it is really cool. If you need an electron microscope to see it, you are approaching that thousand angels on the head of a pin thing. Andy Warhol would be proud of the toilet too:)
Actually lots of companies do that and they don't say 'it's your problem' because they normally find some fscked up way to say that you have voided the warranty and they'd be glad to help you for 25 dollars per minute telephone support.
Speaking of exploded: I don't think there are very many return policies for any dynamite that you have purchased, plus, if you have trouble with it you normally don't complain much past that one sentence: "Ohhh shBOOOM..........."
I have always loved this argument for one simple reason. If you name and itemize the last 20 times something went wrong at your company, how many of them were something the vendor did wrong, or something the vendor had to fix for you? How many were end user issues, networking configuration nightmares of your own creation, configuration management that someone at your company messed up? Misapplied patches or patches you 'forgot' to apply?
In truth, support from the vendor does little for you UNLESS the system they supply is so fscking locked up that you can't do anything with it in the first place, and are FORCED to call for help because you can't do anything with it.
Where I work, we are slowly writing code to work around 'no longer supported' binary processes. If there is no 'community support' we just learn how to do it ourselves or write code we can understand to take its place.
When you want to point that finger of blame it still will take 4hours minimum to get the pointing done. In that time I will generally have already fixed the problem and be working the code to avoid any such occurance in the future.
In a word: yes. I suspect this is as much to do with the lack of peers as anything in the program itself. I think that if enough of us are using it, it will be much better as more peers are added.
I like the concept of this because it is about information being free; free of inspection by those who would search your home or ask for travel papers, and do so without legal authority or permission. Perhaps it might be thought of as Freedomnet. Sharing pics with the family, or organizing a group, say like anonymous via freenet helps to ensure the integrity of your communications and freedom from inspection of the same.
Sure, there will be nefarious groups and individuals who use it but there has been nothing to stop them from using something like it in the past either. In fact, given a bit of time, I can think of probably 100 different secure methods for those pesky terrorists to send coded messages over public infrastructure without needing engineers to accomplish it. So to say this is only for terrorists is defeatist and ignorant of the facts, and alarmist as well.
While I agree with you on the point of both being exploited, having used both I have to say that GNU/Linux (Ubuntu) is far more securely set up right out of the box than any Windows installation. period.
There is nothing in the Windows world that ever gave me the joy that I experienced last night: I logged into my Ubuntu laptop and up popped a window for updates. It said there is a new version of Ubuntu ready and asked if I would like to upgrade. Sure, it took all night to upgrade, but it was FREE! All I had to give was my consent.
This morning I had a cup of coffee, scanned the news, and checked out Ubuntu 8.04 briefly. This is an experience that Windows users will never have. Specifically I mean free upgrades, improvements, patches (free for both-ish, but you never know exactly why or what MS is patching) and security improvements. The sense that I get from GNU/Linux and F/OSS is that they are working to HELP me, not the other way around.
Point of info: I donated to Fedora, Ubuntu, DSL, Puppy, OOo, Gimp, ClamAV, and will probably donate to others this year if I find I'm using their code regularly. So when I say free I don't mean I'm freeloading. I truly feel that I'm getting damned good value for the money I donated.
Eventually, there will be an exploit but in the meantime I'm not paying someone to put that exploit on my machine for them, I'm donating money to pay for the hard work that went into creating world class software that I use. There is quite a difference between the two cultures, even if both will be attacked at some point.
Back on topic, the F/OSS world is opening up the information age to many people who would not otherwise be privy to it. That means an entire class of people are giving this to them, sharing it with them. RMS should be proud of what he has promoted and done.
These press releases would also state how many millions of dollars these contracts are worth to the company supplying the products.
What is even better about this is that not only is there no dollar value in the story to make it worth hearing, but millions and millions of people will be using F/OSS software rather than beginning a life of paying for the privilege of 'using' software.
So the story is about success and growth rather than money and contracts. A positive story. Sure, it's good for Dell monetarily, and Ubuntu too but it's not all about money, profit, and contracts. Just reading it make me feel the world is a bit more free.
(cynicism on) How long before we see stories about MS doing deals to counteract these successes? (cynicism off)
I think that it is time for the Internet (read anonymous) to start striking back at those world leaders that wish to silence information.
Yes, I'm American and I think the Bush Administration is one of the likely targets of such an effort.
We have the Internet, it is free, information flows around the globe. For all the faults that might bring it has been hailed as an equalizer and liberator of peoples all over the globe. Freedom of information is the basis of the good inside an OLPC.
FTFA:
Print (and television) media in Russia is already under either official or unofficial government control, leaving the Internet as the last frontier free of government scrutiny. "It is difficult to find anyone who is not against extremism but it depends on how the law is used," Center of Journalism in Extreme Situations director Oleg Panfilov told the AFP in response to the news. Panfilov noted that the government has used the law "selectively" in the past, but that it's still worrisome when the government tries to expand the law into new areas. Yes, we are all against extremism and extremists, but very few of us agree on what exactly those are. Such subjective terms should never be allowed to be enacted as laws. By allowed, I mean that free peoples should protest such laws, even if they are not in the country where it is enacted.
In times past it was said that Monarchy's that do not hang together will 'hang' separately. I think that time has not changed this at all, and many of the so called republics are merely facades for the ruling classes to hide behind.
Wow, that sounded a bit socialist or something, but I truly think that the Internet has the power to change things for the better. If the Russian people are unable to, perhaps we outside of Russia should make our voices known and heard.
In the US, yes there are enormous costs associated with bringing a pharmaceutical product to market. I like you analogy but it leaves a bit of a bad taste in the mouth. All that R&D, FDA, distribution etc. is supposed to free the end user of failures, side effects, and other harmful things. Looking at the environment that MS has created for malicious software I'd say the FDA needs to take Windows off the shelf, and give their ok on a class action law suit.
If you find the original letter that Bill wrote to the homebrew computer club (I think that's the name) about software and costs you'll find that charging for software, even then, was something of a character flaw for Bill.
While I agree with the sentiment of your post, I have to say that doing things (especially large projects) in a modular fashion does make sense.
Seen from a different view, USB 2 and USB 1 standards are not incompatible, and worked well. There are devices that are not USB2 compliant, but work with systems that are.
In terms like that, if MS wants to tell the world that they will only be compliant with USB1, let them. While the rest of the world works and becomes compliant with version 2. The real problems would only happen, as stated above, if MS was given responsibility for development of the standards.
I personally don't care if MS wants to be non-compliant with a new standard. At this point in time I'm willing to bet that the rest of the world will simply march on without them, as it looks like they will do with ODF.
Don't worry, in terms of computing the OLPC users will not be marching anywhere for quite some time. They'll have to wait till they grow up a bit and go to college where real computers are running real OS's. OLPC is a great idea but it remains to be seen what value MS will bring to the table for that project.
If the community as a whole wants to break the standard into modules that work without or with the other modules at several revisions, ok. If only MS wants that.... NOT ok, but let MS be non-compliant all they want.
Users are beginning to tire of MS's antics, this would just be one more that would cause them headaches that they can solve for free.
You are probably on to something here. I'm betting spam delivery is about to get 1000s of % better very soon. Either that or a CNN DDoS attack from the EU sponsored by particleH4X0R5smashers....
You pick the source you want to read about the story. Perhaps you might stop to think that not all the bad or flippant comments about MS are posted by people simply out to bash MS. Some of them are deserved and well earned comments.
This is probably the most compelling reason to avoid it until after SP3 or equivalent. With Vista soaring to the top of the OS charts, IE and Office losing ground to competitors... well, things don't look so good for MS. Add the Yahoo! games, impending class action Vista Ready lawsuits, all they need now is one disgruntled employee to blow the whistle on nefarious dealings with the NSA regarding your web surfing habits and we can finally begin to smell the rot on the corpse that is MS.
IANAL nor a veteran of synch software coding but I'm willing to bet that MS will NOT support Mac or Linux with this product. I also do not beleive that they will support end users who lose their data. In fact, I'm willing to bet that there is less support from MS than F/OSS for lost data, so the price comparison really hurts the product. Sure, it will get used by default in places where they are too entrenched to move away from MS, or think they are.
The people that they need to sell this to first have to be taught WHY they need it. I don't see a very big splash being made with this product.... that is unless Sony gets involved, in which case the splash will be followed by a flush....
Seagate, which claims to be the first company to ship a billion drives, says all those drives amounted to 79 million terabytes of capacity, enough for 158 billion hours of digital video or 1.2 trillion hours of MP3 songs." -OR- 14.73 TBytes of failed backups!
the news announcement of the purchase? Yep, it was the sound of a flushing toilet (American Standard if I heard it right). Why a flushing toilet? Because Sony just flushed another part of the Internet multimedia experience down the shitter. All we can do now is watch it slowly slide into oblivion.
These days, even though Sony is huge and not all parts or employees are particularly evil, I don't think I'd even use their batteries as a paperweight on my desk.
I used it because I think it is valid. If you force people to register for a chance to win something it is quite often that those not cognizant of the dangers will use their common login credentials which they use for everything, including work, their bank account, their mortgage etc. A malicious piece of code need only scan briefly for details regarding banks visited etc. to try to use those login credentials elsewhere.
The number might not be as high as the 20+% quoted, but then even if it is only 3% it is enough for someone to make money off of. 3% of 200 million is 6 million sets of login credentials. Even if only 25% of those are usable, it can be a lot of money.
Now, let the phisher sell those on to someone else and then someone else (a valid way to make money from such information)... soon, there are 15 groups trying to hack into your system... with a valid login! Forget dictionary attacks, if they have valid logins for your network, All your hard drives are belong to h4x0r5.
You know that it takes only on person with the right information to get into a system and cause havoc. If you are giving away most of what they need to get in, small security measures are not much of deterrent.
The 3-letter people will tell you that it takes ONLY one spy to ruin a lot of good things. In this case, they are right.
I understand your concerns over this. There is a very fine line between privacy violations and getting just enough data about user's activities to have useful data for developing other things that are immensely useful.
When collected, if the data is stripped of any identifying information I believe that there are hundreds of useful ways to use that data. Google trends is one of those ways. So I teeter on the fence about Google's treatment of personally identifying information. I hope that the 'don't be evil' motto runs deep enough through the company that they actually don't, yet still give the rest of the world such useful tools. The Internet is fucking awesome.
Think of it, just 20 years ago it would be very hard to find some information that is freely available in your home now, never mind how difficult it would have been to find out the number of other users who had viewed that material in a given time period.
NOTE: The word 'useful' was not harmed in the making of this post.
I'm sure NYCL can give a better answer, but there has been some use of the 5th amendment right that protects you from having to incriminate yourself to legally allow you to not give them the password, or divulge where files are on your laptop.
My advice is bury it, encrypt it. Use obscurity in as much as you have several partitions encrypted, and when/if forced by courts to give up the password, give them the password to only one partition and counter sue for loss of data if you can. I forget what movie it was in but the bad guy said "always be guilty of a lesser crime" to avoid doing hard time.
Yep put your data in encrypted partition ABC, then a bunch of scientology and/b/ stuff in another encrypted partition xyz. If you are forced to surrender a password, give them only the password for partition xyz. Lie and tell them that is the only password.
Well, actually Mr AC, it doesn't have to be skewed against MS. As it happens, it is nearly always skewed against MS because historically speaking, MS has always been screwing other people. Did your grandma ever tell you that story about the little boy who cried wolf too much?
MS has extinguished competitors, acted unethically for long enough that people don't trust MS to have done anything right or correctly. That's normal people./. users hate MS even more because it's fun, and well... MS earned it.
Bad news always travels farther and faster than good news. MS would have to do a lot of good things to reverse their reputation. So that's how it is. No matter what the story is actually about, if it involves MS it will be expected that MS has fucked up again somehow.
Slashdot Mirror
it is really cool. If you need an electron microscope to see it, you are approaching that thousand angels on the head of a pin thing. Andy Warhol would be proud of the toilet too :)
Actually lots of companies do that and they don't say 'it's your problem' because they normally find some fscked up way to say that you have voided the warranty and they'd be glad to help you for 25 dollars per minute telephone support.
Speaking of exploded: I don't think there are very many return policies for any dynamite that you have purchased, plus, if you have trouble with it you normally don't complain much past that one sentence: "Ohhh shBOOOM..........."
I have always loved this argument for one simple reason. If you name and itemize the last 20 times something went wrong at your company, how many of them were something the vendor did wrong, or something the vendor had to fix for you? How many were end user issues, networking configuration nightmares of your own creation, configuration management that someone at your company messed up? Misapplied patches or patches you 'forgot' to apply?
In truth, support from the vendor does little for you UNLESS the system they supply is so fscking locked up that you can't do anything with it in the first place, and are FORCED to call for help because you can't do anything with it.
Where I work, we are slowly writing code to work around 'no longer supported' binary processes. If there is no 'community support' we just learn how to do it ourselves or write code we can understand to take its place.
When you want to point that finger of blame it still will take 4hours minimum to get the pointing done. In that time I will generally have already fixed the problem and be working the code to avoid any such occurance in the future.
that we can't get today's spammers to manually type in every address too. That might cut down on spam a bit.
In a word: yes. I suspect this is as much to do with the lack of peers as anything in the program itself. I think that if enough of us are using it, it will be much better as more peers are added.
I like the concept of this because it is about information being free; free of inspection by those who would search your home or ask for travel papers, and do so without legal authority or permission. Perhaps it might be thought of as Freedomnet. Sharing pics with the family, or organizing a group, say like anonymous via freenet helps to ensure the integrity of your communications and freedom from inspection of the same.
Sure, there will be nefarious groups and individuals who use it but there has been nothing to stop them from using something like it in the past either. In fact, given a bit of time, I can think of probably 100 different secure methods for those pesky terrorists to send coded messages over public infrastructure without needing engineers to accomplish it. So to say this is only for terrorists is defeatist and ignorant of the facts, and alarmist as well.
While I agree with you on the point of both being exploited, having used both I have to say that GNU/Linux (Ubuntu) is far more securely set up right out of the box than any Windows installation. period.
There is nothing in the Windows world that ever gave me the joy that I experienced last night: I logged into my Ubuntu laptop and up popped a window for updates. It said there is a new version of Ubuntu ready and asked if I would like to upgrade. Sure, it took all night to upgrade, but it was FREE! All I had to give was my consent.
This morning I had a cup of coffee, scanned the news, and checked out Ubuntu 8.04 briefly. This is an experience that Windows users will never have. Specifically I mean free upgrades, improvements, patches (free for both-ish, but you never know exactly why or what MS is patching) and security improvements. The sense that I get from GNU/Linux and F/OSS is that they are working to HELP me, not the other way around.
Point of info: I donated to Fedora, Ubuntu, DSL, Puppy, OOo, Gimp, ClamAV, and will probably donate to others this year if I find I'm using their code regularly. So when I say free I don't mean I'm freeloading. I truly feel that I'm getting damned good value for the money I donated.
Eventually, there will be an exploit but in the meantime I'm not paying someone to put that exploit on my machine for them, I'm donating money to pay for the hard work that went into creating world class software that I use. There is quite a difference between the two cultures, even if both will be attacked at some point.
Back on topic, the F/OSS world is opening up the information age to many people who would not otherwise be privy to it. That means an entire class of people are giving this to them, sharing it with them. RMS should be proud of what he has promoted and done.
These press releases would also state how many millions of dollars these contracts are worth to the company supplying the products.
What is even better about this is that not only is there no dollar value in the story to make it worth hearing, but millions and millions of people will be using F/OSS software rather than beginning a life of paying for the privilege of 'using' software.
So the story is about success and growth rather than money and contracts. A positive story. Sure, it's good for Dell monetarily, and Ubuntu too but it's not all about money, profit, and contracts. Just reading it make me feel the world is a bit more free.
(cynicism on) How long before we see stories about MS doing deals to counteract these successes? (cynicism off)
holy flying c-notes batman.... The financial institutions and creditors ARE the criminals. How the hell is that supposed to work?
Thanks for that, it's a good idea... a great idea. Money always talks.
I'm working with another person on brainstorming ways to push democratic 'public opinion' onto the politicians, and this fits in with that goal.
Thanks again.
Yes, I'm American and I think the Bush Administration is one of the likely targets of such an effort.
We have the Internet, it is free, information flows around the globe. For all the faults that might bring it has been hailed as an equalizer and liberator of peoples all over the globe. Freedom of information is the basis of the good inside an OLPC.
FTFA: Print (and television) media in Russia is already under either official or unofficial government control, leaving the Internet as the last frontier free of government scrutiny. "It is difficult to find anyone who is not against extremism but it depends on how the law is used," Center of Journalism in Extreme Situations director Oleg Panfilov told the AFP in response to the news. Panfilov noted that the government has used the law "selectively" in the past, but that it's still worrisome when the government tries to expand the law into new areas. Yes, we are all against extremism and extremists, but very few of us agree on what exactly those are. Such subjective terms should never be allowed to be enacted as laws. By allowed, I mean that free peoples should protest such laws, even if they are not in the country where it is enacted.
In times past it was said that Monarchy's that do not hang together will 'hang' separately. I think that time has not changed this at all, and many of the so called republics are merely facades for the ruling classes to hide behind.
Wow, that sounded a bit socialist or something, but I truly think that the Internet has the power to change things for the better. If the Russian people are unable to, perhaps we outside of Russia should make our voices known and heard.
Does anyone have any ideas?
I don't know about that... I can predict errors in some limited domains:
My wife starting the weed whacker... error inbound!
My daughter drinking... error inbound!
I can predict those types of errors well in advance of seconds... geez, that's not rocket science at all.
Not sure how MS is going to help them.
Flying chairs do not normally penetrate the right objects/areas.
And if a MS buyout of Yahoo! would help there is no explanation for the utter failure of Microsoft's online businesses thus far.
I hope you get high positive mod points for this. I agree completely.
In the US, yes there are enormous costs associated with bringing a pharmaceutical product to market. I like you analogy but it leaves a bit of a bad taste in the mouth. All that R&D, FDA, distribution etc. is supposed to free the end user of failures, side effects, and other harmful things. Looking at the environment that MS has created for malicious software I'd say the FDA needs to take Windows off the shelf, and give their ok on a class action law suit.
If you find the original letter that Bill wrote to the homebrew computer club (I think that's the name) about software and costs you'll find that charging for software, even then, was something of a character flaw for Bill.
Did Gates just compare Windows to drugs? huh?
So all the jokes about MS giving software to schools cheaply like a drug dealer are right?
After that, I can't think straight....
While I agree with the sentiment of your post, I have to say that doing things (especially large projects) in a modular fashion does make sense.
Seen from a different view, USB 2 and USB 1 standards are not incompatible, and worked well. There are devices that are not USB2 compliant, but work with systems that are.
In terms like that, if MS wants to tell the world that they will only be compliant with USB1, let them. While the rest of the world works and becomes compliant with version 2. The real problems would only happen, as stated above, if MS was given responsibility for development of the standards.
I personally don't care if MS wants to be non-compliant with a new standard. At this point in time I'm willing to bet that the rest of the world will simply march on without them, as it looks like they will do with ODF.
Don't worry, in terms of computing the OLPC users will not be marching anywhere for quite some time. They'll have to wait till they grow up a bit and go to college where real computers are running real OS's. OLPC is a great idea but it remains to be seen what value MS will bring to the table for that project.
If the community as a whole wants to break the standard into modules that work without or with the other modules at several revisions, ok. If only MS wants that.... NOT ok, but let MS be non-compliant all they want.
Users are beginning to tire of MS's antics, this would just be one more that would cause them headaches that they can solve for free.
You are probably on to something here. I'm betting spam delivery is about to get 1000s of % better very soon. Either that or a CNN DDoS attack from the EU sponsored by particleH4X0R5smashers....
tap tap tap... hello McFly!
When MS threatened a unfriendly buyout of Yahoo! is what I'm referring to as Yahoo! Games.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&output=googleabout&btnG=Search+our+site&q=yahoo%20buyout%20microsoft
You pick the source you want to read about the story. Perhaps you might stop to think that not all the bad or flippant comments about MS are posted by people simply out to bash MS. Some of them are deserved and well earned comments.
This is probably the most compelling reason to avoid it until after SP3 or equivalent. With Vista soaring to the top of the OS charts, IE and Office losing ground to competitors... well, things don't look so good for MS. Add the Yahoo! games, impending class action Vista Ready lawsuits, all they need now is one disgruntled employee to blow the whistle on nefarious dealings with the NSA regarding your web surfing habits and we can finally begin to smell the rot on the corpse that is MS.
IANAL nor a veteran of synch software coding but I'm willing to bet that MS will NOT support Mac or Linux with this product. I also do not beleive that they will support end users who lose their data. In fact, I'm willing to bet that there is less support from MS than F/OSS for lost data, so the price comparison really hurts the product. Sure, it will get used by default in places where they are too entrenched to move away from MS, or think they are.
The people that they need to sell this to first have to be taught WHY they need it. I don't see a very big splash being made with this product.... that is unless Sony gets involved, in which case the splash will be followed by a flush....
the news announcement of the purchase? Yep, it was the sound of a flushing toilet (American Standard if I heard it right). Why a flushing toilet? Because Sony just flushed another part of the Internet multimedia experience down the shitter. All we can do now is watch it slowly slide into oblivion.
These days, even though Sony is huge and not all parts or employees are particularly evil, I don't think I'd even use their batteries as a paperweight on my desk.
I used it because I think it is valid. If you force people to register for a chance to win something it is quite often that those not cognizant of the dangers will use their common login credentials which they use for everything, including work, their bank account, their mortgage etc. A malicious piece of code need only scan briefly for details regarding banks visited etc. to try to use those login credentials elsewhere.
... soon, there are 15 groups trying to hack into your system... with a valid login! Forget dictionary attacks, if they have valid logins for your network, All your hard drives are belong to h4x0r5.
The number might not be as high as the 20+% quoted, but then even if it is only 3% it is enough for someone to make money off of. 3% of 200 million is 6 million sets of login credentials. Even if only 25% of those are usable, it can be a lot of money.
Now, let the phisher sell those on to someone else and then someone else (a valid way to make money from such information)
You know that it takes only on person with the right information to get into a system and cause havoc. If you are giving away most of what they need to get in, small security measures are not much of deterrent.
The 3-letter people will tell you that it takes ONLY one spy to ruin a lot of good things. In this case, they are right.
I understand your concerns over this. There is a very fine line between privacy violations and getting just enough data about user's activities to have useful data for developing other things that are immensely useful.
When collected, if the data is stripped of any identifying information I believe that there are hundreds of useful ways to use that data. Google trends is one of those ways. So I teeter on the fence about Google's treatment of personally identifying information. I hope that the 'don't be evil' motto runs deep enough through the company that they actually don't, yet still give the rest of the world such useful tools. The Internet is fucking awesome.
Think of it, just 20 years ago it would be very hard to find some information that is freely available in your home now, never mind how difficult it would have been to find out the number of other users who had viewed that material in a given time period.
NOTE: The word 'useful' was not harmed in the making of this post.
I'm sure NYCL can give a better answer, but there has been some use of the 5th amendment right that protects you from having to incriminate yourself to legally allow you to not give them the password, or divulge where files are on your laptop.
/b/ stuff in another encrypted partition xyz. If you are forced to surrender a password, give them only the password for partition xyz. Lie and tell them that is the only password.
My advice is bury it, encrypt it. Use obscurity in as much as you have several partitions encrypted, and when/if forced by courts to give up the password, give them the password to only one partition and counter sue for loss of data if you can. I forget what movie it was in but the bad guy said "always be guilty of a lesser crime" to avoid doing hard time.
Yep put your data in encrypted partition ABC, then a bunch of scientology and
Well, actually Mr AC, it doesn't have to be skewed against MS. As it happens, it is nearly always skewed against MS because historically speaking, MS has always been screwing other people. Did your grandma ever tell you that story about the little boy who cried wolf too much?
/. users hate MS even more because it's fun, and well... MS earned it.
MS has extinguished competitors, acted unethically for long enough that people don't trust MS to have done anything right or correctly. That's normal people.
Bad news always travels farther and faster than good news. MS would have to do a lot of good things to reverse their reputation. So that's how it is. No matter what the story is actually about, if it involves MS it will be expected that MS has fucked up again somehow.