When you get down to it, there are several multi-billion dollar industries entirely based around things we don't really need, and many that have been around for a good while. Music, film, drugs, sports, perfume, computer games... In fact, in first world countries, stuff people don't need probably accounts for the majority of economic activity*. Facebook is hardly unique in that respect.
*Disclaimer: this claim is a wild guess based on no actual statistics, and what people "need" is arguable anyway.
And here's why that's not a problem. Even if the market is basically targetting that 95%, the hardware that's produced for it can be repurposed easily enough for what we want. Most likely the companies making it will sell some with traditional operating systems, but even if they don't, it'll be hacked. So far, even the most concerted attempts to prevent users getting full control have fallen (PS3, anyone?). And not all companies will make it very challenging to hack. Apart from anything else, the geeky 5% (or even 1%) of the market is still worth having.
Perhaps the more serious concern is that, if computers become appliances, and only tinkerers have full access to their systems, where do the next generation of tinkerers come from? Will people be able to start prodding things, and finding things out, and slowly developing an interest? My guess is that they will, but it will mostly be at a higher level. Just like writing in assembler or directly controlling tape drives are niche interests now, I guess that compiling software on your own machine is going to become increasingly niche, as more tinkerers play around with the web, or code running in scripting environments.
Little to do with the *code* security, yes. But it's got a lot to do with real-users-not-getting-viruses security.
Seriously, everyone. I know it's sponsored by Microsoft, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's some dodgy selection of test URLs behind the scenes. But if these results are even in the right ballpark, then it's something that Google (and Mozilla, and Opera) really need to pay more attention to. Stop finding excuses to ignore it just because we don't like what it says. Go and try to find the methodology, and see how it's dodgy. Or even do your own tests.
If I was working on a research grant, I couldn't touch wikipedia *anyway*. It *might* be an OK source for grade / high-school and *some* undergrad papers / projects, but NOT for research grants.
Wikipedia shouldn't be cited as a source at any level. But it can help you to understand a topic, and hopefully point you to some better sources if you need to cite something. There's no arbitrary limit at which you can't use it like that. Even when you're an expert in some field, you're still going to want information on related fields quite often.
And in fact, we (the British) have now given up on the jump jet variant. We'll get the carrier variant, and fit our new carrier (or carriers, as and when there's the money) with catapults and arrestor wires.
I reckon a few Harriers will live on for airshows. I've seen them, and they are impressive to watch. Plus, there's a certain patriotic satisfaction in knowing that we made a successful VTOL jet decades ago (the Russians also had one in service, but it was a bizarre design with two extra vertically-mounted engines).
Well, it would be no great leap for Google to add that feature themselves. They've been able to act as a POP client for some time now, sucking in e-mails from the accounts people have with their ISPs, mainly.
And I like GMail's interface. Facebook would be doing pretty well to beat Google there.
sadly no one is forcing them to learn about computers if they constantly confuse G**gle with the Web.
I disagree. Computers and the internet (and Google) are tools. People shouldn't have to understand how it all works in order to use it, because it's fantastically useful even if you think it's powered by magic pixies. We force people to get drivers licences before they're put in charge of half a ton of steel capable of travelling at 100 mph because it's easy to kill people if you get it wrong. If you 'get it wrong' with a computer, you end up with some data in a proprietary format. Which is usually nothing more than an annoyance.
By all means try to educate people, but banning them from the internet until they pass some test is a terrible idea.
Plus patching any known security holes? Interesting idea. I think the trouble is funding/motivation: both virus and antivirus writers usually do it for profit, and it would take time and effort to keep it up to date. Since it would be, at best, dubiously legal, it probably couldn't be sponsored by any company, so it would have to be a guerilla effort. And the people who could write it mostly wouldn't benefit (except perhaps that they'd spend less time cleaning their families computers...).
Even without a car alarm, you'll notice if your car isn't where you parked it
It won't do you much good, though. This is why an alarm is now standard in most, if not all, new cars. Microsoft seems to be moving in the same direction for Windows, with Security Essentials. I guess antitrust issues stop them from installing it by default, though.
Like the CPU issue, I don't really see the bugs that I always hear about. At least on the sites I visit, it's reliable enough for regular use. I don't know what I do differently to everyone complaining: I'm using the stock versions of Firefox and Flash installed from Ubuntu repos.
People always say this. But I can easily watch Flash video in full screen on Linux, and I often do. Just testing a (non-fullscreen) video now, it took up some 35% of one core (Pentium 5300: not exactly top of the range). I don't have a problem with it.
The findings are new, but disturbing for the future of biofuel.
To put this in perspective, the newspaper article you link to describes some scientists who've done a computer simulation of burning mixtures including biodiesel (a particular type of biofuel), and predict that it will produce a greater amount of PAHs, which are known to cause cancer, than simulated pure fossil fuels. As far as I can see, they've not even burnt anything.
Assuming real experiments match their simulation, the mixture will most likely be tweaked a bit--some chemical change, some additive, or something--to bring down the resulting amount of PAHs. We already drive around with catalytic converters bolted to our cars to clean up various pollutants. What you've described is a minor pothole in biofuel development, not the roadblock you seem to be implying. By far the greater challenge is how to devote the necessary land to grow biofuels while we simultaneously increase food production to feed a growing world population, and try to conserve land for nature.
other online papers in the UK like The Guardian have ad revenues of around 40 million,
It's worth pointing out, though, that the Guardian is easily the most successful UK paper in attracting online visitors, even before the paywall. It has a good website, and its readership tends to be younger and more left-leaning, so probably more likely to go online.
I don't agree with the GP's apparent 'all forking is bad' viewpoint, but I think there's half a point in there. Choice is good, but I'd rather have a dozen good choices than 300 mostly poor ones. I see the problem more as duplicated effort than forks: open source devs sometimes reimplement essentially the same software in a different language/toolkit/license, without really improving the options available.
Forking when necessary is part of the culture of open source (and, for the record, I think LibreOffice was probably a necessary fork). But collaboration is also a big part of the open source idea, that we can share and improve on code together, rather than duplicating lots of effort in a futile competition. Unfortunately, that sometimes gets overlooked.
As for whether OpenOffice/LibreOffice is 'finished', I think it could do with being rather snappier to load, and some work on usability. A 'visual refresh' (as Ubuntu puts it) wouldn't go amiss either.
In my experience, this situation is fairly common: FOSS is very good at producing 'tools': useful but unpolished software. Often, they require a certain amount of putting it together yourself, searching for information on how to make X talk to Y. That has its positives: you can make it do more or less whatever you want; and its negatives: you don't get a simple wizard to click through to set up your Google Docs replacement.
FOSS works largely by people "scratching their own itch". It sounds like 'a Google Docs replacement for your own server' is one of your itches. I was trying to suggest work you might be able to use to scratch it yourself.
This. The researchers did not, in fact, call it the liberal gene. They called it the "dopamine receptor D4 gene". The paper is titled "Friendships Moderate an Association between a
Dopamine Gene Variant and Political Ideology".
But that's excuse enough for the media to turn it into a "liberal gene". It's been transformed by the Science News Cycle.
Oh, and if we're being picky, it's an allele, a particular form of a gene. You could equally call the other alleles of a gene (which predispose you to have fewer friends as a teenager) "Conservative alleles". But that's stupid too.
But Google doesn't care if people use Chrome. It's free, and doesn't include any ads (and however much it tracks you, I doubt they make much money from that alone). Much like Mozilla, they released Chrome in order to drive browsers forwards. Crucially, Google want faster Javascript engines. And Firefox has risen to the bait.
I want a FOSS system I can install on my own server that has all the functionality of Google Docs but lives on my sever.
Which bit? For online editing of documents/spreadsheets, there's "Feng office" (formerly Opengoo). They try to commercialise it, but it's open source, and there's a free "Community edition". No concurrent editing last time I checked, though. For concurrent editing, there's Etherpad, and Google has released/is releasing/say they will release the code for Wave. Granted, none of it's a polished, drop in replacement for Google Docs, but that's life.
Slashdot Mirror
thanks google goggles
When you get down to it, there are several multi-billion dollar industries entirely based around things we don't really need, and many that have been around for a good while. Music, film, drugs, sports, perfume, computer games... In fact, in first world countries, stuff people don't need probably accounts for the majority of economic activity*. Facebook is hardly unique in that respect.
*Disclaimer: this claim is a wild guess based on no actual statistics, and what people "need" is arguable anyway.
And here's why that's not a problem. Even if the market is basically targetting that 95%, the hardware that's produced for it can be repurposed easily enough for what we want. Most likely the companies making it will sell some with traditional operating systems, but even if they don't, it'll be hacked. So far, even the most concerted attempts to prevent users getting full control have fallen (PS3, anyone?). And not all companies will make it very challenging to hack. Apart from anything else, the geeky 5% (or even 1%) of the market is still worth having.
Perhaps the more serious concern is that, if computers become appliances, and only tinkerers have full access to their systems, where do the next generation of tinkerers come from? Will people be able to start prodding things, and finding things out, and slowly developing an interest? My guess is that they will, but it will mostly be at a higher level. Just like writing in assembler or directly controlling tape drives are niche interests now, I guess that compiling software on your own machine is going to become increasingly niche, as more tinkerers play around with the web, or code running in scripting environments.
Little to do with the *code* security, yes. But it's got a lot to do with real-users-not-getting-viruses security.
Seriously, everyone. I know it's sponsored by Microsoft, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's some dodgy selection of test URLs behind the scenes. But if these results are even in the right ballpark, then it's something that Google (and Mozilla, and Opera) really need to pay more attention to. Stop finding excuses to ignore it just because we don't like what it says. Go and try to find the methodology, and see how it's dodgy. Or even do your own tests.
If you download his Insurance file or donate money to his site, expect to be put under intense surveilence COINTELPRO style.
But if enough people download the file or donate money, the government's surveillance resources can't stretch to it.
If I was working on a research grant, I couldn't touch wikipedia *anyway*. It *might* be an OK source for grade / high-school and *some* undergrad papers / projects, but NOT for research grants.
Wikipedia shouldn't be cited as a source at any level. But it can help you to understand a topic, and hopefully point you to some better sources if you need to cite something. There's no arbitrary limit at which you can't use it like that. Even when you're an expert in some field, you're still going to want information on related fields quite often.
And in fact, we (the British) have now given up on the jump jet variant. We'll get the carrier variant, and fit our new carrier (or carriers, as and when there's the money) with catapults and arrestor wires.
I reckon a few Harriers will live on for airshows. I've seen them, and they are impressive to watch. Plus, there's a certain patriotic satisfaction in knowing that we made a successful VTOL jet decades ago (the Russians also had one in service, but it was a bizarre design with two extra vertically-mounted engines).
Well, it would be no great leap for Google to add that feature themselves. They've been able to act as a POP client for some time now, sucking in e-mails from the accounts people have with their ISPs, mainly.
And I like GMail's interface. Facebook would be doing pretty well to beat Google there.
sadly no one is forcing them to learn about computers if they constantly confuse G**gle with the Web.
I disagree. Computers and the internet (and Google) are tools. People shouldn't have to understand how it all works in order to use it, because it's fantastically useful even if you think it's powered by magic pixies. We force people to get drivers licences before they're put in charge of half a ton of steel capable of travelling at 100 mph because it's easy to kill people if you get it wrong. If you 'get it wrong' with a computer, you end up with some data in a proprietary format. Which is usually nothing more than an annoyance.
By all means try to educate people, but banning them from the internet until they pass some test is a terrible idea.
Plus patching any known security holes? Interesting idea. I think the trouble is funding/motivation: both virus and antivirus writers usually do it for profit, and it would take time and effort to keep it up to date. Since it would be, at best, dubiously legal, it probably couldn't be sponsored by any company, so it would have to be a guerilla effort. And the people who could write it mostly wouldn't benefit (except perhaps that they'd spend less time cleaning their families computers...).
Even without a car alarm, you'll notice if your car isn't where you parked it
It won't do you much good, though. This is why an alarm is now standard in most, if not all, new cars. Microsoft seems to be moving in the same direction for Windows, with Security Essentials. I guess antitrust issues stop them from installing it by default, though.
Like the CPU issue, I don't really see the bugs that I always hear about. At least on the sites I visit, it's reliable enough for regular use. I don't know what I do differently to everyone complaining: I'm using the stock versions of Firefox and Flash installed from Ubuntu repos.
For comparison, an HTML5 test video at the same resolution in WebM (Firefox 4) took over half of a core.
People always say this. But I can easily watch Flash video in full screen on Linux, and I often do. Just testing a (non-fullscreen) video now, it took up some 35% of one core (Pentium 5300: not exactly top of the range). I don't have a problem with it.
Chernobyl is in the Ukraine, not Poland.
The findings are new, but disturbing for the future of biofuel.
To put this in perspective, the newspaper article you link to describes some scientists who've done a computer simulation of burning mixtures including biodiesel (a particular type of biofuel), and predict that it will produce a greater amount of PAHs, which are known to cause cancer, than simulated pure fossil fuels. As far as I can see, they've not even burnt anything.
Assuming real experiments match their simulation, the mixture will most likely be tweaked a bit--some chemical change, some additive, or something--to bring down the resulting amount of PAHs. We already drive around with catalytic converters bolted to our cars to clean up various pollutants. What you've described is a minor pothole in biofuel development, not the roadblock you seem to be implying. By far the greater challenge is how to devote the necessary land to grow biofuels while we simultaneously increase food production to feed a growing world population, and try to conserve land for nature.
Well, we do refer to the Dutch. We just got a bit confused about where they come from. The people we call the Dutch call themselves Nederlanders.
More or less than paying a massive American corporation for software?
other online papers in the UK like The Guardian have ad revenues of around 40 million,
It's worth pointing out, though, that the Guardian is easily the most successful UK paper in attracting online visitors, even before the paywall. It has a good website, and its readership tends to be younger and more left-leaning, so probably more likely to go online.
Oh, and The Times is not "NYT UK".
I don't agree with the GP's apparent 'all forking is bad' viewpoint, but I think there's half a point in there. Choice is good, but I'd rather have a dozen good choices than 300 mostly poor ones. I see the problem more as duplicated effort than forks: open source devs sometimes reimplement essentially the same software in a different language/toolkit/license, without really improving the options available.
Forking when necessary is part of the culture of open source (and, for the record, I think LibreOffice was probably a necessary fork). But collaboration is also a big part of the open source idea, that we can share and improve on code together, rather than duplicating lots of effort in a futile competition. Unfortunately, that sometimes gets overlooked.
As for whether OpenOffice/LibreOffice is 'finished', I think it could do with being rather snappier to load, and some work on usability. A 'visual refresh' (as Ubuntu puts it) wouldn't go amiss either.
In my experience, this situation is fairly common: FOSS is very good at producing 'tools': useful but unpolished software. Often, they require a certain amount of putting it together yourself, searching for information on how to make X talk to Y. That has its positives: you can make it do more or less whatever you want; and its negatives: you don't get a simple wizard to click through to set up your Google Docs replacement.
FOSS works largely by people "scratching their own itch". It sounds like 'a Google Docs replacement for your own server' is one of your itches. I was trying to suggest work you might be able to use to scratch it yourself.
Bonus links for web presentations: Slimey (editor), S5 Project.
This. The researchers did not, in fact, call it the liberal gene. They called it the "dopamine receptor D4 gene". The paper is titled "Friendships Moderate an Association between a Dopamine Gene Variant and Political Ideology".
But that's excuse enough for the media to turn it into a "liberal gene". It's been transformed by the Science News Cycle.
Oh, and if we're being picky, it's an allele, a particular form of a gene. You could equally call the other alleles of a gene (which predispose you to have fewer friends as a teenager) "Conservative alleles". But that's stupid too.
But Google doesn't care if people use Chrome. It's free, and doesn't include any ads (and however much it tracks you, I doubt they make much money from that alone). Much like Mozilla, they released Chrome in order to drive browsers forwards. Crucially, Google want faster Javascript engines. And Firefox has risen to the bait.
I want a FOSS system I can install on my own server that has all the functionality of Google Docs but lives on my sever.
Which bit? For online editing of documents/spreadsheets, there's "Feng office" (formerly Opengoo). They try to commercialise it, but it's open source, and there's a free "Community edition". No concurrent editing last time I checked, though. For concurrent editing, there's Etherpad, and Google has released/is releasing/say they will release the code for Wave. Granted, none of it's a polished, drop in replacement for Google Docs, but that's life.
What they do on Release 27 I don't know, but it's still a ways off.
Unicode! ;-)