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Transportation

Submission + - Steve Jobs' Yacht Impounded in Amsterdam (cnn.com)

SchrodingerZ writes: "The Venus, Steve Jobs' custom-made mega yacht, (valued at 137.5 million dollars), has been impounded in Amsterdam. Philippe Starck, the boat's main designer, had The Venus impounded by debt collectors, after supposedly Starck and his company, Ubik, were paid only 6 million of the 9-million-euro commission. Roelant Klaassen, a lawyer for Ubik, released in a statement that 'These guys [Jobs and Starck] trusted each other, so there wasn't a very detailed contract.' 'The Venus is a floating ode to both Jobs and Starck's minimalist aesthetic. Made entirely out of aluminum, with 40-foot-long floor-to-ceiling windows lining the passenger compartment and seven 27-inch iMacs making up the command center.' The ship was unofficially unveiled in late October, a year after Jobs' death. It now sits dormant in the Port of Amsterdam, until the payment dispute is resolved."
Security

Submission + - How do YOU establish a secure computing environment? 3

sneakyimp writes: We've seen increasingly creative ways for bad guys to compromise your system like infected pen drives, computers preloaded with malware, mobile phone apps with malware, and a $300 app that can sniff out your encryption keys.
On top of these obvious risks, there are lingering questions about the integrity of common operating systems and cloud computing services. Do Windows, OSX, and linux have security holes? Does Windows supply a backdoor for the U.S. or other governments? Should you really trust your linux multiverse repository? Do Google and Apple data mine your private mobile phone data for private information? Does Ubuntu's sharing of my data with Amazon compromise my privacy? Can the U.S. Government seize your cloud data without a warrant? Can McAfee or Kaspersky really be trusted?
Naturally, the question arises of how to establish and maintain an ironclad workstation or laptop for the purpose of handling sensitive information or doing security research. DARPA has approached the problem by awarding a $21.4M contract to Invincea to create a secure version of Android. What should we do if we don't have $21.4M USD? Is it safe to buy a PC from any manufacturer? Is it even safe to buy individual computer components and assemble one's own machine? Or might the MOBO firmware be compromised?
What steps can one take to insure a truly secure computing environment? Is this even possible? Can anyone recommend a through checklist or suggest best practices?
Games

Submission + - Steam for Linux is now an open beta (steamcommunity.com)

jotaass writes: In news that are guaranteed to make the Linux gaming community (in particular, but not exclusively) excited, Valve has just announced that
the Steam for Linux client Beta is now open to the public. A .deb package is available here. Interesting as well, they are using an empy GitHub repository solely as an issue tracker, open for anyone to submit, edit and track bugs, with no actual code in the repo.

Comment Re:in other news from 1983 (Score 1) 92

I found Full Spectrum Warrior to be more like a puzzle game. Each level was designed with specific challenges. Move to cover here, flank insurgent there and so on. As you said, a single mistake could be devastating, but unlike sokoban you can recover. Albeit by trudging back to the healing point. I did like that feature, but when I started thinking of the game in that fashion, it sort of lost its appeal.

Maybe the game was more dynamic than that, but for some reason it stopped being interesting for me and I moved on to other games.

Comment Re:Really? (Score 1) 333

Just as a gag, based on a string of comments made on an earlier date about Google vs. Bing, I typed "2^2^2^2" into Google, Bing, Wolfram|Alpha, and Yahoo. Google, Wolfram|Alpha, and Yahoo all provided the correct answer of 65536 (2^(2^(2^2))), while Bing provides 256 (((2^2)^2)^2). That alone makes Bing's search results less reliable than the others, in my opinion.

Comment Re:Unconstitutional (Score -1, Troll) 327

Ayn Rand fans should be horrified at the outcome here. Here is a businessman who is engaging in pure, free capitalism. Takes a lower quality product and sells it as a higher quality product. The government has no business getting involved in this man's pursuit of making a profit. If they don't like what he has to sell, they can take their business to another capitalist who offers better products and better service. Let the market sort itself out!

Comment Re:Clarity? (Score 0, Redundant) 364

If I want to walk a windows user through changing the desktop resolution, it's easy. Good luck doing those in linux.

ssh -X into the machine, and run:

xdpyinfo | grep dimensions

I have no idea why "a low end non power user" would know or care what their display resolution is. Its like complaining that linux is not ready for the desktop because a sterotypical grannie would have a hard time setting up a hard-realtime CNC controller. Who cares?

I don't print much. Didn't even own a printer from 1995 thru 2009. Based on my recent experiences, seems that changing the default printer is much simpler than understanding the concept of even having a default printer, or the concept of being able to print to multiple printers.

Comment Re:This seems abrupt (Score 1) 856

'Are you going to assume I'm ignorant of how Windows works, or can we have a reasonable discussion? '

Of course I'm going to assume you are ignorant of how windows works. You and everyone else I encounter.

Perhaps the tone of my response was a bit mocking and biting but turnabout is fair play and you invited it.

Of course, none of that changes that my post was accurate.

Education

Submission + - One-Laptop-Per-Child application development

An anonymous reader writes: This OLPC (One-Laptop-Per-Child) tutorial teaches you how to develop Python activities for the XO laptop. It covers the ins and outs of Sugar (the XO user interface, or UI) and the details behind activity development. You will also learn about Python programming, Sugar application program interfaces (APIs) for Python, and platform emulation with QEMU. Learn OLPC application development and help the worlds children.
The Internet

Submission + - Wikipedia, Relevance and Zealotry (an article) 2

gmezero writes: "It's been over two years now since I finally became so fed up with Wikipedia that I finally had to start editing, and from then on I have become embroiled in an ongoing love hate relationship with the site. Actually, in hind-sight, it's probably less of a hate the site issue, and more of a hate the clueless and opinionated, so called WikiCops, that more often than not detract from content quality.

One of my chief complaints is the abuse of the issue of relevance. This one ranks up there at the same levels of disgust as people who have received a college degree and actually think they are now an authority on a subject when they've never even worked in the field.

What has brought me to this article though is first hand experience with Wikipedia amnesia. The notion that if a dozen people who are zealots on a given subject matter decide that since they have not heard of something, then it must not be relevant to the world.

This is fast becoming a problem for Internet only history from the early 1990's for one as nearly all of the websites that might be used to reference events, have in many cases long disappeared from existence before 1996, when Archive.org initially started it's woefully incomplete collection of websites online at the time. So unless it managed to transfer over to the print world, or rise to a high level of visibility in the UseNet, a sole voice trying to preserve an important element of history becomes irrelevant in the eyes of the WikiCop.

I have also noticed that as Internet users age, they're usage patterns change as well. When people are younger they tend to be more active in Social Media projects. As they get older, they gravitate back to a few communities that have persisted with them, or drop back into a more passive, consumption mode due to the burdens of everyday life. This has resulted in a large number of Internet users who; A) have no familiarity with the early web because they either weren't an early adopter or aren't old enough to know; or B) have moved on in their life and are not aware that their personal experiences and knowledge have value to the collective of society as a whole.

My fights within the video game related pages of Wikipedia if nothing else have given me strong cause to question the quality and validity of all of the material on the site.

One personal case in point is the very page that brought me in to the wiki, and as I write this, continues to be a battle ground: "Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar". In April of 2005 I added to items to this page. I significant piece of historical trivia, and links to unofficial textfile based maps of the game that were distributed when the game was officially released.

I eventually gave up the fight over the trivia as it wore me down, and someone eventually promised to make a trivia specific page to hold the data. Of course since most WikiCops are about 12 years old from best I can tell, none of them understand the relevancy of trivia, and I finally caved. It disgusts me, but there it is.

The second item, and more contentious in my mind though is the t-files links.

Unfortunately I have a personal relationship with the content in the files, which weakens my case and brings me back to the "relevance" issue.

In the early to mid 1980's I was an Apple // software pirate, and I had reached a level of distribution access where I was frequently second in line in the food chain of distribution (the first being the cracker or their friend that made the first upload to the team's home transfer site). It was during this time that I collected a final version of Ultima IV before its commercial release. I had been a long fan of the Ultima series having purchased II and III and I had IV on pre-order at the time because I just couldn't resist the cloth maps.

Anyways, as I had already authored quite a few game maps by that point for many of the early Infocom titles, I took it upon myself to make a complete map of the overworld of Ultima IV so I could release it in time for the game's commercial release. I mapped while awake, and distributed U4 while I was asleep, and somehow squeezed high-school in between the hours. And then, at the allotted hour I bundled up the maps and began uploading them at the top of the distribution chains... By the sixth site I called, the maps had already started cross-propagating, and my work was done. Not but a year later I myself dropped out of the scene, but from then on I enjoyed meeting people across the country (other Apple gamers, as well as IBM and C64 players) who not only had downloaded my maps, but also, by design, had printed them out and hung them on their wall. Even I was surprised at how many people in the oddest of places seemed to have seen the files.

So here we are going into the later half of the 2007, and how many of you, my dear reader were involved in the Apple gaming community in the 80's? Let's be honest... statistically? Not that many of you. How many of you were more than casually involved in software piracy in the 80's? Probably even less that the previous number. And how many of you kept the text files you downloaded and not only saved them, but actively format/platform shifted it over the years so as not to loose them? Let's guess, about 10 of you right?... or wait, that's 11 if you count me.

Currently Jason Scott's TextFiles archive has grown to become the definitive source for files like this though, so am I to think that since he doesn't have a copy of my maps on his site that somehow they weren't relevant? Hardly, my personal collection of textiles from those days totals over 1500 at my best estimate, and I know from a cursory scan that I have many files that Jason doesn't. I'm going to bet that someone else out there also has a large collection that varies from both of ours as well, but Jason's is the only one collated an online, so does that make it the only valid source? Why haven't I sent mine to Jason? Well, I would like to clean up the file naming, and purge any duplicates first... and I'm to busy fighting with WikiCops on Wikipedia to actually get that done.

So my dilemma. The Ultima IV world maps I created were highly relevant to a specific demographic of gamers in the late 1980's and they are still useful to this very day to players of the game, so since it was highly unlikely anyone else was going to do it, I took it upon myself to host the files and link them into the article where they persisted for two years, unchallenged through over 100 edits until an anonymous IP user decided to clip them from the page. After which the WikiCop Xihr decided that it could not be re-added to the page as he decided it was linkspam.

There is no other host for this 20 year old text file.
The wiki links go directly to the original un-edited files.
There are no links on the pages.
There are no ads on the pages.
There is not even links to the other files available from each file.
The site the files are hosted on is not a commercial site.

So, how does one resolve this situation. Do I sit back and concede to this WikiCop? Do I do the more distasteful thing in my mind of contriving another host for the files and ask a friend to reinstate the links to the new host (as is a very frequent activity in Wikipedia).

What would you do? The sad part is that I have many times found myself at the reading pages pages that I would love to contribute to as an authority or expert on the subject matter but due to the behavior of clueless high-school and college kids, or worse yet the guy who bitches about girls with sharp knees needing a sandwich... and my contribution ends up becoming a daily fight of education for those that care to listen that just wears me down. If I go away for a couple of months, I have to start back over because the burnout rate of people with a clue that care is so high they've eventually quit the site in disgust themselves.

I'm becoming of the mind as many others around me have already stated that Wikipedia is itself the most destructive and least relevant utilities for knowledge accumulation, and that truly makes me sad, because it really could be an invaluable resource in all matters.

Should I bother, or just brush my hands and walk away?"

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