A suggestion would be major overhauls once every two years of the backend stuff while user applications is kept on newest stable versions.
This is exactly what you'll get with Debian Stable + Backports. A stable base with regularly updated versions of popular software packages (eg Firefox, OpenOffice) to put on top of it.
And running this type of system now has more official support.
it's about being able to run your application in a different environment where you don't have admin rights.
In a lot of university clusters or compute grids researchers have access to a large collection of compute nodes, but they usually don't have any rights to those machines. In fact, most of the time the programs are ran in a sandbox and have a restrictive environment.
Wouldn't virtualisation help in that sort of situation? Set up your own Linux (or whatever) installation in your own virtual space? Can't things like User Mode Linux do that?
As of January 30, 2009 Micro-USB has been accepted by almost all cell phone manufacturers as the standard charging port (including HTC, Motorola, Nokia, LG, Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Research In Motion) in the EU and most of the world. Worldwide conversion to the new cellphone charging standard is expected to be completed between 2010 to 2012.
> that model doesn't work in the US due to technology and frequency differences
That doesn't seem to have been a problem in Australia or New Zealand where there are also frequency differences between networks.
You just buy a phone with the right frequency for your network (850 or 900/2100) and you're right. Some new phones like the iPhone 4 support both sets of frequencies so are are non-issue.
The real reason that model doesn't work in the US is due to the carriers being allowed (by the buying public, or by regulators, depending on your politics) to impose such terrible prices and terms.
This proposal has a ton of flaws that have already been highlighted in other comments (4 characters is too short, summary screws up "Free" vs "free.", the session is still easily hijacked to anyone present during the handshake, an so forth).
However, the real benefit to this kind of proposal, in my mind, is that it brings more public attention to the fact that unencrypted wifi is security madness.I've said to people before that I think that it needs to be illegal to sell an access point capable of unencrypted operation.
But it brings attention to our desperate need for a solution allowing businesses offering "free public wifi" to be able to ensure users' authenticated sessions aren't shared with each other. This is a reasonable expectation of privacy equivalent to non-electronic forms of communication, for example where somebody can't see you filling out a paper form unless they're standing right there looking over your shoulder.
But with Flash, browser makers have no control over how CPU-hungry the plugin is.
With HTML5, browser makers have the ability to keep improving the efficiency of their engines for greater performance and lower CPU usage. They use it as a point of differentiation from their competitors (look at how it's fuelled improvements in Javascript engines over the last 4 years).
I remember being young and my dad explaining how data got sent to schools using non-visible (vertical blanking interval) parts of the PAL analog TV signal. It was one-way of course, and I believe it had basically no error correction coding.
Does anyone remember the game Farm Town, which FarmVille was an almost exact clone of? It's sad when the original creators of a brilliant idea lose out on seeing any success because they didn't market it as well.
Farm Town may even have been a clone of an even earlier game. But FarmVille definitely was modeled very closely on Farm Town.
In my experience, digitimes.com is not the most reliable and fact-checked of news sources, despite that when they do get it right, they tend to get it pretty quick.
The title of the summary omitted the word 'embedded', present in the original article's title.
From the article,
I'm now nearly certain that... we actually created the first recognizable "embedded Linux wireless router". PLEASE: Note the word choice, there - embedded, Linux, wireless, router. Eliminate any of those words and you end up with a different product, from a different person.
Would I be right in saying that this means the kid is not allowed to do any online banking, log into gmail, use Skype, or download updates to his operating system?
That will now happen to Go-oo, the project which maintained a set of patches on top of OpenOffice which would never be accepted into Sun's OpenOffice.org tree for political/commercial reasons?
Note that many Linux distros actually use Go-oo for their "OpenOffice.org" packages.
The left side of his face swollen beyond recognition... Over the next few days, skin on the back of his head and on his face just next to his left nostril peeled away to reveal the path the beam had burned through the skin, the skull, and the brain tissue.
Compare to Wired article:
The left half of Bugorski's face swelled up beyond recognition, and over the next several days started peeling off, showing the path that the proton beam... had burned through parts of his face his bone, and the brain tissue underneath.
So the rule of thumb is that an arbitrary Ubuntu system does not have a H.264 licence via Canonical, unless it's an OEM system which specifically lists the H.264 licence in its documentation or marketing materials.
It does not affect the Ubuntu user who has download and installed Ubuntu himself (from an ISO or CD).
It does not affect anyone who already runs Ubuntu.
It doesn't affect all people who buy a computer with Ubuntu pre-installed, but it may start to be available to some.
The security risk is bound to depend on the openness of the standards.
HTML5 is absolutely open; anybody can read the specification, and anybody can inspect the source code of any of the free HTML5 implementations (as for proprietary implementations, you'd have to put your faith in the vendor).
Flash is not open like HTML5; while free implementations of clients exist their market usage is not even a blip on the radar and their functionality is lacking. Everybody* uses Adobe's client for which source code is not available. So, security here will depend on your faith in the vendor to a much greater extent.
I personally have more faith in the security-through-transparency model and favor open standards and technologies.
The parent's point was that good free implementations of ordinary h264 exist, even though they have patent issues, whereas they don't even exist for Flash.
Can you elaborate on this, so that we may be informed of the issues rather than write this off as a baseless jab from someone with something against Ian Hickson?
Even if HTC were not compelled by law to release their source code (which I believe they were, because the kernel is not the part under the Apache license), they would still have been compelled to do so in order to keep their word, given that they have been talking about releasing the source for months.
So it's good that after all this time it's happened.
> I believe if there was one event that caused them to change their minds and become web-standard compliant it was their losing fight with the EU monopoly courts and their punishment: to become standards-compliant with respect to APIs, networking and, apparently, at least in MS' mind, the internet as well.
Nah, in my mind the one event that caused them to change their minds and become web-standards compliant has been that their market share stopped growing and started going in the other direction.
Since then, they no longer have the power to decide for themselves what a browser needs to be capable of and have been forced to start following others, which ultimately has led to catching up with web standards, primarily because the browsers it has been forced to follow (Firefox, Safari etc) choose to follow web standards.
I think that had the shoe been on the other foot, and Internet Explorer were the David steadily gaining market share against the Goliath Firefox, then Firefox would be forced to follow IE on features, and would need to start adopting IE's features in order to compete. But wait, that sounds familiar... that did happen back when IE was stealing market share from then-dominant Netscape. Netscape was forced to follow Microsoft's version of 'standards' to some extent. In some regards the results of that are still being felt, and are why there are some Microsoft-y browser war 1.0 features in browsers today.
Slashdot Mirror
A suggestion would be major overhauls once every two years of the backend stuff while user applications is kept on newest stable versions.
This is exactly what you'll get with Debian Stable + Backports. A stable base with regularly updated versions of popular software packages (eg Firefox, OpenOffice) to put on top of it.
And running this type of system now has more official support.
The image in the summary is really quite blurry compared with the same thing on the original article, which is crystal clear.
Original article: http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/homepage2006/tinyfont/index.html
it's about being able to run your application in a different environment where you don't have admin rights.
In a lot of university clusters or compute grids researchers have access to a large collection of compute nodes, but they usually don't have any rights to those machines. In fact, most of the time the programs are ran in a sandbox and have a restrictive environment.
Wouldn't virtualisation help in that sort of situation? Set up your own Linux (or whatever) installation in your own virtual space? Can't things like User Mode Linux do that?
hopefully it'll get to the point where installing software on Linux will be as easy as on WIndows and OSX.
I think you might have that the wrong way around. Either that or it was sarcasm and my detector is malfunctioning.
No, Samsung use them.
According to w'pedia:
As of January 30, 2009 Micro-USB has been accepted by almost all cell phone manufacturers as the standard charging port (including HTC, Motorola, Nokia, LG, Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Research In Motion) in the EU and most of the world. Worldwide conversion to the new cellphone charging standard is expected to be completed between 2010 to 2012.
> that model doesn't work in the US due to technology and frequency differences
That doesn't seem to have been a problem in Australia or New Zealand where there are also frequency differences between networks.
You just buy a phone with the right frequency for your network (850 or 900/2100) and you're right. Some new phones like the iPhone 4 support both sets of frequencies so are are non-issue.
The real reason that model doesn't work in the US is due to the carriers being allowed (by the buying public, or by regulators, depending on your politics) to impose such terrible prices and terms.
You lost me at "Java"
This proposal has a ton of flaws that have already been highlighted in other comments (4 characters is too short, summary screws up "Free" vs "free.", the session is still easily hijacked to anyone present during the handshake, an so forth).
However, the real benefit to this kind of proposal, in my mind, is that it brings more public attention to the fact that unencrypted wifi is security madness.I've said to people before that I think that it needs to be illegal to sell an access point capable of unencrypted operation.
But it brings attention to our desperate need for a solution allowing businesses offering "free public wifi" to be able to ensure users' authenticated sessions aren't shared with each other. This is a reasonable expectation of privacy equivalent to non-electronic forms of communication, for example where somebody can't see you filling out a paper form unless they're standing right there looking over your shoulder.
But with Flash, browser makers have no control over how CPU-hungry the plugin is.
With HTML5, browser makers have the ability to keep improving the efficiency of their engines for greater performance and lower CPU usage. They use it as a point of differentiation from their competitors (look at how it's fuelled improvements in Javascript engines over the last 4 years).
Teletext?
I remember being young and my dad explaining how data got sent to schools using non-visible (vertical blanking interval) parts of the PAL analog TV signal. It was one-way of course, and I believe it had basically no error correction coding.
Does anyone remember the game Farm Town, which FarmVille was an almost exact clone of? It's sad when the original creators of a brilliant idea lose out on seeing any success because they didn't market it as well.
Farm Town may even have been a clone of an even earlier game. But FarmVille definitely was modeled very closely on Farm Town.
In my experience, digitimes.com is not the most reliable and fact-checked of news sources, despite that when they do get it right, they tend to get it pretty quick.
The title of the summary omitted the word 'embedded', present in the original article's title.
From the article,
Would I be right in saying that this means the kid is not allowed to do any online banking, log into gmail, use Skype, or download updates to his operating system?
All of which require SSL at some stage...
That will now happen to Go-oo, the project which maintained a set of patches on top of OpenOffice which would never be accepted into Sun's OpenOffice.org tree for political/commercial reasons?
Note that many Linux distros actually use Go-oo for their "OpenOffice.org" packages.
Whoops, second one was the wikipedia article
They look the same to me.
Wired article:
The left side of his face swollen beyond recognition ... Over the next few days, skin on the back of his head and on his face just next to his left nostril peeled away to reveal the path the beam had burned through the skin, the skull, and the brain tissue.
Compare to Wired article:
The left half of Bugorski's face swelled up beyond recognition, and over the next several days started peeling off, showing the path that the proton beam ... had burned through parts of his face his bone, and the brain tissue underneath.
So to further clarify, from TFA:
So the rule of thumb is that an arbitrary Ubuntu system does not have a H.264 licence via Canonical, unless it's an OEM system which specifically lists the H.264 licence in its documentation or marketing materials.
It does not affect the Ubuntu user who has download and installed Ubuntu himself (from an ISO or CD).
It does not affect anyone who already runs Ubuntu.
It doesn't affect all people who buy a computer with Ubuntu pre-installed, but it may start to be available to some.
I have serious doubts that the EULA can override law like that.
Your doubts are warranted. It can't.
I'm skeptical that this security-by-protectionism model would really provide security (or, would be any good for eg. the US economy).
The security risk is bound to depend on the openness of the standards.
HTML5 is absolutely open; anybody can read the specification, and anybody can inspect the source code of any of the free HTML5 implementations (as for proprietary implementations, you'd have to put your faith in the vendor).
Flash is not open like HTML5; while free implementations of clients exist their market usage is not even a blip on the radar and their functionality is lacking. Everybody* uses Adobe's client for which source code is not available. So, security here will depend on your faith in the vendor to a much greater extent.
I personally have more faith in the security-through-transparency model and favor open standards and technologies.
The parent's point was that good free implementations of ordinary h264 exist, even though they have patent issues, whereas they don't even exist for Flash.
Can you elaborate on this, so that we may be informed of the issues rather than write this off as a baseless jab from someone with something against Ian Hickson?
July 2009. Over three months ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Hero
Even if HTC were not compelled by law to release their source code (which I believe they were, because the kernel is not the part under the Apache license), they would still have been compelled to do so in order to keep their word, given that they have been talking about releasing the source for months.
So it's good that after all this time it's happened.
> I believe if there was one event that caused them to change their minds and become web-standard compliant it was their losing fight with the EU monopoly courts and their punishment: to become standards-compliant with respect to APIs, networking and, apparently, at least in MS' mind, the internet as well.
Nah, in my mind the one event that caused them to change their minds and become web-standards compliant has been that their market share stopped growing and started going in the other direction.
Since then, they no longer have the power to decide for themselves what a browser needs to be capable of and have been forced to start following others, which ultimately has led to catching up with web standards, primarily because the browsers it has been forced to follow (Firefox, Safari etc) choose to follow web standards.
I think that had the shoe been on the other foot, and Internet Explorer were the David steadily gaining market share against the Goliath Firefox, then Firefox would be forced to follow IE on features, and would need to start adopting IE's features in order to compete. But wait, that sounds familiar... that did happen back when IE was stealing market share from then-dominant Netscape. Netscape was forced to follow Microsoft's version of 'standards' to some extent. In some regards the results of that are still being felt, and are why there are some Microsoft-y browser war 1.0 features in browsers today.