I'm in the middle of converting 3 people to Ubuntu from windows environments... they are having no problems adjusting at all LOLOLOLOL, once they got over the shock of having to ASK to install any software, they have been fine. I keep them locked down so they can't do any harm and always install anything they want if it is not malware. They just use it, don't care what it came from or the ideology behind it. They just want it to work like the games console, or the microwave. So far a small hiccup on the iPod and on a Canon camera.... other than that, no problems at all.
I run Ubuntu and Fedora at home, play with a couple of other distros, but for the family members, it's Ubuntu. Fedora on the two servers. I was donated a copy (legal and stuff) of XP Pro so it sits on a box in the corner of the office if needed. Spend more time keeping it up to date and scanned than anything else really.
The move with Sun/OOorg/MySQL is something I'm watching closely and hope that it ends up being the winner I suspect it will be.
Why not add a signature verification pad to the pc as well? If you can type the right way and reasonably falsify a signature you can login and go to/. to read all about it....
does it really matter whether they were trying to save face, or trying to save their asses in court?
Either way, the Internet has yet again handily shown another large corporate entity that 'do no evil' is a pretty damned good motto.
That once letter to the local paper editor gets millions of reads these days. Despite their efforts, many businesses and their practices are transparent to the public whether they like it or not. The "blowback" from that is what some like to call 'market forces' at work:)
Google was rather bright to call everything beta, and only put a line through the word when everyone was happy with how it works. When you produce products and make claims of a general nature and have no clear plan with how to deal with those inevitable questions from reviewers and users... well, blowback is the natural response.
Trying to hush up the competition is... er... illegal. Trying to hush those that would expose you to the competition is essentially the same thing, and quite the example of not 'don't be evil'.
It's just a shame that the folks at Creative had to fsck it up like this when they could have created a PR positive experience of it.
I have a similar view except that all I say is if they have only child porn possession, not production against them, confiscate it, class D misdemeanor and on your way. Go after the producers. Don't ruin the lives of countless (otherwise) innocent people.
Like your friend, I do not think an outright war on these industries is the answer; it is already proven to not work and it doesn't make sense to begin with. But while legalizing drugs and controlling them through the government seems like a perfectly reasonably solution, proposing to legalize child porn (even just possession of it) is completely different. If there is nothing against possessing it, then there will be an even bigger market for it (probably much bigger than anyone wants to admit) - which means there would have to be legal producers of it, which defeats the purpose, or the illegal producers will just continue producing and distributing it - in fact it's likely even more producers would pop up.... penguinchris This argument is fallacious for both porn and drugs. The assumption is a that there is a constant demand and legal possession will not make it easier to find producers. You cannot quantitatively state that demand will remain or increase and that producer's numbers will grow. Where marijuana has been decriminalized, it's use has not increased, and in some places has decreased.
It's a big assumption. Saving resources is quite valuable, and more important not criminalizing every part of society that we possibly could is also a good thing.
How society prosecutes child pornography... like a lynch mob: guilty until proven innocent and no recompense for those poor souls that did not deserve to be labeled and treated like some monster.
There is way too much leniency given to law enforcement in the process of stopping child pornography. WAY TOO MUCH.
I'm not saying that child pornography is good or even just 'not bad'... I'm saying that lynch mob mentality in prosecuting anyone suspected of it is absolutely the wrong thing to do.
Sex crime laws and their enforcement (at least in the US) are criminal in themselves. They are, at best, mostly subjective in nature and enforced with the tact of a nuclear weapon.
Victims are stigmatized, penalized, emotionally brutalized, and then forever branded as someone that people can't trust.
Laws are good to have. Not all laws are good laws. A law set by a community that cannot be amended or repealed is not a law, it's a dogma. These laws need some changes, big ones.
I doubt it. More likely he was the first to walk through the poison ivy, it's just a rash. Wait till all the others start stomping through the poison ivy that is P2P... then call it an outbreak.
Not sure how good an analogy that is, but seems good. If they make enough PR stink about this, it might just get them some business. Plan A was not working. Rest assured that plan B will be as friendly as the DMCA, on steroids.
I hope that the real truth of it is that they looked at NIN and Radiohead and did some math to come to the conclusion it is more profitable to give 'name your price' downloads and take some theft than it is to hire an army of lawyers for decades.
On the optimistic side, perhaps this will lead to a la carte music purchasing AND more than top 100 artists available?
Welcome to the 21st century. There are some things that you might like to know about life here:
The local city or county authority knows who you are by your billing information, water usage, electric usage, and cars registered to your address. Additionally, what information is not known about you from your ISP can usually be garnered from the telephone people (they hear everything you know).
We use building permits to know how much activity is happening in new homes and home modifications and real estate records for sales of existing homes.
Put all that together with tax records, medical and insurance records and about the only thing we don't know about you is who at the last fucking piece of pizza (I wanted that for breakfast).
While total information awareness is only just now starting to take off, we already have a huge amount of data.
Back in 1893 (your time) it was necessary to collect information on residents because we just didn't have all this information before.
P.S. Governments are responsible for schools in the same way that they are responsible for ensuring enough public transportation. Insurance industries can tell us how many beds will be profitable and that has NOTHING to do with the number of people in the area.
Not sure where you are from, but around here I don't imagine that too many illegals actually participate in the census taking. For some reason TimeWarner is apparently convinced that there are enough of them to put on EXTRA Spanish language channels though. Wonder how they knew that without accurate census data?
I've been in a business that guarantees bandwidth and latency for some 20 years. YES you can guarantee just your portion of it.
What you are saying is that end users are too fucking stupid to learn how it works. While I'll agree that there are some who are, people in general are smart enough to understand a simple explanation of how it works.
Car analogy: You can guaranteed highway speeds capabilities of 120mph on a car. Do people sue Ford because they can't go over 70mph in their mustang?
No matter which way you do it there will be a small percentage of users who won't understand. They also have blinking clocks on their VCRs and are often seen with shoe laces untied.
I've been explaining the very same problem to people for a lot of years, so I can say with authority that all end users are NOT that stupid.
I'm sorry, NOT! If Comcast built their network correctly to begin with, the infrastructure COULD handle specific bandwidth requirements that could in turn be advertised correctly.
The advertised vs. actual problem occurs when the architecture of the network is itself sloppy, and relies on end users never testing their bandwidth at the same time. Generally, this works, but is NOT good for guaranteed QoS.
If every neighborhood WAN/Ring was set up with 2x the required network feeding it you would get reduced speed during an outage and guaranteed bandwidth possibilities. The problem is that requires upgrades, and we know that won't happen till some pork toting politicians says the county/state will pay for it.
Current and previous network designs were vamped up analog cable tv networks (read as router jammed in outdoor cabinet somewhere in the neighborhood) the cable companies went into the network business with less than suitable design and staff and winged it. The public is now happy to have the less than optimal service that was offered rather than demanding 'you can hear a pin drop' quality.
50Mbps is what I would equate to high end, but I'm willing to bet that the QoS is NO better than dialup, just faster most of the time. If the QoS was better, they'd advertise it.
What this means is that the cheapest upgrade to crap old equipment came with a huge bandwidth increase by default. They could give you a QoS guaranteed 15Mb/3Mb and setup the network to produce that... but nope, not happening. It 'SOUNDS' so much better to say **50Mbps**
that this F/OSS stuff is actually working... that would just ruin everything. If this keeps up where will it stop? Baseball players playing for the love of the game? Backyard engineers reporting on bad levees? Damnit, this will ruin everything.
What? Iran is over there with all those 'nucular' weapons stuff and we haven't hacked into their computer systems yet? oh, ok, that's what those cable cuts were for... hmmmm
Right hand, meet left hand.... Translation: We've been spying on other countries and shit, and someone is about to blow the whistle because:
A - We didn't tell anyone about stuff we found out; like Bin Laden has been ordering room service from a certain hotel in Riyadh. Or... Iranian officials are calling their spies in China to tell them to hurry up with the plans for nuclear weapons, we need them to back up the saber rattling.
B - Someone hacked our spying systems and is about to tell the world how we planned the 9/11 attacks so we really need to create a cyber-threat reason to bomb the bajesus out of them.
An attack mentality from an organization called Cyber Defense Command can only mean bad things are about to happen, or have happened and we are about to find out about them.
A pre-emptive defense is something like a firewall and NOT something like launching cyber attacks on likely future suspects.
A good defense is a strong offense, unless you are defending yourself from other people's rights.
NXP downplays the significance of the hack, saying that that model of RFID card uses old technology and they do a much better job these days. means absolutely fuck all....
Next hackers to try the new stuff in 3... 2.... 1...
H4x0r3d !! All your code are belong to us!
Seriously, I know they need to try, but personally I don't think they ever try hard enough. Mostly this is due to convenience of not having to generate millions of keys and other such secure ideas. Sometimes I wonder why they try to make it cheap instead of just trying to make is safe? To save a couple of bucks per device? Security is not cheap or easy. period. ever.
and extrapolating from your comment, rather non-linearly, not having net-neutrality is today's equivalent to the burning of the Library at Alexandria. Well, sort of. Censorship at its worst in both cases IMO. Regardless of your own opinions, it must be admitted that censorship robs society of its best resource.
That burning might be said to have been the point of the spear that was the dark ages. I wonder if we learned anything?
Not specifically related to your comment, but some p2p clients default to sharing mode without the knowledge of the user. Intent to distribute etc. gets a bit murky on that part for me. I'm not sure how it would apply to this case, but I know it happens so intent might be hard to prove if my thinking is correct.
What do you think? Will more data usually perform better than a better algorithm?" Duh... the algorithm can ONLY be as good as the data supplied to it. Better data always improves performance in this type of problem. The netflix challenge is to arrive at a better algorithm with the supplied data. Adding more data gives you a richer data set to choose from. This is obvious, no?
I read the article in question here and can say that I'm surprised that this is even a question.
I was going to ask what the hell they were thinking to ask that question. Flat rate is the only way to make the Internet usable. If you go back to the $2/min charging scheme, the use of the Internet will drop to nothing again. The things that makes the Internet useful are:
1 - cheap pc hardware 2 - flat rate ISP charging 3 - net neutrality
If you change the balance of any of these, usage will drop followed shortly by usefulness of the Internet. If say you want to try tiered pricing, ok, take today's bandwidth usage for heavy users, call that standard rate. Add usage weighted tiers to that. Reasoning is this: ISPs are NOT going to downgrade or upgrade infrastructure just to add pricing games. The tier would have to be based on aggregate usage, so you pay current rates up to a standard max. throughput cap, after which you are charged a per/GByte tax. If the tier kicks in too quickly, people will stop using it. Metering must be verifiable, and in the end, no matter what you do it will turn out to be the same mess for billing and sales that wireless phones are now.
If you want to throttle people down on bandwidth and charge them less, go ahead. Some won't care, and will take it quickly. If you want to charge more for bandwidth that you have already sold at a given price... well, good luck with that.
(I know it's april 1st, but I really do have a wife) That's hilarious!!
I'm looking into similar with a server at home as the sync point, then syncing that to Google et al online. Hoping to combine the sync mechanisms of several phone/pda types in the mix and have full familial synching even when the intarwebtubes are down... let the server sync it when they come back up.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm in the middle of converting 3 people to Ubuntu from windows environments... they are having no problems adjusting at all LOLOLOLOL, once they got over the shock of having to ASK to install any software, they have been fine. I keep them locked down so they can't do any harm and always install anything they want if it is not malware. They just use it, don't care what it came from or the ideology behind it. They just want it to work like the games console, or the microwave. So far a small hiccup on the iPod and on a Canon camera.... other than that, no problems at all.
you can't tell ME that the entire Internets is in that little cup?
but what happens if I forget and pour coffee in it?
I run Ubuntu and Fedora at home, play with a couple of other distros, but for the family members, it's Ubuntu. Fedora on the two servers. I was donated a copy (legal and stuff) of XP Pro so it sits on a box in the corner of the office if needed. Spend more time keeping it up to date and scanned than anything else really.
The move with Sun/OOorg/MySQL is something I'm watching closely and hope that it ends up being the winner I suspect it will be.
for some good responses to this article the first time around, try http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=508970&cid=22942214
It still means bad things are about to happen when the defense team is studying offense tactics
Why not add a signature verification pad to the pc as well? If you can type the right way and reasonably falsify a signature you can login and go to /. to read all about it....
does it really matter whether they were trying to save face, or trying to save their asses in court?
:)
... er... illegal. Trying to hush those that would expose you to the competition is essentially the same thing, and quite the example of not 'don't be evil'.
Either way, the Internet has yet again handily shown another large corporate entity that 'do no evil' is a pretty damned good motto.
That once letter to the local paper editor gets millions of reads these days. Despite their efforts, many businesses and their practices are transparent to the public whether they like it or not. The "blowback" from that is what some like to call 'market forces' at work
Google was rather bright to call everything beta, and only put a line through the word when everyone was happy with how it works. When you produce products and make claims of a general nature and have no clear plan with how to deal with those inevitable questions from reviewers and users... well, blowback is the natural response.
Trying to hush up the competition is
It's just a shame that the folks at Creative had to fsck it up like this when they could have created a PR positive experience of it.
It's a big assumption. Saving resources is quite valuable, and more important not criminalizing every part of society that we possibly could is also a good thing.
How society prosecutes child pornography... like a lynch mob: guilty until proven innocent and no recompense for those poor souls that did not deserve to be labeled and treated like some monster.
There is way too much leniency given to law enforcement in the process of stopping child pornography. WAY TOO MUCH.
I'm not saying that child pornography is good or even just 'not bad'... I'm saying that lynch mob mentality in prosecuting anyone suspected of it is absolutely the wrong thing to do.
Sex crime laws and their enforcement (at least in the US) are criminal in themselves. They are, at best, mostly subjective in nature and enforced with the tact of a nuclear weapon.
Victims are stigmatized, penalized, emotionally brutalized, and then forever branded as someone that people can't trust.
Laws are good to have. Not all laws are good laws. A law set by a community that cannot be amended or repealed is not a law, it's a dogma. These laws need some changes, big ones.
I doubt it. More likely he was the first to walk through the poison ivy, it's just a rash. Wait till all the others start stomping through the poison ivy that is P2P... then call it an outbreak.
Not sure how good an analogy that is, but seems good. If they make enough PR stink about this, it might just get them some business. Plan A was not working. Rest assured that plan B will be as friendly as the DMCA, on steroids.
I hope that the real truth of it is that they looked at NIN and Radiohead and did some math to come to the conclusion it is more profitable to give 'name your price' downloads and take some theft than it is to hire an army of lawyers for decades.
On the optimistic side, perhaps this will lead to a la carte music purchasing AND more than top 100 artists available?
Welcome to the 21st century. There are some things that you might like to know about life here:
The local city or county authority knows who you are by your billing information, water usage, electric usage, and cars registered to your address. Additionally, what information is not known about you from your ISP can usually be garnered from the telephone people (they hear everything you know).
We use building permits to know how much activity is happening in new homes and home modifications and real estate records for sales of existing homes.
Put all that together with tax records, medical and insurance records and about the only thing we don't know about you is who at the last fucking piece of pizza (I wanted that for breakfast).
While total information awareness is only just now starting to take off, we already have a huge amount of data.
Back in 1893 (your time) it was necessary to collect information on residents because we just didn't have all this information before.
P.S. Governments are responsible for schools in the same way that they are responsible for ensuring enough public transportation. Insurance industries can tell us how many beds will be profitable and that has NOTHING to do with the number of people in the area.
Not sure where you are from, but around here I don't imagine that too many illegals actually participate in the census taking. For some reason TimeWarner is apparently convinced that there are enough of them to put on EXTRA Spanish language channels though. Wonder how they knew that without accurate census data?
Once again, welcome to 21st century America.
I've been in a business that guarantees bandwidth and latency for some 20 years. YES you can guarantee just your portion of it.
What you are saying is that end users are too fucking stupid to learn how it works. While I'll agree that there are some who are, people in general are smart enough to understand a simple explanation of how it works.
Car analogy: You can guaranteed highway speeds capabilities of 120mph on a car. Do people sue Ford because they can't go over 70mph in their mustang?
No matter which way you do it there will be a small percentage of users who won't understand. They also have blinking clocks on their VCRs and are often seen with shoe laces untied.
I've been explaining the very same problem to people for a lot of years, so I can say with authority that all end users are NOT that stupid.
I'm sorry, NOT! If Comcast built their network correctly to begin with, the infrastructure COULD handle specific bandwidth requirements that could in turn be advertised correctly.
The advertised vs. actual problem occurs when the architecture of the network is itself sloppy, and relies on end users never testing their bandwidth at the same time. Generally, this works, but is NOT good for guaranteed QoS.
If every neighborhood WAN/Ring was set up with 2x the required network feeding it you would get reduced speed during an outage and guaranteed bandwidth possibilities. The problem is that requires upgrades, and we know that won't happen till some pork toting politicians says the county/state will pay for it.
Current and previous network designs were vamped up analog cable tv networks (read as router jammed in outdoor cabinet somewhere in the neighborhood) the cable companies went into the network business with less than suitable design and staff and winged it. The public is now happy to have the less than optimal service that was offered rather than demanding 'you can hear a pin drop' quality.
50Mbps is what I would equate to high end, but I'm willing to bet that the QoS is NO better than dialup, just faster most of the time. If the QoS was better, they'd advertise it.
What this means is that the cheapest upgrade to crap old equipment came with a huge bandwidth increase by default. They could give you a QoS guaranteed 15Mb/3Mb and setup the network to produce that... but nope, not happening. It 'SOUNDS' so much better to say **50Mbps**
It's nothing but marketing droid bs.
that this F/OSS stuff is actually working... that would just ruin everything. If this keeps up where will it stop? Baseball players playing for the love of the game? Backyard engineers reporting on bad levees? Damnit, this will ruin everything.
What? Iran is over there with all those 'nucular' weapons stuff and we haven't hacked into their computer systems yet? oh, ok, that's what those cable cuts were for... hmmmm
Right hand, meet left hand.... Translation: We've been spying on other countries and shit, and someone is about to blow the whistle because:
A - We didn't tell anyone about stuff we found out; like Bin Laden has been ordering room service from a certain hotel in Riyadh. Or... Iranian officials are calling their spies in China to tell them to hurry up with the plans for nuclear weapons, we need them to back up the saber rattling.
B - Someone hacked our spying systems and is about to tell the world how we planned the 9/11 attacks so we really need to create a cyber-threat reason to bomb the bajesus out of them.
An attack mentality from an organization called Cyber Defense Command can only mean bad things are about to happen, or have happened and we are about to find out about them.
A pre-emptive defense is something like a firewall and NOT something like launching cyber attacks on likely future suspects.
A good defense is a strong offense, unless you are defending yourself from other people's rights.
Podcasting is just wrong. period. I don't iCare iWhat iYou iThink.
It's a video clip or audio clip and has only remote ties to the iPod.
You might as well call it a YouTubeCast or something... sheesh, it's just a video clip or audio clip. Lets get off the iPod theme with this.
And yes, you can call it an MP4 Video Clip if you wish... unless of course you always eat mashedpod potatoes and iGravy with your Mac Turkey.
This astronomy child porn has to stop! Before you know it, these 'astronomers' will be cruising the galaxy trying to probe every new planet they find!
Elephant and Castle tube station would be a good place to ask...
Next hackers to try the new stuff in 3... 2.... 1...
H4x0r3d !! All your code are belong to us!
Seriously, I know they need to try, but personally I don't think they ever try hard enough. Mostly this is due to convenience of not having to generate millions of keys and other such secure ideas. Sometimes I wonder why they try to make it cheap instead of just trying to make is safe? To save a couple of bucks per device? Security is not cheap or easy. period. ever.
I think you have it just right. I stopped buying creative products today!
Time for some more open-hardware projects I suspect
and extrapolating from your comment, rather non-linearly, not having net-neutrality is today's equivalent to the burning of the Library at Alexandria. Well, sort of. Censorship at its worst in both cases IMO. Regardless of your own opinions, it must be admitted that censorship robs society of its best resource.
That burning might be said to have been the point of the spear that was the dark ages. I wonder if we learned anything?
Not specifically related to your comment, but some p2p clients default to sharing mode without the knowledge of the user. Intent to distribute etc. gets a bit murky on that part for me. I'm not sure how it would apply to this case, but I know it happens so intent might be hard to prove if my thinking is correct.
I read the article in question here and can say that I'm surprised that this is even a question.
I was going to ask what the hell they were thinking to ask that question. Flat rate is the only way to make the Internet usable. If you go back to the $2/min charging scheme, the use of the Internet will drop to nothing again. The things that makes the Internet useful are:
1 - cheap pc hardware
2 - flat rate ISP charging
3 - net neutrality
If you change the balance of any of these, usage will drop followed shortly by usefulness of the Internet. If say you want to try tiered pricing, ok, take today's bandwidth usage for heavy users, call that standard rate. Add usage weighted tiers to that. Reasoning is this: ISPs are NOT going to downgrade or upgrade infrastructure just to add pricing games. The tier would have to be based on aggregate usage, so you pay current rates up to a standard max. throughput cap, after which you are charged a per/GByte tax. If the tier kicks in too quickly, people will stop using it. Metering must be verifiable, and in the end, no matter what you do it will turn out to be the same mess for billing and sales that wireless phones are now.
If you want to throttle people down on bandwidth and charge them less, go ahead. Some won't care, and will take it quickly. If you want to charge more for bandwidth that you have already sold at a given price... well, good luck with that.
I'm looking into similar with a server at home as the sync point, then syncing that to Google et al online. Hoping to combine the sync mechanisms of several phone/pda types in the mix and have full familial synching even when the intarwebtubes are down... let the server sync it when they come back up.