I don't think XUL apps should really be used outside the browser.
But the browser is a XUL app. So is the mail client. That's one of the main points of XULrunner - to make it easier to make stand alone apps that use XUL for the GUI.
Which is something that Linux and the wider FOSS community really doesn't need - yet another way to manage packages of software. You've got several distro level package manegment systems (deb, rpm, ports etc), language level package systems (perl, python, etc) and now platform level packages. Why can't XULRunner just tap into the base package management system instead of doing it it's own way?
It's hard to see how yet more package management is going to make things easier, for example what happens if I write a python app that uses XUL for the front end and some C libraries and native python libraries at the back? The python runtime and the C libraries are managed by debian on my system but by rpm on somebody elses, the native python libraries use python's setup.py and the XUL would be managed by XULRunner.
When I read the BBC article, at first I wondered why any "security expert" would be calling for a back door, then I realized he was calling for a back door to be put into TPM (which would instantly make it unfit for the purpose it was designed for) and so I wondered if this wasn't some attempt to get the government to effectively kill TPM/DRM in the name of anti-terrorism.
Seeing as the article is in the Politics section, I bet the author really doesn't have much of clue as to what's actually going on.
But how do you prove beyond resonable doubt (or even on balance of probablities) that data was there in the first place if the encrypted data is indistiguishable from random noise? Assuming someone is innocent until proven guilty, the then government can't just say "there's encrypted data there" without some form of evidence. And the hard disk with the alledged encrypted data isn't evidence if they can't show that there is encrypted data on it.
And who doesn't suspect MS would leave backdoors anyway?
I don't - seeing as we're talking about TPM/"Trusted Computing" - the hardware level DRM system that only benefits Microsoft, Apple, RIAA, MPAA et al. A backdoor into TPM would break the fancy new DRM that's coming with Vista. Why would Microsoft build back doors into something that's suppossed to protect them ?
but the closed nature of cell phones and their networks is worse. What would the Internet be like if you could only use approved applications built into the computer on it? What if every email was $0.10?
I thought that was really just a problem in the USA - I don't think any providers in the UK (or Europe for that matter) restrict what applications are available on phones, or do weird things to lock out phone functionality (other than locking a subsidized phone to a network, but even then that can be unlocked). Maybe providers in other parts of the world restrict things as well, but I've only ever heard of that happening in the US.
Fair point with email, I still can't believe SMS is so popular, especially as it's extradorinarily expensive considering it's limitations. Hopefully with 3G mobile messaging might start to swing back to email style pricing. I can't see why anyone would pay 10p for a text if they have a flat rate mobile data service and can send an email "for free".
I expect that local government could slash energy consumption by enforcing some kind of "out of hours" energy tax aimed at lights, computers etc. being left on over night.
How do you enforce that? If you try to enforce by metered usage then what about ligitimate uses of overnight power such as water heating - which is often done at night when power is cheaper? What about companies that work 24/7, even if it's just the servers that are being used (so that some of those computers that are on are actually in use by someone, somewhere on the planet)? Where I work, we have both machines and people working around the clock - should we be penalized for that?
The first would-be terrorist to cause a problem, everyone around would pull a gun on his ass.
Exactly how does this work with terrorists who are inteding to kill themselves along with the people they're murdering? Look at the 7/7 bombings in London - even if every person in the 3 bombed carriges and the bus were carrying guns, it wouldn't have stopped the terrorists with timed bombs in their bag. Hell, it wouldn't be much use against the bombing in Spain (bags left on a train) or even car bombings for that matter.
I could see how everybody carrying guns might help them if somebody went postal with a machine gun, but that person isn't going to be terrorist.
For those who don't like the DRM language, the V2 is always available. Just specify which version in your dist package.
yeah, but if you used the GNU v2 licence verbatim you have this fun little line -
either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
So what happens then - I give you software with DRM with the GPL v2 or later, but the v3 causes problems with the DRM.
I think instead of GPL v3 they should be creating the New Gnu Public License v1 because the v3 proposal has some radical features added to it and a lot of software is licensed "v2 or later".
Oops, actually that's the rating in the 18-49 demographic - so 5.1% of 18 - 49 year olds watched the show. You also get household ratings, which just tell you what percentage of households watched a show. So while a show may get a household rating of 3, it might get a 18-49 of 5 - meaning that the show is more popular among people 18 - 49 than against the population in general.
18-49 is considered a good demographic to target - as they do most of the spending.
As I understood it - the podcast viewership was included in the primetime ratings.
I thougth the iTunes downloads are commercial free - so you would think they wouldn't count (why would an advertiser pay a lot of money to advertise on a high rated show if most of those ratings come from commercial free downloads?)
Conceivably, if it sold on iTunes, and DVD & iTunes sales were strong enough, would a studio ever have enough balls to make a TV show that wasn't distributed on TV?
Seeing as the studios make straight to syndication series, then one could assume that if the iTunes & DVD market grew large enough, then they probably would start taking the risks. I suppose it would follow a similar format to what happens now - if enough people watch the pilot (which I bet for dramas would be more like made for tv movies), then they'd make the series.
Networks eager to get their shows on people's ipods will certainly be tempted to try to strike special deals to make their shows more easily obtainable.
They could just put downloadble copies on thier own websites, already in downloadable in an iPod friendly file for free. Channel 4 in the UK are going to do something with the launch of the IT Crowd - while that looks like it'll be streamed instead of downloaded, it's only a matter of time before they start making downloads of programmes available in order to drum up interest. As long as watching video on an iPod is not as good as watching it on the small screen (or should that now be called the the medium screen) it'll be a great marketting tool to sell the broadcast.
A shame really, when I first read "Molten Core Combat", I thought it was some form of benchmarking that pits various machines against each other, overclocking them to hell and seeing which one lasts longest (hence, "molten core" combat).
Since when does the American government "control" Google? Or Amazon? Or any American computer company? Unlike Europe, where you'll still find cases of government control and/or interefence in the tech industry, the American government does not get that involved and therefore doesn't have much in the way of control.
As someone who has lived in both the US and the EU (well, the UK at least:-), I'd have to say that freedom of speach is taken far more seriously in the US than the EU. There's no way in hell that the US would propose what the UK is proposing to do about outlawing speech that might be considered religiously offensive.
And what is all this sensitivity getting us in the EU? Riots in France, stabbings in the Netherlands and home grown bombers in the UK. Maybe instead of being sensitive and outlawing any speech that might be considered offensive to various groups, we should start open debate - a lot of which will not be pleasant.
There are plenty of American channels that have nudity and I don't think any state bans alcohol (though there are some "dry" towns) - certainly any US state's anti-alcohol bias would be less than the bias to be found in certain states in Northern Europe. I think painting the picture of Americans as being a bunch of red neck morons with a bible in one hand and a gun in the other is as ridiculous as painting a picture of Europeans being a bunch a of socialist, tree hugging, cheese-eaters.
But that would either require VNC on the host (and I have never seen anybody but me have that installed) or using the webclient, which is a pain in the ass and kind of defeats the purpose
Not if you had a "Portable VNC Client" that the host can read off the PDA (just make the PDA look like a USB mass storage device) and you'd probably only need that for windows, as if you on a *nix box you could just use X.
The PDA will have problems accessing the net (Windows is crap as router, really)
I think that's always going to be a case of YMMV - a lot will depend on how the PDA is connected to the host. I suppose the worst case would be in an internet cafe connected connected to a windows pc via USB - but then I would be very surprised if internet cafes keep allowing arbitrary code to run off USB devices (it seems to me to be a security nightmare) so the whole "portable apps" craze will probably be a bit of a wash out there eventually anyway.
I suppose as a backup, the PDA could hold copies of the windows "portable app suite" for when networking connectivity just isn't up to scratch, but then you're kinda defeating the purpose.
A lot will depend on what sort environment you're mostly going to be using - if it's mostly windows machines with the occasional bit of linux on x86 you're probably better off with just a usb stick and couple of binaries, if it's mostly *nix on various architectures with the ocassional bit of windows an "app server in your pocket" might be a better way to go.
I've been thinking about that jsut recently and I think a better (though probably expensive) option might be to have the apps running on a PDA with Linux on it and then hook the pda up to the PC via USB/Bluetooth/WiFi/Ethernet and use VNC to access the apps.
It might not be the quickest way to run the apps, but PDAs are getting faster over time, so it gradually becoems more feasible.
Innovation in operating systems is pretty much at a standstill outside the academic environment. Current operating systems cannot leverage parralelism very well for anything but hyper-specialized applications. Current operating systems have user environments that are crummy at managing massive amounts of data crammed into cavernous storage systems. Current operating systems are rotten at deploying your data across networked devices like cell phones and MP3 players and DVRs without a crapload of work.
But a lot of that can be handled in user space. I think it should be a layer sitting on top of the OS that handles the management of large amounts of data (ideally in a cross platform way) while the OS takes care of process management and low level I/O (which is what current OS's are fairly good at, seeing as they have at least 25 years worth of experince doing just that). Otherwise you just end up bloating the OS with features that that don't really belong in the OS .
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Therefore, you can't blame the religion if secular-minded groups do it.
But you can blame religion when non secular minded groups (such as the bombers in London) do it.
And I don't care if "Christians do it too", because I'm not christian. Christianity is a threat, just not as great a threat as Islam is.
I encourage you look up the Islamic concept of "hudna" which indicates why all treaties made with Muslims are useless.
I read that and all I could think of was Chamberlains "peace in our time" treaty with Hitler
I don't think XUL apps should really be used outside the browser.
But the browser is a XUL app. So is the mail client. That's one of the main points of XULrunner - to make it easier to make stand alone apps that use XUL for the GUI.
XULRunner is a package manager of sorts.
Which is something that Linux and the wider FOSS community really doesn't need - yet another way to manage packages of software. You've got several distro level package manegment systems (deb, rpm, ports etc), language level package systems (perl, python, etc) and now platform level packages. Why can't XULRunner just tap into the base package management system instead of doing it it's own way?
It's hard to see how yet more package management is going to make things easier, for example what happens if I write a python app that uses XUL for the front end and some C libraries and native python libraries at the back? The python runtime and the C libraries are managed by debian on my system but by rpm on somebody elses, the native python libraries use python's setup.py and the XUL would be managed by XULRunner.
When I read the BBC article, at first I wondered why any "security expert" would be calling for a back door, then I realized he was calling for a back door to be put into TPM (which would instantly make it unfit for the purpose it was designed for) and so I wondered if this wasn't some attempt to get the government to effectively kill TPM/DRM in the name of anti-terrorism.
Seeing as the article is in the Politics section, I bet the author really doesn't have much of clue as to what's actually going on.
But how do you prove beyond resonable doubt (or even on balance of probablities) that data was there in the first place if the encrypted data is indistiguishable from random noise? Assuming someone is innocent until proven guilty, the then government can't just say "there's encrypted data there" without some form of evidence. And the hard disk with the alledged encrypted data isn't evidence if they can't show that there is encrypted data on it.
And who doesn't suspect MS would leave backdoors anyway?
I don't - seeing as we're talking about TPM/"Trusted Computing" - the hardware level DRM system that only benefits Microsoft, Apple, RIAA, MPAA et al. A backdoor into TPM would break the fancy new DRM that's coming with Vista. Why would Microsoft build back doors into something that's suppossed to protect them ?
but the closed nature of cell phones and their networks is worse. What would the Internet be like if you could only use approved applications built into the computer on it? What if every email was $0.10?
I thought that was really just a problem in the USA - I don't think any providers in the UK (or Europe for that matter) restrict what applications are available on phones, or do weird things to lock out phone functionality (other than locking a subsidized phone to a network, but even then that can be unlocked). Maybe providers in other parts of the world restrict things as well, but I've only ever heard of that happening in the US.
Fair point with email, I still can't believe SMS is so popular, especially as it's extradorinarily expensive considering it's limitations. Hopefully with 3G mobile messaging might start to swing back to email style pricing. I can't see why anyone would pay 10p for a text if they have a flat rate mobile data service and can send an email "for free".
I expect that local government could slash energy consumption by enforcing some kind of "out of hours" energy tax aimed at lights, computers etc. being left on over night.
How do you enforce that? If you try to enforce by metered usage then what about ligitimate uses of overnight power such as water heating - which is often done at night when power is cheaper? What about companies that work 24/7, even if it's just the servers that are being used (so that some of those computers that are on are actually in use by someone, somewhere on the planet)? Where I work, we have both machines and people working around the clock - should we be penalized for that?
The first would-be terrorist to cause a problem, everyone around would pull a gun on his ass.
Exactly how does this work with terrorists who are inteding to kill themselves along with the people they're murdering? Look at the 7/7 bombings in London - even if every person in the 3 bombed carriges and the bus were carrying guns, it wouldn't have stopped the terrorists with timed bombs in their bag. Hell, it wouldn't be much use against the bombing in Spain (bags left on a train) or even car bombings for that matter.
I could see how everybody carrying guns might help them if somebody went postal with a machine gun, but that person isn't going to be terrorist.
But you have no State representation in the Federal
What about the Senate - isn't that suppossed to be the representation of the States, at least originally?
For those who don't like the DRM language, the V2 is always available. Just specify which version in your dist package.
yeah, but if you used the GNU v2 licence verbatim you have this fun little line -
either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
So what happens then - I give you software with DRM with the GPL v2 or later, but the v3 causes problems with the DRM.
I think instead of GPL v3 they should be creating the New Gnu Public License v1 because the v3 proposal has some radical features added to it and a lot of software is licensed "v2 or later".
Oops, actually that's the rating in the 18-49 demographic - so 5.1% of 18 - 49 year olds watched the show. You also get household ratings, which just tell you what percentage of households watched a show. So while a show may get a household rating of 3, it might get a 18-49 of 5 - meaning that the show is more popular among people 18 - 49 than against the population in general.
18-49 is considered a good demographic to target - as they do most of the spending.
It's the rating - 5.1% of households watched the show.
As I understood it - the podcast viewership was included in the primetime ratings.
I thougth the iTunes downloads are commercial free - so you would think they wouldn't count (why would an advertiser pay a lot of money to advertise on a high rated show if most of those ratings come from commercial free downloads?)
Conceivably, if it sold on iTunes, and DVD & iTunes sales were strong enough, would a studio ever have enough balls to make a TV show that wasn't distributed on TV?
Seeing as the studios make straight to syndication series, then one could assume that if the iTunes & DVD market grew large enough, then they probably would start taking the risks. I suppose it would follow a similar format to what happens now - if enough people watch the pilot (which I bet for dramas would be more like made for tv movies), then they'd make the series.
Networks eager to get their shows on people's ipods will certainly be tempted to try to strike special deals to make their shows more easily obtainable.
They could just put downloadble copies on thier own websites, already in downloadable in an iPod friendly file for free. Channel 4 in the UK are going to do something with the launch of the IT Crowd - while that looks like it'll be streamed instead of downloaded, it's only a matter of time before they start making downloads of programmes available in order to drum up interest. As long as watching video on an iPod is not as good as watching it on the small screen (or should that now be called the the medium screen) it'll be a great marketting tool to sell the broadcast.
A shame really, when I first read "Molten Core Combat", I thought it was some form of benchmarking that pits various machines against each other, overclocking them to hell and seeing which one lasts longest (hence, "molten core" combat).
But you would think they would understand "laissez faire"
Since when does the American government "control" Google? Or Amazon? Or any American computer company? Unlike Europe, where you'll still find cases of government control and/or interefence in the tech industry, the American government does not get that involved and therefore doesn't have much in the way of control.
As someone who has lived in both the US and the EU (well, the UK at least :-), I'd have to say that freedom of speach is taken far more seriously in the US than the EU. There's no way in hell that the US would propose what the UK is proposing to do about outlawing speech that might be considered religiously offensive.
And what is all this sensitivity getting us in the EU? Riots in France, stabbings in the Netherlands and home grown bombers in the UK. Maybe instead of being sensitive and outlawing any speech that might be considered offensive to various groups, we should start open debate - a lot of which will not be pleasant.
There are plenty of American channels that have nudity and I don't think any state bans alcohol (though there are some "dry" towns) - certainly any US state's anti-alcohol bias would be less than the bias to be found in certain states in Northern Europe. I think painting the picture of Americans as being a bunch of red neck morons with a bible in one hand and a gun in the other is as ridiculous as painting a picture of Europeans being a bunch a of socialist, tree hugging, cheese-eaters.
That's not what begging the question means.
# Modern_Usage
Do we have to go through this EVERY time?
Apperently it does in modern usage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
But that would either require VNC on the host (and I have never seen anybody but me have that installed) or using the webclient, which is a pain in the ass and kind of defeats the purpose
Not if you had a "Portable VNC Client" that the host can read off the PDA (just make the PDA look like a USB mass storage device) and you'd probably only need that for windows, as if you on a *nix box you could just use X.
The PDA will have problems accessing the net (Windows is crap as router, really)
I think that's always going to be a case of YMMV - a lot will depend on how the PDA is connected to the host. I suppose the worst case would be in an internet cafe connected connected to a windows pc via USB - but then I would be very surprised if internet cafes keep allowing arbitrary code to run off USB devices (it seems to me to be a security nightmare) so the whole "portable apps" craze will probably be a bit of a wash out there eventually anyway.
I suppose as a backup, the PDA could hold copies of the windows "portable app suite" for when networking connectivity just isn't up to scratch, but then you're kinda defeating the purpose.
A lot will depend on what sort environment you're mostly going to be using - if it's mostly windows machines with the occasional bit of linux on x86 you're probably better off with just a usb stick and couple of binaries, if it's mostly *nix on various architectures with the ocassional bit of windows an "app server in your pocket" might be a better way to go.
I've been thinking about that jsut recently and I think a better (though probably expensive) option might be to have the apps running on a PDA with Linux on it and then hook the pda up to the PC via USB/Bluetooth/WiFi/Ethernet and use VNC to access the apps.
It might not be the quickest way to run the apps, but PDAs are getting faster over time, so it gradually becoems more feasible.
Innovation in operating systems is pretty much at a standstill outside the academic environment. Current operating systems cannot leverage parralelism very well for anything but hyper-specialized applications. Current operating systems have user environments that are crummy at managing massive amounts of data crammed into cavernous storage systems. Current operating systems are rotten at deploying your data across networked devices like cell phones and MP3 players and DVRs without a crapload of work.
But a lot of that can be handled in user space. I think it should be a layer sitting on top of the OS that handles the management of large amounts of data (ideally in a cross platform way) while the OS takes care of process management and low level I/O (which is what current OS's are fairly good at, seeing as they have at least 25 years worth of experince doing just that). Otherwise you just end up bloating the OS with features that that don't really belong in the OS .