This feature is a big threat to a diverse democratic society. Because:
1. Every society, no matter how peaceful and democratic, will come into the hands of the wrong people / organizations at times.
1. These people/organizations/movements/businesses will see it as their duty to put down any resistence against whatever their goal is, with any means they have.
1. The systematic registration of peoples faces will not only create a register of images where they know who's on them. It will also make it possible to automatically tag any other image on the net of the people who has been tagged. This includes recognising everyone who's caught in one of the millions of surveilance cameras hidden or visible everywhere.
2. One way to beat this feature is to change your own features as often as possible. With make up and piercings, hair style and plastic surgery if you're a woman, with all of those in addition to growing a beard and cutting it off regularly, if you're a man. This will surly confuse the system.
3. One way to beat this feature is to purposely submit a lot of images and tag them incorrectly. This will surly confuse the system.
If we fail to break this, there will come a time when the people in power will have the possibility to know where anyone is at any moment. They will use this power to subdue any resistance. And believe me, I'm not one who jumps at any conspiration theory. And believe me, people will be rounded up, tortured and killed if we don't break this.
Yes, if you have much use for/var/log you should mount it so it doesn't disappear after reboot... There are a lot of programs that write there even when the log deamon isn't running, so I normally turn it off, and if there's some strange error I turn it on again. I haven't tested if this speeds the system up at all, though. And yes, system upgrade breaks things, but usually (but not always) you get warned about this by pacman during upgrading. If stability were a big concern, and I needed simplicity, performance and customizability, I would still run Arch Linux, but I would need a test system and only upgrade the production system when I knew it would be stable. Of course this isn't very practical if you only have an eee with a 20Gb ssd.
If you want an optimized system, Arch Linux is not more difficult than any other distro. You just don't have the choice to install a complete desktop system with lots and lots of things you don't want, configured in ways you don't like, so that you can uninstall almost everything and then install what you want, from obscure package repos, so you get library confusions etc, for then to reconfigure almost everything, so it works the way you like it to.
The Arch Linux installer lets you:
1. Install a very basic system 2. Configure the most important things in one simple configuration file (or a few more if you want or need to)
Then you boot into your basic system and:
1. Update your system with one command 2. Install the programs you need. The package manager will take care of all dependencies. 3. Configure them the way you want them 4. Enjoy!
Of course, I agree, this is more difficult than letting someone else make all the choices for you.
By the way, I use Arch Linux on a Eee 901, and it works perfectly. There are some tricks to speed it up. Mounting the/tmp and/var/log and/var/tmp as a ram disk makes it a lot more responsive. Turning off disk cache in firefox is also a good idea. Driver support isn't a problem for me at least. Everything works. You might need to install a customized kernel package for the wireless card, but from 2.6.29 there will be support for the card in the kernel (This is for the 901, I don't know about the 1000HD).
And why all this goddamn focus on who "wins" each state? The primaries (at least for the Dems) aren't a winner-take-all. All three of the leading Democratic candidates walk away from this with delegates to the convention. All three of them walked away from Iowa with delegates. Yet somehow Hillary's loss in Iowa all but doomed her campaign in the eyes of the media. This is what I've been wondering all the time since last night. They make a big thing out of Clinton's "win" although Obama and Clinton got 8 delegates each. That's a tie. Now Obama has 25 and Clinton 24 delegates of the needed 2025 they need. The media circus is absurd here, and the strangest thing is that no one even mentions it.
When I write my poem late in the night, I often want to keep what I write. So I look through a list of choices made up of words that when read in my mind will turn into voices which inexplicably transform into meaning, an attribute that language has. My intent is clear, ever out of rhythm, I choose the one that will Save As. Then my rescue mission will need a name, worthy of carrying my work into fame. I thought the deed was done at last, but nay! The text must be coded in one specific way. The popular code is made by a doctor who's quite weak and small. But I'm not sure he's a decent physician at all. I've let him rescue some poems I wrote a long time ago, I think. Youthful romantic plain, not good, but they didn't stink. His prescription was made with his popular Writer. It was a bit like his Office, but quite a lot lighter. Ahh, to the point; Those poems are now lost forever. From now on I'll be a little more clever. I will save my files with ODF! The morale of this poem is twofold; for one a poem doesn't need to rhyme, the second and more important, which this poem very clearly illustrates; the choice of coding for the text doesn't really matter if the content isn't worth the flipflops it is turning.
It's because they don't mean 'open', they mean 'free', as in unrestricted, and that is something they are very specific about.
Why not just redefine the English word free? I think the free world would have been a much better place if this particular word had been a little less ambiguous. As in: I will free you => I will make you free => I will take everything you own.
I wonder what free software (as in unoccupied) is like...
(Just in case you didn't notice; My language is not English. Where I come from, free means free, gratis gratis. No Fuzz.
You're absolutely right.
One of the reasons Free Software or Open Source or whatever is less popular than
Mac or Windows is computer hackers' inability to come up with catchy names. Mac
is perhaps the most successful in giving names to their products.
The worst example is of course FSF's GNU, which sounds like some form of
health organisation, and by insisting on GNU/Linux they're leaving 80% of the world's
population behind, left with just a shrug.
Who would use Ekiga when they can use Skype? Or
Gimp when they have Photoshop? I think a lot of potential Free Software users get turned
off when they first hear about Gnome or KDE, not because the concept of choosing their
desktop environment is too difficult to grasp, but because their names are so unattractive.
Linux is one of the few really successful names in
Free Software, together with Firefox. That's why The Linux Foundation isn't a bad idea.
I think it's time for us who know that GNU is the most important software ever
written, hidden behind the ugliest name, to start the renaming of the FOSS world, whether
the hackers want it or not.
Sort of. But in a simpler way. I'm not trying to refute materialism. I'm just pointing to the fact that it has a big problem with explaining awareness.
Yes. It is self-sufficient. It explains quite well how the brain works, and how it relates to our sensual experiences. But it doesn't even begin to consider how neural impulses are "processed" into conscious awareness. I was just trying to say that there is a gap in this model between the sensual and the actual perception, which senses can not penetrate completely, since they are the object of perception. So, since something beyond the senses leads it into our awareness, I'll suggest that we could call it extra sensory, if not actual perception. This transition from the senses to our consciousness is of course so normal to us that it's a bit painful to see it as something strange and difficult to understand.
By the way, I am not implying that because of this we have to assume that ghosts exist and that they can read our minds.
It baffles me how so few intelligent people understand that the foundation of any sensory experience must be some sort of ESP, or at least that anything else is very difficult to explain philosophically. That goes if you're a spiritualist, a materialist, a socialist, and even a scientist.
Whenever hardware comes with a Linux driver, it is a very bad sign.
It usually means that the drivers are closed source binary files that has
to be installed. It takes a lot of effort to make such drivers work well
in an up to date Linux system. And the only only ones that can make updates
are the hardware producers.
I once bought a USB ISDN adapter. It claimed to include Linux drivers. And it
actually did. But only for Linux kernel version 2.4.18. It has never been
updated.
Free Open Source drivers in Linux are generally included, and you don't have
to install anything. It just works. Today and tomorrow and probably in ten years too.
This is why a lot of people think Free and Open Source software is an important
issue. It is a development model and a way of thinking that can make
the world a lot simpler and more efficient, both for the end users,
hardware and software producers.
The flawed closed source development model is founded on the idea that you need to
have total control over your customers if you want to be successful and
make a lot of money. I hope and believe that this path will lead to a lot
of dissatisfied customers and poverty.
It seems most people's concern is that DRM restricts how they can use content.
I'm surprised that so few have pointed out that to play DRMed media on a computer, you have to use closed source programs, programs that make it impossible to know what they actually do. We know that the programs let us watch the movie, but we don't know, and can never know if they do something else as well. Like making a log of all our computer activities. Who knows? We don't.
I know, this applies to any closed source program, but DRM is different, since it's a very effective way of forcing people to give up their control of their computers, their choice of software and their privacy.
It's not the information, which is common knowledge for us. It's more who is giving the information and to whom. It not as if the Pope should stand forward and say that Muhammad might have been an important prophet, but more like his brother in law did it.
Yes. Such a movement would have my full support.
I think closed hardware is a just as important issue as closed software.
The FSF has previously been very careful about saying anything about closed hardware, except that their work has been concerned with software only. Recently this has changed, after DRM became an issue. I hope they take this line even further and start working for opening up the hardware specifications. After all, what is the use for Free software, if there's no hardware for it to run on.
Good programs for content creation are: Ardour, Rosegarden, Kino, Cinelerra, Avidemux etc.
To use them, you should install Gnome/ gtk / KDE / QT / xorg / GNU / Linux etc.
This is old news. Why are people still talking about this Vista thing?
This FUD is all bad taste, it's like saying about a still born child:
He'd have become a villain if he'd ever grown up.
Amiga 500 universal problem solution
on
Computer Voodoo?
·
· Score: 1
Well, I did have an Amiga 500 once, it wasn't easy to get hold of. A friend of mine came to the shop 10 minutes before me, and got one. I had to wait two weeks. I'm not quite over that yet. Still, I got Amiga number 1172 or something, and it was like coming to heaven (at least after filling the extra 256kb slot and getting the extra disk drive). But then, out of the blue, it stopped working, or some things stopped working, that worked on all my friends' Amigas. A game would crash at some arbitary place, or at the same place every time, or some disk wouldn't be read, or the machine just wouldn't start, or it gave a strange noice, or whatever. Sometimes it was my Amiga, other times someone else's.
Luckily, we had some sort of instinct that told us what to do. Of course we had to twist it. So we lifted the Amiga up and twisted. And it worked. Every time. Of course sometimes it was the disk's fault. But not to despair. The simple solution was to throw it hard on the wall, two or three times. It worked every time as well.
I just installed Rockbox on my iAudio X5. It took me about 15 minutes. First, searching the webpage for the information. Then asking in the IRC channel about a few things I was unsure about; I got immediate, to the point answers. The actual installation took under a minute, and suddenly I had a usable user interface and a lot of games on my player. I have tried it for a while now, and it seems quite stable. I'm amazed by the simplicity and elegance of this software.
What are they thinking about at MS now? I thought they already had taken away the passwords. At least, the last time I logged into XP, a few years ago, it didn't ask me for one, and I got unlimited privileges.
If MS acctually implements this, I'm sure they'll have to implement a button that says something like this:
We all knew that most of these people don't like Linux, and for obvious reasons.
So, does Linux need them? No. They can't harm Linux one bit, and that's what's bothering them.
Can Linux harm these people, and their shareholders? Indirectly, yes, as long as they cling to old fashioned ways of making business, thinking they can win by putting other people down, instead of creating something worthwhile.
Maybe women are not as interested in IT as men?
on
Women Leaving I.T.
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's time to consider, without discriminating men or women, to see that there are differences between them as individuals.
We should fight for equal rights of women and men, that we should all have the same credit for the same work. But we should not decide that just as many men must do the same thing as women, or that there should be just as many women as men at every workplace. That's an artificial ideal. Women and men have different dreams for how they want to live.
However, I have always found it more stimulating and interesting to work in an environment with a balance of both sexes. If some workplace attracts mainly women or mainly men, one should perhaps see this as a problem with the workplace, not as a problem with what women or men generally want to do with their lives.
Code should be intelligent, readable and beautiful. You should not base your code on what you presume the compiler will make of it. Of course, if you know what the compiler will make, it's a bit different. But even then it can be complicated to know what is most effective.
As an example; I used to programme assembly language on the Amiga 500, a long time ago, with the Motorola 68000 processor. You would presume that doing 'clr a0' should be quicker than 'sub a0,a0', wouldn't you? But after getting hold of a book with the actual cycles an instuction uses, I found out that the previous was quicker. (I hope I remeber the example from '88 correctly...)
So, my advice is that you optimize you C code as C, not as if it were Assembly Language.
When I have made my revolutionary combined Video Editor / Calculator / 'Turn your computer into a washing machine' Program, I start with e.g. version 2^364289-2^182145+1, and then search for nice prime numbers downwards, until I reach 1, and then I'll have to learn something about complex numbers, I guess, or maybe stop developing the program.
When I was interested in invisibility, for some reason, at about the age of 10, I thought about this possibility, to transfer the light electronically from one side of the object to the other. Of course I would have prefered a suit, but trying to be realistic, I thought a sphere would be the easiest to make.
So, after thinking it all over again, my hopes sank, since each light point on the sphere would have to emit different light in all directions. If you look at it from the left, the lights on the front, left side should show what's on the right side of the sphere, while if you look at it from the front, then the same points on the sphere should display what's behind it. I did think about having small spherical light-sources, emitting different light in different directions, but even then I concluded that any real invisibility would be impossible. It would at least throw some sort of shaddow. The best possible result would be an object which is able to show you what's behind it.
Having settled the matter of invisibility, I forgot about it, and began pondering about how to know which card is the next in the deck....I'm still working on that.
Slashdot Mirror
This feature is a big threat to a diverse democratic society. Because:
1. Every society, no matter how peaceful and democratic, will come into the hands of the wrong people / organizations at times.
1. These people/organizations/movements/businesses will see it as their duty to put down any resistence against whatever their goal is, with any means they have.
1. The systematic registration of peoples faces will not only create a register of images where they know who's on them. It will also make it possible to automatically tag any other image on the net of the people who has been tagged. This includes recognising everyone who's caught in one of the millions of surveilance cameras hidden or visible everywhere.
2. One way to beat this feature is to change your own features as often as possible. With make up and piercings, hair style and plastic surgery if you're a woman, with all of those in addition to growing a beard and cutting it off regularly, if you're a man. This will surly confuse the system.
3. One way to beat this feature is to purposely submit a lot of images and tag them incorrectly. This will surly confuse the system.
If we fail to break this, there will come a time when the people in power will have the possibility to know where anyone is at any moment. They will use this power to subdue any resistance. And believe me, I'm not one who jumps at any conspiration theory. And believe me, people will be rounded up, tortured and killed if we don't break this.
Yes, if you have much use for /var/log you should mount it so it doesn't disappear after reboot... There are a lot of programs that write there even when the log deamon isn't running, so I normally turn it off, and if there's some strange error I turn it on again. I haven't tested if this speeds the system up at all, though.
And yes, system upgrade breaks things, but usually (but not always) you get warned about this by pacman during upgrading.
If stability were a big concern, and I needed simplicity, performance and customizability, I would still run Arch Linux, but I would need a test system and only upgrade the production system when I knew it would be stable.
Of course this isn't very practical if you only have an eee with a 20Gb ssd.
If you want an optimized system, Arch Linux is not more difficult than any other distro. You just don't have the choice to install a complete desktop system with lots and lots of things you don't want, configured in ways you don't like, so that you can uninstall almost everything and then install what you want, from obscure package repos, so you get library confusions etc, for then to reconfigure almost everything, so it works the way you like it to.
The Arch Linux installer lets you:
1. Install a very basic system
2. Configure the most important things in one simple configuration file (or a few more if you want or need to)
Then you boot into your basic system and:
1. Update your system with one command
2. Install the programs you need. The package manager will take care of all dependencies.
3. Configure them the way you want them
4. Enjoy!
Of course, I agree, this is more difficult than letting someone else make all the choices for you.
By the way, I use Arch Linux on a Eee 901, and it works perfectly. There are some tricks to speed it up. Mounting the /tmp and /var/log and /var/tmp as a ram disk makes it a lot more responsive. Turning off disk cache in firefox is also a good idea.
Driver support isn't a problem for me at least. Everything works. You might need to install a customized kernel package for the wireless card, but from 2.6.29 there will be support for the card in the kernel (This is for the 901, I don't know about the 1000HD).
1. Consciousness
2. Reality
If you don't agree with 1. you don't have it.
Well, you need 1. to know, but if you don't agree with 2. you don't.
Or, which I'd never suggest, of course, you're just stupid.
When I write my poem late in the night,
I often want to keep what I write.
So I look through a list of choices
made up of words that when read in my mind will turn into voices
which inexplicably transform into meaning, an attribute that language has.
My intent is clear, ever out of rhythm, I choose the one that will Save As.
Then my rescue mission will need a name,
worthy of carrying my work into fame.
I thought the deed was done at last, but nay!
The text must be coded in one specific way.
The popular code is made by a doctor who's quite weak and small.
But I'm not sure he's a decent physician at all.
I've let him rescue some poems I wrote a long time ago, I think.
Youthful romantic plain, not good, but they didn't stink.
His prescription was made with his popular Writer.
It was a bit like his Office, but quite a lot lighter.
Ahh, to the point; Those poems are now lost forever.
From now on I'll be a little more clever.
I will save my files with ODF!
The morale of this poem is twofold;
for one a poem doesn't need to rhyme,
the second and more important, which this poem very clearly illustrates;
the choice of coding for the text doesn't really matter
if the content isn't worth the flipflops it is turning.
It's because they don't mean 'open', they mean 'free', as in unrestricted, and that is something they are very specific about.
Why not just redefine the English word free? I think the free world would have been a much better place if this particular word had been a little less ambiguous. As in: I will free you => I will make you free => I will take everything you own.
I wonder what free software (as in unoccupied) is like...
(Just in case you didn't notice; My language is not English. Where I come from, free means free, gratis gratis. No Fuzz.
You're absolutely right.
One of the reasons Free Software or Open Source or whatever is less popular than Mac or Windows is computer hackers' inability to come up with catchy names. Mac is perhaps the most successful in giving names to their products.
The worst example is of course FSF's GNU, which sounds like some form of health organisation, and by insisting on GNU/Linux they're leaving 80% of the world's population behind, left with just a shrug.
Who would use Ekiga when they can use Skype? Or Gimp when they have Photoshop? I think a lot of potential Free Software users get turned off when they first hear about Gnome or KDE, not because the concept of choosing their desktop environment is too difficult to grasp, but because their names are so unattractive.
Linux is one of the few really successful names in Free Software, together with Firefox. That's why The Linux Foundation isn't a bad idea.
I think it's time for us who know that GNU is the most important software ever written, hidden behind the ugliest name, to start the renaming of the FOSS world, whether the hackers want it or not.
Sort of. But in a simpler way. I'm not trying to refute materialism. I'm just pointing to the fact that it has a big problem with explaining awareness.
Yes. It is self-sufficient. It explains quite well how the brain works, and how it relates to our sensual experiences. But it doesn't even begin to consider how neural impulses are "processed" into conscious awareness. I was just trying to say that there is a gap in this model between the sensual and the actual perception, which senses can not penetrate completely, since they are the object of perception. So, since something beyond the senses leads it into our awareness, I'll suggest that we could call it extra sensory, if not actual perception. This transition from the senses to our consciousness is of course so normal to us that it's a bit painful to see it as something strange and difficult to understand. By the way, I am not implying that because of this we have to assume that ghosts exist and that they can read our minds.
It baffles me how so few intelligent people understand that the foundation of any sensory experience must be some sort of ESP, or at least that anything else is very difficult to explain philosophically. That goes if you're a spiritualist, a materialist, a socialist, and even a scientist.
Whenever hardware comes with a Linux driver, it is a very bad sign. It usually means that the drivers are closed source binary files that has to be installed. It takes a lot of effort to make such drivers work well in an up to date Linux system. And the only only ones that can make updates are the hardware producers. I once bought a USB ISDN adapter. It claimed to include Linux drivers. And it actually did. But only for Linux kernel version 2.4.18. It has never been updated. Free Open Source drivers in Linux are generally included, and you don't have to install anything. It just works. Today and tomorrow and probably in ten years too. This is why a lot of people think Free and Open Source software is an important issue. It is a development model and a way of thinking that can make the world a lot simpler and more efficient, both for the end users, hardware and software producers. The flawed closed source development model is founded on the idea that you need to have total control over your customers if you want to be successful and make a lot of money. I hope and believe that this path will lead to a lot of dissatisfied customers and poverty.
I'm surprised that so few have pointed out that to play DRMed media on a computer, you have to use closed source programs, programs that make it impossible to know what they actually do. We know that the programs let us watch the movie, but we don't know, and can never know if they do something else as well. Like making a log of all our computer activities. Who knows? We don't.
I know, this applies to any closed source program, but DRM is different, since it's a very effective way of forcing people to give up their control of their computers, their choice of software and their privacy.
It's not the information, which is common knowledge for us. It's more who is giving the information and to whom. It not as if the Pope should stand forward and say that Muhammad might have been an important prophet, but more like his brother in law did it.
Yes. Such a movement would have my full support. I think closed hardware is a just as important issue as closed software. The FSF has previously been very careful about saying anything about closed hardware, except that their work has been concerned with software only. Recently this has changed, after DRM became an issue. I hope they take this line even further and start working for opening up the hardware specifications. After all, what is the use for Free software, if there's no hardware for it to run on.
Good programs for content creation are: Ardour, Rosegarden, Kino, Cinelerra, Avidemux etc.
To use them, you should install Gnome/ gtk / KDE / QT / xorg / GNU / Linux etc.
This is old news. Why are people still talking about this Vista thing?
This FUD is all bad taste, it's like saying about a still born child:
He'd have become a villain if he'd ever grown up.
Well, I did have an Amiga 500 once, it wasn't easy to get hold of. A friend of mine came to the shop 10 minutes before me, and got one. I had to wait two weeks. I'm not quite over that yet. Still, I got Amiga number 1172 or something, and it was like coming to heaven (at least after filling the extra 256kb slot and getting the extra disk drive). But then, out of the blue, it stopped working, or some things stopped working, that worked on all my friends' Amigas. A game would crash at some arbitary place, or at the same place every time, or some disk wouldn't be read, or the machine just wouldn't start, or it gave a strange noice, or whatever. Sometimes it was my Amiga, other times someone else's. Luckily, we had some sort of instinct that told us what to do. Of course we had to twist it. So we lifted the Amiga up and twisted. And it worked. Every time. Of course sometimes it was the disk's fault. But not to despair. The simple solution was to throw it hard on the wall, two or three times. It worked every time as well.
You mean: "If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?"
I just installed Rockbox on my iAudio X5. It took me about 15 minutes. First, searching the webpage for the information. Then asking in the IRC channel about a few things I was unsure about; I got immediate, to the point answers. The actual installation took under a minute, and suddenly I had a usable user interface and a lot of games on my player. I have tried it for a while now, and it seems quite stable. I'm amazed by the simplicity and elegance of this software.
If MS acctually implements this, I'm sure they'll have to implement a button that says something like this:
I don't understand, please let me in anyway
We all knew that most of these people don't like Linux, and for obvious reasons.
So, does Linux need them? No. They can't harm Linux one bit, and that's what's bothering them.
Can Linux harm these people, and their shareholders? Indirectly, yes, as long as they cling to old fashioned ways of making business, thinking they can win by putting other people down, instead of creating something worthwhile.
We should fight for equal rights of women and men, that we should all have the same credit for the same work. But we should not decide that just as many men must do the same thing as women, or that there should be just as many women as men at every workplace. That's an artificial ideal. Women and men have different dreams for how they want to live.
However, I have always found it more stimulating and interesting to work in an environment with a balance of both sexes. If some workplace attracts mainly women or mainly men, one should perhaps see this as a problem with the workplace, not as a problem with what women or men generally want to do with their lives.
As an example; I used to programme assembly language on the Amiga 500, a long time ago, with the Motorola 68000 processor. You would presume that doing 'clr a0' should be quicker than 'sub a0,a0', wouldn't you? But after getting hold of a book with the actual cycles an instuction uses, I found out that the previous was quicker. (I hope I remeber the example from '88 correctly...)
So, my advice is that you optimize you C code as C, not as if it were Assembly Language.
When I have made my revolutionary combined Video Editor / Calculator / 'Turn your computer into a washing machine' Program, I start with e.g. version 2^364289-2^182145+1, and then search for nice prime numbers downwards, until I reach 1, and then I'll have to learn something about complex numbers, I guess, or maybe stop developing the program.
When I was interested in invisibility, for some reason, at about the age of 10, I thought about this possibility, to transfer the light electronically from one side of the object to the other. Of course I would have prefered a suit, but trying to be realistic, I thought a sphere would be the easiest to make.
So, after thinking it all over again, my hopes sank, since each light point on the sphere would have to emit different light in all directions. If you look at it from the left, the lights on the front, left side should show what's on the right side of the sphere, while if you look at it from the front, then the same points on the sphere should display what's behind it. I did think about having small spherical light-sources, emitting different light in different directions, but even then I concluded that any real invisibility would be impossible. It would at least throw some sort of shaddow. The best possible result would be an object which is able to show you what's behind it.
Having settled the matter of invisibility, I forgot about it, and began pondering about how to know which card is the next in the deck....I'm still working on that.