See you can't stick with one topic, you're all over the place and your argument is incoherent.
Thanks for being so specific. I'm addressing the points you brought up.
We're not wiretapping everyone. I assume in your most recent post you're talking about the gathering of phone call records, which wouldn't use much bandwidth. I was referring to the bandwidth and storage costs of "wiretapping everyone". You're shifting the topic around to suit your point (as vague as it is).
I take it you did not bother to read this thread in context? What the hell did you think we were talking about? The topic was wiretaps without warrants. This includes and number of kinds of wiretaps from complete capture of voice, to relational databases of who talks to whom, to a system that combines the former with trageted instances of the latter.
Johnson and Nixon were both ratted out by the people doing the wire taps.
Yeah the taped lock in my imagination. As for King, the FBI made him aware of its activities anonymously while trying to influence him with recordings of his associates, not because the FBI came clean.
It's much harder to find who placed a bugging device than it is to trace these centralized wire taps, you are obviously wrong on that point.
Yeah, right. someone has to go to every location to place a physical bug. That means more manpower and more chance of discovery. It also means a lot less deniability. In the case of a centralized monitoring system it can always be some minor person who exceeded their authority and added a single entry. In the case of physical wiretaps that is much less believable since it is commanding significant manpower.
What the fuck does one have to do with the other? You're a computer guy AND a fucking NSA expert? This is wearing away at your credibility...
I never claimed to be either, only that I am knowledgeable about networks and network monitoring systems, both ours and our competitors and potential competitors (like Narus whose system is in place at AT&T).
When you say it is unobserved, you are making a blanket statement. What you really wanted to say was "why don't we get the courts involved?".
Did you sleep through your 3rd grade social studies class? Separation of powers means different branches of government have different powers. Checks and balances means each branch of government observes and can stop inappropriate actions of the others. The executive branch policing itself is the same as the anybody else policing themselves, not useful for a real problem. That is why they have to get permission from the judicial branch to perform these activities. And given the current state of the government only the most outrageous abuses would be denied anyway. No, refusing to get a warrant is only useful if they are hiding illegal or potentially illegal or incredibly unethical behavior.
Why don't we have civil rights attourneys follow around police officers to prevent the occasional white officers beating black guy down?
We do have a judicial check on the police, its called the courts, you know where the police have to bring people after they arrest them? And if there are abuses the courts can rebuke the police, order them arrested, or award fines. In this way the police are prevented from running wild. What makes you think the NSA should not be held to the same standard as required by the constitution?
Do we get the courts authorization before we go blow up some house in Afghanistan?
No, the legislative branch gets that right, as only they can declare war, which the executive branch then directs.
As far as "poisoning" the black list with a wrong target, who needs to? That would only be an overly complicated form of DDoS attack, which can be accomplished much more simply already. It's not something to worry about yet.
Actually, it would accomplish a little more. It would not only attack a target with a DDoS, but also may train DDoS filters to automatically remove DDoS from the same hosts. Thus, it makes the system ineffective against spam for a company from the same link.
That's exactly what we're doing here. It's the only strategy that's going to work. Bitching and moaning won't get you a clean mailbox. Taking spammers down will.
And you think this is going to work? First, there is little or nothing stopping abuse of this system. I can compromise a machine and send out piles of offensive spam for my competitor, and the system will then fire what amounts to a DoS attack at him. Second, This sort of an attack can be filtered out by ISPs now (on premium accounts) and that capability is trickling down and becoming more and more available. This sort of vigilante crap is a poorly thought out, not quite solution.
If you disagree with fighting fire with fire...
Umm, I usually prefer to use a fire extinguisher. Otherwise, my house burns down.
...I suggest you also criticize any and all law enforcement activities.
Lets see, a official government operating with rules and oversight within the law, versus vigilantes with no oversight that may or may not be worse than the problem they claim to be solving. I think I'll stick with the former.
If I tell a vigilante some guy beat up my mother they might go out and beat him up. Great. Unless, of course I made it up to get him beaten up. If I tell the police someone beat me up, they go and arrest him. Then, if there is enough evidence, they are convicted and punished. Great, unless there is not enough evidence. Which is better? Is it better that some criminals go free or that innocents are punished? The US legal system says the former, and I concur. It is a greater harm to punish the innocent than to not punish the guilty.
I'd say a good anti-adware program would probably advice[sic] you to uninstall 50% of the google pack programs anyway! Really, I don't want these "toolbars", screensavers, search helpers, no matter if they are from spyware companies or from google.
Anti-adware? I've never heard of such a thing. I've heard of anti-spyware, which could, conceivably be applied to some of this software in some configurations. Anyway, Google toolbar helps make up for some fundamental deficiencies of IE as compared to, well browsers whose developers care about their users. The search functionality adds indexed searching of your hard drive, a fundamental deficiency of Windows as compared to, well all the other OS's. Both of these are supposedly going to be fixed in Vista and are billed as major features. Anyway, is there anyone on Slashdot who doesn't blow away the pre-installed configuration on boxes they buy?
I'm no grammar nazi, but I must admit the point of your post disappeared from my consciousness in a *poof* when I tried to parse the world, "realisticness."
"Reality," "realism," "in reality," or just "really," would all be fine substitutes that don't divert others from your intended message.
I call BS. I have never, ever had an Exchange server fail to interoperate with any non-MS client via SMTP, POP3, or IMAP. It just works, plain and simple, and it is certainly "stable". Most of our Exchange 2003 boxes have 40-50GB databases, yet perform well. The only time Exchagne ever goes down is when we reboot for an OS-level security patch.
Do you allow the clients to use their mail from Exchange/POP/SMTP/IMAP and synch them all so that all the inboxes contain the same data or do you just let each user use one or the other? Because in the former case, several years back, I was unable to keep the server stable with complete re-installs and different hardware. I ended up installing two separate servers, one on Windows one on Linux and synching them. It was a huge pain. The sysadmin at another company I worked at, independently came to the same conclusion, and several other sysadmins have mentioned the same issue over the years. Where I work now, the sysadmin had the same problem, with regular outages until, without any input from me, engineering installed their own servers and only exchange was run on the "official" server. I'd say that is some pretty strong anecdotal evidence, unless you know some secret everyone else I know doesn't.
Even on the beautiful OS X, which that we (Slashdot communal mind) know is of course perfect;), a search facility is very necessary when you have to deal with hundreds of menu options, or better yet, documents.
You misunderstand. I said the special casing with special graphics and adding preference panes as a file type was unnecessary, not that a search feature in general was unnecessary.
As far as OS X's organization of the control panel and system utilities: I have to say I don't particularly care for it...
Okay.
...nor do I care much for its finder.
Again, Okay, but why do I care and what does this have to do with what we were talking about?
Also: Linux has typically lagged far behind the rest when it comes to desktop usability. This isn't so any more.
Linux has a few desktop usability wins (more and better virtual desktop options, for example) but I still don't think it is at the top of the heap yet. I'm not sure I'll ever willingly go back to the stone ages of a workstation without system services. I also, have become rather accustomed to expose, although that is less important to me. I also think OS X has a big win when it comes to application-is-a-folder and I wish Linux would adopt openstep and integrate it with their application managers and that Apple would adopt some of the application management features from Linux distros. Aside from that, Linux is still not there for software availability, which is a chicken and egg problem that hopefully can be solved by virtualization technologies in the near future.
FYI I used to hate and I mean HATE KDE. Now there is no other environment I'd rather work on. My desktop is laid out very similar in style to OS X but is far more usable. Nothing against OS X, I just don't think their environment was designed for power users, but more for uber-novices.
Heh. Well, I guess everyone is entitled to their opinion. Yours seems to differ from that of most of the dozens of coders and security experts here though, most of whom have adopted it. Almost every issue I've seen power users have with OS X, has turned out to be that they haven't learned how OS X does something and are trying to do it "the old way." The only exception I've seen is getting some of the low-level kernel modifications for jails or kernel level network monitoring functioning, and most of that has been just the learning curve and getting the tools rebuilt for the different platform. The trend I have seen is a steady migration to OS X as users discover how powerful it is and how many pain points it solves. I know one guy who went from OS X back to Linux. For me as an individual, looking at the available functionality, it is not much of a contest right now.
Really though, I never, ever, ever want to train one more application's spell checker to know that SNMP is not misspelled. I did it once already. Why the hell shouldn't my web browser, email client, IM, terminals, publishing app, calendar, graphic editor, text editors, etc. be able to use the same knowledge. It is all text, after all. Until Linux catches up on that front, it will be a lesser choice for a workstation (although it is a damn fine server).
No, that means you should tell the vendor, and then choose another car.
Or, I can just choose the car I think is best suited to my needs based on all the criteria including price, rather than judging solely based on one.
Wait a minute ! You gave no valid reason to use Windows or OS X. "most suited" ? What does that mean ?
Well, maybe the task I need to accomplish is to get a Framemaker file to my client. In that case, I'd say some version of Windows is my best bet. Or maybe, my job is (and it is) some graphics work (bitmap and vector), some publishing, a lot of writing, layout, some PHP, a little light perl and python, some training, and collaborating with a hundred coders on a variety of platforms. In that case, I need a very flexible OS that offers customization and both commercial and open source software for integrating and collaborating with various other people's workflows. Right now I'm using OS X for my workstation, occasionally Windows for compatibility tasks, and OpenBSD and Linux for servers. If you want to know the particular software or OS specific features I'm using that are not available anywhere else, I can make a list. The short list is basically: application availability, system services, functional indexed filesystem, and reasonable multitasking.
"Required by employer" ? Why ?
Because otherwise they don't give me money. Haven't you heard of the golden rule? He who has the gold makes the rules. Now I have my choice of OS right now for my workstation, but in at least one previous job I've been given a Windows workstation, without administrative privileges and told to get to work. Rules prohibited me from installing any software at all, let alone another OS. If you want to be paid, sometimes you have to follow whatever random rules are in place.
Anyway, that does not answer the question of why you should migrate to Windows Vista.
Nor did anyone ask that question. We were discussing why it is useful to read about it. As for why I might upgrade a machine to it, well new features. Fast user switching for domain logins will motivate some. The indexed filesystem will motivate others. There are a few useful features here and there along with all the crap and anti-features.
Which is exactly the goal of FOSS software. What, you really believed FOSS was there to promote a model ?
That is not what I said. Go re-read my post. I said your choice of software was motivated by promoting a model, not that that was the purpose of the model. The purpose of pretty much all software is to solve a problem or complete a task. Some of us recognize that being open source is a very useful feature for much software. A few people, however, are more concerned with that one feature than they are with judging the overall ability of the software to complete the task.
For example, when I choose software for a project I evaluate a lot of different criteria. Latex is open source and very flexible. It also relies upon a crapload of hacks to do common tasks (images, colored text). Also, the toolset is not very learnable. Framemaker has a much better toolset, more features, and is much more learnable, but it is nowhere near as flexible and is not only closed source but only supported on Windows. Which should I choose? The answer is, "it depends upon the project." In some cases one is the most suitable solution and in some cases the other.
The primary goal of the closed source model is to sell, not to get work done, communicate or create.
This is usually true, but not always. Not that it matters for the most part, since there is this thing called a capitalist market that does a good job (with some exceptions) of giving money to those who solve the problems customers want solved.
This is a very naive view, as a lot of (I would say "most") closed source software out there is so bad that you need reviews to know beforehand if they really do what they claim, and some FOSS even manage to be way
Praise Allah, or Vishnu, or someone! Thanks for the answer. I've asked several people and no one has known for certain and most thought it was not possible to add file types. Finally, a feature that is included that I actually care about.
As near as I can determine, there isn't one. I've tried all the usual suspects, and I can't stand any of them.
What platform are you looking for? What applications have you tried? From your list, I think Preview on OS X might fit the bill. It handles the colors for usability, searching built into the filesystem index even, and text selection is fine. As for keyboard-ability, it is fine for navigating and adding annotations, but I'm not sure about copying and pasting sections of the PDF itself without the mouse (as a viewer it has no insertion point or cursor, the same as HTML browsers).
Any use of PDF that does not involve paper is, as far as I'm concerned, a bad idea. Notably, PDF is an horrific choice for anything that needs to be viewed on screen.
You're missing the other common use, portable online publishing. I'd never e-mail someone an HTML file and a directory of accompanying images, and even if I did the layout could be inexact or misleading and the fonts wrong. Doc is proprietary, and ever-changing and has the same problems as you never know what program will be reading it or how it will be interpreted. Plus, unintentional meta-data is a security risk. Not enough people have OpenOffice. Images are too large and lack selectable text etc. What format would you recommend I e-mail to a client?
A nice use of the pervasive desktop search integrated into the explorer windows is in Control Panel. We're pretty good about changing control panel wildly between releases, and I never remember which menu your system environment variables or enabling remote desktop or changing it so that the "Explorer:Start Navigation" sound is (none). Now i just hit "start->control panel", click in the search box for something like "sound" and i get search-as-i-type results that are pretty accurate and take me right to the control panel i want to go to.
I've always felt this feature in OS X was wholly unnecessary, since the panels are well named and organized. I don't think I ever used it except to see the exceptionally pretty graphics they added just for it. I'll bet someone at MS saw those graphics and told them to copy it:) Still, given the ever changing control panels and large number of them in Windows, this does sound useful.
Since you have the search functionality in front of you, can you answer a question? First, what file types does it index content from? Second, is it a plug-in architecture. If I can't add open office files to the index, it is a non-starter.
Slashdot might not as well cover how good or bad Vista is because in Vista and OSX are closed source OSes. Users have no say in how good or bad a proprietary OS is. So we might as well not deal with it.
Umm, I have no say in how well made most of my car is, does that mean I should spend half of every day walking to and from work, and take several month long sabbaticals when I want to visit my family?
People are going to use both Windows and OS X because they are the tools most suited to them, or because they are required to by their employer. Given that fact, it is very useful to have more information on what to expect. Further, it is a good idea to see what each OS on the market is doing for reasons of compatibility and because they might have good ideas that can be adopted.
I Personally wish that people would stop consuming, and giving creed to closed OSes, and no, OSX is not an Open OS. I don't care how like BSD it is.
It all depends upon why you use a computer. If your purpose is to promote an open source model, then you've chosen wisely. For me, my purpose is to get work done, to communicate, to create. To me, being open source is a feature. It is nice, and useful, and provides security going forward, but it is by no means the only feature or the most important one.
If you don't want Slashdot to cover other OS's, you can just flip a few toggles and you won't see them anymore. Problem solved. For the rest of us, this is certainly useful and welcome news and discussion.
One of his complaints was the size, so a better reader would not help here. But a better generator might. For example pdflatex, and OpenOffice, are able to generate decently compact and high quality PDFs.
Part of the issue is he is not comparing apples to apples. He complains that PDF files, which provide exact positioning and vectors, are not as small as HTML or text, which provide only markup. He doesn't want to spend the time downloading that extra information, and in many cases he's right to claim it is not needed. The problem there, however, has nothing to do with the format and everything to do with it being inappropriately used. Of course, he's also losing a lot of the benefits of the format, like a single, portable file with the images and text all in one place, rather than a directory of mixed text and binary files.
For Windows apps, we use ps2pdf: we've defined a "printer" in Samba that pipes its input through ps2pdf.
For more complex PDFs, this is not an option. Doing something like that loses the TOC information, for example. That is not to say, however, that using the standard Adobe distiller is a good idea either. There are dozens of PDF generating engines, both stand alone and built into applications. Your point is well taken. His complaints are all about uses of the format he does not like, and poor tools that use the format.
While that's true with their desktop applications, Microsoft's server software is built on open standards like everyone else. They use TCP/IP, and XML everywhere. Also, MS's products are very programmable and If you know a bit of C++ and COM you can make the software work with almost anything.
Disclaimer: I haven't administrated and Windows servers for several years, just used them and listened to gripes
You must mean open standards like Exchange, Active Directory, FAT,.doc,.wmd and the like? They only use TCP'/IP because they were desperately playing catch-up on having internet access at all and because they haven't grabbed enough of the server market. They abuse XML more than use it, using patents and embedded binary data to describe structure to remove all of the main advantages, like interoperability and tool reuse. As for programming, everything is closed source and as such cannot be truly customized. Using MS products is an exercise in work-arounds and trying to jump over roadblocks they intentionally constructed to lock you into only their products.
Doing something as simple as running a mail server using MS tools becomes a huge pain in the ass. Try serving mail to Windows, Linux, and OS X clients and still allowing all users to use all the features available to that client. Then try implementing ClamAV to filter the viruses. You're better off skipping AD and Exchange and implementing all open source and standards. Otherwise you'll spend all your time fighting the fact that MS products won't play nice and can't remain stable serving POP, IMAP, and Exchange.
This is what I experienced and the same story I've heard from admin after admin who runs a mixed environment. How you got a different impression is my question. Have you ever administered a mixed environment with MS server products and other servers?
Yes, it leads to MS automatically gaining market share in their new products by exploting familiarity with old products, but that's not neccessarily "cheating" since other vendors can work a bit harder and make their software as easy to use as Microsoft's offerings.
It is cheating if they use secret or undocumented protocols and formats, which they do. It is also illegal if you're a monopoly, which is why MS was convicted of it in the EU.
My experinece[sic] with a lot of their ( very expensive) products is that they are difficult to install, use and develop with. As if they're following a "Making customers hate your product HOWTO". Microsoft's products are like 5 or 6 times more usable, always.
It has been my experience that if are already an all MS shop, MS products are less expensive, but only if you are an all MS shop and may the gods have mercy upon you if you ever need to integrate with other platforms or do anything beyond those limited capabilities because it will truly be a hellish experience.
The MS motto should be, "you're already locked in, so suck it up and pay a little more, cuz we're usually 'good enough.'"
50% of their sales would be gone tomorrow if there was such a thing as a free/open source sales guy or if people doing the purchasing evaluated free alternatives.
Also, the most common scenario is running PDFs within Acrobat viewer, loaded within Internet Explorer, running on top of Windows. So we have a rather bloated viewer, loading in a bloated browser, on an OS that fails at multitasking, especially for this type of sharing. On top of that, the browser and often Windows itself can become completely unresponsive while the viewer stalls, waiting for the whole document to download. The average user can find their machine locked until whatever file from whatever speed connection on the other end is done loading. It is sad, and gives PDF an undeservedly bad reputation.
Instead of $300B spent in Iraq we should have spent it here on fusion reactor research!!! Thats what happens when politicians are un-educated rubes.
You're confusing different goals for lack of education and sophistication. From certain politicians perspective the choice is:
spend the money on hard science which makes oil worth less and helps free the US from dependence upon it. Considering how much money politicians have invested in oil (entire family fortunes built upon it) and considering the political ties to the middle east they have that make them valuable players this does not look very good.
Go to war in the middle east. Billions of dollars are suddenly allocated for this war, most of which are then to be allocated to defense contractors. Giving that money to particular people results in large political and financial favors in return. Giving that money to companies you are heavily invested in makes you billions personally. Unlike a private sector allocation, you can hide the waste in "national security" or justify it as "the soldiers need it now, whatever the cost" or "they were more expensive but the best thing for the troops." Additionally, those ties political contacts and ties in the middle east are suddenly more important and valuable.
Given the choice between advancing mankind, while making less money and losing political capital, or killing thousands, but making obscene amounts of money and political capital, I don't think we have to guess which way politicians will jump. It is not ignorance, but self interest without a whiff of ethics that made this choice.
Repeatedly. Take a look at the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, for example. He conducted unconstitutional and illegal wiretaps of numerous political figures including Martin Luthor King Jr. and several members of the republican party. I don't think I need to go into Nixon's abuses, do I?
My point was that if someone wants to break the law and wiretap someone, the easiest way is to go to their house and plug a listening device into their POTS terminal.
That is the easiest way to tap one person's phone. It is not the safest way though, as hiring a detective or sending an agent can get them caught and it is hard to make up national security excuses the public will buy. If, however, you want to spy on all of your political rivals and you want to be sure you can keep it from ever going to court, using a centralized tap is much, much easier and safer.
I'm very informed on the subject, you are stretching and bending the truth every which way, completely ignoring some aspects. Do you even realize how much storage and processing it would take to analyze EVERY conversation connected to the United States?
I work at a company that builds devices that do broad scale monitoring of internet traffic for major ISPs. Yes, I know what it takes to analyze large amounts of voice traffic and apply regular expressions. For example, I know how easy it would be to add a list of congress person's and political rivals' phone numbers to the "listen to list" for spot checking by the NSA, or simply archiving (which is then copied for some unknown persons to listen through). The point is, even without listening to anything, you can build valuable data for later analysis. Think, "any congress number to any medical facility - flag: for archive." How many conversations with medical personal will yield something usable (maybe 1 in 10?).
Now let me ask you. What valid reason is there for keeping this monitoring unobserved? Is negative 48 hours really such a short amount of time to get a wiretap? I mean if it really is a terrorist phone call we need to monitor, why the hell shouldn't the judicial system be informed and asked for approval within 48 hours? If they aren't misusing this, there is no reason to avoid oversight.
The storage alone would amass so quickly... not to mention the bandwidth required to re-transmit every conversation to one central database. I've heard this said before.
Storage for a moving window of data is not a problem these days. The bandwidth is a tap off of the routers in the core. All this is a solved problem with off-the-shelf technology. Just use google already and read the sales brochures.
If you want to call it an invasion of privacy, then blame the phone company. They've been keeping a log of your phone calls for decades.
The phone company is not "the greatest threat to a free people." So long as the government does not have it, we are safe from abuse by those who would have power over us. I take it you slept through your history classes and the founding principals of our nation?
The way I see it the United States is fighting this threat on every front, and you have nothing but criticism, it's as if you just want everything to fail miserably (very possible, given your extreme political bias).
What threat? How is this in any way mitigating any threat? All the security put in place is useless and mostly unneeded. More people die every day in car crashes than have been killed by terrorists since the history of the US. More people drown in buckets. It is more likely that you will be struck by lightening, survive, get on a plane which crashes, survive that, and then die in a car accident than it is you will be killed by terrorists. Where is the the war on lightening, planes, and cars? Terrorists are a convenient boogeyman to cow the cowardly. You want to stop terrorists, start free firearm training for all US citizens. Subsidize handgun sales. Make sure eve
Restates, I disagree that the user is a better UI designer, but instead, they can help developers get outside their normal "deep in the guts" perspective.
Software is designed with a purpose. Users obtain software and try to use it to solve a task. While no single user should be taken as the epitome of all users, you have to remember the point of the software. In general a user-centered approach is ideal and the UI should have some disconnect from the underlying code. Ask users what they need to do to solve a problem. Then design a UI to do it. Then write the code to make the UI work.
The problem is, most open source, and even closed source developers develop for themselves first. This means, they get the code working, before they code the UI. The problem with this is, by the time you have the code working, you've biased yourself as a user. As a result, most UI designs made after the underlying code reflect the code's perspective more strongly than the things the user wants to accomplish.
I intensely dislike the assumption that developers are "bad at UI development". Most are actually pretty good at identifying poor designs and making them better.
I agree, mostly. Developers are just as good at UI design as anyone else, provided they do it before they write the underlying code and don't have making the underlying code easier in mind when they do it. This, of course, almost never happens, hence the reputation.
First mistake... Thinking that reading a book and using the HCI (Human Computer Interface) buzzword will improve the user experience of your software.
I disagree. There is definitely low-hanging fruit for usability improvement. Certainly procedural changes in the design process and testing is the way to go to have a truly usable UI, but that is not always possible in every environment. Just reading a book can allow a designer to avoid some of the most common snafus and provide them with a better framework for thinking about the design. Just following a set of rules, like Apples design guidelines, without even understanding them can provide consistency and take advantage of a lot of UI testing results that can be summarized into simple rules.
In my opinion, in a perfect world, users should be the first part of a design process. Ask them what they need to accomplish and then ask your developers what can be reasonably accomplished. Find the middle ground and then write the UI for doing it. Once this is accomplished, simultaneously test the UI and write the back end that supports it. Don't be afraid to expose limitations of your back-end software. It is often better to let users know what is really going on then to give them a perfect UI that does not reflect reality.
Hiring a UI guy is a good step, but if there is not a commitment to the UI from the beginning of the process, it will never have stellar results. Of course in the real world all of this varies greatly by user type, available resources, and how important the usability is to the project goals. Sometimes it is important to be able to say, "He runs security for all of a major ISP; he can figure it out already." rather than pressing for more money and time spent on polishing a UI.
I was right there with you up until your final example. When I read, "...I can, for example, edit text files far quicker in Vi than I can in Notepad." I thought to myself, "What?" Obviously a user can download vi, or VIM or some such variant or even a completely different text editor for Windows that will give them the same functionality, of the text editor, that you have. Now there are real benefits to running Linux over Windows. You could have said, "when editing text, I'm edit text more quickly using Vi, cat, |, regexps, and the other CLI tools available than I can with Windows. The integration of the command line and the GUI environment allows me to script and integrate my workflows. "
I agree with pretty much every principal you stated, but I do take exception to your example.
PDF may be open, but until it stops sucking I will continue to open a google cache version of a pdf before I will open one directly.
You seem to be confusing the crappy software you are running with a file format. Internet Explorer sucks at properly rendering HTML and is full of security holes. Is that the fault of HTML or the fault of MS who wrote the program and users who don't download a better browser?
such activities are a couple hundred years in the past.
Take a look at history. Christians are still trying to convert others and atrocities commit regularly throughout the history of the religion. You have the inquisition, colonization, collaboration in the holocaust, numerous wars with colonized lands, etc, etc. The christian religion is just as violent as the muslim religion and the Bible has more calls to violence than the Qur'an. If you insist on arguing that it is religion making the difference, why should the date at which it occurred matter in any case?
Only the last is any kind of point, and I'll note that the perpetrator's religion was all but certainly pure rather than tempered by secularism and its emphasis on reason.
His religion was "pure?" What they hell is that supposed to mean? All religions evolve over time and split and re-join in different ways. He considered himself a christian, doing the duties of a christian, and his only motivation was beliefs taught as part of religious dogma. It is not like it is an isolated incident either. Persecution of Gays, nudists, etc. by christians is not at all uncommon.
Whoever can make you believe impossibilities, can make you commit atrocities.
Nicely vague and inappropriate.
Here's a quote from me: Prejudice against members of a given religion is just as irrational as prejudice against members of anything else.
What you miss is the distinction between societies based on truth and fairness, and societies based on "honor". Truth is no defense in the latter, and is actively and even violently discourged if it doesn't look good.
You've been reading way too much propaganda man. Societies are all based upon the same thing, human nature. The people in Iran are no different than the people in Texas. If you put either of them in the same situation as the other, they would behave about the same. Obviously there are differences between the two religions, but not very significant ones. Both are used more as a framework for explaining actions decided by emotional motivations than they are a way to approach the world. Your arguments that religion is the fundamental difference motivating the actions of people in the middle east is irrational and unsupported. It sounds like the kind of propaganda you'd hear from Rush Limbaugh, or the like. Just rational enough that people who don't think about it won't notice it makes no sense; simple enough that they can remember it as a "talking point." Humans are not that simple.
Attempting to explain the relative activities of two groups based upon one aspect is all fine and proper, but neglecting to normalize all the other variables in the equation is simply too large of a mistake to ignore. Read up on the scientific process or even just on logical problem solving.
I give credit to a significant number of the muslim clerics for their selfless and brave stand for peace during recent events. I'd like to think religious community leaders in the US would behave as well if positions were reversed.
Sigh... once again... the first amendment does not protect your right to hear what you want, but other people's right to say what you don't want to hear. Censorship in any form is really touchy. Not hearing each side of an argument is rediculous[sic], especially when labeling one side "racist" by default.
I understand where you're coming from, but I think you missed the quotation marks surrounding censorship. Is it censorship if you don't include my advertisement in your autobiography? Google is not the government. Google does not have a monopoly and the government is not forcing anyone to use it. Thus, Google can include or exclude anything they want in their news aggregator or even in their general search. If they excluded these sites from their search, I'd be upset and they might lose my business. It would be deceptive and show a bias. Not including them in their aggregator, however, is (in my opinion) the right choice. They are aggregating news sites and trying to provide the best news. These sites were crappy opinion sites, with little or no facts, let alone facts that were current event related. To call this "censorship" is, to fundamentally misunderstand what censorship is.
By many of the posts I just read, I've got to believe that few of you have either read the Koran or have bothered to learn a little about the so-called "Prophet" Mohammed and Mohammedism history.
This is Slashdot, I'd say one in 100 people have read the Qur'aan, which puts them way above the average populace. What is your point?
Is criticizing Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin "hate speech"? I think not.
Anything designed to incite hate is "hate speech" although the term is very nebulous.
People, mostly those people of the fringe left, are calling anything that disturbs them as "hate speech".
Considering the term "fringe left" is your undefined classification and is not a moniker claimed by any group, your observation has the same validity as an aromatic turd. Those people are all promiscuous idiots. Whatever. Your prejudice and sloppy thinking is obvious.
I will not allow them to censor me.
Who do you think is trying to censor you? Do they have ray guns? Do they speak inside your head unless you wear a tinfoil hat? Can they smell your thoughts?
You were obviously posted here and of the sites Google chose not to aggregate, none have been taken down that I've seen. Not adding your link to my page is not censorship, it is freedom.
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See you can't stick with one topic, you're all over the place and your argument is incoherent.
Thanks for being so specific. I'm addressing the points you brought up.
We're not wiretapping everyone. I assume in your most recent post you're talking about the gathering of phone call records, which wouldn't use much bandwidth. I was referring to the bandwidth and storage costs of "wiretapping everyone". You're shifting the topic around to suit your point (as vague as it is).
I take it you did not bother to read this thread in context? What the hell did you think we were talking about? The topic was wiretaps without warrants. This includes and number of kinds of wiretaps from complete capture of voice, to relational databases of who talks to whom, to a system that combines the former with trageted instances of the latter.
Johnson and Nixon were both ratted out by the people doing the wire taps.
Yeah the taped lock in my imagination. As for King, the FBI made him aware of its activities anonymously while trying to influence him with recordings of his associates, not because the FBI came clean.
It's much harder to find who placed a bugging device than it is to trace these centralized wire taps, you are obviously wrong on that point.
Yeah, right. someone has to go to every location to place a physical bug. That means more manpower and more chance of discovery. It also means a lot less deniability. In the case of a centralized monitoring system it can always be some minor person who exceeded their authority and added a single entry. In the case of physical wiretaps that is much less believable since it is commanding significant manpower.
What the fuck does one have to do with the other? You're a computer guy AND a fucking NSA expert? This is wearing away at your credibility...
I never claimed to be either, only that I am knowledgeable about networks and network monitoring systems, both ours and our competitors and potential competitors (like Narus whose system is in place at AT&T).
When you say it is unobserved, you are making a blanket statement. What you really wanted to say was "why don't we get the courts involved?".
Did you sleep through your 3rd grade social studies class? Separation of powers means different branches of government have different powers. Checks and balances means each branch of government observes and can stop inappropriate actions of the others. The executive branch policing itself is the same as the anybody else policing themselves, not useful for a real problem. That is why they have to get permission from the judicial branch to perform these activities. And given the current state of the government only the most outrageous abuses would be denied anyway. No, refusing to get a warrant is only useful if they are hiding illegal or potentially illegal or incredibly unethical behavior.
Why don't we have civil rights attourneys follow around police officers to prevent the occasional white officers beating black guy down?
We do have a judicial check on the police, its called the courts, you know where the police have to bring people after they arrest them? And if there are abuses the courts can rebuke the police, order them arrested, or award fines. In this way the police are prevented from running wild. What makes you think the NSA should not be held to the same standard as required by the constitution?
Do we get the courts authorization before we go blow up some house in Afghanistan?
No, the legislative branch gets that right, as only they can declare war, which the executive branch then directs.
found a reliable source of news who has a little to say on it: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=4756403 .
Way to stay current. That is what was discovered as of about a year ago and is way
As far as "poisoning" the black list with a wrong target, who needs to? That would only be an overly complicated form of DDoS attack, which can be accomplished much more simply already. It's not something to worry about yet.
Actually, it would accomplish a little more. It would not only attack a target with a DDoS, but also may train DDoS filters to automatically remove DDoS from the same hosts. Thus, it makes the system ineffective against spam for a company from the same link.
That's exactly what we're doing here. It's the only strategy that's going to work. Bitching and moaning won't get you a clean mailbox. Taking spammers down will.
And you think this is going to work? First, there is little or nothing stopping abuse of this system. I can compromise a machine and send out piles of offensive spam for my competitor, and the system will then fire what amounts to a DoS attack at him. Second, This sort of an attack can be filtered out by ISPs now (on premium accounts) and that capability is trickling down and becoming more and more available. This sort of vigilante crap is a poorly thought out, not quite solution.
If you disagree with fighting fire with fire...
Umm, I usually prefer to use a fire extinguisher. Otherwise, my house burns down.
Lets see, a official government operating with rules and oversight within the law, versus vigilantes with no oversight that may or may not be worse than the problem they claim to be solving. I think I'll stick with the former.
If I tell a vigilante some guy beat up my mother they might go out and beat him up. Great. Unless, of course I made it up to get him beaten up. If I tell the police someone beat me up, they go and arrest him. Then, if there is enough evidence, they are convicted and punished. Great, unless there is not enough evidence. Which is better? Is it better that some criminals go free or that innocents are punished? The US legal system says the former, and I concur. It is a greater harm to punish the innocent than to not punish the guilty.
I'd say a good anti-adware program would probably advice[sic] you to uninstall 50% of the google pack programs anyway! Really, I don't want these "toolbars", screensavers, search helpers, no matter if they are from spyware companies or from google.
Anti-adware? I've never heard of such a thing. I've heard of anti-spyware, which could, conceivably be applied to some of this software in some configurations. Anyway, Google toolbar helps make up for some fundamental deficiencies of IE as compared to, well browsers whose developers care about their users. The search functionality adds indexed searching of your hard drive, a fundamental deficiency of Windows as compared to, well all the other OS's. Both of these are supposedly going to be fixed in Vista and are billed as major features. Anyway, is there anyone on Slashdot who doesn't blow away the pre-installed configuration on boxes they buy?
I'm no grammar nazi, but I must admit the point of your post disappeared from my consciousness in a *poof* when I tried to parse the world, "realisticness."
"Reality," "realism," "in reality," or just "really," would all be fine substitutes that don't divert others from your intended message.
I call BS. I have never, ever had an Exchange server fail to interoperate with any non-MS client via SMTP, POP3, or IMAP. It just works, plain and simple, and it is certainly "stable". Most of our Exchange 2003 boxes have 40-50GB databases, yet perform well. The only time Exchagne ever goes down is when we reboot for an OS-level security patch.
Do you allow the clients to use their mail from Exchange/POP/SMTP/IMAP and synch them all so that all the inboxes contain the same data or do you just let each user use one or the other? Because in the former case, several years back, I was unable to keep the server stable with complete re-installs and different hardware. I ended up installing two separate servers, one on Windows one on Linux and synching them. It was a huge pain. The sysadmin at another company I worked at, independently came to the same conclusion, and several other sysadmins have mentioned the same issue over the years. Where I work now, the sysadmin had the same problem, with regular outages until, without any input from me, engineering installed their own servers and only exchange was run on the "official" server. I'd say that is some pretty strong anecdotal evidence, unless you know some secret everyone else I know doesn't.
Even on the beautiful OS X, which that we (Slashdot communal mind) know is of course perfect ;), a search facility is very necessary when you have to deal with hundreds of menu options, or better yet, documents.
You misunderstand. I said the special casing with special graphics and adding preference panes as a file type was unnecessary, not that a search feature in general was unnecessary.
As far as OS X's organization of the control panel and system utilities: I have to say I don't particularly care for it...
Okay.
Again, Okay, but why do I care and what does this have to do with what we were talking about?
Also: Linux has typically lagged far behind the rest when it comes to desktop usability. This isn't so any more.
Linux has a few desktop usability wins (more and better virtual desktop options, for example) but I still don't think it is at the top of the heap yet. I'm not sure I'll ever willingly go back to the stone ages of a workstation without system services. I also, have become rather accustomed to expose, although that is less important to me. I also think OS X has a big win when it comes to application-is-a-folder and I wish Linux would adopt openstep and integrate it with their application managers and that Apple would adopt some of the application management features from Linux distros. Aside from that, Linux is still not there for software availability, which is a chicken and egg problem that hopefully can be solved by virtualization technologies in the near future.
FYI I used to hate and I mean HATE KDE. Now there is no other environment I'd rather work on. My desktop is laid out very similar in style to OS X but is far more usable. Nothing against OS X, I just don't think their environment was designed for power users, but more for uber-novices.
Heh. Well, I guess everyone is entitled to their opinion. Yours seems to differ from that of most of the dozens of coders and security experts here though, most of whom have adopted it. Almost every issue I've seen power users have with OS X, has turned out to be that they haven't learned how OS X does something and are trying to do it "the old way." The only exception I've seen is getting some of the low-level kernel modifications for jails or kernel level network monitoring functioning, and most of that has been just the learning curve and getting the tools rebuilt for the different platform. The trend I have seen is a steady migration to OS X as users discover how powerful it is and how many pain points it solves. I know one guy who went from OS X back to Linux. For me as an individual, looking at the available functionality, it is not much of a contest right now.
Really though, I never, ever, ever want to train one more application's spell checker to know that SNMP is not misspelled. I did it once already. Why the hell shouldn't my web browser, email client, IM, terminals, publishing app, calendar, graphic editor, text editors, etc. be able to use the same knowledge. It is all text, after all. Until Linux catches up on that front, it will be a lesser choice for a workstation (although it is a damn fine server).
No, that means you should tell the vendor, and then choose another car.
Or, I can just choose the car I think is best suited to my needs based on all the criteria including price, rather than judging solely based on one.
Wait a minute ! You gave no valid reason to use Windows or OS X. "most suited" ? What does that mean ?
Well, maybe the task I need to accomplish is to get a Framemaker file to my client. In that case, I'd say some version of Windows is my best bet. Or maybe, my job is (and it is) some graphics work (bitmap and vector), some publishing, a lot of writing, layout, some PHP, a little light perl and python, some training, and collaborating with a hundred coders on a variety of platforms. In that case, I need a very flexible OS that offers customization and both commercial and open source software for integrating and collaborating with various other people's workflows. Right now I'm using OS X for my workstation, occasionally Windows for compatibility tasks, and OpenBSD and Linux for servers. If you want to know the particular software or OS specific features I'm using that are not available anywhere else, I can make a list. The short list is basically: application availability, system services, functional indexed filesystem, and reasonable multitasking.
"Required by employer" ? Why ?
Because otherwise they don't give me money. Haven't you heard of the golden rule? He who has the gold makes the rules. Now I have my choice of OS right now for my workstation, but in at least one previous job I've been given a Windows workstation, without administrative privileges and told to get to work. Rules prohibited me from installing any software at all, let alone another OS. If you want to be paid, sometimes you have to follow whatever random rules are in place.
Anyway, that does not answer the question of why you should migrate to Windows Vista.
Nor did anyone ask that question. We were discussing why it is useful to read about it. As for why I might upgrade a machine to it, well new features. Fast user switching for domain logins will motivate some. The indexed filesystem will motivate others. There are a few useful features here and there along with all the crap and anti-features.
Which is exactly the goal of FOSS software. What, you really believed FOSS was there to promote a model ?
That is not what I said. Go re-read my post. I said your choice of software was motivated by promoting a model, not that that was the purpose of the model. The purpose of pretty much all software is to solve a problem or complete a task. Some of us recognize that being open source is a very useful feature for much software. A few people, however, are more concerned with that one feature than they are with judging the overall ability of the software to complete the task.
For example, when I choose software for a project I evaluate a lot of different criteria. Latex is open source and very flexible. It also relies upon a crapload of hacks to do common tasks (images, colored text). Also, the toolset is not very learnable. Framemaker has a much better toolset, more features, and is much more learnable, but it is nowhere near as flexible and is not only closed source but only supported on Windows. Which should I choose? The answer is, "it depends upon the project." In some cases one is the most suitable solution and in some cases the other.
The primary goal of the closed source model is to sell, not to get work done, communicate or create.
This is usually true, but not always. Not that it matters for the most part, since there is this thing called a capitalist market that does a good job (with some exceptions) of giving money to those who solve the problems customers want solved.
This is a very naive view, as a lot of (I would say "most") closed source software out there is so bad that you need reviews to know beforehand if they really do what they claim, and some FOSS even manage to be way
Praise Allah, or Vishnu, or someone! Thanks for the answer. I've asked several people and no one has known for certain and most thought it was not possible to add file types. Finally, a feature that is included that I actually care about.
As near as I can determine, there isn't one. I've tried all the usual suspects, and I can't stand any of them.
What platform are you looking for? What applications have you tried? From your list, I think Preview on OS X might fit the bill. It handles the colors for usability, searching built into the filesystem index even, and text selection is fine. As for keyboard-ability, it is fine for navigating and adding annotations, but I'm not sure about copying and pasting sections of the PDF itself without the mouse (as a viewer it has no insertion point or cursor, the same as HTML browsers).
Any use of PDF that does not involve paper is, as far as I'm concerned, a bad idea. Notably, PDF is an horrific choice for anything that needs to be viewed on screen.
You're missing the other common use, portable online publishing. I'd never e-mail someone an HTML file and a directory of accompanying images, and even if I did the layout could be inexact or misleading and the fonts wrong. Doc is proprietary, and ever-changing and has the same problems as you never know what program will be reading it or how it will be interpreted. Plus, unintentional meta-data is a security risk. Not enough people have OpenOffice. Images are too large and lack selectable text etc. What format would you recommend I e-mail to a client?
A nice use of the pervasive desktop search integrated into the explorer windows is in Control Panel. We're pretty good about changing control panel wildly between releases, and I never remember which menu your system environment variables or enabling remote desktop or changing it so that the "Explorer:Start Navigation" sound is (none). Now i just hit "start->control panel", click in the search box for something like "sound" and i get search-as-i-type results that are pretty accurate and take me right to the control panel i want to go to.
I've always felt this feature in OS X was wholly unnecessary, since the panels are well named and organized. I don't think I ever used it except to see the exceptionally pretty graphics they added just for it. I'll bet someone at MS saw those graphics and told them to copy it :) Still, given the ever changing control panels and large number of them in Windows, this does sound useful.
Since you have the search functionality in front of you, can you answer a question? First, what file types does it index content from? Second, is it a plug-in architecture. If I can't add open office files to the index, it is a non-starter.
Slashdot might not as well cover how good or bad Vista is because in Vista and OSX are closed source OSes. Users have no say in how good or bad a proprietary OS is. So we might as well not deal with it.
Umm, I have no say in how well made most of my car is, does that mean I should spend half of every day walking to and from work, and take several month long sabbaticals when I want to visit my family?
People are going to use both Windows and OS X because they are the tools most suited to them, or because they are required to by their employer. Given that fact, it is very useful to have more information on what to expect. Further, it is a good idea to see what each OS on the market is doing for reasons of compatibility and because they might have good ideas that can be adopted.
I Personally wish that people would stop consuming, and giving creed to closed OSes, and no, OSX is not an Open OS. I don't care how like BSD it is.
It all depends upon why you use a computer. If your purpose is to promote an open source model, then you've chosen wisely. For me, my purpose is to get work done, to communicate, to create. To me, being open source is a feature. It is nice, and useful, and provides security going forward, but it is by no means the only feature or the most important one.
If you don't want Slashdot to cover other OS's, you can just flip a few toggles and you won't see them anymore. Problem solved. For the rest of us, this is certainly useful and welcome news and discussion.
One of his complaints was the size, so a better reader would not help here. But a better generator might. For example pdflatex, and OpenOffice, are able to generate decently compact and high quality PDFs.
Part of the issue is he is not comparing apples to apples. He complains that PDF files, which provide exact positioning and vectors, are not as small as HTML or text, which provide only markup. He doesn't want to spend the time downloading that extra information, and in many cases he's right to claim it is not needed. The problem there, however, has nothing to do with the format and everything to do with it being inappropriately used. Of course, he's also losing a lot of the benefits of the format, like a single, portable file with the images and text all in one place, rather than a directory of mixed text and binary files.
For Windows apps, we use ps2pdf: we've defined a "printer" in Samba that pipes its input through ps2pdf.
For more complex PDFs, this is not an option. Doing something like that loses the TOC information, for example. That is not to say, however, that using the standard Adobe distiller is a good idea either. There are dozens of PDF generating engines, both stand alone and built into applications. Your point is well taken. His complaints are all about uses of the format he does not like, and poor tools that use the format.
While that's true with their desktop applications, Microsoft's server software is built on open standards like everyone else. They use TCP/IP, and XML everywhere. Also, MS's products are very programmable and If you know a bit of C++ and COM you can make the software work with almost anything.
Disclaimer: I haven't administrated and Windows servers for several years, just used them and listened to gripes
You must mean open standards like Exchange, Active Directory, FAT, .doc, .wmd and the like? They only use TCP'/IP because they were desperately playing catch-up on having internet access at all and because they haven't grabbed enough of the server market. They abuse XML more than use it, using patents and embedded binary data to describe structure to remove all of the main advantages, like interoperability and tool reuse. As for programming, everything is closed source and as such cannot be truly customized. Using MS products is an exercise in work-arounds and trying to jump over roadblocks they intentionally constructed to lock you into only their products.
Doing something as simple as running a mail server using MS tools becomes a huge pain in the ass. Try serving mail to Windows, Linux, and OS X clients and still allowing all users to use all the features available to that client. Then try implementing ClamAV to filter the viruses. You're better off skipping AD and Exchange and implementing all open source and standards. Otherwise you'll spend all your time fighting the fact that MS products won't play nice and can't remain stable serving POP, IMAP, and Exchange.
This is what I experienced and the same story I've heard from admin after admin who runs a mixed environment. How you got a different impression is my question. Have you ever administered a mixed environment with MS server products and other servers?
Yes, it leads to MS automatically gaining market share in their new products by exploting familiarity with old products, but that's not neccessarily "cheating" since other vendors can work a bit harder and make their software as easy to use as Microsoft's offerings.
It is cheating if they use secret or undocumented protocols and formats, which they do. It is also illegal if you're a monopoly, which is why MS was convicted of it in the EU.
My experinece[sic] with a lot of their ( very expensive) products is that they are difficult to install, use and develop with. As if they're following a "Making customers hate your product HOWTO". Microsoft's products are like 5 or 6 times more usable, always.
It has been my experience that if are already an all MS shop, MS products are less expensive, but only if you are an all MS shop and may the gods have mercy upon you if you ever need to integrate with other platforms or do anything beyond those limited capabilities because it will truly be a hellish experience.
The MS motto should be, "you're already locked in, so suck it up and pay a little more, cuz we're usually 'good enough.'"
50% of their sales would be gone tomorrow if there was such a thing as a free/open source sales guy or if people doing the purchasing evaluated free alternatives.
Also, the most common scenario is running PDFs within Acrobat viewer, loaded within Internet Explorer, running on top of Windows. So we have a rather bloated viewer, loading in a bloated browser, on an OS that fails at multitasking, especially for this type of sharing. On top of that, the browser and often Windows itself can become completely unresponsive while the viewer stalls, waiting for the whole document to download. The average user can find their machine locked until whatever file from whatever speed connection on the other end is done loading. It is sad, and gives PDF an undeservedly bad reputation.
Instead of $300B spent in Iraq we should have spent it here on fusion reactor research!!! Thats what happens when politicians are un-educated rubes.
You're confusing different goals for lack of education and sophistication. From certain politicians perspective the choice is:
Given the choice between advancing mankind, while making less money and losing political capital, or killing thousands, but making obscene amounts of money and political capital, I don't think we have to guess which way politicians will jump. It is not ignorance, but self interest without a whiff of ethics that made this choice.
When has this happened in the past?
Repeatedly. Take a look at the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, for example. He conducted unconstitutional and illegal wiretaps of numerous political figures including Martin Luthor King Jr. and several members of the republican party. I don't think I need to go into Nixon's abuses, do I?
My point was that if someone wants to break the law and wiretap someone, the easiest way is to go to their house and plug a listening device into their POTS terminal.
That is the easiest way to tap one person's phone. It is not the safest way though, as hiring a detective or sending an agent can get them caught and it is hard to make up national security excuses the public will buy. If, however, you want to spy on all of your political rivals and you want to be sure you can keep it from ever going to court, using a centralized tap is much, much easier and safer.
I'm very informed on the subject, you are stretching and bending the truth every which way, completely ignoring some aspects. Do you even realize how much storage and processing it would take to analyze EVERY conversation connected to the United States?
I work at a company that builds devices that do broad scale monitoring of internet traffic for major ISPs. Yes, I know what it takes to analyze large amounts of voice traffic and apply regular expressions. For example, I know how easy it would be to add a list of congress person's and political rivals' phone numbers to the "listen to list" for spot checking by the NSA, or simply archiving (which is then copied for some unknown persons to listen through). The point is, even without listening to anything, you can build valuable data for later analysis. Think, "any congress number to any medical facility - flag: for archive." How many conversations with medical personal will yield something usable (maybe 1 in 10?).
Now let me ask you. What valid reason is there for keeping this monitoring unobserved? Is negative 48 hours really such a short amount of time to get a wiretap? I mean if it really is a terrorist phone call we need to monitor, why the hell shouldn't the judicial system be informed and asked for approval within 48 hours? If they aren't misusing this, there is no reason to avoid oversight.
The storage alone would amass so quickly... not to mention the bandwidth required to re-transmit every conversation to one central database. I've heard this said before.
Storage for a moving window of data is not a problem these days. The bandwidth is a tap off of the routers in the core. All this is a solved problem with off-the-shelf technology. Just use google already and read the sales brochures.
If you want to call it an invasion of privacy, then blame the phone company. They've been keeping a log of your phone calls for decades.
The phone company is not "the greatest threat to a free people." So long as the government does not have it, we are safe from abuse by those who would have power over us. I take it you slept through your history classes and the founding principals of our nation?
The way I see it the United States is fighting this threat on every front, and you have nothing but criticism, it's as if you just want everything to fail miserably (very possible, given your extreme political bias).
What threat? How is this in any way mitigating any threat? All the security put in place is useless and mostly unneeded. More people die every day in car crashes than have been killed by terrorists since the history of the US. More people drown in buckets. It is more likely that you will be struck by lightening, survive, get on a plane which crashes, survive that, and then die in a car accident than it is you will be killed by terrorists. Where is the the war on lightening, planes, and cars? Terrorists are a convenient boogeyman to cow the cowardly. You want to stop terrorists, start free firearm training for all US citizens. Subsidize handgun sales. Make sure eve
Restates, I disagree that the user is a better UI designer, but instead, they can help developers get outside their normal "deep in the guts" perspective.
Software is designed with a purpose. Users obtain software and try to use it to solve a task. While no single user should be taken as the epitome of all users, you have to remember the point of the software. In general a user-centered approach is ideal and the UI should have some disconnect from the underlying code. Ask users what they need to do to solve a problem. Then design a UI to do it. Then write the code to make the UI work.
The problem is, most open source, and even closed source developers develop for themselves first. This means, they get the code working, before they code the UI. The problem with this is, by the time you have the code working, you've biased yourself as a user. As a result, most UI designs made after the underlying code reflect the code's perspective more strongly than the things the user wants to accomplish.
I intensely dislike the assumption that developers are "bad at UI development". Most are actually pretty good at identifying poor designs and making them better.
I agree, mostly. Developers are just as good at UI design as anyone else, provided they do it before they write the underlying code and don't have making the underlying code easier in mind when they do it. This, of course, almost never happens, hence the reputation.
First mistake... Thinking that reading a book and using the HCI (Human Computer Interface) buzzword will improve the user experience of your software.
I disagree. There is definitely low-hanging fruit for usability improvement. Certainly procedural changes in the design process and testing is the way to go to have a truly usable UI, but that is not always possible in every environment. Just reading a book can allow a designer to avoid some of the most common snafus and provide them with a better framework for thinking about the design. Just following a set of rules, like Apples design guidelines, without even understanding them can provide consistency and take advantage of a lot of UI testing results that can be summarized into simple rules.
In my opinion, in a perfect world, users should be the first part of a design process. Ask them what they need to accomplish and then ask your developers what can be reasonably accomplished. Find the middle ground and then write the UI for doing it. Once this is accomplished, simultaneously test the UI and write the back end that supports it. Don't be afraid to expose limitations of your back-end software. It is often better to let users know what is really going on then to give them a perfect UI that does not reflect reality.
Hiring a UI guy is a good step, but if there is not a commitment to the UI from the beginning of the process, it will never have stellar results. Of course in the real world all of this varies greatly by user type, available resources, and how important the usability is to the project goals. Sometimes it is important to be able to say, "He runs security for all of a major ISP; he can figure it out already." rather than pressing for more money and time spent on polishing a UI.
I was right there with you up until your final example. When I read, "...I can, for example, edit text files far quicker in Vi than I can in Notepad." I thought to myself, "What?" Obviously a user can download vi, or VIM or some such variant or even a completely different text editor for Windows that will give them the same functionality, of the text editor, that you have. Now there are real benefits to running Linux over Windows. You could have said, "when editing text, I'm edit text more quickly using Vi, cat, |, regexps, and the other CLI tools available than I can with Windows. The integration of the command line and the GUI environment allows me to script and integrate my workflows. "
I agree with pretty much every principal you stated, but I do take exception to your example.
PDF may be open, but until it stops sucking I will continue to open a google cache version of a pdf before I will open one directly.
You seem to be confusing the crappy software you are running with a file format. Internet Explorer sucks at properly rendering HTML and is full of security holes. Is that the fault of HTML or the fault of MS who wrote the program and users who don't download a better browser?
Download a decent PDF reader already.
such activities are a couple hundred years in the past.
Take a look at history. Christians are still trying to convert others and atrocities commit regularly throughout the history of the religion. You have the inquisition, colonization, collaboration in the holocaust, numerous wars with colonized lands, etc, etc. The christian religion is just as violent as the muslim religion and the Bible has more calls to violence than the Qur'an. If you insist on arguing that it is religion making the difference, why should the date at which it occurred matter in any case?
Only the last is any kind of point, and I'll note that the perpetrator's religion was all but certainly pure rather than tempered by secularism and its emphasis on reason.
His religion was "pure?" What they hell is that supposed to mean? All religions evolve over time and split and re-join in different ways. He considered himself a christian, doing the duties of a christian, and his only motivation was beliefs taught as part of religious dogma. It is not like it is an isolated incident either. Persecution of Gays, nudists, etc. by christians is not at all uncommon.
Whoever can make you believe impossibilities, can make you commit atrocities.
Nicely vague and inappropriate.
Here's a quote from me: Prejudice against members of a given religion is just as irrational as prejudice against members of anything else.
What you miss is the distinction between societies based on truth and fairness, and societies based on "honor". Truth is no defense in the latter, and is actively and even violently discourged if it doesn't look good.
You've been reading way too much propaganda man. Societies are all based upon the same thing, human nature. The people in Iran are no different than the people in Texas. If you put either of them in the same situation as the other, they would behave about the same. Obviously there are differences between the two religions, but not very significant ones. Both are used more as a framework for explaining actions decided by emotional motivations than they are a way to approach the world. Your arguments that religion is the fundamental difference motivating the actions of people in the middle east is irrational and unsupported. It sounds like the kind of propaganda you'd hear from Rush Limbaugh, or the like. Just rational enough that people who don't think about it won't notice it makes no sense; simple enough that they can remember it as a "talking point." Humans are not that simple.
Attempting to explain the relative activities of two groups based upon one aspect is all fine and proper, but neglecting to normalize all the other variables in the equation is simply too large of a mistake to ignore. Read up on the scientific process or even just on logical problem solving.
I give credit to a significant number of the muslim clerics for their selfless and brave stand for peace during recent events. I'd like to think religious community leaders in the US would behave as well if positions were reversed.
Sigh... once again... the first amendment does not protect your right to hear what you want, but other people's right to say what you don't want to hear. Censorship in any form is really touchy. Not hearing each side of an argument is rediculous[sic], especially when labeling one side "racist" by default.
I understand where you're coming from, but I think you missed the quotation marks surrounding censorship. Is it censorship if you don't include my advertisement in your autobiography? Google is not the government. Google does not have a monopoly and the government is not forcing anyone to use it. Thus, Google can include or exclude anything they want in their news aggregator or even in their general search. If they excluded these sites from their search, I'd be upset and they might lose my business. It would be deceptive and show a bias. Not including them in their aggregator, however, is (in my opinion) the right choice. They are aggregating news sites and trying to provide the best news. These sites were crappy opinion sites, with little or no facts, let alone facts that were current event related. To call this "censorship" is, to fundamentally misunderstand what censorship is.
By many of the posts I just read, I've got to believe that few of you have either read the Koran or have bothered to learn a little about the so-called "Prophet" Mohammed and Mohammedism history.
This is Slashdot, I'd say one in 100 people have read the Qur'aan, which puts them way above the average populace. What is your point?
Is criticizing Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin "hate speech"? I think not.
Anything designed to incite hate is "hate speech" although the term is very nebulous.
People, mostly those people of the fringe left, are calling anything that disturbs them as "hate speech".
Considering the term "fringe left" is your undefined classification and is not a moniker claimed by any group, your observation has the same validity as an aromatic turd. Those people are all promiscuous idiots. Whatever. Your prejudice and sloppy thinking is obvious.
I will not allow them to censor me.
Who do you think is trying to censor you? Do they have ray guns? Do they speak inside your head unless you wear a tinfoil hat? Can they smell your thoughts?
You were obviously posted here and of the sites Google chose not to aggregate, none have been taken down that I've seen. Not adding your link to my page is not censorship, it is freedom.