Wrong. They don't want "to foster a false sense of security". Quite the contrary, they want the public to feel scared and to be constantly remaindered that they are in danger. Some of those people would lose their jobs if the general public felt safer.
That's solved by Flashblock (or, even better, completely deinstall flash if you can: I only use Flash for YouTube and starting with Firefox 4 even there won't be necessary, thanks to native WebM video) and most importantly Adblock Plus with a subscription to Easylist. Your browser will suddenly become much faster.
If I'm allowed to vote at home criminals can use threats and/or bribes to convince me to vote in their presence so they can be sure that I voted exactly how they wanted.
That's why vote must always be strictly secret and voters must always have plausible deniability about their choices. E.g. in most modern democracies voters are prohibited from taking photos inside the voting booth for exactly this reason: so anyone else cannot be sure of their votes, and threats and bribes to influence elections become much less effective.
When the Government asks Google for information about a user, how is that "censorship"? It may be a violation of privacy, but it's not censorship unless Google admits that the government then used that information about the user to censor their online activities.
The user now lives in a very small room with no windows and no internet access. Does that counts as "censoring their online activities"?
One thing that most people didn't get about Wave is that its mayor strength is providing an environment where humans and computers can easily communicate and work together.
Don't think about Wave as a super-email or super-chat or super-wiki, although it's a bit of all this, think of an interface that can be populated with custom robots that give to you and your coworkers easy real-time collaborative access to backends specific for your the work you're doing.
Like a form in a web site, that's highly interactive and can be accessed collaboratively by many people at once.
It had huge potential, but unfortunately very few people "got it".
But somehow in this particular case the information found its way to the media and the police felt compelled to immediately confirm it instead of doing what they should have according to Swedish law, refusing to comment on the identity of the person accused.
Sorry for the uppercase, but this is infuriating: the Google online store was actively refusing to sell the damn phone to more than 95% of the world population!
There are tutorials all over the internet in all kind of languages with complicated and costly (more than US$ 100 on top of the official price) procedures to buy the Nexus One outside the US.
The thing has been available in Europe only after six months and has been frequently sold out for weeks in both stores and online stores. See e.g. the difficulties to buy it in the UK, France, Italy, eastern Europe, etc. from May to the beginning of July.
I've been trying to buy it (from Italy) for months and I've finally found one only three weeks ago thanks to a post on a forum that tipped the right store that had one available.
So before jumping to wrong conclusion, please try to avoid blocking more than 95% of the world population from your store (no jokes about starving African kids, please: Africa is less than 15% of the world population, and not everyone there is busy dying anyway). And keep in mind that people from Europe and some Asian countries get much better than the average American what these thing can do (the first thing I did with mine is installing bash and Python; and, yes, a powerful always-on pocket computer with GPS, constant internet access, camera and all kind of sensors can be programmed to do lots of new unusual useful things).
I hope every single fucking patent lawsuit for smartphones in the US succeeds. So HTC, Nokia, Apple, Motorola, all the Android phones and pretty much everyone will be prohibited from selling smartphones in the US.
Maybe it would be the time that you fix your stupid patent laws that allows software to be patented (most of the patents involved in this shit, especially to most wide-reaching ones and more difficult to avoid, are software patents).
When sites suck so much to not accept emails longer than 32 characters or with "-" or "+" in them, they usually also suck to the point of doing these checks only on the client side, which is obviously easy to work around. The server may not validate the input at all!
See e.g. this (scroll down to "Now the interesting technical part"): United Airlines sucks.
So it should be impossible for Windows Update, running as administrator, to add extensions to Firefox? How exactly is this miracle to be accomplished?
Seriously, have you even read the comment to which you're replying? I never said anywhere that it should be "impossible" and I clearly described what the Mozilla developers should do if any program tries to circumvent this mechanism.
I liked more the external power brick, because it's a component that generates lots of heat and it was passively cooled. If you put it inside the Mac Mini it will inevitably cause more fan noise than a similar solution with external power supply.
Dear Mozilla developers, please disable by default *all* extensions except:
the ones that are manually installed by the user using the standard UI inside Firefox;
the ones that are manually enabled by the user using a menu switch inside Firefox for EACH externally installed extension (do NOT show a confirmation dialog if a new extension appears out of nowhere: users always click "yes").
The power to choose what to install in their browsers must reside only in the hands of the users.
If a vendor actively tries to circumvent this new protection mechanism, permanently blacklist ALL its extensions, plugins and whatnot. Report them to antivirus vendors as malware.
It's not the first time this happens and it actively damages users, with slower browsing experience, less screen space for actual content, huge undisclosed privacy and security breaches (you can BET they exists, even if they are not made public).
This shit has to stop.
P.S. to the users of Microsoft products: please any time you can, try to avoid this company, you're not their customer, you're their victim. There are other software vendors that respect you much more than that.
Well they are completely right to complain about this: "they couldn't scribble notes in the margins, easily highlight passages".
You can do that with the products from IREX which, BTW, also happen to be much more open than the Kindle (no DRM bullshit, based on Linux, you can install new/better applications, etc.).
Disclaimer: I don't work for IREX, I'm only an happy owner of an iLiad.
They simply used the maximum quality for Theora, that's like encoding a JPEG with quality 100. Nobody does that. Shooting for the same size or a bit more that H.264 would have resulted in indistinguishable quality difference. Don't take my word for it, try (starting from the lossless source, obviously).
What's new here is that Apple is possibly thinking of making this a standard while owning critical patents on it, then after this is widespread (if it ever happens) crackdown on competition using its patents.
Apple is becoming more evil lately, see the recent attempt to shut down competition on smartphones from HTC using completely trivial software patents (the original article is from LWN, I highly suggest getting a subscription there).
Sounds familiar? Remember GIF? MP3? h.264? Yeah, I know, this last reference will get me modded as troll.
Instead of buying hardware (DS, iPod) from hostile manufactures and having to crack them simply to use your own devices, why don't you vote with your money and buy a SmartQ V5? It's small, cheap, waaay more powerful than a DS and it runs Ubuntu 9.10 and Android.
Or the V7 if you want a bigger screen (warning: don't confuse them with the older SmartQ 5 and SmartQ 7).
Or any of the many lesser known cheap Linux tablets/MIDs from small Chinese vendors. Many of them are just one apt-get away from being extremely useful pocketable computers.
Can you please be more specific? What do you think is not true in my previous post? I was explicitly talking about books bought from Amazon with the Kindle (which are all DRMed) and you reply saying that it's also possible to read non-DRM books from third parties. What's your point?
Anyone that thinks that the Kindle is even barely acceptable doesn't know the iLiad. Better hardware, open system (I installed an alternate PDF viewer on mine, with better features for my usage than the builtin one) and MOST important it's my device and my books.
With the Kindle, Amazon is just temporary allowing you to read their books on their device: they can at any time remotely delete books you paid for (it already happened and it WILL happen again, or they wouldn't have spent money developing this "feature"), remotely change the contents of "your" books even after you have paid and downloaded them (it already happened and once the capability is there it WILL be abused for censorship) and remotely disable functionality on the Kindle itself. All this without your consent.
Mark my words: if you buy books on the Kindle, 10 years from now you will not be able to read them without breaking anti-piracy laws, even if you think you can make backups now.
Please don't give money to Amazon for the privilege of raping your freedom to read books.
And, going back to the hardware thing, the bigger screens of the iLiads (8.1 or 10.2 inches) are waaay better for content that can't be reformatted on the fly (e.g. PDF files). Remember this is not an LCD, you can't scroll: a page must fit entirely on the screen.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. They don't want "to foster a false sense of security". Quite the contrary, they want the public to feel scared and to be constantly remaindered that they are in danger. Some of those people would lose their jobs if the general public felt safer.
That's solved by Flashblock (or, even better, completely deinstall flash if you can: I only use Flash for YouTube and starting with Firefox 4 even there won't be necessary, thanks to native WebM video) and most importantly Adblock Plus with a subscription to Easylist. Your browser will suddenly become much faster.
There's an even bigger problem: selling votes.
If I'm allowed to vote at home criminals can use threats and/or bribes to convince me to vote in their presence so they can be sure that I voted exactly how they wanted.
That's why vote must always be strictly secret and voters must always have plausible deniability about their choices. E.g. in most modern democracies voters are prohibited from taking photos inside the voting booth for exactly this reason: so anyone else cannot be sure of their votes, and threats and bribes to influence elections become much less effective.
When the Government asks Google for information about a user, how is that "censorship"? It may be a violation of privacy, but it's not censorship unless Google admits that the government then used that information about the user to censor their online activities.
The user now lives in a very small room with no windows and no internet access. Does that counts as "censoring their online activities"?
One thing that most people didn't get about Wave is that its mayor strength is providing an environment where humans and computers can easily communicate and work together.
Don't think about Wave as a super-email or super-chat or super-wiki, although it's a bit of all this, think of an interface that can be populated with custom robots that give to you and your coworkers easy real-time collaborative access to backends specific for your the work you're doing.
Like a form in a web site, that's highly interactive and can be accessed collaboratively by many people at once.
It had huge potential, but unfortunately very few people "got it".
Warrants are public
No in Sweden they aren't.
But somehow in this particular case the information found its way to the media and the police felt compelled to immediately confirm it instead of doing what they should have according to Swedish law, refusing to comment on the identity of the person accused.
Who is the idiot that modded parent down. Seriously, did the US government paid you to do troll-modding on /.?
Fuck the US government agency that pulled this shit and the Swedish authorities that allowed them to do it.
Sorry for the uppercase, but this is infuriating: the Google online store was actively refusing to sell the damn phone to more than 95% of the world population!
There are tutorials all over the internet in all kind of languages with complicated and costly (more than US$ 100 on top of the official price) procedures to buy the Nexus One outside the US.
The thing has been available in Europe only after six months and has been frequently sold out for weeks in both stores and online stores. See e.g. the difficulties to buy it in the UK, France, Italy, eastern Europe, etc. from May to the beginning of July.
I've been trying to buy it (from Italy) for months and I've finally found one only three weeks ago thanks to a post on a forum that tipped the right store that had one available.
So before jumping to wrong conclusion, please try to avoid blocking more than 95% of the world population from your store (no jokes about starving African kids, please: Africa is less than 15% of the world population, and not everyone there is busy dying anyway). And keep in mind that people from Europe and some Asian countries get much better than the average American what these thing can do (the first thing I did with mine is installing bash and Python; and, yes, a powerful always-on pocket computer with GPS, constant internet access, camera and all kind of sensors can be programmed to do lots of new unusual useful things).
26 users.
I don't do that stuff anymore.
Actually the current version of Ogg supports an optional index and ffmpeg2theora creates it by default.
I hope every single fucking patent lawsuit for smartphones in the US succeeds. So HTC, Nokia, Apple, Motorola, all the Android phones and pretty much everyone will be prohibited from selling smartphones in the US.
Maybe it would be the time that you fix your stupid patent laws that allows software to be patented (most of the patents involved in this shit, especially to most wide-reaching ones and more difficult to avoid, are software patents).
Why eliminate them completely, why simply not raise the price until it's profitable if some consumer want them?
When sites suck so much to not accept emails longer than 32 characters or with "-" or "+" in them, they usually also suck to the point of doing these checks only on the client side, which is obviously easy to work around. The server may not validate the input at all!
See e.g. this (scroll down to "Now the interesting technical part"): United Airlines sucks.
So it should be impossible for Windows Update, running as administrator, to add extensions to Firefox? How exactly is this miracle to be accomplished?
Seriously, have you even read the comment to which you're replying? I never said anywhere that it should be "impossible" and I clearly described what the Mozilla developers should do if any program tries to circumvent this mechanism.
I liked more the external power brick, because it's a component that generates lots of heat and it was passively cooled. If you put it inside the Mac Mini it will inevitably cause more fan noise than a similar solution with external power supply.
Dear Mozilla developers, please disable by default *all* extensions except:
The power to choose what to install in their browsers must reside only in the hands of the users.
If a vendor actively tries to circumvent this new protection mechanism, permanently blacklist ALL its extensions, plugins and whatnot. Report them to antivirus vendors as malware.
It's not the first time this happens and it actively damages users, with slower browsing experience, less screen space for actual content, huge undisclosed privacy and security breaches (you can BET they exists, even if they are not made public).
This shit has to stop.
P.S. to the users of Microsoft products: please any time you can, try to avoid this company, you're not their customer, you're their victim. There are other software vendors that respect you much more than that.
Well they are completely right to complain about this: "they couldn't scribble notes in the margins, easily highlight passages".
You can do that with the products from IREX which, BTW, also happen to be much more open than the Kindle (no DRM bullshit, based on Linux, you can install new/better applications, etc.).
Disclaimer: I don't work for IREX, I'm only an happy owner of an iLiad.
They simply used the maximum quality for Theora, that's like encoding a JPEG with quality 100. Nobody does that. Shooting for the same size or a bit more that H.264 would have resulted in indistinguishable quality difference. Don't take my word for it, try (starting from the lossless source, obviously).
safari only supports h.264 in the html5 video tag
Safari supports whatever codec happens to be installed. By default Apple installs H.264 and not Theora (which is still available separately).
And, yes, I know defaults are powerful things.
What's new here is that Apple is possibly thinking of making this a standard while owning critical patents on it, then after this is widespread (if it ever happens) crackdown on competition using its patents.
Apple is becoming more evil lately, see the recent attempt to shut down competition on smartphones from HTC using completely trivial software patents (the original article is from LWN, I highly suggest getting a subscription there).
Sounds familiar? Remember GIF? MP3? h.264? Yeah, I know, this last reference will get me modded as troll.
1 teragram is exactly 1 milion metric tons, but it's also approximately 1.1 million funny American tons.
Instead of buying hardware (DS, iPod) from hostile manufactures and having to crack them simply to use your own devices, why don't you vote with your money and buy a SmartQ V5? It's small, cheap, waaay more powerful than a DS and it runs Ubuntu 9.10 and Android.
Or the V7 if you want a bigger screen (warning: don't confuse them with the older SmartQ 5 and SmartQ 7).
Or any of the many lesser known cheap Linux tablets/MIDs from small Chinese vendors. Many of them are just one apt-get away from being extremely useful pocketable computers.
Can you please be more specific? What do you think is not true in my previous post? I was explicitly talking about books bought from Amazon with the Kindle (which are all DRMed) and you reply saying that it's also possible to read non-DRM books from third parties. What's your point?
Anyone that thinks that the Kindle is even barely acceptable doesn't know the iLiad. Better hardware, open system (I installed an alternate PDF viewer on mine, with better features for my usage than the builtin one) and MOST important it's my device and my books.
With the Kindle, Amazon is just temporary allowing you to read their books on their device: they can at any time remotely delete books you paid for (it already happened and it WILL happen again, or they wouldn't have spent money developing this "feature"), remotely change the contents of "your" books even after you have paid and downloaded them (it already happened and once the capability is there it WILL be abused for censorship) and remotely disable functionality on the Kindle itself. All this without your consent.
Mark my words: if you buy books on the Kindle, 10 years from now you will not be able to read them without breaking anti-piracy laws, even if you think you can make backups now.
Please don't give money to Amazon for the privilege of raping your freedom to read books.
And, going back to the hardware thing, the bigger screens of the iLiads (8.1 or 10.2 inches) are waaay better for content that can't be reformatted on the fly (e.g. PDF files). Remember this is not an LCD, you can't scroll: a page must fit entirely on the screen.