Because they don't grok / can't be bothered / can't see the value.
Setting up regular SSH / rsync backup is fiddly, and not even easy on Windows. Installing Dropbox is easy on every OS I've tried it on.
Couple that with a full backup history for files (even for every version of a file), syncing between machines across the LAN (faster than uploading files via the web), and a hosted solution for backups that you don't have to administer ; it's a lot more capable than just SSH / rsync. Although obviously not as secure. But let's face it, no-one with both a clue about security, and the need to maintain it, are uploading files to Dropbox. Unless they're using it as DeadDropBox to trade encrypted files with their fellow spooks.
Ubuntu One uses OAuth, which should have a sensible means of expiring tokens.
And seeing the sibling poster - obligatory extra SPAAAAM! Ahem... U1 is currently cheaper than Dropbox, being a buck fifty per GB per year, rather than the 2 bucks per GB that Dropbox charge, and you can get extra storage in smaller increments, so if you need 60GB you'll only need to shell out $90 per year for 3x20GB packs, not $200 for the 100GB account on Dropbox. The downside is that the service isn't quite as good as Dropbox ; their Windows client is less mature than their Linux client, it doesn't AFAICT have LAN syncing, or delta compression. The upside is that you could view it as supporting something important to you, if that has value in your personal catalogue. And it's cheaper for the same volume of storage.
Command people to jump from an unsurvivable precipice, first handing them a note from the Pope that says that God will save them. The ones who do it have faith.
Of course, it's one of those Heisenberg things... you can't measure it without changing it... (even the ones who refuse will probably become less faithful when they realize the implications..)
It's not bad, but it's apparently better to use a hash that was designed to be slow. MD5 is part of a family of hashes designed to be fast, to provide a digest of large byte streams which can be signed to provide non-repudiation. Hash functions like bcrypt() have been designed to be expensive - this matters little when you are only running it once to authenticate your user, but the extra expense makes it less practical to generate rainbow tables or brute-force a known hash.
Rebooting a server.. not so much. All our servers have lights-out management or are VMs. And if you're paying me to swap a stick of RAM, you're paying over the odds.
And I can prove that I score better on certain productivity metrics while I work at home (like hours worked, lines of code committed, etc). Whereas when I'm in the office I have to content with a noisy open-plan designed to destroy productivity, and I have to skip out of the door at 1700 sharp to catch my ride home, instead of being able to stick with any problem that requires my extended attention until my daughter gets home from school.
So on the whole, I think it would be fair play to pay me the same, even though I'm actually providing more value for less cost to the enterprise, because I also benefit from it - I can do things like slip out for a run in my lunch hour that I would never be able to do at work.
BMI over 30 is defined as obese. I know, because WiiFit plays the humiliating little "you're a fatty, ain'tcha?" tune every time it assesses my weight. On the other hand, I'm 6'1", broad at the shoulder, and still get into 36" waist pants. I have a few pounds I could stand to lose, but mostly for reasons of vanity. No way would you peg me as obese. Most people are surprised to discover I weigh just over 230 pounds (either that, or they're all being *really* polite).
Happily I live in the UK and don't have to pay for health insurance... it would no doubt be great fun finding a provider in the USA willing to understand (mostly because that understanding would cost them money...)
I'm not sure the cost would be that much higher. As other posters have pointed out, much of modern cars is already a servo-mechanism under the control of a computer. The addition of a few sensor clusters and silicon would only add a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars. If the things are provable safer than a human driver, you could save that in insurance premiums in a year or two. And the inverse would be true - if a robo-car is safer, you can bet that the insurance for human drivers will start to climb in price.
But I agree about the public transport angle. Once the car can drive itself, it makes far more sense that it shouldn't just be sat stationary 22 hours a day.
.. that weren't being done ; a lot of management just don't want to hear that they have to actually spend money on hardware and staff to run it. Instead, squash the problem by removing that squeaky cog.
I agree there's no stable driver support for the 560Ti, this was a little disconcerting the first time I booted up to a ChunkyVision resolution with no dual screen.
In the case of Ubuntu, adding a PPA to my repository list was enough to get the drivers.
While that's not ideal, I'm sure they'll be rolled into the next release.
Speaking as a parent, if my daughter did this (and I would be shocked if she did), I would make damn sure sufficient wrath descended upon her that she'd never do it again. Firstly, for stealing from her father, and secondly, for spending money on stupid shit.
If your kids don't think their actions have consequences, you're doing it wrong. Your job isn't to insulate them from the world, it's just to put safety wheels on it until they can ride it safely.
I do pay for digital music. Usually I get it on a CD though.
Recently I have been purchasing from the Ubuntu One store where I either can't get the CD, or I'm feeling impatient. Realistically, any CD that enters my house gets put in a drive once - to rip it - and then gets put away. But they are usually cheaper than digital albums in my experience, and it's nice to have a read-only backup copy. Some albums are coming in cheaper online now - which realistically, they should be. The price difference is only a £1 at the moment ; but it might be swinging in favour of the download - a pound cheaper AND three days sooner is an improvement - and realistically, I have at least three geographically separate backup copies of all my music files at any given time. And I can always re-download from Ubuntu One.
In other words "Because we threw our toys out of the pram on this one and demanded removal of the Amazon affiliate feature, GNOME would have made zero money out of affiliate purchases made through Banshee on Ubuntu, but Canonical stepped in and stopped us throwing all that money away, while at the same time adopting our project as the default music player on their astoundingly popular distro, increasing it's penetration by rather more than 4X, AND also giving GNOME the same 75/25 split on profits from the existing Ubuntu One music store, even though it has nothing to do with Banshee."
I found that I preferred the new button placement after a while - it makes sense, the first thing you want to do after closing a program is usually open another one, so placing the button at the top left, nearer the applications menu, is logical, unlike Windows, where the button is as far from the Start menu as possible.
I still don't like the implementation of window grouping though ; I'd quite like THAT to be like Windows. The menus are not logical (if you left click, you cannot then access a right click menu for the window buttons by right clicking) and when windows start to get grouped, their order in the bar changes... and then changes back again as you close them. Maddening.
The TCO of Windows for me includes sufficient corporate anti-viral and snoopware to raise the clean-boot memory consumption of my workstation from about 250MB to around 800MB, a period each day where my computer thrashes the disk auditing the filesystem making anything IO bound grind to a halt for an hour, followed by a half hour where the same process compresses it's report to send to IT services, making anything CPU bound grind to a halt. The virus scanner consumes basically a whole CPU core on it's own when working on files, which makes processes that take under 1:30 on Linux take over 8 minutes on Windows, and the same occurs for my users (who are the main users of these processes). I can't use all 6GB of RAM in the workstation on Windows, because our IT dept. hasn't got an "approved" 64-bit build of Windows. Yes, it is an issue for me, and my users, because they will be using the incredibly memory-hungry (by necessity) apps that we are developing.
No, I'm not a normal user, but the cost of all that extra weight to my productivity cannot be understated. On Linux, my frustrations are mostly about finding the way to do some thing that I've not done before - and that really could just be considered part of the job. Once solved, these problems are no longer an issue. On Windows, my frustrations are all with how slowly or badly it does stuff that is totally routine, and I can't do anything about it.
I now only use Windows for the one thing it is better at - running Outlook and Office. And the only reason Outlook is useful to me is because it's the only viable client for Exchange. And the only reason Office is useful is because OpenOffice sucks for Office documents - hopefully something that will be resolved by the LibreOffice project. I do test on Windows, because Java GUI toolkits have some quirks on different platforms. But I find it a deeply frustrating experience, like driving your wifes underpowered minivan because your Lotus is in the shop....
I know you're going for a funny ; but it's already part of the default installation of Ubuntu (Mines), along with Solitaire (Aisleriot), Tetris (Quadrapassel) and Sudoku.
Someone commented (on TFA) that the cost of Windows + Office licenses would cover a large amount of driver authoring ; never mind that, it would probably cover the costs of buying printers and scanners that had compatible Linux drivers - and then some.
Indeed. If the coders are anything like myself, they are doing one of two things ; cringing uncontrollably because a piece of code that they wrote is causing problems. Or genuinely not giving a rats arse because they were ordered not to do an appropriate level of testing by the immediate management who feared that they would miss a deadline.
They've added some of the debt to their Easy Hacks page ; I had a crack at some of the more mundane tasks like removing defunct macros with shell scripts.
It might cost more up front, but in the long run it's much cheaper, and you get to control the recordings.
Although the BBC has been applying to be able to encrypt it's EPG data for HD channels - there was a large fuss made about it at the time but I've heard nothing since, so I presume they are sneaking it in the back door quietly.
Because the GPL means you have to share the freedoms you receive with others.
BSD-style licenses allow you to take those freedoms away, and others to take the gift you grant them and keep it to themselves. If that's your bag, fine, no-one forced you to give your sources away to anyone who would profit from them, just as no-one forces you to choose GPL code to save time on your implementation and reciprocate in exchange.
Until there is any significant proof of genetic predisposition to susceptibility, the memetic part is by far the larger and more significant part of that.
Certain memes go along with religion though - the "be fruitful and multiply" meme being written into the religious text is no coincidence. Religions evolves just like any other self-replicating entity. Like other life forms dependent on a host, it may confer benefits to enhance the survival of that host or induce odd behavior to induce it's host to proliferate or to spread itself (like toxoplasmosis).
I view the evangelic strains of religion to be more virulent, and they probably do take root in minds with an unprepared "immune system" more easily. To steal directly from Neal Stephenson and Snow Crash - the decline of the staid, formal religions, like Catholicism or the Church of England, is probably reducing the group immunity of the populace to the virulent evangelical religion - what would you prefer, someone who goes to Mass and understands that their religious texts sometimes speak figuratively, or someone who goes PTA meetings and demands that the education of your children is hobbled because it contradicts their holy book?
If they get cheap enough, they can have ubiquitous coverage. This is never going to happen with helicopters because they cost too much and consume too much in the way of manpower.
On the other hand, a fleet of drones feeding data back into an expert system would a much further reaching and valuable source of data - so much so that you can bet within a few years that there will be companies lobbying for the ability to buy the data so they can analyze it to see where they should plunk their next Starbucks. Or worse.
It's like the difference between git and CVS ; doing things faster and cheaper might just seem like cost cutting, but also enables use cases that were previously impractical or not even thought of.
Indeed. The Big Bang Theory, while excellent, and containing many jokes that are only understandable if you ARE intelligent, doesn't have a single male character AFAIK that you could aspire to.
Sheldon : OCD and social inadequacy. Raj : Unable to talk to women. Literally. Howard : Shouldn't be ALLOWED to talk to women. Leonard : Spineless underachiever. Zac : Thick as two short planks.
Actually, I'll go further and say you wouldn't want to be the majority of the characters, but especially the intelligent ones. I think if you actually WERE one of the male leads (except Leonard) you wouldn't really mind that much, just because you were so blinkered about your shortcomings.
Penny : Dead end job. Leonard's Mother : Overanalyzer. Leslie Winkle : User
The only character I find without fault so far is Bernadette, because she enjoys her studies, works hard to pay for them, knows that Howard is a bit of a project but that she'll get his undying loyalty for a little work - she has her head screwed on and she isn't screwing with anyone else to get what she wants.
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Because they don't grok / can't be bothered / can't see the value.
Setting up regular SSH / rsync backup is fiddly, and not even easy on Windows. Installing Dropbox is easy on every OS I've tried it on.
Couple that with a full backup history for files (even for every version of a file), syncing between machines across the LAN (faster than uploading files via the web), and a hosted solution for backups that you don't have to administer ; it's a lot more capable than just SSH / rsync. Although obviously not as secure. But let's face it, no-one with both a clue about security, and the need to maintain it, are uploading files to Dropbox. Unless they're using it as DeadDropBox to trade encrypted files with their fellow spooks.
Ubuntu One uses OAuth, which should have a sensible means of expiring tokens.
And seeing the sibling poster - obligatory extra SPAAAAM! Ahem... U1 is currently cheaper than Dropbox, being a buck fifty per GB per year, rather than the 2 bucks per GB that Dropbox charge, and you can get extra storage in smaller increments, so if you need 60GB you'll only need to shell out $90 per year for 3x20GB packs, not $200 for the 100GB account on Dropbox. The downside is that the service isn't quite as good as Dropbox ; their Windows client is less mature than their Linux client, it doesn't AFAICT have LAN syncing, or delta compression. The upside is that you could view it as supporting something important to you, if that has value in your personal catalogue. And it's cheaper for the same volume of storage.
Command people to jump from an unsurvivable precipice, first handing them a note from the Pope that says that God will save them. The ones who do it have faith.
Of course, it's one of those Heisenberg things... you can't measure it without changing it... (even the ones who refuse will probably become less faithful when they realize the implications..)
It's not bad, but it's apparently better to use a hash that was designed to be slow. MD5 is part of a family of hashes designed to be fast, to provide a digest of large byte streams which can be signed to provide non-repudiation. Hash functions like bcrypt() have been designed to be expensive - this matters little when you are only running it once to authenticate your user, but the extra expense makes it less practical to generate rainbow tables or brute-force a known hash.
Rebooting a server .. not so much. All our servers have lights-out management or are VMs. And if you're paying me to swap a stick of RAM, you're paying over the odds.
And I can prove that I score better on certain productivity metrics while I work at home (like hours worked, lines of code committed, etc). Whereas when I'm in the office I have to content with a noisy open-plan designed to destroy productivity, and I have to skip out of the door at 1700 sharp to catch my ride home, instead of being able to stick with any problem that requires my extended attention until my daughter gets home from school.
So on the whole, I think it would be fair play to pay me the same, even though I'm actually providing more value for less cost to the enterprise, because I also benefit from it - I can do things like slip out for a run in my lunch hour that I would never be able to do at work.
BMI over 30 is defined as obese. I know, because WiiFit plays the humiliating little "you're a fatty, ain'tcha?" tune every time it assesses my weight. On the other hand, I'm 6'1", broad at the shoulder, and still get into 36" waist pants. I have a few pounds I could stand to lose, but mostly for reasons of vanity. No way would you peg me as obese. Most people are surprised to discover I weigh just over 230 pounds (either that, or they're all being *really* polite).
Happily I live in the UK and don't have to pay for health insurance... it would no doubt be great fun finding a provider in the USA willing to understand (mostly because that understanding would cost them money...)
I'm not sure the cost would be that much higher. As other posters have pointed out, much of modern cars is already a servo-mechanism under the control of a computer. The addition of a few sensor clusters and silicon would only add a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars. If the things are provable safer than a human driver, you could save that in insurance premiums in a year or two. And the inverse would be true - if a robo-car is safer, you can bet that the insurance for human drivers will start to climb in price.
But I agree about the public transport angle. Once the car can drive itself, it makes far more sense that it shouldn't just be sat stationary 22 hours a day.
.. that weren't being done ; a lot of management just don't want to hear that they have to actually spend money on hardware and staff to run it. Instead, squash the problem by removing that squeaky cog.
And then he made his point rather more obvious.
Just speculatin'
I agree there's no stable driver support for the 560Ti, this was a little disconcerting the first time I booted up to a ChunkyVision resolution with no dual screen.
In the case of Ubuntu, adding a PPA to my repository list was enough to get the drivers.
While that's not ideal, I'm sure they'll be rolled into the next release.
Speaking as a parent, if my daughter did this (and I would be shocked if she did), I would make damn sure sufficient wrath descended upon her that she'd never do it again. Firstly, for stealing from her father, and secondly, for spending money on stupid shit.
If your kids don't think their actions have consequences, you're doing it wrong. Your job isn't to insulate them from the world, it's just to put safety wheels on it until they can ride it safely.
I do pay for digital music. Usually I get it on a CD though.
Recently I have been purchasing from the Ubuntu One store where I either can't get the CD, or I'm feeling impatient. Realistically, any CD that enters my house gets put in a drive once - to rip it - and then gets put away. But they are usually cheaper than digital albums in my experience, and it's nice to have a read-only backup copy. Some albums are coming in cheaper online now - which realistically, they should be. The price difference is only a £1 at the moment ; but it might be swinging in favour of the download - a pound cheaper AND three days sooner is an improvement - and realistically, I have at least three geographically separate backup copies of all my music files at any given time. And I can always re-download from Ubuntu One.
In other words "Because we threw our toys out of the pram on this one and demanded removal of the Amazon affiliate feature, GNOME would have made zero money out of affiliate purchases made through Banshee on Ubuntu, but Canonical stepped in and stopped us throwing all that money away, while at the same time adopting our project as the default music player on their astoundingly popular distro, increasing it's penetration by rather more than 4X, AND also giving GNOME the same 75/25 split on profits from the existing Ubuntu One music store, even though it has nothing to do with Banshee."
Someone call the waaaahmbulance.
I found that I preferred the new button placement after a while - it makes sense, the first thing you want to do after closing a program is usually open another one, so placing the button at the top left, nearer the applications menu, is logical, unlike Windows, where the button is as far from the Start menu as possible.
I still don't like the implementation of window grouping though ; I'd quite like THAT to be like Windows. The menus are not logical (if you left click, you cannot then access a right click menu for the window buttons by right clicking) and when windows start to get grouped, their order in the bar changes... and then changes back again as you close them. Maddening.
The TCO of Windows for me includes sufficient corporate anti-viral and snoopware to raise the clean-boot memory consumption of my workstation from about 250MB to around 800MB, a period each day where my computer thrashes the disk auditing the filesystem making anything IO bound grind to a halt for an hour, followed by a half hour where the same process compresses it's report to send to IT services, making anything CPU bound grind to a halt. The virus scanner consumes basically a whole CPU core on it's own when working on files, which makes processes that take under 1:30 on Linux take over 8 minutes on Windows, and the same occurs for my users (who are the main users of these processes). I can't use all 6GB of RAM in the workstation on Windows, because our IT dept. hasn't got an "approved" 64-bit build of Windows. Yes, it is an issue for me, and my users, because they will be using the incredibly memory-hungry (by necessity) apps that we are developing.
No, I'm not a normal user, but the cost of all that extra weight to my productivity cannot be understated. On Linux, my frustrations are mostly about finding the way to do some thing that I've not done before - and that really could just be considered part of the job. Once solved, these problems are no longer an issue. On Windows, my frustrations are all with how slowly or badly it does stuff that is totally routine, and I can't do anything about it.
I now only use Windows for the one thing it is better at - running Outlook and Office. And the only reason Outlook is useful to me is because it's the only viable client for Exchange. And the only reason Office is useful is because OpenOffice sucks for Office documents - hopefully something that will be resolved by the LibreOffice project. I do test on Windows, because Java GUI toolkits have some quirks on different platforms. But I find it a deeply frustrating experience, like driving your wifes underpowered minivan because your Lotus is in the shop....
I know you're going for a funny ; but it's already part of the default installation of Ubuntu (Mines), along with Solitaire (Aisleriot), Tetris (Quadrapassel) and Sudoku.
Someone commented (on TFA) that the cost of Windows + Office licenses would cover a large amount of driver authoring ; never mind that, it would probably cover the costs of buying printers and scanners that had compatible Linux drivers - and then some.
Indeed. If the coders are anything like myself, they are doing one of two things ; cringing uncontrollably because a piece of code that they wrote is causing problems. Or genuinely not giving a rats arse because they were ordered not to do an appropriate level of testing by the immediate management who feared that they would miss a deadline.
They've added some of the debt to their Easy Hacks page ; I had a crack at some of the more mundane tasks like removing defunct macros with shell scripts.
It might cost more up front, but in the long run it's much cheaper, and you get to control the recordings.
Although the BBC has been applying to be able to encrypt it's EPG data for HD channels - there was a large fuss made about it at the time but I've heard nothing since, so I presume they are sneaking it in the back door quietly.
They're beneficial - they weren't going to buy anything anyway, so they've saved the ad server some bandwidth. It's not free, you know.
Because the GPL means you have to share the freedoms you receive with others.
BSD-style licenses allow you to take those freedoms away, and others to take the gift you grant them and keep it to themselves. If that's your bag, fine, no-one forced you to give your sources away to anyone who would profit from them, just as no-one forces you to choose GPL code to save time on your implementation and reciprocate in exchange.
It's a vegetable in the same way a can of crushed tomatoes
IE, not at all. Tomatoes are a fruit.
Specifically, a memetic / genetic complex.
Until there is any significant proof of genetic predisposition to susceptibility, the memetic part is by far the larger and more significant part of that.
Certain memes go along with religion though - the "be fruitful and multiply" meme being written into the religious text is no coincidence. Religions evolves just like any other self-replicating entity. Like other life forms dependent on a host, it may confer benefits to enhance the survival of that host or induce odd behavior to induce it's host to proliferate or to spread itself (like toxoplasmosis).
I view the evangelic strains of religion to be more virulent, and they probably do take root in minds with an unprepared "immune system" more easily. To steal directly from Neal Stephenson and Snow Crash - the decline of the staid, formal religions, like Catholicism or the Church of England, is probably reducing the group immunity of the populace to the virulent evangelical religion - what would you prefer, someone who goes to Mass and understands that their religious texts sometimes speak figuratively, or someone who goes PTA meetings and demands that the education of your children is hobbled because it contradicts their holy book?
If they get cheap enough, they can have ubiquitous coverage. This is never going to happen with helicopters because they cost too much and consume too much in the way of manpower.
On the other hand, a fleet of drones feeding data back into an expert system would a much further reaching and valuable source of data - so much so that you can bet within a few years that there will be companies lobbying for the ability to buy the data so they can analyze it to see where they should plunk their next Starbucks. Or worse.
It's like the difference between git and CVS ; doing things faster and cheaper might just seem like cost cutting, but also enables use cases that were previously impractical or not even thought of.
Indeed. The Big Bang Theory, while excellent, and containing many jokes that are only understandable if you ARE intelligent, doesn't have a single male character AFAIK that you could aspire to.
Sheldon : OCD and social inadequacy.
Raj : Unable to talk to women. Literally.
Howard : Shouldn't be ALLOWED to talk to women.
Leonard : Spineless underachiever.
Zac : Thick as two short planks.
Actually, I'll go further and say you wouldn't want to be the majority of the characters, but especially the intelligent ones. I think if you actually WERE one of the male leads (except Leonard) you wouldn't really mind that much, just because you were so blinkered about your shortcomings.
Penny : Dead end job.
Leonard's Mother : Overanalyzer.
Leslie Winkle : User
The only character I find without fault so far is Bernadette, because she enjoys her studies, works hard to pay for them, knows that Howard is a bit of a project but that she'll get his undying loyalty for a little work - she has her head screwed on and she isn't screwing with anyone else to get what she wants.