I like that they used Linux for the demo. That means they probably have a window manager ready to go (i.e., I won't have to wait for Microsoft to adopt it). When it comes out, all I'll have to do is "emerge 10-gui" (oh, and buy the hardware) to try it out.
Speaking of which, the hardware had better not be too expensive. That would kill it.
I don't think I like their linear window management idea. I like that I can arrange windows to overlap on a 2D space, and access them with a single click, or Alt+Tab in 1-D fashion. It seems better to me than manually scrolling through all my open windows.
Oh, and attaching the touch surface to the place where I rest my wrists to type? No. Just no. That's the dumbest idea ever.
Science fiction and fantasy are both thought experiments of the form: if the rules (or the state of things) were different in this way, what would happen.
Some Science Fiction writers like to suggest or imply that the state of the world or the rules might possibly change in the way that they describe, and therefore serve as an explicit warning/encouragement pointing out the good or bad that could come of such a change.
Fantasy tends to use metaphor and parallel to make this same sort of point.
If there are no real rules, and anything can happen, this is called "deus ex machina", and it's pretty lame.
I've been doing this from the beginning, and it works quite well and quite simply.
I use my blog URL as the login (burndive.blogspot.com), and MyOpenID as the delegate (burndive.myopenid.com).
It doesn't require my own webserver (though I've got one of those too--but it doesn't have the uptime, nor do I have the inclination to maintain OpenID on it). All it required me to do was insert a line into the HTML of my blog template which redirected OpenID to my page at MyOpenID. If I ever want to change providers, I simply change which site my blog points to.
Most of your complaints stem from an ignorance of how the system works, which, admittedly, is the Achilles' heel of OpenID: user education.
Google is being an innovator in this field at the moment, and so I'm glad that they're positioned to get more "default" marketshare via OEMs.
It will push Microsoft to innovate with their own browser in order to keep their search engine hits up.
One feature that I expect to see in the release version of Chrome is video chat. They released a plug-in to make Firefox compatible with their Google Talk chat's new video feature, but I'm betting that functionality will come built-in to Chrome.
Quite frankly, if you aren't willing to at least offer a way to contact you, I'm not interested in letting you post a comment. Remember I have to trust you aren't gonna spam the bajesus out of my site too! A random OpenID URL offers me no assurance you aren't just some comment spammer.
I'm willing to provide the URL of my blog. With that information, you can find out quite a bit about me, or not, without my knowledge, and you can also contact me if you choose.
An e-mail address can be generated and thrown away just as easily as an OpenID. The whole point of signing in is to create a consistent identity. It doesn't actually matter if you can contact that identity.
What better anchor for such an identity than a URL, which can, at the discretion of the user point an interested party to a variety of additional information or none at all?
You have to trust I wont leak your email, and I have to trust you are a real person, not a comment spammer. That whole trust think swings both ways, you know.
I allow anonymous comments on my blog because if someone has feedback to give, I don't want to put any barriers to that feedback. If they wish to provide an identity, they can do that as well, but I'm not going to force them.
Sites that rely on user-generated content have a vested interest in getting users to participate. The lower the barrier to participation, the more likely a new person is to start using the service, and eventually, if it is in mutual interest, provide an e-mail address, or whatever other information is desired.
Do you already have a Google Account nickname set up and ready to enter into the login field? Did you even know such a thing existed? Does Joe The Plumber (TM) know that?
I do, but then again, I use OpenID the way God intended: I have my blog delegate to a 3rd party that specializes in it (myopenid.com).
My blog URL is exactly what I want to show the world my identity. It's the hub of a significant portion of my public online content.
Why does a blog that I'm commenting on need to know my e-mail address? They might spam me.
An e-mail address is private information. A URL is just as unique, with the added benefit of being public.
I don't want my e-mail address sitting there attached to my comment for all the world to see and add to their SPAM database.
I don't even want the blog I'm commenting on to have it. That's kind of the point: I can uniquely authenticate as myself, and there's a neat little link to my blog if you want to contact me or read more about/by me.
OpenID chose not to use the e-mail address for the login ID intentionally, because a site doesn't always need your e-mail address, and it certainly isn't normally appropriate to display that kind of information to the world.
A URL on the other hand, is perfectly OK to display to the world, and just as unique.
Yes, it's better, because if I'm a site that accepts OpenIDs, all I have to do for Microsoft support (and the other thousands of OpenID providers) is implement the standard.
If I want to accept Google's OpenIDs, I have to implement their own proprietary API.
The problem from Google's perspective is that the user doesn't have a Google URL, they have a Google username, and that's what the users think they should enter in order to log in.
So, in stead of typing in something like http://username.openid.google.com/ the user selects "Google Account" from a drop-down box, and types in his user name. (Which is functionally equivalent to MS Passport.)
When I log in to a blog and leave a comment with my OpenID, my OpenID URL is displayed as the unique identifier of the author attached to that post. This presents a problem for Google Accounts as OpenIDs because while URLs are intended to be public ready-to-be-displayed information, a Google Account username (which is easily translatable into an e-mail address) is not.
Therefore, the URL that Google needs users to enter is something like http://nickname.openid.google.com/ but they don't know that that's what they should enter (because they don't know how OpenID works), and so Google is providing a way for sites to translate a Google-authenticated ID into something like an OpenID.
I think if they're going to do this, that they should also offer a way to do it directly, with a URL, for normal OpenID sites that don't support their little proprietary system, and make efforts to wean users off of the proprietary system by showing them their OpenID URL and telling them how to sign in normally.
Powershell, the cmd replacement that *should* be in Windows 7 (it's in Server 2008 and available for Vista and XP) is able to download files from the internet over HTTP (and some other protocols, I assume), or at least so it appears from its Wikipedia article. At the very least, you should be able to download cygwin's setup.exe, which should get you any kind of protocol and/or compiler you needed.
Your equation of egalitarianism to justice is fallacious.
It is not "fair" to deprive someone else of his property. If someone else does better with his property than you, and as a result, he has more money (and passes that to his children), that is fair. (Notice that I said "his property"; not something he stole.)
The Pentateuch actually proscribes a very fair society: if implemented, it would prevent the rich from exploiting the poor, and also provide the poor opportunities to advance themselves through hard work and ingenuity (not a protected minimum wage, and not through hand-outs).
For example, land owners were not allowed to harvest their entire crop: they were forbidden from harvesting the "corners" of the field, and from going over it more than once. This enabled the poor to go through and harvest what was left. As a consequence, nothing was wasted, and anyone who was in need could put in some work and get by.
Just because something "isn't so bad" compared to other unhealthy and detrimental things doesn't make it a good thing. It may even be "less bad" than those things, but that doesn't make it "good".
Do you think that schools should teach children that abuse of alcohol, smoking, unhealthy diets, and divorce are "good" and "healthy" and "normal" just because they're "not that bad" compared to other bad choices that one could make?
That's my argument. And again, it makes me mad when people try to utilize the school system to undermine what parents are teaching their children about acceptable lifestyle choices.
I probably should have said "psychologically" instead of "mentally", but I'm guessing you would still disagree on much the same grounds.
I agree. Which is why it pisses me off that some people are trying to get elementary schools to teach that homosexuality is perfectly normal and healthy, despite it being one of the least healthy lifestyles on the face of the earth, mentally, physically, and socially.
Instead of teaching kids false information (so that they won't disrespect those who make poor decisions), we should teach them that every human being is worthy of respect, including those who make decisions that we cannot condone.
As a Christian, I believe that God created man and woman in His image, "male and female".
Therefore, perverting the sexual relationship (which was designed as an attribute of marriage) is disrespectful to God, because it distorts our view of Him ("God is Love"--sex is one of many, but it is one of the more powerful stamps of His character on us), and it is disrespectful to both men and women, because it distorts both of the roles that they were designed to play in marriage (and in sex, as an extension).
Homosexuality is a perversion and a distortion of what God says about His own character.
I have nothing personally against homosexuals, it's just that they insult my God in their ignorance, and that makes me sad.
Homosexuality isn't the only perversion of sex: fornication, adultery, rape, incest, voyeurism (i.e., porn) are all in the same category.
Christians who have a "special" problem with homosexuals that they don't have with fornicators and adulterers are being hypocrites. They distort God's character that they're supposed to be emulating. That makes me sad too.
It would be nice if someone else with Reiser's skill and vision picked up his code and continued its support and development. It's GPL-lisenced, they could even call it something else (they might have to--not sure what the trademark issues are). I've been using ReiserFS v3 for a while now, and I kind of like it.
The fact is, just because it's available for someone to take over doesn't mean they can make enough money doing it to make it worthwhile.
If no one adopts his baby, it's going to atrophy and be left in the developmental dust, and I will have to pick a new filesystem, one that gets security, compatibility, and feature updates.
We are used to thinking that "someone" will develop X-product, after all, "someone" made a kernel, and "someone" made Bittorrent, and they conveniently showed up on the Internet. These things don't just happen, though. "Someone" is a real person, and there are thousands of reasons that, for example, I don't suddenly decide to be full-time Linux developer.
The goal of the USA in supporting the educational institutions is to create an environment conducive to a knowledgeable and intelligent electorate, for the purpose of making wise decisions in public life, and allowing our little experiment in representative government continue for one more generation.
If the universities all turn into trade schools, then we really ought to just hand over power to the intellectual elite. The alternative would be by default that the one who can best control a mass of largely ignorant fools can maintain power.
I for one am all for using our educational institutions as a vehicle for the furtherance of democracy, even if that means that CS majors have to write papers. Perish the thought that we should have to communicate intelligibly with other members of society.
His joke was a play on the fact that web sites have IP addresses (and that 127.0.0.1 would be a 'short' one); my joke was that attributing the quote that he was parodying to Bill Gates is dubious.
Slashdot Mirror
I like that they used Linux for the demo. That means they probably have a window manager ready to go (i.e., I won't have to wait for Microsoft to adopt it). When it comes out, all I'll have to do is "emerge 10-gui" (oh, and buy the hardware) to try it out.
Speaking of which, the hardware had better not be too expensive. That would kill it.
I don't think I like their linear window management idea. I like that I can arrange windows to overlap on a 2D space, and access them with a single click, or Alt+Tab in 1-D fashion. It seems better to me than manually scrolling through all my open windows.
Oh, and attaching the touch surface to the place where I rest my wrists to type? No. Just no. That's the dumbest idea ever.
Actually, it's Latin for "god from a machine". It involved a diety character being lowered to the stage in order to save the day at the end of a play.
Science fiction and fantasy are both thought experiments of the form: if the rules (or the state of things) were different in this way, what would happen.
Some Science Fiction writers like to suggest or imply that the state of the world or the rules might possibly change in the way that they describe, and therefore serve as an explicit warning/encouragement pointing out the good or bad that could come of such a change.
Fantasy tends to use metaphor and parallel to make this same sort of point.
If there are no real rules, and anything can happen, this is called "deus ex machina", and it's pretty lame.
I've been doing this from the beginning, and it works quite well and quite simply.
I use my blog URL as the login (burndive.blogspot.com), and MyOpenID as the delegate (burndive.myopenid.com).
It doesn't require my own webserver (though I've got one of those too--but it doesn't have the uptime, nor do I have the inclination to maintain OpenID on it). All it required me to do was insert a line into the HTML of my blog template which redirected OpenID to my page at MyOpenID. If I ever want to change providers, I simply change which site my blog points to.
Most of your complaints stem from an ignorance of how the system works, which, admittedly, is the Achilles' heel of OpenID: user education.
I believe Frank Herbert called this invention a windtrap in 1965.
Google is being an innovator in this field at the moment, and so I'm glad that they're positioned to get more "default" marketshare via OEMs.
It will push Microsoft to innovate with their own browser in order to keep their search engine hits up.
One feature that I expect to see in the release version of Chrome is video chat. They released a plug-in to make Firefox compatible with their Google Talk chat's new video feature, but I'm betting that functionality will come built-in to Chrome.
I believe you mean, "Return of the Scottish Character".
I'm willing to provide the URL of my blog. With that information, you can find out quite a bit about me, or not, without my knowledge, and you can also contact me if you choose. An e-mail address can be generated and thrown away just as easily as an OpenID. The whole point of signing in is to create a consistent identity. It doesn't actually matter if you can contact that identity. What better anchor for such an identity than a URL, which can, at the discretion of the user point an interested party to a variety of additional information or none at all?
I allow anonymous comments on my blog because if someone has feedback to give, I don't want to put any barriers to that feedback. If they wish to provide an identity, they can do that as well, but I'm not going to force them.
Sites that rely on user-generated content have a vested interest in getting users to participate. The lower the barrier to participation, the more likely a new person is to start using the service, and eventually, if it is in mutual interest, provide an e-mail address, or whatever other information is desired.
Do you already have a Google Account nickname set up and ready to enter into the login field? Did you even know such a thing existed? Does Joe The Plumber (TM) know that?
I do, but then again, I use OpenID the way God intended: I have my blog delegate to a 3rd party that specializes in it (myopenid.com).
My blog URL is exactly what I want to show the world my identity. It's the hub of a significant portion of my public online content.
Why does a blog that I'm commenting on need to know my e-mail address? They might spam me.
An e-mail address is private information. A URL is just as unique, with the added benefit of being public.
I don't want my e-mail address sitting there attached to my comment for all the world to see and add to their SPAM database.
I don't even want the blog I'm commenting on to have it. That's kind of the point: I can uniquely authenticate as myself, and there's a neat little link to my blog if you want to contact me or read more about/by me.
OpenID chose not to use the e-mail address for the login ID intentionally, because a site doesn't always need your e-mail address, and it certainly isn't normally appropriate to display that kind of information to the world.
A URL on the other hand, is perfectly OK to display to the world, and just as unique.
Yes, it's better, because if I'm a site that accepts OpenIDs, all I have to do for Microsoft support (and the other thousands of OpenID providers) is implement the standard.
If I want to accept Google's OpenIDs, I have to implement their own proprietary API.
The problem from Google's perspective is that the user doesn't have a Google URL, they have a Google username, and that's what the users think they should enter in order to log in.
So, in stead of typing in something like http://username.openid.google.com/ the user selects "Google Account" from a drop-down box, and types in his user name. (Which is functionally equivalent to MS Passport.)
When I log in to a blog and leave a comment with my OpenID, my OpenID URL is displayed as the unique identifier of the author attached to that post.
This presents a problem for Google Accounts as OpenIDs because while URLs are intended to be public ready-to-be-displayed information, a Google Account username (which is easily translatable into an e-mail address) is not.
Therefore, the URL that Google needs users to enter is something like http://nickname.openid.google.com/ but they don't know that that's what they should enter (because they don't know how OpenID works), and so Google is providing a way for sites to translate a Google-authenticated ID into something like an OpenID.
I think if they're going to do this, that they should also offer a way to do it directly, with a URL, for normal OpenID sites that don't support their little proprietary system, and make efforts to wean users off of the proprietary system by showing them their OpenID URL and telling them how to sign in normally.
Powershell, the cmd replacement that *should* be in Windows 7 (it's in Server 2008 and available for Vista and XP) is able to download files from the internet over HTTP (and some other protocols, I assume), or at least so it appears from its Wikipedia article. At the very least, you should be able to download cygwin's setup.exe, which should get you any kind of protocol and/or compiler you needed.
dvd::rip: http://exit1.org/dvdrip/
Your equation of egalitarianism to justice is fallacious.
It is not "fair" to deprive someone else of his property. If someone else does better with his property than you, and as a result, he has more money (and passes that to his children), that is fair. (Notice that I said "his property"; not something he stole.)
The Pentateuch actually proscribes a very fair society: if implemented, it would prevent the rich from exploiting the poor, and also provide the poor opportunities to advance themselves through hard work and ingenuity (not a protected minimum wage, and not through hand-outs).
For example, land owners were not allowed to harvest their entire crop: they were forbidden from harvesting the "corners" of the field, and from going over it more than once. This enabled the poor to go through and harvest what was left. As a consequence, nothing was wasted, and anyone who was in need could put in some work and get by.
Just because something "isn't so bad" compared to other unhealthy and detrimental things doesn't make it a good thing. It may even be "less bad" than those things, but that doesn't make it "good".
Do you think that schools should teach children that abuse of alcohol, smoking, unhealthy diets, and divorce are "good" and "healthy" and "normal" just because they're "not that bad" compared to other bad choices that one could make?
That's my argument. And again, it makes me mad when people try to utilize the school system to undermine what parents are teaching their children about acceptable lifestyle choices.
I probably should have said "psychologically" instead of "mentally", but I'm guessing you would still disagree on much the same grounds.
I agree. Which is why it pisses me off that some people are trying to get elementary schools to teach that homosexuality is perfectly normal and healthy, despite it being one of the least healthy lifestyles on the face of the earth, mentally, physically, and socially.
Instead of teaching kids false information (so that they won't disrespect those who make poor decisions), we should teach them that every human being is worthy of respect, including those who make decisions that we cannot condone.
I care that it is.
As a Christian, I believe that God created man and woman in His image, "male and female".
Therefore, perverting the sexual relationship (which was designed as an attribute of marriage) is disrespectful to God, because it distorts our view of Him ("God is Love"--sex is one of many, but it is one of the more powerful stamps of His character on us), and it is disrespectful to both men and women, because it distorts both of the roles that they were designed to play in marriage (and in sex, as an extension).
Homosexuality is a perversion and a distortion of what God says about His own character.
I have nothing personally against homosexuals, it's just that they insult my God in their ignorance, and that makes me sad.
Homosexuality isn't the only perversion of sex: fornication, adultery, rape, incest, voyeurism (i.e., porn) are all in the same category.
Christians who have a "special" problem with homosexuals that they don't have with fornicators and adulterers are being hypocrites. They distort God's character that they're supposed to be emulating. That makes me sad too.
It would be nice if someone else with Reiser's skill and vision picked up his code and continued its support and development. It's GPL-lisenced, they could even call it something else (they might have to--not sure what the trademark issues are). I've been using ReiserFS v3 for a while now, and I kind of like it.
The fact is, just because it's available for someone to take over doesn't mean they can make enough money doing it to make it worthwhile.
If no one adopts his baby, it's going to atrophy and be left in the developmental dust, and I will have to pick a new filesystem, one that gets security, compatibility, and feature updates.
We are used to thinking that "someone" will develop X-product, after all, "someone" made a kernel, and "someone" made Bittorrent, and they conveniently showed up on the Internet. These things don't just happen, though. "Someone" is a real person, and there are thousands of reasons that, for example, I don't suddenly decide to be full-time Linux developer.
The goal of the USA in supporting the educational institutions is to create an environment conducive to a knowledgeable and intelligent electorate, for the purpose of making wise decisions in public life, and allowing our little experiment in representative government continue for one more generation.
If the universities all turn into trade schools, then we really ought to just hand over power to the intellectual elite. The alternative would be by default that the one who can best control a mass of largely ignorant fools can maintain power.
I for one am all for using our educational institutions as a vehicle for the furtherance of democracy, even if that means that CS majors have to write papers. Perish the thought that we should have to communicate intelligibly with other members of society.
All of us, who know what we're doing can use Pidgin, and everyone else will download the official client, which will show them ads.
Either I don't get it, or you don't get it.
His joke was a play on the fact that web sites have IP addresses (and that 127.0.0.1 would be a 'short' one); my joke was that attributing the quote that he was parodying to Bill Gates is dubious.
What was your joke?
I believe you mean short cited.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony