I just can't help but worry that Canonical is overextending themselves (even if it is in reaction to Dell asking them to do so), and that the distro will eventually cave once bad PR builds up from a few high-profile failures at the enterprise/corporation level. Those in the FOSS community might not care about bad corporate PR, but it would certainly set Linux back quite a bit adoption-wise to have its golden front-runner made to look extremely foolish.
The big money is with support for servers, not desktops. And there-in lies the problem. Canonical are just looking for the gold.
It's a shame since Ubuntu is the opposite of most other distros out there, and hence makes poor server and good desktop. Greed may ruin the distro on both server and desktop markets, and with it, all recent hopes of take-up of Linux installs on the desktop.
But failed since they couldn't reduce the footprint and achieve acceptable performance.
The reason they are trying again, is that after Firefox 3 comes the time of Tamarin, the ECMAScript engine in Flash Player, which will also power the Firefox releases after 3. Spidermonkey and Tamarin is like night and day.
So, why did Jobs publicly rail against DRM, and removed it from the iTunes store when given permission by the one major label that agreed?
EU has recently started investigating Apple for their monopoly on the mp3 market (same kind of monopoly as Windows, and EU is researching for the same problems) which their further by creating DRM exclusive to their hardware.
Before you jump on me for their conclusions, remember, it's THEIR conclusions. I suppose you cheered for EU when they sued Microsoft for the same thing.
EU may fine Apple 323 million British pounds if they conclude Apple is abusing their monopoly on the market. That's 656 million.
Steve Jobs kept refusing EU's demands citing requirements by partners and inability for interoperable DRM to be "kept secret", among others. Steve Jobs also refused for years the demands of indie music producers and labels to sell DRM free music iTunes.
The DRM was mandatory on iTunes, even if you want to sell it without the DRM.
Days after this announcement by EU that they are investigating Apple, Jobs released his well known open later, where he put the blame again on the labels (interesting, what about the indie labels he went against?).
Couple of months later he released DRM free tracks on iTunes from some labels.
So, make your own conclusions. Maybe you'll also turn 180 degrees and become first defendant of DRM-free music if you had the EU on your ass wanting nearly 700 million dollars in fines.
In fact, Jobs' stand against DRM is probably the reason that Yahoo (and others) are now saying the same thing. Apple was the first major company to take a public stand against DRM. I think that other companies are just following that lead. Without that, Yaho and others would still be trying to enable the record labels' DRM fantasies.
Emphasize mine. Emphasizing you're one sad, sad monkey for believing any of this crap.
Anyone complaining about Apple updating their firmware has rocks in their head. It's what they do, it's what they said they'll do, and nobody ought to be surprised that they'll do it.
Apple are supposed to be the "good" guys to their fanbase. And the "good" guys just did something bad.
Maybe they shouldn't be surprised Apple bricks their phones, but they are since it's the kind of culture Apple built. As you see, it has both upsides and downsides.
Lately Apple keeps hitting successfully the downsides.
so you're paying out the nose, ears, ass for Windows and MS IIS and you care about free fastCGI?
As a PHP developer I care. I can convince someone to install a free official plugin by MS on his host, than convince him to buy something. If it was paid, I'm sure, as any pointy haired management guy, he'd decide it's not important and run as CGI. Then it's my fault it performs like crap.
Hence, it's a good thing it's there, and free.
--
So, that's about step 1 in the "Make PHP devs become Windows devs".
Now step 2: driving the PHP crowd to.NET. They even have a PHP-to-C# converter, and there's a third party PHP compiler for.NET.
You know this is what they want right. While cooperating with Zend they kept bad mouthing PHP on MSDN and offering tutorials to switch to the superior.NET... Ok, ok.. apart from cost, gotta give 'em that: is IS far superior:P
Let's hope Apple starts following this line too. iTunes/iPod domination allowed DRMd music to be accepted by far too many.
Let's leave it to MS to attempt to legitimize DRM.
Yea, let's let's. But fitting Apple and Microsoft to prebuilt models in your head won't change reality. Apple has at least as (if not more ) interest than Microsoft in keeping the DRM on iTunes for most of the tracks.
Jobs wants more market control and more money. The rest is just the means he uses to get those two.
I know they are using the 40GB/60GB/80GB markers to indicate what version you have, but you can't see that by looking at the system. If they made them different colors, it'd be easy to see which ones were backwards compatible or not. Something tells me that "I have a black/white/pink PS3" will be less confusing than "I have the 40GB non-backwards compatible PS3" to most people.
Except, the 40GB non BC one is black in Europe and white only in Japan. So color means nothing for the model.
You do realize that some of our greatest minds have been religious throughout human history? Of course that doesn't prove anything, other than the fact that your statement (or rather, what you are implying with it) is nonsense.
Religion adoption has started suffering only recently, as modern science and modern communication and information sources have become commonplace. I don't think citing human history as example is relevant at all to what I said.
The good about culture and sharing information is, I have access to everything the great minds came up with, and thus have higher base than any of them alone in the past had. They are brilliant since they came up with it. Today, knowing basic scientific facts doesn't mean you're brilliant. The bar is higher, hence religion has to try harder.
You can just avoid analyzing it and go for the pure spiritual experience, call the basis of your understanding based in religion, and call that self sufficient, that's great. No problem.
But then religion shouldn't have place when the decision affect the course of human development. The decision there should be based on logic, and analysis.
He predicted that firms like Eolas will soon come after open source vendors or users. Microsoft paid $521m to settle a patent claim by Eolas in August.
Now I understand why after MS almost won, they paid 512 million to Eolas.
During the case, Eolas said they're not going after open source software. But now, Microsoft predicts different things. Interesting how they know.
I clearly remember they settled with another patent troll, while they made a deal with them: MS pays so the troll can go after MS' competitors (on the same patent). If the troll knocks the competitors out, MS gets their money back. Otherwise they keep them.
In fact I remember now: it was the joystick vibration patent.
I wouldn't be surprised of MS and Eolas had a cute little talk after which Eolas submitted to be Microsoft's bitch in the "War against Linux" if Eolas gets their money.
Now I like Microsoft, but when I sense dirty tricks made able just the sheer amount of money they can afford to throw away, it pisses me off.
It is based in religious belief. I know that's not good enough for you, but I don't care. I'm not trying to convince you, I'm explaining my point of view. By all means, continue mocking my beliefs...
Well, look, you're the one who came with the claim humans are superior just because [fill blanks], and now escape discussion. Granted, you're free to have all sorts of beliefs based on [fill blanks], but you should expect it to be challenged if it's questionable.
If I gotta give you that: I've no clue if God exists or not. How could I know? But God as he's in the Bible, I've pretty much ruled out for all practical purposes.
Too many flaws, inconsistencies and flat out nonsense. I've read the Bible and I figure it was pretty good work at the time it was written, but our culture has evolved, and with it the ability to fool the average knowledgeable person has dropped dramatically.
and we are inherently superior to animals. That of course does not mean animals are worthless; they are God's creations as well. But they are not people.
That's ok you believe that, as long as you can support it with solid evidence.
Let's leave the proof of God's existence out of the discussion, I want to ask, what means "inherently superior"?
Is it in magical "just so" way superior? Sort of like Aryans are superior to Jews or something?
If you have something else to quite beside the Bible, we're here to hear you.
And while on topic, since I suppose you'll be saying how we can form complex rational thought and use complex communication (something which some animals can do actually, some mammals like dolphins, apes, some birds, some octopus species).
I suppose then mentally retarded or otherwise disabled people who can't do that are not human, then maybe it's ok to experiment on them.
I also wonder if you could recover an image of someone's face from pixelated video. If the camera or the person is moving but only slightly then you may be able to determine the x,y movement of the whole image from the non-pixelated parts of the image. From this you can then consider each of the large pixelated pixels as a sample point on the person's face, and as they move you aquire additional sample points. Over enough time, say a 5 minute interview, you might be able to reconstruct a recognisable face.
Ah, good point indeed. If it's a video, yes, you can restore extra detail.
There are lots of cameras out there which use a simple version of this trick to shoot higher res photos than their matrix is (by shooting several photos with sliightly offset matrix and assembling those).
And there's already software in wide use which can take existing video footage of, say, recording a page of a book for a while with low resolution, and using the minor motion/shifts in the frame to automatically arrive at a much higher (and accurate!) resolution image. It's amazing the amount of detail it can restore.
Since pixelization is in fact reducing the resolution, the same applies there.
I guess the only sure method is not to leave anything that can be analyzed. Don't wanna be recognized.. ? Don't allow to be recorded/shot.
--As computers become more adept at extrapolating data of different types, your identity isn't safe unless you completely cover all those identifying features. --
Yes, or you could just stop molesting children and photographing it.
And before you know, you've become part of the "think of the children / if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide" crowd.
But of course, if we try to protect our identity, we must molest children.
I showed this to my PS using friend and he shurgged, said 'Just do a radial blur in the opposite direction' and 30 seconds later had a picture about 80-90% as good as the one they're waving about as being the result of some super secret methodology. It does strike me as a bit stupid explaining it all - now crims will just use better techniques for blurring themselves out. The media, law enforcement agencies are doing this more and more and it's insane - "we just had an idea for a terrorist attack that might happen and here it is in full", "This is foresnic evidence that allowed us to catch the crim" and so on.
Yup, they spun it (pun intended) into cheap PR. The problem is, it's not that they are super smart, it's that the criminal was super stupid.
And it'll make anyone with basic image processing skills question their overall expertise if they'd brag about untwirl.
That said, the average folk will definitely be impressed. I knew a guy who inverted his photo in attempt to protect his identity (no, he didn't molest children). Imagine his shock when I took the inverted photo, inverted it again arriving at the original.
To him I'm probably some sorta super genius who used sophisticated data restoration hack. To a guy with basic knowledge, it's nothing worth noting.
To see how blur can restore detail not visible to the naked eye, check out Focus Magic. Not as easy as untwirl, but gives you an idea. This is because the blur distribution (usually gaussian if digital, or linear with cameras) gives away the possible origin position of the pixels.
If you pixelize however, with big enough square, you lose real resolution and that's much harder to restore anything interesting out of (it's not like in movies, with the unlimited extrapolation techniques, as we all know).
Other gotchas: covering with black rectangle but leaving it only 1-2% transparent. Looks solid, but data can be recovered.
And a very common other method: people keep leaving their name and camera model in the meta info of the image. Easy to check out via right-click>Properties in Windows.
The average person out there really does not understand computers. As such, the criminals look smart, and now the police look even smarter. It is hoped that by making the cops appear to be intelligent that other criminals will stop as well as perhaps the cops will get more money for this.
Fear of the unknown is a better weapon, than giving forensic analysis tutorials to the entire world.
And what they achieve is they look dumb now, since anyone having a clue knows the transform is basic. It may push some smarter people doing a crime since they believe if the police is so proud with their untwirl, they must be on a pretty low level overall.
I'm not saying this will make smart people molest children and shoot photos of themselves, but still, your reason is weak..
1. We're already experimenting with animals, including almost-humans (apes). They have similar self-appreciation, feelings, pain and confusion like you. We're only less sympathetic since they're not EXACTLY like us. But they are, in fact, more like us than we suspect.
2. Experimenting with human embyos, experimenting on people will dramatically further science and improve life for the rest of us (billions). It means we need to come to terms with the fact that humans are animals as any, and experimentation is required. But how do we do that without allowing for genocide? Not simple problem, but unless we solve it, we'll all be victims to save the few from being victims.
You're not stupid. The average consumer doesn't want to install their own OS. The average consumer cannot install their own OS. The author of the post makes several assumptions that the average consumer is just as much of a tech-loving, curious prosumer as he is. They aren't.
I was on the other side, but I have to admit unbundling Windows doesn't seem so bad as it initially does. My main concerns were two:
1. Piracy will increase, but WGA supposedly takes care of that.
2. Ease of install: image based installs are not complex. You're supposed to just put the DVD in, boot, type the license, and it's done in about 3-4 mins.
The image is already fine-tuned for the system, complete with drivers and suitable default configuration.
I guess the tricky part is what exactly what constitute unbundling, as it'll be written in text. We don't want the hardware vendors rendered unable to prepare a Windows image with the right drivers in and sell raw OS boxes. THAT would be hard for the average consumer, and a step backwards.
Further though, apart from unbundling not being a big concern, question is, is it actually any benefit? Just unbundling no. What matters is not unbundling so much as choice.
We do see choices popping up in the big vendors. Lenovo and DELL ship with Ubuntu, I hope we see this standard with all their systems as Ubuntu picks speed (and so hardware support for gfx chipsets for it etc.).
I think we all should agree: as long as you have the choice to get the machine without operating system, or system of your choice, then unbundling is just unnecessary technicality to go though.
If youve been doing your windows updates then you have 99% of it. Im not seeing any big stability fix here, just lots of hotfixes rolled into one and some vista stuff tossed in.
You don't understand: I've had this XP install for over 4 years, and it's showing its age, after installing and removing all sorts of apps over time (not those little spyware free apps, but trials, and various things I thought I need but didn't afterwise).
I want to reinstall, and those are 1000+ hotfixes I need to catch up to. In fact this is the reason I kept my current install. I wanted to reinstall for at least 5-6 months now.
If Autopatcher was around I wouldn't fuss much about it. Thanks to Microsoft it's not.
In European markets, as well as others outside of North America, however, might see a great benefit here.
As a European, I gotta tell you we don't have some special love for ads on our phones either. I've changed two service providers since the previous ones would demand sending me SMS for various promotions and lotteries I couldn't care less about.
Google is milking the ads idea horribly and starting to piss off people.
They better come up with a new trick if they want to expand outside the desktop search business.
Google is not expected to charge phone makers a licensing fee for their software. Google will make its money brokering ads on the mobile phones
&
Because I'm sure the manufacturers will pass the savings on directly to you and me.
Even if they would, I'd rather pay the $10, or $20 more than watch ads. On a tiny mobile screen, you lose from ads in 4 ways:
1. Extra time required to download the ad (we're not all on the latest 3G). 2. Extra fees for the extra bandwidth from the ads (unlimited data plans are rare outside US, and the cost per MB is insane). 3. Limited screen space because there's actually some ad sitting there, I lose productivity since I have less screen space. 4. Ads distract me from doing my work.
All in all, Google, I know all you have is hammer, but we're not all nails.
My guess is that they try to do the right thing, but have drifted toward RFC violation in the name of "compatibility". That seems to be the standard course when users are trained that the MS way is the right way, other apps are viewed as inferior because "it works under IE".
Ever thought why IE does it this way? It's because the servers (*cough* Apache *cough*) have historically, and still have plenty of the mime types wrong. They report mime type, but the wrong one. Anything that's not image or html is text to them.
Well, IE did what they had to make web pages work.
Firefox does it too, again, because of the servers.
I'm sorry if it's not as simple as "IE sucks" for you.
(also, if you're careful enough, Outlook and Outlook Express are perfectly usable on Windows, especially the newer versions)
Would you mind explaining what means "if you're careful enough". There's absolutely nothing from with Outlook and OE (called Windows Mail in Vista).
Or maybe you just want to be careful saying something here about a Microsoft product that's not derogatory. Don't buy into the culture here, this kind of blind bashing is frowned upon in most places but here.
Thunderbird is nice, but it was obvious for a couple of years they only throw half-hearted attempts at it. I always feared one day I'll wake up to see Thunderbird gone, so I never migrated away from OE. Sad to see it come this way, but glad I kept using OE.
Mozilla is a slowly sinking ship right now. It's really strange to see a former not-for-profit foundation, kill the entire ecosystem around Firefox in effort to optimize their income.
They still can change course but this will be a tad more impossible with every single day.
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.
Hmm, didn't know the exact text. So, in short:
People should have rights, except for when they don't
Slashdot Mirror
I just can't help but worry that Canonical is overextending themselves (even if it is in reaction to Dell asking them to do so), and that the distro will eventually cave once bad PR builds up from a few high-profile failures at the enterprise/corporation level. Those in the FOSS community might not care about bad corporate PR, but it would certainly set Linux back quite a bit adoption-wise to have its golden front-runner made to look extremely foolish.
The big money is with support for servers, not desktops. And there-in lies the problem. Canonical are just looking for the gold.
It's a shame since Ubuntu is the opposite of most other distros out there, and hence makes poor server and good desktop. Greed may ruin the distro on both server and desktop markets, and with it, all recent hopes of take-up of Linux installs on the desktop.
But failed since they couldn't reduce the footprint and achieve acceptable performance.
The reason they are trying again, is that after Firefox 3 comes the time of Tamarin, the ECMAScript engine in Flash Player, which will also power the Firefox releases after 3. Spidermonkey and Tamarin is like night and day.
So, in fact, Adobe saved the day here.
So, why did Jobs publicly rail against DRM, and removed it from the iTunes store when given permission by the one major label that agreed?
EU has recently started investigating Apple for their monopoly on the mp3 market (same kind of monopoly as Windows, and EU is researching for the same problems) which their further by creating DRM exclusive to their hardware.
Before you jump on me for their conclusions, remember, it's THEIR conclusions. I suppose you cheered for EU when they sued Microsoft for the same thing.
EU may fine Apple 323 million British pounds if they conclude Apple is abusing their monopoly on the market. That's 656 million.
Steve Jobs kept refusing EU's demands citing requirements by partners and inability for interoperable DRM to be "kept secret", among others. Steve Jobs also refused for years the demands of indie music producers and labels to sell DRM free music iTunes.
The DRM was mandatory on iTunes, even if you want to sell it without the DRM.
Days after this announcement by EU that they are investigating Apple, Jobs released his well known open later, where he put the blame again on the labels (interesting, what about the indie labels he went against?).
Couple of months later he released DRM free tracks on iTunes from some labels.
So, make your own conclusions. Maybe you'll also turn 180 degrees and become first defendant of DRM-free music if you had the EU on your ass wanting nearly 700 million dollars in fines.
In fact, Jobs' stand against DRM is probably the reason that Yahoo (and others) are now saying the same thing. Apple was the first major company to take a public stand against DRM. I think that other companies are just following that lead. Without that, Yaho and others would still be trying to enable the record labels' DRM fantasies.
Emphasize mine. Emphasizing you're one sad, sad monkey for believing any of this crap.
Anyone complaining about Apple updating their firmware has rocks in their head. It's what they do, it's what they said they'll do, and nobody ought to be surprised that they'll do it.
Apple are supposed to be the "good" guys to their fanbase. And the "good" guys just did something bad.
Maybe they shouldn't be surprised Apple bricks their phones, but they are since it's the kind of culture Apple built. As you see, it has both upsides and downsides.
Lately Apple keeps hitting successfully the downsides.
so you're paying out the nose, ears, ass for Windows and MS IIS and you care about free fastCGI?
.NET. They even have a PHP-to-C# converter, and there's a third party PHP compiler for .NET.
.NET... Ok, ok.. apart from cost, gotta give 'em that: is IS far superior :P
As a PHP developer I care. I can convince someone to install a free official plugin by MS on his host, than convince him to buy something.
If it was paid, I'm sure, as any pointy haired management guy, he'd decide it's not important and run as CGI.
Then it's my fault it performs like crap.
Hence, it's a good thing it's there, and free.
--
So, that's about step 1 in the "Make PHP devs become Windows devs".
Now step 2: driving the PHP crowd to
You know this is what they want right. While cooperating with Zend they kept bad mouthing PHP on MSDN and offering tutorials to switch to the superior
It'll only increase my stress levels if I'm nervous and a dumb algorithm shuffles the UI in front of me in attempt to make it better.
In such moments I'd rather prefer consistency and things I know. The errors I know, the controls I know, in the position and colors I know.
Let's hope Apple starts following this line too. iTunes/iPod domination allowed DRMd music to be accepted by far too many.
Let's leave it to MS to attempt to legitimize DRM.
Yea, let's let's. But fitting Apple and Microsoft to prebuilt models in your head won't change reality. Apple has at least as (if not more ) interest than Microsoft in keeping the DRM on iTunes for most of the tracks.
Jobs wants more market control and more money. The rest is just the means he uses to get those two.
I know they are using the 40GB/60GB/80GB markers to indicate what version you have, but you can't see that by looking at the system. If they made them different colors, it'd be easy to see which ones were backwards compatible or not. Something tells me that "I have a black/white/pink PS3" will be less confusing than "I have the 40GB non-backwards compatible PS3" to most people.
Except, the 40GB non BC one is black in Europe and white only in Japan. So color means nothing for the model.
You do realize that some of our greatest minds have been religious throughout human history? Of course that doesn't prove anything, other than the fact that your statement (or rather, what you are implying with it) is nonsense.
Religion adoption has started suffering only recently, as modern science and modern communication and information sources have become commonplace. I don't think citing human history as example is relevant at all to what I said.
The good about culture and sharing information is, I have access to everything the great minds came up with, and thus have higher base than any of them alone in the past had. They are brilliant since they came up with it. Today, knowing basic scientific facts doesn't mean you're brilliant. The bar is higher, hence religion has to try harder.
You can just avoid analyzing it and go for the pure spiritual experience, call the basis of your understanding based in religion, and call that self sufficient, that's great. No problem.
But then religion shouldn't have place when the decision affect the course of human development. The decision there should be based on logic, and analysis.
He predicted that firms like Eolas will soon come after open source vendors or users. Microsoft paid $521m to settle a patent claim by Eolas in August.
Now I understand why after MS almost won, they paid 512 million to Eolas.
During the case, Eolas said they're not going after open source software. But now, Microsoft predicts different things. Interesting how they know.
I clearly remember they settled with another patent troll, while they made a deal with them: MS pays so the troll can go after MS' competitors (on the same patent). If the troll knocks the competitors out, MS gets their money back. Otherwise they keep them.
In fact I remember now: it was the joystick vibration patent.
I wouldn't be surprised of MS and Eolas had a cute little talk after which Eolas submitted to be Microsoft's bitch in the "War against Linux" if Eolas gets their money.
Now I like Microsoft, but when I sense dirty tricks made able just the sheer amount of money they can afford to throw away, it pisses me off.
It is based in religious belief. I know that's not good enough for you, but I don't care. I'm not trying to convince you, I'm explaining my point of view. By all means, continue mocking my beliefs...
Well, look, you're the one who came with the claim humans are superior just because [fill blanks], and now escape discussion. Granted, you're free to have all sorts of beliefs based on [fill blanks], but you should expect it to be challenged if it's questionable.
If I gotta give you that: I've no clue if God exists or not. How could I know? But God as he's in the Bible, I've pretty much ruled out for all practical purposes.
Too many flaws, inconsistencies and flat out nonsense. I've read the Bible and I figure it was pretty good work at the time it was written, but our culture has evolved, and with it the ability to fool the average knowledgeable person has dropped dramatically.
and we are inherently superior to animals. That of course does not mean animals are worthless; they are God's creations as well. But they are not people.
That's ok you believe that, as long as you can support it with solid evidence.
Let's leave the proof of God's existence out of the discussion, I want to ask, what means "inherently superior"?
Is it in magical "just so" way superior? Sort of like Aryans are superior to Jews or something?
If you have something else to quite beside the Bible, we're here to hear you.
And while on topic, since I suppose you'll be saying how we can form complex rational thought and use complex communication (something which some animals can do actually, some mammals like dolphins, apes, some birds, some octopus species).
I suppose then mentally retarded or otherwise disabled people who can't do that are not human, then maybe it's ok to experiment on them.
I also wonder if you could recover an image of someone's face from pixelated video. If the camera or the person is moving but only slightly then you may be able to determine the x,y movement of the whole image from the non-pixelated parts of the image. From this you can then consider each of the large pixelated pixels as a sample point on the person's face, and as they move you aquire additional sample points. Over enough time, say a 5 minute interview, you might be able to reconstruct a recognisable face.
Ah, good point indeed. If it's a video, yes, you can restore extra detail.
There are lots of cameras out there which use a simple version of this trick to shoot higher res photos than their matrix is (by shooting several photos with sliightly offset matrix and assembling those).
And there's already software in wide use which can take existing video footage of, say, recording a page of a book for a while with low resolution, and using the minor motion/shifts in the frame to automatically arrive at a much higher (and accurate!) resolution image. It's amazing the amount of detail it can restore.
Since pixelization is in fact reducing the resolution, the same applies there.
I guess the only sure method is not to leave anything that can be analyzed. Don't wanna be recognized.. ? Don't allow to be recorded/shot.
--As computers become more adept at extrapolating data of different types, your identity isn't safe unless you completely cover all those identifying features. --
Yes, or you could just stop molesting children and photographing it.
And before you know, you've become part of the "think of the children / if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide" crowd.
But of course, if we try to protect our identity, we must molest children.
I showed this to my PS using friend and he shurgged, said 'Just do a radial blur in the opposite direction' and 30 seconds later had a picture about 80-90% as good as the one they're waving about as being the result of some super secret methodology.
It does strike me as a bit stupid explaining it all - now crims will just use better techniques for blurring themselves out. The media, law enforcement agencies are doing this more and more and it's insane - "we just had an idea for a terrorist attack that might happen and here it is in full", "This is foresnic evidence that allowed us to catch the crim" and so on.
Yup, they spun it (pun intended) into cheap PR. The problem is, it's not that they are super smart, it's that the criminal was super stupid.
And it'll make anyone with basic image processing skills question their overall expertise if they'd brag about untwirl.
That said, the average folk will definitely be impressed. I knew a guy who inverted his photo in attempt to protect his identity (no, he didn't molest children). Imagine his shock when I took the inverted photo, inverted it again arriving at the original.
To him I'm probably some sorta super genius who used sophisticated data restoration hack. To a guy with basic knowledge, it's nothing worth noting.
To see how blur can restore detail not visible to the naked eye, check out Focus Magic. Not as easy as untwirl, but gives you an idea. This is because the blur distribution (usually gaussian if digital, or linear with cameras) gives away the possible origin position of the pixels.
If you pixelize however, with big enough square, you lose real resolution and that's much harder to restore anything interesting out of (it's not like in movies, with the unlimited extrapolation techniques, as we all know).
Other gotchas: covering with black rectangle but leaving it only 1-2% transparent. Looks solid, but data can be recovered.
And a very common other method: people keep leaving their name and camera model in the meta info of the image. Easy to check out via right-click>Properties in Windows.
PS: it was "twirl", not "radial blur" btw.
The average person out there really does not understand computers. As such, the criminals look smart, and now the police look even smarter. It is hoped that by making the cops appear to be intelligent that other criminals will stop as well as perhaps the cops will get more money for this.
Fear of the unknown is a better weapon, than giving forensic analysis tutorials to the entire world.
And what they achieve is they look dumb now, since anyone having a clue knows the transform is basic. It may push some smarter people doing a crime since they believe if the police is so proud with their untwirl, they must be on a pretty low level overall.
I'm not saying this will make smart people molest children and shoot photos of themselves, but still, your reason is weak..
1. We're already experimenting with animals, including almost-humans (apes). They have similar self-appreciation, feelings, pain and confusion like you. We're only less sympathetic since they're not EXACTLY like us. But they are, in fact, more like us than we suspect.
2. Experimenting with human embyos, experimenting on people will dramatically further science and improve life for the rest of us (billions). It means we need to come to terms with the fact that humans are animals as any, and experimentation is required. But how do we do that without allowing for genocide? Not simple problem, but unless we solve it, we'll all be victims to save the few from being victims.
You're not stupid. The average consumer doesn't want to install their own OS. The average consumer cannot install their own OS. The author of the post makes several assumptions that the average consumer is just as much of a tech-loving, curious prosumer as he is. They aren't.
I was on the other side, but I have to admit unbundling Windows doesn't seem so bad as it initially does. My main concerns were two:
1. Piracy will increase, but WGA supposedly takes care of that.
2. Ease of install: image based installs are not complex. You're supposed to just put the DVD in, boot, type the license, and it's done in about 3-4 mins.
The image is already fine-tuned for the system, complete with drivers and suitable default configuration.
I guess the tricky part is what exactly what constitute unbundling, as it'll be written in text. We don't want the hardware vendors rendered unable to prepare a Windows image with the right drivers in and sell raw OS boxes. THAT would be hard for the average consumer, and a step backwards.
Further though, apart from unbundling not being a big concern, question is, is it actually any benefit? Just unbundling no. What matters is not unbundling so much as choice.
We do see choices popping up in the big vendors. Lenovo and DELL ship with Ubuntu, I hope we see this standard with all their systems as Ubuntu picks speed (and so hardware support for gfx chipsets for it etc.).
I think we all should agree: as long as you have the choice to get the machine without operating system, or system of your choice, then unbundling is just unnecessary technicality to go though.
>I've been waiting for XP SP3 forever.
If youve been doing your windows updates then you have 99% of it. Im not seeing any big stability fix here, just lots of hotfixes rolled into one and some vista stuff tossed in.
You don't understand: I've had this XP install for over 4 years, and it's showing its age, after installing and removing all sorts of apps over time (not those little spyware free apps, but trials, and various things I thought I need but didn't afterwise).
I want to reinstall, and those are 1000+ hotfixes I need to catch up to. In fact this is the reason I kept my current install. I wanted to reinstall for at least 5-6 months now.
If Autopatcher was around I wouldn't fuss much about it. Thanks to Microsoft it's not.
In European markets, as well as others outside of North America, however, might see a great benefit here.
As a European, I gotta tell you we don't have some special love for ads on our phones either. I've changed two service providers since the previous ones would demand sending me SMS for various promotions and lotteries I couldn't care less about.
Google is milking the ads idea horribly and starting to piss off people.
They better come up with a new trick if they want to expand outside the desktop search business.
Google is not expected to charge phone makers a licensing fee for their software. Google will make its money brokering ads on the mobile phones
&
Because I'm sure the manufacturers will pass the savings on directly to you and me.
Even if they would, I'd rather pay the $10, or $20 more than watch ads. On a tiny mobile screen, you lose from ads in 4 ways:
1. Extra time required to download the ad (we're not all on the latest 3G).
2. Extra fees for the extra bandwidth from the ads (unlimited data plans are rare outside US, and the cost per MB is insane).
3. Limited screen space because there's actually some ad sitting there, I lose productivity since I have less screen space.
4. Ads distract me from doing my work.
All in all, Google, I know all you have is hammer, but we're not all nails.
I'll pass on the gPhone.
My guess is that they try to do the right thing, but have drifted toward RFC violation in the name of "compatibility". That seems to be the standard course when users are trained that the MS way is the right way, other apps are viewed as inferior because "it works under IE".
Ever thought why IE does it this way? It's because the servers (*cough* Apache *cough*) have historically, and still have plenty of the mime types wrong. They report mime type, but the wrong one. Anything that's not image or html is text to them.
Well, IE did what they had to make web pages work.
Firefox does it too, again, because of the servers.
I'm sorry if it's not as simple as "IE sucks" for you.
The irony of this page (click for 100% scale) is astounding.
I had to snap a shot before Adobe pulls their ad.
(also, if you're careful enough, Outlook and Outlook Express are perfectly usable on Windows, especially the newer versions)
Would you mind explaining what means "if you're careful enough". There's absolutely nothing from with Outlook and OE (called Windows Mail in Vista).
Or maybe you just want to be careful saying something here about a Microsoft product that's not derogatory. Don't buy into the culture here, this kind of blind bashing is frowned upon in most places but here.
Thunderbird is nice, but it was obvious for a couple of years they only throw half-hearted attempts at it. I always feared one day I'll wake up to see Thunderbird gone, so I never migrated away from OE. Sad to see it come this way, but glad I kept using OE.
Mozilla is a slowly sinking ship right now. It's really strange to see a former not-for-profit foundation, kill the entire ecosystem around Firefox in effort to optimize their income.
They still can change course but this will be a tad more impossible with every single day.
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.
Hmm, didn't know the exact text. So, in short:
People should have rights, except for when they don't
Nice.