I've been browsing the web practically since there was one, and I rather like that I can type in a substring of the title of a page I visited yesterday but didn't think to bookmark or save the exact URL somewhere. I'm a human, it's not my job to remember URLs. Domain names sure, but URLs are the computer's job.
Everyone that I've heard complain about the awesomebar hates it because they only want URL auto-complete and are confused that it does more than they were expecting or are used to.
History Block fixes this problem very nicely. It let's you setup a block list of urls that should not appear in the history.
So if someone snoops around in your browser, they would see an addon called "HistoryBlock" which contains a list of all the sites you didn't want them to know you visit.
Personally, I hate the "awesomebar" because it's slow. If I have to wait for an auto complete function to catch up with my typing, something is very wrong.
While I've never been of the opinion that Firefox in general is anything approaching fleet-footed, I've never seen a speed problem with the awesomebar. My slowest computer is an ancient Athlon somewhere in the 1.5GHz range and even on that I've never been able to enter a URL quicker than the awesomebar could auto-complete it for me. (Unless the disk was thrashing or something else was chewing through CPU cycles.)
I don't know about you, but if I buy or make something, it's for me. I'm not there to take care of it for the next owners.
This sentiment would be understandable if it were a driveway or a porch we were talking about here, but this is the foundation of a house. It's not something you can just tear out and try again.
I hope for the submitter's sake that he got this approved by an engineer (with a second and third opinion) he could find or else your average home inspector is going to flag this and he'll never be able to sell the house for anywhere near what he put into it.
So everyone in that class failed the course because none of them (even the instructor) realized that the program input was bad? I'm not saying that the story isn't true, but this seems to be stretching the bounds of credibility.
On one hand, you have a future where you can never be sure what's really "out there", where there are huge swaths of information that you simply can't access, not because you or the information owner have any disagreement, but because some third party that you don't even know has determined that you shouldn't or couldn't see it.
I've always maintained that the opposite of net neutrality is censorship. Simply put, net neutrality and the establishment of ISPs as carriers of information rather than producers, filters, or surveyors will be every single bit as important to freedom in western civilization as free speech.
And before someone goes Mr. Pedantic on me, note that "censorship" is literally defined as the act or ability to censor. Other entities besides the government can censor information and ISPs would be the perfect example.
Long story short : Get, and use 64-bit Windows for Windows machines with a lot of RAM. Since 64-bit XP is poorly supported, and Vista is dog-shit, then that means you should be using 64-bit Windows 7..
...which isn't for sale yet.
Alternatively you can use any distribution of Linux or BSD released in the last 5 years.
With Ubuntu 9.04, also keep in mind that video / 2D / 3D operations are not accelerated because Canonical chose to use FLOSS-only drivers on this release.
Wrong/misleading. Ubuntu has always used FLOSS-only drivers by default on a fresh install, but all releases (including 9.04) will pop up a notification on the first boot that you have hardware which requires proprietary drivers to work at full performance. If you click on the notification, it brings up an application where you click a single button to install the proprietary drivers. There was nothing in 9.04 that changed this.
They have the added benefit of lowering the work of the main CPU (i.e. less power is used), using silicon to accelerate graphics rather than software.
There's no such thing as software-accelerated graphics. Either the graphics routines are running on the CPU, or a graphics accelerator (dedicated GPU). If you don't have the right drivers for your video chip, all of the whiz-bang 3D stuff is disabled anyway.
Tweak the kernel to enable dynamic ticks (i.e. a 'tickless' system)
This is already enabled on all of the modern major distributions.
"You agree that Google may access or disclose your personal information, including the content of your communications, if Google is required to do so in order to comply with any valid legal process or governmental request (such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order), or as otherwise provided in these Terms of Service and the general Google Privacy Policy."
And even if this wasn't in the EULA, it wouldn't matter. They are still required by law to submit whatever information is requested through a legal discovery process. You can't successfully sue somebody for following the law.
She'll never win the lawsuit against Google, though, since her information was revealed through the discovery process of the trial. Google was required by law to hand it over to the court. Even their ToS say that they will do this and whats-her-name had to agree to those terms in order to sign up for an account with Google.
Sorry. "Expectation of anonymity"? Where did that come from?
Absolutely correct in this case. There are currently few (if any) laws on the books that in any way help protect a user's personal information when voluntarily or involuntarily disclosed to a corporation. Thus, anyone using a commercial service (this includes Slashdot, which is owned by SourceForge, Inc.) should by default assume that the corporation behind it can and will reveal all information accumulated about them to third parties such as government agencies and other corporations. Simply because nothing actually prevents them from doing so. Sure, they might say they won't in their policies and so forth, but you can't enforce a promise and corporations have been known to flat-out lie about their privacy policies anyway.
TL;DR: If you give Google (or any other online service) your real information, expect to have it sold, licensed, or disclosed to someone eventually.
In fact, I am becoming more in favor of making everyone use their real name, all the time, to lessen the ridiculous-ness, the hateful content, the juvenile, spiteful posts, that we regularly see on forums.
If you don't like hateful, juvenile, or spiteful content, what on earth are you doing on the Internet to begin with? (Slashdot of all places!) Did somebody not tell you that you have the option to leave whichever forums you find objectionable? You should start your own set of forums that require all members to use their real names (with some form of ID verification so users can't use made-up names for anonymity or pose as someone else) and see just what kind of following you get.
In RL, there is no anonymity.
Sure there is. Ever been in a crowd? Walked down a street? Unless you're a celebrity or happen to run into an acquaintance, nobody knows who you are when you're out in public. Yes, a sufficiently motivated individual could find out your identity without much trouble (by pick-pocketing, mugging, arresting, or asking) but the same is basically true on the Internet because an IP can often be traced back to a particular person.
Ever read a newspaper article where an "inside source" or a whistleblower has revealed information to the press that shed light on a government or corporate scandal? Remember Deep Throat, the informant that eventually unseated a United States President?
Anonymity is useful and necessary both in real life as well as online. It's the only way that some people have to speak the truth without fear of reprisal or revenge. And without that, there is no true freedom of speech.
This is why I think leading edge distros like Ubuntu should stop supporting 32-bit and only distribute 64-bit versions of their distros. The only computers that still are 32-bit are either embedded systems or older legacy computers. We need to move on.
Say what?! Thank goodness you're not on the release engineering team of any major distros.:P
There is still a LOT of 32-bit hardware out in the world and there will be for years to come. I have three machines at home, a desktop at work, and a web server that all have 32-bit processors. They do their jobs and they do them well. Replacing them with newer machines just to get 32 more bits in the CPU is simply out of the question. Most individuals and business are going to look at it this way and your "leading edge distros like Ubuntu" cannot afford to turn these users away.
Besides, you don't really get any enormous advantage simply moving from a 32-bit processor to a 64-bit one, if all other factors are the same. Yes, you get to address more than 4GB of memory without special hacks but that's about it. Unless running a server or a high-powered workstation, most people can get by just fine with 2GB of memory for a little while longer. There are no immediate must-have features that those 32 extra bits magically enable. No must-have applications or games that absolutely require 64 bits of precision. There's certainly a speed difference between an application running in 32-bit versus native mode on a 64-bit processor, but in most cases the difference is not staggering.
Finally, one of the primary "marketing points" for Linux is that it supports more hardware out of the box than any other OS written, period. In particular, support for older computers and hardware is unbeatable and using Linux on them extends their useful service life by years. As an example: A 400MHz Celeron is pretty much a paperweight as far as any proprietary operating system is concerned. But with Linux, you can use it for all sorts of things like a firewall, a network-attached storage device, a low-traffic web server, a PBX, and so on. And you don't have to run 10-year-old software to do it. Throw this capability away, and you've just removed one of the biggest reasons people try or use Linux to begin with.
I don't see how it would pan out that this law would lower drug prices. Drug deals are still going to be shady affairs since (as far as the article implies) the only thing that's changing in Mexico is that ordinary citizens won't necessarily go to jail for having small amounts of drugs on them. The drugs will still be confiscated and their sale is still illegal. The law doesn't change anything about how the large drug distribution networks operate, which is the main cost involved in drug prices. (Or I would think, I'm not obviously not much of an expert.)
That the Mexican president enacted it at all, what with his war against the drug cartels. It doesn't really seem to help his side much since it doesn't affect the cartels at all. In fact, it may help them because they'll see more business from people who otherwise wouldn't want to be caught with drugs for fear of getting jailtime. All I can think of is that it may be an olive branch extended to his constituents who are casual drug users and are fed up with all the violence that his war on drugs has caused.
Finally, we'll never see a law like this in the U.S., period. The "war on drugs" is too big a political platform to step down from. Suburban Americans are so terrified that their precious little snowflake might try a doobie and turn into a dope-crazed junkie overnight that there will literally be rioting in the streets if any politician so much as suggests anything less than a mandatory prison sentence for anyone caught with a flake of marijuana on their shoe. The current health care controversy would look like a tea party in comparison. Also, the corrections industry is one of America's best-kept and most profitable secrets and the "drug war" is what fuels it since half of the country's prisoners are non-violent offenders such as drug users. Make drugs legal, (or at least less criminalized), and you're stripping billions of dollars from that industry, something that the powerful stakeholders will not stand for.
I work at a web host and know people from other hosting companies and ISPs around town. Not a single Internet-related business that I know if around here has any interest in IPv6 because few of their engineers know anything about it, none of their equipment supports it, IPv4 addresses are still remarkably cheap, and (most importantly) not a single customer is asking for it.
No business will invest in IPv6 until there is either a clear cost benefit to supporting it or until customers start demanding it. History has proven again and again that technical merit alone does not propel technology into the mainstream.
Twitter only serves to further cheapen your existence.
Yes, my existance has certainly been cheapened by having the ability to stay up to date and in frequent contact with dozens of friends, family, and co-workers who I otherwise would never have the time to talk to on a daily basis.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been browsing the web practically since there was one, and I rather like that I can type in a substring of the title of a page I visited yesterday but didn't think to bookmark or save the exact URL somewhere. I'm a human, it's not my job to remember URLs. Domain names sure, but URLs are the computer's job.
Everyone that I've heard complain about the awesomebar hates it because they only want URL auto-complete and are confused that it does more than they were expecting or are used to.
So if someone snoops around in your browser, they would see an addon called "HistoryBlock" which contains a list of all the sites you didn't want them to know you visit.
Classic.
While I've never been of the opinion that Firefox in general is anything approaching fleet-footed, I've never seen a speed problem with the awesomebar. My slowest computer is an ancient Athlon somewhere in the 1.5GHz range and even on that I've never been able to enter a URL quicker than the awesomebar could auto-complete it for me. (Unless the disk was thrashing or something else was chewing through CPU cycles.)
This sentiment would be understandable if it were a driveway or a porch we were talking about here, but this is the foundation of a house. It's not something you can just tear out and try again.
I hope for the submitter's sake that he got this approved by an engineer (with a second and third opinion) he could find or else your average home inspector is going to flag this and he'll never be able to sell the house for anywhere near what he put into it.
So everyone in that class failed the course because none of them (even the instructor) realized that the program input was bad? I'm not saying that the story isn't true, but this seems to be stretching the bounds of credibility.
I've always maintained that the opposite of net neutrality is censorship. Simply put, net neutrality and the establishment of ISPs as carriers of information rather than producers, filters, or surveyors will be every single bit as important to freedom in western civilization as free speech.
And before someone goes Mr. Pedantic on me, note that "censorship" is literally defined as the act or ability to censor. Other entities besides the government can censor information and ISPs would be the perfect example.
Alternatively you can use any distribution of Linux or BSD released in the last 5 years.
Wrong/misleading. Ubuntu has always used FLOSS-only drivers by default on a fresh install, but all releases (including 9.04) will pop up a notification on the first boot that you have hardware which requires proprietary drivers to work at full performance. If you click on the notification, it brings up an application where you click a single button to install the proprietary drivers. There was nothing in 9.04 that changed this.
There's no such thing as software-accelerated graphics. Either the graphics routines are running on the CPU, or a graphics accelerator (dedicated GPU). If you don't have the right drivers for your video chip, all of the whiz-bang 3D stuff is disabled anyway.
This is already enabled on all of the modern major distributions.
Go a step further - write the screenplay for the book.
Uhh, they do have it in their EULA:
http://www.blogger.com/terms.g
"You agree that Google may access or disclose your personal information, including the content of your communications, if Google is required to do so in order to comply with any valid legal process or governmental request (such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order), or as otherwise provided in these Terms of Service and the general Google Privacy Policy."
And even if this wasn't in the EULA, it wouldn't matter. They are still required by law to submit whatever information is requested through a legal discovery process. You can't successfully sue somebody for following the law.
11/16 baked?
Rival? Are you serious?
She'll never win the lawsuit against Google, though, since her information was revealed through the discovery process of the trial. Google was required by law to hand it over to the court. Even their ToS say that they will do this and whats-her-name had to agree to those terms in order to sign up for an account with Google.
Absolutely correct in this case. There are currently few (if any) laws on the books that in any way help protect a user's personal information when voluntarily or involuntarily disclosed to a corporation. Thus, anyone using a commercial service (this includes Slashdot, which is owned by SourceForge, Inc.) should by default assume that the corporation behind it can and will reveal all information accumulated about them to third parties such as government agencies and other corporations. Simply because nothing actually prevents them from doing so. Sure, they might say they won't in their policies and so forth, but you can't enforce a promise and corporations have been known to flat-out lie about their privacy policies anyway.
TL;DR: If you give Google (or any other online service) your real information, expect to have it sold, licensed, or disclosed to someone eventually.
If you don't like hateful, juvenile, or spiteful content, what on earth are you doing on the Internet to begin with? (Slashdot of all places!) Did somebody not tell you that you have the option to leave whichever forums you find objectionable? You should start your own set of forums that require all members to use their real names (with some form of ID verification so users can't use made-up names for anonymity or pose as someone else) and see just what kind of following you get.
Sure there is. Ever been in a crowd? Walked down a street? Unless you're a celebrity or happen to run into an acquaintance, nobody knows who you are when you're out in public. Yes, a sufficiently motivated individual could find out your identity without much trouble (by pick-pocketing, mugging, arresting, or asking) but the same is basically true on the Internet because an IP can often be traced back to a particular person.
Ever read a newspaper article where an "inside source" or a whistleblower has revealed information to the press that shed light on a government or corporate scandal? Remember Deep Throat, the informant that eventually unseated a United States President?
Anonymity is useful and necessary both in real life as well as online. It's the only way that some people have to speak the truth without fear of reprisal or revenge. And without that, there is no true freedom of speech.
Solution: Don't buy Apple hardware.
Say what?! Thank goodness you're not on the release engineering team of any major distros. :P
There is still a LOT of 32-bit hardware out in the world and there will be for years to come. I have three machines at home, a desktop at work, and a web server that all have 32-bit processors. They do their jobs and they do them well. Replacing them with newer machines just to get 32 more bits in the CPU is simply out of the question. Most individuals and business are going to look at it this way and your "leading edge distros like Ubuntu" cannot afford to turn these users away.
Besides, you don't really get any enormous advantage simply moving from a 32-bit processor to a 64-bit one, if all other factors are the same. Yes, you get to address more than 4GB of memory without special hacks but that's about it. Unless running a server or a high-powered workstation, most people can get by just fine with 2GB of memory for a little while longer. There are no immediate must-have features that those 32 extra bits magically enable. No must-have applications or games that absolutely require 64 bits of precision. There's certainly a speed difference between an application running in 32-bit versus native mode on a 64-bit processor, but in most cases the difference is not staggering.
Finally, one of the primary "marketing points" for Linux is that it supports more hardware out of the box than any other OS written, period. In particular, support for older computers and hardware is unbeatable and using Linux on them extends their useful service life by years. As an example: A 400MHz Celeron is pretty much a paperweight as far as any proprietary operating system is concerned. But with Linux, you can use it for all sorts of things like a firewall, a network-attached storage device, a low-traffic web server, a PBX, and so on. And you don't have to run 10-year-old software to do it. Throw this capability away, and you've just removed one of the biggest reasons people try or use Linux to begin with.
I see what you did there
I don't see how it would pan out that this law would lower drug prices. Drug deals are still going to be shady affairs since (as far as the article implies) the only thing that's changing in Mexico is that ordinary citizens won't necessarily go to jail for having small amounts of drugs on them. The drugs will still be confiscated and their sale is still illegal. The law doesn't change anything about how the large drug distribution networks operate, which is the main cost involved in drug prices. (Or I would think, I'm not obviously not much of an expert.)
That the Mexican president enacted it at all, what with his war against the drug cartels. It doesn't really seem to help his side much since it doesn't affect the cartels at all. In fact, it may help them because they'll see more business from people who otherwise wouldn't want to be caught with drugs for fear of getting jailtime. All I can think of is that it may be an olive branch extended to his constituents who are casual drug users and are fed up with all the violence that his war on drugs has caused.
Finally, we'll never see a law like this in the U.S., period. The "war on drugs" is too big a political platform to step down from. Suburban Americans are so terrified that their precious little snowflake might try a doobie and turn into a dope-crazed junkie overnight that there will literally be rioting in the streets if any politician so much as suggests anything less than a mandatory prison sentence for anyone caught with a flake of marijuana on their shoe. The current health care controversy would look like a tea party in comparison. Also, the corrections industry is one of America's best-kept and most profitable secrets and the "drug war" is what fuels it since half of the country's prisoners are non-violent offenders such as drug users. Make drugs legal, (or at least less criminalized), and you're stripping billions of dollars from that industry, something that the powerful stakeholders will not stand for.
It may be an intermittent Heisenberg compensator...
I work at a web host and know people from other hosting companies and ISPs around town. Not a single Internet-related business that I know if around here has any interest in IPv6 because few of their engineers know anything about it, none of their equipment supports it, IPv4 addresses are still remarkably cheap, and (most importantly) not a single customer is asking for it.
No business will invest in IPv6 until there is either a clear cost benefit to supporting it or until customers start demanding it. History has proven again and again that technical merit alone does not propel technology into the mainstream.
Politicians seek to control the Internet because they believe that doing so will grant them more power.
Businesses seek to control the Internet because they believe that doing so will grant them more money.
Both are ultimately wrong, because the more you restrict what individuals can do on the Internet, the less useful it becomes to society as a whole.
Ah, see, you had me in total agreement until I noticed that your source material was a pair of TechCrunch articles.
Also, their presence on your lawn is far less than fully appreciated.
Oh, you mean the exact opposite of how the current U.S. president got into office?
Yes, my existance has certainly been cheapened by having the ability to stay up to date and in frequent contact with dozens of friends, family, and co-workers who I otherwise would never have the time to talk to on a daily basis.