The differences between one style and another are meaningless, but the value of having a consistent style across an entire codebase is, in my experience, enormous. If everyone can read your code as though it was their own, that does in fact save hundreds of hours of time across the team.
This statement reminds me of the player who having alway played red or blue team are soo fixed in thinking they become incapable of switching sides without constantly trying to kill their own teammates while everyone else has the capability to do so in a moments notice with no mental effort.
It must be nice to only have to deal with code from yourself or your organization. We don't have that luxury. We have to work with code from external sources that will ignore us if we try and dictate style.
In my opinion the superficial style elements mentioned in the summary only help the pedantic control freak types. You are ultimatly better off promoting a more permissive environment where the small pedantic shit is not sweated. Let everyones minds adapt to dealing with diversity and there will be no mental cost. It also makes both employee churn and reality of external code much easier to deal with in the long run. I find it also helps give an idea of who may have done what at a glance without having to sort through the RCS.
If your going to legislate anything how about opening up the last mile cable monopolies to competition as was done with the telephone network for DSL?
You will never solve anything if your answer to side effects of lack of effective competition is legislation. Most of our pricing and service issues can can be traced back to effects of prior decade of nonstop consolidation in the ISP market to the point where in too many areas there is no other ISP to choose from.
I have a feeling if you pass such legislation the ISP will just drop your speed for the rest of the month to work around the inconvience... see your not capped..wink wink..... good luck with that netflix video.
With few exceptions caps in USA have some analogy to electricity usage and rush hour in that peak usage is all that matters. While you could argue pricing structures more closely matching the cost of production are better..another argument could be made that caps are easier for the user to understand, minimizes cost of any metering infustructure and puts least mental constraints on natural tendancies of users.
There is also the idea that any legislation benefits large ISPs who have staff, power and money to get their way disadvantaging the smaller ones we ought to be doing everything possible to promote to increase competition and systematically reign in fat, lazy, selfish tendancies that accompany being a monopoly.
Like it or not, Windows 8 is here and it shall be staying. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot to dislike about the OS and keeping a steady stream of criticism (at least mildly constructive) is a good thing, in the hopes that Service Packs and forthcoming versions of Windows will improve it. However, just saying "OMG it sucks, its horrible, its unintuitive etc..." isn't going to change the fact that it is currently the latest version of Windows
I don't mean to sound rude but aint that like saying yellow is still yellow even if you happen to think yellow is a shit color? What information is being conveyed with such statements?
Thus, I suggest that the power user, developer, and enthusiast community who will have direct or even tangential exposure (ie. All your relatives are going to be looking to you for tech support on their new Win8 PCs purchased during the holiday) should start educating themselves and others on privacy, safety, usability and other configurations, tips and tricks for Windows 8.
When people ask me what I think of windows 8 I recommend against upgrading.
When people who have windows 8 express displeasure I tell them how to contact the vendor of their new PC to obtain a "downgrade" to Windows 7.
The few people who care about what I think are now happy campers.
Win8 has a lot of potential vectors for private information to be shared and it behooves those with the knowledge to show how to configure to protect one's privacy and any trade-offs that may require. For instance, should users turn off SmartScreen within Win8 itself? Create an "old fashioned/offline" user account instead of one linked to their MicrosoftLIVE account? What Live Tiles are safe to use and which send information to unknown 3rd parties or make it available for data mining? Likewise, the Windows Store etc..
Or you could just install windows 7.
What Live Tiles are safe to use and which send information to unknown 3rd parties or make it available for data mining? Likewise, the Windows Store etc..
Trick question.
Some will, quite rightly, say that it shouldn't require this sort of analysis and decision making to an OS without being the victim of privacy, security, or just an obtuse UI, but the fact of the matter is this is what we're given to work with in terms of the latest Windows OS.
The fact of the matter is Microsoft is a business and its survival is tied to customers purchasing products. The defeatist additude you are powerless and have no other choices is both incorrect and self-reinforcing.
There is no more powerful driver in business than voting with your dollar.
Windows 8 is not about imparting any new value on the customer. It is about CPR on tablet and phone market share. It is about a boiling frog approach to a closed app store model where all execution must be currated and approved by MS with hands in the cookie jar at every step. It is about epic leaks of data and privacy. It is about monitizing everything possible... even the shit metro apps that come with windows have ads with content downloaded from the Internet.
If you don't like all the bullshit you have a choice. If enough people fail to exercise their choice it will in fact vaporize.
For example the movie industry would like nothing better than to kill off DVDs and force everyone upgrade to blueray. Why don't they?
If I was not feeling particularly lazy I would post a youtube link to none other than Alex Jones (who is a certified conspiracy theorist) explaining technical reasons for inconsistancies in the view counters.
The weirdness is due to "distributed systems" following one of those "eventually consistant" memes.
So you have a common place to both find and update applications from a trusted source, rather than www.coolutility.ru?
Props to our Russian friends serving up those IOS images amoung other goodies.
What I never understood if Metro apps are isolated what does it matter who the app came from? Can't the OS frigging protect itself using policy determined by the user? Also I fail to understand how anyone even with the most vigorous testing ensure safety of applications? You can't..it is just impossible unless the OS has the ability to isolate and enforce access controls.
I mean MS can't even pay their own programmers to write safe applications after spending billions on secure development.
Finally there is a difference between providing an option to buy something from the store and forcing everyone to use the store because there is no other way to install any applications.
It's an Operating System... It's an Operating System... It's an Operating System... It's an Operating System...
There is a lot of extraneous shit included standard with operating systems these days. These things provide the user value. It does not seem to be out of line to ask these questions especially considering the other major general purpose operating systems bundle these things and often a whole lot more.
There are definite improvements over windows 7, even if they are minor. So in general, if all you want is an incremental improvement over windows 7, you can use it just like that.
With price of DRAM the way they are if you want to improve the performance of your windows 7 computer buying a couple more gigs it will get you more value for your buck without the unwelcomed nonsense.
No one is forcing you to use metro for all your apps.
If you run a metro app you are forced to use metro. Metro apps cannot run within the desktop. If metro really is "the future" of Windows then your "choice" will in fact be forcibly curtailed at some point.
So yeah, windows 8 is less than ideal in that some settings screens take you to a metro interface (but you could live without them), and metro itself is horrible, but if you use it just like windows 7 and all versions before that, it still works fine.
Another stick of ram seems like a better deal to me. All of this apologizing... if you do x then it aint so bad is really quite telling. Why waste your money on a bad experience and then have to waste your time working to mitigate? What is the point?
Rather than spewing ad hominem care to be more specific?
You can pretty much use Windows 8 just like Windows 7, just the "start menu" is now fullscreen. Press the windows key, start typing what you want, bingo.
You can now while all of your apps are windows apps.. At some point in the future when there are metro only apps which won't run from the desktop your choice to do this and reason for having that big honkin monitor go out the window.
I guess for me it comes back to the simple truth of every app being a fullscreen app is fundementally fucktardulous. It makes "windows" worthless to me.
I have the misfortune of living at ground zero for an ongoing wind farm build. 24/7 truck traffic, massive clouds of dust, hour plus highway shutdowns while they move their superloads, obnoxious subcontractors that ignore traffic laws, etc, etc. Then there's the ecological impact
I think windmills look cool when I see them on hills driving by. The newer ones with super optimized blade designs look especially futurastic.
The funniest part is the journalist filter is calling them x-ray scanners but I'm guessing the actual report is THz scanners. Xrays see thru things, THz sees thru things, therefore a dumbass would assume they must be the same.
THz is sub-mm. Non x-ray scanners currently deployed are all mm as far as I know.
Hate to rain on your parade, but nuclear radiation is a completely different thing from electromagnetic radiation. They happen to both have the word "radiation" in them, but they're really not the same thing.
Alpha rays are a helium nucleus
Beta is electrons like what excites phosphors in yer old CRT TV.
Both Alpha and Beta are trivially shielded by small amounts of air, matter, layers of skin..etc. Normally quite harmless unless injested or inhaled then quite deadly.
Gamma rays are high energy photons like the ones presumably collected by Chekov when he beamed aboard the aircraft carrier Enterprise.
This "electromagic radiation" is quite dangerous and the reason we require large quantities of bulky matter to shield humans from exposure to "electromagnetic radiation".
Self-signed certs don't provide any security advantage in the Gmail use case over no SSL
There is an important difference in the use of SSL provides protection against passive easedropping where an attacker may only be able to listen to but not alter the contents of transmitted data.
In the early days of using computers to optimize logistics folks would peer into their inventories and make decisions with a narrow view of what made them the most money. It was only later they discovered secondary effects of this was actually costing them money.
The lack of low value item x in stock meant a customer wanting item x and may also purchase item y decides they would rather shop somewhere both x and y items are in stock translating into lost sales.
I think as TFA points out this data shows only that humans can adapt to changes in their environment. It does not address TFAs productivity question or validate a design decision.
If we did a "project mojave" style test replacing metro shell with program manager I suspect we would find the same signals in the data.
Contrary to what was implied from summary your standard grid tie solar setup is not going to do you any good at all when grid power goes out. Amazingly TFA says nothing at all about cost of energy storage.
Grid tie solar provides no redundancy, does not scale and destabilizes the grid as built out in its current form. It can only ever hope to throttle back peekers.
What we really need is the very same thing holding back electric cars and all manner of portable gadgetry...high density energy storage that does not suck ass.
Not really the web I ever knew
on
The Web We Lost
·
· Score: 1
I think a few of the points from TFA were sorta lame.. detracting from the central issue of aggregation of power into the hands of a few megasites.
I have to admit part of the issue is embedded in human perception. There is a "long tail" where while mega-sites may dominate the minds and bandwidth usage of many there are still countless millions of independent sites which exist yet tend to get overlooked the minds of those who bring up this issue.
It has been my experience most businesses even small ma-pa shops have their own domain names and home pages. Web design firms are everywhere now.. hosting business is growing not shrinking.
The major change has been on the user side of the equation where previously people would upload content to their ISP or a service like geocities.
Today blogging sites, facebook and wikipedia have replaced the need for most people to have personal web pages. Rather than creating a page explaining my "origional" (LOL) research I could just start or improve a wikipedia article.
Rather than publishing my endless stream of personal opinions I could get an account on a blogging service.
Rather than publishing an endless stream of nonsense about myself I could open my own facebook account.
While businesses are leveraging facebook to collect information on their customers and prospects web hosting is gaining ground not loosing it to facebook or anyone else.
The marketeers have millions to spend on propogation of "to the cloud" memes. I think it would be awesome to find a way to counteract this making running your own servers cool again.
P2P/torrents has shown it is technically possible to innovate in this area even though it ended up being a really stupid idea (providing an open feedback channel) having done more to bolster legislative support for opressive structures than the facebooks of the world ever have.
While I don't believe currently megasites have caused damage my fear for the future is mostly in the form of laws which institutionalize megasites in some way like a mattress industry lobbying for *more* regulation in order to keep competition out.
For example I can see structures where there are technical barriers such as future legislation requiring sophisticated infustructure and compliance verification for automatic detection of CP or IP infringement such as what has evolved within youtube. This would constitute a prohibitive bar for new entrants.
This fact still does not justify wasting your money on a lottery ticket.
What if we spent all of our efforts building an astroid shield and a GRB goes off nearby and cooks the planet? If we happen to have won that lottery you would look pretty stupid worrying about asteroids when you should have been building a gamma shield.
Resources are finite. We must all choose our battles carefully based on evidence rather than arbitrary fears or hopes.
At some point, someone is going to get into *serious* legal trouble through this. Most likely via someone using their connection transfering child porn and getting caught. It only has to happen once.
Nothing can ever happen if everyone is always content to sit in the corner cowering in fear of what could happen. Such a society would suck ass.
I would counter your argument by asking a stupid question... How many tens? hundreds? of millions of PCs are compromised botnet zombies?
Why could not the same argument of CP raid risk be extended to simply owning a PC? We've all heard of encryption ransomware why not CP raid ransom or your compromised system being used to traffic the same? What is the difference?
For me "middle of the earth" attack was a new and interesting idea... otherwise this paper would have read a heck of a lot better had the hyperbole been left at home.
The contorted attempt to say changing time is not "spoofing" or including offtopic segways such as hacking web servers and perl CGI scripts was a little too much to stomach.
No mention at all of RAIM and similiar technologies.
"Now, some of you may share Richardâ(TM)s concerns over some aspects of this feature, and as I mentioned earlier, I am not here to convince you otherwise. Richard has every right to share his views on privacy, and who am I to tell him or you that he is/you are wrong?"
RMS quotes: "In your Software Freedom Day events, in your FLISOL events, donâ(TM)t install or recommend Ubuntu. Instead, tell people that Ubuntu is shunned for spying."
Back to Bacon: "These statements simply generate fear, uncertainty, and doubt about Ubuntu; a project that has a long history of bringing Free Software to millions of users around the world with an open community and governance."
1. RMS believes the feature constitutes spyware as I don't think anyone doubts.
2. You seem to believe he has every right to his views "who am I to tell him or you that he is/you are wrong?"
Then I fail to see how in the same breath you can assert his statement regarding being shunned for spying is childish and communicating FUD rather than the legitimate beliefs of RMS with which you agree he is entitled and with which you disagree.
To make matters worse you have resorted to an unproductive personal attack by asserting his remarks are "childish".
This is what happens when you rely on third parties.. they go out of business, stop caring or up the price cause they can and your screwed with no recourse.
Even console games say it rather plainly right on the box they can shut down multi-player whenever they feel like it.
Iâ(TM)m not a fan of ubuntu nor RMS, and I definitely donâ(TM)t like the sounds of this feature, but since when was "free software" equated with "respects your privacy".
Since when was "free food" equated with "does not make you seriously ill" or "free wood" equated with "does not contain unstable ordinance"
I suppose free junk mail with recording equipment to spy on someone until trash is taken out is also germane.
Culturally most of it does, and by consequence of having access to the code any privacy concerns can easily be detected / removed by end users if desired
Innocent unintentional expliotable and information leaking security bugs routinely march right by all open source eyeballs and security audits unscathed only to be discovered years after the fact if ever.
The idea this sort of thing would be obvious or possible when done intentionally is not plausable.
In the end "trust" is the only practical assurance us mortals have. Canonical does not benefit from pissing theirs away like this. All they had to do was ask first.
I still don't see the connection between free software and assumed privacy. If anything this seems like a dangerous assumption.
It is a dangerous assumption to go to the faucet and get a drink of water which for all I know could be contaiminated and make me sick or dead..but I do it anyway without thinking twice.
Now if I were living in Mexico my calculation would be different.
It is simply impossible to exist on earth without trust. If Canonical becomes to be known for unwelcomed shennanigans the community of people who are willing to trust them will diminish and with it their support revenue.
states that this feature is "malicious" as a matter of fact, and throws around spooky words like "surveillance" and "spyware" like he's doing a Fox news special report. I'm
Malicious seems to be about the proper strength to me. If a user had important or confidential information being leaked out to third parties or over the Internet in the clear due to this it could have serious consequences for the user, organization or third parties.
I'm all for having opinions, but the way RMS spouts them as absolute irrefutable fact has always annoyed me
I can't stand RMS but I agree with his assessment on this issue.
It's probably a useful feature to most, it can easily be disabled by the sounds of it, will bring in some money, and I suspect most users don't give a shit about being "spied on" in this manner.
How is this any different than installing a key logger or altering 'bash' to send your commands to god knows where? Whats the difference? You speak of not caring... my question is more basic... do most users even comphrend what is going on?
Remember this is the facebook/twitter/whatever else generation. A lot of people _like_ sharing all the minutia of their day with the entire world. I don't get it, but it's their choice.
Even facebook requires a concious decision to be made to post information viewable by others. This is in fact explicitly the whole point of facebook.
My guess a user searching their local computer for a document detailing a secret new product or searching for document containing information from a lawyer or a physician does NOT intend that information to be leaked out to ANYONE.
Slashdot Mirror
If the drive successfully syncs up to the array then it passes otherwise it gets RMAd.
The differences between one style and another are meaningless, but the value of having a consistent style across an entire codebase is, in my experience, enormous. If everyone can read your code as though it was their own, that does in fact save hundreds of hours of time across the team.
This statement reminds me of the player who having alway played red or blue team are soo fixed in thinking they become incapable of switching sides without constantly trying to kill their own teammates while everyone else has the capability to do so in a moments notice with no mental effort.
It must be nice to only have to deal with code from yourself or your organization. We don't have that luxury. We have to work with code from external sources that will ignore us if we try and dictate style.
In my opinion the superficial style elements mentioned in the summary only help the pedantic control freak types. You are ultimatly better off promoting a more permissive environment where the small pedantic shit is not sweated. Let everyones minds adapt to dealing with diversity and there will be no mental cost. It also makes both employee churn and reality of external code much easier to deal with in the long run. I find it also helps give an idea of who may have done what at a glance without having to sort through the RCS.
Having conventions is still a good thing.
If your going to legislate anything how about opening up the last mile cable monopolies to competition as was done with the telephone network for DSL?
You will never solve anything if your answer to side effects of lack of effective competition is legislation. Most of our pricing and service issues can can be traced back to effects of prior decade of nonstop consolidation in the ISP market to the point where in too many areas there is no other ISP to choose from.
I have a feeling if you pass such legislation the ISP will just drop your speed for the rest of the month to work around the inconvience... see your not capped..wink wink..... good luck with that netflix video.
With few exceptions caps in USA have some analogy to electricity usage and rush hour in that peak usage is all that matters. While you could argue pricing structures more closely matching the cost of production are better..another argument could be made that caps are easier for the user to understand, minimizes cost of any metering infustructure and puts least mental constraints on natural tendancies of users.
There is also the idea that any legislation benefits large ISPs who have staff, power and money to get their way disadvantaging the smaller ones we ought to be doing everything possible to promote to increase competition and systematically reign in fat, lazy, selfish tendancies that accompany being a monopoly.
Like it or not, Windows 8 is here and it shall be staying. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot to dislike about the OS and keeping a steady stream of criticism (at least mildly constructive) is a good thing, in the hopes that Service Packs and forthcoming versions of Windows will improve it. However, just saying "OMG it sucks, its horrible, its unintuitive etc..." isn't going to change the fact that it is currently the latest version of Windows
I don't mean to sound rude but aint that like saying yellow is still yellow even if you happen to think yellow is a shit color? What information is being conveyed with such statements?
Thus, I suggest that the power user, developer, and enthusiast community who will have direct or even tangential exposure (ie. All your relatives are going to be looking to you for tech support on their new Win8 PCs purchased during the holiday) should start educating themselves and others on privacy, safety, usability and other configurations, tips and tricks for Windows 8.
When people ask me what I think of windows 8 I recommend against upgrading.
When people who have windows 8 express displeasure I tell them how to contact the vendor of their new PC to obtain a "downgrade" to Windows 7.
The few people who care about what I think are now happy campers.
Win8 has a lot of potential vectors for private information to be shared and it behooves those with the knowledge to show how to configure to protect one's privacy and any trade-offs that may require. For instance, should users turn off SmartScreen within Win8 itself? Create an "old fashioned/offline" user account instead of one linked to their MicrosoftLIVE account? What Live Tiles are safe to use and which send information to unknown 3rd parties or make it available for data mining? Likewise, the Windows Store etc..
Or you could just install windows 7.
What Live Tiles are safe to use and which send information to unknown 3rd parties or make it available for data mining? Likewise, the Windows Store etc..
Trick question.
Some will, quite rightly, say that it shouldn't require this sort of analysis and decision making to an OS without being the victim of privacy, security, or just an obtuse UI, but the fact of the matter is this is what we're given to work with in terms of the latest Windows OS.
The fact of the matter is Microsoft is a business and its survival is tied to customers purchasing products. The defeatist additude you are powerless and have no other choices is both incorrect and self-reinforcing.
There is no more powerful driver in business than voting with your dollar.
Windows 8 is not about imparting any new value on the customer. It is about CPR on tablet and phone market share. It is about a boiling frog approach to a closed app store model where all execution must be currated and approved by MS with hands in the cookie jar at every step. It is about epic leaks of data and privacy. It is about monitizing everything possible... even the shit metro apps that come with windows have ads with content downloaded from the Internet.
If you don't like all the bullshit you have a choice. If enough people fail to exercise their choice it will in fact vaporize.
For example the movie industry would like nothing better than to kill off DVDs and force everyone upgrade to blueray. Why don't they?
I'm not YT conspiracy theorist but something has to be wrong here....
http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/8659/screenshotfrom201212211.png
300 views
600 likes?
200 dislikes?
If I was not feeling particularly lazy I would post a youtube link to none other than Alex Jones (who is a certified conspiracy theorist) explaining technical reasons for inconsistancies in the view counters.
The weirdness is due to "distributed systems" following one of those "eventually consistant" memes.
So you have a common place to both find and update applications from a trusted source, rather than www.coolutility.ru?
Props to our Russian friends serving up those IOS images amoung other goodies.
What I never understood if Metro apps are isolated what does it matter who the app came from? Can't the OS frigging protect itself using policy determined by the user? Also I fail to understand how anyone even with the most vigorous testing ensure safety of applications? You can't..it is just impossible unless the OS has the ability to isolate and enforce access controls.
I mean MS can't even pay their own programmers to write safe applications after spending billions on secure development.
Finally there is a difference between providing an option to buy something from the store and forcing everyone to use the store because there is no other way to install any applications.
It's an Operating System...
It's an Operating System...
It's an Operating System...
It's an Operating System...
There is a lot of extraneous shit included standard with operating systems these days. These things provide the user value. It does not seem to be out of line to ask these questions especially considering the other major general purpose operating systems bundle these things and often a whole lot more.
There are definite improvements over windows 7, even if they are minor. So in general, if all you want is an incremental improvement over windows 7, you can use it just like that.
With price of DRAM the way they are if you want to improve the performance of your windows 7 computer buying a couple more gigs it will get you more value for your buck without the unwelcomed nonsense.
No one is forcing you to use metro for all your apps.
If you run a metro app you are forced to use metro. Metro apps cannot run within the desktop. If metro really is "the future" of Windows then your "choice" will in fact be forcibly curtailed at some point.
So yeah, windows 8 is less than ideal in that some settings screens take you to a metro interface (but you could live without them), and metro itself is horrible, but if you use it just like windows 7 and all versions before that, it still works fine.
Another stick of ram seems like a better deal to me. All of this apologizing... if you do x then it aint so bad is really quite telling. Why waste your money on a bad experience and then have to waste your time working to mitigate? What is the point?
You seem to be confused between Windows RT and Windows 8, the latter (which is what we are talking about) does not have the attributes you describe.
Unless the application your using is a windows rt app then it has those exact attributes.
He's not real bright.
Rather than spewing ad hominem care to be more specific?
You can pretty much use Windows 8 just like Windows 7, just the "start menu" is now fullscreen. Press the windows key, start typing what you want, bingo.
You can now while all of your apps are windows apps.. At some point in the future when there are metro only apps which won't run from the desktop your choice to do this and reason for having that big honkin monitor go out the window.
I guess for me it comes back to the simple truth of every app being a fullscreen app is fundementally fucktardulous. It makes "windows" worthless to me.
I have the misfortune of living at ground zero for an ongoing wind farm build. 24/7 truck traffic, massive clouds of dust, hour plus highway shutdowns while they move their superloads, obnoxious subcontractors that ignore traffic laws, etc, etc. Then there's the ecological impact
I think windmills look cool when I see them on hills driving by. The newer ones with super optimized blade designs look especially futurastic.
The funniest part is the journalist filter is calling them x-ray scanners but I'm guessing the actual report is THz scanners. Xrays see thru things, THz sees thru things, therefore a dumbass would assume they must be the same.
THz is sub-mm. Non x-ray scanners currently deployed are all mm as far as I know.
Hate to rain on your parade, but nuclear radiation is a completely different thing from electromagnetic radiation. They happen to both have the word "radiation" in them, but they're really not the same thing.
Alpha rays are a helium nucleus
Beta is electrons like what excites phosphors in yer old CRT TV.
Both Alpha and Beta are trivially shielded by small amounts of air, matter, layers of skin..etc. Normally quite harmless unless injested or inhaled then quite deadly.
Gamma rays are high energy photons like the ones presumably collected by Chekov when he beamed aboard the aircraft carrier Enterprise.
This "electromagic radiation" is quite dangerous and the reason we require large quantities of bulky matter to shield humans from exposure to "electromagnetic radiation".
Self-signed certs don't provide any security advantage in the Gmail use case over no SSL
There is an important difference in the use of SSL provides protection against passive easedropping where an attacker may only be able to listen to but not alter the contents of transmitted data.
In the early days of using computers to optimize logistics folks would peer into their inventories and make decisions with a narrow view of what made them the most money. It was only later they discovered secondary effects of this was actually costing them money.
The lack of low value item x in stock meant a customer wanting item x and may also purchase item y decides they would rather shop somewhere both x and y items are in stock translating into lost sales.
I think as TFA points out this data shows only that humans can adapt to changes in their environment. It does not address TFAs productivity question or validate a design decision.
If we did a "project mojave" style test replacing metro shell with program manager I suspect we would find the same signals in the data.
I feel a great disturbance in the fibre.
Contrary to what was implied from summary your standard grid tie solar setup is not going to do you any good at all when grid power goes out. Amazingly TFA says nothing at all about cost of energy storage.
Grid tie solar provides no redundancy, does not scale and destabilizes the grid as built out in its current form. It can only ever hope to throttle back peekers.
What we really need is the very same thing holding back electric cars and all manner of portable gadgetry...high density energy storage that does not suck ass.
I think a few of the points from TFA were sorta lame.. detracting from the central issue of aggregation of power into the hands of a few megasites.
I have to admit part of the issue is embedded in human perception. There is a "long tail" where while mega-sites may dominate the minds and bandwidth usage of many there are still countless millions of independent sites which exist yet tend to get overlooked the minds of those who bring up this issue.
It has been my experience most businesses even small ma-pa shops have their own domain names and home pages. Web design firms are everywhere now.. hosting business is growing not shrinking.
The major change has been on the user side of the equation where previously people would upload content to their ISP or a service like geocities.
Today blogging sites, facebook and wikipedia have replaced the need for most people to have personal web pages. Rather than creating a page explaining my "origional" (LOL) research I could just start or improve a wikipedia article.
Rather than publishing my endless stream of personal opinions I could get an account on a blogging service.
Rather than publishing an endless stream of nonsense about myself I could open my own facebook account.
While businesses are leveraging facebook to collect information on their customers and prospects web hosting is gaining ground not loosing it to facebook or anyone else.
The marketeers have millions to spend on propogation of "to the cloud" memes. I think it would be awesome to find a way to counteract this making running your own servers cool again.
P2P/torrents has shown it is technically possible to innovate in this area even though it ended up being a really stupid idea (providing an open feedback channel) having done more to bolster legislative support for opressive structures than the facebooks of the world ever have.
While I don't believe currently megasites have caused damage my fear for the future is mostly in the form of laws which institutionalize megasites in some way like a mattress industry lobbying for *more* regulation in order to keep competition out.
For example I can see structures where there are technical barriers such as future legislation requiring sophisticated infustructure and compliance verification for automatic detection of CP or IP infringement such as what has evolved within youtube. This would constitute a prohibitive bar for new entrants.
This debate occurred in the 19th century. It's over. The answer is a resounding no. As in not at at all. Forget it. Give it up.
In the 19th century there was no worry about machine intelligence gaining parity with human intelligence in the "forseeable future" either.
It is foolish to assume the old balance would continue to hold once reserve labor pool can no longer be assumed to consist exclusivly of humans.
The only rational questions in the foreseeable future are whether or not we should reduce the work week's duration and increase paid vacation time.
All this does is increase the cost of human labor ...exactly what skynet wants.
Ever heard about lottery? We could win!
This fact still does not justify wasting your money on a lottery ticket.
What if we spent all of our efforts building an astroid shield and a GRB goes off nearby and cooks the planet? If we happen to have won that lottery you would look pretty stupid worrying about asteroids when you should have been building a gamma shield.
Resources are finite. We must all choose our battles carefully based on evidence rather than arbitrary fears or hopes.
At some point, someone is going to get into *serious* legal trouble through this. Most likely via someone using their connection transfering child porn and getting caught. It only has to happen once.
Nothing can ever happen if everyone is always content to sit in the corner cowering in fear of what could happen. Such a society would suck ass.
I would counter your argument by asking a stupid question... How many tens? hundreds? of millions of PCs are compromised botnet zombies?
Why could not the same argument of CP raid risk be extended to simply owning a PC? We've all heard of encryption ransomware why not CP raid ransom or your compromised system being used to traffic the same? What is the difference?
Stop trolling us slashdot... this aint news and it aint a legitimate question... please just stop.
For me "middle of the earth" attack was a new and interesting idea... otherwise this paper would have read a heck of a lot better had the hyperbole been left at home.
The contorted attempt to say changing time is not "spoofing" or including offtopic segways such as hacking web servers and perl CGI scripts was a little too much to stomach.
No mention at all of RAIM and similiar technologies.
"Now, some of you may share Richardâ(TM)s concerns over some aspects of this feature, and as I mentioned earlier, I am not here to convince you otherwise. Richard has every right to share his views on privacy, and who am I to tell him or you that he is/you are wrong?"
RMS quotes:
"In your Software Freedom Day events, in your FLISOL events, donâ(TM)t install or recommend Ubuntu. Instead, tell people that Ubuntu is shunned for spying."
Back to Bacon:
"These statements simply generate fear, uncertainty, and doubt about Ubuntu; a project that has a long history of bringing Free Software to millions of users around the world with an open community and governance."
1. RMS believes the feature constitutes spyware as I don't think anyone doubts.
2. You seem to believe he has every right to his views "who am I to tell him or you that he is/you are wrong?"
Then I fail to see how in the same breath you can assert his statement regarding being shunned for spying is childish and communicating FUD rather than the legitimate beliefs of RMS with which you agree he is entitled and with which you disagree.
To make matters worse you have resorted to an unproductive personal attack by asserting his remarks are "childish".
This is what happens when you rely on third parties.. they go out of business, stop caring or up the price cause they can and your screwed with no recourse.
Even console games say it rather plainly right on the box they can shut down multi-player whenever they feel like it.
Iâ(TM)m not a fan of ubuntu nor RMS, and I definitely donâ(TM)t like the sounds of this feature, but since when was "free software" equated with "respects your privacy".
Since when was "free food" equated with "does not make you seriously ill" or "free wood" equated with "does not contain unstable ordinance"
I suppose free junk mail with recording equipment to spy on someone until trash is taken out is also germane.
Culturally most of it does, and by consequence of having access to the code any privacy concerns can easily be detected / removed by end users if desired
Innocent unintentional expliotable and information leaking security bugs routinely march right by all open source eyeballs and security audits unscathed only to be discovered years after the fact if ever.
The idea this sort of thing would be obvious or possible when done intentionally is not plausable.
In the end "trust" is the only practical assurance us mortals have. Canonical does not benefit from pissing theirs away like this. All they had to do was ask first.
I still don't see the connection between free software and assumed privacy. If anything this seems like a dangerous assumption.
It is a dangerous assumption to go to the faucet and get a drink of water which for all I know could be contaiminated and make me sick or dead..but I do it anyway without thinking twice.
Now if I were living in Mexico my calculation would be different.
It is simply impossible to exist on earth without trust. If Canonical becomes to be known for unwelcomed shennanigans the community of people who are willing to trust them will diminish and with it their support revenue.
states that this feature is "malicious" as a matter of fact, and throws around spooky words like "surveillance" and "spyware" like he's doing a Fox news special report. I'm
Malicious seems to be about the proper strength to me. If a user had important or confidential information being leaked out to third parties or over the Internet in the clear due to this it could have serious consequences for the user, organization or third parties.
I'm all for having opinions, but the way RMS spouts them as absolute irrefutable fact has always annoyed me
I can't stand RMS but I agree with his assessment on this issue.
It's probably a useful feature to most, it can easily be disabled by the sounds of it, will bring in some money, and I suspect most users don't give a shit about being "spied on" in this manner.
How is this any different than installing a key logger or altering 'bash' to send your commands to god knows where? Whats the difference? You speak of not caring... my question is more basic... do most users even comphrend what is going on?
Remember this is the facebook/twitter/whatever else generation. A lot of people _like_ sharing all the minutia of their day with the entire world. I don't get it, but it's their choice.
Even facebook requires a concious decision to be made to post information viewable by others. This is in fact explicitly the whole point of facebook.
My guess a user searching their local computer for a document detailing a secret new product or searching for document containing information from a lawyer or a physician does NOT intend that information to be leaked out to ANYONE.