Its a gift. Ownership is therefore transferred to her. Just because you have control, doesn't mean you legally own it (otherwise.... can I borrow your car?
We tried this in a project at university many years ago. Problem was that the power was so noisy in a standard electric train set that we couldn't establish with any certainty exactly where the train was, let alone which train it was.
Its pretty cool. After a program is recorded, a process starts up that scans the video file for what looks like ads. I believe it detects these by finding slow fades to black, still pictures and logos appearing.
When I get to watch a program (usually the next day, or a few days later), all the ads are gone.
It does occasionally get it wrong, and for those occasions (or when I am watching it as its being recorded) I have the trusty skip-30 and back-5 buttons.
Having built a PVR and having that PVR skip ads successfully, my wife and I are finding that we watch more TV programs and enjoy that which we watch much more. 47 solid minutes of CSI sure beats the heck out of 60 minutes interrupted every 15.
I know that TV execs consider it stealing (to not watch ads), so I am just giving a user experience report on Ads.
I know that the same is true for the internet - my interest in news online has increased 10 fold now that Firefox + adblock allows me to block the popups, popunder and flash garishness. (Even the ads on slashdot:-)
The bottom line here is that (IMHO) appreciation and uptake of content increases markedly when all the surrounding crap is removed. Simple is good. Pretty obvious really.
TV execs have often commented that people enjoy watching ads, and indeed prefer it. Rubbish. The same is true for the internet.
So dont do it - dont use popups.
(Yes - I know that TV, Newspapers, Radio live on ads. I am not trying to pass comment on the validity of the model, just on a single user experience).
First Best Buy was on Slashdot for allegedly abusive practices concerning rebates. Now this. Does Best Buy management have any more sink-the-company ideas?
Actually, this probably isn't sink-the-company stuff. Best Buy is not a company living on a reputation of excellent customer service. You don't go there for individual attention, for intelligent information about products, for the ability to barter or make deals. You go there for prices and selection. When you are a struggling or small company, service is important. When you are Best Buy/Walmart you want to ship product as fast as possible. The customer is almost irrelevant (as long as they keep buying).
Best quote (from memory) from Crossing The Chasm:
"Ship as fast as you can and ignore the customer".
I realise that this is a marketing strategy more tailored towards individual products, but I think the concept holds.
We have over 100 active distros, and in pointing out thats a problem I have been told that its only a problem for newbies or for installers.
Much as I hate to say it (because I use Linux and think its technically superior) Linux is not ready for prime time (ducks and weaves). Here's the problem:
with over 100 distros, which one do you pick? They are different and you need to pick the right one to suit your hardware (laptop, 686 vs 586 etc)
having picked it you have now entered installer hell. I sure hope that either
your distro/kernel combo happens to have compatible binaries (Let me assure you that its a major problem to find drivers for some kernel versions), OR
you are comfortable compiling from source. (feel free to reply with thie trivial set of line noise^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsteps to install and compile on your distro, but that only reinforces my point).
Apps are not cleanly packaged. There are few common standards for config files, binaries, app directories and so on (actually, those conventions are there but many common apps ignore them). Love it or hate it - on windows just about everything goes in "Program Files". Config usually goes in HKLM\Software or HKCU\Software.
Until the number of distros drops, the coherence between distros increases, and the coverage of hardware increases, Linux will not win big on the home PC or laptop.
Until the coverage of corporate apps increases (which it is), Linux will be limited in Corps.
Linux is still in the very early adopter stage (Inside the Tornado, Crossing The Chasm).
The three most important features of a PVR
on
Home Theatre PC Guide
·
· Score: 2, Informative
No noise, silence, quietness...
Honestly - you guys are all talking about putting big drives in a tower, or having P4's vs encoders, blah blah blah. When you finally get your system up and running you are going to have a loud hum, a whine, lots of clicks and occasional buzzes when watching tv or movies or listening to music.
Noise makes a difference. Design for noise first. As many people have pointed out, any old PC can be a myth box. Any old grunty PC can be a MCE box. Thats easy. To have one that you want to share your living room with? Thats another matter.
Here's a test - put your P4 home PC in your living room and then watch a DVD. Notice the noise? I sure did.
Best choice I made was designing around noise first, heat second (because of reducing noise) and then CPU power/memory/HDD size third. Trust me, you wont regret it.
So what can you do...
Use as lower powered PC as you can get away with. I suggest a Via EDEN fanless CPU.
Use an external power supply - no fan. The EPIA mobos require very little power.
Sadly, you cannot use "any old mobo/cpu/hdd" for a PVR. If you do, be prepared to enjoy the sweet whine of a power supply fan + CPU fan, plus the whine and seek click of a HDD, plus the jet-engine like wind up of the optical drive.
Noise Matters! Especially in the lounge. And double-especially if you will be leaving it on 24x7 or watching DVDs or playing some gentle music.
Here's my recommendation (from experience folks - I have done this and been very happy with the results):
Option 1
A quiet PC built around a fanless VIA EPIA mobo, plus external power supply + quiet (and large) Samsung or seagate HDD and quiet Samsung DVD.
Option 2
A diskless, fanless PC booting from a flash card, plus a quiet optical drive. This is the MythTV front end. Then put a large, cheap PC elsewhere in the house. That is the server. Front end plays recordings and live TV delivered from the server.
I use option 1, and put it in an HTPC case so it looks just right beside the amp.
A measure of success is that the S.O asked me to get more disk space because we record so much stuff (kids programs mainly). I've just added another 400G:-). We went away for 2 weeks and came back to every episode of ER, CSI*, and The Magic School Bus you could ever want.
Just to expand on that a little - this guy is using large car aerials. Most people just use a cellphone with a hidden built-in aerial a couple of inches long.
Unless they are scaling their results back - they are getting skewed numbers.
Many proofs have been thought to have been found, only to be proven wrong years later. And that was only after years of study my mathematicians of the time. For example, from the article: this particular puzzle was twice 'solved' only to be 'unsolved' 11 years later. Consider also Wilkes proof for fermats conjecture - it was proven wrong and had to be redone.
So the question is - how are we going to prove/disprove a computer program that proves a theorem? Program complexity has meant that all but the most trivial programs cannot be 'proven'.
The solution, it seems to me, is per the article: get the s/w to output a series of steps using formal logic. Any series of formal logic steps should be confirmable by a 'formal logic validator', and that is the only program we need to prove correct. That will be non-trivial, but will then open the floodgates to any hacked up piece of code to be used to generate provable logic.
New Zealands problem is also that we have a (near) monopoly telco setting data costs. The end user effectively pays per megabyte. Most people have monthly download limits from 500MB/mo to (the highest) 10G/mo. It costs real $$$ to download video files here.
<sarcasm> Perhaps Telecom NZ have found a natural defense against video piracy - price gouging </sarcasm>
I've spend considerable time on this, so allow me to share my pain...
I created a mythtv box from an EPIA MII12000 (1.2GHz). I put it into a georgeous Silverstone LC06 case. I switched the fans with silent ones, chose silent optical/HD drives. The end result is just awesome. In fact the 12000 is way overpowered for what I am doing - thanks to onboard encoding in the Hauppauge PVR card I use, and decoding in the EPIA motherboard - and the CPU sits at 10% most of the time. The 800MHz CPU would have been a better pick, and then I would have had less heat = 1 less and slower fans.
Thats the good side...
Behind the scenes there were months of trying to debug random crashes. There is a known issue in the DMA on the MII12000 and others. VIA have refused (scroll to bottom) to respond, even on bulletin boards where they often frequent. They know about the problem because they have fixed in windows driver updates released late last year.
There was a happy ending, for me anyway. If I rebuilt the kernel with CPUFREQ off and only i386 code (a real pain with Fedora Core 3 because it defaults to i686) then everything seems stable.
But I have serious reservations about their support for linux, and would have reservations about dealing with them again.
I agree that in the early days, many distributions made sense. There were lots of ideas floating around - lots of innovation, beer and late night coding sessions. The best few should survive.
Those days are waning. It has come time for linux to become respectable - for coders to focus on rounding out the OS and the tools that support it. For years we have been talking about linux on the desktop, and each year we get just a tiny little bit closer. But it just aint going to happen with 100+ distros creating noise. Talk to any business developer - do a few things *very* well. 100 distros aint a few things.
I dont want to squash tinkering - playing and pushing the boundaries is what linux is all about, but how about pushing the boundaries while still using {debian,mandrake,rhel} rather than creating a whole new distro.
Just think - when all these distros disappear (and bar a few, they will), we will lose all the great ideas and cool innovations with them. Linux is here for the long haul, and we need to modify our approach to support that.
If we are going to become a real alternative to MS on the desktop, its going to take a coordination that just isn't there right now.
Just what we need to increase confusion. Look - I agree that there some justification to put this out, but do we *really* need yet another distro? A few well placed distros, each appealing to a market segment would be much better than this helter skelter rush for every man and their (yellow) dog to have a distro.
Wouldn't it be better to have 3 distros, one for techies, one for desktops and one for servers with paid with support. I know that those of you who use distro 'X' will yell "But {Debian,Mandrake,RHEL} doesn't quite match my requirements". Those 3 key distro's are very good, and I'm sure if theres some feature on some other distro, it will be available on one of these when all that hacking talent goes to just support them.
I'd rather we were all talking about and backing 3 very very good distros than over 100quite good ones.
I think this statement would be more accurate if you dated it 2000.
Novell have bled on the top line (actual cash vs expense) since 2k (and probably before, but I only have figures back to 2k). 2k4 was a small turnaound with 65m in operating profit.
Having said that, they still have a small war chest, with 1.5b cash+equivalents, and short term liabilities of 700K. So they are solvent and good to go for a little while longer. Long term debt is not too high, but I can't find any info on its due dates.
MS would never have seen a bean of that money.
First there's the jail time. Then you've got an unemployed teenager with a criminal record and no tertiary education who will, if he finds someone to employ him, probably make minimum wage.
It certainly is a PR move. Remember, almost everything MS does is a PR move because they are now first and foremost a great marketing company.
So its a good move on their behalf - chase some loser for 500K and never see a bean, or offer 'foregiveness' out of the bottom of their hearts.
What it really does.
on
Firefox Hacks
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Be warned - in case you are tempted...
This is a pretty ingenious script that
Opens up windows (or tabs, depending on how you open the link) as fast as your computer can - 100% CPU
Each window displays gay porn
Plays a loud sound "Hey everybody I'm looking at gay porno"
Behind the scenes it also copies the contents of your clipboard to this guy.
It works in IE and firefox. It is simply a page with an image, a flash movie, and a javascript that copies your clipboard to a field then 'submit()'s' the form, reloading the page.
Very simple and bypasses popup blockers (at least the ones I have on).
This has got to be a security hole in firefox, both on the ability to open windows/tabs, and copying the clipboard.
If you recall, their management made the (unconvincing) argument that 99% of the time people didn't need fluff like: * referential integrity (pk & fk constraints) * views * triggers * stored procedures
So, they never implemented this because they had been arguing that nobody needs it anway. Nevermind that it's been standard fare for over twenty years.
That is pure marketing hype of Microsoft proportions. If we dont have the feature, then its a useless feature that no-one wants. Until we implement it, then its a great feature.
I am not from the US, but I was sent there for a few months to work. My wife came too for the holiday.
Some random notes about life without an SSN...
I decided to open a US bank account. Got a check book ok. Got a debit card. Then the fun starts - the bank calls back after two weeks to cancel the debit card. No SSN. The checks are 'starters' even though they start at 1000 (to fool those pesky shop clerks on the look out for checks that start at 1). Everyone refuses to honour them. So banking was a bust.
Couldn't use checks at walmart - no SSN.
Couldn't use VISA at Best Buy because it wasn't a US based VISA, and (you guessed it) no SSN. I did point out that I have used that VISA all over the world, except this very store.
Strangely, I have purchased from there many times since so perhaps I just hit a loser that day.
A bank clerk called my passport a forgery when I tried to withdraw my money (since I couldn't use checks or cards) because it had a date "15/3/1967" - to quote ("there's no 15th month").
I eventually found a website that provides fake SSNs you can use with minimal chance of dups. Suddenly everything went smoothly at the supermarket:-).
The reason I think that SSNs are dangerous is that because it is a simple ID, America has become tied to it in a dangerous way. Its become a widely respected and accepted ID. But there is no security associated with it. SSNs leak easily but encapsulate too much power - your SSN gives me trivial access to stuff thats yours.
Picture ID cards, money, drivers licences carry numerous security precautions - holograms, encoded data, special paper, the physical look of them. They are harder to duplicate (although it still does happen).
What is missing is that the SSN should be a first step to identification - perhaps as a replacement for your name + birthdate (yeah, I know.... "I am not a number"). Then follow it up with other identifiers - license, other data only you would know.
And people who dont need it *specifically* should not be permitted to force it from you. Sure, you can take your business elsewhere, but usually its a pain, and sometimes you just can't.Personally I think it should be restricted to government departments only.
If we cannot build and maintain a space station, we will have no chance at flying to Mars, establishing a base on the Moon, or even just living safely outsite the Van Allen belt.
Sadly a pretty standard reply when questioning Linux and its direction. Look - for all the ra-ra about how well Linux is doing, fact is there are bugger-all of them on the desktop. And that ain't going to change in any great numbers unless we (and I include myself as a Linux user and enthusiast) are able to get two groups of people on board:
the great unwashed. These are the people who dont understand apt-get and the beauty of a clean kernel. They want something at home that looks like the PC at work, can do email/browse the web and can run games they buy at the local shop.
the CIO, who wants something with minimum retraining costs (and therefore looks like windows) and can do all the stuff windows can do, including run the corporate apps.
I believe linux, with OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird, has much corporate functionality nailed.
But it doesn't have games (that you can buy down at the local shop) or corporate apps, and it isn't quite as simple as windows (to a current windows user).
I agree with this. One of the problems with Linux is that there is too much choice.
Let me explain before the flames arrive - with windows during install there is one GUI (with themes), one notepad, one calculator... That means few questions and you are up and running straight away. Sure there are other choices for almost every utility, and once you are up and running you can look at the others.
With linux you have to select between 3 or 4 GUIs (at least on Fedora) and a gazillion versions of most other tools.
Here's a test: you are a beginner and you are offered the choice of: Gnome, KDE, XFCE, TWM,... - which do you choose? What I did the first time was install them all - holy crap what a mess that made. And dont get me started on the 50 different text editors all slightly different. Not to mention picture editors, dev tools... Of course, this is after you have managed to figure out which distro you should run.
Now, linux-heads love choice and more power to them for that. BUT such up-front confusion with linux is not the way to win over the general public.
Now lots of people are going to point to their favourite distro and say "but mine makes it **really** simple". Crap. Ubuntu, Novell, Mandrake, PCLinuxOS all say the same thing. In my opinion Linspire or Xandros have the best shot, but they disappear under a sea of confusing and conflicting marketing. Another question: how many distros are there right now? Let me list the ones I know of: Debian, Fedora, RHEL, Gentoo, Knoppix (+ a few variants), Suse/Novell, CentOS, Slackware, Ubuntu, Xandros, Linspire, MEPIS, DSL, Yoper, Puppy, Turbo, Devil, Yellowdog... (actually, I just found a site that lists the top 100). what a mess
People say Linux hasn't forked. Technically that may be true for the kernel. But in the minds of the public it has, and they are the people who create marketshare.
Keep in mind that there has already been shown to be *signficant* revenue in licensing patents - its an awesome business model.
Create the patent (this does involve research and work and inventiveness). Then let other people productise it, take the risk, sell it and pay royalties to you. (Profit!!!)For example:
Collecting the patent royalties could add millions to IBM's net profits. In 1995--the last year IBM released figures--the company took in $650 million from royalties on all patents, software and hardware alike. Insiders say that senior managers believe IBM could collect $1 billion a year from its patents
Thats chickenfeed to what MS has paid out in patent licensing in the last couple of years.
My prediction: When the MS bottom line starts drooping, the patent suits will begin.
Slashdot Mirror
Its a gift. Ownership is therefore transferred to her. Just because you have control, doesn't mean you legally own it (otherwise.... can I borrow your car?
We tried this in a project at university many years ago. Problem was that the power was so noisy in a standard electric train set that we couldn't establish with any certainty exactly where the train was, let alone which train it was.
When I get to watch a program (usually the next day, or a few days later), all the ads are gone.
It does occasionally get it wrong, and for those occasions (or when I am watching it as its being recorded) I have the trusty skip-30 and back-5 buttons.
I know that TV execs consider it stealing (to not watch ads), so I am just giving a user experience report on Ads.
I know that the same is true for the internet - my interest in news online has increased 10 fold now that Firefox + adblock allows me to block the popups, popunder and flash garishness. (Even the ads on slashdot :-)
The bottom line here is that (IMHO) appreciation and uptake of content increases markedly when all the surrounding crap is removed. Simple is good. Pretty obvious really.
TV execs have often commented that people enjoy watching ads, and indeed prefer it. Rubbish. The same is true for the internet.
So dont do it - dont use popups.
(Yes - I know that TV, Newspapers, Radio live on ads. I am not trying to pass comment on the validity of the model, just on a single user experience).
Best quote (from memory) from Crossing The Chasm: "Ship as fast as you can and ignore the customer".
I realise that this is a marketing strategy more tailored towards individual products, but I think the concept holds.
Much as I hate to say it (because I use Linux and think its technically superior) Linux is not ready for prime time (ducks and weaves). Here's the problem:
- with over 100 distros, which one do you pick? They are different and you need to pick the right one to suit your hardware (laptop, 686 vs 586 etc)
- having picked it you have now entered installer hell. I sure hope that either
- your distro/kernel combo happens to have compatible binaries (Let me assure you that its a major problem to find drivers for some kernel versions), OR
- you are comfortable compiling from source. (feel free to reply with thie trivial set of line noise^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsteps to install and compile on your distro, but that only reinforces my point).
- Apps are not cleanly packaged. There are few common standards for config files, binaries, app directories and so on (actually, those conventions are there but many common apps ignore them). Love it or hate it - on windows just about everything goes in "Program Files". Config usually goes in HKLM\Software or HKCU\Software.
Until the number of distros drops, the coherence between distros increases, and the coverage of hardware increases, Linux will not win big on the home PC or laptop.Until the coverage of corporate apps increases (which it is), Linux will be limited in Corps.
Linux is still in the very early adopter stage (Inside the Tornado, Crossing The Chasm).
Honestly - you guys are all talking about putting big drives in a tower, or having P4's vs encoders, blah blah blah. When you finally get your system up and running you are going to have a loud hum, a whine, lots of clicks and occasional buzzes when watching tv or movies or listening to music.
Noise makes a difference. Design for noise first. As many people have pointed out, any old PC can be a myth box. Any old grunty PC can be a MCE box. Thats easy. To have one that you want to share your living room with? Thats another matter.
Here's a test - put your P4 home PC in your living room and then watch a DVD. Notice the noise? I sure did.
Best choice I made was designing around noise first, heat second (because of reducing noise) and then CPU power/memory/HDD size third. Trust me, you wont regret it.
So what can you do...
Noise Matters! Especially in the lounge. And double-especially if you will be leaving it on 24x7 or watching DVDs or playing some gentle music.
Here's my recommendation (from experience folks - I have done this and been very happy with the results):
Option 1
A quiet PC built around a fanless VIA EPIA mobo, plus external power supply + quiet (and large) Samsung or seagate HDD and quiet Samsung DVD.
Option 2
A diskless, fanless PC booting from a flash card, plus a quiet optical drive. This is the MythTV front end. Then put a large, cheap PC elsewhere in the house. That is the server. Front end plays recordings and live TV delivered from the server.
I use option 1, and put it in an HTPC case so it looks just right beside the amp.
A measure of success is that the S.O asked me to get more disk space because we record so much stuff (kids programs mainly). I've just added another 400G :-). We went away for 2 weeks and came back to every episode of ER, CSI*, and The Magic School Bus you could ever want.
Unless they are scaling their results back - they are getting skewed numbers.
So the question is - how are we going to prove/disprove a computer program that proves a theorem? Program complexity has meant that all but the most trivial programs cannot be 'proven'.
The solution, it seems to me, is per the article: get the s/w to output a series of steps using formal logic. Any series of formal logic steps should be confirmable by a 'formal logic validator', and that is the only program we need to prove correct. That will be non-trivial, but will then open the floodgates to any hacked up piece of code to be used to generate provable logic.
<sarcasm>
Perhaps Telecom NZ have found a natural defense against video piracy - price gouging
</sarcasm>
Comes with a more respectable price too.
I created a mythtv box from an EPIA MII12000 (1.2GHz). I put it into a georgeous Silverstone LC06 case. I switched the fans with silent ones, chose silent optical/HD drives. The end result is just awesome. In fact the 12000 is way overpowered for what I am doing - thanks to onboard encoding in the Hauppauge PVR card I use, and decoding in the EPIA motherboard - and the CPU sits at 10% most of the time. The 800MHz CPU would have been a better pick, and then I would have had less heat = 1 less and slower fans.
Thats the good side...
Behind the scenes there were months of trying to debug random crashes. There is a known issue in the DMA on the MII12000 and others. VIA have refused (scroll to bottom) to respond, even on bulletin boards where they often frequent. They know about the problem because they have fixed in windows driver updates released late last year.
There was a happy ending, for me anyway. If I rebuilt the kernel with CPUFREQ off and only i386 code (a real pain with Fedora Core 3 because it defaults to i686) then everything seems stable.
But I have serious reservations about their support for linux, and would have reservations about dealing with them again.
Those days are waning. It has come time for linux to become respectable - for coders to focus on rounding out the OS and the tools that support it. For years we have been talking about linux on the desktop, and each year we get just a tiny little bit closer. But it just aint going to happen with 100+ distros creating noise. Talk to any business developer - do a few things *very* well. 100 distros aint a few things.
I dont want to squash tinkering - playing and pushing the boundaries is what linux is all about, but how about pushing the boundaries while still using {debian,mandrake,rhel} rather than creating a whole new distro.
Just think - when all these distros disappear (and bar a few, they will), we will lose all the great ideas and cool innovations with them. Linux is here for the long haul, and we need to modify our approach to support that.
If we are going to become a real alternative to MS on the desktop, its going to take a coordination that just isn't there right now.
Just what we need to increase confusion. Look - I agree that there some justification to put this out, but do we *really* need yet another distro? A few well placed distros, each appealing to a market segment would be much better than this helter skelter rush for every man and their (yellow) dog to have a distro.
Wouldn't it be better to have 3 distros, one for techies, one for desktops and one for servers with paid with support. I know that those of you who use distro 'X' will yell "But {Debian,Mandrake,RHEL} doesn't quite match my requirements". Those 3 key distro's are very good, and I'm sure if theres some feature on some other distro, it will be available on one of these when all that hacking talent goes to just support them.
I'd rather we were all talking about and backing 3 very very good distros than over 100quite good ones.
I think this statement would be more accurate if you dated it 2000.
Novell have bled on the top line (actual cash vs expense) since 2k (and probably before, but I only have figures back to 2k). 2k4 was a small turnaound with 65m in operating profit.
Having said that, they still have a small war chest, with 1.5b cash+equivalents, and short term liabilities of 700K. So they are solvent and good to go for a little while longer. Long term debt is not too high, but I can't find any info on its due dates.
Their real danger now is being lost in the crowd.
It certainly is a PR move. Remember, almost everything MS does is a PR move because they are now first and foremost a great marketing company.
So its a good move on their behalf - chase some loser for 500K and never see a bean, or offer 'foregiveness' out of the bottom of their hearts.
This is a pretty ingenious script that
- Opens up windows (or tabs, depending on how you open the link) as fast as your computer can - 100% CPU
- Each window displays gay porn
- Plays a loud sound "Hey everybody I'm looking at gay porno"
- Behind the scenes it also copies the contents of your clipboard to this guy.
It works in IE and firefox. It is simply a page with an image, a flash movie, and a javascript that copies your clipboard to a field then 'submit()'s' the form, reloading the page.Very simple and bypasses popup blockers (at least the ones I have on).
This has got to be a security hole in firefox, both on the ability to open windows/tabs, and copying the clipboard.
If you want to have a look, use:
WARNING: dont click on this link, just copy the wget command to a shell. Dont say I didn't warn you...I am not from the US, but I was sent there for a few months to work. My wife came too for the holiday.
Some random notes about life without an SSN...
-
I decided to open a US bank account. Got a check book ok. Got a debit card. Then the fun starts - the bank calls back after two weeks to cancel the debit card. No SSN. The checks are 'starters' even though they start at 1000 (to fool those pesky shop clerks on the look out for checks that start at 1). Everyone refuses to honour them. So banking was a bust.
- Couldn't use checks at walmart - no SSN.
- Couldn't use VISA at Best Buy because it wasn't a US based VISA, and (you guessed it) no SSN. I did point out that I have used that VISA all over the world, except this very store.
Strangely, I have purchased from there many times since so perhaps I just hit a loser that day.
- A bank clerk called my passport a forgery when I tried to withdraw my money (since I couldn't use checks or cards) because it had a date "15/3/1967" - to quote ("there's no 15th month").
I eventually found a website that provides fake SSNs you can use with minimal chance of dups. Suddenly everything went smoothly at the supermarketThe reason I think that SSNs are dangerous is that because it is a simple ID, America has become tied to it in a dangerous way. Its become a widely respected and accepted ID. But there is no security associated with it. SSNs leak easily but encapsulate too much power - your SSN gives me trivial access to stuff thats yours.
Picture ID cards, money, drivers licences carry numerous security precautions - holograms, encoded data, special paper, the physical look of them. They are harder to duplicate (although it still does happen).
What is missing is that the SSN should be a first step to identification - perhaps as a replacement for your name + birthdate (yeah, I know.... "I am not a number"). Then follow it up with other identifiers - license, other data only you would know.
And people who dont need it *specifically* should not be permitted to force it from you. Sure, you can take your business elsewhere, but usually its a pain, and sometimes you just can't.Personally I think it should be restricted to government departments only.
The Space Station has taught us a lot, including:
- How to live in space
- How triple component redundancy may not be enough with current technology.
- How we don't have a safe and reusable way to fly there yet
On top of that, the occasional experiment is done there too.Again - if we can't get this right, whats the chance of living on the moon or mars in our lifetime?
-
the great unwashed. These are the people who dont understand apt-get and the beauty of a clean kernel. They want something at home that looks like the PC at work, can do email/browse the web and can run games they buy at the local shop.
- the CIO, who wants something with minimum retraining costs (and therefore looks like windows) and can do all the stuff windows can do, including run the corporate apps.
I believe linux, with OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird, has much corporate functionality nailed.But it doesn't have games (that you can buy down at the local shop) or corporate apps, and it isn't quite as simple as windows (to a current windows user).
When we nail all these we will be well on track.
Let me explain before the flames arrive - with windows during install there is one GUI (with themes), one notepad, one calculator... That means few questions and you are up and running straight away. Sure there are other choices for almost every utility, and once you are up and running you can look at the others.
With linux you have to select between 3 or 4 GUIs (at least on Fedora) and a gazillion versions of most other tools.
Here's a test: you are a beginner and you are offered the choice of: Gnome, KDE, XFCE, TWM, ... - which do you choose? What I did the first time was install them all - holy crap what a mess that made. And dont get me started on the 50 different text editors all slightly different. Not to mention picture editors, dev tools... Of course, this is after you have managed to figure out which distro you should run.
Now, linux-heads love choice and more power to them for that. BUT such up-front confusion with linux is not the way to win over the general public.
Now lots of people are going to point to their favourite distro and say "but mine makes it **really** simple". Crap. Ubuntu, Novell, Mandrake, PCLinuxOS all say the same thing. In my opinion Linspire or Xandros have the best shot, but they disappear under a sea of confusing and conflicting marketing. Another question: how many distros are there right now? Let me list the ones I know of: Debian, Fedora, RHEL, Gentoo, Knoppix (+ a few variants), Suse/Novell, CentOS, Slackware, Ubuntu, Xandros, Linspire, MEPIS, DSL, Yoper, Puppy, Turbo, Devil, Yellowdog... (actually, I just found a site that lists the top 100). what a mess
People say Linux hasn't forked. Technically that may be true for the kernel. But in the minds of the public it has, and they are the people who create marketshare.
Can I suggest to the editors that if you know you are linking to a video, you simply place a link to a mirror there as well.
Having said that, the site is holding up remarkably well - I've still got 14kb/s..... uh oh 13..... 12..... damn.
Keep in mind that there has already been shown to be *signficant* revenue in licensing patents - its an awesome business model.
Create the patent (this does involve research and work and inventiveness). Then let other people productise it, take the risk, sell it and pay royalties to you. (Profit!!!)For example:
Thats chickenfeed to what MS has paid out in patent licensing in the last couple of years.My prediction: When the MS bottom line starts drooping, the patent suits will begin.