But a Xen hypervisor VM is in some ways more similar to a BSD jail than it is to VMware's monitor.
Actually, Xen is not at all similar to a BSD jail, no matter how you look at it. Xen does full OS virtualization from the kernel and drivers on down to userland. A FreeBSD is basically chroot on steroids. The "virtualized" processes run exactly the same as "native" ones, they just have some restrictions on their system calls, that's all.
I guess the thing that bugged me about the most about TFA was the fact that they were using VMWare Server and actually expecting to get decent performance out of it. Somebody should have gotten fired for that. VMWare server is great for a number of things, but performance certainly isn't one of them. If they wanted to go with VMWare, they should have shelled out for ESX in the beginning instead of continually trying to go the cheap route.
Then this is a problem with Firefox, not IE, that it let's plugins be installed without user intervention. At the least it should warn upon next start that "Blah has been installed, do you want to enable it?"
Since Firefox is open source, people will always be able to figure out a way to quietly install extensions, plugins, bookmarks, and so on in a way that the user can't immediately see. The only real way to solve that (superficially, at least) is to close up the source code and implement some kind of built-in DRM. Somehow, I don't think you'll get much support behind that idea.
It should be obvious that the problem is not with Firefox. It's with Microsoft installing software and making changes to your computer that you didn't directly authorize. But they've been doing that for well over a decade, so it shouldn't be news to anyone by now, least of all Windows users who have had this happen to them time and time again but still insist on using software that they will never have any real control over.
Your school places your daughter on the wrong bus, that's the problem. Not that you can't track her. Solve the underlying problem instead. Either storm the principal's office and fire up a storm, get the PTA (if existant) to do something about the problem
In many schools, the school faculty don't "put" kids on busses. The busses are waiting out in back and the kids are expected to board the right one. That's how it worked in my school. It's efficient and it teaches the children a modicum of responsibility, even if a kid boards the wrong bus from time to time. If this is the case with the submitter, then him bringing his wrath to the PTA is going to accomplish nothing except making him look like every other over-reacting parent who can't stand the thought of their precious snowflake actually making a mistake or misjudgement.
It sounds like what the school system needs is just a few tweaks to their boarding procedure. Another commenter mentioned laminated bus passes with the bus number printed on them, I think that's a smashing idea as long as it's used as an advisory system and not an enforcement one.
Instead of jumping directly to an electronic device, teach her what to do if she gets lost... the same strategy that's been used successfully by parents for many, many years: find a "safe" adult (police officer, female adult with kids) and tell them that she's lost. If she's old enough to attend school, she's old enough to learn her phone number and address.
It's sad that it took about 3-4 pages of scrolling to find the most reasonable response to this question.
Any time I think to myself, "omg, I *must* have this new piece of technology in order to be safe/secure/entertained," I force myself to stop and think about what people did just a few years ago before the technology existed. In this specific case, the child certainly realized that she wasn't on the right bus pretty quickly. Even though it was only the first day, she should have noticed that the route was different and (even more obviously) all of the other kids were different than the first two days.
To prevent this from happening again, the parent should underscore to his child the importance of recognizing when a situation isn't right and how to constructively fix it (i.e., go up to the bus driver and say, "hi, I'm on the wrong bus".) Throwing money and cell phones at the problem is simply misguided at best and at worse, it further reinforces the notion that mummy and daddy are always going to be there to protect you so that you never have to learn how to be independent on your own. The submitter left out a lot of crucial details, but I have to assume that his daughter was the one that got on the wrong bus in the first place. I did it once when I was in school. It's not really that big a deal. Once the bus driver realizes that the kid is on the wrong route, the bus driver radios the school, and the school calls the parents and informs them of the situation.
Perhaps this is a symptom of a deeper problem with how children are being taught and raised. The whole "be afraid of strangers" mantra that most parents these days subscribe to is overblown and socially damaging. Perhaps even life-threatening in many cases. If you really want your kid to be safe, teach them about the world as it actually exists and how to deal with real problems. Giving them the "everyone is out to molest and kill you" treatment does a shitload more damage to them than a random encounter with a stranger is likely to.
This looks interesting. For some reason, low-power displays just fascinate the heck out of me. I can think of so many neat projects to create out of them. (eInk displays would be great, except that they are horribly expensive right now.)
One display that I'd love to get more information on is the one in Google's new electronic conference room signs. It looks and acts just like a standard low-resolution LCD display, except the image is retained even when power is completely removed. I did some research and I found the company that apparently makes them, but I never was able to figure out exactly how to buy a development kit or sample.
and analysts say this will create a shortage of data center space in 2010 in key markets like northern Virginia and Silicon Valley where demand exceeds supply
As someone who is pretty familiar with the datacenter industry, I find this to be a ludicrous assessment. Yes, I'm sure there is a credit crunch that's slowing the building of new datacenters, but that's because the whole damned economy has been slowing down for the better part of a year already. Apparently they haven't taken into account the fact that sales of rackspace are slowing down as businesses try to consolidate their technology to better cope with the recession.
But the recession won't cause a shortage of datacenter space any more than it will cause a shortage of big screen TVs at Walmart.
What's with this obsession people seem to have with extensions all of a suddenly. I don't want to manage a pile of extensions all the time I want all the core functionality built in.
The problem is what happens when you and I have a completely different view of what constitutes "core functionality"? Should we just build every concept and feature directly into the application? Somehow I think your tune would be a lot different if Firefox came with its 1000+ extensions built right into the browser and enabled by default.
Also, what happens when somebody has a great idea for a modification to the software that would be immensely useful to a small subset of users but not at all useful for anyone else? Sure they could release their own Firefox but I'm sure you can see the many reasons that would be an untenable option for just about everyone involved.
I can't help feeling this is yet another situation where choice and configurability is being touted as a good thing when actually it's a problem because there is simply too much of it.
Huh? How can there be such a thing as too much choice? It's not as if you're being asked to opt-out of all the extensions. You have to go looking for them in order to install them. If you think that's hard, then buddy, there's nothing I can do to help you.
IMHO the worst feature of Firefox is extensions. It's great that you can tailor it to your own needs
So choice and configuration are a problem. But tailoring software to your needs is good. Firefox extensions are bad. Yet you apparently use them. What part of this am I not quite getting?
but the constant updates (colourful tabs I'm looking at you) drive me round the bend and a fresh install on a machine means half an hour finding and downloading all those extensions again.
1) Put the extensions you use on a flash drive or wherever you can easily access them from a fresh install. 2) Turn off updates.
Problem solved!
Perhaps it would be more acceptable if there was a way of just indicating that updates should be automatically installed and providing a simple list of extensions to install on first execution.
This is an interesting idea. But unfortunately it's completely worthless if you haven't submitted it to the Firefox developers or someone else willing to implement it and create a patch (assuming you're not up to the programming task yourself).
The other problem I find with extensions is the way they break package managers. Hopefully as KOffice is a core package there will be some common sense applied. If you look at the Eclipse packages some extensions are packaged but most aren't pretty much defeating the whole point of using the distro package repository (and they are horribly out of date).
This is not a problem with the concept or idea of extensions but with the package management on your operating system. Again, assuming you paid nothing for the software in question, this is a case of reporting the problem to the maintainers or fixing it yourself and submitting your work. (Or finding something else that suits your needs better.)
If they really want to take off, they NEED to focus on a good working Windows version, because on the desktop, getting 1% of the Windows market is better than getting 50% of the linux market.
Like most open source development efforts, getting n percent of the market isn't important to them nor should it be. The only ones who care about market penetration in the software world are proprietary vendors who sell software as a business model. For OSS developers, what matters most is creating the kind of software that they want (ideally with community participation) and releasing it for free for others to do with as they please.
Even on the KDE site, it looks like they are pretty far from making this into something that's truly cross-platform. All Windows versions are considered "unstable" and very little work is being done on a Mac version.
Good luck to them in their efforts.
Even if you can't write a single line of code to save your life, your response should have been to download whatever is available, test it, and report any bugs that you find so that they get fixed and a stable version can be released in the near future. Instead, you say, "good luck" and walk away. No offense but that's a pretty dick thing to do.
Open source software does not improve itself. The only way problems get fixed and features get added is when people step up and put in the actual effort to do it. You have zero right to complain about anything you haven't already tried to fix. If you reported a bunch of bugs or submitted some patches that would demonstratively increase the quality of the software, then you complain. Not before.
I think it all comes down to rights. Magazines have a right to print ads in their pages if they want. But I have a right to rip out those pages. NPR has a right to advertise their sponsors, but I have a right to turn it off and listen to a podcast instead. And websites have a right to put as many ads as they like on their layout, but I have the right to block them in my browser.
Am I the only one that finds it interesting how short the lifetime is for Internet business models? Traditional business models can be successful for dozens if not hundreds of years.
Traditional business models are extremely lucky to be around for dozens of years. I'm only aware of one that has survived for hundreds of years. (Think: oldest profession.)
Web based models seem to only remain viable for around a decade at best, then competition crops up with a new idea or some independent developer ruins the model (Ad-block anyone?).
Um, ad blocking came to the web at around the same time that ads did. People have always found ways to block them. Sure, until recently it hasn't been as easy as it is now, but isn't that was technology is for: Constantly making it easier to eliminate or manage the annoyances in life?
I mean, if you're going to stand there and claim that blocking ads is wrong because it deprives site owners of deserved revenue, then you pretty much have to make the same claim for bulk email advertisers too. After all, those email lists and servers take serious cash to purchase. Anyone who filters, blocks, or rejects spam is depriving the spammer of his deserved income as well.
I really don't understand the whole "ad blocking is evil and immoral" mindset anyway. I mean, if I install ad blocking software on all of my computers (and trust me, I do) that right there says, "hey, I'm not interested in your advertisements and I was never going to buy whatever crap the ads are hawking or punch your damn monkey anyway." I feel I'm doing the web a favor by blocking ads because it means that I'm conserving Internet bandwidth by not consuming traffic for a service that I'm not using. The advertisers should pay me for not wasting their bandwidth.
It seems to me that if your business is going to survive on the web, you'd better be spending time and effort every single day looking for new revenue streams and business models.
It seems to me that you don't understand what it means to be in business. It has always been the case that you have to spend time and effort every single day looking for new revenue streams and new business models. There is no business model that stays profitable without continually adjusting to political, societal, and market changes. Nowhere has that ever been more true than on the web. Just because you can slap together a site on the intertubes doesn't mean your entitled to easy money. There is no easy money in this world, nor should there ever be.
So... Tools that make it even easier to strip the content from people who've spent their free time running websites that are expensive, using their bandwidth to do so? How is this democratic? A democracy is about having a say in how a country (the web) is run, not having your say over individuals (websites). It's easy to spin it as "giving the user control back from the big bad corporations" but there are scores of good websites producing quality content that do struggle to even cover costs, let alone make a profit.
Even though you clearly wouldn't agree, I believe that I have the right to filter, block, store, mangle, encrypt, decrypt, decompile, disassemble, sort, munge, rearrange, repurpose, or otherwise process any traffic that flows onto my network regardless of whether or not such traffic has advertisements on it or not.
Just because you buy a web hosting account and put up a site does not mean you are automatically entitled by law or moral code to make some tiny amount of money every time someone visits it. If you want your little corner of the Internet to be a toll booth, then make it a paysite or figure out a real business model instead. It is simply not my job to make sure that somebody out there in the world gets revenue every time I pull up a web page in my browser.
Hello, this is the Internet we're talking about. If there were any service, protocol, or application which wasn't used for porn in some way, I'll eat my hat.
What I hate most about SourceForge is when you search for an open source project and get handed the link to its SourceForge page rather than its actual web page.
Gods damn it, if it wanted to browse the CVS or any of that crap, I would have found my way there eventually. Most of the time, I just want to find out what the application is all about and *then* go poking around the source or download the software.
This seems to be a shirking of the responsibilities of a free citizen. It's important to keep in mind that The Authorities cannot possibly protect everyone, it's just a flat physical impossibility. There will never be a cop everywhere at once.
Oh man, if only I had a spare Internet to give you.
The authorities seem now to be bent on trying to achieve the impossible goal of being everywhere and protecting everyone. And thanks to the Western notion of entitlement (with a generous helping of fearmongering on the nighly news), the citizenry wants the authorities to expand their power as necessary in order to feel more "safe."
But you're very right. The biggest problem with the American cultural attitude right now is, "nothing that happens is my fault, I deserve everything, yet I have no responsibilities toward my community or anyone else." If people really want to feel safe and have their freedom, then we need to teach them to step up and do their part whenever they see someone else being wronged instead of just looking away and saying, "not my problem." (Although it should be counterbalanced with the idea that just because an individual looks, speaks, or acts different than the norm doesn't mean they're a threat.)
This actually happened to me this week: somebody stole some of my groceries at a self-checkout lane at the store. While I was distracted with the scanning of the items, they took the items literally as they rolled of the end of the belt and into the bagging area about 10 feet down. I didn't catch them in the act, and it's partially my fault for not being more observant, but at least 3 other people (including the cashier) were nearby and at least one of them had to have seen the theft occuring. Yet no one spoke up.
Digital cameras still require you to take the time to get to a computer and do something with the picture via the memory card or the camera itself.
I'm actually rather surprised that nobody (especially Polaroid of all companies) has even attempted a digital camera with tiny printer built-in and enough film for a dozen photos. For sure, you wouldn't fit one into an iPhone, but the resulting contraption could be about the same size or smaller than one of the old clunky Polaroid cameras.
Instant sharing isn't as simple or direct as snapping the picture and handing it to someone, like with a Polaroid.
Well, it could also be argued that physical photos themselves are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. My wife and I are in the process of scanning and archiving all the family photos we can find (some over a century old) because we know we can preserve, distribute, and annotate them digitally a lot more reliably than the physical originals.
What's missing in the present is a simple and fool-proof way to share photos no matter where you are. If I'm with a group of friends and somebody takes a nice photo, I can ask them for their memory card and stick it into my phone or laptop and make a copy, but that still requires a fair amount of hassle and technical know-how. The SD cards that can wirelessly upload their contents to the web automatically are a nice step in the right direction. But instant photo sharing won't be truly fool-proof until we have ubiquitous cheap wireless Internet access everywhere.
These days, when you see a Slashdot submission with the tantalizing headline, "Is it time for a Foobar fork?" you'll find that it's usually the work of an outside observer trying to stir up drama and contention that never really existed in the first place. Often, the outside observer is doing this just to get traffic to his blog, but oddly enough that doesn't seem to be case this time.
Still, based on what I've read from the links in TFA, I can't find anyone but the submitter (Elektroschock) advocating a fork. Submitter should probably find something more productive to occupy his 3-day weekends.
I love the idea of home automation, then I realize that my light switch isn't that far away.
I'm sure you were going for +5 Funny, but somehow you wound up at Insightful instead.
To enlighten the mods a little: home automation is less about having to leave your couch to turn off the light than it is about giving your house the ability to control itself according to parameters that you specify.
These days, anyone can write a program that runs on their computer. Only a few of us so far can run a program that runs on our house.
We're going to have to find a way for people to Not Work. Sooner or later nobody is going to have to. Eventually a robot will make a better burger than a person can make, et cetera.
People have been saying this since at least the industrial revolution, maybe longer. It was a load of bullshit back then. It is a load of bullshit today. If there's one trait that identifies Western culture more than any other, it's a misguided sense of entitlement. The idea that you (or your community) deserve something from society just for existing. They forget that unlike most of the world's population, they should feel privileged merely for having been born in a developed country where even the poorest of the poor still has the outside chance to succeed and experience things that the other 5/6 of the world can never even dream of. And everyone else doesn't really have to try very hard because they were born into the relative luxury of living in a house, having a car or mass transportation that can take them anywhere, not to mention having enough free time to squeeze in 28 hours of TV a week.
I'm in Michigan and watching the situation here is entertaining. The American auto industry has, for years, been eating itself from the inside out. Now that it's on the verge of collapse, local politicians here will say, do, or promise anything to those who thought they had some kind of God-given right to do nothing but bolt fenders onto a frame until they retire at age 65 with a phat pension check.
The bottom line is that as society and industry changes, so does the job market. Somehow, the descendants of buggy-whip makers survived to the present. Michigan families will too. As old jobs go away, there are always new ones being created. In a free, dynamic society where anyone can learn and work as they decide, there will always be something profitable to do. It's just a matter of how much effort you are willing to devote to that work. The unemployment rate in Michigan isn't so high right now because 13.4% of the population can't find work. It's because 13.4% of the population can't find work that they want to do. Whether it's because the job itself is boring or dirty, or because the pay isn't what they've become accustomed to.
We have two possible futures ahead of us, the one where we're put into slavery and forced to work just to keep us busy, and the future where we find some new paradigm (sorry) in which it's not necessary for people to work all the time, or there are new things for them to work on.
Actually, there are an infinite number of futures ahead of us. It would really be for the best if more people kept that in mind.
Just think about what happens when all the cars go electric... automotive repair will be practically restricted to body, paint, and suspension work. What are all the people who fix cars now going to do? Especially since body and paint work are becoming niche applications over time; some of the newest designs for vehicles use space-frame engineering with plastic body panels and molded colors.
I'm sorry, but I have a real problem with the suggestion that we simply throw out decades of engineering and manufacturing progress just so some subset of the population will never have to learn a new skill or two.
Years ago, the Air Force had some pretty ridiculous security policies for its I.T. systems. (And I would expect that they still probably do.) I've written extensively here on Slashdot about them, but one thing that consistently bugged me was the password policy. I can't recall the specifics, but the password had several "conditions" that needed to be satisfied before it would save your password. Among them were things like:
- Must be mixed-case - Must be between 8 and 12 characters in length (or so) - Must contain at least 2 symbols (barring a short list of seemingly random exceptions) - Must contain at least 1 letter - Must not contain a space, tab, or non-keyboard character - No part can match a dictionary word or proper name
I'm not a cryptologist, so I always wondered: wouldn't adding so many restrictions actually make it easier to brute-force passwords? If an attacker knows the unit's password policy, shouldn't that enable them to narrow the search space considerably?
With the exception of the VoIP, all of these would be better handled by embedded microcontrollers and associated peripherals. There's a huge hacker community doing all of these things. Google Arduino, XBee, and XPort.
I've been researching hardware for this exact scenario. My goal has been to replace my current home file and web server (An Athlon 750 with 3 drives that consumes about 107 watts idle) with something smaller and a lot more power efficient.
I'm currently looking into building a mini-tower system with an Intel Nano 330 dual-core CPU, mini-tower case, and two 1TB disks. (One primary storage disk and another to back up the first.) Rough estimates say that the total cost to build will be around $315 and I'm hoping to get between 15-20 watts idle (more if I can get the disks to spin down after a timeout).
This plug computer looks interesting and I considered it as an alternative. But it turns out that the end price would be about the same ($100 for plug and about $100 for each external disk), the power savings wouldn't be all that great (a difference of 4 to 8 watts), and the disadvantages are significant (non-x86, usb disks only).
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Actually, Xen is not at all similar to a BSD jail, no matter how you look at it. Xen does full OS virtualization from the kernel and drivers on down to userland. A FreeBSD is basically chroot on steroids. The "virtualized" processes run exactly the same as "native" ones, they just have some restrictions on their system calls, that's all.
I guess the thing that bugged me about the most about TFA was the fact that they were using VMWare Server and actually expecting to get decent performance out of it. Somebody should have gotten fired for that. VMWare server is great for a number of things, but performance certainly isn't one of them. If they wanted to go with VMWare, they should have shelled out for ESX in the beginning instead of continually trying to go the cheap route.
Since Firefox is open source, people will always be able to figure out a way to quietly install extensions, plugins, bookmarks, and so on in a way that the user can't immediately see. The only real way to solve that (superficially, at least) is to close up the source code and implement some kind of built-in DRM. Somehow, I don't think you'll get much support behind that idea.
It should be obvious that the problem is not with Firefox. It's with Microsoft installing software and making changes to your computer that you didn't directly authorize. But they've been doing that for well over a decade, so it shouldn't be news to anyone by now, least of all Windows users who have had this happen to them time and time again but still insist on using software that they will never have any real control over.
In many schools, the school faculty don't "put" kids on busses. The busses are waiting out in back and the kids are expected to board the right one. That's how it worked in my school. It's efficient and it teaches the children a modicum of responsibility, even if a kid boards the wrong bus from time to time. If this is the case with the submitter, then him bringing his wrath to the PTA is going to accomplish nothing except making him look like every other over-reacting parent who can't stand the thought of their precious snowflake actually making a mistake or misjudgement.
It sounds like what the school system needs is just a few tweaks to their boarding procedure. Another commenter mentioned laminated bus passes with the bus number printed on them, I think that's a smashing idea as long as it's used as an advisory system and not an enforcement one.
It's sad that it took about 3-4 pages of scrolling to find the most reasonable response to this question.
Any time I think to myself, "omg, I *must* have this new piece of technology in order to be safe/secure/entertained," I force myself to stop and think about what people did just a few years ago before the technology existed. In this specific case, the child certainly realized that she wasn't on the right bus pretty quickly. Even though it was only the first day, she should have noticed that the route was different and (even more obviously) all of the other kids were different than the first two days.
To prevent this from happening again, the parent should underscore to his child the importance of recognizing when a situation isn't right and how to constructively fix it (i.e., go up to the bus driver and say, "hi, I'm on the wrong bus".) Throwing money and cell phones at the problem is simply misguided at best and at worse, it further reinforces the notion that mummy and daddy are always going to be there to protect you so that you never have to learn how to be independent on your own. The submitter left out a lot of crucial details, but I have to assume that his daughter was the one that got on the wrong bus in the first place. I did it once when I was in school. It's not really that big a deal. Once the bus driver realizes that the kid is on the wrong route, the bus driver radios the school, and the school calls the parents and informs them of the situation.
Perhaps this is a symptom of a deeper problem with how children are being taught and raised. The whole "be afraid of strangers" mantra that most parents these days subscribe to is overblown and socially damaging. Perhaps even life-threatening in many cases. If you really want your kid to be safe, teach them about the world as it actually exists and how to deal with real problems. Giving them the "everyone is out to molest and kill you" treatment does a shitload more damage to them than a random encounter with a stranger is likely to.
This looks interesting. For some reason, low-power displays just fascinate the heck out of me. I can think of so many neat projects to create out of them. (eInk displays would be great, except that they are horribly expensive right now.)
One display that I'd love to get more information on is the one in Google's new electronic conference room signs. It looks and acts just like a standard low-resolution LCD display, except the image is retained even when power is completely removed. I did some research and I found the company that apparently makes them, but I never was able to figure out exactly how to buy a development kit or sample.
As someone who is pretty familiar with the datacenter industry, I find this to be a ludicrous assessment. Yes, I'm sure there is a credit crunch that's slowing the building of new datacenters, but that's because the whole damned economy has been slowing down for the better part of a year already. Apparently they haven't taken into account the fact that sales of rackspace are slowing down as businesses try to consolidate their technology to better cope with the recession.
But the recession won't cause a shortage of datacenter space any more than it will cause a shortage of big screen TVs at Walmart.
Hmm. Well there it is. :)
They were going to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey, but the equipment wouldn't let them?
Let's pray this is a coincidence.
The problem is what happens when you and I have a completely different view of what constitutes "core functionality"? Should we just build every concept and feature directly into the application? Somehow I think your tune would be a lot different if Firefox came with its 1000+ extensions built right into the browser and enabled by default.
Also, what happens when somebody has a great idea for a modification to the software that would be immensely useful to a small subset of users but not at all useful for anyone else? Sure they could release their own Firefox but I'm sure you can see the many reasons that would be an untenable option for just about everyone involved.
Huh? How can there be such a thing as too much choice? It's not as if you're being asked to opt-out of all the extensions. You have to go looking for them in order to install them. If you think that's hard, then buddy, there's nothing I can do to help you.
So choice and configuration are a problem. But tailoring software to your needs is good. Firefox extensions are bad. Yet you apparently use them. What part of this am I not quite getting?
1) Put the extensions you use on a flash drive or wherever you can easily access them from a fresh install.
2) Turn off updates.
Problem solved!
This is an interesting idea. But unfortunately it's completely worthless if you haven't submitted it to the Firefox developers or someone else willing to implement it and create a patch (assuming you're not up to the programming task yourself).
This is not a problem with the concept or idea of extensions but with the package management on your operating system. Again, assuming you paid nothing for the software in question, this is a case of reporting the problem to the maintainers or fixing it yourself and submitting your work. (Or finding something else that suits your needs better.)
Like most open source development efforts, getting n percent of the market isn't important to them nor should it be. The only ones who care about market penetration in the software world are proprietary vendors who sell software as a business model. For OSS developers, what matters most is creating the kind of software that they want (ideally with community participation) and releasing it for free for others to do with as they please.
Even if you can't write a single line of code to save your life, your response should have been to download whatever is available, test it, and report any bugs that you find so that they get fixed and a stable version can be released in the near future. Instead, you say, "good luck" and walk away. No offense but that's a pretty dick thing to do.
Open source software does not improve itself. The only way problems get fixed and features get added is when people step up and put in the actual effort to do it. You have zero right to complain about anything you haven't already tried to fix. If you reported a bunch of bugs or submitted some patches that would demonstratively increase the quality of the software, then you complain. Not before.
I think it all comes down to rights. Magazines have a right to print ads in their pages if they want. But I have a right to rip out those pages. NPR has a right to advertise their sponsors, but I have a right to turn it off and listen to a podcast instead. And websites have a right to put as many ads as they like on their layout, but I have the right to block them in my browser.
Traditional business models are extremely lucky to be around for dozens of years. I'm only aware of one that has survived for hundreds of years. (Think: oldest profession.)
Um, ad blocking came to the web at around the same time that ads did. People have always found ways to block them. Sure, until recently it hasn't been as easy as it is now, but isn't that was technology is for: Constantly making it easier to eliminate or manage the annoyances in life?
I mean, if you're going to stand there and claim that blocking ads is wrong because it deprives site owners of deserved revenue, then you pretty much have to make the same claim for bulk email advertisers too. After all, those email lists and servers take serious cash to purchase. Anyone who filters, blocks, or rejects spam is depriving the spammer of his deserved income as well.
I really don't understand the whole "ad blocking is evil and immoral" mindset anyway. I mean, if I install ad blocking software on all of my computers (and trust me, I do) that right there says, "hey, I'm not interested in your advertisements and I was never going to buy whatever crap the ads are hawking or punch your damn monkey anyway." I feel I'm doing the web a favor by blocking ads because it means that I'm conserving Internet bandwidth by not consuming traffic for a service that I'm not using. The advertisers should pay me for not wasting their bandwidth.
It seems to me that you don't understand what it means to be in business. It has always been the case that you have to spend time and effort every single day looking for new revenue streams and new business models. There is no business model that stays profitable without continually adjusting to political, societal, and market changes. Nowhere has that ever been more true than on the web. Just because you can slap together a site on the intertubes doesn't mean your entitled to easy money. There is no easy money in this world, nor should there ever be.
Even though you clearly wouldn't agree, I believe that I have the right to filter, block, store, mangle, encrypt, decrypt, decompile, disassemble, sort, munge, rearrange, repurpose, or otherwise process any traffic that flows onto my network regardless of whether or not such traffic has advertisements on it or not.
Just because you buy a web hosting account and put up a site does not mean you are automatically entitled by law or moral code to make some tiny amount of money every time someone visits it. If you want your little corner of the Internet to be a toll booth, then make it a paysite or figure out a real business model instead. It is simply not my job to make sure that somebody out there in the world gets revenue every time I pull up a web page in my browser.
Hello, this is the Internet we're talking about. If there were any service, protocol, or application which wasn't used for porn in some way, I'll eat my hat.
What I hate most about SourceForge is when you search for an open source project and get handed the link to its SourceForge page rather than its actual web page.
Gods damn it, if it wanted to browse the CVS or any of that crap, I would have found my way there eventually. Most of the time, I just want to find out what the application is all about and *then* go poking around the source or download the software.
It already did. In India.
Oh man, if only I had a spare Internet to give you.
The authorities seem now to be bent on trying to achieve the impossible goal of being everywhere and protecting everyone. And thanks to the Western notion of entitlement (with a generous helping of fearmongering on the nighly news), the citizenry wants the authorities to expand their power as necessary in order to feel more "safe."
But you're very right. The biggest problem with the American cultural attitude right now is, "nothing that happens is my fault, I deserve everything, yet I have no responsibilities toward my community or anyone else." If people really want to feel safe and have their freedom, then we need to teach them to step up and do their part whenever they see someone else being wronged instead of just looking away and saying, "not my problem." (Although it should be counterbalanced with the idea that just because an individual looks, speaks, or acts different than the norm doesn't mean they're a threat.)
This actually happened to me this week: somebody stole some of my groceries at a self-checkout lane at the store. While I was distracted with the scanning of the items, they took the items literally as they rolled of the end of the belt and into the bagging area about 10 feet down. I didn't catch them in the act, and it's partially my fault for not being more observant, but at least 3 other people (including the cashier) were nearby and at least one of them had to have seen the theft occuring. Yet no one spoke up.
I'm actually rather surprised that nobody (especially Polaroid of all companies) has even attempted a digital camera with tiny printer built-in and enough film for a dozen photos. For sure, you wouldn't fit one into an iPhone, but the resulting contraption could be about the same size or smaller than one of the old clunky Polaroid cameras.
Well, it could also be argued that physical photos themselves are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. My wife and I are in the process of scanning and archiving all the family photos we can find (some over a century old) because we know we can preserve, distribute, and annotate them digitally a lot more reliably than the physical originals.
What's missing in the present is a simple and fool-proof way to share photos no matter where you are. If I'm with a group of friends and somebody takes a nice photo, I can ask them for their memory card and stick it into my phone or laptop and make a copy, but that still requires a fair amount of hassle and technical know-how. The SD cards that can wirelessly upload their contents to the web automatically are a nice step in the right direction. But instant photo sharing won't be truly fool-proof until we have ubiquitous cheap wireless Internet access everywhere.
These days, when you see a Slashdot submission with the tantalizing headline, "Is it time for a Foobar fork?" you'll find that it's usually the work of an outside observer trying to stir up drama and contention that never really existed in the first place. Often, the outside observer is doing this just to get traffic to his blog, but oddly enough that doesn't seem to be case this time.
Still, based on what I've read from the links in TFA, I can't find anyone but the submitter (Elektroschock) advocating a fork. Submitter should probably find something more productive to occupy his 3-day weekends.
I'm sure you were going for +5 Funny, but somehow you wound up at Insightful instead.
To enlighten the mods a little: home automation is less about having to leave your couch to turn off the light than it is about giving your house the ability to control itself according to parameters that you specify.
These days, anyone can write a program that runs on their computer. Only a few of us so far can run a program that runs on our house.
People have been saying this since at least the industrial revolution, maybe longer. It was a load of bullshit back then. It is a load of bullshit today. If there's one trait that identifies Western culture more than any other, it's a misguided sense of entitlement. The idea that you (or your community) deserve something from society just for existing. They forget that unlike most of the world's population, they should feel privileged merely for having been born in a developed country where even the poorest of the poor still has the outside chance to succeed and experience things that the other 5/6 of the world can never even dream of. And everyone else doesn't really have to try very hard because they were born into the relative luxury of living in a house, having a car or mass transportation that can take them anywhere, not to mention having enough free time to squeeze in 28 hours of TV a week.
I'm in Michigan and watching the situation here is entertaining. The American auto industry has, for years, been eating itself from the inside out. Now that it's on the verge of collapse, local politicians here will say, do, or promise anything to those who thought they had some kind of God-given right to do nothing but bolt fenders onto a frame until they retire at age 65 with a phat pension check.
The bottom line is that as society and industry changes, so does the job market. Somehow, the descendants of buggy-whip makers survived to the present. Michigan families will too. As old jobs go away, there are always new ones being created. In a free, dynamic society where anyone can learn and work as they decide, there will always be something profitable to do. It's just a matter of how much effort you are willing to devote to that work. The unemployment rate in Michigan isn't so high right now because 13.4% of the population can't find work. It's because 13.4% of the population can't find work that they want to do. Whether it's because the job itself is boring or dirty, or because the pay isn't what they've become accustomed to.
Actually, there are an infinite number of futures ahead of us. It would really be for the best if more people kept that in mind.
I'm sorry, but I have a real problem with the suggestion that we simply throw out decades of engineering and manufacturing progress just so some subset of the population will never have to learn a new skill or two.
I see what you did there.
Years ago, the Air Force had some pretty ridiculous security policies for its I.T. systems. (And I would expect that they still probably do.) I've written extensively here on Slashdot about them, but one thing that consistently bugged me was the password policy. I can't recall the specifics, but the password had several "conditions" that needed to be satisfied before it would save your password. Among them were things like:
- Must be mixed-case
- Must be between 8 and 12 characters in length (or so)
- Must contain at least 2 symbols (barring a short list of seemingly random exceptions)
- Must contain at least 1 letter
- Must not contain a space, tab, or non-keyboard character
- No part can match a dictionary word or proper name
I'm not a cryptologist, so I always wondered: wouldn't adding so many restrictions actually make it easier to brute-force passwords? If an attacker knows the unit's password policy, shouldn't that enable them to narrow the search space considerably?
With the exception of the VoIP, all of these would be better handled by embedded microcontrollers and associated peripherals. There's a huge hacker community doing all of these things. Google Arduino, XBee, and XPort.
I've been researching hardware for this exact scenario. My goal has been to replace my current home file and web server (An Athlon 750 with 3 drives that consumes about 107 watts idle) with something smaller and a lot more power efficient.
I'm currently looking into building a mini-tower system with an Intel Nano 330 dual-core CPU, mini-tower case, and two 1TB disks. (One primary storage disk and another to back up the first.) Rough estimates say that the total cost to build will be around $315 and I'm hoping to get between 15-20 watts idle (more if I can get the disks to spin down after a timeout).
This plug computer looks interesting and I considered it as an alternative. But it turns out that the end price would be about the same ($100 for plug and about $100 for each external disk), the power savings wouldn't be all that great (a difference of 4 to 8 watts), and the disadvantages are significant (non-x86, usb disks only).