So far I see only 47 datasets available(is that the best you can do US Gov't?!?!) but the best thing about this site is that it serves as an official directory to myriad data sources. Higher visibility of that data to the general public may encourage more citizens to ask for this kind of data for their areas of interest or for their jurisdictions. So overall this is a good thing. The only thing I wish they would do is provide a forum/mailing list where data consuming developers can coordinate their tools to process this data. I expressed more about this idea here: http://www.thenationaldialogue.org/ideas/grow-a-development-data-analysis-community
on the essential car systems stuff but can auto manufacturers separate it from the user facing stuff? I'm thinking I'd like one of these to be driving the GPS, screen, and sound system.
This may have something to do with recent attacks on Adobe's Reader. People are switching to alternatives that can read PDFs and don't leave them vulnerable to such attacks. So Adobe may be moving from an application domination strategy to a file format domination strategy. Such a strategy would allow and even encourage all applications to support PDF as fully as possible. Another reason may be seeing as how Open Office has has this feature for a while, the legal argument you vaguely refer to may no longer be valid(if it ever was).
Open Office is free software which respects you as the user so that if you have a problem you can fix it yourself. You are also free to use the software for whatever purpose you choose and to carry the torch in your own direction should Microsoft not agree with your ideas for improvement or not want to fix a bug that's hanging you up.
Non-free software will make great progress in satisfying the technical needs of its users including adding features introduced by free software. For example, Office 2007 SP2 now supports, in some form, ODF. The fact that it isn't free software still remains a liability when it comes to user freedom and to software progress in general.
Does your support of free software end when non-free software has the features you've come to enjoy?
I prefer the government installs the fiber and leases it to companies that provide billing, maintenance, and tech support services. Let competition in those areas bring prices down. Internet access is a public good and greases the wheels of the commerce. It's not something to be taxed and exploited by large monopolistic corporations.
Like so many geeks, I my fair share of time wondering why Windows has been so successful. My conclusion is that it boils down to satisfying individuals and organizations who placed no value on freedom.
The other reasons are auxiliary: timing, marketing, features, illegal monopoly practices. When it comes down to it, if people value their freedom, they'll run only free software. gNewSense is a great place to start: http://www.gnewsense.org/
Thanks for your reply. I'm glad to hear the Library definitions will be documented.
I'm not an expert on interoperability but I assume that if the library metadata is stored on disk using a format that's easy to parse you will have mitigated the lock-in problem. In an ideal sense, one should be able to access or even update such a library meta-database directly on disk in a dual-boot scenario. So if there are any checksums on the database, those should be documented as well so the data can truly be operated on by any program.
My only suggestion to Microsoft is to release their software under a free software license.
My main point with this post was to give my impressions not having used the OS. I'm not doing a review, but I was trying to figure out what is new and what would be useful to see in free software.
I'm not going to load a beta or RC or even a final version onto any of my machines but at the same time I'm not going to launch a campaign against it. I would like to emphasize that people are much better off long term using and learning to use free software. If this information can be used to improve free software, my work is done.
It's a good point that the search box is more efficient than the old way but usability of the control panel has regressed at least for me. The new feature of a search box is something to get used to, though honestly people are better off spending such time getting used to a free operating system and free software in general.
I mostly get annoyed at the way the control panel is displayed to you before it's done loading. So you go to click on an item and it's moved between the time you started the clicking process and the time the click has registered.
The only reason to run Windows 7 is to know what the non-free software world is doing but you can just watch online videos to find that out. I recently did this and here are my impressions in bullet form:
* Windows 7 is a lot like Vista
* next desktop background feature is kind of cool but i saw it in kde4
* new task bar - makes it easier to switch to mac and more annoying to actually switch tasks using a mouse
* control panel still in the new harder to deal with style but not sure if it still loads piecemeal like Vista
* Libraries are introduced as another way to segment your data in an annoying and OS-locked-in way.
* of equal or lesser value with purchase of a normal-priced Tibet. This offer has no cash value and may not be combined with any other offers. Limit 1 per customer. Good only at participating locations.
Just to clarify the OP's idea. They want to store only encrypted data on the server, send only encrypted queries to the server(that the server can't even decrypt), yet they expect that the server will be able to send them back results. I don't think it can happen but surprise me.
The best I think you can do is store and transfer the data in encrypted form and put the indexes and any search logic on the client. Maybe the index could be stored on the server as well and synced to the client, but creating the index will require access to the plaintext.
It's a shame that with 190+ posts not a single mention of encryption is to be found. Are we geeks or are we a barbershop? There should be an open invitation from those of us who know about encryption to help bloggers like this guy setup pgp for email and a truecrypt file if not full-drive encryption so raids like this, while succeeding in making the raiders look foolish, have the added feature that no data will be compromised.
Microsoft gives us updates all the time and we trust them to fix bugs and security holes. Firefox not coming with their extension is not in the scope of bugs and security holes they should fix. When they overstep their bounds like this ON TOP of an application(esp. a free software application) what might they be doing in their proprietary code under the application? Whatâ(TM)s next, an OpenOffice extension to make sure Microsoft never has an $ where their s is?
Of course, we can change our ports, upgrade our packages and more...on our systems. But we have accounts on other systems and while we trust those systems to lose our data only rarely or be down from time to time, we have to assume that our password will be stolen and harvested along with our username from one or more of those in the future. Just imagine friendster when it's down to one underpaid intern of a sysadmin.
So the moral of the story is, have a different password for each system and keep track of them whatever way you want(meatspace isn't bad but encrypted is better). Yeah, it's a hassle but it's actually not too bad since browsers can remember passwords and if a box or laptop gets stolen or hacked, you just spend a couple hours revving all your passwords.
Slashdot Mirror
The other two percent clicked accidentally. Or are failbots.
Yeah why doesn't Google reimplement GNU?
So far I see only 47 datasets available(is that the best you can do US Gov't?!?!) but the best thing about this site is that it serves as an official directory to myriad data sources. Higher visibility of that data to the general public may encourage more citizens to ask for this kind of data for their areas of interest or for their jurisdictions. So overall this is a good thing. The only thing I wish they would do is provide a forum/mailing list where data consuming developers can coordinate their tools to process this data. I expressed more about this idea here: http://www.thenationaldialogue.org/ideas/grow-a-development-data-analysis-community
on the essential car systems stuff but can auto manufacturers separate it from the user facing stuff? I'm thinking I'd like one of these to be driving the GPS, screen, and sound system.
Does this mean I can be alerted when I get near someone who cut me off before?
Just when I thought the chart format was stabilizing we need 3 more columns!
This may have something to do with recent attacks on Adobe's Reader. People are switching to alternatives that can read PDFs and don't leave them vulnerable to such attacks. So Adobe may be moving from an application domination strategy to a file format domination strategy. Such a strategy would allow and even encourage all applications to support PDF as fully as possible. Another reason may be seeing as how Open Office has has this feature for a while, the legal argument you vaguely refer to may no longer be valid(if it ever was).
Open Office is free software which respects you as the user so that if you have a problem you can fix it yourself. You are also free to use the software for whatever purpose you choose and to carry the torch in your own direction should Microsoft not agree with your ideas for improvement or not want to fix a bug that's hanging you up.
We definitely need this AcidTest for ODF rendering. I just ran across this post that highlights a few potential problems in Microsoft's implementation: http://www.archivum.info/comp.os.linux.advocacy/2008-08/msg00757.html
Non-free software will make great progress in satisfying the technical needs of its users including adding features introduced by free software. For example, Office 2007 SP2 now supports, in some form, ODF. The fact that it isn't free software still remains a liability when it comes to user freedom and to software progress in general.
Does your support of free software end when non-free software has the features you've come to enjoy?
I prefer the government installs the fiber and leases it to companies that provide billing, maintenance, and tech support services. Let competition in those areas bring prices down. Internet access is a public good and greases the wheels of the commerce. It's not something to be taxed and exploited by large monopolistic corporations.
Like so many geeks, I my fair share of time wondering why Windows has been so successful. My conclusion is that it boils down to satisfying individuals and organizations who placed no value on freedom.
The other reasons are auxiliary: timing, marketing, features, illegal monopoly practices. When it comes down to it, if people value their freedom, they'll run only free software. gNewSense is a great place to start: http://www.gnewsense.org/
Thanks for your reply. I'm glad to hear the Library definitions will be documented.
I'm not an expert on interoperability but I assume that if the library metadata is stored on disk using a format that's easy to parse you will have mitigated the lock-in problem. In an ideal sense, one should be able to access or even update such a library meta-database directly on disk in a dual-boot scenario. So if there are any checksums on the database, those should be documented as well so the data can truly be operated on by any program.
My only suggestion to Microsoft is to release their software under a free software license.
My main point with this post was to give my impressions not having used the OS. I'm not doing a review, but I was trying to figure out what is new and what would be useful to see in free software.
I'm not going to load a beta or RC or even a final version onto any of my machines but at the same time I'm not going to launch a campaign against it. I would like to emphasize that people are much better off long term using and learning to use free software. If this information can be used to improve free software, my work is done.
It's a good point that the search box is more efficient than the old way but usability of the control panel has regressed at least for me. The new feature of a search box is something to get used to, though honestly people are better off spending such time getting used to a free operating system and free software in general.
I mostly get annoyed at the way the control panel is displayed to you before it's done loading. So you go to click on an item and it's moved between the time you started the clicking process and the time the click has registered.
The only reason to run Windows 7 is to know what the non-free software world is doing but you can just watch online videos to find that out. I recently did this and here are my impressions in bullet form:
* Windows 7 is a lot like Vista
* next desktop background feature is kind of cool but i saw it in kde4
* new task bar - makes it easier to switch to mac and more annoying to actually switch tasks using a mouse
* control panel still in the new harder to deal with style but not sure if it still loads piecemeal like Vista
* Libraries are introduced as another way to segment your data in an annoying and OS-locked-in way.
Botched. Should have been:
//also works if you s/Tibet/Software/g
Free Tibet!*
* of equal or lesser value with purchase of a normal-priced Tibet. This offer has no cash value and may not be combined with any other offers. Limit 1 per customer. Good only at participating locations.
I bet it was fun watching the Time Warner Customer Service dashboard/control panel over the past few days.
"Look, the cancellation rate is dipping....oh, no it isn't. Doh!"
Just to clarify the OP's idea. They want to store only encrypted data on the server, send only encrypted queries to the server(that the server can't even decrypt), yet they expect that the server will be able to send them back results. I don't think it can happen but surprise me.
The best I think you can do is store and transfer the data in encrypted form and put the indexes and any search logic on the client. Maybe the index could be stored on the server as well and synced to the client, but creating the index will require access to the plaintext.
It's a shame that with 190+ posts not a single mention of encryption is to be found. Are we geeks or are we a barbershop? There should be an open invitation from those of us who know about encryption to help bloggers like this guy setup pgp for email and a truecrypt file if not full-drive encryption so raids like this, while succeeding in making the raiders look foolish, have the added feature that no data will be compromised.
I think this is a neat demo but where can I find me some source code and help extend it?
Microsoft gives us updates all the time and we trust them to fix bugs and security holes. Firefox not coming with their extension is not in the scope of bugs and security holes they should fix. When they overstep their bounds like this ON TOP of an application(esp. a free software application) what might they be doing in their proprietary code under the application? Whatâ(TM)s next, an OpenOffice extension to make sure Microsoft never has an $ where their s is?
Of course, we can change our ports, upgrade our packages and more...on our systems. But we have accounts on other systems and while we trust those systems to lose our data only rarely or be down from time to time, we have to assume that our password will be stolen and harvested along with our username from one or more of those in the future. Just imagine friendster when it's down to one underpaid intern of a sysadmin.
So the moral of the story is, have a different password for each system and keep track of them whatever way you want(meatspace isn't bad but encrypted is better). Yeah, it's a hassle but it's actually not too bad since browsers can remember passwords and if a box or laptop gets stolen or hacked, you just spend a couple hours revving all your passwords.
An unexpected error occurred. An exception occured in module:
USPS
at address: 0x1234 Main St., Hometown USA, zc=0x10001