And BTW, I wasn't attempting to badmouth Linux, which could probably have been noted from my repeated attempts to blame the BIOS. I suspect that part of the reason it's easy to install OSX on external drives is that Apple doesn't deal with Linux anymore.
As technology improves, it will be interesting to see if someone one-ups this idea and provides the entire operating system in something closer to an Ubuntu Live CD.
Everyone is doing this already. Ok... everyone except Microsoft. You've been able to run a complete version of Linux or OSX off of a USB drive for a while now.
Is it just the BIOS that gets in the way? I've been running OSX from external drives for years now, and it makes a whole lot of recovery and imaging tasks unbelievably easier, and I keep wondering, why the hell does Microsoft have to make it so difficult?
Even with Linux, you can't just run your normal Linux install and point it towards an external drive and have that work. You have to do extra tricks that are... tricky.
So really, is it a problem with the BIOS? Can't we just fix whatever it is and be done with this problem?
I'm not sure there's a hard method that can make that sort of determination. It seems like it's something we should be cognizant of when we make any alterations, we should make efforts to preserve the original, and note (to the audience) which changes have been made.
I think that, even if this new way of reading Moby Dick is easier, I would probably choose to read the original block-formatted version instead. However, I might prefer reading the scientific paper formatted in this new system, particularly because I'm trying to grab information rather than absorb the voice of the author.
Well clearly some amount of reformatting has been considered fine. We change the typeface and font size, page size, etc. This means line breaks might change from one edition to another and we accept that. But those are incidental line breaks which we don't find meaningful in prose block-formatting. If you change the paragraph breaks instead, I think that crosses a line which might potentially be problematic.
The new cues may change the overall meaning of the text resulting in a failure to communicate.
I think this might be my only objection to the idea. I went to their site and started reading Moby Dick, and it immediately occurred to me that, by changing the formating, it changed the way I was reading the text. I think it does make reading the text easier, but it made me read the text more like poetry, and in poetry, line breaks often have a sort of significance. A line break tends to change the timing, almost like a form of punctuation.
If you think about it, we often use whitespace like punctuation. I just did-- I broke to a new paragraph to signify that I was shifting focus. Maybe this is something fairly innate in people, or maybe it's strictly conventional. Either way, that's how we all read. Whitespace is punctuation. Therefore, it's not clear to me that it's necessarily appropriate to go adding whitespace to other people's writing without considering the effect on meaning.
Consider if someone published a copy of Moby Dick with new punctuation, periods and commas where they weren't before, and dropping some commas and periods. Let's say they broke up paragraphs how they wanted and not how Melville wrote them. Could they make it more readable? Perhaps. But it's trickier to ask whether such an act would be appropriate. By changing the punctuation and whitespace, you change the cadence and timing, and potentially the meaning. I'm sure Faulkner could be edited to make it more readable, but readability isn't everything.
Did they do such a shoddy job in the study? Why is there no link to a peer-reviewed study?
They do link to an actual journal article, and you'll find the same link on Live Ink's website. I don't know how respectable "ReadingOnline" is, but why are you assuming that this magazine article is the total of Live Ink's "research"? The example image you're talking was generated by Venture Beat, and not by Live Ink, and the example is only meant to give an idea of what Live Ink does.
That's why Microsoft ignores software patents. Even they, the richest company on the planet, have no alternative. And that's also why they're getting hit with a few 9-figure verdicts already. But they still play the game and pretend they're legitimate, because they somehow think they'll benefit, in the end, using them to crush current and potential competition with multi-million legal actions and the threat thereof.
"Somehow"? I'll tell you how: lawyers. Set up a system where everyone has a potential lawsuit against everyone else, and the player who pays the most for lawyers. The only other people who win are the lawyers themselves.
Make no mistake, the Chinese are famous for having invented many of the greatest inventions in history. Problem is, they often did it multiple times, independently. In the Western universe, I seem to recall that intellectual property was kept as trade secrets, to the exclusion of the public and similarly lost to antiquity.
There is this notion that patents are good because they encourage an exchange of designs and technology that otherwise would be made secret. However, assuming that's the purpose and utility of the patent system, it's clear that the patent system should be rather strict on the requirement that the design is not "obvious". It seems like it should be insufficient that the design is new, or even that no one had thought of it, but that it's actually difficult to figure out how to accomplish the results of the method being used. If, for example, you want to patent a method for compressing audio, it should be required that you show that other people in the industry would have some trouble devising and equivalent method with equivalent results.
Maybe that's how our patent system is supposedly set up, but from the patents I hear about sometimes, it sure doesn't seem like they're testing for this sort of obviousness.
Oh, don't be so cynical. Just think of all the wonderful things you'll be able to do when you have both Digital Consumer Enablement and Windows Genuine Advantage.
The thing that seems obvious to me is that you hire a bunch of the cheaper people who can do all of the normal day to day stuff, and you also hire a guru who gets all of the impossible tasks
And that seems to me to be the key thing: inexperienced people need to work along side experienced people. That's how people get experience.
Why is this such a hard concept for people to understand these days? It's like there are two camps: either you think companies should hire all-knowing experienced geniuses or you think companies are better off hiring a small army of inexperienced guys.
Throughout history, in pretty much every trade, there's been this idea of apprentices. There's been the idea of "working your way up the ladder". The idea is pretty simple: you put the new guy in with the experienced guy, so that the experienced guy can pass on his knowledge and the new guy can get up-to-speed. Over time, the new guy learns enough to take over the small/easy portions of the experienced guy's work. The experienced guy gets to avoid the crap-work, and the new guy gets experience. Over more time, the new guy starts becoming an experienced guy, can take on more complicated problems, the experienced guy can keep focusing on higher and higher-level problems, and it keeps building on that model until either the old experienced-guy or the new experienced-guy move on to something better.
You will still be all of those same things, and you will remember all of those things, if there ceases to be an electronic trail. That's what the issue is about-- should there be a detailed electronic information trail of your life, maintained forever, whether you like it or not?
E-mail, chat transcripts, purchase histories-- do you really want all that information sitting around, indefinitely, waiting to be made public? Even though you've admitted to crying when you were 11, there are probably some events of your life that you wouldn't so readily admit to. There are things that, even if they're still a part of you, they aren't a part you'd like to have dragged out into the light of day for ridicule, where both strangers and loved-ones will know exactly what you did.
If you don't have anything like that in your life, consider yourself fortunate. Many of us do, and there's no purpose in saving a record of these events unless you want to tear people down, hurt feelings, and damage lives.
Of course, it's worth mentioning that there's a problem with "targeted advertising". In order to "target" ads to particular people, they must first collect information on their potential audience. Most people find this sort of data collection to be an invasion of privacy.
This is exactly why you're not supposed to choose a hobby as a career. Careers are meant to be something you're good at, and can stand doing, but not something you want to do for fun. What happens when you do something you enjoy over and over again? You stop enjoying it....
... and when you really stop enjoying it, you find something else that you enjoy. Which is what this guy is trying to do.
For most of us, our "careers" take up the lion share of our lives. Life is too short to spend it doing things you "can stand doing" instead of things you enjoy.
Sometimes when I'm watching something on TIVO I'll forget I can zip through the commercials. I'm more prone to forget and watch the commercials if there are fewer of them and they're interesting.
Well that's the funny thing, too. Since getting my DVR from my cable company, I've noticed that there are times when I actually stop fast forwarding, rewound, and watched an ad. Do you know why? Either the ad got my attention with something that was going on, or it was an ad for a product I might actually want.
I think that bears repeating: "an ad for a product I might actually want." For the good of our cultural/socialogical sanity, the various groups in the advertising industry should be trying to find ways to deliver ads people are willing to watch without a fight, shielding consumers from ads that will only annoy the crap out of people. That was the whole idea of ads on television, after all-- to make the ads worth watching. Ads today are so fricken annoying, though, that it's usually not worth watching them anymore.
And I'm not suggesting that the advertising industry damage themselves by showing restraint out of purely altruistic motivations. On the contrary, if they don't scale back and find ways to avoid annoying the crap out of people, we might just keep getting more inventive at blocking all ads all the time.
Take the web as an example: A lot of people have become so annoyed with horrible pop-ups, pop-unders, complicated flash junk, etc., and the result is that we've developed extensions and plug-ins that block pretty much all advertising everywhere. If advertisers showed a little more restraint, ad-blocking might not be so common.
I think the GP is acknowledging that it doesn't offer much, but it's not clear that it won't protect you at all. I agree that good security is layered, and right now NAT allows a layer of obscurity by not allowing others to discern where traffic is coming from or where it's going.
A while back, I was having problems installing Citrix on my Linux machines. I forget what the deal was, but it was something like... the installer assumed that a needed file was included in the OS even though most distros had stopped including that file the year before.
Ok, so I figured out what the problem was, figured out which file was needed, found the file online, and got Citrix working on that machine. Even though it was an obvious fix, I figured I'd just report the problem in case they didn't know the problem existed. I went looking for somewhere on their site that I could report a problem or bug, and couldn't find one. I finally found some kind of support e-mail address and e-mailed them, very politely, explaining what I'd found.
I got an e-mail back shortly after explaining that if I wanted support, I would have to buy a contract or pay a per-incident fee. I wrote back saying something along the lines of, "I'm sorry if I e-mailed the wrong address. I'm not looking for support, I wanted to inform you of a problem with your install program that will cause it to fail in newer versions of many Linux distributions. I've already fixed it for myself, but please pass the information along to the appropriate people so you can include the missing file in your next release."
I got another e-mail explaining that I needed to pay the per-incident fee. It wasn't an automated thing; it was definitely a real person composing the e-mails, but completely failing to understand what I was telling them. We went back and forth a few times, and finally I gave up. I checked back with updated versions of the software to see if it was fixed, and several updates were released without including the necessary file. A year passed without fixing the issue before I stopped paying attention.
Sometimes, even if you're willing to go through some trouble to report problems with no personal gain for yourself, people still won't listen.
Microsoft doesn't give a shit about making you or I happy. They care about corporate customers with support contracts and umpteen-hojillion seats.
... and Microsoft doesn't even give a shit about keeping their corporate customers happy with support contracts and umpteen-hojillion seats. They care about keeping those corporate customers paying for those support contracts and convincing them to migrate those umpteen-hojillion seats to the new version of Windows and Office, which offer minimal improvements at a heavy cost.
Excellent point. This whole "civilization" thing, along with all the "science" and "economy"-- these are all done out of "boredom". At least, if "doing [something] out of boredom" consists of doing something that isn't absolutely necessary because you have an excess of time and resources.
Calling it "done out of boredom" belittles the activity without giving you any insight into the motivations. Instead, people should ask, "Out of all the things developers could choose to do 'out of boredom', why are they choosing to work on open source projects?"
Slashdot Mirror
CORRECTION: Apple doesn't deal with BIOS anymore. They've been using OpenFirmware and now EFI.
And BTW, I wasn't attempting to badmouth Linux, which could probably have been noted from my repeated attempts to blame the BIOS. I suspect that part of the reason it's easy to install OSX on external drives is that Apple doesn't deal with Linux anymore.
As a matter of fact, you can. But why bother when you can install it on a USB drive so easily?
Everyone is doing this already. Ok... everyone except Microsoft. You've been able to run a complete version of Linux or OSX off of a USB drive for a while now.
Is it just the BIOS that gets in the way? I've been running OSX from external drives for years now, and it makes a whole lot of recovery and imaging tasks unbelievably easier, and I keep wondering, why the hell does Microsoft have to make it so difficult?
Even with Linux, you can't just run your normal Linux install and point it towards an external drive and have that work. You have to do extra tricks that are... tricky.
So really, is it a problem with the BIOS? Can't we just fix whatever it is and be done with this problem?
I'm not sure there's a hard method that can make that sort of determination. It seems like it's something we should be cognizant of when we make any alterations, we should make efforts to preserve the original, and note (to the audience) which changes have been made.
I think that, even if this new way of reading Moby Dick is easier, I would probably choose to read the original block-formatted version instead. However, I might prefer reading the scientific paper formatted in this new system, particularly because I'm trying to grab information rather than absorb the voice of the author.
Well clearly some amount of reformatting has been considered fine. We change the typeface and font size, page size, etc. This means line breaks might change from one edition to another and we accept that. But those are incidental line breaks which we don't find meaningful in prose block-formatting. If you change the paragraph breaks instead, I think that crosses a line which might potentially be problematic.
The new cues may change the overall meaning of the text resulting in a failure to communicate.
I think this might be my only objection to the idea. I went to their site and started reading Moby Dick, and it immediately occurred to me that, by changing the formating, it changed the way I was reading the text. I think it does make reading the text easier, but it made me read the text more like poetry, and in poetry, line breaks often have a sort of significance. A line break tends to change the timing, almost like a form of punctuation.
If you think about it, we often use whitespace like punctuation. I just did-- I broke to a new paragraph to signify that I was shifting focus. Maybe this is something fairly innate in people, or maybe it's strictly conventional. Either way, that's how we all read. Whitespace is punctuation. Therefore, it's not clear to me that it's necessarily appropriate to go adding whitespace to other people's writing without considering the effect on meaning.
Consider if someone published a copy of Moby Dick with new punctuation, periods and commas where they weren't before, and dropping some commas and periods. Let's say they broke up paragraphs how they wanted and not how Melville wrote them. Could they make it more readable? Perhaps. But it's trickier to ask whether such an act would be appropriate. By changing the punctuation and whitespace, you change the cadence and timing, and potentially the meaning. I'm sure Faulkner could be edited to make it more readable, but readability isn't everything.
Did they do such a shoddy job in the study? Why is there no link to a peer-reviewed study?
They do link to an actual journal article, and you'll find the same link on Live Ink's website. I don't know how respectable "ReadingOnline" is, but why are you assuming that this magazine article is the total of Live Ink's "research"? The example image you're talking was generated by Venture Beat, and not by Live Ink, and the example is only meant to give an idea of what Live Ink does.
Aren't you thinking of his brother Philip?
"Somehow"? I'll tell you how: lawyers. Set up a system where everyone has a potential lawsuit against everyone else, and the player who pays the most for lawyers. The only other people who win are the lawyers themselves.
There is this notion that patents are good because they encourage an exchange of designs and technology that otherwise would be made secret. However, assuming that's the purpose and utility of the patent system, it's clear that the patent system should be rather strict on the requirement that the design is not "obvious". It seems like it should be insufficient that the design is new, or even that no one had thought of it, but that it's actually difficult to figure out how to accomplish the results of the method being used. If, for example, you want to patent a method for compressing audio, it should be required that you show that other people in the industry would have some trouble devising and equivalent method with equivalent results.
Maybe that's how our patent system is supposedly set up, but from the patents I hear about sometimes, it sure doesn't seem like they're testing for this sort of obviousness.
Oh, don't be so cynical. Just think of all the wonderful things you'll be able to do when you have both Digital Consumer Enablement and Windows Genuine Advantage.
And that seems to me to be the key thing: inexperienced people need to work along side experienced people. That's how people get experience.
Why is this such a hard concept for people to understand these days? It's like there are two camps: either you think companies should hire all-knowing experienced geniuses or you think companies are better off hiring a small army of inexperienced guys.
Throughout history, in pretty much every trade, there's been this idea of apprentices. There's been the idea of "working your way up the ladder". The idea is pretty simple: you put the new guy in with the experienced guy, so that the experienced guy can pass on his knowledge and the new guy can get up-to-speed. Over time, the new guy learns enough to take over the small/easy portions of the experienced guy's work. The experienced guy gets to avoid the crap-work, and the new guy gets experience. Over more time, the new guy starts becoming an experienced guy, can take on more complicated problems, the experienced guy can keep focusing on higher and higher-level problems, and it keeps building on that model until either the old experienced-guy or the new experienced-guy move on to something better.
You will still be all of those same things, and you will remember all of those things, if there ceases to be an electronic trail. That's what the issue is about-- should there be a detailed electronic information trail of your life, maintained forever, whether you like it or not?
E-mail, chat transcripts, purchase histories-- do you really want all that information sitting around, indefinitely, waiting to be made public? Even though you've admitted to crying when you were 11, there are probably some events of your life that you wouldn't so readily admit to. There are things that, even if they're still a part of you, they aren't a part you'd like to have dragged out into the light of day for ridicule, where both strangers and loved-ones will know exactly what you did.
If you don't have anything like that in your life, consider yourself fortunate. Many of us do, and there's no purpose in saving a record of these events unless you want to tear people down, hurt feelings, and damage lives.
Of course, it's worth mentioning that there's a problem with "targeted advertising". In order to "target" ads to particular people, they must first collect information on their potential audience. Most people find this sort of data collection to be an invasion of privacy.
... and when you really stop enjoying it, you find something else that you enjoy. Which is what this guy is trying to do.
For most of us, our "careers" take up the lion share of our lives. Life is too short to spend it doing things you "can stand doing" instead of things you enjoy.
Well that's the funny thing, too. Since getting my DVR from my cable company, I've noticed that there are times when I actually stop fast forwarding, rewound, and watched an ad. Do you know why? Either the ad got my attention with something that was going on, or it was an ad for a product I might actually want.
I think that bears repeating: "an ad for a product I might actually want." For the good of our cultural/socialogical sanity, the various groups in the advertising industry should be trying to find ways to deliver ads people are willing to watch without a fight, shielding consumers from ads that will only annoy the crap out of people. That was the whole idea of ads on television, after all-- to make the ads worth watching. Ads today are so fricken annoying, though, that it's usually not worth watching them anymore.
And I'm not suggesting that the advertising industry damage themselves by showing restraint out of purely altruistic motivations. On the contrary, if they don't scale back and find ways to avoid annoying the crap out of people, we might just keep getting more inventive at blocking all ads all the time.
Take the web as an example: A lot of people have become so annoyed with horrible pop-ups, pop-unders, complicated flash junk, etc., and the result is that we've developed extensions and plug-ins that block pretty much all advertising everywhere. If advertisers showed a little more restraint, ad-blocking might not be so common.
I think the GP is acknowledging that it doesn't offer much, but it's not clear that it won't protect you at all. I agree that good security is layered, and right now NAT allows a layer of obscurity by not allowing others to discern where traffic is coming from or where it's going.
A while back, I was having problems installing Citrix on my Linux machines. I forget what the deal was, but it was something like... the installer assumed that a needed file was included in the OS even though most distros had stopped including that file the year before.
Ok, so I figured out what the problem was, figured out which file was needed, found the file online, and got Citrix working on that machine. Even though it was an obvious fix, I figured I'd just report the problem in case they didn't know the problem existed. I went looking for somewhere on their site that I could report a problem or bug, and couldn't find one. I finally found some kind of support e-mail address and e-mailed them, very politely, explaining what I'd found.
I got an e-mail back shortly after explaining that if I wanted support, I would have to buy a contract or pay a per-incident fee. I wrote back saying something along the lines of, "I'm sorry if I e-mailed the wrong address. I'm not looking for support, I wanted to inform you of a problem with your install program that will cause it to fail in newer versions of many Linux distributions. I've already fixed it for myself, but please pass the information along to the appropriate people so you can include the missing file in your next release."
I got another e-mail explaining that I needed to pay the per-incident fee. It wasn't an automated thing; it was definitely a real person composing the e-mails, but completely failing to understand what I was telling them. We went back and forth a few times, and finally I gave up. I checked back with updated versions of the software to see if it was fixed, and several updates were released without including the necessary file. A year passed without fixing the issue before I stopped paying attention.
Sometimes, even if you're willing to go through some trouble to report problems with no personal gain for yourself, people still won't listen.
... and Microsoft doesn't even give a shit about keeping their corporate customers happy with support contracts and umpteen-hojillion seats. They care about keeping those corporate customers paying for those support contracts and convincing them to migrate those umpteen-hojillion seats to the new version of Windows and Office, which offer minimal improvements at a heavy cost.
that Canadians put red flowers on their coins, and Americans don't?
There is no way that MS will let any other distribution but suse exist
There is no way for MS to stop other distributions from existing.
Excellent point. This whole "civilization" thing, along with all the "science" and "economy"-- these are all done out of "boredom". At least, if "doing [something] out of boredom" consists of doing something that isn't absolutely necessary because you have an excess of time and resources.
Calling it "done out of boredom" belittles the activity without giving you any insight into the motivations. Instead, people should ask, "Out of all the things developers could choose to do 'out of boredom', why are they choosing to work on open source projects?"
Camping, while being a viable attack vector in the real world (called a sniper) is frowned upon so much in game....
Are you suggesting that being a sniper isn't "frowned upon" in real life? It's just ok to set up somewhere with a rifle and shoot people.