I could have swore that some modems that I bought back in the day listed "Caller ID" as one of their features in the specification on the packaging. My question is: can this feature be accessed from within one's favorite open source operating system? If so, I'm guessing that it's only possible with one or two brands of winmodem, but hey, if the price is right, it might be part of a cheap solution to the submitter's problem.
In a session titled "Windows/Linux integration: The Art of the Possible" on June 12, Moskowitz said that Linux is free like a puppy is free, "but after that comes the costs of training and the leashing and the dog-sitter."
While Linux has been more stable than Windows historically, that gap is now narrowing. But there are a lot fewer reboots with Linux, he said, asking the audience whether Linux has less security bugs.
After hearing their response, he acknowledged that there is no consensus on this question and that from his perspective, "it appears to be equal. Windows has more patches, but Microsoft releases them more frequently and fixes things more quickly," said Moskowitz.
Okay, perhaps I'm just being cynical or whatever, but this is what I'm hearing:
"The Windows and Linux camps need to put aside their differences and begin to work together to improve interoperability. (But we're still better than those open source nutjobs, right?)"
Aside from the obvious group back-patting, this just smells of publicity stunt. Last I checked, most open source software developers have no problem trying to make their software work with even closed source programs. If anyone needs to change, it's the closed source guys. If they want better interoperability, then they need to document their protocols and APIs or better yet, open up their code. It's hard to find a better way to encourage interoperability than giving away your source code for free.
Well, device drivers are usually kernel modules. As the OpenBSD and Linux kernels are vastly different, it is (AFAIK) very much non-trivial to port a driver from one kernel to another. A developer wanting to write a wifi Linux driver based on a OpenBSD one would be better off using the latter as documentation of the hardware for writing the former from scratch. (That is, assuming that he's familiar with the OpenBSD kernel to begin with. He would be part of a very small subset of Linux kernel developers, I'm sure.)
Why would anyone store their documents on any outside corporation's server, much less one with a demonstrated committment and ability to mine those documents?
If you're so worried about Google mining or selling your private information, here's a simple, easy, and 100% effective solution: don't put your private information online. Geez, it's not that hard of a concept to grasp.
From what I can tell, they're pushing the online spreadsheets as a way to deliberately share them with other people. Nowhere (that I could tell) were they suggesting that you upload your bank ledger to them.
Google is an evil company whose primary objective is to use everyone elses content to generate revenue
Well if that's your criterion for evil may I suggest you stay far away from Slashdot, Yahoo, digg, reddit, flickr, delicious, craigslist, ebay, online bookstores, all usenet providers, news sites, weather sites, forum websites, every commercial search engine in existance, and let's not forget ISPs themselves.
In fact, to keep a safe distance from all this evil, it's probably just safer if you never go online again. None of us would complain.
Oh, and please if you are from the USA do not get offended, it is nothing personal against citizens, its about the government:).
No, don't apologize. You'd be surprised how many of us realize how shitty our country is. It's just that we're currently in the minority in that regard and likely will be for awhile.
Am I the only person who thinks this is going to be spectacularly easy to hack?
Assuming, of course, that the fortnightly telephone calls don't download a new encryption key to the box that allows the box to decrypt the movies for viewing. If that is part of the system, then emulating the Moviebeam central office won't get you very far. (Unless the encryption is weak, but that's another topic.)
I dunno, get a decent provider? A few years ago, I lived in a place where there was no broadband. Finally, Comcast cable Internet became available and I signed up right away. Their only plan was around 1.5 Mbps at the time and for a few months, that's exactly what I got. Then steadily, of course, speed went down as they grossly oversold the line. The last month I lived there, I was getting better performance out of my backup dialup connection.
Now I live in a much more modern area and have a wider variety of options to chose from. I'm currently signed up with a medium-sized local provider with tens of thousands of accounts in the area and their speeds are pretty much as advertised as long as you're a reasonable distance from the CO.
Local companies are usually a better bet for broadband. For starters, they don't have the marketing budget of national corporations, so they have to work harder to keep their customers happy. One time my DSL went out in the middle of the day on Friday. Plugged the modem straight into the NI to rule out problems with my wiring and called up tech support. They promised to send a technician out next week. Saturday morning, I roll out of bed at 8:30 and there's a note on my front door saying that there was a problem with some piece of equipment down the block and that my DSL should be back up. It was.
I recognized the name of the technician on the note. He was the owner of the company.
Re:Unverifiable? Let's give it a go...
on
Online Revenge
·
· Score: 1
The moral of the story here: always ALWAYS check the seller's stats before bidding on an item. I see what look like great deals all the time on eBay, but upon closer inspection, the seller rating is awful and when this is the case, there's a good chance that the seller is out to scam. My personal policy is to never buy from anyone with a seller rating below 15 and with a positive feedback percentage lower than 95%.
How's a fella to start out on eBay then? Well, buying stuff is probably the easiest way. Also, many people don't have a problem bidding on low-rating sellers, so that's another avenue. Selling a bunch of low-cost items at first may help, although that could also raise a lot of red flags (it certainly would for me).
I raised my seller rating by selling and buying textbooks for my classes on half.com. (Owned by ebay, so the account is shared between the two sites.) Here I'm less concerned with low-rating buyers since I realize a lot of them are college students. Dozens of purchases and I've only gotten almost scammed once: I recently bought a DVD and right after, the seller marked the item as shipped and went on "vacation." Tried to contact him, filed a claim, and ebay returned by money just yesterday.
I've heard many horror stories of eBay refusing to refund money even for very obvious (and expensive) scams, though, so the best option is to just avoid them altogether if you can.
Don't expect to see iPod vending machines on street corners anytime soon. This one appeared in an Atlanta airport, where such a machine would make sense. Your everyday air traveller is an affluent entertainment-hungry impulse buyer willing to spend any amount of money to avoid being bored for the next hour or two. Plus, the machine is simply not going to get ripped off in an airport crawling with security.
From the looks of it, this machine isn't even Apple's doing, but rather some company called Zoom Systems.
Great I can buy a 750GB drive...however how the hell am I gonna back this thing up...
Easy: with a second 750GB drive. In my case, I have a file server with two 200GB drives. (Installed back when 200GB was widely considered a metric buttload of storage space.) All of my important data lives on one of the drives and the workstations mount a Samba drive exported by the server. Each night, the 200GB drive containing my valuable data is backed up to the other with 7 days worth of increments. (Off-site backups merely involve an extra machine and a decent network connection.)
Sure, this method assumes the added cost of a whole separate drive, but I challenge anyone here to come up with a cheaper and easier way to keep a large disk properly backed up.
No kidding. I mean, fuck. I'd have submitted my own, ahem, "design", if I would have known that just throwing a few gradients into the existing layout would have netted me a brand-spanking new laptop.
Most broadband users could easily get by on 5GB/month for $10-$15, then $0.25-$0.50/GB downstream after that.
Screwing, in other words, those of us who actually use our Internet connection to its full potential.
Second, it would provide a financial disincentive for people to use file sharing software for illegal reasons, thus providing the "social solution" to the "social problem" of how to handle mass copyright infringement without DRM or legislation.
Man, guity before being proven innocent, eh? I use gigs and gigs of bandwidth per month, but none of it is for pirating software or movies or anything. Mainly, I download quite a lot of free and open source software, stream shitloads of (legal) music, play online games, do remote tech support (think VNC and RDP), and make many VoIP calls per day. And as an American citizen, I of course pay dearly for the meager amount of bandwidth that allows these features as compared to the rest of the world.
If you'd rather see the Internet go back to what it was 10 years ago, where the only thing you could (affordably) do was pull up web pages and send the occasional email, go ahead with your metered bandwidth plan. Making people worry about how much every second of video, music, gameplay, or phone call is costing them will be the quickest way to ensure that these and similar technologies never even get off the ground.
It's a shame that so few people seem to realize that unmetered, net-neutral access is what made the Internet the great medium that it is today.
I have no RFID equipment to verify this, but it's been reported that card sleeves made of partially conductive material (such as that used in some anti-static bags) are effective at shielding RFID chips from casual activation. So if your card can be activated from a reader 4cm away, one of these sleeves might reduce the range to 0.5cm, meaning you can still authenticate with the card still in the sleeve (by touching it to the reader), but any person on the street with a hand-held RFID reader disguised as a walkman won't be able to just walk by you in order to clone your card.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness..."
Hello, that's the Declaration of Independence. An important historical document to be sure, but not one that has any legal footing in our current system of government.
In fact, the founding document of our government (the Constitution), makes absolutely no mention of God. Neither does the bill of rights. We know for fact that our founding fathers were religious men, so this omission cannot be by mistake.
When our country lost its collective faith in God, it had political consequences. All our rights are up for grabs now.
Ugh. You can't be serious.
Putting aside the above argument, your logic fails in that the at least 80% of the US population belongs to a religion that believes in God. (And by this, I mean: Protestant 52%, Roman Catholic 24%, Mormon 2%, Jewish 1%, Muslim 1%. "Other" is listed as 10% and the vast majority of those probably feature a single God as their Chief Executive Deity.) You're also forgetting that religious conservatives are currently the majority both at the polls and in the White House and Congress. Nevermind facts when doomsday preaching will do, eh?
Really, if your claim is that the US is falling apart from lack of faith in God, you need your head examined.
One carefully crafted piece of black electrical ought to do the trick. That's pretty much the first thing I'd do after showing off my brand-new MacBook to friends.
C'mon, who the hell would really use a built-in camera for anything serious after the first week of playing with the machine? Okay, besides the "video podcast" crowd or those chronic Internet expeditionists who get kicks out of waving their wangs around at complete strangers online. (Not that there's a whole lot of difference between these two groups...)
I installed AntiVir on my wife's Windows computer last about a year ago and it has apparently worked fine. About two months ago, I'm doing something on the machine an AntiVir starts complaining about a super duper new version that I need to upgrade to or I won't be protected against viruses anymore. What the heck, I figure, and upgrade it. Aside from some annoying ads, everything went fine. A month after that, I get a popup message saying something to the effect of, "Your free demo of AntiVir has run out. Please pay us money now."
Cute. I installed AVG instead and it seems to work well enough.
My wife's computer is the only Windows machine in the house, but luckily is due for an upgrade relatively soon. I'm going to coax her into a Mini Mac or iMac partly because desk space is at a premium in our office and partly so I don't have to worry about any of this anti-virus and anti-spyware business.
Mac OS X has ALWAYS been closed. It's Darwin that has been open. And "Darwin" is more than a bootable OS: Darwin is Apple's open source strategy AND an OS; but the usefulness has always come from the open source components of the OS, not the usefulness of Darwin as an OS itself. Darwin's usefulness as an OS is, shall we say, "limited" at best, and always has been.
RTFM. The kernel of Darwin/OS X was always open source, now it's not. The only open source parts now are the Unixy userland (and I'm not even sure about that), which is really just FreeBSD. "Limited" is an understatement. Darwin is now totally useless to the open source community.
For awhile there, it looked like Apple was going to be a friend to open source, but time and again they've shown that they're only interested in taking rather than cooperating. (The Konqueror/Safari debacle, for instance.) Rather reminds me of another large operating system company that likes open source, but only the kind of open source that they're not obligated to contribute back to.
Exactly. Some new HPs apparently come with this newfangled glossy screen. My first thought:
"Wait, isn't that a step backward?"
I mean, it took forever for low-glare CRT screens to become commonplace and LCDs luckily had them right off the bat. Now we're going back to a glare-ful displays? Okay, you MIGHT argue that the increased brightness of the display means that you can get away with a non-non-glare screen in most situations. BUT, the backlights in LCDs tend to lose brightness over time, and those that burn brightest get darker quicker. I'm betting that in 2 years, you'll see a flood of these on eBay because the owners couldn't read their damn screens unless they turn out all the lights.
Here in the U.S., the education discount for the new MacBook is a piddly $50. MacMall is actually slightly cheaper.
I seem to remember a time when the education discount was 10% across the board, but maybe my brain is just making that up. I do know that there was a government employee discount as well, and it was a better discount, but that seems to be gone now.
TurboGears is similar to Rails, but in Python. I don't believe it was inspired by Rails, but the TG people are using the Rails momentum to guide development (in terms of what's working for Rails and what isn't) as well as borrowing a few marketing ideas. (For example, the 20-Minute Wiki tutorial.)
I'm neither a RoR or TurboGears guru by any stretch, but near as I can tell, these are the main differences between Rails and TurboGears (real gurus are welcome to correct/add to this list):
1. No need to learn a new language (if you already know Python). Relatively few developers knew anything about Ruby before RoR became a hit, while lots of people know Python.
2. TurboGears comes with less magic built-in. Which is actually a boon for most people because a few that I've talked to thought that all of the magic in Rails ended up making non-trivial applications hard to both develop and debug. TurboGears is much more verbose. Sure, you have to write a few more lines of code for many typical tasks, but you also have a much better idea of what's going on in your application and can debug it quickly when it breaks.
3. TurboGears ties together several pre-existing projects into one framework rather than rolling their own. This offers a couple of nice benefits. First, it's less work that the TG developers have to do. They neither had to write nor have to maintain much of the code that TG rests upon. Second, it's possible that one sub-project can be substituted for another later on down the road. (I understand that they're already using this feature and are in the process of migrating SQLObject out and bringing SQLAlchemy in.)
4. Better documentation. Python is already exceedingly well documented and the TG folks are going out of their way to make sure that their framework is documented just as well. By contrast, if you're just starting out with Ruby and Rails, the best documentation available right now is a Ruby book and a Rails book, both by the same publisher. Part of the reason I didn't go too far into Rails was because I couldn't afford to invest in the books at the time. (There is a TurboGears book in the works by Mark Ramm which should be out later this year.)
Of course, one potential downside to TurboGears is that you have to learn how the various sub-projects work in order to use TurboGears. But they're not all that hard and are probably about the same amount of effort to learn as all of Rails.
There are also a couple other really nifty things about TG that I'd like to mention. (I don't know if rails has these or not.)
The templating engine, Kid, allows you to draft up a template and give right to your web designer, with placeholder text and all, and have them hack on it in Dreamweaver or whatever they use. When they're done, just copy it back into TurboGears and it simply works. Kid uses real HTML tags and attributes, so web browsers can view the templates directly and HTML editors can edit them without mucking up the template-specific stuff.
CatWalk, the built-in AJAX database editor can be enabled in your TurboGears app by inserting like two lines of code. Talk about sweet.
The settlement states that Poul-Henning Kamp must not talk about the history of problems which the D-Link routers caused.
You know what, that just pisses me off. Any rational person should have laughed at a condition like that. No matter how much money was offered. Getting the truth out about the problem is far more important and will go a lot further to helping solve it than taking a bribe and pretending it never happenend. (Hint: D-Link is far from the the only company who does this with NTP and other services.)
My respect for this prominent open source hacker has dropped a few notches today.
Slashdot Mirror
I could have swore that some modems that I bought back in the day listed "Caller ID" as one of their features in the specification on the packaging. My question is: can this feature be accessed from within one's favorite open source operating system? If so, I'm guessing that it's only possible with one or two brands of winmodem, but hey, if the price is right, it might be part of a cheap solution to the submitter's problem.
In a session titled "Windows/Linux integration: The Art of the Possible" on June 12, Moskowitz said that Linux is free like a puppy is free, "but after that comes the costs of training and the leashing and the dog-sitter."
While Linux has been more stable than Windows historically, that gap is now narrowing. But there are a lot fewer reboots with Linux, he said, asking the audience whether Linux has less security bugs.
After hearing their response, he acknowledged that there is no consensus on this question and that from his perspective, "it appears to be equal. Windows has more patches, but Microsoft releases them more frequently and fixes things more quickly," said Moskowitz.
Okay, perhaps I'm just being cynical or whatever, but this is what I'm hearing:
"The Windows and Linux camps need to put aside their differences and begin to work together to improve interoperability. (But we're still better than those open source nutjobs, right?)"
Aside from the obvious group back-patting, this just smells of publicity stunt. Last I checked, most open source software developers have no problem trying to make their software work with even closed source programs. If anyone needs to change, it's the closed source guys. If they want better interoperability, then they need to document their protocols and APIs or better yet, open up their code. It's hard to find a better way to encourage interoperability than giving away your source code for free.
Well, device drivers are usually kernel modules. As the OpenBSD and Linux kernels are vastly different, it is (AFAIK) very much non-trivial to port a driver from one kernel to another.
A developer wanting to write a wifi Linux driver based on a OpenBSD one would be better off using the latter as documentation of the hardware for writing the former from scratch. (That is, assuming that he's familiar with the OpenBSD kernel to begin with. He would be part of a very small subset of Linux kernel developers, I'm sure.)
Why would anyone store their documents on any outside corporation's server, much less one with a demonstrated committment and ability to mine those documents?
If you're so worried about Google mining or selling your private information, here's a simple, easy, and 100% effective solution: don't put your private information online. Geez, it's not that hard of a concept to grasp.
From what I can tell, they're pushing the online spreadsheets as a way to deliberately share them with other people. Nowhere (that I could tell) were they suggesting that you upload your bank ledger to them.
Google is an evil company whose primary objective is to use everyone elses content to generate revenue
Well if that's your criterion for evil may I suggest you stay far away from Slashdot, Yahoo, digg, reddit, flickr, delicious, craigslist, ebay, online bookstores, all usenet providers, news sites, weather sites, forum websites, every commercial search engine in existance, and let's not forget ISPs themselves.
In fact, to keep a safe distance from all this evil, it's probably just safer if you never go online again. None of us would complain.
The Happy Hacking keyboard places ALL 101 KEYS within touch-typing range.
I think you mean "all 60 keys."
Oh, and please if you are from the USA do not get offended, it is nothing personal against citizens, its about the government :).
No, don't apologize. You'd be surprised how many of us realize how shitty our country is. It's just that we're currently in the minority in that regard and likely will be for awhile.
Am I the only person who thinks this is going to be spectacularly easy to hack?
Assuming, of course, that the fortnightly telephone calls don't download a new encryption key to the box that allows the box to decrypt the movies for viewing. If that is part of the system, then emulating the Moviebeam central office won't get you very far. (Unless the encryption is weak, but that's another topic.)
I dunno, get a decent provider? A few years ago, I lived in a place where there was no broadband. Finally, Comcast cable Internet became available and I signed up right away. Their only plan was around 1.5 Mbps at the time and for a few months, that's exactly what I got. Then steadily, of course, speed went down as they grossly oversold the line. The last month I lived there, I was getting better performance out of my backup dialup connection.
Now I live in a much more modern area and have a wider variety of options to chose from. I'm currently signed up with a medium-sized local provider with tens of thousands of accounts in the area and their speeds are pretty much as advertised as long as you're a reasonable distance from the CO.
Local companies are usually a better bet for broadband. For starters, they don't have the marketing budget of national corporations, so they have to work harder to keep their customers happy. One time my DSL went out in the middle of the day on Friday. Plugged the modem straight into the NI to rule out problems with my wiring and called up tech support. They promised to send a technician out next week. Saturday morning, I roll out of bed at 8:30 and there's a note on my front door saying that there was a problem with some piece of equipment down the block and that my DSL should be back up. It was.
I recognized the name of the technician on the note. He was the owner of the company.
The moral of the story here: always ALWAYS check the seller's stats before bidding on an item. I see what look like great deals all the time on eBay, but upon closer inspection, the seller rating is awful and when this is the case, there's a good chance that the seller is out to scam. My personal policy is to never buy from anyone with a seller rating below 15 and with a positive feedback percentage lower than 95%.
How's a fella to start out on eBay then? Well, buying stuff is probably the easiest way. Also, many people don't have a problem bidding on low-rating sellers, so that's another avenue. Selling a bunch of low-cost items at first may help, although that could also raise a lot of red flags (it certainly would for me).
I raised my seller rating by selling and buying textbooks for my classes on half.com. (Owned by ebay, so the account is shared between the two sites.) Here I'm less concerned with low-rating buyers since I realize a lot of them are college students. Dozens of purchases and I've only gotten almost scammed once: I recently bought a DVD and right after, the seller marked the item as shipped and went on "vacation." Tried to contact him, filed a claim, and ebay returned by money just yesterday.
I've heard many horror stories of eBay refusing to refund money even for very obvious (and expensive) scams, though, so the best option is to just avoid them altogether if you can.
Hello, here's a non-linkjacked URL:
a chine-133740.php
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/ipod-vending-m
Don't expect to see iPod vending machines on street corners anytime soon. This one appeared in an Atlanta airport, where such a machine would make sense. Your everyday air traveller is an affluent entertainment-hungry impulse buyer willing to spend any amount of money to avoid being bored for the next hour or two. Plus, the machine is simply not going to get ripped off in an airport crawling with security.
From the looks of it, this machine isn't even Apple's doing, but rather some company called Zoom Systems.
Great I can buy a 750GB drive...however how the hell am I gonna back this thing up...
Easy: with a second 750GB drive. In my case, I have a file server with two 200GB drives. (Installed back when 200GB was widely considered a metric buttload of storage space.) All of my important data lives on one of the drives and the workstations mount a Samba drive exported by the server. Each night, the 200GB drive containing my valuable data is backed up to the other with 7 days worth of increments. (Off-site backups merely involve an extra machine and a decent network connection.)
Sure, this method assumes the added cost of a whole separate drive, but I challenge anyone here to come up with a cheaper and easier way to keep a large disk properly backed up.
No kidding. I mean, fuck. I'd have submitted my own, ahem, "design", if I would have known that just throwing a few gradients into the existing layout would have netted me a brand-spanking new laptop.
Most broadband users could easily get by on 5GB/month for $10-$15, then $0.25-$0.50/GB downstream after that.
Screwing, in other words, those of us who actually use our Internet connection to its full potential.
Second, it would provide a financial disincentive for people to use file sharing software for illegal reasons, thus providing the "social solution" to the "social problem" of how to handle mass copyright infringement without DRM or legislation.
Man, guity before being proven innocent, eh? I use gigs and gigs of bandwidth per month, but none of it is for pirating software or movies or anything. Mainly, I download quite a lot of free and open source software, stream shitloads of (legal) music, play online games, do remote tech support (think VNC and RDP), and make many VoIP calls per day. And as an American citizen, I of course pay dearly for the meager amount of bandwidth that allows these features as compared to the rest of the world.
If you'd rather see the Internet go back to what it was 10 years ago, where the only thing you could (affordably) do was pull up web pages and send the occasional email, go ahead with your metered bandwidth plan. Making people worry about how much every second of video, music, gameplay, or phone call is costing them will be the quickest way to ensure that these and similar technologies never even get off the ground.
It's a shame that so few people seem to realize that unmetered, net-neutral access is what made the Internet the great medium that it is today.
I have no RFID equipment to verify this, but it's been reported that card sleeves made of partially conductive material (such as that used in some anti-static bags) are effective at shielding RFID chips from casual activation. So if your card can be activated from a reader 4cm away, one of these sleeves might reduce the range to 0.5cm, meaning you can still authenticate with the card still in the sleeve (by touching it to the reader), but any person on the street with a hand-held RFID reader disguised as a walkman won't be able to just walk by you in order to clone your card.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness..."
Hello, that's the Declaration of Independence. An important historical document to be sure, but not one that has any legal footing in our current system of government.
In fact, the founding document of our government (the Constitution), makes absolutely no mention of God. Neither does the bill of rights. We know for fact that our founding fathers were religious men, so this omission cannot be by mistake.
When our country lost its collective faith in God, it had political consequences. All our rights are up for grabs now.
Ugh. You can't be serious.
Putting aside the above argument, your logic fails in that the at least 80% of the US population belongs to a religion that believes in God. (And by this, I mean: Protestant 52%, Roman Catholic 24%, Mormon 2%, Jewish 1%, Muslim 1%. "Other" is listed as 10% and the vast majority of those probably feature a single God as their Chief Executive Deity.) You're also forgetting that religious conservatives are currently the majority both at the polls and in the White House and Congress. Nevermind facts when doomsday preaching will do, eh?
Really, if your claim is that the US is falling apart from lack of faith in God, you need your head examined.
One carefully crafted piece of black electrical ought to do the trick. That's pretty much the first thing I'd do after showing off my brand-new MacBook to friends.
C'mon, who the hell would really use a built-in camera for anything serious after the first week of playing with the machine? Okay, besides the "video podcast" crowd or those chronic Internet expeditionists who get kicks out of waving their wangs around at complete strangers online. (Not that there's a whole lot of difference between these two groups...)
I installed AntiVir on my wife's Windows computer last about a year ago and it has apparently worked fine. About two months ago, I'm doing something on the machine an AntiVir starts complaining about a super duper new version that I need to upgrade to or I won't be protected against viruses anymore. What the heck, I figure, and upgrade it. Aside from some annoying ads, everything went fine. A month after that, I get a popup message saying something to the effect of, "Your free demo of AntiVir has run out. Please pay us money now."
Cute. I installed AVG instead and it seems to work well enough.
My wife's computer is the only Windows machine in the house, but luckily is due for an upgrade relatively soon. I'm going to coax her into a Mini Mac or iMac partly because desk space is at a premium in our office and partly so I don't have to worry about any of this anti-virus and anti-spyware business.
Thanks, I was actually supposed to work today...
Mac OS X has ALWAYS been closed. It's Darwin that has been open. And "Darwin" is more than a bootable OS: Darwin is Apple's open source strategy AND an OS; but the usefulness has always come from the open source components of the OS, not the usefulness of Darwin as an OS itself. Darwin's usefulness as an OS is, shall we say, "limited" at best, and always has been.
RTFM. The kernel of Darwin/OS X was always open source, now it's not. The only open source parts now are the Unixy userland (and I'm not even sure about that), which is really just FreeBSD. "Limited" is an understatement. Darwin is now totally useless to the open source community.
For awhile there, it looked like Apple was going to be a friend to open source, but time and again they've shown that they're only interested in taking rather than cooperating. (The Konqueror/Safari debacle, for instance.) Rather reminds me of another large operating system company that likes open source, but only the kind of open source that they're not obligated to contribute back to.
Exactly. Some new HPs apparently come with this newfangled glossy screen. My first thought:
"Wait, isn't that a step backward?"
I mean, it took forever for low-glare CRT screens to become commonplace and LCDs luckily had them right off the bat. Now we're going back to a glare-ful displays? Okay, you MIGHT argue that the increased brightness of the display means that you can get away with a non-non-glare screen in most situations. BUT, the backlights in LCDs tend to lose brightness over time, and those that burn brightest get darker quicker. I'm betting that in 2 years, you'll see a flood of these on eBay because the owners couldn't read their damn screens unless they turn out all the lights.
Here in the U.S., the education discount for the new MacBook is a piddly $50. MacMall is actually slightly cheaper.
I seem to remember a time when the education discount was 10% across the board, but maybe my brain is just making that up. I do know that there was a government employee discount as well, and it was a better discount, but that seems to be gone now.
The debate isn't whether copyright laws violated, but whether the GPL was violated. Copyright doesn't enter into it.
TurboGears is similar to Rails, but in Python. I don't believe it was inspired by Rails, but the TG people are using the Rails momentum to guide development (in terms of what's working for Rails and what isn't) as well as borrowing a few marketing ideas. (For example, the 20-Minute Wiki tutorial.)
I'm neither a RoR or TurboGears guru by any stretch, but near as I can tell, these are the main differences between Rails and TurboGears (real gurus are welcome to correct/add to this list):
1. No need to learn a new language (if you already know Python). Relatively few developers knew anything about Ruby before RoR became a hit, while lots of people know Python.
2. TurboGears comes with less magic built-in. Which is actually a boon for most people because a few that I've talked to thought that all of the magic in Rails ended up making non-trivial applications hard to both develop and debug. TurboGears is much more verbose. Sure, you have to write a few more lines of code for many typical tasks, but you also have a much better idea of what's going on in your application and can debug it quickly when it breaks.
3. TurboGears ties together several pre-existing projects into one framework rather than rolling their own. This offers a couple of nice benefits. First, it's less work that the TG developers have to do. They neither had to write nor have to maintain much of the code that TG rests upon. Second, it's possible that one sub-project can be substituted for another later on down the road. (I understand that they're already using this feature and are in the process of migrating SQLObject out and bringing SQLAlchemy in.)
4. Better documentation. Python is already exceedingly well documented and the TG folks are going out of their way to make sure that their framework is documented just as well. By contrast, if you're just starting out with Ruby and Rails, the best documentation available right now is a Ruby book and a Rails book, both by the same publisher. Part of the reason I didn't go too far into Rails was because I couldn't afford to invest in the books at the time. (There is a TurboGears book in the works by Mark Ramm which should be out later this year.)
Of course, one potential downside to TurboGears is that you have to learn how the various sub-projects work in order to use TurboGears. But they're not all that hard and are probably about the same amount of effort to learn as all of Rails.
There are also a couple other really nifty things about TG that I'd like to mention. (I don't know if rails has these or not.)
The templating engine, Kid, allows you to draft up a template and give right to your web designer, with placeholder text and all, and have them hack on it in Dreamweaver or whatever they use. When they're done, just copy it back into TurboGears and it simply works. Kid uses real HTML tags and attributes, so web browsers can view the templates directly and HTML editors can edit them without mucking up the template-specific stuff.
CatWalk, the built-in AJAX database editor can be enabled in your TurboGears app by inserting like two lines of code. Talk about sweet.
The settlement states that Poul-Henning Kamp must not talk about the history of problems which the D-Link routers caused.
You know what, that just pisses me off. Any rational person should have laughed at a condition like that. No matter how much money was offered. Getting the truth out about the problem is far more important and will go a lot further to helping solve it than taking a bribe and pretending it never happenend. (Hint: D-Link is far from the the only company who does this with NTP and other services.)
My respect for this prominent open source hacker has dropped a few notches today.