So do I. The trick is to know what's really important and what is less important and choose your compromises accordingly. For instance it's better to deal with slightly less stunning 3d performance in order to avoid relying on blobware, rather than the other way around.
They sound like a great company, and paying $500 for a laptop isnt much if you can be sure you arent getting crap/unsupportable hardware in the deal. I will keep them in mind for my next purchase but... at the moment they dont seem to be shipping anything with ECC so I guess I will have to build my next purchase myself like usual.
Nvidia has insisted on closed source proprietary drivers. Does this mean the drivers are crap? Nope, it just makes it very difficult for the open source community to troubleshoot/support them.
Unfortunately that does, indeed, mean they are crap. It makes them *impossible* to troubleshoot or support and it also means they wont even run at all on many linux systems! It's hard to imagine what one could possibly do to produce something that is more 'crap' than that.
The fact is that 'supported' in the context of a Free system has to mean Free drivers or it's nonsense. This means the only recent video hardware that is really supported is the Intel HD. Some of the older Nvidia and ATI hardware can be properly supported, but caveat emptor. It's not easy to find supported hardware.
Unfortunately this is exactly what you can expect with blobware support. Some people get lucky with the correct combination of software and hardware and it will seem to work perfectly. So you wonder why others complain. Well, they arent using the exact same software and hardware you are, and binaries are brittle. They break. One machine may work fine with blob drivers for a long time. A slightly different system may experience regular crashes. A more radically different system may not be able to run the blob at all. The only way to properly support Linux is with a Free driver which can be cleaned, fixed, and maintained by the kernel team.
You really expect a company that requires you to install a rootkit just to buy their products is going to somehow improve the situation for Free drivers? Are you out of your blooming mind?
Can you name one Android device that works without blobware? That's not a free system. You can download, modify, and build the source to *parts* of the system - but the system remains entirely owned by a proprietary blob. I have an Android device and it most assuredly is a proprietary device, as even after rooting it control of critical parts of the system remain completely beyond my control and the code I can download is only a subset of the code that actually makes the thing work.
YOU, Sir, are the one that shouldnt be commenting on things you know nothing about.
Android is proprietary system only marginally more free than iOS, and the number of infectors out there is not the only measure of security, in fact it's one of the poorest ones. If there are hundreds of packages of half-assed malware out there that could theoretically infect my android phone but in practice dont and cant, why should that bother me? On the other hand both of these systems are proprietary and therefore both may be expected to provide official backdoors that can be exploited by serious attacks and against which you are nearly defenseless. I have had a lot of complaints about my android but malware was never one of them.
And this brings us right back to the crux of it - freedom may not be free, but neither is your 'locked down device' ever going to be secure. We dont make secure devices anymore, we havent for years, the lockdown isnt to prevent software that YOU consider malicious, only to prevent software that the manufacturer (who generally doesnt even consider you a customer) considers malicious, regardless of your opinion. The manufacturer always leaves ways for themselves to get in, they are just locking YOU out. The malware makers then come along and find and exploit the doors the manufacturer left, so these systems wind up being LESS secure than Free systems.
Freedom to tinker isnt only important to the tinkerer - it's important to 'consumers' in general, because todays tinkerer is tomorrows competitor in the marketplace offering something the customer wanted - or alternatively not offering it, because that freedom was taken away and they never had a chance.
If you read quickly, audio and A/V will feel inefficient, because they are. If you read slowly(and don't suffer from any notable verbal-comprehension impediments), audio and A/V will feel engaging; because it is both faster than text and far more 'natural' and less fatiguing than an attempt at speed reading.
Exactly. For me, video news is incredibly inefficient. They take 10 minutes to tell me a story I could research better myself in 2. What a waste of time! But even in an academic setting many of my coworkers read a little slower and there sure seems to be an association - the slower you read the more likely you are to enjoy video-news.
You do realize that old farts said the same stupid things about the mouse?
We were right.
Guess we all know how that turned out.
With a mass industry selling mouse interfaces to the technically clueless, and a niche industry catering to those of us that are trying to do real work to help us work around this problem? Yeah, exactly.
Ah correct, the exception of course is when using a mass noun, and truth is one of those wierd little words that can be a mass noun or a counting noun.
Opera at the very least isnt susceptible to the same bug in the most common test case. I dont pretend to have tested it thoroughly. I just now tested IE and it passes the same. Chrome and Firefox failed. The fault is the affected browsers. They should be getting that keypress first, and not passing it through to the plugin.
Hmm I could have sworn I have experienced it on both IE and Safari at some point, some sort of plugin blocking ctrl(cmd)+w at the very least. It seemed to me that all the browsers, not just firefox, were keen to 'enable' plugins. There was all that talk about the browser being the OS, you might recall - trying hard to encourage people to develop their programs with the browser as the target platform. I can understand programmers targetting that 'platform' wouldnt be happy about being told they wont even receive any meta-key input.
I havent read through the entire thread for several years and I might be confused.
Yes, chrome is awful too. Browsers in general are pretty awful. Traditionally they have bent over backwards to enable plugins to do whatever they want, which is why this bug occured and more importantly why it has never been fixed and cannot be fixed. It's not a technical problem, it's a political problem, at this point a patch that fixed the original bug would never be accepted, it would cause too many problems with existing plugins.
The only browser I know of that at least partially avoids this bug is Opera. And I havent thoroughly tested it yet, so it may still be affected. But at least it passes one simple test that all the others fail. Go to youtube, start a video playing, then hit ctrl-t. In Opera that works just as it should.
Right about the time firefox 4 came out they went full retard. Every time someone fixes a typo they have a new major revision. The ridiculous versioning wasnt the only sign of collapse, although it's hard to miss. I relied on first Netscape then Firefox as my primary browser for well over 10 years but they finally made it suck so bad I even prefer IE. I absolutely loathe IE.
I switched to Opera as my primary browser and although I am far less than 100% happy with that (I would definitely prefer a Free solution) I must admit it works pretty well, and if you set aside the blobware nature of the release as well as notscript appearing to be slightly inferior to noscript, Opera wins every other comparison in my opinion. Personally I put pretty heavy weight on those two things, much more than most people would, yet new Firefox is so bad I just uninstalled it.
Evolution is far from perfect as a theory. For example, it fails to explain the origins of life ("survival of the fittest" presupposes existence of both the fit and the non-fit.)
The fact that a scientific theory has a particular scope and doesnt answer questions that lie outside of that scope is not a flaw, it's a necessary characteristic. It doesnt 'fail the job' because that is NOT its job.
And, there are difficulties with the almost vanishingly-small probability that life exists at all, again, a problem that classic evolution does little to help us understand.
The fact is that no one has a demonstrably correct calculation of such a probability. Differing assumptions will produce whatever estimate one is inclined to believe. Whether life is highly unlikely to start or whether it happens in nearly ever solar system, we just dont know at this point. But more importantly, you are again criticising a theory for not providing answers to problems which are outside of its scope.
There are many theories of biogenesis, but evolution is not one of them. Evolution is about what happens after biogenesis, and could be compatible with many different theories of biogenesis. Biogenesis is harder to study so it's no surprise we know less there. Evolution of living organisms, on the other hand, is so well established that opponents of evolution education have no choice but to criticise it with straw men and non sequiturs like you have done here, for lack of any decent ammo with which to criticise.
The problem he is describing isnt a problem with support for the retina display. It is a problem in the design of the software itself, a design limitation that makes it difficult or impossible to 'fix.' If you have a piece of software that does half of what you need and is well designed, and one that doesnt 90% but is poorly designed, adding 50% of the necessary function to the first may be easier and more rewarding than struggling to somehow tack on the last 10% in the second case.
Hypothesis 1: The makers of eBlaster, some niche-market nannyware/spyware, went to the time and trouble to develop not just a way to infect the bios or firmware on one particular job, but across a very wide array of pc hardware.
Hypothesis 2: The computer shop agreed to do a system restore but actually performed a system refresh, saving them significant time on the service and producing an effect that in normal situation would be indistinguishable, at least to most of their customers eyes.
No, just no. If they properly reformatted the drive from a setup disk the rootkit would not be in memory and it would be wiped. That is just wrong. You dont reformat the disk you just booted from, you boot from a known good read only setup disk and then format.
What appears to have happened here is that rather than actually reformatting and reinstalling, the computer shop probably just removed a bunch of stuff from add/remove, restored some default settings and the like and called it good since the computer appeared to be effectively restored and working as it should be.
Paying close attention to semantic hygiene and insisting on precision is actually why he is still very relevant today. The world would be better off with more like him and far fewer like you.
No need to be ashamed of plugging a no-crapware pc vendor in an article about crapware, that's for sure.
On the other hand, anything posted to slashdot is subject to criticism as well. I went through your system configurator and found I was unable to deselect the RAM. Actually built a nice little system other than that, but why would I want to pay $90 for a stick of RAM I won't use? In some cases I would want to be able to specify no hard drive, though not in this case - at any rate that option is also missing.
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So do I. The trick is to know what's really important and what is less important and choose your compromises accordingly. For instance it's better to deal with slightly less stunning 3d performance in order to avoid relying on blobware, rather than the other way around.
They sound like a great company, and paying $500 for a laptop isnt much if you can be sure you arent getting crap/unsupportable hardware in the deal. I will keep them in mind for my next purchase but... at the moment they dont seem to be shipping anything with ECC so I guess I will have to build my next purchase myself like usual.
Unfortunately that does, indeed, mean they are crap. It makes them *impossible* to troubleshoot or support and it also means they wont even run at all on many linux systems! It's hard to imagine what one could possibly do to produce something that is more 'crap' than that.
The fact is that 'supported' in the context of a Free system has to mean Free drivers or it's nonsense. This means the only recent video hardware that is really supported is the Intel HD. Some of the older Nvidia and ATI hardware can be properly supported, but caveat emptor. It's not easy to find supported hardware.
Unfortunately this is exactly what you can expect with blobware support. Some people get lucky with the correct combination of software and hardware and it will seem to work perfectly. So you wonder why others complain. Well, they arent using the exact same software and hardware you are, and binaries are brittle. They break. One machine may work fine with blob drivers for a long time. A slightly different system may experience regular crashes. A more radically different system may not be able to run the blob at all. The only way to properly support Linux is with a Free driver which can be cleaned, fixed, and maintained by the kernel team.
You really expect a company that requires you to install a rootkit just to buy their products is going to somehow improve the situation for Free drivers? Are you out of your blooming mind?
Can you name one Android device that works without blobware? That's not a free system. You can download, modify, and build the source to *parts* of the system - but the system remains entirely owned by a proprietary blob. I have an Android device and it most assuredly is a proprietary device, as even after rooting it control of critical parts of the system remain completely beyond my control and the code I can download is only a subset of the code that actually makes the thing work.
YOU, Sir, are the one that shouldnt be commenting on things you know nothing about.
Android is proprietary system only marginally more free than iOS, and the number of infectors out there is not the only measure of security, in fact it's one of the poorest ones. If there are hundreds of packages of half-assed malware out there that could theoretically infect my android phone but in practice dont and cant, why should that bother me? On the other hand both of these systems are proprietary and therefore both may be expected to provide official backdoors that can be exploited by serious attacks and against which you are nearly defenseless. I have had a lot of complaints about my android but malware was never one of them.
And this brings us right back to the crux of it - freedom may not be free, but neither is your 'locked down device' ever going to be secure. We dont make secure devices anymore, we havent for years, the lockdown isnt to prevent software that YOU consider malicious, only to prevent software that the manufacturer (who generally doesnt even consider you a customer) considers malicious, regardless of your opinion. The manufacturer always leaves ways for themselves to get in, they are just locking YOU out. The malware makers then come along and find and exploit the doors the manufacturer left, so these systems wind up being LESS secure than Free systems.
Freedom to tinker isnt only important to the tinkerer - it's important to 'consumers' in general, because todays tinkerer is tomorrows competitor in the marketplace offering something the customer wanted - or alternatively not offering it, because that freedom was taken away and they never had a chance.
Exactly. For me, video news is incredibly inefficient. They take 10 minutes to tell me a story I could research better myself in 2. What a waste of time! But even in an academic setting many of my coworkers read a little slower and there sure seems to be an association - the slower you read the more likely you are to enjoy video-news.
We were right.
With a mass industry selling mouse interfaces to the technically clueless, and a niche industry catering to those of us that are trying to do real work to help us work around this problem? Yeah, exactly.
Ah correct, the exception of course is when using a mass noun, and truth is one of those wierd little words that can be a mass noun or a counting noun.
The blurbage still doesnt work.
The browser should always get the input first, and only pass it to the plugin after examining it and if appropriate.
Opera at the very least isnt susceptible to the same bug in the most common test case. I dont pretend to have tested it thoroughly. I just now tested IE and it passes the same. Chrome and Firefox failed. The fault is the affected browsers. They should be getting that keypress first, and not passing it through to the plugin.
Hmm I could have sworn I have experienced it on both IE and Safari at some point, some sort of plugin blocking ctrl(cmd)+w at the very least. It seemed to me that all the browsers, not just firefox, were keen to 'enable' plugins. There was all that talk about the browser being the OS, you might recall - trying hard to encourage people to develop their programs with the browser as the target platform. I can understand programmers targetting that 'platform' wouldnt be happy about being told they wont even receive any meta-key input.
I havent read through the entire thread for several years and I might be confused.
Yes, chrome is awful too. Browsers in general are pretty awful. Traditionally they have bent over backwards to enable plugins to do whatever they want, which is why this bug occured and more importantly why it has never been fixed and cannot be fixed. It's not a technical problem, it's a political problem, at this point a patch that fixed the original bug would never be accepted, it would cause too many problems with existing plugins.
The only browser I know of that at least partially avoids this bug is Opera. And I havent thoroughly tested it yet, so it may still be affected. But at least it passes one simple test that all the others fail. Go to youtube, start a video playing, then hit ctrl-t. In Opera that works just as it should.
Right about the time firefox 4 came out they went full retard. Every time someone fixes a typo they have a new major revision. The ridiculous versioning wasnt the only sign of collapse, although it's hard to miss. I relied on first Netscape then Firefox as my primary browser for well over 10 years but they finally made it suck so bad I even prefer IE. I absolutely loathe IE.
I switched to Opera as my primary browser and although I am far less than 100% happy with that (I would definitely prefer a Free solution) I must admit it works pretty well, and if you set aside the blobware nature of the release as well as notscript appearing to be slightly inferior to noscript, Opera wins every other comparison in my opinion. Personally I put pretty heavy weight on those two things, much more than most people would, yet new Firefox is so bad I just uninstalled it.
"There is a surprise" or "there are some surprises" but never "there is some."
The fact that a scientific theory has a particular scope and doesnt answer questions that lie outside of that scope is not a flaw, it's a necessary characteristic. It doesnt 'fail the job' because that is NOT its job.
The fact is that no one has a demonstrably correct calculation of such a probability. Differing assumptions will produce whatever estimate one is inclined to believe. Whether life is highly unlikely to start or whether it happens in nearly ever solar system, we just dont know at this point. But more importantly, you are again criticising a theory for not providing answers to problems which are outside of its scope.
There are many theories of biogenesis, but evolution is not one of them. Evolution is about what happens after biogenesis, and could be compatible with many different theories of biogenesis. Biogenesis is harder to study so it's no surprise we know less there. Evolution of living organisms, on the other hand, is so well established that opponents of evolution education have no choice but to criticise it with straw men and non sequiturs like you have done here, for lack of any decent ammo with which to criticise.
The problem he is describing isnt a problem with support for the retina display. It is a problem in the design of the software itself, a design limitation that makes it difficult or impossible to 'fix.' If you have a piece of software that does half of what you need and is well designed, and one that doesnt 90% but is poorly designed, adding 50% of the necessary function to the first may be easier and more rewarding than struggling to somehow tack on the last 10% in the second case.
For firefox this is actually pretty good. My personal favorite bug is still plaguing users of FF over 11 years after being reported.
Hypothesis 1: The makers of eBlaster, some niche-market nannyware/spyware, went to the time and trouble to develop not just a way to infect the bios or firmware on one particular job, but across a very wide array of pc hardware.
Hypothesis 2: The computer shop agreed to do a system restore but actually performed a system refresh, saving them significant time on the service and producing an effect that in normal situation would be indistinguishable, at least to most of their customers eyes.
Which one is more likely, hmm?
No, just no. If they properly reformatted the drive from a setup disk the rootkit would not be in memory and it would be wiped. That is just wrong. You dont reformat the disk you just booted from, you boot from a known good read only setup disk and then format.
What appears to have happened here is that rather than actually reformatting and reinstalling, the computer shop probably just removed a bunch of stuff from add/remove, restored some default settings and the like and called it good since the computer appeared to be effectively restored and working as it should be.
Paying close attention to semantic hygiene and insisting on precision is actually why he is still very relevant today. The world would be better off with more like him and far fewer like you.
It isnt even the library - google isnt hosting the sites. It simply indexed them. More like the folks that assign ISBNs than the library.
No need to be ashamed of plugging a no-crapware pc vendor in an article about crapware, that's for sure.
On the other hand, anything posted to slashdot is subject to criticism as well. I went through your system configurator and found I was unable to deselect the RAM. Actually built a nice little system other than that, but why would I want to pay $90 for a stick of RAM I won't use? In some cases I would want to be able to specify no hard drive, though not in this case - at any rate that option is also missing.
Pretty good place to work eh?