There lays the "fly in the ointment". People can't see or hear in digital. Pure digital sound would be as appealing to a human as listening to a dial-up modem connect and pure digital video would be incomprehensible to us. So, at some point, the signal must be converted to analog. Screwdriver and solder time. For example, the leads to the speaker cones are analog even if the speaker box circuitry only accepts a digital signal.
Really, the Chinese government itself knows their Great Firewall of China is porous and it has been allowed to remain that way intentionally. The cardinal rule of effective censorship is simplicity. Filters add layers of complexity and with complexity comes errata. If they were serious, China would have no direct internet link with the outside world. They would have proxy servers that only housed "white listed" websites. It would give the appearance of being able to surf the world wide web but, it would be nothing of the sort.
I don't think there should be a problem. Back in the day when Netscape and I.E. where new many sites offered a "text only" version of their site to visitors in case they they were using what was then an older and what is now an ancient browser like Lynx. It's still a good idea because it gives you a backup should your fancy pages with the lastest whizz-bang toys go tits up. You end up with a browser agnostic backup and redunancy is always good.
Well, I think advertising has a lot to do with it. Imagine you are an advertiser and you haven't much luck getting your message onto Linux desktops. Well, browser objects are tailor made for it. Putting a toolbar in Konqueror or Firefox would be trivial and well within the users permissions. Of course, the object itself is a perfect place to put an advert. Heck, you could even rotate the ads while the widget is looking up your stock quotes or whatever and it could keep track of which ads you click.
It depends on what the widget is going to call. A restricted user can't call hardware, for example, but a widget might have to. It won't be a seemless experience if the end user has to run to the administrator every time they install a widget. So, there will have to be some elevation or, at the very least, it will become very tempting. Anyway, you can cause all sorts of mischief without needing elevation. They are browser objects, after all. I'm sure we've all experienced stumbling onto a web page that has some crappy javascript or a botched applet that has locked the bowser, or frozen the desktop or even crashed the X server. A malicious or just badly written widget won't need Administrator rights to ruin your day.
The KDE desktop, the file browser and the Konqueror browser, itself, are shells runing on top of the Konqueror engine in exactly the same fashion as Windows Explorer and the IE browser are shells on top of the Explorer engine. It's a very economical way to do it and, because the engine starts at login, it gives the impression of being very speedy. All in all, a great idea. Where Windows falls down is the ActiveX components having elevated permissions and being able to make system calls from what is essentially a browser window. Until now, KDE has been immune to that and the permissions are very tight. But, the widgets will need elevated permissions to run and the Konqueror engine will be doing the parsing and rendering because it would be redundant to use a seperate engine. Now, the whole thing might turn out to be well behaved and malicious widgets won't be a problem but, short of sandboxing, there is no guarantee there won't be problems because there will be broswer objects running with elevated permissions and that is exploitable. Haven't we been here before?
I don't think memory use is much of an issue these days. You can buy a gig of RAM for peanuts so there is no reason not to have your box loaded with as much memory as it will take. All modern operating systems just love the RAM, Linux included. But, adding a new abstraction layer will effect performance, there is no way around that. However, if it's easy to turn off it's not that big a deal and, if you want blazing speed on old hardware, fluxbox is hard to beat. What it will do is make life harder for administrators because the end users love their eye candy and woe betides him who stands between them and the latest toy. That means users with 16 widgets, mostly written by amatures, crapping up their system and you know who they'll phoning to fix their 'puter. Great.
That's true and it's not that big a deal for my personal use but, if I'm deploying a Dist with that version of KDE to the cubical drones you know there will be no end of whinging if I turn off the latest toy from the Administrator account. They're still all bitchy from losing their precious Windows. If I go ahead and let them have it they are going to download every widget out there good, bad or indifferent and that means headaches for me. Now, if they want to make this functionality, if you can call it that, a seperate piece of software I can choose to install or not, that would be fine. But, geese, I really don't want those monkeys to lay hands on the Linux version of Bonzai Buddy by default.
The biggest problem with it is the widgets are going to have to have elevated permissions in order to function. Maybe not Administrator rights but higher than the user in any case. So, I can write a Javascript, call it a widget and it will run from the desktop with elevated permissions. The malicious 13 year old in me sees considerable opportunity in that arrangement.
Konquerer will have everything to do with unless the abstraction layer is running off the X server, much like Windows ActiveX components, which wouldn't make any sense. KHTML has to be rendered by a browser because that's how the scripts will be parsed. The desktop is just a Konquerer shell anyway. It's going to make Konquerer even more like Windows Explorer, which it is a lot already, with the browser making calls to the hardware abstraction layer. I see the makings of a security hole you could drive a small band of Mongols through.
Like Windows 2000 or XP, the KDE desktop is very light and nimble once you turn all the crap off. I want my OS to start basic and I choose what to turn on. It reminds me of the first time I installed Win 2k Pro and I was greeted with transition effects. Nothing says "professional" quite like sliding menus.
I don't think so. The basic KDE desktop enviroment is pretty comfortable and easy to use anyway. The biggest problem for Linux is hardware compatibility and management. Apple gets around it by tying the OS directly to their hardware. A Mac user isn't going to care much how familiar the desktop is if their network card doesn't work and their monitor is stuck at 60 Hz VESA.
The very first thing I do, whether an OS is Mac, *NIX or Windows is turn off all the eye candy that slows the box down. Yay, One more thing to disable.
Gee, from the diagram it appears the ramp is exploiting the weight of the car rather than kinetic energy. Looks like it would sip far less gas than your average speeed bump. Pretty clever.
Over here, on the other side of the pond, it could be put to good use. In northern Canada we have very remote stretches of highway where maintaining power or telephone lines is very problematic. The obvious answer for roadside emergency cell phones and so on, solar panels, are out because of winter darkness. Tapping passing drivers for a bit of their gas to store in a battery array for a roadside emergency phone and warming booth would be pretty welcome 240 KM outside of Watson Lake, Yukon in January.
There is no guilty or innocent in a civil case so the rules of criminal law do not apply. I know of no country that is any different in that respect. The best way to torpedo any libel suit that might be brought against you for something you wrote or said where you do not have concrete proof but firmly believe something to be the case is to make liberal use of the words "I believe" and "in my opinion".
That's not entirely true. In order for it to be libel the person must KNOW what they are saying is not true. If the person honestly believes what they said was the truth there is no libel. Nevertheless, that can be even harder to prove than what they are saying was, in fact, the truth.
Back in the day, when the mighty gophers roamed the planet, university students would string ethernet cable window to window in the dorms as a peer to peer "darknet". It couldn't be seen or controlled by the administrators because it wasn't on the school network. Of course, it didn't last long at all because the universities excerised their property rights and had the cables removed. Today, it can be done without wires using wifi in their place. A true darknet, maybe even a global one, is feasible. That would be interesting.
Well, the biggest worm in their apple is the simple fact that their protection tech, "compatible" devices and so on are designed by geeks. For that very reason, there will always be backdoors. I have a Samsung home theatre in a box that was clearly designed by some young geeks for their friends at college. Dirt cheap, high quality and leaks digital data like a sieve. Permanent hidden Region 0 code, XVID, 3ivx and MPEG2 support and hideously broken media protections that just don't seem to work at all. Hook the thing up to your digital TV card and ripping DVDs is trivial. I know there are quite a few other DVD players and HTBs out there from other manufactures that are similarly hacked right out of the box. They are dependent on the very people who want to stick it to them.
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There lays the "fly in the ointment". People can't see or hear in digital. Pure digital sound would be as appealing to a human as listening to a dial-up modem connect and pure digital video would be incomprehensible to us. So, at some point, the signal must be converted to analog. Screwdriver and solder time. For example, the leads to the speaker cones are analog even if the speaker box circuitry only accepts a digital signal.
Really, the Chinese government itself knows their Great Firewall of China is porous and it has been allowed to remain that way intentionally. The cardinal rule of effective censorship is simplicity. Filters add layers of complexity and with complexity comes errata. If they were serious, China would have no direct internet link with the outside world. They would have proxy servers that only housed "white listed" websites. It would give the appearance of being able to surf the world wide web but, it would be nothing of the sort.
I don't think there should be a problem. Back in the day when Netscape and I.E. where new many sites offered a "text only" version of their site to visitors in case they they were using what was then an older and what is now an ancient browser like Lynx. It's still a good idea because it gives you a backup should your fancy pages with the lastest whizz-bang toys go tits up. You end up with a browser agnostic backup and redunancy is always good.
Well, I think advertising has a lot to do with it. Imagine you are an advertiser and you haven't much luck getting your message onto Linux desktops. Well, browser objects are tailor made for it. Putting a toolbar in Konqueror or Firefox would be trivial and well within the users permissions. Of course, the object itself is a perfect place to put an advert. Heck, you could even rotate the ads while the widget is looking up your stock quotes or whatever and it could keep track of which ads you click.
It depends on what the widget is going to call. A restricted user can't call hardware, for example, but a widget might have to. It won't be a seemless experience if the end user has to run to the administrator every time they install a widget. So, there will have to be some elevation or, at the very least, it will become very tempting. Anyway, you can cause all sorts of mischief without needing elevation. They are browser objects, after all. I'm sure we've all experienced stumbling onto a web page that has some crappy javascript or a botched applet that has locked the bowser, or frozen the desktop or even crashed the X server. A malicious or just badly written widget won't need Administrator rights to ruin your day.
Those are the Koqueror runtime components, aren't they? What you see, file manager, desktop and browser are all shells.
The KDE desktop, the file browser and the Konqueror browser, itself, are shells runing on top of the Konqueror engine in exactly the same fashion as Windows Explorer and the IE browser are shells on top of the Explorer engine. It's a very economical way to do it and, because the engine starts at login, it gives the impression of being very speedy. All in all, a great idea. Where Windows falls down is the ActiveX components having elevated permissions and being able to make system calls from what is essentially a browser window. Until now, KDE has been immune to that and the permissions are very tight. But, the widgets will need elevated permissions to run and the Konqueror engine will be doing the parsing and rendering because it would be redundant to use a seperate engine. Now, the whole thing might turn out to be well behaved and malicious widgets won't be a problem but, short of sandboxing, there is no guarantee there won't be problems because there will be broswer objects running with elevated permissions and that is exploitable. Haven't we been here before?
I don't think memory use is much of an issue these days. You can buy a gig of RAM for peanuts so there is no reason not to have your box loaded with as much memory as it will take. All modern operating systems just love the RAM, Linux included. But, adding a new abstraction layer will effect performance, there is no way around that. However, if it's easy to turn off it's not that big a deal and, if you want blazing speed on old hardware, fluxbox is hard to beat. What it will do is make life harder for administrators because the end users love their eye candy and woe betides him who stands between them and the latest toy. That means users with 16 widgets, mostly written by amatures, crapping up their system and you know who they'll phoning to fix their 'puter. Great.
That's true and it's not that big a deal for my personal use but, if I'm deploying a Dist with that version of KDE to the cubical drones you know there will be no end of whinging if I turn off the latest toy from the Administrator account. They're still all bitchy from losing their precious Windows. If I go ahead and let them have it they are going to download every widget out there good, bad or indifferent and that means headaches for me. Now, if they want to make this functionality, if you can call it that, a seperate piece of software I can choose to install or not, that would be fine. But, geese, I really don't want those monkeys to lay hands on the Linux version of Bonzai Buddy by default.
The biggest problem with it is the widgets are going to have to have elevated permissions in order to function. Maybe not Administrator rights but higher than the user in any case. So, I can write a Javascript, call it a widget and it will run from the desktop with elevated permissions. The malicious 13 year old in me sees considerable opportunity in that arrangement.
Konquerer will have everything to do with unless the abstraction layer is running off the X server, much like Windows ActiveX components, which wouldn't make any sense. KHTML has to be rendered by a browser because that's how the scripts will be parsed. The desktop is just a Konquerer shell anyway. It's going to make Konquerer even more like Windows Explorer, which it is a lot already, with the browser making calls to the hardware abstraction layer. I see the makings of a security hole you could drive a small band of Mongols through.
Like Windows 2000 or XP, the KDE desktop is very light and nimble once you turn all the crap off. I want my OS to start basic and I choose what to turn on. It reminds me of the first time I installed Win 2k Pro and I was greeted with transition effects. Nothing says "professional" quite like sliding menus.
I don't think so. The basic KDE desktop enviroment is pretty comfortable and easy to use anyway. The biggest problem for Linux is hardware compatibility and management. Apple gets around it by tying the OS directly to their hardware. A Mac user isn't going to care much how familiar the desktop is if their network card doesn't work and their monitor is stuck at 60 Hz VESA.
The very first thing I do, whether an OS is Mac, *NIX or Windows is turn off all the eye candy that slows the box down. Yay, One more thing to disable.
Then come to Canada: http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2004/03/31/canada/downlo ad_court040331
However, do keep in mind that you must marry a member of the same sex. It isn't optional anymore and we are very strict about that.
I mean, if you shove one continent under another, you shouldn't expect any squirting. Must be aliens.
Not if it is sealed in some way or placed in an avalanche shelter which is covered anyway.
Gee, from the diagram it appears the ramp is exploiting the weight of the car rather than kinetic energy. Looks like it would sip far less gas than your average speeed bump. Pretty clever.
Over here, on the other side of the pond, it could be put to good use. In northern Canada we have very remote stretches of highway where maintaining power or telephone lines is very problematic. The obvious answer for roadside emergency cell phones and so on, solar panels, are out because of winter darkness. Tapping passing drivers for a bit of their gas to store in a battery array for a roadside emergency phone and warming booth would be pretty welcome 240 KM outside of Watson Lake, Yukon in January.
There is no guilty or innocent in a civil case so the rules of criminal law do not apply. I know of no country that is any different in that respect. The best way to torpedo any libel suit that might be brought against you for something you wrote or said where you do not have concrete proof but firmly believe something to be the case is to make liberal use of the words "I believe" and "in my opinion".
That's not entirely true. In order for it to be libel the person must KNOW what they are saying is not true. If the person honestly believes what they said was the truth there is no libel. Nevertheless, that can be even harder to prove than what they are saying was, in fact, the truth.
Back in the day, when the mighty gophers roamed the planet, university students would string ethernet cable window to window in the dorms as a peer to peer "darknet". It couldn't be seen or controlled by the administrators because it wasn't on the school network. Of course, it didn't last long at all because the universities excerised their property rights and had the cables removed. Today, it can be done without wires using wifi in their place. A true darknet, maybe even a global one, is feasible. That would be interesting.
Well, the biggest worm in their apple is the simple fact that their protection tech, "compatible" devices and so on are designed by geeks. For that very reason, there will always be backdoors. I have a Samsung home theatre in a box that was clearly designed by some young geeks for their friends at college. Dirt cheap, high quality and leaks digital data like a sieve. Permanent hidden Region 0 code, XVID, 3ivx and MPEG2 support and hideously broken media protections that just don't seem to work at all. Hook the thing up to your digital TV card and ripping DVDs is trivial. I know there are quite a few other DVD players and HTBs out there from other manufactures that are similarly hacked right out of the box. They are dependent on the very people who want to stick it to them.