I'm using Ubuntu Breezy with an Intel 802.11g card, and it works just fine - it worked out of the box with no tuning on my part. AFAIK most old 802.11b cards Just Work - the problem comes when you go to 802.11g; there you want to avoid Broadcomm, since drivers for Broadcomm chipsets on Linux are spotty. I don't know why the Intel is better, but for whatever reason, it is (I'm sure there is a reason - I just don't follow those drivers very closely).
You may run into trouble when you are in a situation where there's more than one network. NetworkManager should take care of that, but it's bleeding edge right now. You can select networks from the command line, and there are widgets for selecting the network in Kde and Gtk which do seem to work, but the UI isn't very easy to use yet. NM should be easier; stay tuned.
Re:Why would you treat someone else differently...
on
Drink Decaf and Die
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· Score: 1
There isn't anything special about food. The reason I mentioned it was that someone was belittling the idea of giving a food service job a name that had some implicit cachet - barista instead of coffee server. I think it's cool that Starbucks is treating their employees as if what they do is cool, not ordinary.
Pulling espressos is about 50% the job itself, and 50% interaction with the customer. If you just wanted an espresso, you'd buy a machine - if you get an espresso drink every day, you could pay for the quite expensive equipment required to make your own espresso in about a year, so there's no reason to ever go to *$$ or your local family-owned coffee shop unless you want something more than just an espresso drink.
So the 50% of the job that's not pulling the espresso is, essentially, being somebody that your customers want to see on a regular basis. And if you are the customer, then your job, should you choose to accept it, is turning the person behind the counter into someone you want to see every day. If you don't want that job, brew your own coffee.
Anyway, the point is that when you say "so those people get less respect from me" you are saying that you have abdicated your power to decide to be who you want to be to the other person; if they act toward you the way you want people to act toward you, then you will act back in kind, and if they don't, you won't either. Why not take the power into your own hands, and just be nice to everybody, regardless of how they treat you?
When you say this, the long form of your argument goes like this:
1. There is a way that people should act. They should be respectful towards each other. 2. This person has been disrespectful to me - they have acted contrary to the way people should act. 3. Because of this, I am going to act the same way they have decided to act - I am going to disrespect them back.
Consider what would happen if every single person in the world thought this way. Would it ever be possible that people would stop disrespecting each other? Now consider this line of reasoning:
1. There is a way that people should act. They should be respectful towards each other. 2. This person has been disrespectful to me - they have acted contrary to the way people should act. 3. Just because this person doesn't know how to act properly doesn't mean that I should also act improperly, so I am going to treat them with respect even though they haven't treated me that way.
What would happen if 10% of the people in the world held to this way of thinking? How would the world change?
Because if they put poison in your food, you die. If they make your food well, it gives you pleasure. And if you treat them like drones, you're encouraging them to give you drone food. Don't try to tell me it doesn't matter - even at a place like McDonalds it's possible to get comparitively good or bad service.
Furthermore, how do you want to be treated? With respect, or like a drone? If with respect, then you're just like everybody else. Why would you treat someone else differently than you yourself would like to be treated?
It's not so much that in treating someone else with respect, you ensure that they treat you with respect. That's not the case, as I'm sure you've experienced. But if you refuse to put negative energy into the world, that's less negative energy in the world, and ultimately that means less negative energy coming back at you, even if it doesn't work in the moment. And when you put positive energy into the world, then that's more positive energy in the world that can come back to you later. I know it sounds a bit lovey-dovey, but on a practical level it does seem to work.
Maybe if you treated McDonalds workers better, you'd enjoy the food there more?
I've noticed over the years that there's this strong stratification in society, where some jobs are "okay", and some are "lower class." A person who sees themselves as "in" expects peopel with "lower class" jobs to provide them with good service, but has no respect for those who provide them that service.
Calling an espresso maker a "barista" adds some cachet to the job, and maybe gives some respect to the barista that is missing from the term "burger flipper". I have trouble seeing that as a bad thing. People who make food for you deserve your respect. The fact that you don't respect them is why it's so hard to find a decent food experience anymore these days.
I assume what you've said is essentially a troll, but I can't resist. You are actually a poseur, in the most basic sense - you are projecting an attitude about something in a way that implies it is the only correct attitude. Lamers who drink coffee because they like the way it tastes are simply deluded, from the view you present.
I will admit that there is some justice to your view - the amount of effort I spend making coffee in the morning is kind of bizarre. However, for what it's worth, the ritual evolved naturally, and I can in fact taste and enjoy the difference between the coffee I brew and what is typically served in a restaurant. I am sorry that you do not share this enjoyment, but as long as coffee does for you what you want, it's all good, right?
As for the whole robusta vs. arabica thing, espresso fiends should be aware that a lot of espresso includes robusta beans to sharpen the flavor. Robusta has a bad rep because a lot of cheap coffee is made with robusta, but it is a legitimate bean with a legitimate flavor that works well in some blends.
That's one side of the value proposition, but the other side is that the Mac UI is a _lot_ nicer than the Windows UI (at least for a lot of end-users), so Windows-native apps running under MacOS are going to feel really clunky, and it will be a competitive advantage for vendors who decide to actually support the Mac. And for vendors the decide never to support the Mac, we can still use their software if we must, which is a big improvement over the current state of the art.
What makes you think the person with the hundred million in pocket is going to write that check? Give me a break!
The problem with political parties isn't that they have grassroots support. It's that they're institutionalized to the point where they are our only choices. If you want to get elected these days, and your positions aren't in line with either of the two parties, your only choice is to take over one of the parties. That's what happened to the Republicans.:'|
The way patent law works is that you can patent an innovation based on an old invention. This patent is clearly a derivative of the Rip van Winkel method, but it contains novel functionality, so it's elegible to be patented. The story Rip van Winkel does not infringe, but if the author of this patent is clever, he can probably register patents with sufficient claims to make it difficult for an author to write a story in the tradition of Rip van Winkel. In effect, he will be able to corner the market. Pharmaceutical companies do this all the time - it's business as usual.
I can't wait until someone starts patenting guitar picking and fretting styles. Soon we will have nothing left to do but meditate. That's probably safe until they figure out a way to reliably observe what your mind is doing, and then you'll have to stop doing things that are covered by patents.
We are getting a little bit carried away here, since the PTO hasn't actually granted the patent yet, but the fact that there's someone out there who's willing to put their name on a patent application like this is amazing. This person is lower than a spammer.
Soros probably contributed for infrastructure or salaries or something. I don't know what to tell you. Whenever *I* contribute to Moveon, they ask me to certify that I haven't given more than my limit for the year. You can speculate all you want about Soros, but I'm talking about my own personal experience here, and Soros isn't, so if you want to go from hard data rather than speculation, I think you're stuck with accepting that Moveon is obeying the law.
What makes you think that the fringe candidate we really need in office has a billion bucks in her back pocket? The reality is that except for rich poseurs like Forbes and Bloomberg, fringe candidates have to raise money the hard way, just like everyone else.
The big problem with campaign finance is that corporations have freedom of speech. Of course human beings should have freedom of speech, but I see no reason why a corporation should have the same freedom. The simple hack here is to just make it illegal for corporations to contribute to campaign advertising. Unfortunately, because corporations are "persons," there's no way to do this, so we wind up with all kinds of crazy laws that try to place limits on campaign financing by corporations in ways that are arguably unconstitutional.
A little more on fringe vs. non-fringe. I made a conscious decision a couple of years back to try to run mainstream stuff, not because I like it (I don't) or because it's better (it isn't), but because I can't help the people who aren't early adopters if I'm running fringe stuff.
If you are serious about taking Linux to the masses, run something mainstream for a year, don't try to customize it to look like the stuff you prefer, and just get used to it. It grows on you, believe it or not. Being a hacker is partly about being different, not conforming. That is a strength of the geek community - we dare to be different. But insofar as Linux adoption is concerned, it is a weakness. Just as it's easier to get a date if you dress in a way that conforms to the group you aspire to be a member of, it's easier to get acceptance if you conform to the general expectations of the average computer user.
That doesn't mean you can't innovate, but just as an abstract artist needs to learn how to paint realistic paintings before moving on to abstract art, so a Linux geek who wants to develop stuff that sees wide adoption needs to become fluent in the UI language that most people speak - Windows or Mac (I recommend Mac, because it's actually better, but still widely accepted). Get to the point where you're fond of it, which will take a year, and *then* start seeing if there are ways to innovate within the constraints of mainstream usability. You will find that there are.
Here are some basic things that are wrong with my very slick ubuntu system:
1. Sound doesn't work without massive fiddling. I think I happen to have gotten unlucky in this, but it took me a huge amount of effort to get sound working. I am not sure what I did to get it working. I think it was one of several support libraries that wasn't installed. Moral: don't unbundle. Throw in everything the user needs. If you are a moby geek, sure, go for a slimmable distribution, but if your target is the other 95%, it has to Just Work, out of the box. So sacrifice disk space for functionality. X has to successfully probe the monitor and correctly identify the modes that it supports, as well as its physical dimensions; when a new monitor is plugged in, X has to be able to cleanly identify the new modes that are available, and support multiple monitors, and all that crap that Windows and OSX Just Do, completely transparently. Because Xorg is so dependent on static configuration, if something blows away the magic config you put in xorg.conf (which happened to me recently), you're in for an hour of hacking on the part of a serious geek to get it working nicely again. Most people are simply going to wind up with a configuration that isn't optimal, and not know what to do about it. Impression: linux is ugly. It isn't if it's configured right, but it's hard to configure it right. My linux screen looks really nice now, but it took a lot of extremely geeky fiddling to get it that way.
2. UI is massively inconsistent, and massively clunky. You want a person's first experience of Linux to be "wow, this is a lot easier to use." If it's "wow, this is a little funky," then they're going to stick with Windows. The 5% that are running Linux are early adopters, and they're willing to suffer to be on the bleeding edge. Most people aren't early adopters; for them it has to Just Work. Say what you want about Windows - after it's installed you're going to be sorry - but it works out of the box, for the most part, and when it doesn't, it's a matter of downloading a few drivers that install easily with installshield. Linux is better technology under the hood, but the usability isn't there.
3. Consistency. My laptop moves around a lot, and peripherals change a lot. My trackpad doesn't work if I start X at my desk, because I have a trackball and keyboard at my desk, and these throw off the device probing. You hear a lot of stories like this. I put my machine to sleep, and nine times out of ten it comes up with a blank screen and I have to hard boot it to get it back; the other time, it works fine. Things sort of work, but they're fragile. If something works, it's got to keep working. This kind of inconsistency is just not something anybody but an early adopter is going to accept. It looks like the problem with X is that it's simply not probing APM correctly, which is because my system does ACPI, not APM. The X wizards probably already have a solution for this, but it's not on my running system, Ubuntu Breezy, so it's not helping me.
4. None of my data transferred over (I switched from Mac), except for IMAP email, because that uses IMAP. All my address book information is stuck on my Mac where I can't use it. My calendar is on my Mac too. There's no interoperability, nor even a way to transfer the data over once and leave it. Given that there are standards for exchanging this data, it ought to be possible.
5. The sights are too low, so even early adopters are underwhelmed. Linux doesn't try to do anything new - it just does what MacOS X does, only not as well. Under the hood it's about the same as OSX, and much better than Windows, but from the user's perspective it's not as good as either of these two competitors. It's hard to compete, because Windows and Mac are both single corporate messages, and Linux is a free-for-all; both its strength and its weakness.
You'd think that free word processing and stuff would make a difference, but people would ra
No offense, man, but this is a bunch of hooey. The average person's biggest obstacle to switching to Linux, other than the unbelievably inconsistent UI, is that Microsoft Word doesn't run there. The way to fix this problem is not to get Microsoft Word to run on Linux - you do that, and we're all still Microsoft vassals. The way to fix this problem is to have OpenOffice or AbiWord freely available on Windows, so that people stop paying the Microsoft Word tax. If you can break that monopoly, then people can switch back and forth between Windows and Linux depending on their personal preferences, rather than being forced to use a particular platform to access a particular application.
So in fact, the best thing you can do if you want to encourage people to switch to Linux *is* to port your favorite app to Windows, and do a good job of it.
And while you're at it, for the love of God, read up on good UI design!:'}
Gaim is actually pretty pathetic compared to what Apple ships. When I connect to AIM from iChat, I see peoples' names and their pictures. In GAIM, I see their AIM ID, which is usually something weird that I may not even recognize, and usually no picture (it gets some pictures, and not others; I don't know why). GAIM wins over AIM because there are no ads - AIM on Windows is absolutely repulsive, to the point where I simply won't run it. Kopete is even worse than GAIM - it gets _no_ images.
I'm really being an asshole by saying these things about GAIM and Kopete, though - both applications are very slick if you don't compare them to Apple's offering. They seem pathetic in comparison, but on their own they are very nice.
Is this the thing that really needs to be fixed for Linux to take off? Frankly I'm not convinced. Reliable device drivers would be nice. A consistent UI would be nice. A fancy instant messager? I don't think that's going to be the thing that makes the difference, although it's certainly worth pursuing if someone has time.
By consistent UI, consider this. KDE has a really nice PIM application called Kontact, which actually subsumes several other applications, including kmail. Kmail is probably the nicest mail program out there other than Apple's Mail.app, and in some ways it's nicer. Kontact also includes an RSS feed watcher called Akregator. To move from one email message to the next in kmail, you hit 'n'. In akregator, you hit the right arrow. The up and down arrows, which are what I would *expect* to work consistently, do nothing in either application.
It would be great to have a nice IM tool, but frankly if we can't manage a consistent UI, where I have some ability to predict what's going to happen when I hit a particular key without reading the instructions, only people who really strongly believe they need to be running Linux are going to run it; everyone else is going to give up in frustration.
BTW, I'm picking on KDE, but I actually just gave up on Gnome and tossed it; in my mind, KDE has a much more consistent UI than Gnome, but it still needs a *lot* of work.
On the hopeful side, KDE is *hugely* improved from the last time I used it. About a year and a half ago I was running Linux with KDE, and it was so visually unappealing (okay, I'm shallow, I admit it) that I ditched it and switched back to Mac. This time the visuals are a _lot_ better. But we still need a more consistent UI. Scratch that. We need a consistent UI. The current UI lacks any quality of consistency.
No, the card has a small on-board computer. You hand it something, it encodes it, and then you present that to another device that also knows the secret. The other device verifies that you have the thing that knows the secret, but you never find out the secret. So it's not just "a signal" - it's a mechanism. That's what makes it "secure". I say "secure" because you are right that in theory you can always get the secret out.
The deal is that it should be more expensive to get the secret out than to just not have whatever the secret is protecting. Then there's no reason to try to get the secret - it's not worth having. All security systems essentially boil down to that tradeoff - even physical security systems.
Just to be clear here, if you type in the key, that's even easier to hack than the biometric scan, if only because the amount of data is smaller. If someone has physical access to your machine while you're authenticating, you're screwed whether you're using a biometric scan or a memorized access code.
The difference is that in the case of a biometric scan, the decryption key to your data is stored as plaintext on your computer, if they even bother to encrypt the data at all. So if I can steal your computer, I can decrypt your data, and there's no need for any clever Spy vs Spy tricks like USB sniffing or replay attacks. You just get the key and use it.
So this is another case of a "protection mechanism" that makes you feel safe, and actually makes you less safe, because that feeling of safety allows you to think you don't need to take precautions, when in fact you do.
Tragically, you are mistaken in this case. Biometric data is analog. All the scanner can say is "yes, that looks like the right fingerprint," or "no, that doesn't look like the right fingerprint." It can't produce a consistent digital value that is derived from the fingerprint. It is possible to make a fingerprint scanner that's self-contained and emits a key whenever it gets a match, but that's probably not what IBM is doing, because that would require putting a fairly expensive CPU in the fingerprint scanner.
You can't use them to protect your hard drive. All it takes to get the data off is for someone to pull the hard drive out and put it in a different system. You are better off sticking with PGP, which actually encrypts the data.
ANSI's model for printing standards is in fact outdated, and that's unfortunate, but it is still a standard. You can implement it without paying any sort of license fee, although you do have to fork over the bux for a copy of the standard. If you can afford to spend tens of thousands of geek-hours building a database management system, you can probably afford to spend $400 sometime during that development cycle to buy a copy of the standard that everyone else, including the other open source databases, implements.
No offense, but that's not the problem. I don't mind if the queries are more or less efficient in one database than another, although I would argue that this is a flaw in the database implementation for the slower database.
The problem is when the SQL code doesn't work on a different SQL engine, not when it's slower.
Were I you, by the way, I would not brag in public about how enamored you are of non-portable code - it's not good for your job prospects.
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I'm using Ubuntu Breezy with an Intel 802.11g card, and it works just fine - it worked out of the box with no tuning on my part. AFAIK most old 802.11b cards Just Work - the problem comes when you go to 802.11g; there you want to avoid Broadcomm, since drivers for Broadcomm chipsets on Linux are spotty. I don't know why the Intel is better, but for whatever reason, it is (I'm sure there is a reason - I just don't follow those drivers very closely).
You may run into trouble when you are in a situation where there's more than one network. NetworkManager should take care of that, but it's bleeding edge right now. You can select networks from the command line, and there are widgets for selecting the network in Kde and Gtk which do seem to work, but the UI isn't very easy to use yet. NM should be easier; stay tuned.
There isn't anything special about food. The reason I mentioned it was that someone was belittling the idea of giving a food service job a name that had some implicit cachet - barista instead of coffee server. I think it's cool that Starbucks is treating their employees as if what they do is cool, not ordinary.
Pulling espressos is about 50% the job itself, and 50% interaction with the customer. If you just wanted an espresso, you'd buy a machine - if you get an espresso drink every day, you could pay for the quite expensive equipment required to make your own espresso in about a year, so there's no reason to ever go to *$$ or your local family-owned coffee shop unless you want something more than just an espresso drink.
So the 50% of the job that's not pulling the espresso is, essentially, being somebody that your customers want to see on a regular basis. And if you are the customer, then your job, should you choose to accept it, is turning the person behind the counter into someone you want to see every day. If you don't want that job, brew your own coffee.
Anyway, the point is that when you say "so those people get less respect from me" you are saying that you have abdicated your power to decide to be who you want to be to the other person; if they act toward you the way you want people to act toward you, then you will act back in kind, and if they don't, you won't either. Why not take the power into your own hands, and just be nice to everybody, regardless of how they treat you?
When you say this, the long form of your argument goes like this:
1. There is a way that people should act. They should be respectful towards each other.
2. This person has been disrespectful to me - they have acted contrary to the way people should act.
3. Because of this, I am going to act the same way they have decided to act - I am going to disrespect them back.
Consider what would happen if every single person in the world thought this way. Would it ever be possible that people would stop disrespecting each other? Now consider this line of reasoning:
1. There is a way that people should act. They should be respectful towards each other.
2. This person has been disrespectful to me - they have acted contrary to the way people should act.
3. Just because this person doesn't know how to act properly doesn't mean that I should also act improperly, so I am going to treat them with respect even though they haven't treated me that way.
What would happen if 10% of the people in the world held to this way of thinking? How would the world change?
Because if they put poison in your food, you die. If they make your food well, it gives you pleasure. And if you treat them like drones, you're encouraging them to give you drone food. Don't try to tell me it doesn't matter - even at a place like McDonalds it's possible to get comparitively good or bad service.
Furthermore, how do you want to be treated? With respect, or like a drone? If with respect, then you're just like everybody else. Why would you treat someone else differently than you yourself would like to be treated?
It's not so much that in treating someone else with respect, you ensure that they treat you with respect. That's not the case, as I'm sure you've experienced. But if you refuse to put negative energy into the world, that's less negative energy in the world, and ultimately that means less negative energy coming back at you, even if it doesn't work in the moment. And when you put positive energy into the world, then that's more positive energy in the world that can come back to you later. I know it sounds a bit lovey-dovey, but on a practical level it does seem to work.
Maybe if you treated McDonalds workers better, you'd enjoy the food there more?
I've noticed over the years that there's this strong stratification in society, where some jobs are "okay", and some are "lower class." A person who sees themselves as "in" expects peopel with "lower class" jobs to provide them with good service, but has no respect for those who provide them that service.
Calling an espresso maker a "barista" adds some cachet to the job, and maybe gives some respect to the barista that is missing from the term "burger flipper". I have trouble seeing that as a bad thing. People who make food for you deserve your respect. The fact that you don't respect them is why it's so hard to find a decent food experience anymore these days.
I assume what you've said is essentially a troll, but I can't resist. You are actually a poseur, in the most basic sense - you are projecting an attitude about something in a way that implies it is the only correct attitude. Lamers who drink coffee because they like the way it tastes are simply deluded, from the view you present.
I will admit that there is some justice to your view - the amount of effort I spend making coffee in the morning is kind of bizarre. However, for what it's worth, the ritual evolved naturally, and I can in fact taste and enjoy the difference between the coffee I brew and what is typically served in a restaurant. I am sorry that you do not share this enjoyment, but as long as coffee does for you what you want, it's all good, right?
As for the whole robusta vs. arabica thing, espresso fiends should be aware that a lot of espresso includes robusta beans to sharpen the flavor. Robusta has a bad rep because a lot of cheap coffee is made with robusta, but it is a legitimate bean with a legitimate flavor that works well in some blends.
That's one side of the value proposition, but the other side is that the Mac UI is a _lot_ nicer than the Windows UI (at least for a lot of end-users), so Windows-native apps running under MacOS are going to feel really clunky, and it will be a competitive advantage for vendors who decide to actually support the Mac. And for vendors the decide never to support the Mac, we can still use their software if we must, which is a big improvement over the current state of the art.
What makes you think the person with the hundred million in pocket is going to write that check? Give me a break!
:'|
The problem with political parties isn't that they have grassroots support. It's that they're institutionalized to the point where they are our only choices. If you want to get elected these days, and your positions aren't in line with either of the two parties, your only choice is to take over one of the parties. That's what happened to the Republicans.
The way patent law works is that you can patent an innovation based on an old invention. This patent is clearly a derivative of the Rip van Winkel method, but it contains novel functionality, so it's elegible to be patented. The story Rip van Winkel does not infringe, but if the author of this patent is clever, he can probably register patents with sufficient claims to make it difficult for an author to write a story in the tradition of Rip van Winkel. In effect, he will be able to corner the market. Pharmaceutical companies do this all the time - it's business as usual.
I can't wait until someone starts patenting guitar picking and fretting styles. Soon we will have nothing left to do but meditate. That's probably safe until they figure out a way to reliably observe what your mind is doing, and then you'll have to stop doing things that are covered by patents.
We are getting a little bit carried away here, since the PTO hasn't actually granted the patent yet, but the fact that there's someone out there who's willing to put their name on a patent application like this is amazing. This person is lower than a spammer.
Soros probably contributed for infrastructure or salaries or something. I don't know what to tell you. Whenever *I* contribute to Moveon, they ask me to certify that I haven't given more than my limit for the year. You can speculate all you want about Soros, but I'm talking about my own personal experience here, and Soros isn't, so if you want to go from hard data rather than speculation, I think you're stuck with accepting that Moveon is obeying the law.
What makes you think that the fringe candidate we really need in office has a billion bucks in her back pocket? The reality is that except for rich poseurs like Forbes and Bloomberg, fringe candidates have to raise money the hard way, just like everyone else.
Actually, that's not true. Moveon is very careful not to violate the $2000 spending limit. Dunno about Swift Voat Bets, though.
The big problem with campaign finance is that corporations have freedom of speech. Of course human beings should have freedom of speech, but I see no reason why a corporation should have the same freedom. The simple hack here is to just make it illegal for corporations to contribute to campaign advertising. Unfortunately, because corporations are "persons," there's no way to do this, so we wind up with all kinds of crazy laws that try to place limits on campaign financing by corporations in ways that are arguably unconstitutional.
A little more on fringe vs. non-fringe. I made a conscious decision a couple of years back to try to run mainstream stuff, not because I like it (I don't) or because it's better (it isn't), but because I can't help the people who aren't early adopters if I'm running fringe stuff.
If you are serious about taking Linux to the masses, run something mainstream for a year, don't try to customize it to look like the stuff you prefer, and just get used to it. It grows on you, believe it or not. Being a hacker is partly about being different, not conforming. That is a strength of the geek community - we dare to be different. But insofar as Linux adoption is concerned, it is a weakness. Just as it's easier to get a date if you dress in a way that conforms to the group you aspire to be a member of, it's easier to get acceptance if you conform to the general expectations of the average computer user.
That doesn't mean you can't innovate, but just as an abstract artist needs to learn how to paint realistic paintings before moving on to abstract art, so a Linux geek who wants to develop stuff that sees wide adoption needs to become fluent in the UI language that most people speak - Windows or Mac (I recommend Mac, because it's actually better, but still widely accepted). Get to the point where you're fond of it, which will take a year, and *then* start seeing if there are ways to innovate within the constraints of mainstream usability. You will find that there are.
Here are some basic things that are wrong with my very slick ubuntu system:
1. Sound doesn't work without massive fiddling. I think I happen to have gotten unlucky in this, but it took me a huge amount of effort to get sound working. I am not sure what I did to get it working. I think it was one of several support libraries that wasn't installed. Moral: don't unbundle. Throw in everything the user needs. If you are a moby geek, sure, go for a slimmable distribution, but if your target is the other 95%, it has to Just Work, out of the box. So sacrifice disk space for functionality. X has to successfully probe the monitor and correctly identify the modes that it supports, as well as its physical dimensions; when a new monitor is plugged in, X has to be able to cleanly identify the new modes that are available, and support multiple monitors, and all that crap that Windows and OSX Just Do, completely transparently. Because Xorg is so dependent on static configuration, if something blows away the magic config you put in xorg.conf (which happened to me recently), you're in for an hour of hacking on the part of a serious geek to get it working nicely again. Most people are simply going to wind up with a configuration that isn't optimal, and not know what to do about it. Impression: linux is ugly. It isn't if it's configured right, but it's hard to configure it right. My linux screen looks really nice now, but it took a lot of extremely geeky fiddling to get it that way.
2. UI is massively inconsistent, and massively clunky. You want a person's first experience of Linux to be "wow, this is a lot easier to use." If it's "wow, this is a little funky," then they're going to stick with Windows. The 5% that are running Linux are early adopters, and they're willing to suffer to be on the bleeding edge. Most people aren't early adopters; for them it has to Just Work. Say what you want about Windows - after it's installed you're going to be sorry - but it works out of the box, for the most part, and when it doesn't, it's a matter of downloading a few drivers that install easily with installshield. Linux is better technology under the hood, but the usability isn't there.
3. Consistency. My laptop moves around a lot, and peripherals change a lot. My trackpad doesn't work if I start X at my desk, because I have a trackball and keyboard at my desk, and these throw off the device probing. You hear a lot of stories like this. I put my machine to sleep, and nine times out of ten it comes up with a blank screen and I have to hard boot it to get it back; the other time, it works fine. Things sort of work, but they're fragile. If something works, it's got to keep working. This kind of inconsistency is just not something anybody but an early adopter is going to accept. It looks like the problem with X is that it's simply not probing APM correctly, which is because my system does ACPI, not APM. The X wizards probably already have a solution for this, but it's not on my running system, Ubuntu Breezy, so it's not helping me.
4. None of my data transferred over (I switched from Mac), except for IMAP email, because that uses IMAP. All my address book information is stuck on my Mac where I can't use it. My calendar is on my Mac too. There's no interoperability, nor even a way to transfer the data over once and leave it. Given that there are standards for exchanging this data, it ought to be possible.
5. The sights are too low, so even early adopters are underwhelmed. Linux doesn't try to do anything new - it just does what MacOS X does, only not as well. Under the hood it's about the same as OSX, and much better than Windows, but from the user's perspective it's not as good as either of these two competitors. It's hard to compete, because Windows and Mac are both single corporate messages, and Linux is a free-for-all; both its strength and its weakness.
You'd think that free word processing and stuff would make a difference, but people would ra
No offense, man, but this is a bunch of hooey. The average person's biggest obstacle to switching to Linux, other than the unbelievably inconsistent UI, is that Microsoft Word doesn't run there. The way to fix this problem is not to get Microsoft Word to run on Linux - you do that, and we're all still Microsoft vassals. The way to fix this problem is to have OpenOffice or AbiWord freely available on Windows, so that people stop paying the Microsoft Word tax. If you can break that monopoly, then people can switch back and forth between Windows and Linux depending on their personal preferences, rather than being forced to use a particular platform to access a particular application.
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So in fact, the best thing you can do if you want to encourage people to switch to Linux *is* to port your favorite app to Windows, and do a good job of it.
And while you're at it, for the love of God, read up on good UI design!
Gaim is actually pretty pathetic compared to what Apple ships. When I connect to AIM from iChat, I see peoples' names and their pictures. In GAIM, I see their AIM ID, which is usually something weird that I may not even recognize, and usually no picture (it gets some pictures, and not others; I don't know why). GAIM wins over AIM because there are no ads - AIM on Windows is absolutely repulsive, to the point where I simply won't run it. Kopete is even worse than GAIM - it gets _no_ images.
I'm really being an asshole by saying these things about GAIM and Kopete, though - both applications are very slick if you don't compare them to Apple's offering. They seem pathetic in comparison, but on their own they are very nice.
Is this the thing that really needs to be fixed for Linux to take off? Frankly I'm not convinced. Reliable device drivers would be nice. A consistent UI would be nice. A fancy instant messager? I don't think that's going to be the thing that makes the difference, although it's certainly worth pursuing if someone has time.
By consistent UI, consider this. KDE has a really nice PIM application called Kontact, which actually subsumes several other applications, including kmail. Kmail is probably the nicest mail program out there other than Apple's Mail.app, and in some ways it's nicer. Kontact also includes an RSS feed watcher called Akregator. To move from one email message to the next in kmail, you hit 'n'. In akregator, you hit the right arrow. The up and down arrows, which are what I would *expect* to work consistently, do nothing in either application.
It would be great to have a nice IM tool, but frankly if we can't manage a consistent UI, where I have some ability to predict what's going to happen when I hit a particular key without reading the instructions, only people who really strongly believe they need to be running Linux are going to run it; everyone else is going to give up in frustration.
BTW, I'm picking on KDE, but I actually just gave up on Gnome and tossed it; in my mind, KDE has a much more consistent UI than Gnome, but it still needs a *lot* of work.
On the hopeful side, KDE is *hugely* improved from the last time I used it. About a year and a half ago I was running Linux with KDE, and it was so visually unappealing (okay, I'm shallow, I admit it) that I ditched it and switched back to Mac. This time the visuals are a _lot_ better. But we still need a more consistent UI. Scratch that. We need a consistent UI. The current UI lacks any quality of consistency.
No, the card has a small on-board computer. You hand it something, it encodes it, and then you present that to another device that also knows the secret. The other device verifies that you have the thing that knows the secret, but you never find out the secret. So it's not just "a signal" - it's a mechanism. That's what makes it "secure". I say "secure" because you are right that in theory you can always get the secret out.
The deal is that it should be more expensive to get the secret out than to just not have whatever the secret is protecting. Then there's no reason to try to get the secret - it's not worth having. All security systems essentially boil down to that tradeoff - even physical security systems.
Just to be clear here, if you type in the key, that's even easier to hack than the biometric scan, if only because the amount of data is smaller. If someone has physical access to your machine while you're authenticating, you're screwed whether you're using a biometric scan or a memorized access code.
The difference is that in the case of a biometric scan, the decryption key to your data is stored as plaintext on your computer, if they even bother to encrypt the data at all. So if I can steal your computer, I can decrypt your data, and there's no need for any clever Spy vs Spy tricks like USB sniffing or replay attacks. You just get the key and use it.
So this is another case of a "protection mechanism" that makes you feel safe, and actually makes you less safe, because that feeling of safety allows you to think you don't need to take precautions, when in fact you do.
Tragically, you are mistaken in this case. Biometric data is analog. All the scanner can say is "yes, that looks like the right fingerprint," or "no, that doesn't look like the right fingerprint." It can't produce a consistent digital value that is derived from the fingerprint. It is possible to make a fingerprint scanner that's self-contained and emits a key whenever it gets a match, but that's probably not what IBM is doing, because that would require putting a fairly expensive CPU in the fingerprint scanner.
You can't use them to protect your hard drive. All it takes to get the data off is for someone to pull the hard drive out and put it in a different system. You are better off sticking with PGP, which actually encrypts the data.
http://www.mediawiki.org/
This should let you do your text in whatever language you want, although you might find yourself wanting to tweak the style sheet.
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Hm. No, wait...
ANSI's model for printing standards is in fact outdated, and that's unfortunate, but it is still a standard. You can implement it without paying any sort of license fee, although you do have to fork over the bux for a copy of the standard. If you can afford to spend tens of thousands of geek-hours building a database management system, you can probably afford to spend $400 sometime during that development cycle to buy a copy of the standard that everyone else, including the other open source databases, implements.
No offense, but that's not the problem. I don't mind if the queries are more or less efficient in one database than another, although I would argue that this is a flaw in the database implementation for the slower database.
The problem is when the SQL code doesn't work on a different SQL engine, not when it's slower.
Were I you, by the way, I would not brag in public about how enamored you are of non-portable code - it's not good for your job prospects.