No, file redundancy is a subtly problem than filesystem redundancy.
What is needed is a way of having individual files posses their own redundancy, so that no matter what filesystem they are stored on, fidelity can be assured to whatever level the user desires. In this way, when transferring the file from place to place, or medium to medium, or even over the network, the end users need not be (as) concerned with ensuring redundant filesystems at every step in the process.
What is needed is essentially a command like $tufn -n 6 -cf file.txt > file.tuf
which creates a file that is protected from bit level degradation, no matter what filesystem or storage method is used. The key idea here is that the protection level is specified by the user, and is independent of the filesystem. Extraction should be likewise as straightforward $tufn -xf file.tuf
Obviously this does not solve the problem of block level or higher corruption, but that's a problem for filesystems. The article is talking about giving files their own protection against aging/noise processes. I would be surprised to find that such a program did not exist already.
Spain is now added to the growing list of countries attempting to put the free internet genie back in the bottle. Many scoff at such attempts and repeat tired old platitudes from the early 1990s about how the internet routes around censorship, etc. But what they forget is that in the last 10, and particularly in the last 5 years, the internet has changed. Drastically. An unfree web is closer now than at any time in the history of the network.
Several developments have lead us to this point. Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, was the development of the Great Firewall of China. The apparatus designed, developed and implemented by the Chinese communist party has conclusively proven that the internet can be controlled, filtered and censored on a massive scale. The technologies developed for its implementation, largely by western companies, are now being sold back to western governments with much the same task in mind. While the wall is not airtight, it does offer the governments the level of control they once enjoyed over traditional media like books and newspapers. As a mass medium, the internet can be successfully centered.
Secondly, the internet has become more centralised. Despite the hype behind Web 2.0, the majority of new internet technologies and sites are controlled by a smaller number of huge companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. What's your hompage right now, and how do you find your way to sites? This is in stark contrast to the very early days of the web, or even the 1990s, where there were no search engines, and the only meeting places were on irc. People now store most, if not all, of their private information on the servers, the "clouds", of big companies, so all that is needed to gain large awareness on the net is control of this relatively small number of private interests.
Thirdly, the vast majority of internet users are now technically unsavvy. Combined with the increasing complexity of website and protocols, this means that the network has become and ever more inscrutable blackbox, and most users will be unaware of any censorship efforts or implementations; that is, where they are not completely apathetic. Whereas in the past, netziens were more likely to spot, and indeed protest at censorship, nowadays most users simply will not care as long as their webmail and social networking accounts are unaffected. Governments can site this apathy as justification, and indeed have.
The Web has changed. We're going to see more and more Governments implementing acts like these. It's in the interests of all big players to shape the internet into a controllable mass medium and that's why they're going to keep pushing these laws, worldwide, until they achieve that goal. In ten years times, earlier times will be looked back on as anarchy by all but a few idealists, who will be looked on as hippies or cranks.
They state very bluntly that IP addresses are expunged from the logs after 48 hours, and that no data is shared with Google Accounts or other Google services.
No. It's the Valley of the Squinting Windows. Technology has brought us right back to the ignorant, vindictive and intolerant society we started out from. The more things change....
The European version of Fallout 3, specifically the one released in the UK and Ireland, had three starting options for race in character customisation
1) Caucasian 2) Asian 3) African American
The minute we started the game, everybody had a good laugh about typical American ignorance. None of us were black, but I'm sure anyone in the UK who was would probably be fairly irritated by that designation. It didn't even stop there. In the UK, "Asian" refers predominantly to people south asian descent, the subcontinent. "East Asian" refers to people of Chinese or surrounding regional descent, this is what Americans refer to as "Asian".
I believe Maddox had something to say on this very topic not so long ago.
Not many programs support encryption of any kind. PGP requires setup that most email clients simply do not support. Thanks to Mozilla's self signed certs policy, we are farther away from encrypted web surfing than we have been at any time. The currently most accessible form of file encryption for most is to use password protected zip or rar files. All chat clients operate in plain text mode by default. The most common form of actually useful encryption most people use is that on bittorrent clients, and that is putting a strain on on the Tor network that cannot be sustained.
The internet is wide open; the geeks have failed. Where are the encryption add ons for apache? Why don't thunderbird clients try to use PGP by default? Where is distributed and secure DNS? Why has bittorrent still not been decentralized from trackers?
Geeks have failed users. People should be enjoying a freer net. Instead, we've thrown them to the wolves while we spend our time editing Wikipedia, writing aps for Google APIs, and playing World of Warcraft. The disruptive encryption technologies that should have arrived by now are conpicuously absent. These technologies need to be developed and need to be present by default on most FOSS software. Anything less simply perpetuates the status quo.
The status quo is that everything you do online is recorded, archived and owned in full by your ISP, Google, marketers, and whichever governments pay enough to intercept the traffic. The status quo is that the Great Firewall of China has succeeded in censoring the internet where so many scoffed that it would fail; and now the technologies behind it are being brought to bear on the countries and societies that developed them. I suppose it's poetic justice in that sense. We spent our time developing technologies that restrict freedom instead of promoting it; small wonder we should see the weapons we created turned against us.
The internet is actually a smaller place than most people think. When it comes to any given field, no matter how large, there are really only a few dozen major sites to consider. Sometimes less.
How many large torrent trackers are there really? Twenty, Thirty? I doubt it's over a hundred. Depends on your definition of large perhaps, but I'll make mine; A tracker which hosts TV, Movies, Music, Games and Software, and which has a large number of seeders and leechers (>10000). How many of these site are there? I estimate that there are about a dozen who really count.
Throw out as many platitudes as you like, but the RIAA et al are putting the bittorrent genie back in the bottle. Technology has not kept pace with legal manoeuvres and one by one the top sites are being shut down. With them goes the hundreds of thousands of technically inexperienced seeds and leechers need to keep torrents healthy. Trackers need critical mass for torrents to be useful, but this mass makes them an easy target for legal action.
This is still whack a mole, but the ratio of moles to hammers is, at most, 10:1. The decline of bittorrent began with the Pirate Bay but it will not stop there. Without major changes to how it is centralised, bittorrent will go the way of napster before it and you'll be back to getting your stuff on irc again.
The Net has changed. The Chinese government has proven that the internet and its users can be brought to heel on a massive scale. Netizens in general, and in particular the geeks whose obligation was to defend the network, have shown though lack of innovation that they are not going to defend users freedoms, anonymity or rights online. We'd all rather give our data to webhosts, ISPs, and Google; trusting them not to betray us. Technology has given power back to the big players, and not delivered on its promise to ordinary people.
Well I'm a mathematician and to my mind there is an awful lot to be done on the mathematics pages on Wikipedia.
The majority of mathematics articles on Wikipedia typically begin with a rambling, incoherent and unhelpful introduction to the topic. When they do begin to properly define the entity at hand, they typically pick the most opaque and rambling definition possible. Important properties are often glossed over while any pertinent mathematical oddities are given their own individual sections on the page. Throughout the spectacle, hyperlinks to equally poorly written articles are liberally thrown down as though the author believes the reader would actually benefit from the topics convoluted connections to some advanced graduate level topic. This article basically sums up the situation in a nutshell.
I've actually attempted to change things, but it's an uphill struggle which I for one know I can't win. Time and again I have been faced with what I can only describe as completely inane article custodians whos arguments at times read like a satire of themselves. In the instance of only one article I was told that "Compound interest is the best way to introduce e^x as everyone understands compound interest", "It's better to talk about the properties of a function before defining it", and "Thinking that a certain method is a better way to introduce a topic breaks Neutral Point of View policy."
At times, the stonewalling becomes so exasperating that I end up losing patience somewhat and end up essentially telling these people outright that they are being stupid. Bad idea. I have recently been brought up on Wikiettique charges of hurting someone's feelings, and despite my complete and utter lack of ability to change just about anything on the site, have been labeled "a bully"; a label to go with my being a "Point of Viewer".
My current opinion is that the Wikipedia editors and custodians have the mentality of 12 year olds. I have tried and tried to explain to these people that the articles they have taken charge of are in need of serious reform; with mathematical bric-a-brac like havercosine coming before the sum of cosines formula on trigonometry pages. If you try and change something, they will revert it. If you try and argue a case, they will dismiss it. If you press them on their opinions, they will appeal to WP:RULES. If you press them further, they will quite literally start crying. I deeply, deeply wish I was exaggerating here. I cannot believe I once thought so highly of Wikipedia and the people that ran it. The influence of these pages on the learning and perception of mathematics worldwide terrifies me.
Now, maybe I'm just an old crank, too stuck in my old ways. But you tell me where the formula for the the sum "cosA + cosB" should be on this page. Before or after the formula for the sum of an infinite number of cosines, or that for "versed cosine"? Now; guess where it is?
Wikipedia is rotten from the top to the bottom. I used to think that the rot set in at the top with Wales, and slowly trickled down to the user base. Now I'm not so sure. It may be that Wikipedia was always going to primarily attract the type of person who is not interesting in providing knowledge for all, but only those for whom its articles are personal prestige projects, intended to impress only themselves and their imagined audience.
Now if the big news sites suddenly drop from Google but can be found via Bing, people are going to change there.
I honestly don't think most users will notice if Fox, Sky and the Times are deindexed from Google News. If anything, they'll probably remark that the overall quality of results has improved.
The principal question is this: Why is a big newspaper a big newspaper?
It is true that omni directional radio sources are subject to inverse square law, but directional signals degrade less slowly.
As it is a linear partial differential equation, all solutions to the wave equation and equations of its type are governed by what is known as the "fundamental solution" or "Green's function" of the equation. In the case of wave type equations(in 3 or more dimensions), this solution will be a delta function type solution which decreases inversely with distance from the source. Squaring its amplitude to obtain energy gives an inverse square energy decrease.
It must be stressed that all solutions of the wave equation, no matter what the sources, or boundary or initial conditions, must all be functions derived, more or less, from convolutions of the fundamental solution with the source terms. You cannot escape the inverse square behaviour of wave propagation over long distances with finite wave sources. The fundamental solution characterises all waves because of the linearity of the wave equation.
Now, there is a second fundamental solution for the wave equation; the so called "acausal" Green's function, which represents an inwardly collapsing wave, or by some conventions, a wave travelling backwards through time. Naturally, these waves are not considered in the context of the transmission of signals. Even if they were, these waves also display and inverse square relation for signal strength( going backwards in time of course).
This has been your daily mathematical public service announcement. Complaints to be directed to the Dean.
Perhaps. But the kicker here is that the Xbox 360 is unable to be used on any other network. Microsoft has taken key steps to ensure that 360s cannot be used over VPNs or any other network other than a local LAN. Individual 360s pass encrypted keys to one another upon first connection and if they do not receive an appropriate replay in 30ms, a connection is not made. It was a blatant attempt to disable alternative services like Xlink Kai and completely lock down online play on the console.
We are dealing with a Walled Garden here. Microsoft is exerting complete control over 360 consoles regardless of who owns them. If it were possible to connect to VPNs like Xlink Kai or others, this ban would be a problem. But it's not. Microsoft sold these guys a console which they said could be used to play online games, and now these console can't be used to so much as send a private message.
This is akin to Linksys deciding that installing Linux on your router means they can disable it from connecting WAN's anymore. Sure, you can use it in a LAN, but is this the product you paid for?
I'm sympathetic to Microsoft's position with regard to cheating and glitching on their network(Though I'm sceptical modded consoles are a major player here). I'm also sympathetic with regard to piracy on modded consoles. But they dug themselves into a hole here when they locked down the online capabilities of their machine without advertising that fact.
Personally, I feel that paying to play online is a rip off anyway. Perhaps this will convince people that subscribing to a game service that treats you like a consumer instead of a player isn't in their long term interest. If you're relying on someone else's servers to play your games, then it's only a matter of time before you won't be able to play those games anymore.
That is the point. Stallman founded a religion, and Torvalds gave us a tool.
No. It was Stallman who gave us the tool; the GPL. This licence is the magic ingredient that makes open source software possible. Without it, without Stallman's contribution, we'd still be stuck with mostly BSD style licences. Private companies would be mooching off and appropriating the work of FOSS programmers, people would be cynical about writing software for nothing, and we wouldn't have a fraction of the fantastic array of software we all have running on our desktops, including the Linux kernel.
We'd all be paying $500 per operating system, and our program suites would mostly consist of massively duplicated pay to use, single function programs or else expensively licensed monolithic program suites like MS Office. Programs provided by private companies with lots of scope to monopolise, little incentive to innovate, and with general contempt for their users. Ask yourself, how would you encode a CD in windows, how would you compile a program, what email client would you use if you couldn't use open source software?
This is what Richard Stallman rescued us from. Restrictive, expensive, bug ridden and often vindictive closed source software. Perhaps you do not like stances. That's fine. But you had best acknowledge that the reason you have a modern web browser to read this site with is largely down to the efforts he made probably before you were even born.
That hasn't been my experience. I find Fedora does a lot less, and doesn't do it as well. The primary example of this is yum, which is a third rate program by comparision to apt. In fact, my personal opinion is that the success of Ubuntu has been down to properly maintained and comprehensive apt-repositories. When I left Fedora, yum had nothing in the same league as these, and dependency hell was very much still with the platform.
Fedora is a distro for admins who want ease of use, but not so much ease of use that they lose their jobs. They want the odd error or config mismatch so they need to directly intervene on occasion. So they won't go for debian or especially Ubuntu. On the other hand, they're not going to do all the legwork, so distros like slack or Gentoo are out of the question. Add in paid company support and "enterprise" editions, and you have the perfect distro for the in house admin of a medium to large business.
You mean after the all the claims they made? After all they said they'd keep us safe from? After how sure they made us feel in their ability? After all the charm, and the cajoling, and the expenses, and the hassle? After all they promised, now that they can't live up to even our most basic expectations, you're telling me that we're the ones at fault?
They can't perform, but now we're the ones who have to change? We're the ones who have to clean all the laundry, and be careful around strangers, and lock up for the night? We need protecting, but they have to be looked after first? We're the ones who have to change our ways, just to make them feel they're doing a good job!?
My mother was right!! I should never have subscribed to a service that came with a free trial!!
Slashdot Mirror
Or he could be dyslexic and have an innocent interest in subterranean erotica.
So it must be true!
No, file redundancy is a subtly problem than filesystem redundancy.
What is needed is a way of having individual files posses their own redundancy, so that no matter what filesystem they are stored on, fidelity can be assured to whatever level the user desires. In this way, when transferring the file from place to place, or medium to medium, or even over the network, the end users need not be (as) concerned with ensuring redundant filesystems at every step in the process.
What is needed is essentially a command like
$tufn -n 6 -cf file.txt > file.tuf
which creates a file that is protected from bit level degradation, no matter what filesystem or storage method is used. The key idea here is that the protection level is specified by the user, and is independent of the filesystem. Extraction should be likewise as straightforward
$tufn -xf file.tuf
Obviously this does not solve the problem of block level or higher corruption, but that's a problem for filesystems. The article is talking about giving files their own protection against aging/noise processes. I would be surprised to find that such a program did not exist already.
Ladies and Gentlemen, do these sound like the actions of a man who had "All he could download"?
Spain is now added to the growing list of countries attempting to put the free internet genie back in the bottle. Many scoff at such attempts and repeat tired old platitudes from the early 1990s about how the internet routes around censorship, etc. But what they forget is that in the last 10, and particularly in the last 5 years, the internet has changed. Drastically. An unfree web is closer now than at any time in the history of the network.
Several developments have lead us to this point. Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, was the development of the Great Firewall of China. The apparatus designed, developed and implemented by the Chinese communist party has conclusively proven that the internet can be controlled, filtered and censored on a massive scale. The technologies developed for its implementation, largely by western companies, are now being sold back to western governments with much the same task in mind. While the wall is not airtight, it does offer the governments the level of control they once enjoyed over traditional media like books and newspapers. As a mass medium, the internet can be successfully centered.
Secondly, the internet has become more centralised. Despite the hype behind Web 2.0, the majority of new internet technologies and sites are controlled by a smaller number of huge companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. What's your hompage right now, and how do you find your way to sites? This is in stark contrast to the very early days of the web, or even the 1990s, where there were no search engines, and the only meeting places were on irc. People now store most, if not all, of their private information on the servers, the "clouds", of big companies, so all that is needed to gain large awareness on the net is control of this relatively small number of private interests.
Thirdly, the vast majority of internet users are now technically unsavvy. Combined with the increasing complexity of website and protocols, this means that the network has become and ever more inscrutable blackbox, and most users will be unaware of any censorship efforts or implementations; that is, where they are not completely apathetic. Whereas in the past, netziens were more likely to spot, and indeed protest at censorship, nowadays most users simply will not care as long as their webmail and social networking accounts are unaffected. Governments can site this apathy as justification, and indeed have.
The Web has changed. We're going to see more and more Governments implementing acts like these. It's in the interests of all big players to shape the internet into a controllable mass medium and that's why they're going to keep pushing these laws, worldwide, until they achieve that goal. In ten years times, earlier times will be looked back on as anarchy by all but a few idealists, who will be looked on as hippies or cranks.
My advice is to learn how to use a typewriter.
And you believe them?
Well worth four minutes of your free time.
Because if your civilian job requires you to man .50 caliber machine guns while facing men armed with RPG lauchers; You're doing it wrong!
Ironically, this funny mod will probably be the final ignominy that drives the parent over the edge.
No, because in the long run, promoting ignorance will cost lives.
Then why do you think it is a good idea to have hundreds of these "net-mines" floating around coastal waters?
And what about low technology good such as clothes, furniture, steel, glass, toys, and widgets? Where does the money flow there?
No. It's the Valley of the Squinting Windows. Technology has brought us right back to the ignorant, vindictive and intolerant society we started out from. The more things change....
The European version of Fallout 3, specifically the one released in the UK and Ireland, had three starting options for race in character customisation
1) Caucasian
2) Asian
3) African American
The minute we started the game, everybody had a good laugh about typical American ignorance. None of us were black, but I'm sure anyone in the UK who was would probably be fairly irritated by that designation. It didn't even stop there. In the UK, "Asian" refers predominantly to people south asian descent, the subcontinent. "East Asian" refers to people of Chinese or surrounding regional descent, this is what Americans refer to as "Asian".
I believe Maddox had something to say on this very topic not so long ago.
How?
Not many programs support encryption of any kind. PGP requires setup that most email clients simply do not support. Thanks to Mozilla's self signed certs policy, we are farther away from encrypted web surfing than we have been at any time. The currently most accessible form of file encryption for most is to use password protected zip or rar files. All chat clients operate in plain text mode by default. The most common form of actually useful encryption most people use is that on bittorrent clients, and that is putting a strain on on the Tor network that cannot be sustained.
The internet is wide open; the geeks have failed. Where are the encryption add ons for apache? Why don't thunderbird clients try to use PGP by default? Where is distributed and secure DNS? Why has bittorrent still not been decentralized from trackers?
Geeks have failed users. People should be enjoying a freer net. Instead, we've thrown them to the wolves while we spend our time editing Wikipedia, writing aps for Google APIs, and playing World of Warcraft. The disruptive encryption technologies that should have arrived by now are conpicuously absent. These technologies need to be developed and need to be present by default on most FOSS software. Anything less simply perpetuates the status quo.
The status quo is that everything you do online is recorded, archived and owned in full by your ISP, Google, marketers, and whichever governments pay enough to intercept the traffic. The status quo is that the Great Firewall of China has succeeded in censoring the internet where so many scoffed that it would fail; and now the technologies behind it are being brought to bear on the countries and societies that developed them. I suppose it's poetic justice in that sense. We spent our time developing technologies that restrict freedom instead of promoting it; small wonder we should see the weapons we created turned against us.
The internet is actually a smaller place than most people think. When it comes to any given field, no matter how large, there are really only a few dozen major sites to consider. Sometimes less.
How many large torrent trackers are there really? Twenty, Thirty? I doubt it's over a hundred. Depends on your definition of large perhaps, but I'll make mine; A tracker which hosts TV, Movies, Music, Games and Software, and which has a large number of seeders and leechers (>10000). How many of these site are there? I estimate that there are about a dozen who really count.
Throw out as many platitudes as you like, but the RIAA et al are putting the bittorrent genie back in the bottle. Technology has not kept pace with legal manoeuvres and one by one the top sites are being shut down. With them goes the hundreds of thousands of technically inexperienced seeds and leechers need to keep torrents healthy. Trackers need critical mass for torrents to be useful, but this mass makes them an easy target for legal action.
This is still whack a mole, but the ratio of moles to hammers is, at most, 10:1. The decline of bittorrent began with the Pirate Bay but it will not stop there. Without major changes to how it is centralised, bittorrent will go the way of napster before it and you'll be back to getting your stuff on irc again.
The Net has changed. The Chinese government has proven that the internet and its users can be brought to heel on a massive scale. Netizens in general, and in particular the geeks whose obligation was to defend the network, have shown though lack of innovation that they are not going to defend users freedoms, anonymity or rights online. We'd all rather give our data to webhosts, ISPs, and Google; trusting them not to betray us. Technology has given power back to the big players, and not delivered on its promise to ordinary people.
Give me one for Michelle Obama.
What's "unverifiable" about a blog?
Well I'm a mathematician and to my mind there is an awful lot to be done on the mathematics pages on Wikipedia.
The majority of mathematics articles on Wikipedia typically begin with a rambling, incoherent and unhelpful introduction to the topic. When they do begin to properly define the entity at hand, they typically pick the most opaque and rambling definition possible. Important properties are often glossed over while any pertinent mathematical oddities are given their own individual sections on the page. Throughout the spectacle, hyperlinks to equally poorly written articles are liberally thrown down as though the author believes the reader would actually benefit from the topics convoluted connections to some advanced graduate level topic. This article basically sums up the situation in a nutshell.
I've actually attempted to change things, but it's an uphill struggle which I for one know I can't win. Time and again I have been faced with what I can only describe as completely inane article custodians whos arguments at times read like a satire of themselves. In the instance of only one article I was told that "Compound interest is the best way to introduce e^x as everyone understands compound interest", "It's better to talk about the properties of a function before defining it", and "Thinking that a certain method is a better way to introduce a topic breaks Neutral Point of View policy."
At times, the stonewalling becomes so exasperating that I end up losing patience somewhat and end up essentially telling these people outright that they are being stupid. Bad idea. I have recently been brought up on Wikiettique charges of hurting someone's feelings, and despite my complete and utter lack of ability to change just about anything on the site, have been labeled "a bully"; a label to go with my being a "Point of Viewer".
My current opinion is that the Wikipedia editors and custodians have the mentality of 12 year olds. I have tried and tried to explain to these people that the articles they have taken charge of are in need of serious reform; with mathematical bric-a-brac like havercosine coming before the sum of cosines formula on trigonometry pages. If you try and change something, they will revert it. If you try and argue a case, they will dismiss it. If you press them on their opinions, they will appeal to WP:RULES. If you press them further, they will quite literally start crying. I deeply, deeply wish I was exaggerating here. I cannot believe I once thought so highly of Wikipedia and the people that ran it. The influence of these pages on the learning and perception of mathematics worldwide terrifies me.
Now, maybe I'm just an old crank, too stuck in my old ways. But you tell me where the formula for the the sum "cosA + cosB" should be on this page. Before or after the formula for the sum of an infinite number of cosines, or that for "versed cosine"? Now; guess where it is?
Wikipedia is rotten from the top to the bottom. I used to think that the rot set in at the top with Wales, and slowly trickled down to the user base. Now I'm not so sure. It may be that Wikipedia was always going to primarily attract the type of person who is not interesting in providing knowledge for all, but only those for whom its articles are personal prestige projects, intended to impress only themselves and their imagined audience.
I honestly don't think most users will notice if Fox, Sky and the Times are deindexed from Google News. If anything, they'll probably remark that the overall quality of results has improved.
The principal question is this: Why is a big newspaper a big newspaper?
As it is a linear partial differential equation, all solutions to the wave equation and equations of its type are governed by what is known as the "fundamental solution" or "Green's function" of the equation. In the case of wave type equations(in 3 or more dimensions), this solution will be a delta function type solution which decreases inversely with distance from the source. Squaring its amplitude to obtain energy gives an inverse square energy decrease.
It must be stressed that all solutions of the wave equation, no matter what the sources, or boundary or initial conditions, must all be functions derived, more or less, from convolutions of the fundamental solution with the source terms. You cannot escape the inverse square behaviour of wave propagation over long distances with finite wave sources. The fundamental solution characterises all waves because of the linearity of the wave equation.
Now, there is a second fundamental solution for the wave equation; the so called "acausal" Green's function, which represents an inwardly collapsing wave, or by some conventions, a wave travelling backwards through time. Naturally, these waves are not considered in the context of the transmission of signals. Even if they were, these waves also display and inverse square relation for signal strength( going backwards in time of course).
This has been your daily mathematical public service announcement. Complaints to be directed to the Dean.
Perhaps. But the kicker here is that the Xbox 360 is unable to be used on any other network. Microsoft has taken key steps to ensure that 360s cannot be used over VPNs or any other network other than a local LAN. Individual 360s pass encrypted keys to one another upon first connection and if they do not receive an appropriate replay in 30ms, a connection is not made. It was a blatant attempt to disable alternative services like Xlink Kai and completely lock down online play on the console.
We are dealing with a Walled Garden here. Microsoft is exerting complete control over 360 consoles regardless of who owns them. If it were possible to connect to VPNs like Xlink Kai or others, this ban would be a problem. But it's not. Microsoft sold these guys a console which they said could be used to play online games, and now these console can't be used to so much as send a private message.
This is akin to Linksys deciding that installing Linux on your router means they can disable it from connecting WAN's anymore. Sure, you can use it in a LAN, but is this the product you paid for?
I'm sympathetic to Microsoft's position with regard to cheating and glitching on their network(Though I'm sceptical modded consoles are a major player here). I'm also sympathetic with regard to piracy on modded consoles. But they dug themselves into a hole here when they locked down the online capabilities of their machine without advertising that fact.
Personally, I feel that paying to play online is a rip off anyway. Perhaps this will convince people that subscribing to a game service that treats you like a consumer instead of a player isn't in their long term interest. If you're relying on someone else's servers to play your games, then it's only a matter of time before you won't be able to play those games anymore.
No. It was Stallman who gave us the tool; the GPL. This licence is the magic ingredient that makes open source software possible. Without it, without Stallman's contribution, we'd still be stuck with mostly BSD style licences. Private companies would be mooching off and appropriating the work of FOSS programmers, people would be cynical about writing software for nothing, and we wouldn't have a fraction of the fantastic array of software we all have running on our desktops, including the Linux kernel.
We'd all be paying $500 per operating system, and our program suites would mostly consist of massively duplicated pay to use, single function programs or else expensively licensed monolithic program suites like MS Office. Programs provided by private companies with lots of scope to monopolise, little incentive to innovate, and with general contempt for their users. Ask yourself, how would you encode a CD in windows, how would you compile a program, what email client would you use if you couldn't use open source software?
This is what Richard Stallman rescued us from. Restrictive, expensive, bug ridden and often vindictive closed source software. Perhaps you do not like stances. That's fine. But you had best acknowledge that the reason you have a modern web browser to read this site with is largely down to the efforts he made probably before you were even born.
That hasn't been my experience. I find Fedora does a lot less, and doesn't do it as well. The primary example of this is yum, which is a third rate program by comparision to apt. In fact, my personal opinion is that the success of Ubuntu has been down to properly maintained and comprehensive apt-repositories. When I left Fedora, yum had nothing in the same league as these, and dependency hell was very much still with the platform.
Fedora is a distro for admins who want ease of use, but not so much ease of use that they lose their jobs. They want the odd error or config mismatch so they need to directly intervene on occasion. So they won't go for debian or especially Ubuntu. On the other hand, they're not going to do all the legwork, so distros like slack or Gentoo are out of the question. Add in paid company support and "enterprise" editions, and you have the perfect distro for the in house admin of a medium to large business.
You mean after the all the claims they made? After all they said they'd keep us safe from? After how sure they made us feel in their ability? After all the charm, and the cajoling, and the expenses, and the hassle? After all they promised, now that they can't live up to even our most basic expectations, you're telling me that we're the ones at fault?
They can't perform, but now we're the ones who have to change? We're the ones who have to clean all the laundry, and be careful around strangers, and lock up for the night? We need protecting, but they have to be looked after first? We're the ones who have to change our ways, just to make them feel they're doing a good job!?
My mother was right!! I should never have subscribed to a service that came with a free trial!!