It's somewhere between cold and hypothermia (metric) in here, so I don't feel too bad about leaving the old space heater althlon on. In fact since I moved to this benighted part of the world it hasn't been any other way.
This is possible the only advantage of living in England. That and the beer.
As for people with their AC on... switch it off! You can aclimatise to heat easily as long as you never go near air conditioned space. It normally takes me a week to get back into the swing of things but I'm perfectly comfortable in 90+ weather - the dehumidifier is way more important than the cooling, if you need any mechanical aids at all. Then at least you won't be paying twice for your power (heating and cooling the excess heat).
In no time you'll have tons of people speeding up their KDE by doing everything on the command line and perhaps even using less memory (as far as CLI vs GUI memory usage is concerned).
Since most of the GUI libraries used by KDE are shared if you have one KDE app open then you have 90% of the memory use required to display an interface for *all* of them (discounting the actual functional code, which is required if you are using the UI or CLI).
Hello to the person who modded this down! (As overrated no less.)
The above comment is funny. In fact, it's geek humour. This being slashdot we like:
Geek humour.
Corrections to the article.
Massivly technical explanations on related subjects that enlighten us.
Things we do not like:
Moderators who are too used to Digg and mod down anything they personally don't like, even if it's factually correct and/or relevant and/or insightful humour, having the gall to cancel out the mod points of someone who, despite only getting given points every few months, still thought the comment was funny enough to mod up.
May I direct your attention to the setting which allows you to apply a penalty of -lots'o'points to anything marked as "funny" so that you personally never see anything entertaining again.
Especially integration with things like GPG for automatically authenticating posts in web forms and web mail. Has anyone found an extension to do that? There's a encryption plugin for gmail I believe but no general extension for all web forms.
It could seriously kick off use of GPG amongst the non-geeks for authentication (mostly) and encryption (past a critical mass). I don't believe it would be that difficult to explain to normal IT literate (ie, already uses Firefox or Opera) the benefit of signatures in evading blame and establishing trust.
Is this going to be a backdoor into the protected parts of the kernel that also handle media protection?
It would be nice if one batch of companies out to screw you over had accidentally been defeated by another batch of companies out to screw you over. Sort of collateral rebuilding, if you like.
One of the good things about youtube is that they have stuck with Flash 7, so at least Linux users *can* watch the videos. Still, it would be nice to see an open format option - and Google Video does offer some other formats.
At least if they move to Flash 9 it works on Linux by either running IE6 or Firefox under WINE until the Linux flash 9 release but it's not the slickest way of doing it.
I'm about to start the road to divorce
on
IT and Divorce?
·
· Score: 5, Funny
That the next colour is blue. It's the only way they could get Bush to fund the the space programme you see... the Pointless American TRIO (of colours) Trip Act.
Adding intelligence to small items has benefits - in that it enables you to make decisions close to the center of activity.
Adding intelligence in a centrallised location has benefits - in that it enables you to lower the cost per flop (support, redundancy etc).
None of this will change unless instant point to point communications of infinite bandwidth are invented - ironically exactly what you would require to make *both* perfect centralisation and decentralisation a reality.
In the mean time we will stumble on with a mix depending on the job, just as we have done for the last 20+ years.
Just in case the article writer (and the media) hadn't noticed, there are plenty of Muslims in the west too. Come to that most of the East is full of Chinese people, who on the whole are about as Muslim as a a beer flavour sausage wrapped in bacon.
The iPOD is ALREADY dead, in case you haven't noticed the Zune is CHEAPER, has WAY MORE FEATURES, and has WIRELESS.
Now, you would think that with a zillion dollars in he bank, Microsoft could afford some lessons in appropriate capitalisation and sublty for it's astroturfers.
If you are writing from scratch you lose no control as you can dual, triple or whatever license your own code as you see fit.
If I sit down and from scratch write a kernel I can release it under the GPL v2, v3, v8 and seventeen differrent closed licenses with no problems at all other than going mad from reading all of the legal junk that's required to define each one.
It would only impact on me if I decided to use someone else's work as the basis for mine, or as part of mine, and then I would either have to comply with their license or do the work myself. Doesn't seem that hard to me.
Most of the people who I know who use Macs were recommended them (and recommend them to others) because they want things to be easy and simple.
This *could* be an ideal market for AOL, I agree, but it's hardly tech savvy.
FWIW generally my experience is that the market is split into approximately four parts -
Those that want an easy life (running Macs)
Those that want complete control (running Linux)
Those that don't know what the options are (running Windows)
Those that have specific software needs (running any of the above).
The number of people in category one who could be described as tech savvy is not really all that high. You don't need to know a lot about the insides of a computer to decide that this one doesn't need much work to make it do what you want.
Group moderation like Slashdot
-Pro, very hands off (once past a critical mass of users).
-Con, promotes group think.
Wikipedia style moderation
-Pro, very hands off (once past a larger critical mass of users).
-Con, promotes group think.
Direct moderation (approval of everything)
-Pro, very accurate.
-Con, very time consuming.
Retroactive moderation (normal form style - post first delete spam later)
-Pro, very accurate.
-Con, very time consuming and crap still shows up until it's dealt with.
I have never seen a working system that was not based on one of these principles. Things that have failed:
Anything with no moderation at all. Look at usenet. These systems are only sucessful if combined with user filtering - one prospective area might be a system with very good user filtering, but then you shift the burden from the admin to the users and why should they bother when there are people willing to do the work for them?
To give you an idea here is a small graph of spam activity. It took 5 days for comment spammers to find an open site and start abusing it, and once they find something that has worked once they just dont stop. And that's even before you consider the malicious idiots who aren't exactly spammers but just twist and distort and abuse other posters - how do you deal with them exactly?
I know four people here who are going to buy a Wii. Assuming that everyone else in the UK knows 4 people who are going to buy a Wii that makes 240 million sales in the first week alone just for the UK via simple mathematical extrapolation. Can't argue with the numbers!
In keeping with your analogy of the operating system... If nobody wants to support the guy who, instead of just improving upon existing user interface conventions, wants to radically change the way we use computers, he might have a hard time getting funded.
And so he should. The reward is probably limited and the risk is enourmous, plus if fundamental changes are discovered then it's better for everyone if it's in the public domain.
This kind of thing should be done via university/academic funding or public support for innovations (by buying basic research and putting it into the public domain). It's one area where your tax dollars, pounds, yen or heshibean half dong would actually have a beneficial effect on the economy and everyone's quality of life.
Quite often the best business ideas (as in, the basis for a business that makes money) are evolutionary, not revolutionary. It's a worthy goal to take the state of the art and add something that just makes it better.
Think how much Linux is benefiting from things like desktop interface improvements - it's not cutting edge amazing ideas, but it does have value. The same thing applies in business.
Really the right place for basic research is in the public domain where the stakes are high and the rewards few and far between. It makes the search for groundbreaking ideas more efficient because people can trade information with no fear or losing out on millions.
This also means that the basic research is then available to businesses who can add *their* value in turning it into something usable for the rest of us... along with another bunch of businesses ensuring that competition brings it's benefits to bear. To look back at the Linux analogy, this is essentially how we are seeing the Open Source model turn out high quality at low cost - the research is all public, and the refinements to make it accessable are driven by people who want to sell it.
The BBC runs a lot of their system (including the weather graphics) on Linux I'd say that the answer is yes. The more important question is how hard is it for me to do it.
The fact that tools can be used to put up insecure sites is not exactly a failing of the tool. The tool will have had a spec (even an informal spec) - which may have been "put sites up fast and let users sort out the security".
It's only a failure of the tool, or the developer of the tool, if the tool is marked as being a one step solution. Of course a lot are, there is no shortage of snake oil salesmen, and in that case they take 100% of the blame. However most rapid deployment tools contain a clear disclaimer of what it does or doesnt do and a guide to helping you with the rest of the steps.
When those things exist the fault is with the user and not with the tool - elitism aside. It's like using a hammer to kill a man (despite the do not kill people with this hammer label and 100 page guide to not killing people with hammers - now with pictures!) and blaming people killed with hammers on the hammer designer.
That has them at around $4bn US (and then some, because the latter half with Christmas is usually far more profitable than the first half) profit per year compared to $2.5bn approx for Microsoft. They aren't going to have to bow to pressure.
Walmart (who do compete in the UK after buying ASDA) were past $10bn in 2005 by comparison.
Just because it's common doesn't mean it's right. Ideally applications should leak no information at all, particuarly when they are used as part of anonymous browsing toolchains (as Firefox often is when combined with Tor).
Not yet.
For what it's worth since it seems to be related to tabs, which are part of the UI, browsers that use Gecko may not all be affected. Equally browsers that use khtml/webkit won't all be immune just because Konqueror is.
Slashdot Mirror
It's somewhere between cold and hypothermia (metric) in here, so I don't feel too bad about leaving the old space heater althlon on. In fact since I moved to this benighted part of the world it hasn't been any other way.
This is possible the only advantage of living in England. That and the beer.
As for people with their AC on... switch it off! You can aclimatise to heat easily as long as you never go near air conditioned space. It normally takes me a week to get back into the swing of things but I'm perfectly comfortable in 90+ weather - the dehumidifier is way more important than the cooling, if you need any mechanical aids at all. Then at least you won't be paying twice for your power (heating and cooling the excess heat).
In no time you'll have tons of people speeding up their KDE by doing everything on the command line and perhaps even using less memory (as far as CLI vs GUI memory usage is concerned).
Since most of the GUI libraries used by KDE are shared if you have one KDE app open then you have 90% of the memory use required to display an interface for *all* of them (discounting the actual functional code, which is required if you are using the UI or CLI).
Hello to the person who modded this down! (As overrated no less.)
The above comment is funny. In fact, it's geek humour. This being slashdot we like:
Geek humour.
Corrections to the article.
Massivly technical explanations on related subjects that enlighten us.
Things we do not like:
Moderators who are too used to Digg and mod down anything they personally don't like, even if it's factually correct and/or relevant and/or insightful humour, having the gall to cancel out the mod points of someone who, despite only getting given points every few months, still thought the comment was funny enough to mod up.
May I direct your attention to the setting which allows you to apply a penalty of -lots'o'points to anything marked as "funny" so that you personally never see anything entertaining again.
Thank you for your attention. That is all.
...now that we can run IE6 on Linux?
It even supports active X! Active X! None of the true internet experience will be lost to you now.
Especially integration with things like GPG for automatically authenticating posts in web forms and web mail. Has anyone found an extension to do that? There's a encryption plugin for gmail I believe but no general extension for all web forms.
.ico file requests.
It could seriously kick off use of GPG amongst the non-geeks for authentication (mostly) and encryption (past a critical mass). I don't believe it would be that difficult to explain to normal IT literate (ie, already uses Firefox or Opera) the benefit of signatures in evading blame and establishing trust.
Semi-on-topic, on the security front Firefox 2 fixes the bug with tab icon handling that allows fingerprinting of Firefox 1.5 by tracking isolated
Is this going to be a backdoor into the protected parts of the kernel that also handle media protection?
It would be nice if one batch of companies out to screw you over had accidentally been defeated by another batch of companies out to screw you over. Sort of collateral rebuilding, if you like.
One of the good things about youtube is that they have stuck with Flash 7, so at least Linux users *can* watch the videos. Still, it would be nice to see an open format option - and Google Video does offer some other formats.
At least if they move to Flash 9 it works on Linux by either running IE6 or Firefox under WINE until the Linux flash 9 release but it's not the slickest way of doing it.
The first step? My wedding next year.
Ohhh, new windows? And this one has transparency! That's going to make the spreadsheets* fly!
*sigh*
That the next colour is blue. It's the only way they could get Bush to fund the the space programme you see... the Pointless American TRIO (of colours) Trip Act.
Adding intelligence to small items has benefits - in that it enables you to make decisions close to the center of activity.
Adding intelligence in a centrallised location has benefits - in that it enables you to lower the cost per flop (support, redundancy etc).
None of this will change unless instant point to point communications of infinite bandwidth are invented - ironically exactly what you would require to make *both* perfect centralisation and decentralisation a reality.
In the mean time we will stumble on with a mix depending on the job, just as we have done for the last 20+ years.
Just in case the article writer (and the media) hadn't noticed, there are plenty of Muslims in the west too. Come to that most of the East is full of Chinese people, who on the whole are about as Muslim as a a beer flavour sausage wrapped in bacon.
I just upped the profit forecast for my spyware removal service startup.by 300%.
Some of the comments are worth a read:
The iPOD is ALREADY dead, in case you haven't noticed the Zune is CHEAPER, has WAY MORE FEATURES, and has WIRELESS.
Now, you would think that with a zillion dollars in he bank, Microsoft could afford some lessons in appropriate capitalisation and sublty for it's astroturfers.
If you are writing from scratch you lose no control as you can dual, triple or whatever license your own code as you see fit.
If I sit down and from scratch write a kernel I can release it under the GPL v2, v3, v8 and seventeen differrent closed licenses with no problems at all other than going mad from reading all of the legal junk that's required to define each one.
It would only impact on me if I decided to use someone else's work as the basis for mine, or as part of mine, and then I would either have to comply with their license or do the work myself. Doesn't seem that hard to me.
Most of the people who I know who use Macs were recommended them (and recommend them to others) because they want things to be easy and simple.
This *could* be an ideal market for AOL, I agree, but it's hardly tech savvy.
FWIW generally my experience is that the market is split into approximately four parts -
Those that want an easy life (running Macs)
Those that want complete control (running Linux)
Those that don't know what the options are (running Windows)
Those that have specific software needs (running any of the above).
The number of people in category one who could be described as tech savvy is not really all that high. You don't need to know a lot about the insides of a computer to decide that this one doesn't need much work to make it do what you want.
Group moderation like Slashdot -Pro, very hands off (once past a critical mass of users). -Con, promotes group think.
Wikipedia style moderation -Pro, very hands off (once past a larger critical mass of users). -Con, promotes group think.
Direct moderation (approval of everything) -Pro, very accurate. -Con, very time consuming.
Retroactive moderation (normal form style - post first delete spam later) -Pro, very accurate. -Con, very time consuming and crap still shows up until it's dealt with.
I have never seen a working system that was not based on one of these principles. Things that have failed:
Anything with no moderation at all. Look at usenet. These systems are only sucessful if combined with user filtering - one prospective area might be a system with very good user filtering, but then you shift the burden from the admin to the users and why should they bother when there are people willing to do the work for them?
To give you an idea here is a small graph of spam activity. It took 5 days for comment spammers to find an open site and start abusing it, and once they find something that has worked once they just dont stop. And that's even before you consider the malicious idiots who aren't exactly spammers but just twist and distort and abuse other posters - how do you deal with them exactly?
I know four people here who are going to buy a Wii. Assuming that everyone else in the UK knows 4 people who are going to buy a Wii that makes 240 million sales in the first week alone just for the UK via simple mathematical extrapolation. Can't argue with the numbers!
In keeping with your analogy of the operating system... If nobody wants to support the guy who, instead of just improving upon existing user interface conventions, wants to radically change the way we use computers, he might have a hard time getting funded.
And so he should. The reward is probably limited and the risk is enourmous, plus if fundamental changes are discovered then it's better for everyone if it's in the public domain.
This kind of thing should be done via university/academic funding or public support for innovations (by buying basic research and putting it into the public domain). It's one area where your tax dollars, pounds, yen or heshibean half dong would actually have a beneficial effect on the economy and everyone's quality of life.
Quite often the best business ideas (as in, the basis for a business that makes money) are evolutionary, not revolutionary. It's a worthy goal to take the state of the art and add something that just makes it better.
Think how much Linux is benefiting from things like desktop interface improvements - it's not cutting edge amazing ideas, but it does have value. The same thing applies in business.
Really the right place for basic research is in the public domain where the stakes are high and the rewards few and far between. It makes the search for groundbreaking ideas more efficient because people can trade information with no fear or losing out on millions.
This also means that the basic research is then available to businesses who can add *their* value in turning it into something usable for the rest of us... along with another bunch of businesses ensuring that competition brings it's benefits to bear. To look back at the Linux analogy, this is essentially how we are seeing the Open Source model turn out high quality at low cost - the research is all public, and the refinements to make it accessable are driven by people who want to sell it.
The BBC runs a lot of their system (including the weather graphics) on Linux I'd say that the answer is yes. The more important question is how hard is it for me to do it.
The fact that tools can be used to put up insecure sites is not exactly a failing of the tool. The tool will have had a spec (even an informal spec) - which may have been "put sites up fast and let users sort out the security".
It's only a failure of the tool, or the developer of the tool, if the tool is marked as being a one step solution. Of course a lot are, there is no shortage of snake oil salesmen, and in that case they take 100% of the blame. However most rapid deployment tools contain a clear disclaimer of what it does or doesnt do and a guide to helping you with the rest of the steps.
When those things exist the fault is with the user and not with the tool - elitism aside. It's like using a hammer to kill a man (despite the do not kill people with this hammer label and 100 page guide to not killing people with hammers - now with pictures!) and blaming people killed with hammers on the hammer designer.
And Tesco took £1.1bn in PROFIT.
That has them at around $4bn US (and then some, because the latter half with Christmas is usually far more profitable than the first half) profit per year compared to $2.5bn approx for Microsoft. They aren't going to have to bow to pressure.
Walmart (who do compete in the UK after buying ASDA) were past $10bn in 2005 by comparison.
Just because it's common doesn't mean it's right. Ideally applications should leak no information at all, particuarly when they are used as part of anonymous browsing toolchains (as Firefox often is when combined with Tor).
Not yet. For what it's worth since it seems to be related to tabs, which are part of the UI, browsers that use Gecko may not all be affected. Equally browsers that use khtml/webkit won't all be immune just because Konqueror is.