Activities have always been something of a niche feature, with most people being perfectly content to use multiple desktops which have been available since the Pleistocene. Having tools on the desktop in the form of widgets or switching the entire look and feel based on when you stop work and start relaxing were just about the whole selling point of activities, but none of these were problems to begin with.
Unfortunately, the KDE team let one small group of designers (two people, as best as I can figure out) run away with the desktop for several releases trying to foist Activities on the userbase. In later releases, the bitch level got so high that the rest of the KDE team have pretty much got those individuals under control, and sanity has returned. You can pretty much avoid activities now entirely, or at least make them sit silently in the background managing nothing but wallpaper.
Any service with a commenting section is full of people projecting their anger and insecurities on others. Given the nature of slashdot, it's particularly bad here.
And anyone using the word "haters" is right up there among the most insecure. What ever happened to a difference of opinion?
I personally dislike Gnome, but I certainly don't "hate" it. I much prefer KDE, but I understand people who want things much simpler.
This will be a welcome change. There is still a maddening separation of some visual elements that have to be adjusted in QT rather than KDE, and some applications that seemingly never made it to the KDE bandwagon.
Thanks KDE, your releases just keep getting better. The Metadata info will be great to have.
True, but many of these features have been there for several releases.
Metadata has been available in the Information sidebar for well over a year. Detachable Konsole tabs have been there since KDE 3.5 days (what, almost 5 years now?). PDF annotations in ocular have been there for many prior releases, only the option to print them is new. And Kontact PIM is still a mess.
So most of these are minor improvements to an already excellent desktop that far surpasses anything else in this market segment.
Of the Australian government succumbs to "Pressure" of a two line blub in mean-nothing publication meant more to justify the Trade Rep's budget with the front office than anything else, well, that's your problem.
Yet that appears to be exactly what you are claiming: The Australian Government rolled over in the face of this single whispered sentence and canceled their plans to require patient date to be kept in-country.
Click fraud has been a huge problem. Even Google has had to put mechanisms in place to detect it and control it. But none of these ad companies have a real strong incentive to do so, other than to maintain a reputation for fairness among advertisers. Facebook? Fairness? Reputation?
In my day job we were a Google advertiser, and on more than one occasion we started seeing huge spikes in clicks when we did nothing different on the web site or in commerce to warrant such an increase.
I called Google about it, and they ran a review of the clicks and dropped the actual click count to below what it had been prior. They do respond, but you have to complain some times.
They are especially good at catching bots.
We've put a ceiling on the amount we will pay for these clicks, and when ever that ceiling is reached we get a notice from Google. Unless we just started an advertising campaign in the trade rags (or something to generate that increase in traffic), we usually just file another click fraud complaint to them and they invariably we are the target of another E-Gold "get paid to click ads" scam.
(We always suspect, but can never prove that one of our competitors is behind this click fest to drive my ads off the search results by over-running our limits, because they always seem to happen when they launch a new product).
The ruling does not affect studies, and with their sterling credentials they should easily be able to get their methods approved and go on to license the technology or make millions selling seminars and training. Wouldn't government approval be a gold mine for them both in money and prestige?
precisely because of the US government's fondness for spying on everything.
Yet again another ridiculous claim without a single reference to support it.
Please point to any credible source that documents the REASON the US "screams" protectionism about data storage. Also please point to one documented incidence of the US "screaming" protectionism with regard to other country's data storage laws.
Imagine a situation where nobody ever thought of creating a food and drug agency, and every bit of food you purchased, and every medicine you needed could never be assumed to be either wholesome or effective. Anyone could put something on the market, make any claim they wanted, and sell it.
Buy a crappy Cell phone? Get a new one, and count it as a lesson learned. Buy an crappy anti Cancer drug? Well, there is always re-incarnation to hope for....
There are some issues in the real world where no regulation is deadly.
Yours is a very short sighted view. You essentially are claiming people can't band together to protect one another by keeping shysters out of the market place. Yet there has never been a time in human history where this was not done at some level, even if it just meant stoning the vendor trying to pawn off ropy flour or spoiled meat. That banding together is what we did when we created the Food and Drug administration, the FTC, the NRC, and a few other agencies entrusted to keep unsafe things out of the market place.
You can still vote with your feet. You can still buy unlicensed untested drugs. Perhaps just not here.
Look, its fairly easy to get into the "cloud" business as the only barriers are financial, not technical. Other than power, It costs about the same to run a data center with 200 cores as it costs to run one with 500 cores. You might hire one more tech support person. Maybe. Probably not.
There will be few jobs outsourced to Texas, other than janitorial ones, because the hosting company is only going to be running the machines, the Mexican hotel chain will still be managing them and running their own booking software.
They are shedding physical plant, not jobs.
What they surrender is control. If the data center is accused of hosting some IP pirate nodes, the Mexican hotel chain could find their servers are grabbed by the FBI in some heavy handed Anti-Pirate operation.
In that case, you should lobby for the complete defunding of the Food and Drug Administration.
But failing to achieve that aim, you will have to put up with the majority view that such protection is in the best interest of society.
There is precious little difference between a teenager and gullible low IQ adults that are easily hoodwinked by medical charlatans. One key similarity between these groups is the belief that they are fully capable of making their own medical decisions, even when they haven't the slightest clue about the underlying biology.
Do you have some kind of knee-jerk, inherit distrust of anyone with the title of Dr?
No, only those pushing unproven treatments.
Stay up late an watch all those guys with a title of Dr pushing these things on late night TV ads. If, after a few nights of this, you still trust everyone with a Dr after their name, then Dr. Icebike has some very cheap lake front building lots to sell you on the shores of Central Park Lake, in the heart of NYC.
If you are given all the known facts upfront, you should be able to make your own choice.
You need only apply this line of reasoning to other endeavors to realize it simply is not true.
Many, if not most people can not possibly make a rational decision even when presented with "all the known facts" simply because they can't interpret the research, due to inadequate education and training.
One of the best services government supplies (other than keeping the roads patched) is preventing con artists from selling useless and dangerous products to uneducated and gullible people. This prevention costs far less than attempting to give each gullible and uneducated person a doctorate in biochemistry so that they could understand "all the known facts".
Your 14 year old daughter comes home and tells you she wants to run off with this charismatic pimp and get rich being a prostitute. You sit her down and explain "all the known facts". She rolls her eyes and runs upstairs to pack her suitcase. Do you sit idly by and say "well, she was given all the known facts upfront, it's her choice"? Most parents (perhaps not you) say no way, call the cops, because they see it as their job to protect those who can not understand, or refuse to believe "all the known facts".
Society has take the same stance with highly complex technical medical practices.
You can still find and obtain these unproven medical treatments, but society is not going to allow them to be sold in the market until they are proven. This is done because 1) there are real pimps in the world, 2) when it comes to extremely complex medical procedures a very large percentage of us are 14 years old.
Trouble is..this is gonna stop a LOT of use tx going on now with private physicians!!
I know some doctors that have been having wonderful, and in some cases amazing results with this type of treatment. And now, sadly, you will have federal bureaucrats and miles of red tape standing in the way.
Wait, you know this HOW? Because these doctors TELL you so? (chortle).
If the results are THAT good, they should be able to prove it fairly easily, right?
So no problem. It gets approved.
On the other hand, if (like way way too many) their claims are baseless, they get booted from the market before they can hoodwink people like, well, uh, you.
True, but as the story points out, if you just want mindless old movies and no Live sports, or current programming you might be happy streaming crap quality shows onto a small tablet. Save the TV money for quality Blueray disks. But you can't be a sports fan very easily unless you settle for 1960's era image quality.
Wipe utilities to pointless overwrites with multiple binary patterns.
Microsoft realizes no on has ever recovered a disk drive from even one overwrite, so they could theoretically write the entire drive in what ever time the hardware is physically capable of a single pass write of every sector.
Can that be done in two minutes? Don't know. But if you forego read-back after write, (indeed, any verification step), you probably could do that. You don't have to actually transfer any data over the bus if the drive has this capability built in.
Quote: It’s Never Been Done – In nearly seven years working as a computer forensic examiner, and in several hours spent searching the Internet and speaking with peers, I’ve never heard of a single verifiable case where MFM was used to recover sensitive data. If anyone knows of such a case, please, by all means, share it with the rest of us.
In fact, Gutmann himself states in the epilogue of his paper that drives have changed a great deal since he originally wrote it and that the method described would probably not work on current drives.
That's right, the guy who discovered the ability to THEORETICALLY recover a drive bit by bit with an electron microscope doesn't believe it.
Wired reported a lot of unsubstantiated stuff over a decade ago. They continue to do so right up to this day.
If you are going to quote me, don't cherry pick:
Forensics has never recovered more than a few random bytes, not so much as a single sentence in real world tests of single pass over-writes.
Go back and read that article and trace it to its source and you will find it was based on a set up job in a lab in controlled environment with virgin disks where they knew exactly what they were looking for and exactly where it was on the disk and exactly what it had been over written with and exactly how many times.
A full format does not complete that quickly. We are well past FAT here. You didn't do a full format if it completed in two minutes. You fat fingered something along the way.
Windows 7 on line faq states the data is erased. Go prove that wrong before you make blanket statements.
A full format does NOT. The difference between a Quick and a Full format is that a Full format will attempt to READ the full disk after a format, while the Quick, simply writes a new table.
When you choose to run a regular format on a volume, files are removed from the volume that you are formatting and the hard disk is scanned for bad sectors. The scan for bad sectors is responsible for the majority of the time that it takes to format a volume.
If you choose the Quick format option, format removes files from the partition, but does not scan the disk for bad sectors. Only use this option if your hard disk has been previously formatted and you are sure that your hard disk is not damaged.
You can't test for bad sectors with a read-only pass of the disk, you have to write each byte, and try to read it. Left unsaid is whether the scan-for-bad-sectors uses a destructive write technique, or a pick-it-up, write-underneath, and put-it-back-down non destructive write technique. This omission has lead to emphatic statements on both sides of the issue. Often by people who only write blogs for a living.
Quick format is a formatting option that creates a new file table on a hard disk but does not fully overwrite or erase the disk. A quick format is much faster than a normal format, which fully erases any existing data on the hard disk.
Since they now say that the data is fully erased, I tend to suspect it is so, because it would only take one court case to reveal the truth, and tag Microsoft with huge claims for false advertising.
Forensics has never recovered more than a few random bytes, not so much as a single sentence in real world tests of single pass over-writes. Even using electron microscopes and the whole nine yards. The more you research this issue the more you realize all (yes ALL) the stories are based on contrived situations where they researchers knew EXACTLY what was written previously, EXACTLY where, and EXACTLY what it was over written with.
Even three letter agencies don't even bother trying on disks they know have been overwritten. Nobody has demonstrated it in the real world on ANY hard drive, let alone a recent one.
Slashdot Mirror
Activities have always been something of a niche feature, with most people being perfectly content to use multiple desktops
which have been available since the Pleistocene. Having tools on the desktop in the form of widgets or switching the entire look and feel based on when you stop work and start relaxing were just about the whole selling point of activities, but none of these were problems to begin with.
Unfortunately, the KDE team let one small group of designers (two people, as best as I can figure out) run away with the desktop for several releases trying to foist Activities on the userbase. In later releases, the bitch level got so high that the rest of the KDE team have pretty much got those individuals under control, and sanity has returned. You can pretty much avoid activities now entirely, or at least make them sit silently in the background managing nothing but wallpaper.
Any service with a commenting section is full of people projecting their anger and insecurities on others. Given the nature of slashdot, it's particularly bad here.
And anyone using the word "haters" is right up there among the most insecure.
What ever happened to a difference of opinion?
I personally dislike Gnome, but I certainly don't "hate" it.
I much prefer KDE, but I understand people who want things much simpler.
This will be a welcome change.
There is still a maddening separation of some visual elements that have to be adjusted in QT rather than KDE, and some applications that seemingly never made it to the KDE bandwagon.
Thanks KDE, your releases just keep getting better. The Metadata info will be great to have.
True, but many of these features have been there for several releases.
Metadata has been available in the Information sidebar for well over a year.
Detachable Konsole tabs have been there since KDE 3.5 days (what, almost 5 years now?).
PDF annotations in ocular have been there for many prior releases, only the option to print them is new.
And Kontact PIM is still a mess.
So most of these are minor improvements to an already excellent desktop that far surpasses anything else in this market segment.
Additionally, whoever came up with the name "Uwingu" for a space program should be smacked in the mouth with a rolled-up newspaper.
My thoughts exactly. Swahili for 'sky' ???
You want to appeal to my wallet? Start by naming it something from a civilization that at least got as far as indoor plumbing.
Of the Australian government succumbs to "Pressure" of a two line blub in mean-nothing publication meant more to justify the Trade Rep's budget with the front office than anything else, well, that's your problem.
Yet that appears to be exactly what you are claiming: The Australian Government rolled over in the face of this single whispered sentence and canceled their plans to require patient date to be kept in-country.
Unbelievable. Such spines!
Exactly.
Click fraud has been a huge problem. Even Google has had to put mechanisms in place to detect it and control it.
But none of these ad companies have a real strong incentive to do so, other than to maintain a reputation for fairness
among advertisers. Facebook? Fairness? Reputation?
In my day job we were a Google advertiser, and on more than one occasion we started seeing huge spikes in clicks
when we did nothing different on the web site or in commerce to warrant such an increase.
I called Google about it, and they ran a review of the clicks and dropped the actual click count to below what
it had been prior. They do respond, but you have to complain some times.
They are especially good at catching bots.
We've put a ceiling on the amount we will pay for these clicks, and when ever that ceiling is reached we get
a notice from Google. Unless we just started an advertising campaign in the trade rags (or something to generate that
increase in traffic), we usually just file another click fraud complaint to them and they invariably
we are the target of another E-Gold "get paid to click ads" scam.
(We always suspect, but can never prove that one of our competitors is behind this click fest to drive my ads off the
search results by over-running our limits, because they always seem to happen when they launch a new product).
So then what's the problem?
The ruling does not affect studies, and with their sterling credentials they should easily be able to get their methods approved and go on to license the technology or make millions selling seminars and training. Wouldn't government approval be a gold mine for them both in money and prestige?
What precisely is the problem?
Screaming? Hardly. Nobody ever head of this site, and nothing was done about the proposal, and the bill died in committee.
Some companies complained. Big deal. NOTHING came of it. The Government did nothing.
Next?
precisely because of the US government's fondness for spying on everything.
Yet again another ridiculous claim without a single reference to support it.
Please point to any credible source that documents the REASON the US "screams" protectionism about data storage.
Also please point to one documented incidence of the US "screaming" protectionism with regard to other country's data storage laws.
Be careful what you wish for.
Imagine a situation where nobody ever thought of creating a food and drug agency, and every bit of food you purchased, and every medicine you needed could never be assumed to be either wholesome or effective. Anyone could put something on the market, make any claim they wanted, and sell it.
Buy a crappy Cell phone? Get a new one, and count it as a lesson learned.
Buy an crappy anti Cancer drug? Well, there is always re-incarnation to hope for....
There are some issues in the real world where no regulation is deadly.
Yours is a very short sighted view.
You essentially are claiming people can't band together to protect one another by keeping shysters out of the market place. Yet there has never been a time in human history where this was not done at some level, even if it just meant stoning the vendor trying to pawn off ropy flour or spoiled meat. That banding together is what we did when we created the Food and Drug administration, the FTC, the NRC, and a few other agencies entrusted to keep unsafe things out of the market place.
You can still vote with your feet. You can still buy unlicensed untested drugs. Perhaps just not here.
Look, its fairly easy to get into the "cloud" business as the only barriers are financial, not technical.
Other than power, It costs about the same to run a data center with 200 cores as it costs to run one with 500 cores.
You might hire one more tech support person. Maybe. Probably not.
There will be few jobs outsourced to Texas, other than janitorial ones, because the hosting company
is only going to be running the machines, the Mexican hotel chain will still be managing them and
running their own booking software.
They are shedding physical plant, not jobs.
What they surrender is control. If the data center is accused of hosting some IP pirate nodes, the Mexican hotel
chain could find their servers are grabbed by the FBI in some heavy handed Anti-Pirate operation.
In that case, you should lobby for the complete defunding of the Food and Drug Administration.
But failing to achieve that aim, you will have to put up with the majority view that such protection is
in the best interest of society.
There is precious little difference between a teenager and gullible low IQ adults that are easily hoodwinked by medical charlatans.
One key similarity between these groups is the belief that they are fully capable of making their own medical decisions, even
when they haven't the slightest clue about the underlying biology.
Do you have some kind of knee-jerk, inherit distrust of anyone with the title of Dr?
No, only those pushing unproven treatments.
Stay up late an watch all those guys with a title of Dr pushing these things on late night TV ads.
If, after a few nights of this, you still trust everyone with a Dr after their name, then Dr. Icebike has some very cheap lake front building lots to sell you on the shores of Central Park Lake, in the heart of NYC.
Your response only makes sense if you BELIEVE these unproven procedures will work.
Which of course already makes you the sucker that society is trying to protect. Go get a proven treatment, and stop trusting charlatans.
If you are given all the known facts upfront, you should be able to make your own choice.
You need only apply this line of reasoning to other endeavors to realize it simply is not true.
Many, if not most people can not possibly make a rational decision even when presented with "all the known facts" simply because they can't
interpret the research, due to inadequate education and training.
One of the best services government supplies (other than keeping the roads patched) is preventing con artists from selling useless and dangerous products to uneducated and gullible people. This prevention costs far less than attempting to give each gullible and uneducated person a doctorate in biochemistry so that they could understand "all the known facts".
Your 14 year old daughter comes home and tells you she wants to run off with this charismatic pimp and get rich being a prostitute. You sit her down and explain "all the known facts". She rolls her eyes and runs upstairs to pack her suitcase. Do you sit idly by and say "well, she was given all the known facts upfront, it's her choice"? Most parents (perhaps not you) say no way, call the cops, because they see it as their job to protect those who can not understand, or refuse to believe "all the known facts".
Society has take the same stance with highly complex technical medical practices.
You can still find and obtain these unproven medical treatments, but society is not going to allow them to be sold in the market until they are proven. This is done because 1) there are real pimps in the world, 2) when it comes to extremely complex medical procedures a very large percentage of us are 14 years old.
Trouble is..this is gonna stop a LOT of use tx going on now with private physicians!!
I know some doctors that have been having wonderful, and in some cases amazing results with this type of treatment. And now, sadly, you will have federal bureaucrats and miles of red tape standing in the way.
Wait, you know this HOW? Because these doctors TELL you so? (chortle).
If the results are THAT good, they should be able to prove it fairly easily, right?
So no problem. It gets approved.
On the other hand, if (like way way too many) their claims are baseless, they get booted from the market before they can hoodwink people like, well, uh, you.
I feel pretty much the same about movies.
So, you watch what you want, and I'll ask for no explanations from you, an provide none of my own.
True, but as the story points out, if you just want mindless old movies and no Live sports, or current programming you might be happy streaming crap quality shows onto a small tablet. Save the TV money for quality Blueray disks. But you can't be a sports fan very easily unless you settle for 1960's era image quality.
Wipe utilities to pointless overwrites with multiple binary patterns.
Microsoft realizes no on has ever recovered a disk drive from even one overwrite, so they could theoretically write the entire drive in what ever time the hardware is physically capable of a single pass write of every sector.
Can that be done in two minutes? Don't know. But if you forego read-back after write, (indeed, any verification step), you probably could do that. You don't have to actually transfer any data over the bus if the drive has this capability built in.
Oh, and read this too: http://www.heliosdf.com/blog/?p=47
Quote:
It’s Never Been Done – In nearly seven years working as a computer forensic examiner, and in several hours spent searching the Internet and speaking with peers, I’ve never heard of a single verifiable case where MFM was used to recover sensitive data. If anyone knows of such a case, please, by all means, share it with the rest of us.
In fact, Gutmann himself states in the epilogue of his paper that drives have changed a great deal since he originally wrote it and that the method described would probably not work on current drives.
That's right, the guy who discovered the ability to THEORETICALLY recover a drive bit by bit with an electron microscope doesn't believe it.
Wired reported a lot of unsubstantiated stuff over a decade ago.
They continue to do so right up to this day.
If you are going to quote me, don't cherry pick:
Forensics has never recovered more than a few random bytes, not so much as a single sentence in real world tests of single pass over-writes.
Go back and read that article and trace it to its source and you will find it was based on a set up job
in a lab in controlled environment with virgin disks where they knew exactly what they were
looking for and exactly where it was on the disk and exactly what it had been over written with
and exactly how many times.
Please go back and read the thread.
A full format does not complete that quickly. We are well past FAT here.
You didn't do a full format if it completed in two minutes. You fat fingered something along the way.
Windows 7 on line faq states the data is erased. Go prove that wrong before you make blanket statements.
A full format does NOT.
The difference between a Quick and a Full format is that a Full format will attempt to READ the full disk after a format, while the Quick, simply writes a new table.
For older versions of windows, Microsoft says:
When you choose to run a regular format on a volume, files are removed from the volume that you are formatting and the hard disk is scanned for bad sectors. The scan for bad sectors is responsible for the majority of the time that it takes to format a volume.
If you choose the Quick format option, format removes files from the partition, but does not scan the disk for bad sectors. Only use this option if your hard disk has been previously formatted and you are sure that your hard disk is not damaged.
You can't test for bad sectors with a read-only pass of the disk, you have to write each byte, and try to read it.
Left unsaid is whether the scan-for-bad-sectors uses a destructive write technique, or a pick-it-up, write-underneath, and put-it-back-down non destructive write technique. This omission has lead to emphatic statements on both sides of the issue. Often by people who only write blogs for a living.
For windows 7, Microsoft says:
Quick format is a formatting option that creates a new file table on a hard disk but does not fully overwrite or erase the disk. A quick format is much faster than a normal format, which fully erases any existing data on the hard disk.
Since they now say that the data is fully erased, I tend to suspect it is so, because it would only take one court case to reveal the truth, and tag Microsoft with huge claims for false advertising.
Forensics has never recovered more than a few random bytes, not so much as a single sentence in real world tests of single pass over-writes.
Even using electron microscopes and the whole nine yards. The more you research this issue the more you realize all (yes ALL) the stories are based on contrived situations where they researchers knew EXACTLY what was written previously, EXACTLY where, and EXACTLY what it was over written with.
Even three letter agencies don't even bother trying on disks they know have been overwritten. Nobody has demonstrated it in the real world on ANY hard drive, let alone a recent one.