The US is not subject to censorship by any foreign nation.
So it's just as well this is not what is being attempted.
The British Government is making a polite request to a supposed friendly nation; the US govt. will likely say 'sorry, we don't like this stuff either but we believe it is constituionaly protected'. Or if it did take any action, it would be of its own free will, not that of the 'foreign nation', i.e. the US would be its *own* censor.
Attempting to 'censor' the US would involve such things as courts, sanctions, military action, jamming/blocking etc., or at least threatening some such things.
So being able to code using variable names written in your own language, vs. transliterating them into Latin characters is a huge benefit...
A benefit only as long as you are sure that the code will only be worked on by people who share your language. In these days of outsourcing and trans-national development, the minimum common language is highly likely to be English - most programmers will have at least some experience with code where everything including comments and variable names is in English. You'll find it much harder to (say) find Indian programmers who are reasonably happy with (e.g.) Danish comments and variable names.
28" Widescreen CRT TVs are absolutely lethal - the don't *quite* weigh enough to be impossible for one normal person to lift, but they weigh more than most people can lift *safely*, and enough to seriously damage you if not lifted correctly. I came within a few mm of getting my foot crushed badly when one of these TVs 'bounced' off a bed onto the floor while being positioned (TV was totally undamaged despite doing a 180deg turn in mid air and landing very hard upside down).
I've never tried lifting a 32" Widescreen CRT TV but I would think it was heavy enough that most people wouldn't even try moving by themselves.
I never understood the desire to push Linux into the mainstream.
Two good reasons: 1/ Higher market share = more companies provide drivers/specs for random devices 2/ Higher market share = more companies port 'important' software
Both of these would potentially benefit at least some of the existing 1% or whatever it is who currently run Linux on their desktop. You can afford to ignore 1% of your potential market (because of the cost of supporting it), not so much when it's 10%.
Yeah, I had Ubuntu installed through Wubi inside Win7 NTFS partition.
Seems a shame to give up on it because of a Wubi problem. In my (and many other people's) opinion wubi is really only for initially trying Ubuntu out without repartitioning, not a good permanant option. Why don't you give a *proper* install another chance?
Re:It is free as in freedom but not free as in bee
on
Desktop Linux Is Dead
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· Score: 1
All I want to be able to do at this point is make regular backups to a regular external HD
any system, including WPA2, could be hacked in less than an hour.
Have you got any evidence that WPA2/AES is 'broken'? My understanding is that *as long as you use a sufficiently long passphrase which is not vulnerable to dictionary attack*, WPA2 is literally uncrackable (by brute force or implementation/algorithm weakness) at present.
You seem to have missed the point of the GP post completely.
Firstly, they didn't mention using 'english text' - presumably dictionary words etc., which is always bad. You just made that bit up. They were only talking about whether to use mixed case and special chars, or not.
So essentially we are talking about the difference between arbitary strings consisting either of single case letters, plus numbers (36 chars) or consisting of mixed case letters, numbers and special characters (about 70 chars depending on what special chars you allow).
The point is that a *slightly longer* arbitary string from the 36 char set is just as secure as a *shorter* string from the 70 char set and easier to remember (mixed case is particularly difficult for most people to remember).
E.g. a 10 char arbitary password from the 36 char set has 36^10 (about 3x10^15) variations and is stronger than an 8 char arbitary password from the 70 char set which only has 70^8 (about 6x10^14) variations.
Please don't lecture us on security again. Thanks!
In the modern era with large disks, it makes a lot of sense to keep backups in the cloud,
That's all very well if you've only got a few GB of data. I've got about 500GB of data that needs backing up and it gets regularly rsync'ed to two external drives. If I wanted to back it up to 'the cloud' the initial backup would take approximately 90 days at my maximum upstream rate (512Kb/s or 64KB/s). Given that my connection gets downgraded to 1/4 speed in the day after a certain amount of data is uploaded, it would probably take about six months during which my internet connection would be nearly unusable for anything non trivial.
In other words, the problem is that for most people, upstream data rates really suck (in my case it's 20x less than downstream).
Your wife or GF doesn't go to the salon just to get clean hair. She goes to get out of the house. She goes to interact and gossip with the other people there. This device will sit unused no matter how effective it is in deterging oil and dirt from hair.
What about the occasions when she doesn't have time to go to the salon, or it's closed, or booked up? She can sit and watch TV, read, whatever while the machine does its thing. Anyhow, I get the impression that most women don't go to the salon *just* to have their hair washed, it's usually mostly when they want a colour or cut etc. as well.
You can also get cash out as part of a debit card purchase (reffered to as "cashback) in most supermarkets and some other shops. I've never heard of anywhere charging extra for this service.
50p cashback charge in my local Spar (only used the service once, nearby free ATM was broken and Sainsbury's closed).
Did they steal the overhead electric power lines for the trains? That's happened in the UK, although it's more usual for them to steal the signalling cables...
In some areas it's quite out of hand, train services are regularly disrupted at vast expense. I'm not generally one for new criminal offences (I think we've probably got too many already in some areas), but in this case I really think you need something a bit heavier than theft (and maybe criminal damage). A new offence of 'Infrastructure Sabotage' for removing parts of a working railway, tramway etc., with punishments maybe 5-10x more than simply (say) stealing equivalent unused cable from storage might reduce the attraction and go someway to reflecting the relative cost to society and to Network Rail etc.
Supposing the "conversation" was to remind Motorola that *they* were breaching their contract with Google in relation to the non-free google services bundle, and that this contract pre-dated Motorola's contract with Skyhook? In that case, Google has done nothing wrong.
Arguably if you want change, you need to educate and put for an interest in proportional representation.
In fact, the UK has finally got their head out their proverbial butts after the last election to actually put for a referendum on the matter...
The proposed 'simple AV' system is not regarded as a form of PR (unlike e.g. AV+), because it may produce a more or *less* proportional result than the current FPTP system depending on the circumstances.
Not to say that AV is a bad thing, for example it eliminates the need for tactical voting based on guesswork.
It has been a while but really? I have never seen a mainframe that didn't use Zulu time.
Maybe it's US/UK thing. Maybe because of the many timezones and DST differences in the US, mainframes (which will tend to be often serving the whole country in the case of banks etc.) are nearly always run on UTC? I've had experience of about 20 different companies' mainframes in the UK over the last 25 years, and about 18 of them either set the system time to GMT(UTC) or BST(UTC+1) as appropriate for the time of year, or (much more common in recent years) have the system clock set to GMT all the time and set the local time offset to +1 for BST. As per my comment above, although z/OS itself tolerates putting the local time offset forward or backwards dynamically, most databases, applications etc. do not tolerate it going backwards.
IBM mainframes have uptimes measured in years if not decades.
Not in my experience. I can think of at least two factors that require more frequent IPLs.
1/ Switch back to 'normal' time from DST (e.g. BST to GMT in the UK). Although it's possible to put the mainframe clock forward dynamically (well, change the local time offset actually) sucessfully on many (if not all) systems, in practice most systems will not cope with the clock going backwards (i.e. the 'same hour' happening again) even though the OS supports it. Generally you have to shut the system down for an hour, then IPL. You could probably get away with shutting down all batch initiators and CICS/DB etc. address spaces and then bringing them up again after waiting an hour, but it's typically less risky to follow the established IPL procedure, and this IPL generally obviates the need to have a seperate IPL for 2/; regardless, the machine is effectively down for more than an hour. It may be possible to achive continuous operation while moving the time offset backwards with some limited subsets of software but I haven't seen it, and although running on a fixed time and effectively ignoing DST will work, this creates problems of its own and doesn't solve 2/
2/ 'CSA creep' - tiny bits of orphaned storage (often left by non-IBM supplied products)eventually fill up restricted size critical storage areas such as the CSA, this could lead to an unscheduled IPL, so typically an IPL every (e.g.) 6 months is advisable.
Not to say that specific systems can't run longer than this (e.g., run on GMT or equivalent at all times, do not tolerate any product which leaks memory in critical areas at all), but I think that's pretty unusual.
Exactly my thoughts - it's been the same in the UK for a while now. I think they now ask for these details when you buy a SIM/PAYG phone, but even if they don't... They don't (it's not a legal requirement)
or you get around it by buying online, you have to register the phone with the phone company in order to add credit, which requires giving them your details.
You can top up an anonymous phone bought with cash using e.g. scratch-card type vouchers bought with cash etc.
how the hell did he buy a phone and start using it without having to register his payment method and add some credit. As far as I know you've not been able to do that in the UK (and I think most of Europe) for at least most of the last decade.
As far as the UK is concerned, you're wrong. There's no legal barrier to buying and topping up a pre-paid phone or sim anonymously with cash, and no current proposals to change this.
I've used unix systems for years and I'd have no clue how to boot into the old kernel either.
In most typical setups you just select it from the Grub menu at startup, i.e. press an arrow key once or twice and hit enter. You may need to press Escape to display the Grub menu if it's set as hidden.
The bottom line is the worst thing...the most terrible awful thing I have to experience as a Linux Desktop User is the delay between clicking on Firefox and it appearing.
Make sure you've got the 'preload' package installed; it's not installed by default on the distros I've used. It preloads your most used programs, and you should see a noticeable speedup in starting Firefox, OpenOffice etc.
Slashdot Mirror
..if we don't like what is being said, its your right to say it
Apparently not in our case though:
..shut your face
You'd make a good diplomat if that's how you'd respond to a polite (even if possibly misguided) request (not demand) from a friendly nation.
The US is not subject to censorship by any foreign nation.
So it's just as well this is not what is being attempted.
The British Government is making a polite request to a supposed friendly nation; the US govt. will likely say 'sorry, we don't like this stuff either but we believe it is constituionaly protected'. Or if it did take any action, it would be of its own free will, not that of the 'foreign nation', i.e. the US would be its *own* censor.
Attempting to 'censor' the US would involve such things as courts, sanctions, military action, jamming/blocking etc., or at least threatening some such things.
(Expect a future GPLv4 to explicitely require that the end-user can override such killswitches.)
I believe your requirement is fulfilled by the GPLv3 'anti-tivoisation' clause (as it's often referred to).
So being able to code using variable names written in your own language, vs. transliterating them into Latin characters is a huge benefit...
A benefit only as long as you are sure that the code will only be worked on by people who share your language. In these days of outsourcing and trans-national development, the minimum common language is highly likely to be English - most programmers will have at least some experience with code where everything including comments and variable names is in English. You'll find it much harder to (say) find Indian programmers who are reasonably happy with (e.g.) Danish comments and variable names.
28" Widescreen CRT TVs are absolutely lethal - the don't *quite* weigh enough to be impossible for one normal person to lift, but they weigh more than most people can lift *safely*, and enough to seriously damage you if not lifted correctly. I came within a few mm of getting my foot crushed badly when one of these TVs 'bounced' off a bed onto the floor while being positioned (TV was totally undamaged despite doing a 180deg turn in mid air and landing very hard upside down).
I've never tried lifting a 32" Widescreen CRT TV but I would think it was heavy enough that most people wouldn't even try moving by themselves.
I never understood the desire to push Linux into the mainstream.
Two good reasons:
1/ Higher market share = more companies provide drivers/specs for random devices
2/ Higher market share = more companies port 'important' software
Both of these would potentially benefit at least some of the existing 1% or whatever it is who currently run Linux on their desktop.
You can afford to ignore 1% of your potential market (because of the cost of supporting it), not so much when it's 10%.
Yeah, I had Ubuntu installed through Wubi inside Win7 NTFS partition.
Seems a shame to give up on it because of a Wubi problem. In my (and many other people's) opinion wubi is really only for initially trying Ubuntu out without repartitioning, not a good permanant option.
Why don't you give a *proper* install another chance?
All I want to be able to do at this point is make regular backups to a regular external HD
grsync?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grsync
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/grsync-simple-gui-rsync-easily-linux/
any system, including WPA2, could be hacked in less than an hour.
Have you got any evidence that WPA2/AES is 'broken'? My understanding is that *as long as you use a sufficiently long passphrase which is not vulnerable to dictionary attack*, WPA2 is literally uncrackable (by brute force or implementation/algorithm weakness) at present.
You seem to have missed the point of the GP post completely.
Firstly, they didn't mention using 'english text' - presumably dictionary words etc., which is always bad. You just made that bit up. They were only talking about whether to use mixed case and special chars, or not.
So essentially we are talking about the difference between arbitary strings consisting either of single case letters, plus numbers (36 chars) or consisting of mixed case letters, numbers and special characters (about 70 chars depending on what special chars you allow).
The point is that a *slightly longer* arbitary string from the 36 char set is just as secure as a *shorter* string from the 70 char set and easier to remember (mixed case is particularly difficult for most people to remember).
E.g. a 10 char arbitary password from the 36 char set has 36^10 (about 3x10^15) variations and is stronger than an 8 char arbitary password from the 70 char set which only has 70^8 (about 6x10^14) variations.
Please don't lecture us on security again. Thanks!
In the modern era with large disks, it makes a lot of sense to keep backups in the cloud,
That's all very well if you've only got a few GB of data. I've got about 500GB of data that needs backing up and it gets regularly rsync'ed to two external drives. If I wanted to back it up to 'the cloud' the initial backup would take approximately 90 days at my maximum upstream rate (512Kb/s or 64KB/s). Given that my connection gets downgraded to 1/4 speed in the day after a certain amount of data is uploaded, it would probably take about six months during which my internet connection would be nearly unusable for anything non trivial.
In other words, the problem is that for most people, upstream data rates really suck (in my case it's 20x less than downstream).
Your wife or GF doesn't go to the salon just to get clean hair. She goes to get out of the house. She goes to interact and gossip with the other people there. This device will sit unused no matter how effective it is in deterging oil and dirt from hair.
What about the occasions when she doesn't have time to go to the salon, or it's closed, or booked up? She can sit and watch TV, read, whatever while the machine does its thing. Anyhow, I get the impression that most women don't go to the salon *just* to have their hair washed, it's usually mostly when they want a colour or cut etc. as well.
You can also get cash out as part of a debit card purchase (reffered to as "cashback) in most supermarkets and some other shops. I've never heard of anywhere charging extra for this service.
50p cashback charge in my local Spar (only used the service once, nearby free ATM was broken and Sainsbury's closed).
Did they steal the overhead electric power lines for the trains? That's happened in the UK, although it's more usual for them to steal the signalling cables...
In some areas it's quite out of hand, train services are regularly disrupted at vast expense. I'm not generally one for new criminal offences (I think we've probably got too many already in some areas), but in this case I really think you need something a bit heavier than theft (and maybe criminal damage).
A new offence of 'Infrastructure Sabotage' for removing parts of a working railway, tramway etc., with punishments maybe 5-10x more than simply (say) stealing equivalent unused cable from storage might reduce the attraction and go someway to reflecting the relative cost to society and to Network Rail etc.
Try googling for "send text from pc", "email to text" etc. and you'll find out.
Updates. Firefox is in the Ubuntu repositories, so it gets updated automatically. Chrome is a .deb that I have to download and install manually.
Is there some reason you don't use Chromium instead, which *is* in the Ubuntu repositories (at least at 10.04)?
Supposing the "conversation" was to remind Motorola that *they* were breaching their contract with Google in relation to the non-free google services bundle, and that this contract pre-dated Motorola's contract with Skyhook? In that case, Google has done nothing wrong.
Arguably if you want change, you need to educate and put for an interest in proportional representation.
In fact, the UK has finally got their head out their proverbial butts after the last election to actually put for a referendum on the matter...
The proposed 'simple AV' system is not regarded as a form of PR (unlike e.g. AV+), because it may produce a more or *less* proportional result than the current FPTP system depending on the circumstances.
Not to say that AV is a bad thing, for example it eliminates the need for tactical voting based on guesswork.
Yet ThePirateBay seems to manage to maintain their distribution network quite well, even though a lot of movies/games/music/etc is available there.
I find it hard to believe that you don't know that TPB stores *no* 'content' on their servers (and that none passes through their network).
It has been a while but really?
I have never seen a mainframe that didn't use Zulu time.
Maybe it's US/UK thing. Maybe because of the many timezones and DST differences in the US, mainframes (which will tend to be often serving the whole country in the case of banks etc.) are nearly always run on UTC?
I've had experience of about 20 different companies' mainframes in the UK over the last 25 years, and about 18 of them either set the system time to GMT(UTC) or BST(UTC+1) as appropriate for the time of year, or (much more common in recent years) have the system clock set to GMT all the time and set the local time offset to +1 for BST.
As per my comment above, although z/OS itself tolerates putting the local time offset forward or backwards dynamically, most databases, applications etc. do not tolerate it going backwards.
IBM mainframes have uptimes measured in years if not decades.
Not in my experience. I can think of at least two factors that require more frequent IPLs.
1/ Switch back to 'normal' time from DST (e.g. BST to GMT in the UK). Although it's possible to put the mainframe clock forward dynamically (well, change the local time offset actually) sucessfully on many (if not all) systems, in practice most systems will not cope with the clock going backwards (i.e. the 'same hour' happening again) even though the OS supports it. Generally you have to shut the system down for an hour, then IPL. You could probably get away with shutting down all batch initiators and CICS/DB etc. address spaces and then bringing them up again after waiting an hour, but it's typically less risky to follow the established IPL procedure, and this IPL generally obviates the need to have a seperate IPL for 2/; regardless, the machine is effectively down for more than an hour.
It may be possible to achive continuous operation while moving the time offset backwards with some limited subsets of software but I haven't seen it, and although running on a fixed time and effectively ignoing DST will work, this creates problems of its own and doesn't solve 2/
2/ 'CSA creep' - tiny bits of orphaned storage (often left by non-IBM supplied products)eventually fill up restricted size critical storage areas such as the CSA, this could lead to an unscheduled IPL, so typically an IPL every (e.g.) 6 months is advisable.
Not to say that specific systems can't run longer than this (e.g., run on GMT or equivalent at all times, do not tolerate any product which leaks memory in critical areas at all), but I think that's pretty unusual.
Exactly my thoughts - it's been the same in the UK for a while now. I think they now ask for these details when you buy a SIM/PAYG phone, but even if they don't...
They don't (it's not a legal requirement)
or you get around it by buying online, you have to register the phone with the phone company in order to add credit, which requires giving them your details.
You can top up an anonymous phone bought with cash using e.g. scratch-card type vouchers bought with cash etc.
how the hell did he buy a phone and start using it without having to register his payment method and add some credit. As far as I know you've not been able to do that in the UK (and I think most of Europe) for at least most of the last decade.
As far as the UK is concerned, you're wrong. There's no legal barrier to buying and topping up a pre-paid phone or sim anonymously with cash, and no current proposals to change this.
There was some talk of this under the previous UK government, e.g.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article4969312.ece
but it never got anywhere.
Also, the proposed id cards and national identity register backing them have been abandoned before any significant rollout occurred.
I've used unix systems for years and I'd have no clue how to boot into the old kernel either.
In most typical setups you just select it from the Grub menu at startup, i.e. press an arrow key once or twice and hit enter. You may need to press Escape to display the Grub menu if it's set as hidden.
The bottom line is the worst thing...the most terrible awful thing I have to experience as a Linux Desktop User is the delay between clicking on Firefox and it appearing.
Make sure you've got the 'preload' package installed; it's not installed by default on the distros I've used. It preloads your most used programs, and you should see a noticeable speedup in starting Firefox, OpenOffice etc.