Comment Parents Beware (Score 5, Informative) 463
See here: Serious Security Flaw In The Kindle Fire
Plenty of folks are quite concerned about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations are being negotiated in secret. This is a treaty that (from the documents that have leaked so far) is quite troubling. It likely will effectively require various countries, including the US, to update copyright laws in a draconian manner. Furthermore, the negotiators have met with entertainment industry representatives multiple times, and there are indications that those representatives have contributed language and ideas to the treaty. But, the public? The folks actually impacted by all of this? We've been kept in the dark, despite repeated requests for more information.
When the Obama administration took over, there was a public stance that this administration was going to be more transparent -- especially with regards to things like Freedom of Information Act requests. The nonprofit group Knowledge Ecology International took that to heart and filed an FOIA request to get more info on ACTA. The US Trade Representative's Office responded denying the request, saying that the information was "classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958." This is a treaty about changing copyright law, not sending missiles somewhere. To claim that it's a national security matter is just downright scary. As KEI points out, the text of the documents requested have been available to tons of people, including more than 30 governments around the world and lobbyists from the entertainment industry, pharma industry and publishing industry.
But when the public asks for them, we're told they're state secrets?
Apple claims 10 hours of battery life for the MBP13 when running OS X, and Anand hit pretty close to that mark when testing it out with his light web browsing test. Now, we’ve shown before that OS X is more optimized for mobile power consumption than all versions of Windows, so going into this test the expectations were a fair bit lower.
And for good reason; the MBP13 (running Windows 7) showed fairly similar battery life to some of the older Core 2-based systems. With it’s 63.5 Wh lithium polymer battery, the MBP hits 5.5 hours on our ideal-case battery test, and exactly 5 hours on the web browsing test. While this is decent for the average Core 2 notebook, it’s pretty woeful compared to the OS X battery life of the MBP. If you have no reason to run Windows (program compatibility, gaming, etc) you’re better off in OS X just so that you can get about double the battery life.
The fact is, any SSD worth anything should work perfectly fine without trim, and if you need trim to get it back to good performance, you should just ditch the SSD entirely. The whole "SSD's need TRIM" support was a bedtime story for gullible morons. The same morons who also bought the "SSD's need big IO and natural alignment" story that came out a couple of years before that. The fact is, SSD's had seriously buggy garbage collection. TRIM was a workaround for an SSD firmware bug, nothing less, and most definitely nothing more. Yes, yes, it can make a difference, but it's not at all the magical fairy dust that people have claimed it was. The real solution was always to just fix the performance bugs in the bad GC that SSD's did.
Apple's solution to the whole TRIM problem was to not use SSD's with badly implemented garbage collection in their computers in the first place.
Meh. What does the guy who created Linux know about computers.
Windows 7 will prove more secure than OS X Snow Leopard this year, in part because it doesn't have Java and Flash enabled by default... When asked what he thought would make the safest OS and browser combo, he opted for Chrome or IE8 on Windows 7, with no Flash installed, although "there probably isn't enough difference between the browsers to get worked up about."
For my money, the juiciest quote from the interview was "The main thing is not to install Flash!"
Since Pwn2Own allows hackers to attack any plugin installed on the OS by default, Microsoft had an advantage until now.
The Alto was first conceptualized in 1972 in a memo written by Butler Lampson, inspired by the On-Line System (NLS) developed by Douglas Engelbart at SRI, and was designed primarily by Chuck Thacker.
Going back farther, NLS was inspired by work done by Ivan Sutherland who created a program called Sketchpad as his Ph.D thesis.
Sketchpad:
is considered to be the ancestor of modern computer-aided drafting (CAD) programs as well as a major breakthrough in the development of computer graphics in general. For example, the Graphic User Interface was derived from the Sketchpad as well as modern object oriented programming. Ivan Sutherland demonstrated with it that computer graphics could be used for both artistic and technical purposes in addition to showing a novel method of human-computer interaction.
Some video of Sketchpad in action is available online. (Jump to the four minute mark.)
Going back still farther, Everyone I've mentioned points back to an article by Vannevar Bush published in 1945 describing an imaginary personal computer called the Memex as a huge inspiration.
The Memex (a portmanteau of "memory" and "index", like Rolodex an earlier index portmanteau common at the time) is the name given by Vannevar Bush to the theoretical proto-hypertext computer system he proposed in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think. The memex is a device in which an individual compresses and stores all of their books, records, and communications which is then mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. A document can be given a simple numerical code that allows the user to access it after dialing the number combination. Documents are also able to be edited in real-time. This process makes annotation fast and simple. The memex is an enlarged intimate supplement to one's memory.
To sum things up...
Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad was inspired by Vannevar Bush's idea of the Memex.
Douglas Engelbart at SRI was inspired by Sutherland's Sketchpad when he created NLS.
Xerox was inspired by NLS when they created Alto.
Apple was inspired by Alto when they created Lisa and Macintosh.
None of these was a direct copy of the other. Learn some history, and STAY OFF MY LAWN!
(BTW - Neither Alto nor Macintosh were written in an object oriented programming language.)
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. -- Jerome Klapka Jerome