could have a 20GB store for all my photos when I was taking pictures on vacation. The total cost of the unit was about $240, but considering that I have no laptop, and didn't want to take a laptop-sized device with me, it fit the bill perfectly.
Now with the Archos GMini and the SmartDisk FlashTrax among these new entrants in the market, there are more uses than just a portable storage device.
I don't know if any of the new portable media centers can or will be able to directly connect to my camera via USB (I imagine it's just a matter of getting the right software on it), but if they want to have my business, they need at least a Compact Flash card, or I'm not getting rid of my Aplux Tripper PSD.
Don't knock the iPod for being a novelty item. It is a very well designed (and well marketed) pocket MP3 player. These new devices competing with Video and Photos and connecting to digital cameras in the same space at competing prices will surely force Apple to invest more in this market.
We are seeing a convergance in small digital devices. I predict that within a decade we will have a digital camera, cell phone, MP3 player, portable storage (20GB is low end, but maybe 20GB in Flash RAM), and Photo viewer in the form factor of a $100 watch.
The only thing preventing most of this today is battery consumption. But Sony, and other large corporations are certainly capable of producing the hardware, and they have designs on the drawing board. Japan will embrace these before the US. After all, what's new over here is 5 years old over there.
It's a lot cooler to do this in private at a friend's house, where it's called a LAN party. Normally, you'd get a group of people with 32" - 36" TVs and take them to a friend's house/apartment which is big enough to host, but it just so happens that a few college friends of mine in the tech field are well off, and they have projectors. We all like to go and hang out on weekends watching anime, playing D&D, and the like; but sometimes we do a Halo LAN party. With 16+ people and 4 projectors (they have upstairs and downstairs living rooms, so we do 8 people per room, using a WiFi bridge), it's pretty crazy.
Amen for Halo LAN parties with portable projectors. It's so much easier than lugging a 32" TV to a friend's place! Projectors have come down in price a lot recently, so you don't need to be rich to get one.
Make sure you pay top dollar for that ring tone. After all, it is _stealing_ if you use a ring tone you didn't pay us extra for, and only _we_ can allow you to add a new ring tone.
Is it just me, or is this rediculous?
First, that there is money to be had in making consumers pay to be able to upload a WAV file into their Cell phone, and second, that the government is breaking into corporate offices over this?
Bizarre.
If I could change patent law, I would do the following: Demand proof of damages.
Patents are designed to defend against inventions. If I patent something useful, but don't actually have an implementation, I'm using the system to stifle others, and not really giving anything back.
In order for something to be an invention, it needs to have an implementable form. Sure, I could patent something that I can't make, but if someone else comes along and figures it out independent of me, then I really shouldn't be able to sue them for having the same idea that I did, unless I actually built it.
So IF forgent claims to have a patent, their patent needs to have an implementation which would serve as a test of requiring the patent. Otherwise, it's just an idea without an implementation.
I could try and patent a perpetual motion machine, and might succeed, but if someone else succeeds in building one, they will have figured out the difficult detail that I didn't: how to break the laws of thermodynamics.
And in a completely unrelated note, XP SP2 just finished installing. Only took about 5 minutes. I guess it pre-downloaded today.
Parent poster wrote:
"I'm sure visitors would just LOVE to see a site error message "I'm sorry, you must download Mozilla 8.0 to view this website"
Just like I'm sure that web authors would love for 98% of their market go to their competitors who work around IE by using scripting and ActiveX (I take it that your use of the word LOVE was sarcastic). Let's face it, just because there is a standard out there doesn't mean that everyone else implements it and Microsoft loses.
In order for XForms to be a big deal, you need to have good clients and good servers, and especially good authoring. XForms isn't a magic bullet, it is a protocol, and these component software pieces don't just write themselves.
I saw a demo from some Microsoft guys recently of some forms using ASP.NET, and I must say that I was impressed by what they were doing. Their tools are really maturing.
If IE was at 97% and is now 96%, that most definately is a 33% increase in the number of people not using IE. However, the more insightful question is: Are they still using Windows?
Because they paid for Windows. They got IE for free just like Firefox.
Now, another interesting thing is: How many other web browsers pretend to be IE? Can you accurately measure usage of IE versus usage of other browsers pretending to be IE?
You're at Joe's internet cafe, or in an airport, etc. Suddenly, your internet explorer gets a web page redirect to some random porno movie of 3 guys raping a rather unattractive asian girl, complete with audio... in full screen mode. Since your laptop's audio is on, everyone in the area, including your girlfriend hear, "No don't put it in my pussy. [scream]"... And you're joe blow who doesn't know how to use the keyboard to close the window to save your life.
Yes, it could happen, particularly, if the geek in the corner is sniffing your WiFi traffic, and singles you out.
More serious would be something which noted when you wanted a secure site, such as a bank, and proxied to a full-screen web page image complete with security icons that tricked the user into sending you their password in the clear.
There are malicious 14 year olds with laptops out there that would find this awfully amusing.
I wrote = >>
:P
vandan (151516) wrote = >
>> I hope you like supporting that Linux install... And like fielding questions like: "I just bought a brand new digital camera etc etc
> Of course. Happened just 2 weeks ago. Canon Digital camera. I ssh'd into the box, installed gphoto and gtkam, set up permissions, made sure there was a menu entry, and told them about it. Not so hard. And I've talked people through setting up a print SERVER over the phone.
So have I. It's not all that hard. "Start->Printers and Faxes, right click on printer, go to Sharing, click 'Share this printer'." Yes, I want a medal. I was a helpdesk worker for 2 years in college. It paid a little more than $10 an hour. Best student job on campus. It taught me to appreciate how out-of-touch people are with their computers. People of all ages.
Oh, and for the Canon camera (I have 3 Canon cameras, and 2 of them are digital), all I did was insert the CD and follow the instructions.
> If I actually wanted to write a virus, do you think I'd be so stupid as to post about it here?
Was that a rhetorical question?
>> A) What are reasonable steps?
> How about:
> - firewall
> - antivirus software
> - keeping Windows up-to-date
You forgot about the "don't download stuff that can be run by your computer". A firewall doesn't protect you from yourself. AntiVirus software is a good first step, but it needs updating, as do IE, OE, and Windows. Microsoft has made it a lot easier to keep up-to-date with XP SP2. If you didn't learn about this before, you can get yourself the latest RC of SP2 by changing the v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com to v5...
> - no Internet Explorer
> - no Outlook / Outlook Express
I run IE and Outlook (and I use OE for newsgroups). My machine automatically downloads patches from MS, and I install the ones I feel are necessary at my leisure. Since I have no open ports on my external firewall, it doesn't bother me to not run firewall software on my computer, but I leave them on anyway, because in XP SP2, it lets you know when programs are trying to open ports to the outside world, and doesn't open the port until you say so.
> Is that so hard. If everyone did that, there would be so few viruses that we wouldn't be talking about it now.
That's where you make a mistake. Viruses come in all flavors and forms. Outlook and IE don't cause viruses, people do. For every kind of self-propagating or social-engineering+computer propagating program, there are approaches to stopping it. User education is not the most effective or practical.
>> B) What is secure? If I get an email from "you" telling me to run the attached security update to my computer, and don't know any better, and I run it, and it is an emailing worm, then I am now hosed. Worms do this all the time. Do I blame you because I thought I could trust you, or do I blame the worm author who masqueraded as you through their program.
> WTF? Dude what I'm talking about is people taking some fucking responsibility and learning about what they have to do to keep their computer secure. I don't really see where this point is coming from.
This point is coming from the host of mass-mailing worms that come in the form of email. Face it, if someone at a store in the back woods country would accept a one-sided, 3 dollar bill, you might not be able to tell a genuine message related to security from an ingenuine attempt at getting into your computer.
Take this challenge, and get back to me. Did you get 10 of 10?
>> Have you ever had your hard disks wiped clean with all of your hard work on them?
> No, because I've taken some responsibility for my computer, and don't get bothered with such garbage. I take it you've had problems though...
Well, since I got my firs
The parent poster writes:
..."
"I really am sick of viruses. Being an IT professional, I get on average 1 request per week to remove viruses / spyware / browser hijacks etc from people's computers."
Welcome to the IT club. So far, you aren't sounding special.
"Recently I started turning them down, but offer to install Linux on their computer instead of trying to fix their Window installation."
I hope you like supporting that Linux install... And like fielding questions like: "I just bought a brand new digital camera. How do I get my pictures and video into the computer? Oh, and I bought a new printer, too. I want to print my new pictures with my new printer. Oh, oh, and my cellphone has this cool service where I can download ringtones... I want to do that, too. I need to do XYZ with some application I use for XYZ. How do I get it on my Linux PC?" Face it. Linux is still a second-class citizen in the desktop market. Having one or two category apps isn't the same thing as having 99% of the market.
"If I were writing a worm,
Then I would hope that you got caught and spent a few years in jail to think about it, and have it on your record for the rest of your life. Maybe you'll be branded as a terrorist! Talking about writing worms doesn't get you my respect. Even hypothetically. It has been done before. It has been discussed to death before. There were viruses that damaged your equipment. There were other viruses that repartitioned your hard drive. Plenty of worms can do these things.
"ALL computer users should take reasonable steps to keep their computers secure. ALL computer users who don't take these steps should have their hard disks wiped clean."
A) What are reasonable steps?
B) What is secure? If I get an email from "you" telling me to run the attached security update to my computer, and don't know any better, and I run it, and it is an emailing worm, then I am now hosed. Worms do this all the time. Do I blame you because I thought I could trust you, or do I blame the worm author who masqueraded as you through their program.
If some application I download to do X has a bug that's exploited and does Y, and I don't know it, is it my fault?
C) Your statements are quite harsh. Have you ever had your hard disks wiped clean with all of your hard work on them? Your statement is akin to saying, "People who get diseases should be shot. That'll teach 'em to get sick!"
I can't believe your post was modded insightful. Flaimbait, yes. Insightful, no.
"Now imagine what a phenomenal product GIMP would be in the eyes of graphic artists who now use photoshop if only the people who had complained about it could be bothered to FIX what they see as problems. A few small years worth of effort in total, very little from each person who has seen something wrong, and the free tool would have surpassed the proprietary one years ago. Instead, all we get are more complaints."
The thing you missed is that when Photoshop gets complaints, those complaints come from someone who has paid $500 to Adobe. This is a graphic artist, not a developer. Adobe pays the developer some of that $500 in order to fix the problem.
In the OSS world, the user that gives feedback gives exactly that: feedback. But what do the developers of the OSS project care about that feedback? After all, if the user wanted to get their feature implemented right, they could have paid someone else to develop it, or picked up a few books on development.
Fundamental assumption: users are not developers. Hence, we have commercial software.
DRM might be an issue, but it isn't going to be at the BIOS level, it will be at a much lower level. Those bits will be in the core of your CPU. Microsoft, Intel, and AMD will hold the special key pieces that unlock the functionality of your media. Since the OS completely foregos the BIOS anyway and directly accesses the CPU and peripherals through encrypted paths, an Open BIOS won't really stop the "DRM Problem".
/.
Then RMS will complain that the blueprints of the CPUs aren't public. The problem with socialism is that while it's very nice in theory, in implementation it's a complete economic failure. If I don't have to pay you for your hard work, I will take the benefit from it, and you will starve.
People who are smart enough and motivated enough to write code need to eat. I much prefer using my talents in a way which puts food on the table for me and my wife and pays the bills and lets me spend extra time playing with Cameras and chatting on
RMS's philosophy that the only kind of software is the kind that you can not only have the rights to change and republish but also to tinker with in any way is directly in contrast with the philosophy of Capitalism - I have something of value to you (a program), and you have something of value to me (compensation). We are both better off for making the trade. If my program source was not valuable, then there would be no incentive for you to honor my payment wishes, and I would starve or find a different way to work.
Free software is like charity. It is donated time. Now, I'm not saying anything bad about charity, but I'm going to make an analogy that probably won't go over well here:
Using Linux and GNU is like eating at a soup kitchen or shopping at a goodwill store. Your soup kitchen may serve gourmet soup much like the fancy restaurant down the street, and your goodwill store may have a fine selection of goods, but it is still charity. The OSS community is a socialist community. It is looking rather popular because it is giving away wares to the capitalist community, but it isn't changing the majority of software development, it is just making the line drawn thicker.
The capitalist system will optimize out the industry. I don't drink RMS's cool aid, though. Being able to develop on top of something out there won't give me incentive to do it. It will give me incentive not to look so that I can get compensation for my code. IBM doesn't like Linux because it's a great OS, IBM likes Linux because it means that they can "outsource".
Bottom line: thanks to the donations of many people, many other people will lose the value of their skills.
Of course, it's hard to make it big in any IP industry now -- Music, Movies, TV, etc. You really need marketing and a brand, and customers. Even RMS is unhappy because RMS brand OSS has started to become engulfed in FUD by freeloading companies like RedHat, SCO, and Linspire, not to mention IBM, which pumped billions into marketing it when they did little to develop it beforehand.
Happiness is finding something you really enjoy, and doing it, and being able to live your life the way you want to. I hope that I can continue to support myself and my wife by doing what I love (writing software) for as long as I live. It would kinda suck if the soup kitchens of the world put out the restaurants... I rather like eating out.
Now go ahead and mark me a troll for having an unpopular opinion.