Doesn't seem much worse than the EULA you 'accepted' for Windows XP, or Google Earth, or most any anti-virus software.
You are about to access a Department of Homeland Security computer system. This computer system and data therein are property of the U.S. Government and provided for official U.S. Government information and use. There is no expectation of privacy when you use this computer system. The use of a password or any other security measure does not establish an expectation of privacy. By using this system, you consent to the terms set forth in this notice.
So you have to accept that they can do anything they want with your details, pass them on to whoever they want, sell them, publish them.. whatever.
Note - there is no 'Yes/No' or 'Accept/Decline' option, just a statement that you have no rights and an 'Ok' button.
I don't really care where life came from, I want to know where it can go.
If you were trying to setup a project to "Boldly go places we haven't been before", then evidence of at least some form of life on other planets could be useful when writing the funding proposal.
"We want to visit places and collect interesting rocks"
is nowhere near as exciting as
"We need to go find out about 'them' before 'they' come and find out about us"
which would probably qualify for defense funding, and could open up a whole range of interesting budget allocation and accounting methods not available to rock collectors.
I don't really see the "tremendous value" in that knowledge.
Finding a biological organism on Mars that didn't come from Earth could be very significant in the discussion about creationism.
If we did find life that had started and evolved independently of life on Earth, then how does Intelligent Design cope with it ?
As far as I remember (IANABS [Not a Bible Scholar]) God didn't mention creating life on other places.
From what little I do know about the Bible, it seemed to be pretty explicit that God created life only on the Earth.
"Oh, yeah, we remember now... He did create life in other places, but He didn't tell us because He wanted to make us feel special."
Ok, so you are saying...
Mars was prototype #1, but that only got as far as tiny microbes
Earth is #2, everything worked as planned and got as far as Human
So what else didn't He tell us about ?
Is there a #3 or #4 where things worked even better and got as far as Vulcan, or Betazoid ?
Creationism and religion aside, it would also be fairly significant for projects like Seti and the search for habitable planets outside our solar system.
Finding life on Mars increases the chances that it may have done so elsewhere in the universe too.
Which may mean projects like Seti are taken more seriously and given more funding.
If we found life on Mars, where there is little if any liquid water, then NASA or ESA would be able to argue for a serious budget to send a lander to Europa.
.. at least people actually get some utility out of cars -- they drive them every day
The reason for the bail out wasn't because the country needs more cars.
The reason for the bail out was because the car manufacturers employ a *lot* of people, and are often the largest employer in the area (directly and indirectly via local supply and support companies).
If a large car manufacturer went down, it would have put a lot of people out of work at a critical time for the economy,
causing a lot of repercussions and possibly taking the rest of the system down with it.
The bailout was to keep people employed, even if only for a short time.
Long enough for the rest of the economy to recover from the recent problems.
Now the initial crisis is over, it is worth asking a few questions.
Does the country really need more cars ?
Are we going to learn anything new from making more cars ?
If we are going to spend any more government money trying to boost the economy by subsidizing manufacturing jobs,
then does it make sense to spend it on people making cars (using old technology), or spend it on people making
spacecraft (using new technology which may teach us interesting new things along the way) ?
What about new energy sources for transport, industry and homes ?
If we are going to spend the money, then it might be better to spend it on developing new technologies
rather than supporting old ones.
So i guess the lesson is, If you're CERN, throw hardware at it. If you're Adobe, get a lot of good programmers/architects.
Actually, I think that is the wrong way round.
Places like CERN do 'throw hardware at it', lots of hardware, and it still isn't enough.
Modern desktop systems have giga bytes of memory, hundreds of giga bytes of disk and multi core processors... and in the Adobe example you are using it to display PDF documents or Flash movies.
Your application would typically be using less that 1% of the available resources.
Spending lots of money optimizing the performance does not make commercial sense.
Large science projects like CERN are pushing the limits of hardware and software.
They typically deal with data sets, data rates and processing requirements that are orders of magnitude larger that most systems can cope with.
A typical science desktop application needs to be able to process and display giga byte data sets, often comparing more than one dataset visually in real time.
A typical eScience grid service needs to be able handle extremely large (peta byte) datasets in real time,
and you can't drop data or pause for a moment - the data stream is live and you only get one chance to process and store it.
Same applies to Google, Yahoo, FaceBook etc.
If your application is pushing the hardware to the limits, then optimizing the software to increase performance by 5% is worth a lot of developer time.
As for Colin Pillinger.... he's not been put in charge of any large project since.
According to Wikipedia, he was diagnosed with progressive multiple sclerosis in 2005.
So he might not feel up to spending the next few years fighting the inevitable political and administrative battles a project like this would involve.
The advertisements all over the Economist page (top and bottom banners and embedded in the article itself) are for the Asus N series notebooks.
Which make a point of promoting the Express Gate instant-on linux environment built into the motherboard.
So even if they buy one with Windows XP or Vista installed, the first thing to run when they switch it on will be Linux with FireFox.
Interesting concept, I might like to join.
However, before I do,.. a couple of questions.
What is your business model ?
Presumably you aren't doing all this for free (someone must be paying for the web servers to run it on), so what data do you collect and who do you sell it to ?
We know delicious is owned by Yahoo, so they probably use it to provide additional data for their search engine.
If you are just two people doing it for the good of mankind, then congratulations. I'm impressed.
In which case, you need a page that outlines your privacy policy, with details of what would happen to all that interesting data you will have collected if/when you get an offer you can't refuse from one of the big players.
Sorry if this is a bit tin-foil-hat, but the big FaceBook connect button on your registration page made me wary.
FaceBook do not have the best reputation regarding data mining and privacy policy (basically, they own your data and can sell it to whoever they want to).
I'm on Demon too (not for much longer though).
Looks like they have relented (this time), I can see both the article and the image itself (8th Dec 02:00 am).
What gets me is that this image is nothing, a complete non-event, compared to the explicitly sexual images that adorn the front pages of most of our tabloid newspapers every day.
JSF, RichFaces, Hibernate, MySQL, developed on NetBeans and served by Apache TomCat on CentOS for a state government contract.
We have to train ourselves, but that's half the fun.
Ok, you got the first half of the process... using open source tools and libraries to build new applications and services.
Sounds like an interesting project to work on, lots of interesting links to the things you are using.
The next step is to make your code open source so the rest of us can learn from your experience and use your code to build even bigger and better systems;-)
NCQ was originally designed to compensate for the rotational latency inherent to mechanical hard drives,
but here it's being used in reverse,
because Intel says its SSDs are so fast that they actually encounter latency in the host system.
Is it time to look at connecting these chips direct to the motherboard ?
Avoiding the added complexity of driving what is essentially a block of memory via a serial interface designed to control spinning discs.
If the SLC memory chips were mapped into the main memory address space,
it should be possible to make them look like a 32G or 64G (NV)RAM drive on a Unix/Linux system.
Mount '/' and '/boot' on the (NV)RAM drive and install the OS on it.
Presto - very fast boot and load times.
You can still use traditional spinning disc(s) for large data, mounted as separate data partitions.
It would need some thought as to which parts of the filesystem went on spinning disc and which parts went on the (NV)RAM partition.
But that is why Unix/Linux has all of the tools for mounting different parts of the filesystem on different partitions.
Back in the olden days, most systems had a combination of small fast(ish) discs and big(ish) slow discs,
and tweaking fstab to mount different parts of the filesystem on different discs was
a standard part of the install process.
Most desktop systems now have one huge disc, and the standard Linux install dumps everything on one big '/' partition,
but all the tools for optimizing the partition layout are still there.
How about an ultra quiet desktop workstation with no moving parts, the OS installed on (NV)RAM disc,
and user data dragged across the network from a fileserver (e.g NFS mounted/home).
When you say 'old' it depends what you want to run on them.
As a developer I use a whole range of systems, and I don't throw old machines away, I use them for testing.
My main desktop is a Quad core AMD Phenom with 8G of memory
Sitting next to that are two AMD Athlon machines, each with 4G of memory
I also have
Four Pentium III machines with 512M of memory
Two AMD K6 machines with 256M of memory
Four Pentium I (yes one) machines with 64M of memory
A Pentium III machine with 512M of memory is quite capable of running a fairly complex website.
I use them to test websites developed using the Drupal content management system.
If your website won't load and run in 512M of memory - you are probably doing something wrong.
In the past I have used Xen VMs, but at the time I found it tricky to setup
(from what I have seen it has improved a lot since then, so this may be a better option now).
For setting up a simple test system, it worked out easier to fire up one of the old machines
and run the tests on that.
If I need to setup a test system that other members of our team can access,
I use rented VMs from one of the cloud providers,
FlexiScale, SliceHost or Amazon EC2.
One thing I would recommend is that you never configure a machine by hand.
Everything should be automatic, using shell scripts or equivalent to setup the machines.
Everything, including the scripts for installing packages and configuring the system should be in source control.
To setup a new set of tests, I start by writing a shell script that
will install and configure all the components needed to run the tests.
It will take a while to create the first few scripts, but you will gradually build up a library of functions that you can re-use.
Someone else has already mentioned using Puppet and Cobbler
to achieve the same thing. Unfortunately they weren't around when I started doing this. I haven't used either of them yet, but I hope to experiment with them fairly soon.
Whichever system you use, automating the install and configuration will save you
a huge amount of time in the long run.
Using my library of configuration scripts, I can setup and configure a new test system in a matter of minutes.
The configuration scripts are designed to be portable, so I can use the same tools on one of my local test
machines, or on an external VM hosted by a cloud provider.
As to what I use the Pentium I machines for - stress testing.
I write Java web services for a UK eScience project, processing large (Tbyte) data sets.
One of the things I need to check is the webservice should never try to load the entire dataset into memory.
It should process the data bit at a time, and free up resources as soon as it has finished with them.
As a stress test, I deploy a webservice on one of the tiny 64M machines, and then run multiple clients on
the bigger more capable machines to hammer it into the ground, repeatedly, day after day for a week.
If my webservice can process Gbyte data sets on a Pentium I machine that only has 64M of memory - without grinding to a halt.
Then I can be fairly confident that when the same webservice is deployed on a multi core
machine with Gbytes of memory it will probably be able to cope with the kind of load our scientists intend to throw at it.
Summary : Keep the old machines and learn how to setup, configure and use them as test machines. In the process you will encounter
many of the problems that your developers and sys admins have to cope with on a daily basis, and you will be much better placed to be able t
It has also been revealed the National Identity Register Number (Nirno) will now not appear on the card or its embedded chip.
This sounds like having a credit card without putting the account number on the card... I can't see how it would work.
Unless the card contained enough other information, like national health number, driving license number, name and date of birth, which you could lookup in the central database.... and get the Niro number.
And of course, only authorized people would be allowed to do that. Like the police, immigration, the local council, high street banks.... mobile phone shops, car hire companies, and the big supermarket chains (Tesco offers banking and financial services).
Director of Privacy International Simon Davies welcomed the removal of the Nirno, following concerns it could be cross referenced across multiple transactions - such as proof of age purchases or opening a bank account - to track a person's everyday activities.
I kind of thought that was the whole reason for the system. A method of establishing a persons identity so that you could look up their details in the database.
How long before commercial companies realize that if they take all the data that is easily accessible on the card (name, date of birth etc) and create a hash value, then that itself becomes a unique identifier that they can use.
Combine the hash with the persons full name (from the card) and the chances of collision are fairly remote... creating a unique identifier for every person in the UK based on the data from their ID card, which can be used "to track a person's everyday activities".
I was thinking about this while doing some background reading about the FireFox EULA problem.
Part of the reason for the FireFox EULA was that they needed to say something about the 'Website Information Services' that FireFox uses to check URLs against a database of malware and philsing sites.
The FireFox EULA (latest draft) has always had reference to their privacy policy,
which has the following section in it about the forgery and attack protection feature :
While it is possible that a third party service provider may determine the actual URL from the hashed URL sent,
Mozilla's third party service providers have entered into a written agreement with Mozilla not to use any data or other information about or from users of Firefox for purposes other than to provide and maintain their service.
In addition, in no event will these third party service providers correlate any Firefox user data with any other data collected through other products, services or web properties of that provider.
So Mozilla promise they won't try to mine the data to recover the real URLs, and they have written agreements from their third party providers that they won't either.
But room 641A makes a mockery of their privacy promise.
The US government can order them to hand over the data, and they would not be allowed to talk about it.
So their privacy promise has a caveat "We promise to do all we can to keep your data private.... unless the US government tell us to do otherwise".
But Mozilla might not even know about it.
If room 641A is real, then they may do all they can to protect the data,
but their hosting company or telecoms provider may be ordered to record or analyze the data,
and the service provider would be prevented from telling anyone it was happening.
This isn't specific to Mozilla, it applies to all US based companies and service providers.
Basically, room 641A invalidates any privacy statement by any US based company.
I'm not sure about whether he should have resigned or not,
but I found this quote from the Royal Society statement interesting (from the BBC article) :
Professor Reiss and the Royal Society have agreed that, in the best interests of the society, he will step down immediately as director of education
....
He is to return, full time, to his position as professor of science education at the Institute of Education
What I got from the article wasn't so much the 'fall of the GPU' as a move away from the fixed APIs e.g. DirectX and OpenGL.
In which case, would this be a huge bonus for Linux ?
A lot of people say they use Linux for work but have Windows installed on the same machine so they can run games.
If the games programmers are going to be writing C/C++ code that runs on the CPU or GPU, then in theory this cuts out the proprietary graphics APIs and makes the games much more portable.
Could this mean that more of these games will be ported to Linux ?
The only reason that this is being discussed at all is because FireFox has such a strong brand and people don't want to loose it.
But that doesn't mean we should accept this.
If the major Linux distributions accept this from Mozilla, everyone else will want to have their own special EULAs displayed and the user experience will become degraded to the point where we have 10 or 20 different apps all popping up their own custom EULAs each with slightly different terms and conditions.
What happens if Mozilla add a couple of extra lines in the next release that makes the EULA just that little bit more restrictive.
Do we go through the same hand wringing all over again "well... we have accepted the first one, and it is only one tiny extra clause..." ?
The only way to deal with this problem is to stop it before it starts.
If Mozilla want to add an EULA, then FireFox gets removed from the default install.
It can still be available in the 'extras', where the user can explicitly accept the EULA when they install it.
Or, Mozilla work with Canonical, RedHat etc. to work out a way of adding the appropriate legal clauses to the system install screens.
I have no objection to Mozilla wanting to protect their trademarks but they need to do it in a way that does not degrage the user experience.
This kind of thing should be displayed when the software package is installed, not when it is run.
If that means it gets dropped from the default install and has to be explicitly selected and installed later, then so be it.
On first boot, Fedora presents a simple to read page that says the license details are here : http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal/Licenses/LicenseAgreement9
I'm sure Ubuntu has something similar.
Sensible thing would be to add the bits Mozilla need to say to these so they are seen by the person who installs it, not the person who uses it.
Requires Windows(TM) XP or Vista compatible computer with USB1.1/2.0 port
Is the whole thing totally locked down and unable to function without Windows, or can you still get at the data by reading it as a normal USB device (i.e. from Linux) ?
Slashdot Mirror
So you have to accept that they can do anything they want with your details, pass them on to whoever they want, sell them, publish them .. whatever.
Note - there is no 'Yes/No' or 'Accept/Decline' option, just a statement that you have no rights and an 'Ok' button.
Wow !! I had no idea. This is an excellent album, thank you for that.
One problem - I tried to buy a copy, and that part of the site didn't seem to work in FireFox :-(
If you were trying to setup a project to "Boldly go places we haven't been before", then evidence of at least some form of life on other planets could be useful when writing the funding proposal.
is nowhere near as exciting as
which would probably qualify for defense funding, and could open up a whole range of interesting budget allocation and accounting methods not available to rock collectors.
Finding a biological organism on Mars that didn't come from Earth could be very significant in the discussion about creationism.
If we did find life that had started and evolved independently of life on Earth, then how does Intelligent Design cope with it ?
As far as I remember (IANABS [Not a Bible Scholar]) God didn't mention creating life on other places. From what little I do know about the Bible, it seemed to be pretty explicit that God created life only on the Earth.
"Oh, yeah, we remember now ... He did create life in other places, but He didn't tell us because He wanted to make us feel special."
Ok, so you are saying ...
So what else didn't He tell us about ?
Is there a #3 or #4 where things worked even better and got as far as Vulcan, or Betazoid ?
Creationism and religion aside, it would also be fairly significant for projects like Seti and the search for habitable planets outside our solar system. Finding life on Mars increases the chances that it may have done so elsewhere in the universe too. Which may mean projects like Seti are taken more seriously and given more funding.
If we found life on Mars, where there is little if any liquid water, then NASA or ESA would be able to argue for a serious budget to send a lander to Europa.
The article points to the Array Systems Computing Inc. site, which seems to be slashdotted.
Information about the tools is also available from the ESA website.
The reason for the bail out wasn't because the country needs more cars.
The reason for the bail out was because the car manufacturers employ a *lot* of people, and are often the largest employer in the area (directly and indirectly via local supply and support companies). If a large car manufacturer went down, it would have put a lot of people out of work at a critical time for the economy, causing a lot of repercussions and possibly taking the rest of the system down with it.
The bailout was to keep people employed, even if only for a short time. Long enough for the rest of the economy to recover from the recent problems.
Now the initial crisis is over, it is worth asking a few questions.
If we are going to spend any more government money trying to boost the economy by subsidizing manufacturing jobs, then does it make sense to spend it on people making cars (using old technology), or spend it on people making spacecraft (using new technology which may teach us interesting new things along the way) ?
What about new energy sources for transport, industry and homes ? If we are going to spend the money, then it might be better to spend it on developing new technologies rather than supporting old ones.
Ok, I'll bite .. what do you actually use the 2nd monitor for ?
Actually, I think that is the wrong way round. Places like CERN do 'throw hardware at it', lots of hardware, and it still isn't enough.
Modern desktop systems have giga bytes of memory, hundreds of giga bytes of disk and multi core processors ... and in the Adobe example you are using it to display PDF documents or Flash movies.
Your application would typically be using less that 1% of the available resources.
Spending lots of money optimizing the performance does not make commercial sense.
Large science projects like CERN are pushing the limits of hardware and software. They typically deal with data sets, data rates and processing requirements that are orders of magnitude larger that most systems can cope with.
A typical science desktop application needs to be able to process and display giga byte data sets, often comparing more than one dataset visually in real time. A typical eScience grid service needs to be able handle extremely large (peta byte) datasets in real time, and you can't drop data or pause for a moment - the data stream is live and you only get one chance to process and store it.
Same applies to Google, Yahoo, FaceBook etc. If your application is pushing the hardware to the limits, then optimizing the software to increase performance by 5% is worth a lot of developer time.
According to Wikipedia, he was diagnosed with progressive multiple sclerosis in 2005. So he might not feel up to spending the next few years fighting the inevitable political and administrative battles a project like this would involve.
The advertisements all over the Economist page (top and bottom banners and embedded in the article itself) are for the Asus N series notebooks. Which make a point of promoting the Express Gate instant-on linux environment built into the motherboard.
So even if they buy one with Windows XP or Vista installed, the first thing to run when they switch it on will be Linux with FireFox.
Interesting concept, I might like to join. .. a couple of questions.
However, before I do,
What is your business model ?
Presumably you aren't doing all this for free (someone must be paying for the web servers to run it on), so what data do you collect and who do you sell it to ?
We know delicious is owned by Yahoo, so they probably use it to provide additional data for their search engine.
If you are just two people doing it for the good of mankind, then congratulations. I'm impressed.
In which case, you need a page that outlines your privacy policy, with details of what would happen to all that interesting data you will have collected if/when you get an offer you can't refuse from one of the big players.
Sorry if this is a bit tin-foil-hat, but the big FaceBook connect button on your registration page made me wary. FaceBook do not have the best reputation regarding data mining and privacy policy (basically, they own your data and can sell it to whoever they want to).
I'm on Demon too (not for much longer though).
Looks like they have relented (this time), I can see both the article and the image itself (8th Dec 02:00 am).
What gets me is that this image is nothing, a complete non-event, compared to the explicitly sexual images that adorn the front pages of most of our tabloid newspapers every day.
http://www.aa.nu/kb-broadband-ipv6.html
Ok, you got the first half of the process ... using open source tools and libraries to build new applications and services.
Sounds like an interesting project to work on, lots of interesting links to the things you are using.
;-)
The next step is to make your code open source so the rest of us can learn from your experience and use your code to build even bigger and better systems
From the techreport article :
Is it time to look at connecting these chips direct to the motherboard ? Avoiding the added complexity of driving what is essentially a block of memory via a serial interface designed to control spinning discs. If the SLC memory chips were mapped into the main memory address space, it should be possible to make them look like a 32G or 64G (NV)RAM drive on a Unix/Linux system. Mount '/' and '/boot' on the (NV)RAM drive and install the OS on it. Presto - very fast boot and load times. You can still use traditional spinning disc(s) for large data, mounted as separate data partitions.
It would need some thought as to which parts of the filesystem went on spinning disc and which parts went on the (NV)RAM partition. But that is why Unix/Linux has all of the tools for mounting different parts of the filesystem on different partitions. Back in the olden days, most systems had a combination of small fast(ish) discs and big(ish) slow discs, and tweaking fstab to mount different parts of the filesystem on different discs was a standard part of the install process. Most desktop systems now have one huge disc, and the standard Linux install dumps everything on one big '/' partition, but all the tools for optimizing the partition layout are still there.
How about an ultra quiet desktop workstation with no moving parts, the OS installed on (NV)RAM disc, and user data dragged across the network from a fileserver (e.g NFS mounted /home).
Or ... has she told you the same story before, but you had forgotten about it.
When you say 'old' it depends what you want to run on them.
As a developer I use a whole range of systems, and I don't throw old machines away, I use them for testing.
I also have
A Pentium III machine with 512M of memory is quite capable of running a fairly complex website. I use them to test websites developed using the Drupal content management system. If your website won't load and run in 512M of memory - you are probably doing something wrong.
In the past I have used Xen VMs, but at the time I found it tricky to setup (from what I have seen it has improved a lot since then, so this may be a better option now). For setting up a simple test system, it worked out easier to fire up one of the old machines and run the tests on that.
If I need to setup a test system that other members of our team can access, I use rented VMs from one of the cloud providers, FlexiScale, SliceHost or Amazon EC2.
One thing I would recommend is that you never configure a machine by hand. Everything should be automatic, using shell scripts or equivalent to setup the machines. Everything, including the scripts for installing packages and configuring the system should be in source control.
To setup a new set of tests, I start by writing a shell script that will install and configure all the components needed to run the tests. It will take a while to create the first few scripts, but you will gradually build up a library of functions that you can re-use. Someone else has already mentioned using Puppet and Cobbler to achieve the same thing. Unfortunately they weren't around when I started doing this. I haven't used either of them yet, but I hope to experiment with them fairly soon.
Whichever system you use, automating the install and configuration will save you a huge amount of time in the long run. Using my library of configuration scripts, I can setup and configure a new test system in a matter of minutes. The configuration scripts are designed to be portable, so I can use the same tools on one of my local test machines, or on an external VM hosted by a cloud provider.
As to what I use the Pentium I machines for - stress testing. I write Java web services for a UK eScience project, processing large (Tbyte) data sets. One of the things I need to check is the webservice should never try to load the entire dataset into memory. It should process the data bit at a time, and free up resources as soon as it has finished with them. As a stress test, I deploy a webservice on one of the tiny 64M machines, and then run multiple clients on the bigger more capable machines to hammer it into the ground, repeatedly, day after day for a week. If my webservice can process Gbyte data sets on a Pentium I machine that only has 64M of memory - without grinding to a halt. Then I can be fairly confident that when the same webservice is deployed on a multi core machine with Gbytes of memory it will probably be able to cope with the kind of load our scientists intend to throw at it.
Summary : Keep the old machines and learn how to setup, configure and use them as test machines. In the process you will encounter many of the problems that your developers and sys admins have to cope with on a daily basis, and you will be much better placed to be able t
This bit makes no sense at all.
This sounds like having a credit card without putting the account number on the card ... I can't see how it would work.
Unless the card contained enough other information, like national health number, driving license number, name and date of birth, which you could lookup in the central database .... and get the Niro number.
And of course, only authorized people would be allowed to do that. Like the police, immigration, the local council, high street banks .... mobile phone shops, car hire companies, and the big supermarket chains (Tesco offers banking and financial services).
I kind of thought that was the whole reason for the system. A method of establishing a persons identity so that you could look up their details in the database. How long before commercial companies realize that if they take all the data that is easily accessible on the card (name, date of birth etc) and create a hash value, then that itself becomes a unique identifier that they can use. Combine the hash with the persons full name (from the card) and the chances of collision are fairly remote ... creating a unique identifier for every person in the UK based on the data from their ID card, which can be used "to track a person's everyday activities".
I was thinking about this while doing some background reading about the FireFox EULA problem.
Part of the reason for the FireFox EULA was that they needed to say something about the 'Website Information Services' that FireFox uses to check URLs against a database of malware and philsing sites.
The FireFox EULA (latest draft) has always had reference to their privacy policy, which has the following section in it about the forgery and attack protection feature :
So Mozilla promise they won't try to mine the data to recover the real URLs, and they have written agreements from their third party providers that they won't either.
But room 641A makes a mockery of their privacy promise. The US government can order them to hand over the data, and they would not be allowed to talk about it. So their privacy promise has a caveat "We promise to do all we can to keep your data private .... unless the US government tell us to do otherwise".
But Mozilla might not even know about it. If room 641A is real, then they may do all they can to protect the data, but their hosting company or telecoms provider may be ordered to record or analyze the data, and the service provider would be prevented from telling anyone it was happening.
This isn't specific to Mozilla, it applies to all US based companies and service providers. Basically, room 641A invalidates any privacy statement by any US based company.
I'm not sure about whether he should have resigned or not, but I found this quote from the Royal Society statement interesting (from the BBC article) :
What I got from the article wasn't so much the 'fall of the GPU' as a move away from the fixed APIs e.g. DirectX and OpenGL.
In which case, would this be a huge bonus for Linux ?
A lot of people say they use Linux for work but have Windows installed on the same machine so they can run games. If the games programmers are going to be writing C/C++ code that runs on the CPU or GPU, then in theory this cuts out the proprietary graphics APIs and makes the games much more portable. Could this mean that more of these games will be ported to Linux ?
I agree.
The only reason that this is being discussed at all is because FireFox has such a strong brand and people don't want to loose it.
But that doesn't mean we should accept this. If the major Linux distributions accept this from Mozilla, everyone else will want to have their own special EULAs displayed and the user experience will become degraded to the point where we have 10 or 20 different apps all popping up their own custom EULAs each with slightly different terms and conditions.
What happens if Mozilla add a couple of extra lines in the next release that makes the EULA just that little bit more restrictive. Do we go through the same hand wringing all over again "well ... we have accepted the first one, and it is only one tiny extra clause ..." ?
The only way to deal with this problem is to stop it before it starts. If Mozilla want to add an EULA, then FireFox gets removed from the default install.
It can still be available in the 'extras', where the user can explicitly accept the EULA when they install it.
Or, Mozilla work with Canonical, RedHat etc. to work out a way of adding the appropriate legal clauses to the system install screens. I have no objection to Mozilla wanting to protect their trademarks but they need to do it in a way that does not degrage the user experience. This kind of thing should be displayed when the software package is installed, not when it is run. If that means it gets dropped from the default install and has to be explicitly selected and installed later, then so be it.
On first boot, Fedora presents a simple to read page that says the license details are here : http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal/Licenses/LicenseAgreement9 I'm sure Ubuntu has something similar. Sensible thing would be to add the bits Mozilla need to say to these so they are seen by the person who installs it, not the person who uses it.
From the TrackStick II technical spec :
Is the whole thing totally locked down and unable to function without Windows, or can you still get at the data by reading it as a normal USB device (i.e. from Linux) ?
I agree with you that a wiki is very useful, particularly for sharing information within a team.
But is this an example of recursive advice ?
Have a look at this Eleni Gabre-Madhin: Building a commodities market in Ethiopia
Broadband internet access would probably count as very useful part of the infrastructure needed for an African commodities market.