Great way to start off with headaches. Not to mention how unstable the product and company are.
Yeah, only 11 years of solid, steady progress. Best to wait another decade or so before it's ready, huh?
I wouldn't want to place a bet on that pony, even if it was someone else's money.
I did and I do. I work in the developing world, where the cost of failure is measured in people's livelihoods - and occasionally their lives. Even $1000 dollars can keep a family going for months. Getting basic infrastructure working matters a lot here, so I don't recommend things lightly.
SME Server was first used in production after the desolation of East Timor by the Indonesians. Dili, the capital, had been ruined. 80% of the existing infrastructure was damaged or destroyed. Oxfam Australia needed some way to keep their office running, and they chose the SME Server. It ran 3 offices, connecting them and managing their email using tiny bandwidth volumes and with NO local IT support.
Here in the developing country where I work, reliability and robustness matter. I've seen SME Servers left untended for periods as long as 18 months without incident. I don't base my recommendations on purest speculation. I actually profile things.
In the cold war, Americans were afraid of losing their freedom to the Soviet Union. But according to the article, the cyber cold war is about America holding on to its "intellectual property":
In the cyber cold war, the capabilities and resources of our adversaries refers to the ability... to steal intellectual property from businesses, secrets from governments and money from everybody.
Very interesting. Especially because theft of 'intellectual property' is usually called 'espionage'. While spying and intelligence-gathering happens quite a bit during times of war, it is not warfare, per se.
OS: get what the IT admin (you?) are able to administer. A 20-employee company might not have a dedicated network administrator, so setting up a Linux environment in a MS-centric company could end up badly.
Baloney. Use SME Server or Zentyal. I run a nearly identical organisation and my headaches have been significantly reduced since we stopped relying on Windows servers.
And to all those who derided the OP for asking others to do his job for him: This is why you ask others' opinions: because sometimes what you think you know isn't always true.
"I've been hired by a small NGO. They have about 20 employees. I do not yet know enough about what I have been hired to do, so I am turning to Slashdot. Please, do my job for me and help me look good."
No. but that's only because I'm not afraid of other people's opinions. I actually like trying to see things from others' point of view. It makes me better at my job.
Not just for links they don't like but for any kind of data that they can use or sell
Whether or not thats true, its pure speculation, and a hell of a reach.
Speculation? Possibly. A 'hell of a reach?' Not in the slightest.
I don't have access to the Facebook code base, and without it, the evidence I present here is nothing more than circumstantial. But consider: Some months ago, Facebook suggested I might want to friend a man whose name rang no bells to me, with whom I had no friends in common. He lives in Toronto, I live on the other side of the world.
Only after googling the name did I realise that this man runs a blog that I visit about twice a month. Once. about a year ago, I emailed him to pass on a link that I thought he might be interested in. So... how did Facebook create this association? The only possibilities are:
They read my browser history;
They accessed my email inbox - something I explicitly disallowed;
Just about a week ago, I got another similar suggestion, this time a woman from Denmark. The only thing we had in common is that she is a fan of Oscar Levant, and I had read a Slashdot thread that day that mentioned him. I'd never heard the name before, so I ran a google search for the name and read his wikipedia page.
What's Facebook up to? At best, they're taking a very liberal interpretation of what constitutes an acceptable level of investigation into my online habits. At wiorst, they're downright spying on me.
There are, perhaps, other less negative explanations, and I'll admit the possibility that I might have overlooked some detail. I'm a geek with 20 years experience in the field, but I'm still human and prone to error. BUT... Occam's Razor applied, the simplest answer is that facebook was taking liberties with what it allowed itself to see.
Will Facebook mine people's messages for content and use that intelligence for their own gain? Of course they will! That's what they do! Will they overreach when they do so? Evidence (albeit circumstantial) suggests they will.
The can wirelessly transmit, (using low power, low bandwidth technologies perhaps not yet invented or a low power subset of Wifi that only works ~30ft?), from their more traditional notebook information during class.
... And these need power cables and external power sources.
I rest my case. 8^)
Trust me, I've been down this road over a dozen times in the last 7 years working in ICT4D. It's one thing to aim for low power. That's a commendable and essential goal. (One which modern technology vendors don't take nearly seriously enough.)
It's another thing entirely to think that you can operate entirely off the grid, or more to the point, that you can rely on any one source of power generation. Experience has taught me that this is a deadly assumption.
I've seen a long string of innovative answers to the same problems. Some of them work, but never as elegantly and as simply as you want them to. The bottom line is that ugly hacks rule, and that means being able to adjust to differing conditions on the fly and staying away from the bleeding edge.
And, by the by, I am the opposite of a 'classical thinker'. Go read my blog if you want to see someone ranting at length and in detail about the perils of applying the computing patterns of the developed world onto the less developed parts. I am a huge fan of appropriate technology. But my main criterion is that it has to work.
Finally, don't get me started about missionaries. I have yet to see an instance where they did more good than harm. Christian fundamentalism is fragmenting this country's social fabric. You want to help? Just help and keep your opinions to yourself.
(1) 100% self contained. Zero infrastructure needed.
Bull. You always want it to be that way, but there always is. I say this having worked on more than one rural low-power computing project. You may not need power for the tablet (though you do - see below), but you still need power and wiring etc. for the network gear, the storage devices, the projector, etc., etc., etc.
(2) No external ports are needed, making a water/dust proof device easier and thus the end result is a more durable piece.
It's trivially easy to seal a power/USB/whatever receptacle. The OLPC XO laptop does it just fine. I've dropped one of those under water and had it working just fine within seconds.
Given the liability created by depending on sunlight (monsoon season, anyone?), the benefits of an external plug (and better still, a removable battery) are immense. Whatever risk they create for the device is far outweighed by their usefulness.
(3) Fringe benefits from the ultra-low-power research needed to build something like this.
This is true. The main challenge for the developing world is learning not to consume like North Americans. Amazingly, most development agencies don't get this. They think that growth and development means, 'Be exactly like us.'
(4) Increased production of Small/Efficient solar cells can hopefully drive cost down if the materials aren't in short supply...
I'd agree to a lesser degree, but I think point (3) is the critical one in this whole exercise.
The best thing about built-in solar and no external supply is that it would force users to regulate their usage time.
Heh, yeah.
Why is it that people think solar power works better in the tropics than elsewhere? Do they think we don't have clouds?
I live and work in a Least Developed Country, and for years now I've watched as, time and again, people take a look at the power generation problem and say, "SOLAR FTW." Then they discover that it rains much of the year, that there are mountains which tend to reduce the hours of direct sunlight, as well as a smattering of rain forest overhead and, to top it all off, we occasionally get hurricanes, which leave the place without power at exactly the time we need it most.
Bottom line: Every location has its own unique power generation challenges. In some places, wind is the answer. In others, micro-hydro. In others a diesel generator and a big battery is the only reasonable answer. For most, it's a mix of several approaches. I have yet to see a single community in the entire country for which solar is the entire answer.
So to technology makers, I can say only this: PUT A FUCKING PLUG IN IT. The solar panel is optional; the plug is not. You don't -you can't- know what form of power generation is going to work. So leave that problem for others to solve. Just make it low-enough-power that it's not going to cost more to run than it is to purchase.
OK. I don't sell Internet service, I sell Internet ACCESS via my limited, filtered and propitiatory[*] method; IPv4 and NAT. You can't force people to move to something they do not think they need, that easily.
[*] Specifically, blood sacrifices to propitiate the network daemons.
You need to drop the Microsoft hate if you actually want to be employable.
Bullshit. I stopped supporting Microsoft servers in 1999, and I've never been without work. More to the point, all the best jobs I've ever had came after that point in time.
It's not hate to want to be able to control all of the environment you're coding in. It's not hate to become sick of telling clients that they'll have to live with a bug until the next product cycle, because $VENDOR doesn't want to fix it just for them.
It is most definitely not hate to want to take pride in the work you do, and to be able to be sure of that, because it's source code all the way down.
at least at the start of this next frontier how about testing for the chip profiling software.
As others have said already: cat/proc/cpuinfo
Okay, seriously: I know you mean more than that. If an application really wants to take advantage of shortcoming within a given processor type, it will necessarily have to interact with it. Problem is, it can do so in one of any number of ways. It could even infect other software and use its activity as cover to inject the tests necessary to characterise the processor's weaknesses.
It's one thing to be able to "detect subtle differences" in floating point operations but another to do it while also trying to avoid detection....
See above.
But why bother attacking the processor if you've already won your way onto the machine and infected other software? Back in 2007, Adi Shamir outlined a way to use errors in math routines to crack private keys. My write-up on it is here. Put most simply, if you know there is a math flaw in a particular kind of processor, then you can exploit that by injecting ‘poisoned’ values into the key decryption process. By watching what happens to that known value, you can infer enough about the key itself that you can, with a little more math, quickly break the private key.
This is not particularly useful for botnet-style attacks that spread themselves indiscriminately around using lowest common denominator exploits. It is useful for the kind of focused attack we've seen recently, in which people target specific individuals in order to steal sensitive data.
Unlike everyone here who has all there important documents^Hporn encrypted and hidden with TrueCrypt on six hard drives stuffed in the laundry room and the USB stick stuffed in their mom's purse while tunneling into Slashdot with two proxies on different continents?
This proposal is like relegating the whole stack to a newsgroup-level of relevance.
I suspect that if it were actually acted on, you'd be dead on the money.
But I also suspect that the submission was deliberately provocative, designed to make the contrast between a Neutral Internet and what ISPs want as stark as possible. In effect, it seems to be saying, "What they want is not Internet, so we should quit calling it that." Right at the outset, it says:
While we have diverse views about the overall policy approach that the assurance of the open
Internet entails, we note here that separating the Internet from specialized services is a dramatic
advance in the discussion, one that is very helpful on its own terms to understanding the
implications of various concerns surrounding this issue....
As a rhetorical stance, I like it. As a policy position, not so much.
As you rightly note, the vendors will do everything in their power to twist the definitions in order to make their proprietary model look more attractive and to subvert the influence of a truly open Internet. The authors of this work may believe that an open Internet will succeed on its merits alone. I don't. However we arrive at it, Network Neutrality is simply not negotiable.
Bemoan the ineffectual nature of government regulation as much as you like; the fact remains that, left alone, most commercial Internet providers have every financial incentive to lock down their networks.
(According to the dominant business perspective in North American and Europe, anyway. One can make compelling arguments about network effects and the collateral benefits that derive from open, end-to-end networks, but most MBAs don't -and don't want to- get it. They're all about controlling the market and sucking it dry. Profit, alas, beats planning every time.)
On the subject of copyright some time ago, opposing extension of copyright, and was not impressed by the response.
Whilst he didn't reply personally, his office trotted out the tired old BSA/FAST/RIAA line of breach of copyright being theft, sponsoring terrorism etc,
So for this reason I will be highly surprised if he has had some sort of "road to Damascus" type conversion
I suspect this is one of the policies that the Lib/Dems wanted as a condition for taking part in the coalition. It's important enough that the people who care about it will be glad of it (assuming it does improve the situation, which is always a big 'if' in politics), and yet a vague enough issue for the general public that it won't cost the Conservatives a thing in the next election.
I could be dead wrong about this; I don't follow British politics very closely. But I've been waiting to see some typically Lib/Dem policies come down the pipe for a while now. Any coalition agreement involves the weaker party eating a lot of shit in exchange for a few choice policy wins. Given the number of items of principle the Lib/Dems have had to compromise on, this might be something that Cameron just has to deliver to survive another year.
I know that. I was just granting that assertion 'for the sake of argument'. My point is that even if we grant that assertion as true, the methods being used to protect the author (the publisher, actually, but that's a different post) are inappropriate and ineffective.
I realize Slashdot has a certain "information should be free" ethos, but it doesn't make much sense to build in the ability to give unlimited copies to everyone and think that it won't undermine the business. While the publishers "wish you to engage in two separate hallucinations", it seems like lots of other people want us to engage in another hallucination: that giving out unlimited copies won't turn into a financial problem for booksellers.
Just for the sake of argument, let's accept that assertion of yours as truth: Infinite distribution necessarily causes financial problems for publishers. That doesn't explain why they would choose to give fewer lending rights to possessors of digital copies than to those who buy the paper object. Nor does it explain why they charge pretty much the same price for this reduced capability.
We seem to be dealing (yet again) with anti-features: The publishers are actually adding to the consumer's burden in exchange for nominally lowering the cost and 'allowing' them the convenience of reading an electronic copy of a given book.
As the Economist rightly notes, this won't stand. Anti-features (including DRM) only need to be removed once. Argue however much you like about the rights of the author. As a writer, I'm pretty damn sympathetic. But realistically, writers have to adjust to the world as it is. People will share things that delight them. They do so with photos, with posters, books, music, TV shows and movies... in short, with everything they can.
Yes, it puts creators in a quandary. Yes, it threatens livelihoods and, potentially, might even prevent the next great opus. But to attempt to remodel the world to fit an outdated vision? That's just insane. I don't mean stupid -it actually requires a fair amount of imagination to get there- I mean insane - nuts, cuckoo. The idea is premised on the fact that all of society (save the poor, beleaguered author) is wrong, and must change. Even if the first clause is correct, the second does not follow. And even if we accept it logically, we still have no hope of effecting that change through technical means.
I suppose it is possible that we could change society. It's happened before. But we will not do it with DRM and anti-features.
After a quick first glance, it seems like it isn't doing anything that a good web designer shouldn't have already have done. Then again, the percentage of well-designed pages out there mean this could still provide a speedup...
And then, you might find yourself in my position. I administer a website with over 100,000 static files, created using a variety of tools over the course of the last 8 years. And one of those tools was FrontPage.
Given the size of our shop, coupled with the need to handle new content coming in, the best I can realistically hope for is that the formatting of our new content doesn't suck quite as tremendously as the older stuff. On top of everything else, we provide important legal content to one of the most Internet-deprived regions in the world. Bandwidth around here is often measured in single-digit kilobytes.
... You can bet your boots I'm going to give this module a test-drive. I'd be crazy not to.
Plug in two mice, castrate a ball mouse to use for clicking with one hand while moving the second mouse with whatever part of his "art arm" still works.
Correction: A mouse and a tablet.
I have carpal tunnel syndrome in my right hand. Using a mouse exclusively is agonising. So, I set up a Wacom tablet in one hand and use a mouse in the other. The mouse is useful when I need to position something and the tablet for gestures. I can spend an entire day working in Lightroom/Photoshop/Inkscape/etc. without experiencing too much pain.
It seems to me that the burned hand should still be able to perform gestures. Heck, I believe it was Cézanne who actually tied brushes to his hands when arthritis caught up with him. It's the niggling stuff that would be difficult, but a mouse will do in a pinch for that kind of work.
Slashdot Mirror
Apocryphal story, but worth telling:
Back in the 1800s, a dignitary once asked a prominent Huron chief, "Do you know why the sun never sets on the British Empire?"
The chief thought for a moment, then replied, "Because God doesn't trust your Queen in the dark."
Except SME Server has issues with Win 7.
Fixed in 8.0. I'm running it right now.
Great way to start off with headaches. Not to mention how unstable the product and company are.
Yeah, only 11 years of solid, steady progress. Best to wait another decade or so before it's ready, huh?
I wouldn't want to place a bet on that pony, even if it was someone else's money.
I did and I do. I work in the developing world, where the cost of failure is measured in people's livelihoods - and occasionally their lives. Even $1000 dollars can keep a family going for months. Getting basic infrastructure working matters a lot here, so I don't recommend things lightly.
SME Server was first used in production after the desolation of East Timor by the Indonesians. Dili, the capital, had been ruined. 80% of the existing infrastructure was damaged or destroyed. Oxfam Australia needed some way to keep their office running, and they chose the SME Server. It ran 3 offices, connecting them and managing their email using tiny bandwidth volumes and with NO local IT support.
Here in the developing country where I work, reliability and robustness matter. I've seen SME Servers left untended for periods as long as 18 months without incident. I don't base my recommendations on purest speculation. I actually profile things.
Are our kids going to have Global Cyber Annihilation Threat drills in school now?
"Children! Prepare to CONTROL, ALT and DELETE for your homeland!"
"Three Finger... SALUTE!"
In the cold war, Americans were afraid of losing their freedom to the Soviet Union. But according to the article, the cyber cold war is about America holding on to its "intellectual property":
Very interesting. Especially because theft of 'intellectual property' is usually called 'espionage'. While spying and intelligence-gathering happens quite a bit during times of war, it is not warfare, per se.
As usual, the redoubtable Seymour Hersh got there first with this observation.
I stand corrected. SME Server looks interesting and is worth investigating. Thank you.
No problem. Feel free to contact me if you ever have questions. My website has all the info you need....
Baloney. Use SME Server or Zentyal. I run a nearly identical organisation and my headaches have been significantly reduced since we stopped relying on Windows servers.
And to all those who derided the OP for asking others to do his job for him: This is why you ask others' opinions: because sometimes what you think you know isn't always true.
Do my job for me?
"I've been hired by a small NGO. They have about 20 employees. I do not yet know enough about what I have been hired to do, so I am turning to Slashdot. Please, do my job for me and help me look good."
No. but that's only because I'm not afraid of other people's opinions. I actually like trying to see things from others' point of view. It makes me better at my job.
Not just for links they don't like but for any kind of data that they can use or sell
Whether or not thats true, its pure speculation, and a hell of a reach.
Speculation? Possibly. A 'hell of a reach?' Not in the slightest.
I don't have access to the Facebook code base, and without it, the evidence I present here is nothing more than circumstantial. But consider: Some months ago, Facebook suggested I might want to friend a man whose name rang no bells to me, with whom I had no friends in common. He lives in Toronto, I live on the other side of the world.
Only after googling the name did I realise that this man runs a blog that I visit about twice a month. Once. about a year ago, I emailed him to pass on a link that I thought he might be interested in. So... how did Facebook create this association? The only possibilities are:
Just about a week ago, I got another similar suggestion, this time a woman from Denmark. The only thing we had in common is that she is a fan of Oscar Levant, and I had read a Slashdot thread that day that mentioned him. I'd never heard the name before, so I ran a google search for the name and read his wikipedia page.
What's Facebook up to? At best, they're taking a very liberal interpretation of what constitutes an acceptable level of investigation into my online habits. At wiorst, they're downright spying on me.
There are, perhaps, other less negative explanations, and I'll admit the possibility that I might have overlooked some detail. I'm a geek with 20 years experience in the field, but I'm still human and prone to error. BUT... Occam's Razor applied, the simplest answer is that facebook was taking liberties with what it allowed itself to see.
Will Facebook mine people's messages for content and use that intelligence for their own gain? Of course they will! That's what they do! Will they overreach when they do so? Evidence (albeit circumstantial) suggests they will.
Quantum Physicists are obviously "dog people"...
That's may be, but Uncertainty teaches us that we still don't know who let them out.
They already do. That's the problem.
... And these need power cables and external power sources.
I rest my case. 8^)
Trust me, I've been down this road over a dozen times in the last 7 years working in ICT4D. It's one thing to aim for low power. That's a commendable and essential goal. (One which modern technology vendors don't take nearly seriously enough.)
It's another thing entirely to think that you can operate entirely off the grid, or more to the point, that you can rely on any one source of power generation. Experience has taught me that this is a deadly assumption.
I've seen a long string of innovative answers to the same problems. Some of them work, but never as elegantly and as simply as you want them to. The bottom line is that ugly hacks rule, and that means being able to adjust to differing conditions on the fly and staying away from the bleeding edge.
And, by the by, I am the opposite of a 'classical thinker'. Go read my blog if you want to see someone ranting at length and in detail about the perils of applying the computing patterns of the developed world onto the less developed parts. I am a huge fan of appropriate technology. But my main criterion is that it has to work.
Finally, don't get me started about missionaries. I have yet to see an instance where they did more good than harm. Christian fundamentalism is fragmenting this country's social fabric. You want to help? Just help and keep your opinions to yourself.
Bull. You always want it to be that way, but there always is. I say this having worked on more than one rural low-power computing project. You may not need power for the tablet (though you do - see below), but you still need power and wiring etc. for the network gear, the storage devices, the projector, etc., etc., etc.
It's trivially easy to seal a power/USB/whatever receptacle. The OLPC XO laptop does it just fine. I've dropped one of those under water and had it working just fine within seconds.
Given the liability created by depending on sunlight (monsoon season, anyone?), the benefits of an external plug (and better still, a removable battery) are immense. Whatever risk they create for the device is far outweighed by their usefulness.
This is true. The main challenge for the developing world is learning not to consume like North Americans. Amazingly, most development agencies don't get this. They think that growth and development means, 'Be exactly like us.'
I'd agree to a lesser degree, but I think point (3) is the critical one in this whole exercise.
The best thing about built-in solar and no external supply is that it would force users to regulate their usage time.
Heh, yeah.
Why is it that people think solar power works better in the tropics than elsewhere? Do they think we don't have clouds?
I live and work in a Least Developed Country, and for years now I've watched as, time and again, people take a look at the power generation problem and say, "SOLAR FTW." Then they discover that it rains much of the year, that there are mountains which tend to reduce the hours of direct sunlight, as well as a smattering of rain forest overhead and, to top it all off, we occasionally get hurricanes, which leave the place without power at exactly the time we need it most.
Bottom line: Every location has its own unique power generation challenges. In some places, wind is the answer. In others, micro-hydro. In others a diesel generator and a big battery is the only reasonable answer. For most, it's a mix of several approaches. I have yet to see a single community in the entire country for which solar is the entire answer.
So to technology makers, I can say only this: PUT A FUCKING PLUG IN IT. The solar panel is optional; the plug is not. You don't -you can't- know what form of power generation is going to work. So leave that problem for others to solve. Just make it low-enough-power that it's not going to cost more to run than it is to purchase.
OK. I don't sell Internet service, I sell Internet ACCESS via my limited, filtered and propitiatory[*] method; IPv4 and NAT. You can't force people to move to something they do not think they need, that easily.
[*] Specifically, blood sacrifices to propitiate the network daemons.
You need to drop the Microsoft hate if you actually want to be employable.
Bullshit. I stopped supporting Microsoft servers in 1999, and I've never been without work. More to the point, all the best jobs I've ever had came after that point in time.
It's not hate to want to be able to control all of the environment you're coding in. It's not hate to become sick of telling clients that they'll have to live with a bug until the next product cycle, because $VENDOR doesn't want to fix it just for them.
It is most definitely not hate to want to take pride in the work you do, and to be able to be sure of that, because it's source code all the way down.
at least at the start of this next frontier how about testing for the chip profiling software.
As others have said already: cat /proc/cpuinfo
Okay, seriously: I know you mean more than that. If an application really wants to take advantage of shortcoming within a given processor type, it will necessarily have to interact with it. Problem is, it can do so in one of any number of ways. It could even infect other software and use its activity as cover to inject the tests necessary to characterise the processor's weaknesses.
It's one thing to be able to "detect subtle differences" in floating point operations but another to do it while also trying to avoid detection....
See above.
But why bother attacking the processor if you've already won your way onto the machine and infected other software? Back in 2007, Adi Shamir outlined a way to use errors in math routines to crack private keys. My write-up on it is here. Put most simply, if you know there is a math flaw in a particular kind of processor, then you can exploit that by injecting ‘poisoned’ values into the key decryption process. By watching what happens to that known value, you can infer enough about the key itself that you can, with a little more math, quickly break the private key.
This is not particularly useful for botnet-style attacks that spread themselves indiscriminately around using lowest common denominator exploits. It is useful for the kind of focused attack we've seen recently, in which people target specific individuals in order to steal sensitive data.
Continents? Continents?!?
Piffle!
I'm riding 3 satellites and a worm-hole, baby!
Best,
Bruce Schneier
Heh.
This proposal is like relegating the whole stack to a newsgroup-level of relevance.
I suspect that if it were actually acted on, you'd be dead on the money.
But I also suspect that the submission was deliberately provocative, designed to make the contrast between a Neutral Internet and what ISPs want as stark as possible. In effect, it seems to be saying, "What they want is not Internet, so we should quit calling it that." Right at the outset, it says:
While we have diverse views about the overall policy approach that the assurance of the open Internet entails, we note here that separating the Internet from specialized services is a dramatic advance in the discussion, one that is very helpful on its own terms to understanding the implications of various concerns surrounding this issue....
As a rhetorical stance, I like it. As a policy position, not so much.
As you rightly note, the vendors will do everything in their power to twist the definitions in order to make their proprietary model look more attractive and to subvert the influence of a truly open Internet. The authors of this work may believe that an open Internet will succeed on its merits alone. I don't. However we arrive at it, Network Neutrality is simply not negotiable.
Bemoan the ineffectual nature of government regulation as much as you like; the fact remains that, left alone, most commercial Internet providers have every financial incentive to lock down their networks.
(According to the dominant business perspective in North American and Europe, anyway. One can make compelling arguments about network effects and the collateral benefits that derive from open, end-to-end networks, but most MBAs don't -and don't want to- get it. They're all about controlling the market and sucking it dry. Profit, alas, beats planning every time.)
On the subject of copyright some time ago, opposing extension of copyright, and was not impressed by the response.
Whilst he didn't reply personally, his office trotted out the tired old BSA/FAST/RIAA line of breach of copyright being theft, sponsoring terrorism etc,
So for this reason I will be highly surprised if he has had some sort of "road to Damascus" type conversion
I suspect this is one of the policies that the Lib/Dems wanted as a condition for taking part in the coalition. It's important enough that the people who care about it will be glad of it (assuming it does improve the situation, which is always a big 'if' in politics), and yet a vague enough issue for the general public that it won't cost the Conservatives a thing in the next election.
I could be dead wrong about this; I don't follow British politics very closely. But I've been waiting to see some typically Lib/Dem policies come down the pipe for a while now. Any coalition agreement involves the weaker party eating a lot of shit in exchange for a few choice policy wins. Given the number of items of principle the Lib/Dems have had to compromise on, this might be something that Cameron just has to deliver to survive another year.
Piracy will never prevent the next great opus.
I know that. I was just granting that assertion 'for the sake of argument'. My point is that even if we grant that assertion as true, the methods being used to protect the author (the publisher, actually, but that's a different post) are inappropriate and ineffective.
I realize Slashdot has a certain "information should be free" ethos, but it doesn't make much sense to build in the ability to give unlimited copies to everyone and think that it won't undermine the business. While the publishers "wish you to engage in two separate hallucinations", it seems like lots of other people want us to engage in another hallucination: that giving out unlimited copies won't turn into a financial problem for booksellers.
Just for the sake of argument, let's accept that assertion of yours as truth: Infinite distribution necessarily causes financial problems for publishers. That doesn't explain why they would choose to give fewer lending rights to possessors of digital copies than to those who buy the paper object. Nor does it explain why they charge pretty much the same price for this reduced capability.
We seem to be dealing (yet again) with anti-features: The publishers are actually adding to the consumer's burden in exchange for nominally lowering the cost and 'allowing' them the convenience of reading an electronic copy of a given book.
As the Economist rightly notes, this won't stand. Anti-features (including DRM) only need to be removed once. Argue however much you like about the rights of the author. As a writer, I'm pretty damn sympathetic. But realistically, writers have to adjust to the world as it is. People will share things that delight them. They do so with photos, with posters, books, music, TV shows and movies... in short, with everything they can.
Yes, it puts creators in a quandary. Yes, it threatens livelihoods and, potentially, might even prevent the next great opus. But to attempt to remodel the world to fit an outdated vision? That's just insane. I don't mean stupid -it actually requires a fair amount of imagination to get there- I mean insane - nuts, cuckoo. The idea is premised on the fact that all of society (save the poor, beleaguered author) is wrong, and must change. Even if the first clause is correct, the second does not follow. And even if we accept it logically, we still have no hope of effecting that change through technical means.
I suppose it is possible that we could change society. It's happened before. But we will not do it with DRM and anti-features.
After a quick first glance, it seems like it isn't doing anything that a good web designer shouldn't have already have done. Then again, the percentage of well-designed pages out there mean this could still provide a speedup...
And then, you might find yourself in my position. I administer a website with over 100,000 static files, created using a variety of tools over the course of the last 8 years. And one of those tools was FrontPage.
Given the size of our shop, coupled with the need to handle new content coming in, the best I can realistically hope for is that the formatting of our new content doesn't suck quite as tremendously as the older stuff. On top of everything else, we provide important legal content to one of the most Internet-deprived regions in the world. Bandwidth around here is often measured in single-digit kilobytes.
... You can bet your boots I'm going to give this module a test-drive. I'd be crazy not to.
Plug in two mice, castrate a ball mouse to use for clicking with one hand while moving the second mouse with whatever part of his "art arm" still works.
Correction: A mouse and a tablet.
I have carpal tunnel syndrome in my right hand. Using a mouse exclusively is agonising. So, I set up a Wacom tablet in one hand and use a mouse in the other. The mouse is useful when I need to position something and the tablet for gestures. I can spend an entire day working in Lightroom/Photoshop/Inkscape/etc. without experiencing too much pain.
It seems to me that the burned hand should still be able to perform gestures. Heck, I believe it was Cézanne who actually tied brushes to his hands when arthritis caught up with him. It's the niggling stuff that would be difficult, but a mouse will do in a pinch for that kind of work.
Rule #1 of buying stuff: the vendor is not your "friend", on Facebook or otherwise.
Rule #2 of buying stuff: Don't buy stuff from douches who spy on you.
Rule #1 of buying stuff: the vendor is not your "friend", on Facebook or otherwise.
Rule #2 of buying stuff: Don't buy from douches who spy on you.