Yikes, how to safely redact Word documents? I'm not sure that is possible. It's actually scary that NSA would dare publish guidance on this topic. Word is a proprietary black box, and all I can do is shake my head if NSA is dumb enough to keep any sensitive information in Word and then release the documents!
On a laptop, it would not only be stupid, but lots of hardware wouldn't even work. Many laptops have the Intel ipw series wifi radios; these have drivers only for 2.6 kernels. I can't imagine anyone is running a recent laptop with a 2.4 kernel.
The operative words in your post are "on work computers." Dell service varies widely depending on what division you got your PC from. I've had experience both with their education division and their home division. Home is absolutely rotten, with long hold times and people who do not speak English. Education is fairly decent, so far as that goes--if someone knew about computers, he wouldn't be working at Dell tech support.
This article is fascinating because it shows how the smallest things will utterly confound computers even as they are barely noticeable by humans. Computers are quite "dumb" in this regard. Maybe antispam will be the next frontier of artificial intelligence research. Which is kind of sad, but perhaps necessary.
A computer user who can boot from a Windows CD, follow a few instructions, and install Windows is not a terribly special case. Lots of boneheads can do it. I know, they're my friends and family.
You're right, lots of boneheads can do that; the problem is that installing Windows takes a lot more than what you have described. Windows doesn't come with a lot of the drivers that you need, so getting the printer, video, network, etc etc to work requires rounding that stuff up and installing it all. Installing Linux is not easy, but neither is installing Windows.
* OS X offers this same benefit, plus it has the great iLife suite, gorgeous hardware, and unbeatable hardware/software integration. Not perfect, but miles ahead of anything else. That is a compelling reason to change, and I've seen a few people go from Windows to Mac, but even so, Windows has 90%+ share and will continue to dominate for quite a while.
Right on. I'm tired of people saying Linux will take over the desktop. OS X will take over the desktop before Linux will. I still recommend OS X rather than Linux, unless someone is a geek--and geeks aren't looking for recommendations.
Linux doesn't NEED to take over the desktop (nobody says BMW needs to sell more cars than GM, to use the familiar vehicle of Slashdot analogy) but that is another story.
I'd like to believe that DRM-free media will eventually win out, because it's so much more convenient for everybody involved, from the producers, to the consumer electronics industry, to the end-user.
It will, but not due to convenience.
It's politically and technically unviable to enforce DRM schemes nowadays. Technically because as HD-DVD shows us, it's cracked pretty quickly. Politically, because you're not going to see free societies jailing or fining everyone who breaks DRM, the same way they don't fine or jail everyone who violates speed limits.
Widespread copying of digital media is here to stay. Content providers who rely on constraint of copying of digital media will die.
Of course chicken littles say that no more content will be produced. Ridiculous. Much content will be produced because it is worth more fresh. For example, the airing of NFL and futbol games will still make big money--people will pass around copies, but people also want to see them live. Same goes for news shows.
Other content will be produced, but paid for by different means. More product placement, for example. Also, good content can be produced cheaply these days.
Other content will be produced, but to serve a different purpose. Recording artists (TRUE artists; that term is used way too much) will distribute their work for free because they LIKE for people to hear their work, the same reason hackers distribute their software for free. They will get more performance gigs, which pay $$.
HBO should be worried, because DRM will not save them.
Meh, Comcast can compete on inertia. Getting Verizon installed requires being home all day so the tech can drill holes in the wall and install a big ONT. It requires a phone call, and deciphering options. Comcast is already in. Competing on inertia is not a GROWTH strategy for Comcast, but Verizon will have a hard time breaking into homes.
Yeah, they're competing on features, but I think Google realized something entirely different. Yahoo and MS were in the business of extracting cash from the user base. That's why they charged for disk space upgrades, extra filters, POP access, and so forth.
Google realized they're in the business of extracting cash from advertisers. To do that, Google mines data. They scan emails and search for patterns so they can sell ads to those who are most likely to want to see them. In order to mine this data, it benefits Google if they see as much email as they possibly can. I think that's what explains the original 1GB size limit while others were doling out a measly 2-4MB: with all that space, you're encouraged to horde mail, and Google is free to mine information from it.
Same goes for your mail forwarding. Google sees every single message that is forwarded through their servers. They can keep that data and use it for marketing. Even if you're not using Gmail and seeing those ads, they might one day use that data to give you ads in another context.
Perhaps this is not a bad bargain, but few seem to realize that Google's goals are not altruistic here.
Not only that, but the syntax is EXTREMELY CONSISTENT.
There's something to be said for that. For instance many Unix utilities operate on lines that have been delimited into fields. So you have to tell the command what your delimeter is. In sort, you do this with -t. With cut, you do it with -d. With awk, you do it with -F. If I'm writing a script with all three, I have to check manpages to see what option to use. This is Unix at its worst.
But at least Unix has cut, awk, and sort; what I haven't seen anyone write about yet is whether Windows Power Shell has anything like those utilities, or the scores of other utilities that make a shell useful. The entire Unix command-line suite, reworked with consistent syntax, would be nice.
It seems to me that what you are saying is that you want something that has all the benefits of centralized packaging, but without a centralized packager. You want third-parties to be able to distribute apps as they please, without submitting them to a centralized packager, yet you want the centralized packager to work with those apps and keep them up-to-date. That sounds impossible to me, so I'd look forward to seeing anything that comes close to your ideal.
The closest I can think of is the proposed new CNR service from Linspire, which would work with many distros:
But even that still has a centralized repository. How do you suggest that we have something that acts like a centralized packager without actually being centralized?
Those work quite easily for a software package from some random Website when it's been packaged for your distro. For the people who insist that noobs refuse to open terminals, the GUIs nowadays have support for this integrated in as well. Installations this way won't do updates, but yikes, that's a really tall order and that's what repositories are for. (FWIW Windows won't update randomly installed software either.)
As for things that are not packaged, these are often installed quite easily. I installed RealPlayer (I know, I'm crazy) a few days ago in Ubuntu, straight from the Real website. Worked without a hitch. Google Earth installs very easily. So do many other apps such as Moneydance.
People are making a problem here where there really isn't one. I think people are complaining about ramdom.tar.gz files that they don't know how to compile. That's a legitimate complaint, but these days users who don't want to learn how to compile anything can easily stick with repositories and get everything they need.
If it's as slow as burning a DVD is, then not really. I gave up on optical media for backup long ago because it's just too slow. I just use an extra hard drive instead. Does anybody know if burning Bluray is any faster per GB than burning a DVD?
Arguably this is not true for all their markets, such as development tools and Office, which historically have not been too contested (not lately at least) and yet have not resulted in the same stagnation.
Actually your first paragraph was right: MS doesn't innovate in ANY market where it doesn't face competition.
Office has not seen innovation in years, since it beat WordPerfect and 123. The innovation now is with other players, who are designing truly innovative interfaces (e.g. Google Calendar's quick appointment add feature, which whips Outlook's clunky forms) and enabling easy collaborative use. Adding some ribbons to Office is not innovation; it's the usual new paint job that comes with MS releases.
Development tools, too, are just responses to competition--.NET vs. Java.
Linux has lots of monocultures--pieces of software that have become mostly standard:
* the Linux kernel (rather than, say, the Hurd) * X.org (rather than XFree86, which is now dead) * bash (rather than ksh, csh, tcsh, or my favorite, fish) * Apache (I had to look at Wikipedia to see if alternatives even exist) * MythTV (any other Linux PVRs?) * GCC, and for that matter, most GNU tools
Perhaps usage standardizes on one piece of software when that benefits people, but usage fragments when there are benefits to choice. Doesn't seem like a problem.
As for which platform Silverlight will support next, Key said, "Linux is an open question. We're looking at the desktops and browsers by volume. We want to put muscle behind supporting the bulk of the market." And Linux support is still under discussion, he said.
Deaths at the hands of "terrorists" kill only a small number of our people each year. Many more die in non-"terrorist" incidents. Still more die in offensive wars that we start.
Sure, when you pay for it...seriously though. Pay-for-view sites, like the Wall Street Journal, Consumer Reports, and Cook's Illustrated, don't have annoying ads. The whole articles are on single pages.
Free sites...well, you get what you pay for. Vote with your mouse though. I know that when I visit a site that goes to the trouble to evade my popup blocker, I never, ever visit it again.
It's my favorite--a great CLI tool. I learned of it in a Slashdot comment, so just continuing the tradition:) All source available under a BSD license.
Okay, let's say that I close my eyes, think really hard, and say "It will rain in Seattle tomorrow." Let's say that I do this every day, some days I say it will rain, and that when I say it will rain, I am right 75% of the time.
Does this mean I KNEW it will rain? No. Does it mean that I PREDICTED it will rain? Again, no. Maybe it just means that it rains 75% of the time in Seattle. To KNOW it will rain tomorrow or even to predict it, I have to have a basis for my prediction. Sheer odds, such as it raining 75% of the time, is not basis for my "prediction" that it will rain TOMORROW.
So it is with Cringely. He has demonstrated time and again that he has zero knowledge of technical issues. Just because he says something and it comes true doesn't mean he PREDICTED it. He needs some sort of basis in fact to have a "prediction". Seeing as his statements in this column are grounded in nothing more than a false belief that fax should work over his lossy VoIP line, he has shown yet again that he is shooting straight in the dark. He cannot "predict" based on his faulty knowledge, and he deserves no credit if his faulty "predictions" turn out to be right.
Ditto to that. Flash isn't the only example. People install Acrobat Reader, Real, and all sort of other junk to get the content they want.
Web browsers are written for two markets: the end users and the web site developers. Most end users don't care all that much about their browser--unless it isn't showing them the content they want. If web sites banded together and pushed Firefox adoption, they could get somewhere.
Of course some of it is chicken/egg. People install Flash because it's got some critical mass. But just because IE is the browser shipped with Windows doesn't mean it has to dominate. MSN Messenger ships with Windows but look at the massive hordes still using AIM.
Some users want to have their data local for privacy and control.
I can think of many reasons to use a desktop mail client. Some of them are actually good reasons. But this one is completely ridiculous. Email is not private. If he had said "Some users want to have their email local so that they can decrypt and encrypt it with GnuPG," that would have been an understandable statement. But plain text email is not private, under any circumstance, ever, any more than a postcard with plain text is private!
I hope people are not using desktop email thinking it is more private. A false sense of security is worse than no security!
Slashdot Mirror
Yikes, how to safely redact Word documents? I'm not sure that is possible. It's actually scary that NSA would dare publish guidance on this topic. Word is a proprietary black box, and all I can do is shake my head if NSA is dumb enough to keep any sensitive information in Word and then release the documents!
On a laptop, it would not only be stupid, but lots of hardware wouldn't even work. Many laptops have the Intel ipw series wifi radios; these have drivers only for 2.6 kernels. I can't imagine anyone is running a recent laptop with a 2.4 kernel.
The operative words in your post are "on work computers." Dell service varies widely depending on what division you got your PC from. I've had experience both with their education division and their home division. Home is absolutely rotten, with long hold times and people who do not speak English. Education is fairly decent, so far as that goes--if someone knew about computers, he wouldn't be working at Dell tech support.
This article is fascinating because it shows how the smallest things will utterly confound computers even as they are barely noticeable by humans. Computers are quite "dumb" in this regard. Maybe antispam will be the next frontier of artificial intelligence research. Which is kind of sad, but perhaps necessary.
A computer user who can boot from a Windows CD, follow a few instructions, and install Windows is not a terribly special case. Lots of boneheads can do it. I know, they're my friends and family.
You're right, lots of boneheads can do that; the problem is that installing Windows takes a lot more than what you have described. Windows doesn't come with a lot of the drivers that you need, so getting the printer, video, network, etc etc to work requires rounding that stuff up and installing it all. Installing Linux is not easy, but neither is installing Windows.
* OS X offers this same benefit, plus it has the great iLife suite, gorgeous hardware, and unbeatable hardware/software integration. Not perfect, but miles ahead of anything else. That is a compelling reason to change, and I've seen a few people go from Windows to Mac, but even so, Windows has 90%+ share and will continue to dominate for quite a while.
Right on. I'm tired of people saying Linux will take over the desktop. OS X will take over the desktop before Linux will. I still recommend OS X rather than Linux, unless someone is a geek--and geeks aren't looking for recommendations.
Linux doesn't NEED to take over the desktop (nobody says BMW needs to sell more cars than GM, to use the familiar vehicle of Slashdot analogy) but that is another story.
I'd like to believe that DRM-free media will eventually win out, because it's so much more convenient for everybody involved, from the producers, to the consumer electronics industry, to the end-user.
It will, but not due to convenience.
It's politically and technically unviable to enforce DRM schemes nowadays. Technically because as HD-DVD shows us, it's cracked pretty quickly. Politically, because you're not going to see free societies jailing or fining everyone who breaks DRM, the same way they don't fine or jail everyone who violates speed limits.
Widespread copying of digital media is here to stay. Content providers who rely on constraint of copying of digital media will die.
Of course chicken littles say that no more content will be produced. Ridiculous. Much content will be produced because it is worth more fresh. For example, the airing of NFL and futbol games will still make big money--people will pass around copies, but people also want to see them live. Same goes for news shows.
Other content will be produced, but paid for by different means. More product placement, for example. Also, good content can be produced cheaply these days.
Other content will be produced, but to serve a different purpose. Recording artists (TRUE artists; that term is used way too much) will distribute their work for free because they LIKE for people to hear their work, the same reason hackers distribute their software for free. They will get more performance gigs, which pay $$.
HBO should be worried, because DRM will not save them.
Meh, Comcast can compete on inertia. Getting Verizon installed requires being home all day so the tech can drill holes in the wall and install a big ONT. It requires a phone call, and deciphering options. Comcast is already in. Competing on inertia is not a GROWTH strategy for Comcast, but Verizon will have a hard time breaking into homes.
Yeah, they're competing on features, but I think Google realized something entirely different. Yahoo and MS were in the business of extracting cash from the user base. That's why they charged for disk space upgrades, extra filters, POP access, and so forth.
Google realized they're in the business of extracting cash from advertisers. To do that, Google mines data. They scan emails and search for patterns so they can sell ads to those who are most likely to want to see them. In order to mine this data, it benefits Google if they see as much email as they possibly can. I think that's what explains the original 1GB size limit while others were doling out a measly 2-4MB: with all that space, you're encouraged to horde mail, and Google is free to mine information from it.
Same goes for your mail forwarding. Google sees every single message that is forwarded through their servers. They can keep that data and use it for marketing. Even if you're not using Gmail and seeing those ads, they might one day use that data to give you ads in another context.
Perhaps this is not a bad bargain, but few seem to realize that Google's goals are not altruistic here.
All my major label stuff comes from lala.com. I get rid of junk I don't want and get new junk, and for cheap, cheap, cheap.
Other music occasionally comes from Magnatune.
Honestly though, these days more of my audio comes from public radio and podcasts rather than music.
Not only that, but the syntax is EXTREMELY CONSISTENT.
There's something to be said for that. For instance many Unix utilities operate on lines that have been delimited into fields. So you have to tell the command what your delimeter is. In sort, you do this with -t. With cut, you do it with -d. With awk, you do it with -F. If I'm writing a script with all three, I have to check manpages to see what option to use. This is Unix at its worst.
But at least Unix has cut, awk, and sort; what I haven't seen anyone write about yet is whether Windows Power Shell has anything like those utilities, or the scores of other utilities that make a shell useful. The entire Unix command-line suite, reworked with consistent syntax, would be nice.
It seems to me that what you are saying is that you want something that has all the benefits of centralized packaging, but without a centralized packager. You want third-parties to be able to distribute apps as they please, without submitting them to a centralized packager, yet you want the centralized packager to work with those apps and keep them up-to-date. That sounds impossible to me, so I'd look forward to seeing anything that comes close to your ideal.
The closest I can think of is the proposed new CNR service from Linspire, which would work with many distros:
http://www.cnr.com/faq.html
But even that still has a centralized repository. How do you suggest that we have something that acts like a centralized packager without actually being centralized?
dpkg -i foo.deb
.tar.gz files that they don't know how to compile. That's a legitimate complaint, but these days users who don't want to learn how to compile anything can easily stick with repositories and get everything they need.
rpm -i foo.rpm
Those work quite easily for a software package from some random Website when it's been packaged for your distro. For the people who insist that noobs refuse to open terminals, the GUIs nowadays have support for this integrated in as well. Installations this way won't do updates, but yikes, that's a really tall order and that's what repositories are for. (FWIW Windows won't update randomly installed software either.)
As for things that are not packaged, these are often installed quite easily. I installed RealPlayer (I know, I'm crazy) a few days ago in Ubuntu, straight from the Real website. Worked without a hitch. Google Earth installs very easily. So do many other apps such as Moneydance.
People are making a problem here where there really isn't one. I think people are complaining about ramdom
This will definitely ensure the laptop is set for a very high-profile consumer.
Not really; Dell markets the Latitudes to enterprises. Even with a $549 drive a Latitude is still cheaper than many Thinkpads.
burning 45 GB is pretty sweet
If it's as slow as burning a DVD is, then not really. I gave up on optical media for backup long ago because it's just too slow. I just use an extra hard drive instead. Does anybody know if burning Bluray is any faster per GB than burning a DVD?
Arguably this is not true for all their markets, such as development tools and Office, which historically have not been too contested (not lately at least) and yet have not resulted in the same stagnation.
Actually your first paragraph was right: MS doesn't innovate in ANY market where it doesn't face competition.
Office has not seen innovation in years, since it beat WordPerfect and 123. The innovation now is with other players, who are designing truly innovative interfaces (e.g. Google Calendar's quick appointment add feature, which whips Outlook's clunky forms) and enabling easy collaborative use. Adding some ribbons to Office is not innovation; it's the usual new paint job that comes with MS releases.
Development tools, too, are just responses to competition--.NET vs. Java.
Linux has lots of monocultures--pieces of software that have become mostly standard:
* the Linux kernel (rather than, say, the Hurd)
* X.org (rather than XFree86, which is now dead)
* bash (rather than ksh, csh, tcsh, or my favorite, fish)
* Apache (I had to look at Wikipedia to see if alternatives even exist)
* MythTV (any other Linux PVRs?)
* GCC, and for that matter, most GNU tools
Perhaps usage standardizes on one piece of software when that benefits people, but usage fragments when there are benefits to choice. Doesn't seem like a problem.
As for which platform Silverlight will support next, Key said, "Linux is an open question. We're looking at the desktops and browsers by volume. We want to put muscle behind supporting the bulk of the market." And Linux support is still under discussion, he said.
s p
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2114418,00.a
Deaths at the hands of "terrorists" kill only a small number of our people each year. Many more die in non-"terrorist" incidents. Still more die in offensive wars that we start.
Our national priorities are seriously misaligned.
Sure, when you pay for it...seriously though. Pay-for-view sites, like the Wall Street Journal, Consumer Reports, and Cook's Illustrated, don't have annoying ads. The whole articles are on single pages.
Free sites...well, you get what you pay for. Vote with your mouse though. I know that when I visit a site that goes to the trouble to evade my popup blocker, I never, ever visit it again.
Under the Personal list, add Ledger:
:) All source available under a BSD license.
http://newartisans.com/ledger.html
It's my favorite--a great CLI tool. I learned of it in a Slashdot comment, so just continuing the tradition
Okay, let's say that I close my eyes, think really hard, and say "It will rain in Seattle tomorrow." Let's say that I do this every day, some days I say it will rain, and that when I say it will rain, I am right 75% of the time.
Does this mean I KNEW it will rain? No. Does it mean that I PREDICTED it will rain? Again, no. Maybe it just means that it rains 75% of the time in Seattle. To KNOW it will rain tomorrow or even to predict it, I have to have a basis for my prediction. Sheer odds, such as it raining 75% of the time, is not basis for my "prediction" that it will rain TOMORROW.
So it is with Cringely. He has demonstrated time and again that he has zero knowledge of technical issues. Just because he says something and it comes true doesn't mean he PREDICTED it. He needs some sort of basis in fact to have a "prediction". Seeing as his statements in this column are grounded in nothing more than a false belief that fax should work over his lossy VoIP line, he has shown yet again that he is shooting straight in the dark. He cannot "predict" based on his faulty knowledge, and he deserves no credit if his faulty "predictions" turn out to be right.
Ditto to that. Flash isn't the only example. People install Acrobat Reader, Real, and all sort of other junk to get the content they want.
Web browsers are written for two markets: the end users and the web site developers. Most end users don't care all that much about their browser--unless it isn't showing them the content they want. If web sites banded together and pushed Firefox adoption, they could get somewhere.
Of course some of it is chicken/egg. People install Flash because it's got some critical mass. But just because IE is the browser shipped with Windows doesn't mean it has to dominate. MSN Messenger ships with Windows but look at the massive hordes still using AIM.
FTA
Some users want to have their data local for privacy and control.
I can think of many reasons to use a desktop mail client. Some of them are actually good reasons. But this one is completely ridiculous. Email is not private. If he had said "Some users want to have their email local so that they can decrypt and encrypt it with GnuPG," that would have been an understandable statement. But plain text email is not private, under any circumstance, ever, any more than a postcard with plain text is private!
I hope people are not using desktop email thinking it is more private. A false sense of security is worse than no security!
On the other hand do I want sensitive data stored on someone else's server?
Of course not. You'd better stop using email then. Email is like a postcard. It can be read or archived by anybody at any step in its journey.
If something is somewhat sensitive, you'd better encrypt it. If it's very sensitive, it doesn't belong in email at all. Email is NOT PRIVATE.