Hmmm...Since I moved to using completely free/libre open source software 4 years ago, the number of system crashes I've experienced can be counted on one hand, I have not needed to waste resources with a virus checker, and yet I've somehow still managed. I've not experienced this "unreliability" that is mentioned for nearly four years. But this is just my personal experience.
I'm sure that users of many non-free, proprietary software systems experience similar reliability. However, most of my friends and relatives who don't use FLOSS are always complaining of crashes, viruses, etc... Most of them also get that nasty build-up in between their teeth as well.
I too, generally agree with your comments. However, now that the Slashdot Hordes have discovered this oversight, the Minions of Walmart should beware. We will teach them the Slashdot effect, and they will tremble!
Considering that we know that there are mafia and other shady connections behind much of the spyware that runs on Windows computers, and that such money funds illegal activities, terrorism, and what not, it seems that the real way to stop funding terrorism would be to outlaw Windows.
That was exactly my feeling upon looking at the "quiz". There are certain computer extras such as closed source screen savers and smileys which are, in my own experience, nearly always bundled with spyware. These are simply products to avoid. The "even experienced users picked the wrong one" argument is a misdirection. Most experienced users won't go looking for this type of crap (and will recognize the quiz for the poorly constructed trap that it is).
That said, I'm starting to get concerned about closed source applications such as Diamond Crush showing up on apps.kde.org. Some of these are much more appealing to geeks. Also, I have wondered what sort of peer review is done on packages at repositories such as www.slacky.it or www.linuxpackages.net. It's nice to be able to download precompiled binaries of open source products that don't come with your distro, but....when I download something from slackware.com or vectorlinux.com, I don't have the same sense of worry about unpleasant easter eggs.
Yeah, the wording of the article makes it sound like they can somehow magically enhance the experience of their business partners. FTA:
A Republican-controlled House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Wednesday defeated a proposal that would have levied extensive regulations on broadband providers and forcibly prevented them from offering higher-speed video services to partners or affiliates.
In reality, they will be throttling down the speeds of users who are not paying to be their "partners or affiliates". The./ post is aptly named as this sort of ruling *is* great for business, poor for the consumer, and very much par for the course for this Republican Congress.
I remember in the early 1990s when AOL came online. Up until then, usenet was relatively garbage free except in the fall when new college students would get email accounts and quickly learn netiquette or get flamed into submission. Then AOL showed up and all the bulletin boards had more noise than signal.
If people have to pay to send email to AOL users, perhaps AOL will go away as it should have more than 10 years ago.:-)
If this does come through, it will ultimately bring the net crashing down. How many different groups own fiber or nodes of sorts? Is it possible that some of the major networks do? Time-Warner? AOL? Google? Comcast? Cox? AT&T? Verisign? If more than a handful of companies own hardware of this sort and start playing this game, nobody is going to get any content. It's one thing as a web master to pay for your ISP and your hosting service. But it's quite something else if every company that has any sort of node starts charging for access through it. None of the big service providers will want to be extorted by every Tom, Dick, and Harry with some control over fiber or nodes. And this might be the very argument that the content providers are going before Congress to make.
The guy's area is climatology. And as I see it, he was just talking about his research and making it relevant as scientists are wont to do. NASA people have been talking about climate change in meetings and in departmental lectures at LEAST since the early 1990's when I went to American Geophysical Union meetings and studied space physics. What has changed is this:
There is an administration in power that is heavily invested in oil.
Said administration has a history of suppressing scientific data - in fact they have taken it to a new level. Ask the Union of Concerned Scientists what they think.
Said administration has defined this man's science as policy. It never used to be policy to state such things.
The evidence is getting more and more clear that what I was hearing about climate change in the early 1990's was, in fact, true see here for example. You can also read National Geographic, which does a story about how climate change affects real people every month. Last month, an author went to the Alps and found that the glaciers were melting and that businessmen were concerned that in 30 years many low lying resorts would have to close. This month there is an article on how traditional peoples of the Arctic are worried about drowning. The Arctic ice is melting more than ever before. Every country but the US seems to "believe" in climate change. The evidence is also getting more and more clear that we are the cause of this warming.
It seems to me that the Bush administration is upset with this scientist because he is interfering with their policy of keeping the truth about climate change from the American public.
Clearly, your prof's "I have power over you" attitude was out of line. But, in spite of that, you still seemed to work things out like adults, which is how it is supposed to happen. His email to the Dean, may or may not have had the affect he intended. Deans get to their positions (usually) by how saavy they are in political (office politics) affairs and their accomplishments. Such people deal with faculty complaints about students and vice verca all the time and can generally read between the lines. Your prof may have had a response from the Dean that said, in effect, "Settle down, it's not the end of the world."
Ideology is only one tool with which to view the world. Were you to actually take part in a hiring process at a university, you would see that weight is given to a number of things (and that ideology is not explicitly one of them):
Their publication record. Have they extensively published in mainstream peer reviewed journals? Incidentally, if there is an ideological criterion, this is it. If the journals are not mainstream journals, the candidate is either shown to be deficient in this area or out in left field.
Do they earn their department funding (perhaps THE most important at some schools!)
Can they collaborate either interdepartmentally or between institutions (now a big one)?
Are they able to teach? Most candidates have to give a seminar and/or teach an undergraduate class to show their qualifications
Do they have a record of service to the universities they have worked at and to the community at large?
Do they have people skills? Can they get along with the undergraduates, graduates, and professors who interview them?
Do some of us at university disagree on matters of abortion, economics, ID, and other issues. Sure, but except where the class explicitly calls for dealing with such issues, it's considered a bit gauche to bring it up (see below). Have I had conversations with students about such things? Yes, but only when they bring it up or when they are no longer my students.
I have also seen intentional baiting of professors in class. A religious student takes a class on evolutionary biology (which may happen to be the professor's bread and butter) and then spends classes trying to get the professor to debate ID. Or a student takes a class on climatology and when the hockey stick graph showing a recent change in climate is brought up and its origins (dozens of studies dating from the 1950s onwards) explained, they will say "but isn't that a political move by the left to try to justify opposition to big oil?" Hint: Most scientists who teach the Big Bang, or evolution or climatology are making their statements based on their professional opinion and research, not specifically because of their political viewpoints (though often their research in the area they teach has lended to such viewpoints). In many cases such students are attempting to create heat and not light. They have a personal issue that detracts from the point of the class - and which they should be debating in the appropriate arena, and not wasting the rest of the class' time.
Most universities already allow for such debate where it is constructive. One can debate religion in religion classes, politics in political science classes, philosophy in philosophy classes, and science in science classes. This whole monitoring of classes for ideology is a bit frightening when mechanisms are already in place to deal with inappropriate professors. Put it in the context of the recently republished It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis, and you'll understand why there is such a hue and cry about paying students to monitor professors.
"At some level the ability to be able to track such activity and use it by linking it with to people that were in the internet cafe at the time is quite desirable, especially after part of your neighbourhood gets destroyed and it comes to light that those responsible used various internet technologies in public places to plan, fund and implement it."
Based on this, we should be monitoring all cell phone and POTS communication too, as it could be used in terrorist actions. For that matter, doesn't a "where are your papers?" society carry inherent security from the terrorists? On the other hand, I've read enough about Nazi Germany and Franco's Spain to know this isn't a good idea. And if you think I'm going over the top, read "IBM and the Holocaust" which outlines how census information gathered prior to the Nazis climb to power helped the Nazis identify all kinds of undesirables to the 3rd or 4th generation. We're much better at data mining now. Better not to over use government surveillance.
Simple solution: robots.txt file in their sacred directories. Then Google shouldn't index their content. Of course, most companies' internal seach engines *suck* in comparison, but since it's really about making a buck and not actually letting people get to content, that shouldn't matter.
I'll bite on the CAD application: BRL-Cad. From their homepage:
Since the late 1950s, computers have been used to assist with the design and study of combat vehicle systems. The result has been a reduction in the amount of time and money required to take a system from the drawing board to full-scale production as well as increased efficiency in testing and evaluation.
In 1979, the U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL) (now the U.S. Army Research Laboratory [ARL]) expressed a need for tools that could assist with the computer simulation and engineering analysis of combat vehicle systems and environments. When no existing computer-aided design (CAD) package was found to be adequate for this purpose, BRL software developers began assembling a suite of utilities capable of interactively displaying, editing, and interrogating geometric models. This suite became known as BRL-CAD.
Now comprising almost a million lines of C code, BRL-CAD has become a powerful constructive solid geometry (CSG) modeling package that has been licensed at over 2,000 sites throughout the world. It contains a large collection of tools, utilities, and libraries including an interactive geometry editor, raytracing and generic framebuffer libraries, a network-distributed image-processing and signal-processing capability, and a customizable embedded scripting language. In addition, BRL-CAD simultaneously supports dual interaction methods, one using a command line and one using a graphical user interface (GUI).
This is what's used to design the A10 Warthog, M1-Abrams tank and other military hardware.
that there will be a native linux-based tax program available? Not that it would be open source, but it seems that if a big financial company is going to go to OpenBSD, they will need to do their taxes on that platform as well.
I hear you about desktops. I agree that it can be frustrating. As the author of an unofficial installer for Vector Linux, I can tell you that it is a pain trying to place an icon on the IceWM, Fluxbox, KDE, and XFCE desktops when a new program is installed. Each particular WM uses a different standard. In fact, some WMs don't natively even support icons and require an addon such as ROX to support icons. That said, many features supported by some WMs are simply not even supported or even wanted by other WMs. This would require every WM author to learn some of the API of every other WM. I don't think that's reasonably going to happen for all kinds of reasons.
About the only thing I can think of is to go to an XML format for:
Placement of icons
Name of program
Location of program
Icon image location
Actions (when supported)
Then, everyone is using the same.destop file format and if there is a feature your WM doesn't support, it can ignore the XML. BUT, this is a long way from happening considering the vast numbers of WMs available.
I personally, am not sure about standardization of the install process. Currently there are three major package types: rpm, deb, and tgz. Each has its own package management, each of which has its strengths and weaknesses. RPM requires a large bloated database for functionality. It also seems to have the bulk of Linux users behind it. DEB is a close second as it is the package type behind many of the live CDs (Morphix, Knoppix) as well as Ubuntu. Apt seems to be pretty cool, but I have too limited experience with it to comment. TGZ is the classical slackware based and oldest package format. Installs are lightning fast and don't require a large database. With dependency info being built into each package now, tools like slapt-get do just about everything I understand debian package management can do.
In addition to the package types, it is nice to be able to put libraries anywhere on the system so that those of us who use multiple versions can get away with it. Standardizing on library locations could mean that this flexibility goes away. It seems that with good./configure scripts, libraries are discovered without the need for such standard locations.
Finally, from the point of view of security, it is nice to know that virus and malware writers can't depend on my system having standard setup A. So many of their attempts to subvert my system (assuming they get past my firewalls, find a flaw in permissions, etc...) will go for naught.
Standards do have a place at the level of the kernel, or within a given window manager. But part of the draw of linux is its flexibility. Standardization beyond a certain point is not productive to those of us who need the ability to customize.
Points of failure in any software, that it is impossible to know who to blame.
For example. Today, I set up HPLIP for the first time instead of HPOJ for my PSC2110. What a pain. I had no problems configuring or making, but then there was an issue when I tried installing. Clearly the HPLIP programmers' fault, right? Or was it that I was using a Slackware derivative with a mixture of packages and as a result, many libraries and config files were in non-standard places? I would have guessed that if./configure && make worked, everything was found properly. But it wasn't. If my nonstandard config was the problem, then perhaps I'm responsible. Eventually I got everything working but with one caviat. I could only scan as root.
In the real world, if this happens to a litigious happy individual who likes to bill $400/hour, he'll sue:
The distro - for not giving directions, or having the package properly precompiled for exactly his system
Slackware - for not providing a compatible package (the reasoning being that if the distro is Slackware-based, then Slackware must assume some liability)
The hpij developers, since this could have been an issue
The cups developers, since this could have been the issue
The kernel developers, since this could have been the issue
HP, since their driver didn't work instantly in the desired way
etc...
I'm sure I've left someone out. Anyhow, considering the sense of entitlement most people who can hire lawyers have, this is not a path that we want to walk down. Each possible point of failure would become the target for a lawsuit when the real failure might be summed up as a case of not RTFM.
But everyone knows that the MLAA will be secretly funded by the EFF and will therefore become the echo chamber of one of the most insidiously anti-capitalist group permitted to exist.
Snork.:-)
But basically, I agree. It is time to create an uprising of sorts against the RIAA. Perhaps another way to do it would be to create a network of micro-radio stations that would play good up and coming artist's music for free. Such tunes could be redistributed about the country via a P2P network.
that the RIAA is really a giant money sucking leech. Consider:
They illegally trespass onto people's computers in clear violation of a number of statutes in order to further their bottom lines
When offered exonerating evidence, they refuse to consider it as this might cut into profits
They want to sue anyone who has the means to play something that could possibly be copyright (whether to them or not, it doesn't matter)
They want to prevent things from going into the public domain and thereby enclose the digital commons
And...for the kicker, they actually produce....nothing. Rather, they front money for other people to do work while getting paybacks that make usurers like the credit card companies look like angels. Artists make like 1% of the net?
If these folks aren't leeches and a detriment to our society, then I don't know what is.
My first thought was to reformat the drive. My first SanDisk 128MB drive didn't work so well with Linux until I did this (despite all claims to the contrary). Now it works like a charm. It has even been through the wash and still works on both Windows and Linux computers.
You have to remember that this is the court that validated George Bush's "election". Bush's reign has been all about taking stuff from the public (i.e. citizens) and giving it to private interests (i.e. corporations). This is totally in line with the current thinking of the administration and congress.
That said, I'm not letting the Clinton administration off the hook for the DMCA (see this) which is about keeping citizens from owning information, or the Bono Copyright Extension Act which extends copyright so far as to keep certain works from ever being in the public domain.
I guess I'm surprised that anyone actually thought the Supreme Court would rule otherwise with the overarching reach that corporations have in government these days.:-(
If Rob blocked access because I wasn't viewing ads, I'd move on and find somewhere else to waste my time. Seems easy enough.
As for those so called "news" sites that require you to register and serve up ads, I don't have much use for them. As advertisers now have full control of the content of these news sites, it's not really news but propaganda that they spin. Check out Bill Moyer's series The Public Mind for a well presented argument of this.
Sites like Amazon.com will gain revenue from their sales. In fact, you'll note that Amazon does not use annoying popups (although they do try to track you). The rest of the site has advertisements, but as the prime purpose of the site is to sell you things, this is to be expected and is fine. If you're trying to present news and base your finances on your advertising, you've got a conflict of interest.
Ultimately it comes down to whether you believe that the web is for the people who view web pages or for the advertisers. This point was presented in the "Linux Journal" (I think...It could have been "Linux User & Developer") a couple months back. A reader in the US asked why the magazine was so expensive compared to US magazines. The editors replied that their audience was the reader and not the advertiser. Thus the reader paid the full price of production instead of the advertiser. Perhaps that will happen on the web, but then, there are enough people out there offering information or services for free that I don't see this as a real issue.
The case to which you are refering is, of course, well known in scientific circles. It would be more accurate to say the U.S. Dept of Fish and Wildlife Scientists deny this since in reality EVERYONE else in the field has evidence that US F&W screwed with other peoples' findings. I think this smacks more of politicians/bureaucrats forcing underlings to tow the party line or get fired.
That said, I'm not a big fan of scientists who don't make a stand. If the most educated of us won't cry foul when something is wrong, who will?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure that users of many non-free, proprietary software systems experience similar reliability. However, most of my friends and relatives who don't use FLOSS are always complaining of crashes, viruses, etc... Most of them also get that nasty build-up in between their teeth as well.
Evil laugh....
That was a joke... Come on... somebody laugh.
That said, I'm starting to get concerned about closed source applications such as Diamond Crush showing up on apps.kde.org. Some of these are much more appealing to geeks. Also, I have wondered what sort of peer review is done on packages at repositories such as www.slacky.it or www.linuxpackages.net. It's nice to be able to download precompiled binaries of open source products that don't come with your distro, but....when I download something from slackware.com or vectorlinux.com, I don't have the same sense of worry about unpleasant easter eggs.
Cheers.
A: Programming, owning a computer without Windows, and thinking about Making something instead of Buying it.
Nuff said.
If people have to pay to send email to AOL users, perhaps AOL will go away as it should have more than 10 years ago. :-)
If this does come through, it will ultimately bring the net crashing down. How many different groups own fiber or nodes of sorts? Is it possible that some of the major networks do? Time-Warner? AOL? Google? Comcast? Cox? AT&T? Verisign? If more than a handful of companies own hardware of this sort and start playing this game, nobody is going to get any content. It's one thing as a web master to pay for your ISP and your hosting service. But it's quite something else if every company that has any sort of node starts charging for access through it. None of the big service providers will want to be extorted by every Tom, Dick, and Harry with some control over fiber or nodes. And this might be the very argument that the content providers are going before Congress to make.
The evidence is getting more and more clear that what I was hearing about climate change in the early 1990's was, in fact, true see here for example. You can also read National Geographic, which does a story about how climate change affects real people every month. Last month, an author went to the Alps and found that the glaciers were melting and that businessmen were concerned that in 30 years many low lying resorts would have to close. This month there is an article on how traditional peoples of the Arctic are worried about drowning. The Arctic ice is melting more than ever before. Every country but the US seems to "believe" in climate change. The evidence is also getting more and more clear that we are the cause of this warming.
It seems to me that the Bush administration is upset with this scientist because he is interfering with their policy of keeping the truth about climate change from the American public.
Clearly, your prof's "I have power over you" attitude was out of line. But, in spite of that, you still seemed to work things out like adults, which is how it is supposed to happen. His email to the Dean, may or may not have had the affect he intended. Deans get to their positions (usually) by how saavy they are in political (office politics) affairs and their accomplishments. Such people deal with faculty complaints about students and vice verca all the time and can generally read between the lines. Your prof may have had a response from the Dean that said, in effect, "Settle down, it's not the end of the world."
- Their publication record. Have they extensively published in mainstream peer reviewed journals? Incidentally, if there is an ideological criterion, this is it. If the journals are not mainstream journals, the candidate is either shown to be deficient in this area or out in left field.
- Do they earn their department funding (perhaps THE most important at some schools!)
- Can they collaborate either interdepartmentally or between institutions (now a big one)?
- Are they able to teach? Most candidates have to give a seminar and/or teach an undergraduate class to show their qualifications
- Do they have a record of service to the universities they have worked at and to the community at large?
- Do they have people skills? Can they get along with the undergraduates, graduates, and professors who interview them?
Do some of us at university disagree on matters of abortion, economics, ID, and other issues. Sure, but except where the class explicitly calls for dealing with such issues, it's considered a bit gauche to bring it up (see below). Have I had conversations with students about such things? Yes, but only when they bring it up or when they are no longer my students.I have also seen intentional baiting of professors in class. A religious student takes a class on evolutionary biology (which may happen to be the professor's bread and butter) and then spends classes trying to get the professor to debate ID. Or a student takes a class on climatology and when the hockey stick graph showing a recent change in climate is brought up and its origins (dozens of studies dating from the 1950s onwards) explained, they will say "but isn't that a political move by the left to try to justify opposition to big oil?" Hint: Most scientists who teach the Big Bang, or evolution or climatology are making their statements based on their professional opinion and research, not specifically because of their political viewpoints (though often their research in the area they teach has lended to such viewpoints). In many cases such students are attempting to create heat and not light. They have a personal issue that detracts from the point of the class - and which they should be debating in the appropriate arena, and not wasting the rest of the class' time.
Most universities already allow for such debate where it is constructive. One can debate religion in religion classes, politics in political science classes, philosophy in philosophy classes, and science in science classes. This whole monitoring of classes for ideology is a bit frightening when mechanisms are already in place to deal with inappropriate professors. Put it in the context of the recently republished It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis, and you'll understand why there is such a hue and cry about paying students to monitor professors.
My experience is not quite so extensive:4 1/?o=120
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/138
but I've now done this twice with no issues and it's rather easy to find backlights. I use http://www.moniserv.com./ The service is excellent. I ordered the wrong backlight by accident, and they took it back and sent me a new one.
Simple solution: robots.txt file in their sacred directories. Then Google shouldn't index their content. Of course, most companies' internal seach engines *suck* in comparison, but since it's really about making a buck and not actually letting people get to content, that shouldn't matter.
that there will be a native linux-based tax program available? Not that it would be open source, but it seems that if a big financial company is going to go to OpenBSD, they will need to do their taxes on that platform as well.
About the only thing I can think of is to go to an XML format for:
Then, everyone is using the same .destop file format and if there is a feature your WM doesn't support, it can ignore the XML. BUT, this is a long way from happening considering the vast numbers of WMs available.
In addition to the package types, it is nice to be able to put libraries anywhere on the system so that those of us who use multiple versions can get away with it. Standardizing on library locations could mean that this flexibility goes away. It seems that with good ./configure scripts, libraries are discovered without the need for such standard locations.
Finally, from the point of view of security, it is nice to know that virus and malware writers can't depend on my system having standard setup A. So many of their attempts to subvert my system (assuming they get past my firewalls, find a flaw in permissions, etc...) will go for naught.
Standards do have a place at the level of the kernel, or within a given window manager. But part of the draw of linux is its flexibility. Standardization beyond a certain point is not productive to those of us who need the ability to customize.
For example. Today, I set up HPLIP for the first time instead of HPOJ for my PSC2110. What a pain. I had no problems configuring or making, but then there was an issue when I tried installing. Clearly the HPLIP programmers' fault, right? Or was it that I was using a Slackware derivative with a mixture of packages and as a result, many libraries and config files were in non-standard places? I would have guessed that if ./configure && make worked, everything was found properly. But it wasn't. If my nonstandard config was the problem, then perhaps I'm responsible. Eventually I got everything working but with one caviat. I could only scan as root.
In the real world, if this happens to a litigious happy individual who likes to bill $400/hour, he'll sue:
Snork. :-)
But basically, I agree. It is time to create an uprising of sorts against the RIAA. Perhaps another way to do it would be to create a network of micro-radio stations that would play good up and coming artist's music for free. Such tunes could be redistributed about the country via a P2P network.
- They illegally trespass onto people's computers in clear violation of a number of statutes in order to further their bottom lines
- When offered exonerating evidence, they refuse to consider it as this might cut into profits
- They want to sue anyone who has the means to play something that could possibly be copyright (whether to them or not, it doesn't matter)
- They want to prevent things from going into the public domain and thereby enclose the digital commons
- And...for the kicker, they actually produce....nothing. Rather, they front money for other people to do work while getting paybacks that make usurers like the credit card companies look like angels. Artists make like 1% of the net?
If these folks aren't leeches and a detriment to our society, then I don't know what is.My first thought was to reformat the drive. My first SanDisk 128MB drive didn't work so well with Linux until I did this (despite all claims to the contrary). Now it works like a charm. It has even been through the wash and still works on both Windows and Linux computers.
That said, I'm not letting the Clinton administration off the hook for the DMCA (see this) which is about keeping citizens from owning information, or the Bono Copyright Extension Act which extends copyright so far as to keep certain works from ever being in the public domain.
I guess I'm surprised that anyone actually thought the Supreme Court would rule otherwise with the overarching reach that corporations have in government these days. :-(
As for those so called "news" sites that require you to register and serve up ads, I don't have much use for them. As advertisers now have full control of the content of these news sites, it's not really news but propaganda that they spin. Check out Bill Moyer's series The Public Mind for a well presented argument of this.
Sites like Amazon.com will gain revenue from their sales. In fact, you'll note that Amazon does not use annoying popups (although they do try to track you). The rest of the site has advertisements, but as the prime purpose of the site is to sell you things, this is to be expected and is fine. If you're trying to present news and base your finances on your advertising, you've got a conflict of interest.
Ultimately it comes down to whether you believe that the web is for the people who view web pages or for the advertisers. This point was presented in the "Linux Journal" (I think...It could have been "Linux User & Developer") a couple months back. A reader in the US asked why the magazine was so expensive compared to US magazines. The editors replied that their audience was the reader and not the advertiser. Thus the reader paid the full price of production instead of the advertiser. Perhaps that will happen on the web, but then, there are enough people out there offering information or services for free that I don't see this as a real issue.
Just my 2 cents...
That said, I'm not a big fan of scientists who don't make a stand. If the most educated of us won't cry foul when something is wrong, who will?