I think the point is that doctors are being pressured by management into working excessive hours that negatively impact patient care.
By making the patient aware of their tiredness, they are living up to their ethical responsibilities. By making the patient responsible for the choice, they are avoiding the pressure that would otherwise be deployed by their management, because they cannot operate on the patient without informed consent. If management pressures them to stop informing patients of their exhaustion level, that manager can be rightfully censured for reducing the quality of patient care.
So this a dual win - conditions for the medics improve, and so does patient care.
Please don't diss NHS doctors. Having been in exactly that position, a junior doctor too tired to do a proper job, I can tell you that the major reason the NHS is in such a world of pain originates from the top down, not the rank and file.
The NHS has for some time been dependent on the goodwill and vocational motivation of it's healthcare professionals, because they sure as hell ain't motivated by the working conditions, pay, and benefits.
The real problems in the NHS stem from multiple sources, including the increasing cost of healthcare consumables (increasingly expensive technology and pharmaceuticals), the costs of revolting profiteering (aka the "Private Finance Initiative"), targets set by politicians, an excess of managers, a decrease of basic common sense and an increase of feelings of entitlement amongst the UK population (I've seen people turn up in A&E (ER) depts for things as basic as a cold or a knee graze).
Yet despite all this, we still achieve better health outcomes than the USA despite spending a quarter per-capita what they do on healthcare. Does this mean we are more than four times as competent?
The story itself is from the New England Journal of Medicine - so has originated from doctors themselves, trying to improve the care that patients receive by fighting against the market forces that increasingly try to reduce medical professionals to the same depth as any other druge worker stuck in a poverty trap.
Until you have a few dozen people listening to them.
We have a large private network and a 30 Mbit/s symmetric pipe as the internet gateway for the ENTIRE organization. I'm not talking a small company here, I'm talking the 3rd largest employer in Europe (after the Peoples Republican Army of China and the Indian railway).
Even just 100 listeners to 32Kbit/s AAC streams would eat 10% of our incoming bandwidth.
Realistically, I think YouTube probably eats most of our pipe, because our management decided that it had to be unblocked because we'd posted some video there. Although we suspect they did that to have a justification for unblocking it. Our upload speeds are great ; I've seen mid-day downloads as low as a few hundred bytes a second, which is really, really annoying when your work depends on server resources on the internet (because it's an external project), and you know that the download speeds are rather impressive before 0900 and after 1700 and are worst at lunchtime when everyone is getting their 'Tube fix.
Please, don't encrypt passwords. Encryption implies that you can retrieve them if you have the keys, which could have made this much worse.
MD5 hashing is probably still a secure practice, done right, for a given degree of "secure". Like any kind of data security, it's all about raising the cost of obtaining the data beyond the amount that a given person is will to pay to do so. While MD5 costs less to crack these days, the cost to obtain each Mozilla user account password is probably still higher than most are willing to pay (although stealing the resources to do this via a botnet probably reduces this cost considerably).
Given equally sound methodology, encrypting passwords is always less secure than hashing them, because encryption implies that you can retrieve the plaintext, which leaves it open to all sorts of additional attacks, like stealing the encryption keys along with the data, "persuading" the sysadmin to decrypt them with either a rubber hose or a wad of cash, etc, etc.
On the other hand, hashing means that you genuinely cannot retrieve the password without expending a large amount of CPU time, and persuasion isn't going to help.
Any site that will emails you your password as plaintext is doing it wrong - there is no reason that any authentication system should be able to retrieve your plaintext password. It's acceptable to offer a means to force a password change, it is NOT acceptable to send my password to me via a medium that any intervening server could read, and it's not acceptable to be storing passwords as plaintext or even encrypted when it is demonstrably less secure than hashing and there is no benefit to retaining them.
In fact, you should mail the sysadmin of any such system and let him know that his system is doing it wrong, and why.
Essentially, the cameras are built by a private company, with private money, and run by the private company, for the state. The private company has used it's dodgy lobbyists to get a sweetheart contract for some inordinately ludicrous fee.
The contracts involved typically have basically zero risk in them for the corporation involved. The fees are guaranteed to increase each year above the rate of inflation, the duration of the contract (and they are long as 35 years) is guaranteed even if the service or infrastructure is no longer required (as in the case of a school with no pupils that the public will be paying a service contract on for the next 20 years) and the base costs that the fees are calculated on are fixed even if they are blatantly guaranteed to decrease over time (as they are in the case of surveillance equipment which like everything else electronic is cheaper every year).
Typical healthcare PFI schemes have been calculated to cost the UK National Health Service around 3 times as much as the actual value of the project. Because private companies are now effectively in control of public spending, they ignore small potatoes like refurbishing two well-placed hospitals for £30M and instead opt to demolish them and build a poorly placed new one for £410M. The rate of return over 12 PFI hospital contracts was 58%, a level of private profit which is inappropriate for a public service.
If the CCTV project is indeed a PFI project, you would expect the same corruption, waste, and profiteering to be involved there too.
In my experience DVCS isn't "overkill" for anything ; if anything, it's less effort for the single developer than say, Subversion would be because you don't have to set up a repository separately ; you just do a git init
(or your chosen DVCS)
And off you go. Some of them (Bazaar) will let you set things up so they work more like a central VCS. While the GUI tools are possibly not as mature as something like TortoiseSVN, I find using the CLI and spawning GUI dialogs for logs and merges to be slicker than using a GUI alone.
And of course, there are lots of lovely plug-ins that let you get your feet wet using a DVCS to interact with a traditional CVCS like SVN ; I find this makes having to use them just about tolerable now.
Skype video conference is Julian Assange's preferred interview medium ; now he's under house arrest, anyone wanting to interview him will have to call using the traditional phone network or use an alternate videoconference system. I think some of the news organizations were sending outside broadcast trucks to interview him.
Yes, this is on the left field of paranoid. But someone had to say it:-)
I would put a link to Marshall Brain's "Manna" story here, but the stupid lame Slashdot Javascript somehow disables cut & paste in Chrome. Grr.
Essentially - if we have a technological revolution that allows robotic labour to do most human jobs, in our current model of capitalism, most people are screwed, because your only value to a capitalist system is the value of your labour (although your compensation for that labour is usually orthogonal to it's actual value).
Whether it's the Roddenberry "the economics of the future are somewhat... different", or Marshall's "Australia Project", a technological revolution in robotic labour must come with a social revolution, or dark times are ahead for many of us.
I tended to suffer from this phenomenon but the opposite way around ; I didn't go to an American college (being a UK student), but at school, in subjects where creative interpretation was involved I would end up with huge periods of mental paralysis where my brain was trying to work out the right answer. As you've just pointed out, there wasn't one.
Quite the opposite in science subjects. Maths, on the other hand, also got too much after calculus when doing things like binomial expansions. Since I didn't need it for my university entrance requirements, I dropped it.
Imagining Linus actually admitting that something was better than something he wrote is hard. git soundly beats BitKeeper in terms of performance ; BK was managing a kernel patch merge in 6 seconds at a time that git was managing 6 patches per second. Squishy-feeling UI considerations don't sound like Linus' bag, and he wrote git specifically to cater to his needs, so I'm struggling to grasp what he would consider "better" about BitKeeper over git.
He thought BitKeeper was better than all the other VCS systems at the time he started git, that I will concede.
They are not so nebulous - when we put Outlook on the internet, it got pwned. They don't dare put Outlook on the internet naked anymore - we have it behind this secured XMLRPC gateway that MS bought from an Israeli security company ("Internet Application Gateway").
I agree that some of the reason is just pure spite against other software. We previously had an IMAP server, so I could pick up my mail using Thunderbird from anywhere. Now we have Outlook, it's the only program that implements the IAG client, so it's either some horrible crippleware webmail, or Windows + Outlook.
Being charged to accept calls is the norm in the USA. You will be charged to receive calls and messages either in monetary amounts or minutes deducted from your allocation.
The experience with email and PGP just proves that most people are boneheads. The only places I see PGP (well, GPG) signatures are on software development mailing lists.
"email" is the wrong metaphor. It misleads people into believing their messages are secure, because they are used to their mail being enclosed in an envelope - just like the one that basically every email program with a GUI depicts somewhere. It's more like a postcard. One that gets delivered via a network of disreputable postmen, some in the employ of enormous and sinister organizations, some just out for themselves. Encryption is the envelope, but people are happy to just keep sending postcards.
I have the right tools installed, but honestly? The only time I even *sign* messages is to get a little kudos on those developers mailing lists. I don't bother encrypting mail because in general for the vast majority of recipients you're going to have to
Explain to them why email is insecure (it can be hard to persuade them of this)
Find PGP compliant tools that integrate with their chosen email solution (since most people use webmail, this is going to be hard)
Talk them through installing the tools
Talk them through key generation
Talk them through key management, distribution, and trust
Explain to them that yes, if they forget their password, they are *never* getting those mails back
No, I can't decrypt them, even though I encrypted them, because they are 'crypted with YOUR key
Explain public-key crypto
If your chosen correspondent doesn't give up at some stage of this process, then you are either very persuasive or you have something important to hide. Or they are technical. It's an excellent measure of how much people value their privacy - most do not value it enough to have to expend significant mental effort to protect it. It remains to be seen how much this perception will be effected by the ongoing corporate harvesting of what would, in a "real world" social network, be considered private material.
In fact, some games (Lord of the Rings Online, I'm looking at you) install a content distribution service (Pando) where you basically agree to be part of their content distribution network, all the time, and not just while you are gaming. Unless you switch it off in the service panel, of course.
There have been fingerprinting systems posted to Slashdot that were surprisingly specific.
Panopticlick, the one that EFF runs for awareness says I'm unique, out of 1.2M visitors.
My plugin config is unique. My font config is 1 / 16,000 users. Admittedly, I'm using a non-default browser on a niche operating system, but you'd be surprised what does install things like fonts and plugins - applications (like Office), etc.
What it fails to mention is that most of the other 9 guys in the bar work for the 10th guy, and provided the labour that made him his riches. So he's magnanimous enough to pay about 60% of their bar bill, when all his riches came from the sweat on their backs?
The other guys should say "Hey, how come you can afford to pay more than half of our bar tab, when we are the guys doing all the work? Why the fuck are we lining your pockets when you work no harder than us?", and then kick him out of the bar and find another drinking buddy who will do the same job (managing their labour) for a fair wage, allowing them to split the $60 fairly between them, making them all significantly more wealthy.
The Brian Cox he means is the ex-bandmember of D:Ream, who has a PhD in particle physics, not astrophysics. He currently works on an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.
While his musical efforts are not as iconic as those of Dr May, his scientific contributions, both in terms of the science itself, and his promotion of the public understanding of science, are arguably more significant.
My experience with CentOS is that it's very stable. Which for me is a euphemism for "antiquated".
For example ; my organization has a contract with CollabNet for server hosting on their TeamForge platform. In addition to the usual forge servers, there are hosted servers (both virtual and "real" with lights-out management) in the back for running build services, etc. The provided OS build on most of these servers is CentOS 5.0
Now CollabNet are very big on Subversion, and selling services related to Subversion. So why oh why are they providing a server OS which installs a truly ancient version of one of their flagship products - 1.4.2 ? Lucid is on 1.6.6, Maverick is on 1.6.12 ; 1.4 is from 2006 ; there have been 2 LTS releases of Ubuntu Server since then.
Yes, I know there is RPMForge. But the whole thing seems very amateur.
Now, as for Gentoo vs Ubuntu...
I have respect for the Gentoo way of doing things. Gentoo was the only way I could get my MythTV box running when I first set it up, because it was the only distro I could find with support for the bleeding-edge drivers my TV capture hardware needed. Just installing Gentoo taught me more about the innards of Linux than anything else had done at the time and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to someone who a) had a lot of time on their hands and b) needed to know a lot about the innards of Linux with little previous experience. I do agree that it tends to attract the kind of user who is knowledgeable. The wiki in particular provided excellent documentation - that said, a lot of it deals with problems you only get with Gentoo because of the way it is;-)
Temper the comments above with consideration for the fact that I'm not up to date with Gentoo - I quit using it actively long before I cleaned it off my MythTV server and replaced it with Mythbuntu. There are still patches in the kernel to IR remote driver tables I wrote when using Gentoo, so it still has a place in my heart, but I really don't want to go back to watching compiler scrollback for hours on end.
You don't need to use Portage to apply your own patches. In Ubuntu, you'd use a Personal Package Archive (PPA) - check out the sources for your package using the Canonical-sponsored Bazaar version control system, patch them, push the result up to the server, and the Canonical build farm will build a shiny new set of packages for you. Add your PPA to your apt sources list and your machine will update from them. You can keep your patched packages up to date with the official ones by merging the new revisions from the Bazaar branch.
So overall, I use Ubuntu because it's more up to date than CentOS, because I understand it better (being my primary desktop OS and the basis of my MythTV server), and because it's friendlier than Gentoo. It has a larger user base - the squeakiest wheels get the most grease, so I think it's more likely that problems get found, making it more likely they get fixed. And I just can't justify waiting for my packages to compile ; I never got the hang of all the workarounds Gentoo has for this like farming builds out to other machines in your network.
I'll raise a glass to Gentoo and all the rest of the diversity in the GNU/Linux OS space. They all bring their own dishes to the table and we are all better off for it.
Indeed. I was in my local computer hardware retailer, browsing their new display areas, and got to put my hand on a Saitek X52 - a lovely, lovely controller. The X36 I have is like a stiff branch in comparison. This thing was as smooth as silk, even in the centre zone which is so critical for precision long distance shooting in the X-Wing games. It has the simple, intuitive, twist-the-stick rudder arrangement I loved in my MS Sidewinder 3D, but it still has the ludicrous proliferation of hats and switches that make the Saitek line great.
I was sorely tempted to buy it right there and then. Then I just walked away feeling a little sad. Because I've not got anything I really want to play on it, because I've played them all to death. Or they aren't very compatible with the OS I have installed.
What is it? Is it just that space combat sims aren't challenging enough for modern GPUs because they don't have enough polygons in them (all that empty space...) ? Or that they probably still don't work so well as internet games because they have more degrees of freedom than FPS games and it's thus harder to compensate for the lag? Or just that the market is too small, because everyone has a mouse, but not everyone has a joystick?
*Browses* Damn, the "real" flight-sim controller market seems to be thriving though ; instrument panels, radio panels, ludicrously authentic force-sensing jet fighter control sticks, flight yokes.
This whole "GPL is restrictive compared to the BSD-style licenses" thing seems to be the favourite FUD of the corporate masses now.
It seems to have gained a lot of traction, predictably, because it's true, from a certain point of view.
Yes, the GPL grants you fewer rights than a BSD style license. The most important right that it does not grant you is the right to take the rights of others away by closing the source after you have received it.
So I don't think of GPL as "restrictive" and BSD-style as "permissive". I think of GPL as "freedom-preserving" and BSD as "promiscuous".
I'm so glad someone already mentioned Capsela - I must have occupied so much of my youth playing with it. It would be even more awesome in todays modern age of superior plastics and rechargeable batteries.
While it's a bit limited compared to something like Mindstorms, Big Trak is programmable, and I really lusted after one in my youth. I never got one though. Now they are available again, for the same kind of price, which with the benefit of inflation, makes them really rather cheap these days.
Note the important part ; the IRA rang the local TV studio, giving a warning and codeword.
IRA codewords were typically established by issuing a prior warning for an act of terrorism in conjunction with the codeword. The same word could then be used to claim responsibility for other acts, either before or after they occurred (although "before" obviously generates more credence).
If it was the modern era, I'd probably sign my communiques using a public key known to be associated with terrorist acts ; much more secure.
All said and done, they probably wouldn't use Twitter, even if GCHQ has a 250,000 strong server farm scraping it, along with all the other social networks. They'd probably send their communiques straight to people that they know can disseminate the information rapidly. But they do announce their atrocities in advance, because it's the only sure way that they will be getting credit for it.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the point is that doctors are being pressured by management into working excessive hours that negatively impact patient care.
By making the patient aware of their tiredness, they are living up to their ethical responsibilities. By making the patient responsible for the choice, they are avoiding the pressure that would otherwise be deployed by their management, because they cannot operate on the patient without informed consent. If management pressures them to stop informing patients of their exhaustion level, that manager can be rightfully censured for reducing the quality of patient care.
So this a dual win - conditions for the medics improve, and so does patient care.
Please don't diss NHS doctors. Having been in exactly that position, a junior doctor too tired to do a proper job, I can tell you that the major reason the NHS is in such a world of pain originates from the top down, not the rank and file.
The NHS has for some time been dependent on the goodwill and vocational motivation of it's healthcare professionals, because they sure as hell ain't motivated by the working conditions, pay, and benefits.
The real problems in the NHS stem from multiple sources, including the increasing cost of healthcare consumables (increasingly expensive technology and pharmaceuticals), the costs of revolting profiteering (aka the "Private Finance Initiative"), targets set by politicians, an excess of managers, a decrease of basic common sense and an increase of feelings of entitlement amongst the UK population (I've seen people turn up in A&E (ER) depts for things as basic as a cold or a knee graze).
Yet despite all this, we still achieve better health outcomes than the USA despite spending a quarter per-capita what they do on healthcare. Does this mean we are more than four times as competent?
The story itself is from the New England Journal of Medicine - so has originated from doctors themselves, trying to improve the care that patients receive by fighting against the market forces that increasingly try to reduce medical professionals to the same depth as any other druge worker stuck in a poverty trap.
I have to say, I rather like the Linux (version 2 series) build in comparison to the Windows one since they fixed it up to use Pulseaudio properly.
Until you have a few dozen people listening to them.
We have a large private network and a 30 Mbit/s symmetric pipe as the internet gateway for the ENTIRE organization. I'm not talking a small company here, I'm talking the 3rd largest employer in Europe (after the Peoples Republican Army of China and the Indian railway).
Even just 100 listeners to 32Kbit/s AAC streams would eat 10% of our incoming bandwidth.
Realistically, I think YouTube probably eats most of our pipe, because our management decided that it had to be unblocked because we'd posted some video there. Although we suspect they did that to have a justification for unblocking it. Our upload speeds are great ; I've seen mid-day downloads as low as a few hundred bytes a second, which is really, really annoying when your work depends on server resources on the internet (because it's an external project), and you know that the download speeds are rather impressive before 0900 and after 1700 and are worst at lunchtime when everyone is getting their 'Tube fix.
Urrgh.
Please, don't encrypt passwords. Encryption implies that you can retrieve them if you have the keys, which could have made this much worse.
MD5 hashing is probably still a secure practice, done right, for a given degree of "secure". Like any kind of data security, it's all about raising the cost of obtaining the data beyond the amount that a given person is will to pay to do so. While MD5 costs less to crack these days, the cost to obtain each Mozilla user account password is probably still higher than most are willing to pay (although stealing the resources to do this via a botnet probably reduces this cost considerably).
Given equally sound methodology, encrypting passwords is always less secure than hashing them, because encryption implies that you can retrieve the plaintext, which leaves it open to all sorts of additional attacks, like stealing the encryption keys along with the data, "persuading" the sysadmin to decrypt them with either a rubber hose or a wad of cash, etc, etc.
On the other hand, hashing means that you genuinely cannot retrieve the password without expending a large amount of CPU time, and persuasion isn't going to help.
Any site that will emails you your password as plaintext is doing it wrong - there is no reason that any authentication system should be able to retrieve your plaintext password. It's acceptable to offer a means to force a password change, it is NOT acceptable to send my password to me via a medium that any intervening server could read, and it's not acceptable to be storing passwords as plaintext or even encrypted when it is demonstrably less secure than hashing and there is no benefit to retaining them.
In fact, you should mail the sysadmin of any such system and let him know that his system is doing it wrong, and why.
PFI == the Private Finance Initiative
Essentially, the cameras are built by a private company, with private money, and run by the private company, for the state. The private company has used it's dodgy lobbyists to get a sweetheart contract for some inordinately ludicrous fee.
The contracts involved typically have basically zero risk in them for the corporation involved. The fees are guaranteed to increase each year above the rate of inflation, the duration of the contract (and they are long as 35 years) is guaranteed even if the service or infrastructure is no longer required (as in the case of a school with no pupils that the public will be paying a service contract on for the next 20 years) and the base costs that the fees are calculated on are fixed even if they are blatantly guaranteed to decrease over time (as they are in the case of surveillance equipment which like everything else electronic is cheaper every year).
Typical healthcare PFI schemes have been calculated to cost the UK National Health Service around 3 times as much as the actual value of the project. Because private companies are now effectively in control of public spending, they ignore small potatoes like refurbishing two well-placed hospitals for £30M and instead opt to demolish them and build a poorly placed new one for £410M. The rate of return over 12 PFI hospital contracts was 58%, a level of private profit which is inappropriate for a public service.
If the CCTV project is indeed a PFI project, you would expect the same corruption, waste, and profiteering to be involved there too.
Most of it wasn't even lame CGI - the vast majority of the FX were cel animation and the sets were ... sets.
In my experience DVCS isn't "overkill" for anything ; if anything, it's less effort for the single developer than say, Subversion would be because you don't have to set up a repository separately ; you just do a
git init
(or your chosen DVCS)
And off you go. Some of them (Bazaar) will let you set things up so they work more like a central VCS. While the GUI tools are possibly not as mature as something like TortoiseSVN, I find using the CLI and spawning GUI dialogs for logs and merges to be slicker than using a GUI alone.
And of course, there are lots of lovely plug-ins that let you get your feet wet using a DVCS to interact with a traditional CVCS like SVN ; I find this makes having to use them just about tolerable now.
Skype video conference is Julian Assange's preferred interview medium ; now he's under house arrest, anyone wanting to interview him will have to call using the traditional phone network or use an alternate videoconference system. I think some of the news organizations were sending outside broadcast trucks to interview him.
Yes, this is on the left field of paranoid. But someone had to say it :-)
Not without a social and cultural revolution.
I would put a link to Marshall Brain's "Manna" story here, but the stupid lame Slashdot Javascript somehow disables cut & paste in Chrome. Grr.
Essentially - if we have a technological revolution that allows robotic labour to do most human jobs, in our current model of capitalism, most people are screwed, because your only value to a capitalist system is the value of your labour (although your compensation for that labour is usually orthogonal to it's actual value).
Whether it's the Roddenberry "the economics of the future are somewhat ... different", or Marshall's "Australia Project", a technological revolution in robotic labour must come with a social revolution, or dark times are ahead for many of us.
I tended to suffer from this phenomenon but the opposite way around ; I didn't go to an American college (being a UK student), but at school, in subjects where creative interpretation was involved I would end up with huge periods of mental paralysis where my brain was trying to work out the right answer. As you've just pointed out, there wasn't one.
Quite the opposite in science subjects. Maths, on the other hand, also got too much after calculus when doing things like binomial expansions. Since I didn't need it for my university entrance requirements, I dropped it.
[citation needed]
Linus : "I'm an egotistical bastard"
Imagining Linus actually admitting that something was better than something he wrote is hard. git soundly beats BitKeeper in terms of performance ; BK was managing a kernel patch merge in 6 seconds at a time that git was managing 6 patches per second. Squishy-feeling UI considerations don't sound like Linus' bag, and he wrote git specifically to cater to his needs, so I'm struggling to grasp what he would consider "better" about BitKeeper over git.
He thought BitKeeper was better than all the other VCS systems at the time he started git, that I will concede.
nebulous security reasons
They are not so nebulous - when we put Outlook on the internet, it got pwned. They don't dare put Outlook on the internet naked anymore - we have it behind this secured XMLRPC gateway that MS bought from an Israeli security company ("Internet Application Gateway").
I agree that some of the reason is just pure spite against other software. We previously had an IMAP server, so I could pick up my mail using Thunderbird from anywhere. Now we have Outlook, it's the only program that implements the IAG client, so it's either some horrible crippleware webmail, or Windows + Outlook.
Being charged to accept calls is the norm in the USA. You will be charged to receive calls and messages either in monetary amounts or minutes deducted from your allocation.
It seems insane to use here in Europe.
The experience with email and PGP just proves that most people are boneheads. The only places I see PGP (well, GPG) signatures are on software development mailing lists.
"email" is the wrong metaphor. It misleads people into believing their messages are secure, because they are used to their mail being enclosed in an envelope - just like the one that basically every email program with a GUI depicts somewhere. It's more like a postcard. One that gets delivered via a network of disreputable postmen, some in the employ of enormous and sinister organizations, some just out for themselves. Encryption is the envelope, but people are happy to just keep sending postcards.
I have the right tools installed, but honestly? The only time I even *sign* messages is to get a little kudos on those developers mailing lists. I don't bother encrypting mail because in general for the vast majority of recipients you're going to have to
If your chosen correspondent doesn't give up at some stage of this process, then you are either very persuasive or you have something important to hide. Or they are technical. It's an excellent measure of how much people value their privacy - most do not value it enough to have to expend significant mental effort to protect it. It remains to be seen how much this perception will be effected by the ongoing corporate harvesting of what would, in a "real world" social network, be considered private material.
Yes.
In fact, some games (Lord of the Rings Online, I'm looking at you) install a content distribution service (Pando) where you basically agree to be part of their content distribution network, all the time, and not just while you are gaming. Unless you switch it off in the service panel, of course.
There have been fingerprinting systems posted to Slashdot that were surprisingly specific.
Panopticlick, the one that EFF runs for awareness says I'm unique, out of 1.2M visitors.
My plugin config is unique. My font config is 1 / 16,000 users. Admittedly, I'm using a non-default browser on a niche operating system, but you'd be surprised what does install things like fonts and plugins - applications (like Office), etc.
... but not for their sake.
If MS finds that they are losing enough from software patents, maybe they'll lobby to get them declared invalid.
What it fails to mention is that most of the other 9 guys in the bar work for the 10th guy, and provided the labour that made him his riches. So he's magnanimous enough to pay about 60% of their bar bill, when all his riches came from the sweat on their backs?
The other guys should say "Hey, how come you can afford to pay more than half of our bar tab, when we are the guys doing all the work? Why the fuck are we lining your pockets when you work no harder than us?", and then kick him out of the bar and find another drinking buddy who will do the same job (managing their labour) for a fair wage, allowing them to split the $60 fairly between them, making them all significantly more wealthy.
The Brian Cox he means is the ex-bandmember of D:Ream, who has a PhD in particle physics, not astrophysics. He currently works on an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.
While his musical efforts are not as iconic as those of Dr May, his scientific contributions, both in terms of the science itself, and his promotion of the public understanding of science, are arguably more significant.
My experience with CentOS is that it's very stable. Which for me is a euphemism for "antiquated".
For example ; my organization has a contract with CollabNet for server hosting on their TeamForge platform. In addition to the usual forge servers, there are hosted servers (both virtual and "real" with lights-out management) in the back for running build services, etc. The provided OS build on most of these servers is CentOS 5.0
Now CollabNet are very big on Subversion, and selling services related to Subversion. So why oh why are they providing a server OS which installs a truly ancient version of one of their flagship products - 1.4.2 ? Lucid is on 1.6.6, Maverick is on 1.6.12 ; 1.4 is from 2006 ; there have been 2 LTS releases of Ubuntu Server since then.
Yes, I know there is RPMForge. But the whole thing seems very amateur.
Now, as for Gentoo vs Ubuntu ...
I have respect for the Gentoo way of doing things. Gentoo was the only way I could get my MythTV box running when I first set it up, because it was the only distro I could find with support for the bleeding-edge drivers my TV capture hardware needed. Just installing Gentoo taught me more about the innards of Linux than anything else had done at the time and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to someone who a) had a lot of time on their hands and b) needed to know a lot about the innards of Linux with little previous experience. I do agree that it tends to attract the kind of user who is knowledgeable. The wiki in particular provided excellent documentation - that said, a lot of it deals with problems you only get with Gentoo because of the way it is ;-)
Temper the comments above with consideration for the fact that I'm not up to date with Gentoo - I quit using it actively long before I cleaned it off my MythTV server and replaced it with Mythbuntu. There are still patches in the kernel to IR remote driver tables I wrote when using Gentoo, so it still has a place in my heart, but I really don't want to go back to watching compiler scrollback for hours on end.
You don't need to use Portage to apply your own patches. In Ubuntu, you'd use a Personal Package Archive (PPA) - check out the sources for your package using the Canonical-sponsored Bazaar version control system, patch them, push the result up to the server, and the Canonical build farm will build a shiny new set of packages for you. Add your PPA to your apt sources list and your machine will update from them. You can keep your patched packages up to date with the official ones by merging the new revisions from the Bazaar branch.
So overall, I use Ubuntu because it's more up to date than CentOS, because I understand it better (being my primary desktop OS and the basis of my MythTV server), and because it's friendlier than Gentoo. It has a larger user base - the squeakiest wheels get the most grease, so I think it's more likely that problems get found, making it more likely they get fixed. And I just can't justify waiting for my packages to compile ; I never got the hang of all the workarounds Gentoo has for this like farming builds out to other machines in your network.
I'll raise a glass to Gentoo and all the rest of the diversity in the GNU/Linux OS space. They all bring their own dishes to the table and we are all better off for it.
Indeed. I was in my local computer hardware retailer, browsing their new display areas, and got to put my hand on a Saitek X52 - a lovely, lovely controller. The X36 I have is like a stiff branch in comparison. This thing was as smooth as silk, even in the centre zone which is so critical for precision long distance shooting in the X-Wing games. It has the simple, intuitive, twist-the-stick rudder arrangement I loved in my MS Sidewinder 3D, but it still has the ludicrous proliferation of hats and switches that make the Saitek line great.
I was sorely tempted to buy it right there and then. Then I just walked away feeling a little sad. Because I've not got anything I really want to play on it, because I've played them all to death. Or they aren't very compatible with the OS I have installed.
What is it? Is it just that space combat sims aren't challenging enough for modern GPUs because they don't have enough polygons in them (all that empty space...) ? Or that they probably still don't work so well as internet games because they have more degrees of freedom than FPS games and it's thus harder to compensate for the lag? Or just that the market is too small, because everyone has a mouse, but not everyone has a joystick?
*Browses*
Damn, the "real" flight-sim controller market seems to be thriving though ; instrument panels, radio panels, ludicrously authentic force-sensing jet fighter control sticks, flight yokes.
This whole "GPL is restrictive compared to the BSD-style licenses" thing seems to be the favourite FUD of the corporate masses now.
It seems to have gained a lot of traction, predictably, because it's true, from a certain point of view.
Yes, the GPL grants you fewer rights than a BSD style license. The most important right that it does not grant you is the right to take the rights of others away by closing the source after you have received it.
So I don't think of GPL as "restrictive" and BSD-style as "permissive". I think of GPL as "freedom-preserving" and BSD as "promiscuous".
I'm so glad someone already mentioned Capsela - I must have occupied so much of my youth playing with it. It would be even more awesome in todays modern age of superior plastics and rechargeable batteries.
While it's a bit limited compared to something like Mindstorms, Big Trak is programmable, and I really lusted after one in my youth. I never got one though. Now they are available again, for the same kind of price, which with the benefit of inflation, makes them really rather cheap these days.
Note the important part ; the IRA rang the local TV studio, giving a warning and codeword.
IRA codewords were typically established by issuing a prior warning for an act of terrorism in conjunction with the codeword. The same word could then be used to claim responsibility for other acts, either before or after they occurred (although "before" obviously generates more credence).
If it was the modern era, I'd probably sign my communiques using a public key known to be associated with terrorist acts ; much more secure.
All said and done, they probably wouldn't use Twitter, even if GCHQ has a 250,000 strong server farm scraping it, along with all the other social networks. They'd probably send their communiques straight to people that they know can disseminate the information rapidly. But they do announce their atrocities in advance, because it's the only sure way that they will be getting credit for it.