I think it says a lot, when someone makes a "it's all the fault of you stupid users...if you don't know how to set things up correctly then get back to watching the tv" comment, but then gets his own facts wrong.
To cross fertilize, "I for one welcome our unix wielding overlords"
Wouldn't centralized software somewhat ruin the point of having/writing open-source software? Is anybody out there planning on writing some kind of open source software that runs an application server?
Fast forward 10 years time, it would be a pity if it was just Google vs Microsoft because no one in the FOSS camp realized it would be a good idea, until it was too late.
I don't know much about these things, but it sounds like this change could be disastrous if open source developers aren't on their toes. We all complain about how Office etc obfuscates their file formats so they are unreadable by other software, but imagine how easily they could do it when the application itself and all its data resides on their own system. I can imagine the situation,
Geekboy: But I don't want to use paintbrush to edit my picture, it's shit!
MS: No problem, you can license Photoshop for an hour, it will cost $10.
Geekboy: Can't I use the GIMP, it's free?
MS: Sorry, we don't run that software on our servers.
I would add that it doesn't have to be a zero-one thing. One could have a computer that has a standard fat hard disk and a video/audio player for all the things to big to fit down the pipe in realtime, but email, office apps, images/editors all stored and run offline.
This way you have most of the benefits of not having to adminsiter your own computer, you can use expensive software pro rata, but you can still do all the normal things by working offline.
Never underestimate the power of good marketing. You can't just hope that if you make a good product everyone is going to find out about it. As much as OS people loathe it, it is a necessary thing. Marketing isn't just about making bad stuff look good, it's also about making good stuff get noticed.
Liberal typically refers to people in favor of progressive reform, not reverting back to antiquated practices, ideologies, or institutions of the past.
And how does that have anything to do with the word "liberal"? I'm not saying you're wrong, just curious.
If you said that the law of space was "the more you look, the more there will be", then people would ask "but what is it that you will see, and when will you see it". If you can't answer that then you are called a philosopher. The basic problem with this kind of theory is that it is not restrictive enough to be scientific - anything and everything can be predicted. This criteria is known as falsifiability
Describing the quantum doesn't necesarily mean it exists - there have been many theories in science that have turned out to be wrong. In particular, there have been plenty of physical objects, eg magnetic monopoles, that people have looked for but not found. A well documented example is when 100 years ago Michelson and Morley looked for changes in the speed of light as the earth rotated, but they didn't find it. Einstein later made this fact into a fundamental law of physics.
Someone describing something does not make that thing so, yet our ethics and scientific communities seem deeply rooted in the 'this is the only way to describe something' mud.
Well, I am a research physicist and I have very rarely come across such thinking amongst my colleagues. During a scientist's training s/he will encounter many different paradigms of scientific thought. Although the measurable difference between each successive scientific theory becomes ever smaller (requiring ever more cunning experimental scientists) the language that is used to describe the theory changes massively through each iteration. For example, whilst a physicist may be very confident in predicting the perihelion advance of mercury, s/he is likely to be unsure of whether gravity will be considered a purely geometrical effect by physicists in 50 years time.
Although individual scientists may well make gains through repeatedly applying a new language to an old question, that doesn't mean they think it is the only language.
Maybe they're holding back whilst they flirt with European politicians. Not even eurocrats would believe "patents are good for the market because they promote research" if they can see EU businesses being killed off by American corps.
Personally, i think this issue with trading patents is a good thing for the long run. The banks are now much more likely to be in the anti-patent lobby than before, and they have a much bigger supply of luxury yachts at their displosal than richard stallman!
I meant more in terms of privacy than persitancy. For example, if someone gets access to your bank details, you could become very poor very quickly. I'm not sure what bank policy is about this, but i imagine you are treading on thin ice. If one's home-made films stored on one's home computer got stolen, this could also causea big problem. There are lots of other important privacy things like this (unrelated to big-brother tinfoiling bullshit); i'm sure you can think of more.
For many home users (I'm tempted to say most) it doesn't make any difference if you're running as admin or user, because all the sensitive data is in the user directory anyway. Whilst it might be a serious issue if a unix style setup with hundreds of users gets rooted, for a home computer it may be no better or worse than a trojan keylogger.
I'm not an expert in these things, but it seems to me that SELinux has the right idea, adding increased resolution for access permissions. Ideally you should have a standardized tool which can prevent certain user apps (not certain users) from accessing different sets of files. I don't know whether SELinux actually does this, but IMO in the end it must do to keep mum-and-dad users a bit safer.
A serial burglar stole my entire legit CD & DVD collection, but left behind the hard disk full of mp3 'backup copies' behind. For some reason the RIAA/MPAA don't believe me.
have you any idea how many unsed cycles there are on the GPU, included as standard in most desktops?
And as others have pointed out, it is a cue, to tell the user that they have clicked and something should be happening soon.
When I'm listening to my mp3 player, i can't hear my phone ring. And i can't feel it vibrate because it's usually in my bag (i don't like leaving it in my pocket all the time). This obviously causes a problem, because if i'm expecting a call then i have to not listen to music, and if i'm not expecting a call then i'll probably miss it.
And regarding batteries, i have a charger at home and at work. Most of my friends have nokia phone chargers. If listening to music through my phone reduces the battery to, say, 5 hours, then i probably won't care.
I find it really bizarre how the slashdot community has so many neo-luddites. Just because this technology is not perfectly set up for how YOU listen to music, or how YOU use your phone, it doesn't mean it isn't good for others. Sometimes i get the feeling that my grandparents are more adaptable to change than the average slashdot reader.
In principle, (and according to the bohr probability postulate in QM) you can have an entirely random (ie, P=0.5 either way) event that is uncorrelated to anything else. In fact, a particular form of 1-0 experiment that is often used for teaching quantum mechanics is measuring the x-spin of an electron which is currently in a state of y-spin.
However, _testing_ that this event is actually random requires many repeated experiments, and then you're into the world of statistics rather than probability. In that case it is (i think) always true that with a finite number of random events it will always be possible to find a statistic that _predicts_ the sequence is correlated/non-random even if it is.
I'm not totally sure of all this, but from memory win 3.1 couldn't:
Interface with USB peripherals, and hence the majority of devices which people want/use.
Have long filenames
Access large HDs
Have limited access users without some novell type extension
And with word 2.0 you couldn't
Save docs as html
Do a decent grammar check
Write for more than an hour without it crashing.
Document templates?
Write scripts in a decent language where the object model is compatible with other 'office' applications, ie vb
The bottom line is, despite significant advances in hardware, the "User Experience" still feels as sluggish and slow as it did in the days of Windows 3.1 on a 386.
Why is this the bottom line? The UI needs to be acceptably fast, not 1ms fast.
Can you IMAGINE how fast Windows 3.1 would be on modern hardware if the drivers existed?
From the article, "And if you think the punishment is stiff when you break municipal, state, or federal law, just try monkeying around with thermodynamic law!"
As of yet there has been no punishment, since there has been no crime. Presumably if someone did break it, their punishment would be a nobel prize though.
Am I the only one that gets irritated by these kind of articles?
What does "Security is a process, not a product." actually mean? I hear it banded about a lot, it sounds nice, but does it actually have any meat to it?
First, "security is a process". Well, it seems true enough, but it's kind of obvious since a process is just something that has a time dependence. Virtually everything in the computing world has a considerable time dependence.
Second, "security is not a product". So presumably if you take an OS that has no facility for passwords (eg of a product), then that has the same security as an OS with a facility for passwords (another eg of a product)? No? I didn't think so. This example may seem trivial and pointless, but similar examples can be used for FF. How about if a browser disabled executable code? Would that be more secure? Yes. Or more practically, how about if a browser disabled executable code by default, would that be more secure? Yes.
Despite this phrase being a combination of obviously true and obviously false, it also promotes the view that the software designers are never to blame when a non-savvy computer user has their online bank account emptied. "Security is a process, dontcha know".
I agree with your general point about there being no malicious intent, but why do you think that it is cheaper to store US data than, say, European data?
As it happens, Europe has actually been mapped out...i know because i saw them on the walls in the vatican. There were lots of pictures of dragons and serpents...but i'm sure google has the technology to filter these out.
But perhaps you are right "no one would use all the features", after all, most people don't travel more than 10 miles from their house in their whole lifetime since we haven't invented the automobile over here yet. Without being able to travel, who needs a map?
Slashdot Mirror
Right, I'm off to go Scouting For Boys.
PS Sorry for being seriously off-topic (and for the deliberate misquote).
But surely any user is infallible. S/he might accidentally write the loop incorrectly and fork indefinitely, bringing down everyone else's sessions.
To cross fertilize, "I for one welcome our unix wielding overlords"
Fast forward 10 years time, it would be a pity if it was just Google vs Microsoft because no one in the FOSS camp realized it would be a good idea, until it was too late.
I don't know much about these things, but it sounds like this change could be disastrous if open source developers aren't on their toes. We all complain about how Office etc obfuscates their file formats so they are unreadable by other software, but imagine how easily they could do it when the application itself and all its data resides on their own system. I can imagine the situation,
Geekboy: But I don't want to use paintbrush to edit my picture, it's shit!
MS: No problem, you can license Photoshop for an hour, it will cost $10.
Geekboy: Can't I use the GIMP, it's free?
MS: Sorry, we don't run that software on our servers.
This way you have most of the benefits of not having to adminsiter your own computer, you can use expensive software pro rata, but you can still do all the normal things by working offline.
Strange, I thought a laser was an EM wave. I'm not an expert, obviously, but don't some snipers use lasers for aiming?
Never underestimate the power of good marketing. You can't just hope that if you make a good product everyone is going to find out about it. As much as OS people loathe it, it is a necessary thing. Marketing isn't just about making bad stuff look good, it's also about making good stuff get noticed.
Liberal typically refers to people in favor of progressive reform, not reverting back to antiquated practices, ideologies, or institutions of the past. And how does that have anything to do with the word "liberal"? I'm not saying you're wrong, just curious.
"Patents cause illegal immigration". It's the only way!
Describing the quantum doesn't necesarily mean it exists - there have been many theories in science that have turned out to be wrong. In particular, there have been plenty of physical objects, eg magnetic monopoles, that people have looked for but not found. A well documented example is when 100 years ago Michelson and Morley looked for changes in the speed of light as the earth rotated, but they didn't find it. Einstein later made this fact into a fundamental law of physics.
Well, I am a research physicist and I have very rarely come across such thinking amongst my colleagues. During a scientist's training s/he will encounter many different paradigms of scientific thought. Although the measurable difference between each successive scientific theory becomes ever smaller (requiring ever more cunning experimental scientists) the language that is used to describe the theory changes massively through each iteration. For example, whilst a physicist may be very confident in predicting the perihelion advance of mercury, s/he is likely to be unsure of whether gravity will be considered a purely geometrical effect by physicists in 50 years time.
Although individual scientists may well make gains through repeatedly applying a new language to an old question, that doesn't mean they think it is the only language.
Just a tiny example, but i'm sure many other exist.
Personally, i think this issue with trading patents is a good thing for the long run. The banks are now much more likely to be in the anti-patent lobby than before, and they have a much bigger supply of luxury yachts at their displosal than richard stallman!
I meant more in terms of privacy than persitancy. For example, if someone gets access to your bank details, you could become very poor very quickly. I'm not sure what bank policy is about this, but i imagine you are treading on thin ice. If one's home-made films stored on one's home computer got stolen, this could also causea big problem. There are lots of other important privacy things like this (unrelated to big-brother tinfoiling bullshit); i'm sure you can think of more.
I'm not an expert in these things, but it seems to me that SELinux has the right idea, adding increased resolution for access permissions. Ideally you should have a standardized tool which can prevent certain user apps (not certain users) from accessing different sets of files. I don't know whether SELinux actually does this, but IMO in the end it must do to keep mum-and-dad users a bit safer.
But it's true I tell you!
have you any idea how many unsed cycles there are on the GPU, included as standard in most desktops? And as others have pointed out, it is a cue, to tell the user that they have clicked and something should be happening soon.
Sometimes it _is_ due to the CEO or board wanting to expand their empire.
Yeah, well i was thinking that myself, but then i realised that it had been modded +5, so it is at least posters and modders.
And regarding batteries, i have a charger at home and at work. Most of my friends have nokia phone chargers. If listening to music through my phone reduces the battery to, say, 5 hours, then i probably won't care.
I find it really bizarre how the slashdot community has so many neo-luddites. Just because this technology is not perfectly set up for how YOU listen to music, or how YOU use your phone, it doesn't mean it isn't good for others. Sometimes i get the feeling that my grandparents are more adaptable to change than the average slashdot reader.
However, _testing_ that this event is actually random requires many repeated experiments, and then you're into the world of statistics rather than probability. In that case it is (i think) always true that with a finite number of random events it will always be possible to find a statistic that _predicts_ the sequence is correlated/non-random even if it is.
- Interface with USB peripherals, and hence the majority of devices which people want/use.
- Have long filenames
- Access large HDs
- Have limited access users without some novell type extension
And with word 2.0 you couldn'tThe bottom line is, despite significant advances in hardware, the "User Experience" still feels as sluggish and slow as it did in the days of Windows 3.1 on a 386.
Why is this the bottom line? The UI needs to be acceptably fast, not 1ms fast.
Can you IMAGINE how fast Windows 3.1 would be on modern hardware if the drivers existed?
And who do you think would actually care?
As of yet there has been no punishment, since there has been no crime. Presumably if someone did break it, their punishment would be a nobel prize though.
Am I the only one that gets irritated by these kind of articles?
First, "security is a process". Well, it seems true enough, but it's kind of obvious since a process is just something that has a time dependence. Virtually everything in the computing world has a considerable time dependence.
Second, "security is not a product". So presumably if you take an OS that has no facility for passwords (eg of a product), then that has the same security as an OS with a facility for passwords (another eg of a product)? No? I didn't think so. This example may seem trivial and pointless, but similar examples can be used for FF. How about if a browser disabled executable code? Would that be more secure? Yes. Or more practically, how about if a browser disabled executable code by default, would that be more secure? Yes.
Despite this phrase being a combination of obviously true and obviously false, it also promotes the view that the software designers are never to blame when a non-savvy computer user has their online bank account emptied. "Security is a process, dontcha know".
As it happens, Europe has actually been mapped out...i know because i saw them on the walls in the vatican. There were lots of pictures of dragons and serpents...but i'm sure google has the technology to filter these out. But perhaps you are right "no one would use all the features", after all, most people don't travel more than 10 miles from their house in their whole lifetime since we haven't invented the automobile over here yet. Without being able to travel, who needs a map?