Flash at least works. It remains to be seen how compatible Moonlight is with Silverlight. Our options here are between proprietary solutions, one of which is mature and has been around for years, as well as having platform ubiquity. The other is new, immature, harder to use, only offers a promise of ubiquity which has not been fulfilled yet, and comes from a company with a proven track record of putting only enough effort into developing technology to shut out the competition, then dropping it all together for many years (see IE).
Also the Flex development tools are free unlike Visual Studio 2008. Go download them for yourself. It's just an Eclipse plugin.
I'm not worried if I can't view Microsoft.com from my Linux box. I am worried if they succeed in pushing this standard, and sites other than Microsoft.com start requiring it.
Flex Builder is free. And from my experience, Flex is far easier to work in, a lot more mature, and not just a knee-jerk response from its parent company to a market condition which caught them by surprise like Silverlight is.
Flex is substantially easier to work with, had a ubiquitous install base, and transports easily to full desktop applications via Apollo.
We went to a full-day demo on Silverlight, given by a Microsoft developer. What they did in about 500 lines of Silverlight code was a pretty nice picture slideshow with smooth image transitions. What we did in about 500 lines of Flex was equivalent, but supported images of any size, allowed you to zoom in, supported a film strip mode, and carousel mode, as well as the standard fade-in, fade-out image transitions. Ours also is able to attach to ANY other language that is capable of delivering web services in a wide variety of formats (XMLRPC, SOAP, WSDL, flat XML, etc), and it only requires 1 line of code to change (or a switch statement if we wanted to support them all at once). Ours is more featureful, easier to read, understand, and maintain than the very best that Microsoft could produce in the same amount of code. It also performs better.
Seriously, I have seen both of these things in action, Silverlight is a long, LONG way away from being able to compete with Flex on both an install base perspective as well as an ease-of-development perspective. There is a reason people aren't adopting Silverlight, and install base is only a small part of it (though of course it itself is significant).
Microsoft is doing their usual bang-up job of supporting the minimal features to look competitive, then cramming it down people's throats until they forget there are better options out there. And well they should, they should be scared silly. Flex is poised to overthrow the desktop monopoly in a way that AJAX and Google Apps can't (wouldn't be surprised to see some Google apps on Flex in the future). To boot, you can convert these browser-based apps to offline desktop apps with about 30 minutes of work, and an Apollo redistributable.
Nothing has been this big of a threat to the desktop monopoly since Java. And Adobe has the gumption, power, and pocketbook to follow through. This is the source of the recent interest in Flash 9 on Linux. They don't care whether Linux users can view pretty animations, they care whether Linux users accept Flex, and being given access to Flex is the first step toward acceptance. They are also courting the open source community more and more (notice that the Flash Remoting spec was recently opened, which is actually a pretty big deal since it enables features that only they are able to deliver today), realizing I think that a lot of these Linux geeks are also IT decision makers.
Adobe is working on a version of Photoshop for the web, which from what I understand will be a combination of HTML/Ajax, Flex, and server-side processing. They are bringing levels of desktop functionality to the browser never before possible, and it has Microsoft bricking in their pants.
Over the coming months, expect to see Microsoft cramming Silverlight down your and anyone else's throat as rigorously as they are able to. It will be hidden in Windows Update files, it will be required to do various things on the Microsoft website, it will be bundled with software. They will make many applications in Silverlight which are better suited to other existing technologies (for example, the Microsoft website!!), because they want to make it as mandatory as they can without hitting anti-trust legislation.
This isn't a 30-second-step-to-the-side, it's a get-intimate-with-a-latex-glove-in-a-back-room thing. This is a "I have the power to make your life miserable for the next hour or potentially a whole lot longer" sort of thing. It's a "I have the ability to make you completely miss your flight, costing you to buy a new ticket for the next flight, or call off the trip all together" sort of thing.
It's the assignment of unregulated power to non-elected government officials, based purely and entirely on the judgment of that individual without any form of external oversight into the correctness, fairness, or legitimacy of those judgments. That person decides whether you make your flight on whatever whim he or she feels like. People, being human beings, WILL abuse this. It's not a matter of IF, it's a matter of how often, only we have no way of telling, and no way to identify or regulate the abuse.
The benefits (if any, which is certainly arguable) do not come even CLOSE to outweighing the cost and risks.
Since January 2006, behavior-detection officers have referred about 70,000 people for secondary screening, Maccario said. Of those, about 600 to 700 were arrested on a variety of charges, including possession of drugs, weapons violations and outstanding warrants.
The scary thing is that there is absolutely no way to oversight this. These officers could start plucking people for absolutely any reason they want, they are being asked to make a value judgment with an expected accuracy of 1%!! It would take thousands of abuses before an officer's abusive behavior could be successfully identified, and the outcome of that could then simply be, "He needs more training." Further, anyone he finds who really is acting fairly suspicious, he could also pluck, an keep closer to a normal success rate, perhaps close enough that the officer's behavior was never abnormal enough to warrant investigation, while he's actively abusing his power the whole time.
Government forces should never for any reason be given authoritative powers which are unable to be subject to external oversight.
Maybe you look like the guy who cut him off in traffic this morning. Maybe he decides to detain a large group just before he detains you, to guarantee that you miss your flight before they can process and pass through the previous group. The point is you simply cannot give unchallengeable power such as this to human beings without it being abused, and with such a small success rate, abuse is both certain and unidentifiable.
Counting catching people on outstanding arrest warrants against their success tally is all the more indicative of their low actual success rate. They want to make their numbers look as good as possible, so they include people they probably had prior knowledge of. These are people whose names and pictures are on a computer screen that morning, the officers know to watch out for them, and would be caught completely independent of this bogus system, but they count it as a win to this system in order to at least hit that 1% mark.
Also what do they mean by weapons violations in the above quote? Is this some guy who forgot he had a pocket knife? If it's something more serious like a gun, isn't he again going to get caught in existing security? I would like to see the number of people they caught who would have slipped through normal security. I'd be surprised if it beat 1 in 10 of the people they did arrest. Even fudging their numbers they can't offer a better number than 1% success rate. This program is a failure out the gate, and it is only an opportunity for abuse without oversight.
If the group splits were for no reason, then the splits would die, and the most popular one would survive. There are a variety of reasons why these different camps exist, and rather than being a weakness of Open Source (as you present it), it is in fact a strength (people have the choice to do this, with other software models there aren't splits because there isn't a choice to even HAVE a split).
Different distros focus on different things. RedHat is enterprise and offers support contracts, but they often have software several versions back from cutting edge. Debian is easy to administer especially on a large scale, and focuses on stability and security. Gentoo is for people who want their software custom compiled for their hardware so that it is as lean as possible. Ubuntu is for end users who don't know that much about Linux but want to give it a try, it's easy to maintain and easy to use, and tries hard to give you a pleasant experience end-to-end. The list goes on, but there are reasons that people prefer one distribution over another, and it's not simply superficial.
It's silly to complain that a RedHat package won't install on Debian. That's like complaining that Windows software won't install under OSX. Except that you actually can convert RedHat RPM's to Debian DEB's, and you can install the result if you can satisfy the dependencies.
As was mentioned elsewhere to you, the reason that software doesn't just port from one distro to another is because of library versioning. A program can be statically linked against its libraries and will run under any Linux with a compatible kernel (ie, if it requires a feature found in the 2.6 kernel, it won't run on a 2.4 kernel - the same as software which requires a Vista feature won't run on XP). This is how most Windows software works. The tradeoff is that the executable gets larger, and it may be vulnerable to a security bug against some included library, without a way to fix that other than recompiling.
This is why there are package managers. If a program requires a specific version of a specific library, then when you install that program, the library gets installed too (unless you already have it, cutting download and install time). When the library has a security update, all the software on your system which uses it benefits from the update. When you remove the last program which depended on a library, that library gets cleaned up too.
The good news for companies is that there is nothing which prevents them from statically linking their software if they want to ensure it runs on any Linux system. There's also nothing which prevents them from bundling the specific library versions they need with the software. Also most communities are more than eager to take care of keeping your software up to date. How easy is it to tell a customer, "apt-get install SoftwareProduct," and they are done? The customer also gets the advantage of the package manager keeping an eye on the software and automatically notifying them of relevant software updates, none of this business in Windows and many OSX products where it is built into each software package independently, and a process starts with the system for each such product just to check for updates (all doing exactly the same work, but custom coded per application, and each with their own memory, cpu, and network footprint).
Main stream software in the open source world is as simple to install and maintain as instructing your package manager to do it. In all but fringe cases, you don't actually have to worry about library versions or system compatibility, the OS takes care of that, and has for years. In fringe cases you still have the option of manually satisfying library dependency issues, or building the package from source (almost always./configure && make && sudo make install, and described otherwise in a README when not).
The real issue you seem to have is, "Customers have choice, and this is a tradeoff of convenience which favors the customer over the developer."
My shoes have neither. There are plenty that don't. Most women's flats and formal wear. Men's formal wear (loafers, etc). Mine are lace/velcroless shoes from Merrell which have an opening at the top surrounded by stretchy padded fabric (it's not elastic, but I don't know a better way to describe it). They fit snugly (but not too tightly to be uncomfortable) around my ankle, and they stay firmly in place.
On a superficial level I'd lean toward HD-DVD. I already know DVD's, and I already know HD. This is just a coupling of concepts with which I am already familiar. Bluray though, what is that, what does it do? Is my stuff compatible with it? Superficially speaking, HD-DVD sounds more comfortable, and there is psychologically less chance that I'll end up with an expensive toy that is not compatible with the rest of my system.
You brought up threads from 4 years and 6 years ago (2003 and 2001)? One guy offered to use mod points, and one guy asked for some mod points. I'd say the cabal is exposed, thanks for your tireless work!
Well, we're clearly arguing circles, so I guess this will be my last one. Unless they are teaching auto mechanics or environmental science, or some other discipline which different types of engine would be material for, they don't need to know the different types of engine to teach. Sure it's nice if they do, but it has nothing to do with their ability to convey the subject matter. Not knowing about Firefox does not hamper their ability to teach with Internet Explorer. It's not their job to know this, and it doesn't hurt their ability to do their job if they don't. It would be nice if they did, but they don't have to.
As long as the type of browser is immaterial to the subject matter, then it's not a debate worth having in class, and it's not something the teacher should necessarily be expected to know.
I don't feel I'm apologizing for ignorance any more than I'm apologizing for lack of omniscience. I don't expect teachers to be conversant experts on the technology they use to facilitate their teaching. I expect them to be sufficiently knowledgeable to be able to effectively leverage that technology in the classroom. Anything else is a bonus. They are not teaching web browsers, they are teaching some other subject. Discussions about web browsers are out of place in that circumstance, and the teacher has a duty and obligation to avoid being distracted into such side conversations. The teacher does NOT need to know the difference between Firefox and IE to be able to use IE to teach the class. And they correctly should be permitted to require students to use the requested tool, even when the student is really sure a different one is better. Discussion otherwise is out of place in a class where that is not the subject matter.
As I said, I don't expect a social studies teacher to know the ramifications of a diesel, gasoline, or propane powered bus (they have those here) before they take the class on a field trip. Likewise I don't expect them to know the difference between IE and Firefox. It's a tool. IE does the job just as well as Firefox for the purpose of teaching, and the student arguing otherwise is being difficult and hindering the entire class. I don't think a teacher should have to know all things about all computers before using one as a tool.
As I said several times, when the student believes otherwise, he can approach the teacher out of class and have a discussion of the relative merits of each, so it's not even like there is not an appropriate escalation procedure for the student. The kid, even in this made up scenario, just felt like being difficult or demonstrating how he knows more than the teacher, and it's not respectful and it's not fair to the other students to detract from their learning what they are supposed to be learning to have the debate.
If you can get access to them to be able to do so, then yes, absolutely. This has the added benefit of helping to expose potential security hazards.
A state lawyer and his client should be in a room where they can't be videotaped while having a counsel session.
The guy changing the codes on the nuke sure as heck should not be where someone can point a camera at him while he's doing it.
The government doctor should not be reading medical records in a place where someone with a video camera is able to spy on what he's reading.
GP didn't say that you have to give physical access to videotape at any time. But if you have the ability to video tape it, then you should be permitted to, and they should not be permitted to stop you (though if they enter a restricted area, you might not be permitted to follow, or if you entered a restricted area to video tape, they should be permitted to escort you out, same as they can do today).
I don't agree with GP's statement that if you have a video camera, you should be permitted to strike an officer and he can't retaliate. He should act toward you the same whether you have a camera or not. If you strike an officer, you're going to get arrested, and that is as it should be. He should not be permitted to destroy the video though, willful destruction of video by government employees either through action or inaction, without the consent of the owner of the video should be considered destruction of evidence, and carry appropriate penalties.
Workers acting in an official government capacity should assume at all times that any civilian observer has a right to make a record of their actions. They should assume that civilian observers are making a record, because this will certainly tint the color of their world.
At this point I don't have much else to say but that I respectfully disagree. If I was the teacher, and the student was using software that I didn't recognize, I'd at least require him to stop using it until I could educate myself more about that software, even if superficially it seemed to be doing the same thing. Software is not calculators. Unknown software has the potential to expose the student or school to a world of bad things. Most calculators aren't going to have a shot at doing this.
In the (now hypothetical) writeup, it sounded as if the teacher has monitoring software that lets him see what the students are running. If he didn't know what Firefox.exe was, then he didn't know it from some IM software, video game, or cracking tool. In his lack of knowledge on this subject, he should play it safe and request that the student return to the software he does know and has approved. Imagine the stink if he was told "MiRC is just a different web browser," and showed the IE screen claiming that it was the MiRC program, when the student was actually chatting with some perv, and making plans to meet after school. Everyone would absolutely jump on him and demand blood because he should have known better or failing knowing better, not taken the word of the student.
I firmly believe schools need more discipline, not less. Students refusing to abide by a reasonable request from the teacher should get detention. If they say, "Stop using HP calculators and use this TI calculator instead," and provide that calculator to the student, then that is what the student should do. The student doesn't know, there may be reasons to use one instead of the other. Maybe the TI does a better job showing you how the calculations work. Maybe the HP one comes with cheat sheets in the calculator, divulging formulas that the student is supposed to have memorized. Maybe the HP one has the subject matter built in as a native function, and the student can get the answer without understanding anything about how it works. The point is the student doesn't know, and the teacher has covered this subject matter more times (hopefully!) than the student has taken the subject matter, so when it comes to a conflict of intention, the outcome should favor the teacher, barring the sort of lengthy discussion which is not appropriate during class while holding up the rest of the students. Again, if the student firmly believes he is right, he can have a discussion with the teacher when he isn't impacting the other students, and if the teacher has reasons for his stand, then he may now have time to make them evident to the student.
FWIW, in case you didn't notice, this thing was a hoax. But even still, if it's a social studies class, the teacher should only have to know enough to be functional. They should not be expected to be an expert on all things technology when that is not the subject they teach. What if the kid had been using Opera? What if the kid had been using iCab? How about NXS Mosaic? How about some spyware/adware laden browser shell?
I'll agree that it would be nice if all teachers knew all things about the Internet, and I think it would be valuable to have teachers taught these matters so they are at least reasonably conversant on the subject, but requiring this stuff loses focus on the purpose of education. The social studies teacher isn't there to teach Internet surfing, they are there to teach social studies.
Insert car alalogy: I think it's ridiculous to require a teacher to understand the difference between different types of school bus before taking his/her kids on a field trip. "Everybody get on the bus." "No, I'm going to take that bus instead because it's got better gas mileage." The district provided a tool, and the teacher, deferring to the expertise of the experts the district hires for this purpose (whether or not you agree with the decision of those experts), expects kids to use that tool and not one they brought from home.
The student was provided with a perfectly adequate tool to do the job, there is NO REASON that he could not use the requested browser, and refusing to do so was lipping off to the teacher, and preventing the class from moving forward. That's the core issue, not whether the teacher should or shouldn't have known the difference between two identical (from the teacher's perspective) browsers.
The only way that there would be an issue in the kid's favor is if for some reason IE wasn't able to do something that was part of the assignment. In which case the student should raise his hand, explain that, and request permission to use something different. That wasn't the case, even in the version the student made up for this hoax, and even in the student's made up scenario, I still side with the teacher. Furthermore, the fact that the student's made up scenario still breaks apart at refusing to comply with reasonable requests shows what this student really thinks of his teachers, that he knows better and his opinion ought to be followed when it disagrees with the teacher's.
The subject was web browsers? Or at least the Internet? Because if so, then I agree with you. But if it was any other subject (including other computer related courses), then it was off topic to the subject at hand, and instead of disagreeing with and disobeying the teacher in class, the student should have done as requested and approached the teacher after class when he wasn't holding everyone else up from learning what they were supposed to be learning.
No, I'm saying both are important. It's silly to violate the spirit of a law in favor of the letter of the law. And it's silly to violate the letter of the law in favor of what you perceive to be the spirit of the law (thing about spirit is not everyone agrees) unless the letter breaks the spirit (and even still you may end up paying the consequence).
Fortunately this discussion is only tangential to the case at hand since there was an easy way that the student could have satisfied both the letter and the spirit of the law, by simply abiding by a normal and reasonable request from the teacher. The teacher should not take time to debate every request because this detracts from the rest of the class's ability to learn, and especially because 99%+ of the time the outcome will be in favor of the teacher's original request.
FYI, high school computer science teacher requirements are completely off-base, at least in my state (Pennsylvania). I looked into becoming a high school comp sci teacher, and the requirement was a degree in business. I kid you not. Not "a degree in business or a degree in computer science," but you MUST have a degree in business, and there are no other requirements (other of course than the standard educational stuff of getting certificates and whatnot, which are common to all subjects).
To convert my Comp Sci degree, it would have required 2.5 years of education. So the result is that most public school computer teachers have no real computer experience other than maybe using Word / Excel. Technically-minded people who want to teach computers don't want to put 4 years into a business degree (or add 2+ years to their CS degree), and people who got a degree to teach business don't tend to want to teach computers, or else don't tend to be very good at it.
Teachers don't have time to argue with kids over every little thing that the kid feels like arguing about. If the kid felt strongly, he could have talked to the teacher after class. If the teacher asks you to use and provides a blue Bic pen, and you refuse and use a blue Pilot pen, and these two pens perform exactly the same function, you're still disobeying a reasonable request from the teacher. Just like teachers are not omniscient, students are not omniscient, and they don't necessarily know if there is a reason the teacher prefers one over the other. Interrupting class progress to have a debate about the merits of different brands of pen is inappropriate, no matter how really really sure the student is that he/she is right.
The teacher has a responsibility to keep class moving forward. Whether or not the different browsers serve the same purpose, stopping class to discuss it is not appropriate.
The student should have complied with the request, and if s/he felt strongly about this subject, come to the teacher after class and described the difference between browsers. Teachers DO know they are not omniscient, and are often willing to admit the error of their ways. But they can't stop and have a discussion every time a kid thinks they know more than the teacher when it's not relevant to the subject matter being taught.
My wife has as many as 55 kids in her classroom, and an aide to assist with discipline. She's happy to address on-topic questions and discussion, because the whole class can benefit from it. If it turns out that the question is specific enough to the kid (ie, the rest of the class won't benefit from it, such as if the rest of the class already has a good grasp on the topic), she'll ask the kid to come in during study hall to work through the details. She's got a responsibility to keep the class moving forward, and stopping to engage in off-topic dialog with individual students any time one of those students feels like having some means she would never get anything taught.
If they were in a class about using to learn the Internet, then it's topical, and I side with the student. If it's any other subject (even computer related), it's off topic, and the student needs to comply so that the teacher isn't spending time arguing with the student instead of teaching the 30-50 other kids in that room.
Teacher doesn't know all things about all things, makes request for perfectly reasonable action from child under his/her supervision. Child refuses on the grounds that child knows better than the teacher what the teacher was asking the child to do. Teacher gives child detention for disobedience.
Look, it turns out that teachers are not omniscient. Whether or not the child was correct that he was adhering to the spirit of the request, he was not adhering to the letter of the request, and refusing to do so is still worthwhile grounds for punishment.
Notably lacking from the report is what the kid's attitude was. If the kid copped an attitude, then nothing else would really matter. Also lacking is whether the student installed unauthorized software on the school's hardware. It could be the teacher was cutting the kid a break for a more serious offense by only giving him detention for failure to comply with the request.
There's many unknowns here, and giving the benefit of the doubt, it still breaks down to a student refusing to comply with a reasonable request, and that should be grounds for punishment.
How do the current systems work? Are they floats? Are they a pair of close wires which run the height of the tank, and a measure of the resistance between them? How much sloshing does the fuel do (presumably a lot since a pilot might decide to drop their nose cone very suddenly, or participate in rolls)? How do current systems accommodate the sloshing and still get an accurate reading? How do you deal with density changes in the form of gas bubbles in the fuel?
I asked this elsewhere, but you seem more likely to be able to give a reasonable answer. Would it be possible to use fiber optics themselves to read fuel levels? I am thinking of having one or more light sources in the tank (also possibly delivered via fiber optics), and measuring the amount of light reaching the ends of fibers which are evenly spaced every few millimeters (or whatever degree of precision is required). A measure of the total light returning on the fibers should give you a read on what the fuel level is like in there. You could even set up a mesh of sorts and get a 3d view of what fuel levels are like for computer analysis (it would be able to know exactly how much sloshing has been happening, and get an idea of what the fuel cavitation is like).
I imagine all of these systems must require some sort of averaging mechanism to deal with the constant perceived changes in gravity and unusually high amount of fuel sloshing; even cars have this now.
So what you're saying is that once a company gets big enough and important enough, they should be granted blanket immunity on all the really bad things they can do, because we just can't live without them, as long as it was sufficiently bad that it would jeopardize operations at the company.
No, the full sanction can and should be brought against the company, and if they honestly cannot afford to cover the costs of their mistake, the government should make the necessary allowances for ensuring the company remains functional, which may include selling the company to the highest bidder.
You can't grant immunity to a company just because they're really important.
Just curious, is there a reason that fuel levels can't be read entirely by fiber optic? Place a fiber end every few millimeters, place a light source (also carried by fiber optic) at the top of the tank, and measure the total light coming back on the incremental fiber. If the fuel is not opaque enough to accommodate (gasoline is pretty clear, I don't know about jet fuel but for some reason I think it is not), put a floater in front of the return fibers and identify which ones are blocked.
I think because they find the key with a search warrant, and you don't have to divulge its location. They can crack the combination on the lock or save, and it is not a violation of your 5th amendment, but of course this is much harder than finding a key. They can brute force the password, and it's not a violation of the 5th amendment, but if you chose a sufficiently secure password, this might be so challenging that they could miss important deadlines in the case before they could get access to the information.
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Flash at least works. It remains to be seen how compatible Moonlight is with Silverlight. Our options here are between proprietary solutions, one of which is mature and has been around for years, as well as having platform ubiquity. The other is new, immature, harder to use, only offers a promise of ubiquity which has not been fulfilled yet, and comes from a company with a proven track record of putting only enough effort into developing technology to shut out the competition, then dropping it all together for many years (see IE).
Also the Flex development tools are free unlike Visual Studio 2008. Go download them for yourself. It's just an Eclipse plugin.
I'm not worried if I can't view Microsoft.com from my Linux box. I am worried if they succeed in pushing this standard, and sites other than Microsoft.com start requiring it.
Flex Builder is free. And from my experience, Flex is far easier to work in, a lot more mature, and not just a knee-jerk response from its parent company to a market condition which caught them by surprise like Silverlight is.
Flex is substantially easier to work with, had a ubiquitous install base, and transports easily to full desktop applications via Apollo.
We went to a full-day demo on Silverlight, given by a Microsoft developer. What they did in about 500 lines of Silverlight code was a pretty nice picture slideshow with smooth image transitions. What we did in about 500 lines of Flex was equivalent, but supported images of any size, allowed you to zoom in, supported a film strip mode, and carousel mode, as well as the standard fade-in, fade-out image transitions. Ours also is able to attach to ANY other language that is capable of delivering web services in a wide variety of formats (XMLRPC, SOAP, WSDL, flat XML, etc), and it only requires 1 line of code to change (or a switch statement if we wanted to support them all at once). Ours is more featureful, easier to read, understand, and maintain than the very best that Microsoft could produce in the same amount of code. It also performs better.
Seriously, I have seen both of these things in action, Silverlight is a long, LONG way away from being able to compete with Flex on both an install base perspective as well as an ease-of-development perspective. There is a reason people aren't adopting Silverlight, and install base is only a small part of it (though of course it itself is significant).
Microsoft is doing their usual bang-up job of supporting the minimal features to look competitive, then cramming it down people's throats until they forget there are better options out there. And well they should, they should be scared silly. Flex is poised to overthrow the desktop monopoly in a way that AJAX and Google Apps can't (wouldn't be surprised to see some Google apps on Flex in the future). To boot, you can convert these browser-based apps to offline desktop apps with about 30 minutes of work, and an Apollo redistributable.
Nothing has been this big of a threat to the desktop monopoly since Java. And Adobe has the gumption, power, and pocketbook to follow through. This is the source of the recent interest in Flash 9 on Linux. They don't care whether Linux users can view pretty animations, they care whether Linux users accept Flex, and being given access to Flex is the first step toward acceptance. They are also courting the open source community more and more (notice that the Flash Remoting spec was recently opened, which is actually a pretty big deal since it enables features that only they are able to deliver today), realizing I think that a lot of these Linux geeks are also IT decision makers.
Adobe is working on a version of Photoshop for the web, which from what I understand will be a combination of HTML/Ajax, Flex, and server-side processing. They are bringing levels of desktop functionality to the browser never before possible, and it has Microsoft bricking in their pants.
Over the coming months, expect to see Microsoft cramming Silverlight down your and anyone else's throat as rigorously as they are able to. It will be hidden in Windows Update files, it will be required to do various things on the Microsoft website, it will be bundled with software. They will make many applications in Silverlight which are better suited to other existing technologies (for example, the Microsoft website!!), because they want to make it as mandatory as they can without hitting anti-trust legislation.
This isn't a 30-second-step-to-the-side, it's a get-intimate-with-a-latex-glove-in-a-back-room thing. This is a "I have the power to make your life miserable for the next hour or potentially a whole lot longer" sort of thing. It's a "I have the ability to make you completely miss your flight, costing you to buy a new ticket for the next flight, or call off the trip all together" sort of thing.
It's the assignment of unregulated power to non-elected government officials, based purely and entirely on the judgment of that individual without any form of external oversight into the correctness, fairness, or legitimacy of those judgments. That person decides whether you make your flight on whatever whim he or she feels like. People, being human beings, WILL abuse this. It's not a matter of IF, it's a matter of how often, only we have no way of telling, and no way to identify or regulate the abuse.
The benefits (if any, which is certainly arguable) do not come even CLOSE to outweighing the cost and risks.
Government forces should never for any reason be given authoritative powers which are unable to be subject to external oversight.
Maybe you look like the guy who cut him off in traffic this morning. Maybe he decides to detain a large group just before he detains you, to guarantee that you miss your flight before they can process and pass through the previous group. The point is you simply cannot give unchallengeable power such as this to human beings without it being abused, and with such a small success rate, abuse is both certain and unidentifiable.
Counting catching people on outstanding arrest warrants against their success tally is all the more indicative of their low actual success rate. They want to make their numbers look as good as possible, so they include people they probably had prior knowledge of. These are people whose names and pictures are on a computer screen that morning, the officers know to watch out for them, and would be caught completely independent of this bogus system, but they count it as a win to this system in order to at least hit that 1% mark.
Also what do they mean by weapons violations in the above quote? Is this some guy who forgot he had a pocket knife? If it's something more serious like a gun, isn't he again going to get caught in existing security? I would like to see the number of people they caught who would have slipped through normal security. I'd be surprised if it beat 1 in 10 of the people they did arrest. Even fudging their numbers they can't offer a better number than 1% success rate. This program is a failure out the gate, and it is only an opportunity for abuse without oversight.
If the group splits were for no reason, then the splits would die, and the most popular one would survive. There are a variety of reasons why these different camps exist, and rather than being a weakness of Open Source (as you present it), it is in fact a strength (people have the choice to do this, with other software models there aren't splits because there isn't a choice to even HAVE a split).
./configure && make && sudo make install, and described otherwise in a README when not).
Different distros focus on different things. RedHat is enterprise and offers support contracts, but they often have software several versions back from cutting edge. Debian is easy to administer especially on a large scale, and focuses on stability and security. Gentoo is for people who want their software custom compiled for their hardware so that it is as lean as possible. Ubuntu is for end users who don't know that much about Linux but want to give it a try, it's easy to maintain and easy to use, and tries hard to give you a pleasant experience end-to-end. The list goes on, but there are reasons that people prefer one distribution over another, and it's not simply superficial.
It's silly to complain that a RedHat package won't install on Debian. That's like complaining that Windows software won't install under OSX. Except that you actually can convert RedHat RPM's to Debian DEB's, and you can install the result if you can satisfy the dependencies.
As was mentioned elsewhere to you, the reason that software doesn't just port from one distro to another is because of library versioning. A program can be statically linked against its libraries and will run under any Linux with a compatible kernel (ie, if it requires a feature found in the 2.6 kernel, it won't run on a 2.4 kernel - the same as software which requires a Vista feature won't run on XP). This is how most Windows software works. The tradeoff is that the executable gets larger, and it may be vulnerable to a security bug against some included library, without a way to fix that other than recompiling.
This is why there are package managers. If a program requires a specific version of a specific library, then when you install that program, the library gets installed too (unless you already have it, cutting download and install time). When the library has a security update, all the software on your system which uses it benefits from the update. When you remove the last program which depended on a library, that library gets cleaned up too.
The good news for companies is that there is nothing which prevents them from statically linking their software if they want to ensure it runs on any Linux system. There's also nothing which prevents them from bundling the specific library versions they need with the software. Also most communities are more than eager to take care of keeping your software up to date. How easy is it to tell a customer, "apt-get install SoftwareProduct," and they are done? The customer also gets the advantage of the package manager keeping an eye on the software and automatically notifying them of relevant software updates, none of this business in Windows and many OSX products where it is built into each software package independently, and a process starts with the system for each such product just to check for updates (all doing exactly the same work, but custom coded per application, and each with their own memory, cpu, and network footprint).
Main stream software in the open source world is as simple to install and maintain as instructing your package manager to do it. In all but fringe cases, you don't actually have to worry about library versions or system compatibility, the OS takes care of that, and has for years. In fringe cases you still have the option of manually satisfying library dependency issues, or building the package from source (almost always
The real issue you seem to have is, "Customers have choice, and this is a tradeoff of convenience which favors the customer over the developer."
My shoes have neither. There are plenty that don't. Most women's flats and formal wear. Men's formal wear (loafers, etc). Mine are lace/velcroless shoes from Merrell which have an opening at the top surrounded by stretchy padded fabric (it's not elastic, but I don't know a better way to describe it). They fit snugly (but not too tightly to be uncomfortable) around my ankle, and they stay firmly in place.
On a superficial level I'd lean toward HD-DVD. I already know DVD's, and I already know HD. This is just a coupling of concepts with which I am already familiar. Bluray though, what is that, what does it do? Is my stuff compatible with it? Superficially speaking, HD-DVD sounds more comfortable, and there is psychologically less chance that I'll end up with an expensive toy that is not compatible with the rest of my system.
You brought up threads from 4 years and 6 years ago (2003 and 2001)? One guy offered to use mod points, and one guy asked for some mod points. I'd say the cabal is exposed, thanks for your tireless work!
Well, we're clearly arguing circles, so I guess this will be my last one. Unless they are teaching auto mechanics or environmental science, or some other discipline which different types of engine would be material for, they don't need to know the different types of engine to teach. Sure it's nice if they do, but it has nothing to do with their ability to convey the subject matter. Not knowing about Firefox does not hamper their ability to teach with Internet Explorer. It's not their job to know this, and it doesn't hurt their ability to do their job if they don't. It would be nice if they did, but they don't have to.
As long as the type of browser is immaterial to the subject matter, then it's not a debate worth having in class, and it's not something the teacher should necessarily be expected to know.
I don't feel I'm apologizing for ignorance any more than I'm apologizing for lack of omniscience. I don't expect teachers to be conversant experts on the technology they use to facilitate their teaching. I expect them to be sufficiently knowledgeable to be able to effectively leverage that technology in the classroom. Anything else is a bonus. They are not teaching web browsers, they are teaching some other subject. Discussions about web browsers are out of place in that circumstance, and the teacher has a duty and obligation to avoid being distracted into such side conversations. The teacher does NOT need to know the difference between Firefox and IE to be able to use IE to teach the class. And they correctly should be permitted to require students to use the requested tool, even when the student is really sure a different one is better. Discussion otherwise is out of place in a class where that is not the subject matter.
As I said, I don't expect a social studies teacher to know the ramifications of a diesel, gasoline, or propane powered bus (they have those here) before they take the class on a field trip. Likewise I don't expect them to know the difference between IE and Firefox. It's a tool. IE does the job just as well as Firefox for the purpose of teaching, and the student arguing otherwise is being difficult and hindering the entire class. I don't think a teacher should have to know all things about all computers before using one as a tool.
As I said several times, when the student believes otherwise, he can approach the teacher out of class and have a discussion of the relative merits of each, so it's not even like there is not an appropriate escalation procedure for the student. The kid, even in this made up scenario, just felt like being difficult or demonstrating how he knows more than the teacher, and it's not respectful and it's not fair to the other students to detract from their learning what they are supposed to be learning to have the debate.
If you can get access to them to be able to do so, then yes, absolutely. This has the added benefit of helping to expose potential security hazards.
A state lawyer and his client should be in a room where they can't be videotaped while having a counsel session.
The guy changing the codes on the nuke sure as heck should not be where someone can point a camera at him while he's doing it.
The government doctor should not be reading medical records in a place where someone with a video camera is able to spy on what he's reading.
GP didn't say that you have to give physical access to videotape at any time. But if you have the ability to video tape it, then you should be permitted to, and they should not be permitted to stop you (though if they enter a restricted area, you might not be permitted to follow, or if you entered a restricted area to video tape, they should be permitted to escort you out, same as they can do today).
I don't agree with GP's statement that if you have a video camera, you should be permitted to strike an officer and he can't retaliate. He should act toward you the same whether you have a camera or not. If you strike an officer, you're going to get arrested, and that is as it should be. He should not be permitted to destroy the video though, willful destruction of video by government employees either through action or inaction, without the consent of the owner of the video should be considered destruction of evidence, and carry appropriate penalties.
Workers acting in an official government capacity should assume at all times that any civilian observer has a right to make a record of their actions. They should assume that civilian observers are making a record, because this will certainly tint the color of their world.
At this point I don't have much else to say but that I respectfully disagree. If I was the teacher, and the student was using software that I didn't recognize, I'd at least require him to stop using it until I could educate myself more about that software, even if superficially it seemed to be doing the same thing. Software is not calculators. Unknown software has the potential to expose the student or school to a world of bad things. Most calculators aren't going to have a shot at doing this.
In the (now hypothetical) writeup, it sounded as if the teacher has monitoring software that lets him see what the students are running. If he didn't know what Firefox.exe was, then he didn't know it from some IM software, video game, or cracking tool. In his lack of knowledge on this subject, he should play it safe and request that the student return to the software he does know and has approved. Imagine the stink if he was told "MiRC is just a different web browser," and showed the IE screen claiming that it was the MiRC program, when the student was actually chatting with some perv, and making plans to meet after school. Everyone would absolutely jump on him and demand blood because he should have known better or failing knowing better, not taken the word of the student.
I firmly believe schools need more discipline, not less. Students refusing to abide by a reasonable request from the teacher should get detention. If they say, "Stop using HP calculators and use this TI calculator instead," and provide that calculator to the student, then that is what the student should do. The student doesn't know, there may be reasons to use one instead of the other. Maybe the TI does a better job showing you how the calculations work. Maybe the HP one comes with cheat sheets in the calculator, divulging formulas that the student is supposed to have memorized. Maybe the HP one has the subject matter built in as a native function, and the student can get the answer without understanding anything about how it works. The point is the student doesn't know, and the teacher has covered this subject matter more times (hopefully!) than the student has taken the subject matter, so when it comes to a conflict of intention, the outcome should favor the teacher, barring the sort of lengthy discussion which is not appropriate during class while holding up the rest of the students. Again, if the student firmly believes he is right, he can have a discussion with the teacher when he isn't impacting the other students, and if the teacher has reasons for his stand, then he may now have time to make them evident to the student.
I guess I did have more to say =)
FWIW, in case you didn't notice, this thing was a hoax. But even still, if it's a social studies class, the teacher should only have to know enough to be functional. They should not be expected to be an expert on all things technology when that is not the subject they teach. What if the kid had been using Opera? What if the kid had been using iCab? How about NXS Mosaic? How about some spyware/adware laden browser shell?
I'll agree that it would be nice if all teachers knew all things about the Internet, and I think it would be valuable to have teachers taught these matters so they are at least reasonably conversant on the subject, but requiring this stuff loses focus on the purpose of education. The social studies teacher isn't there to teach Internet surfing, they are there to teach social studies.
Insert car alalogy: I think it's ridiculous to require a teacher to understand the difference between different types of school bus before taking his/her kids on a field trip. "Everybody get on the bus." "No, I'm going to take that bus instead because it's got better gas mileage." The district provided a tool, and the teacher, deferring to the expertise of the experts the district hires for this purpose (whether or not you agree with the decision of those experts), expects kids to use that tool and not one they brought from home.
The student was provided with a perfectly adequate tool to do the job, there is NO REASON that he could not use the requested browser, and refusing to do so was lipping off to the teacher, and preventing the class from moving forward. That's the core issue, not whether the teacher should or shouldn't have known the difference between two identical (from the teacher's perspective) browsers.
The only way that there would be an issue in the kid's favor is if for some reason IE wasn't able to do something that was part of the assignment. In which case the student should raise his hand, explain that, and request permission to use something different. That wasn't the case, even in the version the student made up for this hoax, and even in the student's made up scenario, I still side with the teacher. Furthermore, the fact that the student's made up scenario still breaks apart at refusing to comply with reasonable requests shows what this student really thinks of his teachers, that he knows better and his opinion ought to be followed when it disagrees with the teacher's.
The subject was web browsers? Or at least the Internet? Because if so, then I agree with you. But if it was any other subject (including other computer related courses), then it was off topic to the subject at hand, and instead of disagreeing with and disobeying the teacher in class, the student should have done as requested and approached the teacher after class when he wasn't holding everyone else up from learning what they were supposed to be learning.
No, I'm saying both are important. It's silly to violate the spirit of a law in favor of the letter of the law. And it's silly to violate the letter of the law in favor of what you perceive to be the spirit of the law (thing about spirit is not everyone agrees) unless the letter breaks the spirit (and even still you may end up paying the consequence).
Fortunately this discussion is only tangential to the case at hand since there was an easy way that the student could have satisfied both the letter and the spirit of the law, by simply abiding by a normal and reasonable request from the teacher. The teacher should not take time to debate every request because this detracts from the rest of the class's ability to learn, and especially because 99%+ of the time the outcome will be in favor of the teacher's original request.
FYI, high school computer science teacher requirements are completely off-base, at least in my state (Pennsylvania). I looked into becoming a high school comp sci teacher, and the requirement was a degree in business. I kid you not. Not "a degree in business or a degree in computer science," but you MUST have a degree in business, and there are no other requirements (other of course than the standard educational stuff of getting certificates and whatnot, which are common to all subjects).
To convert my Comp Sci degree, it would have required 2.5 years of education. So the result is that most public school computer teachers have no real computer experience other than maybe using Word / Excel. Technically-minded people who want to teach computers don't want to put 4 years into a business degree (or add 2+ years to their CS degree), and people who got a degree to teach business don't tend to want to teach computers, or else don't tend to be very good at it.
Teachers don't have time to argue with kids over every little thing that the kid feels like arguing about. If the kid felt strongly, he could have talked to the teacher after class. If the teacher asks you to use and provides a blue Bic pen, and you refuse and use a blue Pilot pen, and these two pens perform exactly the same function, you're still disobeying a reasonable request from the teacher. Just like teachers are not omniscient, students are not omniscient, and they don't necessarily know if there is a reason the teacher prefers one over the other. Interrupting class progress to have a debate about the merits of different brands of pen is inappropriate, no matter how really really sure the student is that he/she is right.
The teacher has a responsibility to keep class moving forward. Whether or not the different browsers serve the same purpose, stopping class to discuss it is not appropriate.
The student should have complied with the request, and if s/he felt strongly about this subject, come to the teacher after class and described the difference between browsers. Teachers DO know they are not omniscient, and are often willing to admit the error of their ways. But they can't stop and have a discussion every time a kid thinks they know more than the teacher when it's not relevant to the subject matter being taught.
My wife has as many as 55 kids in her classroom, and an aide to assist with discipline. She's happy to address on-topic questions and discussion, because the whole class can benefit from it. If it turns out that the question is specific enough to the kid (ie, the rest of the class won't benefit from it, such as if the rest of the class already has a good grasp on the topic), she'll ask the kid to come in during study hall to work through the details. She's got a responsibility to keep the class moving forward, and stopping to engage in off-topic dialog with individual students any time one of those students feels like having some means she would never get anything taught.
If they were in a class about using to learn the Internet, then it's topical, and I side with the student. If it's any other subject (even computer related), it's off topic, and the student needs to comply so that the teacher isn't spending time arguing with the student instead of teaching the 30-50 other kids in that room.
This is what I hear when I read this:
Teacher doesn't know all things about all things, makes request for perfectly reasonable action from child under his/her supervision. Child refuses on the grounds that child knows better than the teacher what the teacher was asking the child to do. Teacher gives child detention for disobedience.
Look, it turns out that teachers are not omniscient. Whether or not the child was correct that he was adhering to the spirit of the request, he was not adhering to the letter of the request, and refusing to do so is still worthwhile grounds for punishment.
Notably lacking from the report is what the kid's attitude was. If the kid copped an attitude, then nothing else would really matter. Also lacking is whether the student installed unauthorized software on the school's hardware. It could be the teacher was cutting the kid a break for a more serious offense by only giving him detention for failure to comply with the request.
There's many unknowns here, and giving the benefit of the doubt, it still breaks down to a student refusing to comply with a reasonable request, and that should be grounds for punishment.
How do the current systems work? Are they floats? Are they a pair of close wires which run the height of the tank, and a measure of the resistance between them? How much sloshing does the fuel do (presumably a lot since a pilot might decide to drop their nose cone very suddenly, or participate in rolls)? How do current systems accommodate the sloshing and still get an accurate reading? How do you deal with density changes in the form of gas bubbles in the fuel?
I asked this elsewhere, but you seem more likely to be able to give a reasonable answer. Would it be possible to use fiber optics themselves to read fuel levels? I am thinking of having one or more light sources in the tank (also possibly delivered via fiber optics), and measuring the amount of light reaching the ends of fibers which are evenly spaced every few millimeters (or whatever degree of precision is required). A measure of the total light returning on the fibers should give you a read on what the fuel level is like in there. You could even set up a mesh of sorts and get a 3d view of what fuel levels are like for computer analysis (it would be able to know exactly how much sloshing has been happening, and get an idea of what the fuel cavitation is like).
I imagine all of these systems must require some sort of averaging mechanism to deal with the constant perceived changes in gravity and unusually high amount of fuel sloshing; even cars have this now.
So what you're saying is that once a company gets big enough and important enough, they should be granted blanket immunity on all the really bad things they can do, because we just can't live without them, as long as it was sufficiently bad that it would jeopardize operations at the company.
No, the full sanction can and should be brought against the company, and if they honestly cannot afford to cover the costs of their mistake, the government should make the necessary allowances for ensuring the company remains functional, which may include selling the company to the highest bidder.
You can't grant immunity to a company just because they're really important.
Just curious, is there a reason that fuel levels can't be read entirely by fiber optic? Place a fiber end every few millimeters, place a light source (also carried by fiber optic) at the top of the tank, and measure the total light coming back on the incremental fiber. If the fuel is not opaque enough to accommodate (gasoline is pretty clear, I don't know about jet fuel but for some reason I think it is not), put a floater in front of the return fibers and identify which ones are blocked.
I think because they find the key with a search warrant, and you don't have to divulge its location. They can crack the combination on the lock or save, and it is not a violation of your 5th amendment, but of course this is much harder than finding a key. They can brute force the password, and it's not a violation of the 5th amendment, but if you chose a sufficiently secure password, this might be so challenging that they could miss important deadlines in the case before they could get access to the information.