I had been prepared to buy Linspire, or at least get their Click&Run service. I do think that the next leg of Linux's path to maturity involves commercial (not necessarily proprietary) software that runs on the Linux platform.
Then I go visit the Linspire web site, listing all the features: Plug'n'play drivers: yea! Multimedia support: yea! Respects Microsoft IP: --WHAT!??
Oh yeah, thanks for reminding me. Linspire's been having sex with Microsoft.
Oh, well. Was nice knowing you. I'll stick to (k)Ubuntu, myself.
I visited your Autopackage web site. I was quite impressed by the way you were able to figure out a set of simple instructions, understandable by grandma, that would work for most distros.
Once you can get the user to run a given application, the app itself can take over and be as user-friendly as you want, but the tricky part is to get them to run the app in the first place, using instructions that don't involve compromising the security of their Linux system. Your 4-step instructions, which don't involve any command line, was suitably impressive. You've figured out how to formulate the instructions so that it is consistent across the KDE and GNOME interfaces. (Having two possible desktop environments is a bit of hassle, isn't it, when it comes to giving user instructions?) And, even if the user fumbles around a lot and just happens to randomly succeed in getting Autopackage installed, from then on Autopackage is installed and s/he won't need to do it again.
In doing research for writing this reply, I learned about Zero Install from Wikipedia. This is also a distro-independent way to install software. Reading through the instructions, I see that it looks like you have to install the Zero Install launcher first, and then from then on you can install software. I think this is not as good as Autopackage, in which (apparently) the software installer comes with each and every package itself, so that grandma user doesn't need to do a separate step; just download TheSoftwarePackageIWant, and it will already set up Autopackage. (Presumably it's a stub that downloads the full Autopackage installer only if necessary, to save space?) Nevertheless, Zero Install is also a worthwhile system for allowing users to install software without waiting for the distro maintainers to do it.
Now, Klik is slightly different; as I understand it, it actually downloads and runs the program from a RAM disk, almost Knoppix-style (the last K in K.L.I.K used to stand for Knoppix). Very handy, from the developer standpoint, in establishing a way to temporarily install software in a consistent environment. That doesn't really matter to grandma users, though, and the main disadvantage I see for Klik is the complex first step that will turn lay users off: you have to get to a terminal (already a big hurdle) and then type in:
wget klik.atekon.de/client/install -O -|sh
But wait! If you run k/Ubuntu, first you have to type
Not very user-friendly at all. (Granted, I don't think the goal of Klik is necessarily to be user-friendly.)
So, for the three systems, Autopackage, Zero Install, and Klik, I think Autopackage comes out the winner in terms of ease of posting instructions on the software author's web site. In other words, suppose I wrote a SuperDuper program that I want to give/sell to non-geek users of all sorts of Linux distros. Autopackage would best let my users download and run my software, without needing to send them to the actual web site for Autopackage / Zero Install / Klik itself.
Also, Autopackage and Zero Install have very friendly web pages, for when people do need to check them out. Klik has a very busy web page that's intimidating to new users, and, much as I hate to say this as a KDE fan, typical of how KDE is more for the technically minded people who want the dazzling array of switches and blinking lights, and not for the lay user who just wants to get things done.
But I'm impressed with the way packages can be basically distro independent now. I no longer think that having different packages is so much of an issue, and the software author who writes The Killer App (e.g. some cool game) no longer needs to wait for the distro maintainers in order to distribute the software.
Unfortunately, I think you have a point, though you might not have the details accurate.
The prevailing wisdom on Slashdot has so far been: "Linux (software in Linux distros) doesn't violate any MS patents, because Ballmer doesn't know what he's talking about. If Microsoft knew of patents, why wouldn't they sue? If we ask Microsoft what patents, and they don't tell us, then even if they do hold violated patents, they can't sue us later on." There are a few flaws in this.
I agree with parent poster that if I were Microsoft, I would not name the patents. Some/.'ers would say that Microsoft gives up the ability to sue: although patents are not trademarks, we reasonably expect the court to frown on Microsoft springing out from behind the bushes and saying, "Gimme all that money you owed me from violating these patents in the past 5 years!"
However, here's the important thing: to take advantage of their patents, Microsoft does not need to sue.
Just as Ballmer mumbling about patents is entirely a PR stunt, any finding that Linux (distros) violates a MS patent will be used for a PR stunt. So MS does not need to sue. Rather, for the time being, MS continues to mumble about "Linux violates patents." Linux (composed of the aggregate consciousness of the Slashdot mass) says, "No I don't! No I don't! Nyaah nyaah, you can't name any patents! Ballmer is a poopiehead!" Microsoft ignores this as an adult would ignore a small child that keeps saying, "Show me the patent!" until finally, Microsoft says, "Alright, fine, here's a patent you violate."
They only have to show one. It would look pretty bad to corporates if Linux then says, "Okay, well, fine. But what about the other 199?" Maybe MS eventually shows another one, and then Linux says, "Oh yeah? What about the other 198?" This gets old pretty fast, and corporations are going to be scared away from using Linux.
One of the posters said that, if MS doesn't tell us which patents when we ask nicely, they can't sue for past damages, but they can sue for forward damages. Can you imagine the havoc this can still wreak despite no past damages? Some ingrained system is distributed with Linux, and then a few years after some major corporations have settled on using it, Microsoft jumps out and says, "Okay, fine, you don't have to pay retroactively since you didn't know. But from now on, pay us $10k per computer." Let's say this is some networking thing, like something in the Aegypten / Kerberos / OogaBoogaKrypto system, where you'd have to replace the entire infrastructure rather than just individual users' systems.
The companies either have to reestablish their infrastructure, or pay through the nose; if the latter case, MS might say, "Hey, we'll give you a discount if you switch over to Windows," or some such. In any case, Microsoft can tell the corporate world, "We told you so! See what happens when you play with IP thieves like Linux?"
The thing to remember is, Microsoft succeeds because they succeed in the public relations aspect, not because of a technological success. Microsoft is not a technology company; it is a marketing company. Once you grasp this, you will see that Microsoft's position is stronger than you (the generic Slashdotter) think, and Linux's position is weaker. Because this game is really being played in a different arena than what you think.
I'm still not giving up hope, but you need to see this from the PR standpoint.
people eat like shit and don't exercise. That's it. Pretty simple huh?
It's more complex than you make it out to be. By that yardstick, I could also say, AIDS is because "people fuck like shit and don't bother about fidelity/safe sex practices/monogamy. That's it. Pretty simple, huh?" You can substitute Hepatitis B or Chlamydia for AIDS if you want something more prevalent.
But you can see that applying reductionist principles to diabetes, Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or even Some Computer Virus doesn't really help. Yes, in an ideal isolated system, that's the cause of your ailments. But if we can't even isolate a ones-and-zeroes construct like Microsoft Outlook from getting Some Computer Virus, what makes you think we'd fare any better trying to isolate diabetes?
Just as virus infections have a social context --it doesn't work when you tell people, "Just have safe sex, ok?" (or, for computer viruses, "Just have safe hex")-- it also doesn't work when you tell people, "Just eat less."
Research into obesity is showing that eating habits and hunger interact in all sorts of metabolic pathways that control appetite in the brain, behaviour, ability of the body to mobilize stored fat (and thus get enough energy without feeling hungry), etc., not to mention the stuff you already knew about the body physically needing to eat energy and nutrition, and the complex social interactions surrounding meals and food that have developed in every single culture.
So, yeah, diabetes can be aggravated by poor eating and exercise habits. But that argument is such a straw man that it can pose for a photo in the Pictorial Encyclopedia of Straw Man Arguments.
In the past I've read postings such as these out of passive interest, but this article has precipitated my slowly saturating suspicion that my underperforming Kubuntu Dapper box is not just slow or misconfigured, but possessed by a rootkit. I can't prove it, but if there's an easy, convenient way for me to be paranoid, I might as well.
You said:
Check your logs at least once a day. Look for any suspicious signs
Is there any way to avoid this? I don't even want to do it once a week, because: a) I might forget, and it's a chore, and b) I'm not sure what to look for. I might get alerted because of something or other that would generate a false positive (e.g. a new configuration on a bittorrent or IRC program).
A sibling poster mentioned Tripwire. How handy is that? I tried installing it when I first started with Linux, back in the days of Mandrake 9.0, but it got to be too much of a hassle installing, and I was never sure when to be or not to be suspicious of minor changes. For example, if I try out new kUbuntu packages all the time, then toss them aside if I'm not interested, would it cause problems with Tripwire?
Also, I run a Linksys router flashed with DD-WRT. It's great protection for my Linux box, but I worry about the router itself. How secure is DD-WRT? I usually turn off the ability to SSH into the router from the Internet, but sometimes I need it on. I wish there were something like Guarddog that would fit into the small non-graphical environment of the DD-WRT so I could easily configure the iptables/netfilter. Also, I don't know if the router can log the connections --that would give a much better indication of intrusion attempts, compared to the logs of my Kubuntu box sitting behind the router.
Any advice would be appreciated. Remember, the main thing is: I am trying to minimize administering the box, and maximize using it.
My Linux box has been running funny for the past year or more now. It runs much more slowly than I would expect, and once in a while it freezes up. Little oddities here and there have been showing up, but every little thing on its own has been explainable.
Finally, the other day, when I tried to SSH into my Dellbuntu laptop from the home server, it said, "Possible man in the middle attack!" I wondered if it could be a trojan on the server itself, or on my re-flashed Linksys router (with DD-WRT), so I pulled out an old D-Link router and tried connecting to the Dellbuntu from a Windows machine, and it gave the same hostkey, so I guess I had never updated the keys after I reinstalled Dellbuntu.
(By the way, why is it so difficult to display a SSH hostkey from the host itself? The SSH client would say, "Are you sure this is the correct SSH hostkey?" and then display the suspicious hostkey. What are we supposed to compare this to? Why can't the SSHdaemon display the hostkey? No, it is NOT in the ~/.ssh directory.)
I guess the other possibility is that my Dellbuntu is compromised.
Anyway, just for peace of mind, I'm going to reinstall everything after the weekend. I put every single config change I make, including a tonne of "sudo apt-get --assume-yes install [xxx]" commands, into a script file, so it should take under an hour to reinstall. I'll have to wait till after the weekend since we have guests over this weekend.
Crummy. I guess it's time for some port-knocking software or ostiaryd or something.
>So, PGP Corp takes an open source product and closes its source.
Eh? They take a open source product and closes its source? Read again, please. GPG and PGP [links to wikipedia]
The GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG) is a free software replacement for the PGP suite of cryptographic software, released under the GNU General Public License.
Or did I misunderstood you?
Umm... I don't even know where to start to answer your question. I'm not sure what your question has to do with anything.
The best I can tell is that you think I am incorrectly saying that GPG is closed source. If that's what you're saying, I have no idea why you're saying it --I didn't even mention GPG. If that's not what you're saying, then I have no idea, so please enlighten me.
In the meantime, I'll elaborate. Phil Zimmerman created PGP and made it open source (though the term "open source" itself wasn't used at the time). PGP got sold to NAI, which stopped making it open source (ie. they added to the software and distributed binaries only without source). NAI sold the rights to PGP Corp.
Technically, it was NAI, not PGPCorp, that closed the source of formerly open source PGP. PGPCorp bought the ex-open-source PGP. Currently, PGP is not open source.
You can check http://www.fabianrodriguez.com/encryption/ for more info.
This is antiterrorist technology. Which invites the question: who gave the city officials access to secret antiterrorist technology in a time of war?
Thank you for not saying "which BEGS the question", but rather showing an example of an easy way to express what you mean using a correct and non-grammarNazi-targeted construct.
I've decided that one way to get people to use the phrase "begging the question" properly, a more effective way than hounding them for using the phrase improperly, would be to use it properly as much as possible so that people can get used to seeing it in the right context. Your sentence provides a nice counterpoint to that, by showing when the phrase should not be used.
Yes, I am a grammar Nazi at heart. Go ahead and complain about how the English language is dynamic --it is so due no less to people who resist change as people who promote change (especially inadvertently).
And, yes, this is off topic, but certainly not out of place in an international English-language forum such as Slashdot.
I'd rather have Microsoft work on this health information system, than some unknown little entity that just is in to grab the money and run.
I'd rather have some small company that has to build up trust and earn the respect of the healthcare industry, rather than some big convicted monopolist that has enough cash to do what it wants with impunity, and has enough monopoly-generated momentum that it can market an OS like Vista and make statements like "Google's success was only because of us!"
If Microsoft was unable to enter the health info industry, then the healthcare sector would demand non-proprietary formats for their data from the small companies that provided health info services, in case the company folded. But this won't happen with Microsoft because of the MS clout.
"... a strategy that borrows from the company's successful formula in personal computer software." I'll bet this sentence is not going to go over too well with the slashdot crowd.
Unfortunately, it will sound nice to health care companies. I am involved in the healthcare sector, and I am worried that this will succeed, without the health care companies knowing (or caring) about the issues. Microsoft has the cash, the clout and the reputation for this. (Remember, to non-geeks, Microsoft is the premier computer company --lay people can't even tell whether Microsoft is software or hardware.)
The health care industry is greatly dependent on information technology, and is beholden to IT --without realizing it. People in healthcare have this attitude, for better or worse, that they are more important and special and have a unique place high on the totem pole, so they don't really see their vulnerability to some run-of-the-mill thing like IT, which is held with the same regard as the people who answer the phones or clean the medical instruments.
I just pray that Microsoft can have some high-profile screw-ups, maybe a few databases hacked here and there, that can reveal to non-geeks the dangers of having a convicted monopolist at the reins of the nation's healthcare info.
I told her she could have her XP or whatever if she bought, installed, and maintained it herself. I wasn't going to touch it with a ten foot pole. That pretty much did it.
I had different results when I did the same. My wife would complain that Linux wasn't exactly the same as Windows. I tried installing Thunderbird email, and she complained that Thunderbird failed to wrap long lines of text. Can you believe it? Failed to wrap long lines! What, is that the responsibility of the sender's email program now, to figure out how wide the recipient's screen is? Well, apparently, all of her friends had trouble reading past the beginning of a long paragraph because, somehow, their email program was incapable to wrapping long lines.
I told her that I wasn't going to touch her Windows machine again. It's been over four years since I've used Windows on a home machine anyway, so I probably wouldn't know how to do advanced stuff even if I wanted to. She still wanted to use her Windows machine, so that was that, and I have been blissfully free of computer support duties.
Recently she had some problem with importing some MS Outlook contacts, which she reasoned was because she had an old version of MS Outlook, so she went and blew 300 smackeroos (US$) on Office 2007, which apparently the store was selling at a discount. (She had to get the version that included Outlook.) Which was fine, as long as she was spending her money and not mine.
Can someone confirm that Windows email programs are too retarded to know how to wrap long lines? That is just unbelievable!
Did anyone read the response? Seriously, customers require this so IT staff can do remote support and reboot the machine remotely. It is only enabled for one reboot, and you must have cryptographic access to enable this feature. The only threat is if someone where to enable this, not reboot, and then have the machine stolen.
So, PGP Corp takes an open source product and closes its source. They don't document this backdoor. When discovered, they say, "Well, okay, it's just so that we can reboot once."
You believe them?
I mean, did you believe them when they failed to mention this "feature"? When they forgot to document it? What else have they omitted? What if, a few months down the road, they say, "Well, there's this other feature that lets you reboot twice." And then later, "Three times. Yeah, we haven't gotten around to documenting that either."
The way they describe it in CTO/CSO Jon Callas' response, it doesn't sound like as much of a security flaw as I feared. But the question is, why was it there, with no documentation?
Closed source crypto is already under suspicion from me as a matter of course. The fact that we have an actual case of an undocumented "feature" only confirms that I should stick with software that's verifiable.
I am not sure if this is true, so someone correct me if I'm wrong:
You can convert a selection to a path. This turns the outline of the selection into a curve that has nodes with Bezier-style controls. Then you can reposition and adjust the path. After that, you can convert it back into a selection.
Note that while the selection is an area (2 dimensions), the path is a curve (1 dimension, assuming it's not a Peano curve or something).
Another possibility is to convert the selection to a mask, but that's still working with areas rather than curves.
I wonder what happens if you make the path intersect itself, like a figure-8, and then convert it back into a selection?
Anyway, a bit of a coincidence that I only discovered this book today. (I was shopping for the Solveig Haugland book, OpenOffice 2 Guide, and saw it recommended on the web site where I purchased the book.) I did buy Professional GIMP, by Akkana Peck (sp?), which has been a very handy reference.
By the way, in case no one else mentions it, Grokking the GIMP is a great book available for free online from which I learned a great deal about using GIMP. It talks about removing colour casting from photographs, advanced selection techniques, etc. I downloaded a copy, and use it when I don't have the dead-tree book handy.
Ah, I remember that thread now on UbuntuForums. Didn't we discuss this a number of times on Slashdot? The other day we came across the right way and wrong way to ask for help, and I couldn't find the thread on Ubuntu Forums. I didn't realize it was UbuntuDupe who was the guy in question. Usually he has interesting comments.
Couple of comments here:
His comments do rub me the wrong way, not just what he says but how he says it. It was true in the Ubuntu Forums thread, and it's true now. UbuntuDupe is focused on being right, in following the instructions: for example, he says:
I would have been able to still load Windows (and burn CDs!) if I hadn't followed the HIGHLY RECOMMENDED advice to install GRUB on the mbr.
So, he wants to show that he is in the right.
When others try to be helpful, they toss out ideas, seeds of a brainstorm that might invoke some sort of suggestion about what might work. However, UbuntuDupe shoots down the ideas. For example:
Do you have access to date on your hard disk, using a live cd (Ubuntu Live CD). If you do, can you go into your linux partion and post your/boot/grub/menu.lst. It sounds like Ubuntu may have screwed up on you grub install. Error 25 refers to a problem with the Windows part of grub.
Then UbuntuDupe says:
I don't have a Live CD. Naive me, I thought that by downloading just the install disc, I wouldn't be locked out of both Windows AND Linux. But it's my fault, really. I should never have believed all that crap about "providing access to all".
This is his response to the very first person trying to help. Other responses to comments are similar, in that while telling erstwhile helpers that their suggestions are not helping, he includes snide remarks about Ubuntu: "Naive me..." or "I should never have believed all the crap," etc. Thus he is discouraging the very people who are trying to help.
I don't think that UbuntuDupe is deliberately being unpleasant toward people trying to help him; it seems like he is simply intrinsically so. I wonder if he interpreted the comments from others, subconsciously or otherwise, as a sort of criticism or a sign that he was not "1337" enough, and became defensive.
Wasn't this with the Breezy version? Since then there has been Dapper, Edgy, and Feisty, and they're about to come out with Gutsy. Not only has Ubuntu become more advanced and refined, but the community has grown, too. This whole thing is a old news; it's like saying, "I know you'll get a bad experience with Ubuntu! I tried it four versions ago, and I had a bad experience!"
Ob. plug for FOSS software. After having used Matlab in school, I just started using Octave. I was pleasantly surprised by how compatible the two are. In fact, the GNU Octave developers actively strive to make their updates follow updates to Matlab, so that the two can be as drop-in compatible as possible.
Nice for people who want a powerful but easy-to-use calculation package without going through the hassle of trying to buy Matlab --heck, to even find out what the actual price is on that web site, you have to log in!
Of course, a slide rule is also Free and Open Source. I remember finding the idea of a slide rule being very cool, and making my own out of two strips of cardboard by drawing marks according to logarithms.
Credit cards from CitiCard (which has a range of credit cards) have the virtual account feature --or, at least one does --I don't know if they all do. Another one was a credit card from MBNA, which got bought out by Bank of America. I haven't used mine since it got bought by B of A, because their web site was giving me trouble (I can't remember what; some combination of Best Viewed with IE using Javascript and Flash or something like that) and I already had the Citi alternative.
"Simply coming into compliance now is not sufficient to settle the matter, because that would mean anyone can violate the license until caught, because the only punishment would be to come into compliance."
I must be living on a different planet from the lawyers. Here I was thinking that compliance means publishing the source code together with all the proprietary modifications, in a form that anybody can recreate the exact same software by recompiling it. In the warped mindset of a PHB, that means giving away the crown jewels for free. How is this not a deterrent for such deadbeat companies?
If you try to assassinate the president of the US or some such person, the authorities will put you in prison, even if you fail to kill! They say, "We can't let the would-be assassin walk free just because the president is still alive."
The authorities must be living on a different planet from me. Here I was thinking that "alive" meant that the president was healthy and able to continue setting his policies as usual. In the warped mindset of an assassin, that means suffering through the continued political maneuvering of someone he had wanted dead. (In the case of assassins for hire, the assassin would have to live without his assassin's fee.) How is this not a deterrent for assassins?
Regarding the parent post, and also the sibling post that says:
This sounds like the herbal supplements scams where you order free a bottle of "Memory Enhancer" or what have you, then they sign you up for a $300 supplement subscription for the next year
Looks like they get your credit card number when you sign up, promising not to charge you for the "free" service or something, and then later charge you because you forgot to cancel their subscription.
Several credit cards now let you generate disposable credit card numbers on the fly --just go to the web site and you can have a new credit card number with your specified credit limit and date of expiry. I'd like to see how they handle that! Maybe they'll send a message: "Dear Sir, your credit card number is no longer valid and we were unable to pull that scam on you. Please go to the following web page and enter your new credit card info, so that we can scam you."
In fact, something similar happened to me. Near the end of the tax year, I decided to make a donation to a charity, and figured out how much would be best given my tax situation. I donated through a web site using a disposable credit card. Somehow, they ended up charging only about 40% of the amount I said I would donate.
Fast forward to three months later, well into the new tax year, I get a phone call from the charity saying that my credit card wasn't working. I said, "What are you talking about? You're not supposed to be charging my credit card." "Yeah, we are --you made a donation." "But that was last year! You charged it already!" "But we didn't charge enough." "So you tried to just charge more now and have some bill randomly show up on my credit card bill? If you want the rest of the donation, send me a receipt backdating the donation to the previous tax year." "I'm sorry, we're not allowed to backdate receipts." "Well, then, too bad. I offered my money and you screwed up. Next time charge the correct amount. And don't make unannounced corrections to your mistake a few months after I've reconciled my finances."
The thing that has irritated me about this is that for a very long time, the FireFox leadership has insisted that there where no memory issues
Agree! And you know what was even more irritating than the official leadership denying this? The dozen Slashbots who would automatically throw themselves sacrificially onto the incoming path of your criticism, saying, "There's no memory leak! Firefox is just reserving 3GB of memory to cache all your huge web pages! Like that bloated Google main page!"
And now Mozilla is saying, "You know that memory leak that didn't exist? Well, we're fixing it now." Did someone take lessons in Microsoft Marketspeak?
Here's something else they should stop denying: the fact that Firefox is frick'n bloated. It needs to be pared down to a skeletal size, and everything moved to an official series plug-ins/extensions/add-ons (or whatever they're called these days) that can be installed by default, but which can be removed to get the desired responsiveness and small memory footprint. But when Chris Beard of Mozilla was interviewed on Slashdot, he said:
I don't know if there's a need for "official" extensions...
Yeah, buddy, that's because all your extensions are an integral inseparable part of Firefox. You're just afraid of the complexity of testing and debugging extensions, aren't you?
I still use Firefox. I still use unsigned extensions because that seems to be the standard, and for some extensions there just aren't any signatures. That's because Firefox has Adblock Plus and NoScript. The minute these appear in Konqueror, I'm saying goodbye to Firefox.
Hey, this headline isn't exciting at all! I mean, why do you think I come to Slashdot in the first place, if not for the sensationalism?? Well, to be sure, the headline spuriously adds this thing about "friction" just because the EU says, "Okay, we'll check out this Google purchase of Doubleclick and will tell you next month whether there might be problems," but "experiences friction" just doesn't have the same punchy feel to it.
After all, when a police bring in the apparent sender of a bomb threat and release him after a few hours, Slashdot says, "Innocent man incarcerated for running Tor server!" And when a game counterfeiter gets arrested, the headline says, "All he did was mod the console and he got arrested!"
The Slashdot staff should do a better job here. The headline should say something like, "EU attacks Google with Doubleclick review." Or, for an even better effect, use the Cavuto mark, as in: "EU reviews Doubleclick. Will Google collapse?"
Yeesh, without these sensationalist headlines, how is Slashdot going to gain ad revenue by attracting more readers who use Firefox and Adblock Plus?
Thank you for pointing this out. The subject header appears in a different colour and font and background colour, and is clearly meant to be separate. I see that I'm not the only one to think of the text as a unit on its own. In the same vein, captions of figures in a text should be independent and not have to rely on the text, nor should text rely on graphic captions to convey their meaning.
With this forewarning, I can now, with a clear conscience, refuse to upmod posts with such sloppy use of the subject headers. (In fact, I rely heavily on the subject heading to choose which posts to upmod. I go out of my way to upmod posters who have taken the trouble to compose a concise and relevant subject header, compared to the 99% of other posts with the heading of "Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Yeah!")
The news article says that, in the end, Righi admitted that the police officer did nothing wrong:
And Righi agreed that a police officer did nothing wrong in arresting him after he refused to show his driver's license outside the store Sept. 1.
Righi himself disagrees, and says in his blog:
When I read [the Cleveland Plain Dealer's] take on what happened I was outraged. Michael Sangiacomo of the Plain Dealer claimed that I "agreed that a police officer did nothing wrong in arresting [me] after [I] refused to show [my] driver's license." This is an outright lie. I never said such a thing and would never say such a thing.I consider the outcome of my legal battle to be a victory, yet today's paper portrays it as defeat.
So, Righi says that he never admitted that the police was wrong. But it doesn't end here! Further down on his blog, we come across this comment:
# Ja Says: September 21st, 2007 at 9:48 am
This is an interesting email I just got back from the reporter who wrote the article at the Plain Dealer. I wrote him stating that his article seemed incorrect. See his response below:
MICHAEL SANGIACOMO hide details 9:43 am (1 minute ago) to date Sep 21, 2007 9:43 AM subject Re: Circuit City case mailed-by plaind.com Tell him to speak with his attorney. The story reflected exactly what his attorney said, and he said it at least four times. In fact, he said that it was very important that I say that the police did no wrong. I attempted to reach Mr. Righi several times and he told me to speak with his attorney. THat's what I did. Please note, Mr. Righi has NOT contacted me and said there was a problem. His attorney has not contacted me either. Perhaps he's trying to save face on his blog. Mike Sangiacomo
Agree. The fact that Microsoft says something doesn't make it so --but people don't know that.
Earlier this month, Microsoft said that Google could not have done without them, and now they're saying that Microsoft products are no longer the butt of jokes.
They can say that just because they are a big company and people listen to them. Whether we choose to believe Microsoft is a different matter.
I remember wearing my first business suit, complete with starched shirt and necktie, early in my university years. People would take me seriously because I was dressed in business attire, no matter what I said. It was fun! Once I stood at the entrance foyer to the city concert hall with my sloppily dressed friends, and people would come up to me and ask for directions and generally assume that I was not part of that group of friends in T-shirt and jeans. I tell them some ridiculous thing with a straight face (like there were free concert tickets upstairs if they could show a McDonalds hamburger wrapper) and people would believe me. Another time I asked to see a high school friend of mine who was in the middle of some all-day meeting, just to socialize (I knew the event was boring) and they just assumed I was a university teacher.
The pranks got boring after the first few times, but it made me realize how easily we accord credibility and respect to certain people for reasons that have nothing to do with the content of their message or their position.
It takes a huge effort to constantly critically evaluate whether to believe something, whether to believe that silver-haired "doctor" on the TV commercials who says your male organ will grow by 50%, or that typical mom-looking woman in the magazine ad (cuddling her baby, no less) who says that XX works on her cold symptoms, or that bespectacled politician who says that illegal immigrants are the cause of failure to curb crime, or your friend at the bar who says, "The Linux kernel is insecure. Trust me --I write web pages for a living." (Yeah, so you know all about the Linux kernel, right?)
So, we end up picking and choosing what we evaluate critically. When we're alert and fresh, we think critically; but after a long hard day at work, or when you feel like just flaking out with a beer in one hand and the TV remote in the other, we let our guard down. That's when the TV commercials hit us, when the Bill O'Reillys and the Wolf Blitzers insinuate their messages. Similarly, Microsoft gets its message splashed across any media space available, and people will listen. It's we geeks who are best able to peel away the facade, to say, "Hey, Microsoft, [[citation needed!]]"
For all I care, next week Microsoft can go say that Microsoft has produced the best Linux for PalmPilots since George Washington invented the Internet.
... we'll just wait for Novell to sue Linux for blatant copying of Unix source into Linux."
Don't laugh. Now that Novell is essentially controlled by Microsoft, that could definitely happen.
Yeah. It sounds ridiculous to even entertain the thought that this might happen; but then the SCO lawsuit itself was pretty ridiculous, too, and that didn't seem to deter SCO.
How much do you want to be that, when the time comes, Daniel Lyons will write, "Aha! *This* time I'm positive that Linux stole Unix code!"
Slashdot Mirror
I had been prepared to buy Linspire, or at least get their Click&Run service. I do think that the next leg of Linux's path to maturity involves commercial (not necessarily proprietary) software that runs on the Linux platform.
Then I go visit the Linspire web site, listing all the features:
Plug'n'play drivers: yea!
Multimedia support: yea!
Respects Microsoft IP: --WHAT!??
Oh yeah, thanks for reminding me. Linspire's been having sex with Microsoft.
Oh, well. Was nice knowing you. I'll stick to (k)Ubuntu, myself.
I visited your Autopackage web site. I was quite impressed by the way you were able to figure out a set of simple instructions, understandable by grandma, that would work for most distros.
Once you can get the user to run a given application, the app itself can take over and be as user-friendly as you want, but the tricky part is to get them to run the app in the first place, using instructions that don't involve compromising the security of their Linux system. Your 4-step instructions, which don't involve any command line, was suitably impressive. You've figured out how to formulate the instructions so that it is consistent across the KDE and GNOME interfaces. (Having two possible desktop environments is a bit of hassle, isn't it, when it comes to giving user instructions?) And, even if the user fumbles around a lot and just happens to randomly succeed in getting Autopackage installed, from then on Autopackage is installed and s/he won't need to do it again.
In doing research for writing this reply, I learned about Zero Install from Wikipedia. This is also a distro-independent way to install software. Reading through the instructions, I see that it looks like you have to install the Zero Install launcher first, and then from then on you can install software. I think this is not as good as Autopackage, in which (apparently) the software installer comes with each and every package itself, so that grandma user doesn't need to do a separate step; just download TheSoftwarePackageIWant, and it will already set up Autopackage. (Presumably it's a stub that downloads the full Autopackage installer only if necessary, to save space?) Nevertheless, Zero Install is also a worthwhile system for allowing users to install software without waiting for the distro maintainers to do it.
Now, Klik is slightly different; as I understand it, it actually downloads and runs the program from a RAM disk, almost Knoppix-style (the last K in K.L.I.K used to stand for Knoppix). Very handy, from the developer standpoint, in establishing a way to temporarily install software in a consistent environment. That doesn't really matter to grandma users, though, and the main disadvantage I see for Klik is the complex first step that will turn lay users off: you have to get to a terminal (already a big hurdle) and then type in:
wget klik.atekon.de/client/install -O -|sh
But wait! If you run k/Ubuntu, first you have to type
sudo apt-get install binutils libstdc++5 rpm gnome-about
Not very user-friendly at all. (Granted, I don't think the goal of Klik is necessarily to be user-friendly.)
So, for the three systems, Autopackage, Zero Install, and Klik, I think Autopackage comes out the winner in terms of ease of posting instructions on the software author's web site. In other words, suppose I wrote a SuperDuper program that I want to give/sell to non-geek users of all sorts of Linux distros. Autopackage would best let my users download and run my software, without needing to send them to the actual web site for Autopackage / Zero Install / Klik itself.
Also, Autopackage and Zero Install have very friendly web pages, for when people do need to check them out. Klik has a very busy web page that's intimidating to new users, and, much as I hate to say this as a KDE fan, typical of how KDE is more for the technically minded people who want the dazzling array of switches and blinking lights, and not for the lay user who just wants to get things done.
But I'm impressed with the way packages can be basically distro independent now. I no longer think that having different packages is so much of an issue, and the software author who writes The Killer App (e.g. some cool game) no longer needs to wait for the distro maintainers in order to distribute the software.
All we need now is to spread th
Unfortunately, I think you have a point, though you might not have the details accurate.
/.'ers would say that Microsoft gives up the ability to sue: although patents are not trademarks, we reasonably expect the court to frown on Microsoft springing out from behind the bushes and saying, "Gimme all that money you owed me from violating these patents in the past 5 years!"
The prevailing wisdom on Slashdot has so far been: "Linux (software in Linux distros) doesn't violate any MS patents, because Ballmer doesn't know what he's talking about. If Microsoft knew of patents, why wouldn't they sue? If we ask Microsoft what patents, and they don't tell us, then even if they do hold violated patents, they can't sue us later on." There are a few flaws in this.
I agree with parent poster that if I were Microsoft, I would not name the patents. Some
However, here's the important thing: to take advantage of their patents, Microsoft does not need to sue.
Just as Ballmer mumbling about patents is entirely a PR stunt, any finding that Linux (distros) violates a MS patent will be used for a PR stunt. So MS does not need to sue. Rather, for the time being, MS continues to mumble about "Linux violates patents." Linux (composed of the aggregate consciousness of the Slashdot mass) says, "No I don't! No I don't! Nyaah nyaah, you can't name any patents! Ballmer is a poopiehead!" Microsoft ignores this as an adult would ignore a small child that keeps saying, "Show me the patent!" until finally, Microsoft says, "Alright, fine, here's a patent you violate."
They only have to show one. It would look pretty bad to corporates if Linux then says, "Okay, well, fine. But what about the other 199?" Maybe MS eventually shows another one, and then Linux says, "Oh yeah? What about the other 198?" This gets old pretty fast, and corporations are going to be scared away from using Linux.
One of the posters said that, if MS doesn't tell us which patents when we ask nicely, they can't sue for past damages, but they can sue for forward damages. Can you imagine the havoc this can still wreak despite no past damages? Some ingrained system is distributed with Linux, and then a few years after some major corporations have settled on using it, Microsoft jumps out and says, "Okay, fine, you don't have to pay retroactively since you didn't know. But from now on, pay us $10k per computer." Let's say this is some networking thing, like something in the Aegypten / Kerberos / OogaBoogaKrypto system, where you'd have to replace the entire infrastructure rather than just individual users' systems.
The companies either have to reestablish their infrastructure, or pay through the nose; if the latter case, MS might say, "Hey, we'll give you a discount if you switch over to Windows," or some such. In any case, Microsoft can tell the corporate world, "We told you so! See what happens when you play with IP thieves like Linux?"
The thing to remember is, Microsoft succeeds because they succeed in the public relations aspect, not because of a technological success. Microsoft is not a technology company; it is a marketing company. Once you grasp this, you will see that Microsoft's position is stronger than you (the generic Slashdotter) think, and Linux's position is weaker. Because this game is really being played in a different arena than what you think.
I'm still not giving up hope, but you need to see this from the PR standpoint.
It's more complex than you make it out to be. By that yardstick, I could also say, AIDS is because "people fuck like shit and don't bother about fidelity/safe sex practices/monogamy. That's it. Pretty simple, huh?" You can substitute Hepatitis B or Chlamydia for AIDS if you want something more prevalent.
But you can see that applying reductionist principles to diabetes, Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or even Some Computer Virus doesn't really help. Yes, in an ideal isolated system, that's the cause of your ailments. But if we can't even isolate a ones-and-zeroes construct like Microsoft Outlook from getting Some Computer Virus, what makes you think we'd fare any better trying to isolate diabetes?
Just as virus infections have a social context --it doesn't work when you tell people, "Just have safe sex, ok?" (or, for computer viruses, "Just have safe hex")-- it also doesn't work when you tell people, "Just eat less."
Research into obesity is showing that eating habits and hunger interact in all sorts of metabolic pathways that control appetite in the brain, behaviour, ability of the body to mobilize stored fat (and thus get enough energy without feeling hungry), etc., not to mention the stuff you already knew about the body physically needing to eat energy and nutrition, and the complex social interactions surrounding meals and food that have developed in every single culture.
So, yeah, diabetes can be aggravated by poor eating and exercise habits. But that argument is such a straw man that it can pose for a photo in the Pictorial Encyclopedia of Straw Man Arguments.
You said: Is there any way to avoid this? I don't even want to do it once a week, because: a) I might forget, and it's a chore, and b) I'm not sure what to look for. I might get alerted because of something or other that would generate a false positive (e.g. a new configuration on a bittorrent or IRC program).
A sibling poster mentioned Tripwire. How handy is that? I tried installing it when I first started with Linux, back in the days of Mandrake 9.0, but it got to be too much of a hassle installing, and I was never sure when to be or not to be suspicious of minor changes. For example, if I try out new kUbuntu packages all the time, then toss them aside if I'm not interested, would it cause problems with Tripwire?
Also, I run a Linksys router flashed with DD-WRT. It's great protection for my Linux box, but I worry about the router itself. How secure is DD-WRT? I usually turn off the ability to SSH into the router from the Internet, but sometimes I need it on. I wish there were something like Guarddog that would fit into the small non-graphical environment of the DD-WRT so I could easily configure the iptables/netfilter. Also, I don't know if the router can log the connections --that would give a much better indication of intrusion attempts, compared to the logs of my Kubuntu box sitting behind the router.
Any advice would be appreciated. Remember, the main thing is: I am trying to minimize administering the box, and maximize using it.
My Linux box has been running funny for the past year or more now. It runs much more slowly than I would expect, and once in a while it freezes up. Little oddities here and there have been showing up, but every little thing on its own has been explainable.
Finally, the other day, when I tried to SSH into my Dellbuntu laptop from the home server, it said, "Possible man in the middle attack!" I wondered if it could be a trojan on the server itself, or on my re-flashed Linksys router (with DD-WRT), so I pulled out an old D-Link router and tried connecting to the Dellbuntu from a Windows machine, and it gave the same hostkey, so I guess I had never updated the keys after I reinstalled Dellbuntu.
(By the way, why is it so difficult to display a SSH hostkey from the host itself? The SSH client would say, "Are you sure this is the correct SSH hostkey?" and then display the suspicious hostkey. What are we supposed to compare this to? Why can't the SSHdaemon display the hostkey? No, it is NOT in the ~/.ssh directory.)
I guess the other possibility is that my Dellbuntu is compromised.
Anyway, just for peace of mind, I'm going to reinstall everything after the weekend. I put every single config change I make, including a tonne of "sudo apt-get --assume-yes install [xxx]" commands, into a script file, so it should take under an hour to reinstall. I'll have to wait till after the weekend since we have guests over this weekend.
Crummy. I guess it's time for some port-knocking software or ostiaryd or something.
Umm... I don't even know where to start to answer your question. I'm not sure what your question has to do with anything.
The best I can tell is that you think I am incorrectly saying that GPG is closed source. If that's what you're saying, I have no idea why you're saying it --I didn't even mention GPG. If that's not what you're saying, then I have no idea, so please enlighten me.
In the meantime, I'll elaborate. Phil Zimmerman created PGP and made it open source (though the term "open source" itself wasn't used at the time). PGP got sold to NAI, which stopped making it open source (ie. they added to the software and distributed binaries only without source). NAI sold the rights to PGP Corp.
Technically, it was NAI, not PGPCorp, that closed the source of formerly open source PGP. PGPCorp bought the ex-open-source PGP. Currently, PGP is not open source.
You can check http://www.fabianrodriguez.com/encryption/ for more info.
Thank you for not saying "which BEGS the question", but rather showing an example of an easy way to express what you mean using a correct and non-grammarNazi-targeted construct.
I've decided that one way to get people to use the phrase "begging the question" properly, a more effective way than hounding them for using the phrase improperly, would be to use it properly as much as possible so that people can get used to seeing it in the right context. Your sentence provides a nice counterpoint to that, by showing when the phrase should not be used.
Yes, I am a grammar Nazi at heart. Go ahead and complain about how the English language is dynamic --it is so due no less to people who resist change as people who promote change (especially inadvertently).
And, yes, this is off topic, but certainly not out of place in an international English-language forum such as Slashdot.
I'd rather have some small company that has to build up trust and earn the respect of the healthcare industry, rather than some big convicted monopolist that has enough cash to do what it wants with impunity, and has enough monopoly-generated momentum that it can market an OS like Vista and make statements like "Google's success was only because of us!"
If Microsoft was unable to enter the health info industry, then the healthcare sector would demand non-proprietary formats for their data from the small companies that provided health info services, in case the company folded. But this won't happen with Microsoft because of the MS clout.
Unfortunately, it will sound nice to health care companies. I am involved in the healthcare sector, and I am worried that this will succeed, without the health care companies knowing (or caring) about the issues. Microsoft has the cash, the clout and the reputation for this. (Remember, to non-geeks, Microsoft is the premier computer company --lay people can't even tell whether Microsoft is software or hardware.)
The health care industry is greatly dependent on information technology, and is beholden to IT --without realizing it. People in healthcare have this attitude, for better or worse, that they are more important and special and have a unique place high on the totem pole, so they don't really see their vulnerability to some run-of-the-mill thing like IT, which is held with the same regard as the people who answer the phones or clean the medical instruments.
I just pray that Microsoft can have some high-profile screw-ups, maybe a few databases hacked here and there, that can reveal to non-geeks the dangers of having a convicted monopolist at the reins of the nation's healthcare info.
I had different results when I did the same. My wife would complain that Linux wasn't exactly the same as Windows. I tried installing Thunderbird email, and she complained that Thunderbird failed to wrap long lines of text. Can you believe it? Failed to wrap long lines! What, is that the responsibility of the sender's email program now, to figure out how wide the recipient's screen is? Well, apparently, all of her friends had trouble reading past the beginning of a long paragraph because, somehow, their email program was incapable to wrapping long lines.
I told her that I wasn't going to touch her Windows machine again. It's been over four years since I've used Windows on a home machine anyway, so I probably wouldn't know how to do advanced stuff even if I wanted to. She still wanted to use her Windows machine, so that was that, and I have been blissfully free of computer support duties.
Recently she had some problem with importing some MS Outlook contacts, which she reasoned was because she had an old version of MS Outlook, so she went and blew 300 smackeroos (US$) on Office 2007, which apparently the store was selling at a discount. (She had to get the version that included Outlook.) Which was fine, as long as she was spending her money and not mine.
Can someone confirm that Windows email programs are too retarded to know how to wrap long lines? That is just unbelievable!
So, PGP Corp takes an open source product and closes its source. They don't document this backdoor. When discovered, they say, "Well, okay, it's just so that we can reboot once."
You believe them?
I mean, did you believe them when they failed to mention this "feature"? When they forgot to document it? What else have they omitted? What if, a few months down the road, they say, "Well, there's this other feature that lets you reboot twice." And then later, "Three times. Yeah, we haven't gotten around to documenting that either."
The way they describe it in
CTO/CSO Jon Callas' response, it doesn't sound like as much of a security flaw as I feared. But the question is, why was it there, with no documentation?
Closed source crypto is already under suspicion from me as a matter of course. The fact that we have an actual case of an undocumented "feature" only confirms that I should stick with software that's verifiable.
I am not sure if this is true, so someone correct me if I'm wrong:
You can convert a selection to a path. This turns the outline of the selection into a curve that has nodes with Bezier-style controls. Then you can reposition and adjust the path. After that, you can convert it back into a selection.
Note that while the selection is an area (2 dimensions), the path is a curve (1 dimension, assuming it's not a Peano curve or something).
Another possibility is to convert the selection to a mask, but that's still working with areas rather than curves.
I wonder what happens if you make the path intersect itself, like a figure-8, and then convert it back into a selection?
Anyway, a bit of a coincidence that I only discovered this book today. (I was shopping for the Solveig Haugland book, OpenOffice 2 Guide, and saw it recommended on the web site where I purchased the book.) I did buy Professional GIMP, by Akkana Peck (sp?), which has been a very handy reference.
By the way, in case no one else mentions it, Grokking the GIMP is a great book available for free online from which I learned a great deal about using GIMP. It talks about removing colour casting from photographs, advanced selection techniques, etc. I downloaded a copy, and use it when I don't have the dead-tree book handy.
Couple of comments here:
When others try to be helpful, they toss out ideas, seeds of a brainstorm that might invoke some sort of suggestion about what might work. However, UbuntuDupe shoots down the ideas. For example: Then UbuntuDupe says:
This is his response to the very first person trying to help. Other responses to comments are similar, in that while telling erstwhile helpers that their suggestions are not helping, he includes snide remarks about Ubuntu: "Naive me..." or "I should never have believed all the crap," etc. Thus he is discouraging the very people who are trying to help.
I don't think that UbuntuDupe is deliberately being unpleasant toward people trying to help him; it seems like he is simply intrinsically so. I wonder if he interpreted the comments from others, subconsciously or otherwise, as a sort of criticism or a sign that he was not "1337" enough, and became defensive.
Ob. plug for FOSS software. After having used Matlab in school, I just started using Octave. I was pleasantly surprised by how compatible the two are. In fact, the GNU Octave developers actively strive to make their updates follow updates to Matlab, so that the two can be as drop-in compatible as possible.
Nice for people who want a powerful but easy-to-use calculation package without going through the hassle of trying to buy Matlab --heck, to even find out what the actual price is on that web site, you have to log in!
Of course, a slide rule is also Free and Open Source. I remember finding the idea of a slide rule being very cool, and making my own out of two strips of cardboard by drawing marks according to logarithms.
Nawwww...
Credit cards from CitiCard (which has a range of credit cards) have the virtual account feature --or, at least one does --I don't know if they all do. Another one was a credit card from MBNA, which got bought out by Bank of America. I haven't used mine since it got bought by B of A, because their web site was giving me trouble (I can't remember what; some combination of Best Viewed with IE using Javascript and Flash or something like that) and I already had the Citi alternative.
If you try to assassinate the president of the US or some such person, the authorities will put you in prison, even if you fail to kill! They say, "We can't let the would-be assassin walk free just because the president is still alive."
The authorities must be living on a different planet from me. Here I was thinking that "alive" meant that the president was healthy and able to continue setting his policies as usual. In the warped mindset of an assassin, that means suffering through the continued political maneuvering of someone he had wanted dead. (In the case of assassins for hire, the assassin would have to live without his assassin's fee.) How is this not a deterrent for assassins?
Looks like they get your credit card number when you sign up, promising not to charge you for the "free" service or something, and then later charge you because you forgot to cancel their subscription.
Several credit cards now let you generate disposable credit card numbers on the fly --just go to the web site and you can have a new credit card number with your specified credit limit and date of expiry. I'd like to see how they handle that! Maybe they'll send a message: "Dear Sir, your credit card number is no longer valid and we were unable to pull that scam on you. Please go to the following web page and enter your new credit card info, so that we can scam you."
In fact, something similar happened to me. Near the end of the tax year, I decided to make a donation to a charity, and figured out how much would be best given my tax situation. I donated through a web site using a disposable credit card. Somehow, they ended up charging only about 40% of the amount I said I would donate.
Fast forward to three months later, well into the new tax year, I get a phone call from the charity saying that my credit card wasn't working. I said,
"What are you talking about? You're not supposed to be charging my credit card."
"Yeah, we are --you made a donation."
"But that was last year! You charged it already!"
"But we didn't charge enough."
"So you tried to just charge more now and have some bill randomly show up on my credit card bill? If you want the rest of the donation, send me a receipt backdating the donation to the previous tax year."
"I'm sorry, we're not allowed to backdate receipts."
"Well, then, too bad. I offered my money and you screwed up. Next time charge the correct amount. And don't make unannounced corrections to your mistake a few months after I've reconciled my finances."
Agree! And you know what was even more irritating than the official leadership denying this? The dozen Slashbots who would automatically throw themselves sacrificially onto the incoming path of your criticism, saying, "There's no memory leak! Firefox is just reserving 3GB of memory to
cache all your huge web pages! Like that bloated Google main page!"
And now Mozilla is saying, "You know that memory leak that didn't exist? Well, we're fixing it now." Did someone take lessons in Microsoft Marketspeak?
Here's something else they should stop denying: the fact that Firefox is frick'n bloated. It needs to be pared down to a skeletal size, and everything moved to an official series plug-ins/extensions/add-ons (or whatever they're called these days) that can be installed by default, but which can be removed to get the desired responsiveness and small memory footprint. But when Chris Beard of Mozilla was interviewed on Slashdot, he said:Yeah, buddy, that's because all your extensions are an integral inseparable part of Firefox. You're just afraid of the complexity of testing and debugging extensions, aren't you?
I still use Firefox. I still use unsigned extensions because that seems to be the standard, and for some extensions there just aren't any signatures. That's because Firefox has Adblock Plus and NoScript. The minute these appear in Konqueror, I'm saying goodbye to Firefox.
Hey, this headline isn't exciting at all! I mean, why do you think I come to Slashdot in the first place, if not for the sensationalism?? Well, to be sure, the headline spuriously adds this thing about "friction" just because the EU says, "Okay, we'll check out this Google purchase of Doubleclick and will tell you next month whether there might be problems," but "experiences friction" just doesn't have the same punchy feel to it.
After all, when a police bring in the apparent sender of a bomb threat and release him after a few hours, Slashdot says, "Innocent man incarcerated for running Tor server!" And when a game counterfeiter gets arrested, the headline says, "All he did was mod the console and he got arrested!"
The Slashdot staff should do a better job here. The headline should say something like, "EU attacks Google with Doubleclick review." Or, for an even better effect, use the Cavuto mark, as in: "EU reviews Doubleclick. Will Google collapse ? "
Yeesh, without these sensationalist headlines, how is Slashdot going to gain ad revenue by attracting more readers who use Firefox and Adblock Plus?
Thank you for pointing this out. The subject header appears in a different colour and font and background colour, and is clearly meant to be separate. I see that I'm not the only one to think of the text as a unit on its own. In the same vein, captions of figures in a text should be independent and not have to rely on the text, nor should text rely on graphic captions to convey their meaning.
With this forewarning, I can now, with a clear conscience, refuse to upmod posts with such sloppy use of the subject headers. (In fact, I rely heavily on the subject heading to choose which posts to upmod. I go out of my way to upmod posters who have taken the trouble to compose a concise and relevant subject header, compared to the 99% of other posts with the heading of "Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Yeah!")
The news article says that, in the end, Righi admitted that the police officer did nothing wrong:
Righi himself disagrees, and says in his blog:
So, Righi says that he never admitted that the police was wrong. But it doesn't end here! Further down on his blog, we come across this comment:
So, who's telling the truth?
Agree. The fact that Microsoft says something doesn't make it so --but people don't know that.
Earlier this month, Microsoft said that Google could not have done without them, and now they're saying that Microsoft products are no longer the butt of jokes.
They can say that just because they are a big company and people listen to them. Whether we choose to believe Microsoft is a different matter.
I remember wearing my first business suit, complete with starched shirt and necktie, early in my university years. People would take me seriously because I was dressed in business attire, no matter what I said. It was fun! Once I stood at the entrance foyer to the city concert hall with my sloppily dressed friends, and people would come up to me and ask for directions and generally assume that I was not part of that group of friends in T-shirt and jeans. I tell them some ridiculous thing with a straight face (like there were free concert tickets upstairs if they could show a McDonalds hamburger wrapper) and people would believe me. Another time I asked to see a high school friend of mine who was in the middle of some all-day meeting, just to socialize (I knew the event was boring) and they just assumed I was a university teacher.
The pranks got boring after the first few times, but it made me realize how easily we accord credibility and respect to certain people for reasons that have nothing to do with the content of their message or their position.
It takes a huge effort to constantly critically evaluate whether to believe something, whether to believe that silver-haired "doctor" on the TV commercials who says your male organ will grow by 50%, or that typical mom-looking woman in the magazine ad (cuddling her baby, no less) who says that XX works on her cold symptoms, or that bespectacled politician who says that illegal immigrants are the cause of failure to curb crime, or your friend at the bar who says, "The Linux kernel is insecure. Trust me --I write web pages for a living." (Yeah, so you know all about the Linux kernel, right?)
So, we end up picking and choosing what we evaluate critically. When we're alert and fresh, we think critically; but after a long hard day at work, or when you feel like just flaking out with a beer in one hand and the TV remote in the other, we let our guard down. That's when the TV commercials hit us, when the Bill O'Reillys and the Wolf Blitzers insinuate their messages. Similarly, Microsoft gets its message splashed across any media space available, and people will listen. It's we geeks who are best able to peel away the facade, to say, "Hey, Microsoft, [[citation needed!]]"
For all I care, next week Microsoft can go say that Microsoft has produced the best Linux for PalmPilots since George Washington invented the Internet.
Yeah. It sounds ridiculous to even entertain the thought that this might happen; but then the SCO lawsuit itself was pretty ridiculous, too, and that didn't seem to deter SCO.
How much do you want to be that, when the time comes, Daniel Lyons will write, "Aha! *This* time I'm positive that Linux stole Unix code!"