Ugh, From a pleasantly idealistic viewpoint, this is really quite depressing. The fact that the 'Wikipedia Experiment' has been greatly successful, with the vast majority of authors doing their honest best to add valid information... And then the politicians that represent us are the ones that so publicly reveal the negative aspects of the system.
That's a bummer.
On a side note, two things that have occured to me recently regarding wikipedia:
1. I've never seen/felt that any wikipedia articles had a 'slant' to them, and I think this is because I almost entirely utilize articles regarding technical subjects, such as explanations of technical terms or scientific theories. It seems these subjects in wikipedia are usually prefectly objective and wonderfully helpful.
2. I've recently started contributing to wikipedia myself, mostly regarding local subjects or descriptions of towns near my home, and started to realize that properly creating/editing a wikipedia page requires quite a bit of learning and time. Maybe this is a major factor to reducing spam/crap edits.... It might just not be worth the effort for most people if they are only trying to cause trouble. Perhaps this is a valid argument against wikipedia trying to simplify any of the editing/markup systems.
The logic of "He has alot so it's no big deal for him to donate alot." is dumb as fuck.
I'm extremely disappointed to see the slashdot crowd almost entirely bashing Gates becuase they don't care for microsofts software. This assumption that somehow Jobs is a better person because you like his software more is stupid, the companies are run with the same goals, Apple just has a different marketing strategy and alot less brute force to throw behind their decisions. I'm quite confident that if Apple had 96% of the OS market, and Microsoft had 4%, then peoples opinions would be exactly the opposite as they are now. It's the same old "Hate the big guy!" attitude, and its not exactly novel or interesting anymore.
Gates has helped millions of people by donating more money than most large countries. This is a wonderful thing and I applaud him for it. Jobs may or may not be donating money, as the article says that no documentation of this could be verified, but It really doesn't matter to me, it is completely up to him what he does with his money.
And now that my rant is over, I'll throw my opinion out there.... I was more than a little disappointed when Apple ran their marketing campaign a few years ago using pictures of many famous civil rights people and other people like Einstien. The exploitation of good people for making money seemed awfully sickening to me. But this is likely a result of a powerful marketing team and not really the fault of Jobs.
1. To predict according to present indications or signs; foretell. See Synonyms at predict.
2. To foreshadow; portend: urban renewal that prognosticates a social and cultural renaissance.
You make a valid point, as a software developer I too have run into bugs for which the solution was not a simple one. That being said, the users of Oracle are paying outrageous prices for the database and in doing so expect that Oracle will move mountains if needed to find a quick solution to the problem. They could get it done faster if it was a priority for them, and with the cost of Oracle I would expect them to put 500 developers on the problem if that's what it took.
In other words, your right that sometimes there is alot of work required to fix a problem, but when you charge as much as they do, and pride yourselves in security as they do, then your customers rightfully expect a swift solution, or they will go find an alternative.
I keep seeing comments about how macOSX is the same as Unix/Linux just with a prettier desktop, so I'd like to provide a little information for those that do not understand that they are completely different.
OSX is actually an operating system called NeXTSTEP that Apple got when they purchased NeXT. The NeXT OS is based on Mach which is an experimental OS designed at CMU. MacOSX also contains a sprinkling of code from BSD, as Mach was originally developed inside of BSD. Apple has also added many things such as the Aqua interface.
Mach is a microkernel where as the Linux kernel is a module-loading monolithic kernel. I will leave the reader to follow said links or utilize Google to understand the massive difference between the two architectures.
The kernel that Apple is currently using in their OS is called XNU, and would technically be described as a Hybrid kernel, although it is basically the Mach microkernel with a few bits stolen from BSD.
Basically the point i'm getting to here, is that while OSX offers a Unix-like command line which may fool the casual observer, it is actually very unrelated to unix/linux.
That being said, Mac OS X seems to be a very nice operating system which is based on some very widely used kernels, and provides enough unix-like behavior to satisfy many.
I'll give him alot of credit for his perceived honesty in the interview. He seems to have come clean on why he was unable to be successful in his goals, and on the surface he seems to have noble intentions.
So a movie comes along that the MPAA doesn't like and suddenly all their gripes about destroying the industry with copyright violations doesn't matter?
I would propose that indeed the creators of this film have lost money, and that all of those employees who received copies were almost absolutely going to have purchased the movie (since it is about them).
I would hope that both criminal and civil suits are filed. As they potentially broke criminal law by cracking any protection in making the copy.
I hope this is widely publicized, as it is clear evidence that this group does not care about the law or moral implications of the piracy, but rather is only concerned in doing what serves them best.
I for one will be sending emails to the producers of my favorite news shows urging them to cover the story, hopefully all of you will do the same.
I agree with alot of the posters calling google news "dubious" and such. There does seem to be a lack of information as to how they determine what exactly is news worthy.
That being said, they seem to choose all the headlines that I'm interested in, and I find it quite pleasant to browse the stories there.
Perhaps the decision making process for what qualifies as a headline is: "What will google users find interesting" -- Which seems perfectly fine by me.
Not quite sure how this question made its way to slashdot, since it seems sort of self-explanatory, but I suppose we can elaborate.
In short, I suppose you would be more secure on dial-up. Less data moving around, less access to situations which may be a threat, less up-time, etc.
That being said, most of the world is already using an always-on connection, and the vast majority of them manage just fine. It's not a daunting task to configure a setup that will secure your home computer to a suitable degree. Just your ordinary broadband router should include a firewall that should be sufficient, and the Windows firewall is also likely sufficient.
If you aren't an expert on setting up your network, then just find one of your more tech-savvy friends (not the one that told you to stay on dialup!) and have them check your router/firewall configuration. There are also websites you can visit (Symantec?) that will perform a check on various ports for basic vulnerabilities.
Looking at the examples in the article, I saw very little evidence of Geometry. To me the questions were all a matter of pattern recognition, which it has long been known was THE strongest benefit of Neural Nets. Since the human brain is a neural net, I'm not particularly surprised that it is capable of recognizing patterns.
Have them write some proofs or identify the magnitude of some angles and I'll be impressed.
Since we've got alot of knowledgable KDE people in this thread, and we've already had a good discussion about the vulnerability, I'm very interesting in hearing some opinions on KDE versus Gnome.
I've been using Linux for quite some time, but until recently had used a windows box for most of my Desktop work, such as multimedia or office work. After deciding to switch entirely to linux I initially started using KDE, but quickly found Gnome was also very nice, and a bit less bloated.
Can anyone comment on the benefits of KDE vs. Gnome on a technical level? To me they seem almost identical on the surface, are they also very similar beneath the surface? What do you all use?
As a side note, I've also enjoyed using much lighter window managers for helping performance in multimedia tasks, does anyone have a favorite 'bare-bones' manager? And how to you overcome the lack of apparent features in these bare-bones managers.
This isn't really news. It seems like the numbers are just pretty much made up. They knew that the polling was completely inaccurate, so they just decided to change the number from 64 to 20. This number has no more meaning than one made up entirely randomly.
I'd guess that most companies are losing more money due to stolen office supplies than computer crime. I get annoyed at computer crime being treated as some magical force, as if it is some how different from every other sort of crime.
Politicians repeat after me: "Computers are not Magic!, Computers are not Magic!"
Obviously these Telco Companies just need to start charging providers for sending data over their network. Right now the providers are using the networks for free you know! Of course they can't afford to build in redundancy with this sort of theft going on!
Wish I was Debian-Guru enough to help you with all of your problems, but i'll say a few things.
Ubuntu is basically Debian, so I don't know if I would do a clean install to switch. If your having performance problems make sure your not using the default kernel that installs, go ahead and use APT to upgrade to the 686 or K7 kernel to take advantage of your CPU. It should be very easy to do.
What graphics card do you have that is giving you trouble? If it's ATI I can probably help.
Regarding Gentoo, it's a very interesting way to go. It requires a bit more time and tech-savvy though. Compiling everything from scratch will yeild better performance (if you know what your doing) and Gentoo is over all a very nice distro (if you can call it a Distro). Portage is very slick. I usually reserve Gentoo for hardware that I really want to squeeze every last bit of performance out of.
If its an ATI card your having trouble with, hit up my site (click my nick) and use the feedback form to send me an email.
I'll use nothing other than Debian and Debian Based distro's. Ubuntu and Kubuntu are nice, as they are based off debian, have the massive package base available, but also are updated a bit more often.
Seems to me the hardest question to ask yourself, for this book, is what aspects of software you will talk about.
For instance, will the book be operating system specific? Or will it be generic enough (or hardware oriented) so as to apply to most any consumer computer (mac/windows).
Personally I would avoid talking about any software in specifics, but describing what a hard drive is and how it holds your files (file cabinet analogy please?)
Taking it to Starbucks, (at least where I live) means using Wifi. It really isn't possible they've implemented usable Wifi support in their LiveCD is it? Usually getting wireless to work on linux means finding windows drivers, utilizing NDISWrapper, etc.
That being said, what would be required for the linux community to make Wifi drivers more accessible? Is this something that is reliant entirely on the manufacturers providing drivers or is there some other solution? It would surely aid linux adoption if it was easier to get your Laptop Wifi working.
For the linux-savvy, NDISWrapper is of course very slick, and I was able to get my HP Notebook Wifi card working in about 20 minutes, but the less techy people such as the Grandmother mentioned in the posting are not going to be able to sort their way through ndiswrapper and iwconfig, much less figure out newer encryption methods.
You make a very good point. I'm not a networking guru, but if there is a way for an ISP to filter traffic that is clearly spyware related, without causing trouble for the end-user, that would mean better performance for everyone.
Perhaps the more tech savvy users could opt-out, as they are able to keep their machines clean.
I would assume something like this is already done by many ISP's.
On second thought, maybe there should just be a Windows Tax for accessing the internet via a Windows box (where all the spyware lives!). ~sarcasm~
The companies aren't pushing any data across your networks, they aren't the ones using it. Quite on the contrary, your subscribers are the ones pulling data across your network from the various sources, and I'd wager a bet that you are already charging them a fat monthly fee.
Yep, I actually had a whole outfit. Pants, Shoes, Shirt, Hat, Wallet. A programmable lighting control board really leaves a technician with nothing to do during hours and hours of performances.... other than make things with Gaff tape.
Note: It's likely a bad idea to wear your new outfit, which is composed of hundreds of dollars worth of gaff tape, in front of anyone you work for in the theater
Slashdot Mirror
Ugh, From a pleasantly idealistic viewpoint, this is really quite depressing. The fact that the 'Wikipedia Experiment' has been greatly successful, with the vast majority of authors doing their honest best to add valid information... And then the politicians that represent us are the ones that so publicly reveal the negative aspects of the system.
That's a bummer.
On a side note, two things that have occured to me recently regarding wikipedia:
1. I've never seen/felt that any wikipedia articles had a 'slant' to them, and I think this is because I almost entirely utilize articles regarding technical subjects, such as explanations of technical terms or scientific theories. It seems these subjects in wikipedia are usually prefectly objective and wonderfully helpful.
2. I've recently started contributing to wikipedia myself, mostly regarding local subjects or descriptions of towns near my home, and started to realize that properly creating/editing a wikipedia page requires quite a bit of learning and time. Maybe this is a major factor to reducing spam/crap edits.... It might just not be worth the effort for most people if they are only trying to cause trouble. Perhaps this is a valid argument against wikipedia trying to simplify any of the editing/markup systems.
The logic of "He has alot so it's no big deal for him to donate alot." is dumb as fuck.
I'm extremely disappointed to see the slashdot crowd almost entirely bashing Gates becuase they don't care for microsofts software. This assumption that somehow Jobs is a better person because you like his software more is stupid, the companies are run with the same goals, Apple just has a different marketing strategy and alot less brute force to throw behind their decisions. I'm quite confident that if Apple had 96% of the OS market, and Microsoft had 4%, then peoples opinions would be exactly the opposite as they are now. It's the same old "Hate the big guy!" attitude, and its not exactly novel or interesting anymore.
Gates has helped millions of people by donating more money than most large countries. This is a wonderful thing and I applaud him for it. Jobs may or may not be donating money, as the article says that no documentation of this could be verified, but It really doesn't matter to me, it is completely up to him what he does with his money. And now that my rant is over, I'll throw my opinion out there.... I was more than a little disappointed when Apple ran their marketing campaign a few years ago using pictures of many famous civil rights people and other people like Einstien. The exploitation of good people for making money seemed awfully sickening to me. But this is likely a result of a powerful marketing team and not really the fault of Jobs.
Prognosticate - Transitive, Verb:
1. To predict according to present indications or signs; foretell. See Synonyms at predict.
2. To foreshadow; portend: urban renewal that prognosticates a social and cultural renaissance.
What if they CANT fix the problem immediately.
You make a valid point, as a software developer I too have run into bugs for which the solution was not a simple one. That being said, the users of Oracle are paying outrageous prices for the database and in doing so expect that Oracle will move mountains if needed to find a quick solution to the problem. They could get it done faster if it was a priority for them, and with the cost of Oracle I would expect them to put 500 developers on the problem if that's what it took.
In other words, your right that sometimes there is alot of work required to fix a problem, but when you charge as much as they do, and pride yourselves in security as they do, then your customers rightfully expect a swift solution, or they will go find an alternative.
I keep seeing comments about how macOSX is the same as Unix/Linux just with a prettier desktop, so I'd like to provide a little information for those that do not understand that they are completely different.
OSX is actually an operating system called NeXTSTEP that Apple got when they purchased NeXT. The NeXT OS is based on Mach which is an experimental OS designed at CMU. MacOSX also contains a sprinkling of code from BSD, as Mach was originally developed inside of BSD. Apple has also added many things such as the Aqua interface.
Mach is a microkernel where as the Linux kernel is a module-loading monolithic kernel. I will leave the reader to follow said links or utilize Google to understand the massive difference between the two architectures.
The kernel that Apple is currently using in their OS is called XNU, and would technically be described as a Hybrid kernel, although it is basically the Mach microkernel with a few bits stolen from BSD.
Basically the point i'm getting to here, is that while OSX offers a Unix-like command line which may fool the casual observer, it is actually very unrelated to unix/linux.
That being said, Mac OS X seems to be a very nice operating system which is based on some very widely used kernels, and provides enough unix-like behavior to satisfy many.
Remind me, are we for or against this guy!? :)
I'll give him alot of credit for his perceived honesty in the interview. He seems to have come clean on why he was unable to be successful in his goals, and on the surface he seems to have noble intentions.
So a movie comes along that the MPAA doesn't like and suddenly all their gripes about destroying the industry with copyright violations doesn't matter?
I would propose that indeed the creators of this film have lost money, and that all of those employees who received copies were almost absolutely going to have purchased the movie (since it is about them).
I would hope that both criminal and civil suits are filed. As they potentially broke criminal law by cracking any protection in making the copy.
I hope this is widely publicized, as it is clear evidence that this group does not care about the law or moral implications of the piracy, but rather is only concerned in doing what serves them best.
I for one will be sending emails to the producers of my favorite news shows urging them to cover the story, hopefully all of you will do the same.
It's going pretty slow, here's a mirror I setup to the image with list on it: http://www.xmilk.com/coreduo.gif
I agree with alot of the posters calling google news "dubious" and such. There does seem to be a lack of information as to how they determine what exactly is news worthy.
That being said, they seem to choose all the headlines that I'm interested in, and I find it quite pleasant to browse the stories there.
Perhaps the decision making process for what qualifies as a headline is: "What will google users find interesting" -- Which seems perfectly fine by me.
No. The editor thought so too.
Well, a neural network seems most typically to be defined as: "an interconnected group of biological neurons."
It seems what you are saying is that perhaps the brain is composed of neural networks, but is not limited to this. I suppose I would agree with that.
Not quite sure how this question made its way to slashdot, since it seems sort of self-explanatory, but I suppose we can elaborate.
In short, I suppose you would be more secure on dial-up. Less data moving around, less access to situations which may be a threat, less up-time, etc.
That being said, most of the world is already using an always-on connection, and the vast majority of them manage just fine. It's not a daunting task to configure a setup that will secure your home computer to a suitable degree. Just your ordinary broadband router should include a firewall that should be sufficient, and the Windows firewall is also likely sufficient.
If you aren't an expert on setting up your network, then just find one of your more tech-savvy friends (not the one that told you to stay on dialup!) and have them check your router/firewall configuration. There are also websites you can visit (Symantec?) that will perform a check on various ports for basic vulnerabilities.
Looking at the examples in the article, I saw very little evidence of Geometry. To me the questions were all a matter of pattern recognition, which it has long been known was THE strongest benefit of Neural Nets. Since the human brain is a neural net, I'm not particularly surprised that it is capable of recognizing patterns.
Have them write some proofs or identify the magnitude of some angles and I'll be impressed.
Since we've got alot of knowledgable KDE people in this thread, and we've already had a good discussion about the vulnerability, I'm very interesting in hearing some opinions on KDE versus Gnome.
I've been using Linux for quite some time, but until recently had used a windows box for most of my Desktop work, such as multimedia or office work. After deciding to switch entirely to linux I initially started using KDE, but quickly found Gnome was also very nice, and a bit less bloated.
Can anyone comment on the benefits of KDE vs. Gnome on a technical level? To me they seem almost identical on the surface, are they also very similar beneath the surface? What do you all use?
As a side note, I've also enjoyed using much lighter window managers for helping performance in multimedia tasks, does anyone have a favorite 'bare-bones' manager? And how to you overcome the lack of apparent features in these bare-bones managers.
This isn't really news. It seems like the numbers are just pretty much made up. They knew that the polling was completely inaccurate, so they just decided to change the number from 64 to 20. This number has no more meaning than one made up entirely randomly.
I'd guess that most companies are losing more money due to stolen office supplies than computer crime. I get annoyed at computer crime being treated as some magical force, as if it is some how different from every other sort of crime.
Politicians repeat after me: "Computers are not Magic!, Computers are not Magic!"
"Oh, my God. It's Mega Maid. She's gone from suck to blow."
Obviously these Telco Companies just need to start charging providers for sending data over their network. Right now the providers are using the networks for free you know! Of course they can't afford to build in redundancy with this sort of theft going on!
Wish I was Debian-Guru enough to help you with all of your problems, but i'll say a few things.
Ubuntu is basically Debian, so I don't know if I would do a clean install to switch. If your having performance problems make sure your not using the default kernel that installs, go ahead and use APT to upgrade to the 686 or K7 kernel to take advantage of your CPU. It should be very easy to do.
What graphics card do you have that is giving you trouble? If it's ATI I can probably help.
Regarding Gentoo, it's a very interesting way to go. It requires a bit more time and tech-savvy though. Compiling everything from scratch will yeild better performance (if you know what your doing) and Gentoo is over all a very nice distro (if you can call it a Distro). Portage is very slick. I usually reserve Gentoo for hardware that I really want to squeeze every last bit of performance out of.
If its an ATI card your having trouble with, hit up my site (click my nick) and use the feedback form to send me an email.
apt-cache search wookie
I'll use nothing other than Debian and Debian Based distro's. Ubuntu and Kubuntu are nice, as they are based off debian, have the massive package base available, but also are updated a bit more often.
Seems to me the hardest question to ask yourself, for this book, is what aspects of software you will talk about.
For instance, will the book be operating system specific? Or will it be generic enough (or hardware oriented) so as to apply to most any consumer computer (mac/windows).
Personally I would avoid talking about any software in specifics, but describing what a hard drive is and how it holds your files (file cabinet analogy please?)
Taking it to Starbucks, (at least where I live) means using Wifi. It really isn't possible they've implemented usable Wifi support in their LiveCD is it? Usually getting wireless to work on linux means finding windows drivers, utilizing NDISWrapper, etc.
That being said, what would be required for the linux community to make Wifi drivers more accessible? Is this something that is reliant entirely on the manufacturers providing drivers or is there some other solution? It would surely aid linux adoption if it was easier to get your Laptop Wifi working.
For the linux-savvy, NDISWrapper is of course very slick, and I was able to get my HP Notebook Wifi card working in about 20 minutes, but the less techy people such as the Grandmother mentioned in the posting are not going to be able to sort their way through ndiswrapper and iwconfig, much less figure out newer encryption methods.
You make a very good point. I'm not a networking guru, but if there is a way for an ISP to filter traffic that is clearly spyware related, without causing trouble for the end-user, that would mean better performance for everyone.
Perhaps the more tech savvy users could opt-out, as they are able to keep their machines clean.
I would assume something like this is already done by many ISP's.
On second thought, maybe there should just be a Windows Tax for accessing the internet via a Windows box (where all the spyware lives!). ~sarcasm~
The companies aren't pushing any data across your networks, they aren't the ones using it. Quite on the contrary, your subscribers are the ones pulling data across your network from the various sources, and I'd wager a bet that you are already charging them a fat monthly fee.
Yep, I actually had a whole outfit. Pants, Shoes, Shirt, Hat, Wallet. A programmable lighting control board really leaves a technician with nothing to do during hours and hours of performances.... other than make things with Gaff tape.
Note: It's likely a bad idea to wear your new outfit, which is composed of hundreds of dollars worth of gaff tape, in front of anyone you work for in the theater