The reason for the menus on top is that you can be more sloppy with your mousing and still hit the menu. There's no overshooting as you can if your window has the menu bar. Macs have traditionally made 'big targets' of key UI interface elements so that the mis-clicks and missed clicks are minimized. That's the theory anyway. In practice, it seems to work as well (your mileage may vary)
DB
Actually, it's pretty damn hard...
on
MacOS X DP3
·
· Score: 1
I can't count the number of times that I've met developers who don't *want* Unix to be easy to use. When strain of thinking that says 'real men use CLI' dies out among Linux contributors then maybe Linux will have a shot at creating a seamless, easy to use user experience. I'm not holding my breath. Unlike at Apple, there is no mandatory Human Interface Guidelines for Linux and I don't see one coming up anytime soon. When the linux user community starts mocking programmers who put out bad interfaces (as Mac users are famous for doing) there will be serious progress.
If you go to Apple's developer site you will find out how to get access to their seeding program. Basically, send Apple money, get early access to their commercial software. It's similar to the MS program in that respect but I think that the fees are lower. Of course, you can also go to Apple's public source site to get access to Darwin and the rest of the open source projects and that remains free.
SurfWatch doesn't offer levels of access or individual filter profiles so we should just throw up our hands and give up. This is what IPO money is for! Somebody out there needs to write up software that does the sort of individual level filtering that parents can opt-in to. It would be an institutional sale kind of offering that would earn serious cash for the first to pull it off because nobody really *likes* to disnify (sp?) the adult intellectual space and most intelligent observers who are knowledgeable on the technical issues are aware that you can't drive it out completely as long as you keep the ability for anyone to publish on the internet.
You don't manage the terminals at an individual library level, but at a county or central private contractor level. The entire point of a web terminal is to make it connected to the internet. Remote management of same by competent people who do regular security sweeps doesn't take a lot of brainpower to figure out how to do. And if you want to catch them, all you need to do is have somebody keep an eye on the machine remotely and looking at it when they break in. A simple phone call to the local librarian to physically look at the miscreant at terminal #5 makes identification a snap while the break in is being perpetrated.
This is not buck rogers stuff. We don't have to do very sophisticated things to handle 99% of the security load. The universe of those who need filtering and those who can break reasonable security don't really overlap that much. I'll take a 99% solution that protects adult civil liberties and aids in responsible parenting over a fascist universal censoring model every day.
I would appreciate having a first degree approximate filter at that age so we're doing civics and the classic http://www.whitehouse.com is linked by mistake, I don't have to waste my time undoing the damage.
Shoulder surfing my kids may minimize exposure but I'd rather have it so that it's not my only tool. And if I'm only filtering me and mine, what business is it to you? It's no longer a first amendment issue. I don't wish to block what you read/see and I'm not looking for legal restrictions on publication.
Oh, it's not so hard as all that. I'm sure that organizations who care about it will be glad to put out filter standards that conform to some open filtering spec. The Southern Baptists, the Family Research Council, and any of a dozen islamic organizations come to mind immediately.
Which filter you request be applied to your child's library surfing is up to you as parent. And if you think that your child is ready to handle it, you always have the option of signing a form saying take off the filter. You can even have an automatic age flag that takes all filtering off at 18. This is no harder to centrally manage than virus updates and that gets done reasonably well. Librarians are very good at handling simple repetitive jobs. That's what they do most of the time. They can schedule filter updates in between cataloguing the new magazines that week and putting in the new mailing of microfilmed NY Times.
As for flushing a kid out, that's easy. Format and load from default. Then revoke his library card and call his parents. There is no user data on these machines. You could even format and load from default on a weekly basis without degrading user experience. You would only lose *gasp* the web cache.
It's my responsibility to watch my kids, true. And if I have a fine granularity tool to keep them out of trouble, I will be able to exercise that responsibility better. There has always been an understanding between those with children and those who want adult information that the children are to be kept out of the adult information by putting certain magazines behind the counter, minimum viewing ages, etc. The problem comes when you approach the border of age groups, when reasonable people can differ on what can and should be available for children. If you maintain that I shouldn't be able to filter what *my* child sees, then I am left with two unpalatable alternatives, filter it all and keep my kid away from computers until I believe he can handle it.
I don't like either of those. Why not just adopt the fine grain filter solution so that we can have an adult internet while keeping the disneyfied version for those who really shouldn't have more than disney. If we develop the tools properly, we can leave the decision up to the individual parents which is where I hope you agree the decision should be.
Your box gets cracked and they don't touch your stuff (as you predict). They do, however use your box to launch a DDoS against whitehouse.gov or even worse from your perspective crack boxes further on that launch a DDoS. A few days later, the secret service is knocking on your door and taking your hardware away and you end up spending thousands in legal fees.
Do you have any idea how much stuff sysadmins ignore in a given week or month? It's quite a bit of foolishness that nobody ever knows that we saw. And often the logs are kept sparser than they could because we would really rather not remember what your favorite e-commerce sex shoppe is.
It's enough to get several people reprimanded/fired and a few criminal cases filed in your average year. Uptight, play strictly by the rules admins can make mini 1984's out of any company. Most of us don't want to. Be glad that this behavior seems rooted in the culture of sysadmins. The FBI is a very different story.
Actually, looking back, I believe that you said that there were no filters. If I trust the professionalism of librarians to maintain an appropriate learning environment for books, that's one thing. But librarians can't filter the internet for the trash, the destructive, and the tremendously stupidity inspiring. A personalized filtering system that applies to my children that I select *for each child* is IMHO a good complement to this librarian filtering.
I don't have a problem with this stuff being out for the teens, it's the 6 and 7 year olds that really shouldn't be given the advanced bestiality courses IMHO.
One of the more subtle filtering methods that are employed by libraries are the use of sections. Your average 5 year old isn't interested in Gray's Anatomy because it's in that boring adult area, etc. There are no 'sections' on the internet, most material is just a few links away and it's much more likely for kids to stray into inappropriate areas.
I'm not arguing for any change in the non-internet materials. I think that by and large what goes into a library is what should be going into one. But the filtering on books and other non-internet materials is there. Having the internet be the only unvetted information source is not a good idea for young children. Parents should and fairly easily could have the option of applying age appropriate filters or not.
Librarians are paid to excercise exactly the sort of judgement that you claim doesn't exist. If the librarian thinks its trash, it doesn't get on the shelves. That's filter level 1.
Beyond that, most libraries that stock adults only materials have them in areas that children have no physical access to. Playboy, if stocked, is not located in a public stack, 2 feet off the ground. This is filter level 2.
The internet doesn't have these sorts of filters attached, this is one of the reasons that it is so threatening to existing heirarchies of all stripes (often a very good thing). Yet parental control of at least a similar quality to the above book style filters is not an unreasonable request and given the ability to personalize filtering by individual we are just an IPO away from solving this problem by purely technical means and with results superior to the crude filtering that librarians have traditionally exercised.
I admit that the solution I propose doesn't scale very well but it's exactly the small town atmosphere where the pro-censorship attitude is most likely to flourish.
Run NT, have individual accounts for each of the children (accessed by mag reader?) and the operating system itself is going to ensure that surfwatch loads a different profile.
Could it be done cheaper and better? Sure! But to say that it can't be done or that it's impossibly hard is not accurate.
Crotchety adults v. constitution is not what this is about. It's not technically difficult to have filtering based on an individualized profile that is keyed to a kid's library card. The parents can set the filtering level when they apply for the card and adjust from there. Adult cards have no filtering and you can't access the internet without a library card either swiped or put in a reader.
Is this really so technically difficult to protect the liberties of adults while allowing parents to limit the surfing of their children? How about technology to *help* responsible parenting?
The problem has, is, and always will be that people don't want offensive content served to their children and the categories of what is or isn't offensive are so maleable as to make a public access site like a library an exercise in long-term political suicide.
You betcha the emotions run high on this because children are coming under assault from so many different directions that *any* area where a bit of innocence can be preserved is going to be grasped at like a life preserver in the middle of the ocean. With organizations like the APA (American Psychologists Association) talking about how maybe incest or statutory rape isn't always a bad thing (to pick one particularly egregious example), somebody looking to have a public unfiltered site is going to have a tough road to hoe.
The solution IMHO isn't to argue the pros and cons of filtering for everyone but to push out availability of cheap broad-band so that families can gain access in their own home. In the meantime, if a child's library card (I'm assuming a magnetic stripe here) can be coded for a certain set of filtering preferences you can move control of what a particular child can and can't see back to where it belongs, in the hands of the child's parents. Have a cheap reader attached to the internet connected computer with reasonable timeouts and library card swipe activated. This way adults are unfiltered and children are filtered to the degree *their* family decides.
When cable modems, set top boxes, and DSL are everywhere, are you going to sue the plumber down the street because somebody cracked his intelligent next-gen TV set and participated in a DoS attack on your box?
It's the fault of the operating system makers for not making security simple enough and breached security obvious enough. Would Auntie Em even know how to secure her box if someone called her and told her she was being hacked?
Isn't the point of Crusoe that you don't need to change the OS? If Transmeta decides to go after the PPC market couldn't they just put out a software PPC compatibility layer? After all, the rest of the motherboard on macs is pretty standard these days.
At that point, a PPC software layer/Mac OS bundle would reduce the price risk of moving to Mac to $140 and net Apple an entire new market.
So when were these people fired? It wasn't during the last 8 years of democratic administration. Our declining federal workforce only declined because we've shrunk the armed forces. Non-military employment is up, up, up.
The situation has been getting worse, not better over the last few years. I just went through an AOS process with my wife and have helped out other immigrants via my church, in the 80's it wasn't as bad.
Let's have a little reality check here. It's been a Democratic administration from 1993-present. They are in charge of the INS. They've blown it in many ways. It's time to modernize and update the whole process.
If you are in Romania and Romtelecom has a monopoly until minimum 2002 and E-1's (europe equivalent of T-1 but slightly wider pipe) cost $8500/month you can bet that you are going to have a harder time attracting job offers. The reason that people want to escape these countries is the same now as 100 years ago. The local legal system blows chunks, the taxes are too high, and it's better in the US.
The fact that Quicktime 4.1 is written as a Carbon app has nothing to do with the future of Mac OS development. As time goes on, more and more apps will be written in Carbon and then in Cocoa. This is the exact same progression that happened with 68k -> PPC.
It is this Cocoa future (2-3 years) that will lead to the best benefit for the other BSD variants. I don't think that BSD will have any problems hanging on until then and it will provide a long term boost because I predict that Cocoa BSD conversions will be trivial.
DB
Re:Rotary Rocket's bad attitude
on
On to Mars
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· Score: 1
NASA's bad faith actions are completely irrelevant to Rotary Rocket's actions. By making themselves appear small investor unfriendly, they are throwing away one of their best tools. If they had thousands of investors all across the country and NASA tried to pull the sort of crap that you allege, all that Rotary Rocket would have to do is to send out a release to their shareholders with a request to call their congressman. The resulting stinky debacle would put a spike in NASA's funding and NASA would know it.
FUD by a government agency can't withstand a widespread protest to Congress.
DB
hunger lack of priorities, it's evil intent
on
On to Mars
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· Score: 1
The hunger that is in the world is due to government action, not lack of resources. But nobody starves their own people out of incompetence anymore, economics has progressed too much for this to be true. The bastards who use hired thugs to take food away from the starving (example: Sudan) are evil, pure and simple. Saying it's a lack of priorities just makes it look a little less unbearable.
DB
Rotary Rocket's bad attitude
on
On to Mars
·
· Score: 1
If Rotary Rocket is stuck for funding, they only have themselves to blame. You can start with their FAQ. If they lack sufficient investment, they should make it easy to invest. It isn't even particularly revolutionary to have a dutch auction for stock and let a wider public participate in the company. This way they would also avoid the investment banker's cut and maximize revenue for the project.
I would put in a little money to this venture and so would a lot of other people but the way they talk about investment in their website makes it clear. The little guy need not apply.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason for the menus on top is that you can be more sloppy with your mousing and still hit the menu. There's no overshooting as you can if your window has the menu bar. Macs have traditionally made 'big targets' of key UI interface elements so that the mis-clicks and missed clicks are minimized. That's the theory anyway. In practice, it seems to work as well (your mileage may vary)
DB
I can't count the number of times that I've met developers who don't *want* Unix to be easy to use. When strain of thinking that says 'real men use CLI' dies out among Linux contributors then maybe Linux will have a shot at creating a seamless, easy to use user experience. I'm not holding my breath. Unlike at Apple, there is no mandatory Human Interface Guidelines for Linux and I don't see one coming up anytime soon. When the linux user community starts mocking programmers who put out bad interfaces (as Mac users are famous for doing) there will be serious progress.
DB
There are people working on porting X Windows to OS X so you will be able to pick your own interface AFAIK.
As far as speed goes, OS X should be significantly faster than OS 8/9.
DB
DB
SurfWatch doesn't offer levels of access or individual filter profiles so we should just throw up our hands and give up. This is what IPO money is for! Somebody out there needs to write up software that does the sort of individual level filtering that parents can opt-in to. It would be an institutional sale kind of offering that would earn serious cash for the first to pull it off because nobody really *likes* to disnify (sp?) the adult intellectual space and most intelligent observers who are knowledgeable on the technical issues are aware that you can't drive it out completely as long as you keep the ability for anyone to publish on the internet.
DB
You don't manage the terminals at an individual library level, but at a county or central private contractor level. The entire point of a web terminal is to make it connected to the internet. Remote management of same by competent people who do regular security sweeps doesn't take a lot of brainpower to figure out how to do. And if you want to catch them, all you need to do is have somebody keep an eye on the machine remotely and looking at it when they break in. A simple phone call to the local librarian to physically look at the miscreant at terminal #5 makes identification a snap while the break in is being perpetrated.
This is not buck rogers stuff. We don't have to do very sophisticated things to handle 99% of the security load. The universe of those who need filtering and those who can break reasonable security don't really overlap that much. I'll take a 99% solution that protects adult civil liberties and aids in responsible parenting over a fascist universal censoring model every day.
DB
Sadly, laughter is about the only thing we have left in the arsenal against our current disgrace of a president.
Please, mock away!
DB
I would appreciate having a first degree approximate filter at that age so we're doing civics and the classic http://www.whitehouse.com is linked by mistake, I don't have to waste my time undoing the damage.
Shoulder surfing my kids may minimize exposure but I'd rather have it so that it's not my only tool. And if I'm only filtering me and mine, what business is it to you? It's no longer a first amendment issue. I don't wish to block what you read/see and I'm not looking for legal restrictions on publication.
DB
Oh, it's not so hard as all that. I'm sure that organizations who care about it will be glad to put out filter standards that conform to some open filtering spec. The Southern Baptists, the Family Research Council, and any of a dozen islamic organizations come to mind immediately.
Which filter you request be applied to your child's library surfing is up to you as parent. And if you think that your child is ready to handle it, you always have the option of signing a form saying take off the filter. You can even have an automatic age flag that takes all filtering off at 18. This is no harder to centrally manage than virus updates and that gets done reasonably well. Librarians are very good at handling simple repetitive jobs. That's what they do most of the time. They can schedule filter updates in between cataloguing the new magazines that week and putting in the new mailing of microfilmed NY Times.
As for flushing a kid out, that's easy. Format and load from default. Then revoke his library card and call his parents. There is no user data on these machines. You could even format and load from default on a weekly basis without degrading user experience. You would only lose *gasp* the web cache.
Don't FUD
DB
It's my responsibility to watch my kids, true. And if I have a fine granularity tool to keep them out of trouble, I will be able to exercise that responsibility better. There has always been an understanding between those with children and those who want adult information that the children are to be kept out of the adult information by putting certain magazines behind the counter, minimum viewing ages, etc. The problem comes when you approach the border of age groups, when reasonable people can differ on what can and should be available for children. If you maintain that I shouldn't be able to filter what *my* child sees, then I am left with two unpalatable alternatives, filter it all and keep my kid away from computers until I believe he can handle it.
I don't like either of those. Why not just adopt the fine grain filter solution so that we can have an adult internet while keeping the disneyfied version for those who really shouldn't have more than disney. If we develop the tools properly, we can leave the decision up to the individual parents which is where I hope you agree the decision should be.
DB
Your box gets cracked and they don't touch your stuff (as you predict). They do, however use your box to launch a DDoS against whitehouse.gov or even worse from your perspective crack boxes further on that launch a DDoS. A few days later, the secret service is knocking on your door and taking your hardware away and you end up spending thousands in legal fees.
Do you still think, no harm, no foul?
DB
Do you have any idea how much stuff sysadmins ignore in a given week or month? It's quite a bit of foolishness that nobody ever knows that we saw. And often the logs are kept sparser than they could because we would really rather not remember what your favorite e-commerce sex shoppe is.
It's enough to get several people reprimanded/fired and a few criminal cases filed in your average year. Uptight, play strictly by the rules admins can make mini 1984's out of any company. Most of us don't want to. Be glad that this behavior seems rooted in the culture of sysadmins. The FBI is a very different story.
DB
Actually, looking back, I believe that you said that there were no filters. If I trust the professionalism of librarians to maintain an appropriate learning environment for books, that's one thing. But librarians can't filter the internet for the trash, the destructive, and the tremendously stupidity inspiring. A personalized filtering system that applies to my children that I select *for each child* is IMHO a good complement to this librarian filtering.
I don't have a problem with this stuff being out for the teens, it's the 6 and 7 year olds that really shouldn't be given the advanced bestiality courses IMHO.
One of the more subtle filtering methods that are employed by libraries are the use of sections. Your average 5 year old isn't interested in Gray's Anatomy because it's in that boring adult area, etc. There are no 'sections' on the internet, most material is just a few links away and it's much more likely for kids to stray into inappropriate areas.
I'm not arguing for any change in the non-internet materials. I think that by and large what goes into a library is what should be going into one. But the filtering on books and other non-internet materials is there. Having the internet be the only unvetted information source is not a good idea for young children. Parents should and fairly easily could have the option of applying age appropriate filters or not.
DB
Librarians are paid to excercise exactly the sort of judgement that you claim doesn't exist. If the librarian thinks its trash, it doesn't get on the shelves. That's filter level 1.
Beyond that, most libraries that stock adults only materials have them in areas that children have no physical access to. Playboy, if stocked, is not located in a public stack, 2 feet off the ground. This is filter level 2.
The internet doesn't have these sorts of filters attached, this is one of the reasons that it is so threatening to existing heirarchies of all stripes (often a very good thing). Yet parental control of at least a similar quality to the above book style filters is not an unreasonable request and given the ability to personalize filtering by individual we are just an IPO away from solving this problem by purely technical means and with results superior to the crude filtering that librarians have traditionally exercised.
DB
I admit that the solution I propose doesn't scale very well but it's exactly the small town atmosphere where the pro-censorship attitude is most likely to flourish.
Run NT, have individual accounts for each of the children (accessed by mag reader?) and the operating system itself is going to ensure that surfwatch loads a different profile.
Could it be done cheaper and better? Sure! But to say that it can't be done or that it's impossibly hard is not accurate.
DB
Crotchety adults v. constitution is not what this is about. It's not technically difficult to have filtering based on an individualized profile that is keyed to a kid's library card. The parents can set the filtering level when they apply for the card and adjust from there. Adult cards have no filtering and you can't access the internet without a library card either swiped or put in a reader.
Is this really so technically difficult to protect the liberties of adults while allowing parents to limit the surfing of their children? How about technology to *help* responsible parenting?
DB
The problem has, is, and always will be that people don't want offensive content served to their children and the categories of what is or isn't offensive are so maleable as to make a public access site like a library an exercise in long-term political suicide.
You betcha the emotions run high on this because children are coming under assault from so many different directions that *any* area where a bit of innocence can be preserved is going to be grasped at like a life preserver in the middle of the ocean. With organizations like the APA (American Psychologists Association) talking about how maybe incest or statutory rape isn't always a bad thing (to pick one particularly egregious example), somebody looking to have a public unfiltered site is going to have a tough road to hoe.
The solution IMHO isn't to argue the pros and cons of filtering for everyone but to push out availability of cheap broad-band so that families can gain access in their own home. In the meantime, if a child's library card (I'm assuming a magnetic stripe here) can be coded for a certain set of filtering preferences you can move control of what a particular child can and can't see back to where it belongs, in the hands of the child's parents. Have a cheap reader attached to the internet connected computer with reasonable timeouts and library card swipe activated. This way adults are unfiltered and children are filtered to the degree *their* family decides.
DB
When cable modems, set top boxes, and DSL are everywhere, are you going to sue the plumber down the street because somebody cracked his intelligent next-gen TV set and participated in a DoS attack on your box?
It's the fault of the operating system makers for not making security simple enough and breached security obvious enough. Would Auntie Em even know how to secure her box if someone called her and told her she was being hacked?
DB
Isn't the point of Crusoe that you don't need to change the OS? If Transmeta decides to go after the PPC market couldn't they just put out a software PPC compatibility layer? After all, the rest of the motherboard on macs is pretty standard these days.
At that point, a PPC software layer/Mac OS bundle would reduce the price risk of moving to Mac to $140 and net Apple an entire new market.
DB
So when were these people fired? It wasn't during the last 8 years of democratic administration. Our declining federal workforce only declined because we've shrunk the armed forces. Non-military employment is up, up, up.
The situation has been getting worse, not better over the last few years. I just went through an AOS process with my wife and have helped out other immigrants via my church, in the 80's it wasn't as bad.
Let's have a little reality check here. It's been a Democratic administration from 1993-present. They are in charge of the INS. They've blown it in many ways. It's time to modernize and update the whole process.
DB
If you are in Romania and Romtelecom has a monopoly until minimum 2002 and E-1's (europe equivalent of T-1 but slightly wider pipe) cost $8500/month you can bet that you are going to have a harder time attracting job offers. The reason that people want to escape these countries is the same now as 100 years ago. The local legal system blows chunks, the taxes are too high, and it's better in the US.
DB
The fact that Quicktime 4.1 is written as a Carbon app has nothing to do with the future of Mac OS development. As time goes on, more and more apps will be written in Carbon and then in Cocoa. This is the exact same progression that happened with 68k -> PPC.
It is this Cocoa future (2-3 years) that will lead to the best benefit for the other BSD variants. I don't think that BSD will have any problems hanging on until then and it will provide a long term boost because I predict that Cocoa BSD conversions will be trivial.
DB
NASA's bad faith actions are completely irrelevant to Rotary Rocket's actions. By making themselves appear small investor unfriendly, they are throwing away one of their best tools. If they had thousands of investors all across the country and NASA tried to pull the sort of crap that you allege, all that Rotary Rocket would have to do is to send out a release to their shareholders with a request to call their congressman. The resulting stinky debacle would put a spike in NASA's funding and NASA would know it.
FUD by a government agency can't withstand a widespread protest to Congress.
DB
The hunger that is in the world is due to government action, not lack of resources. But nobody starves their own people out of incompetence anymore, economics has progressed too much for this to be true. The bastards who use hired thugs to take food away from the starving (example: Sudan) are evil, pure and simple. Saying it's a lack of priorities just makes it look a little less unbearable.
DB
I would put in a little money to this venture and so would a lot of other people but the way they talk about investment in their website makes it clear. The little guy need not apply.
DB