This isn't a follow-up in that there's more news on this issue specifically; it's just that another article (Graeme Wood, The Atlantic) regarding prisoners wearing tracking devices as opposed to being stuck in prisons reminded me of what I had written about earlier with regard to Apple monitoring people's voices, faces, distances from devices, and heartbeats. I feel like Apple and its iPhones and iPods (of course, with a lot of the other cool features disabled but with the scary monitoring features enabled) would be the prime candidate for this kind of thing; if they detect that the person has moved too far away from the device, they could immediately alert the police (also, this would work if they detect a different face, voice, or heartbeat than the criminal in question). Heh, heh.
Tuesday, 31 August 2010
Monday, 30 August 2010
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| Main Screen |
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Saturday, 28 August 2010
This is not a typical review for this blog, as it is a review of a specific application (rather than of a desktop environment or operating system). However, I figured I should publish this anyway, as Blogilo is a desktop blogging application for KDE (though it works in GNOME as well, provided the Qt libraries are present).
I was going to write and publish this entire review from Blogilo. It seems nice enough, and it has many rich text features present in Blogger's online client. However, it doesn't yet have support for Blogger labels. Most importantly, however, it refused to publish this post to this blog (or, more accurately, it crashed when trying to do so). Hence, while Blogilo looks like a very promising project, I cannot as yet recommend it for actual publishing.
On a slightly related note, this blog now has a Facebook fan page! The Facebook box is on the sidebar (and a few things have been rearranged). If you enjoy the content of this blog, I would greatly appreciate it if you "Liked" this page on Facebook or subscribed to the RSS feed (or subscribed by email). Thank you!
(UPDATE: I have submitted this blog to a few indexing sites like Technorati. I am simply republishing this post to complete the indexing process. The Technorati code for this blog post is ZRH2VH7EDPKM.)
I was going to write and publish this entire review from Blogilo. It seems nice enough, and it has many rich text features present in Blogger's online client. However, it doesn't yet have support for Blogger labels. Most importantly, however, it refused to publish this post to this blog (or, more accurately, it crashed when trying to do so). Hence, while Blogilo looks like a very promising project, I cannot as yet recommend it for actual publishing.
On a slightly related note, this blog now has a Facebook fan page! The Facebook box is on the sidebar (and a few things have been rearranged). If you enjoy the content of this blog, I would greatly appreciate it if you "Liked" this page on Facebook or subscribed to the RSS feed (or subscribed by email). Thank you!
(UPDATE: I have submitted this blog to a few indexing sites like Technorati. I am simply republishing this post to complete the indexing process. The Technorati code for this blog post is ZRH2VH7EDPKM.)
You're probably thinking, "No it doesn't! That's ridiculous!"
It is ridiculous, but it might come true soon.
I was going through some news articles when I came across an article in the EFF linking to this gem of a patent filing. Apple, in a move to counter the government's new rules permitting the jailbreaking of phones for non-copyright infringing purposes (among other things), still wants essentially total control over the products they sell to consumers. This patent basically details all of the ways that they plan to catch unauthorized users from using the product and unauthorized software (e.g. copied music) from getting onto the product. It includes ways of identifying unauthorized users or usage such as proximity sensors, voice recognition, facial recognition, and heartbeat recognition. WHAT?
I can use other people as cover for the proximity sensors. I can change my voice/tone to fool the voice recognition. I can even wear masks to avoid facial recognition. But how am I supposed to mess with my heartbeat? The worst part in that is that Apple isn't using the heartbeat sensor to detect changes in a person's heartbeat (that could quickly turn for the worse); it's using those sensors solely to prevent people from using Apple products in ways that Apple doesn't like.
People, please vote with your wallets and stay away from Apple products! Apple seems to have no reservations about turning such data over to the US government, and with the US government (initiated by the MPAA, RIAA, and other such organizations and companies) looking to implement even more draconian restrictions on users' technology and files, the consumer is being demonized here. If people continue to buy Apple products, Apple will then have enough money to make new iPhones and iPods that are able to detect users' heartbeats (among other things); if you also think that this is ridiculous and somewhat creepy, stay away from Apple!
It is ridiculous, but it might come true soon.
I was going through some news articles when I came across an article in the EFF linking to this gem of a patent filing. Apple, in a move to counter the government's new rules permitting the jailbreaking of phones for non-copyright infringing purposes (among other things), still wants essentially total control over the products they sell to consumers. This patent basically details all of the ways that they plan to catch unauthorized users from using the product and unauthorized software (e.g. copied music) from getting onto the product. It includes ways of identifying unauthorized users or usage such as proximity sensors, voice recognition, facial recognition, and heartbeat recognition. WHAT?
I can use other people as cover for the proximity sensors. I can change my voice/tone to fool the voice recognition. I can even wear masks to avoid facial recognition. But how am I supposed to mess with my heartbeat? The worst part in that is that Apple isn't using the heartbeat sensor to detect changes in a person's heartbeat (that could quickly turn for the worse); it's using those sensors solely to prevent people from using Apple products in ways that Apple doesn't like.
People, please vote with your wallets and stay away from Apple products! Apple seems to have no reservations about turning such data over to the US government, and with the US government (initiated by the MPAA, RIAA, and other such organizations and companies) looking to implement even more draconian restrictions on users' technology and files, the consumer is being demonized here. If people continue to buy Apple products, Apple will then have enough money to make new iPhones and iPods that are able to detect users' heartbeats (among other things); if you also think that this is ridiculous and somewhat creepy, stay away from Apple!
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| The Desktop with some Notifications |
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Friday, 27 August 2010
Monday, 23 August 2010
In anticipation of my new laptop, I decided to test 5 major KDE distributions to see which one could work best on my laptop. As it happens, I ended up testing all of these on my old Sony VAIO desktop and installed Linux Mint 9 GNOME on my laptop. Go figure.
Each of these distributions aims to provide a hospitable and workable environment for the new user/Windows migrant. As such, there are a few features I expect to see included out-of-the-box. One of these is Firefox. A lot of implementations of KDE provide Konqueror instead of Firefox; while Konqueror may be faster and doubles as an excellent file manager, in terms of extensibility, ability to handle pretty much any webpage, and name recognition, Konqueror doesn't come close to Firefox. Along with this, I expect to see proprietary codecs included out-of-the-box. The story is similar for KOffice versus OpenOffice.org, so I also expect to see OpenOffice.org present and integrated nicely with KDE. I also want to see good hardware support (as tested by checking for support of my Logitech Quickcam Communicate STX USB webcam) out-of-the-box. The distribution shouldn't be too sluggish in live mode (but before that, it should have a live mode so that the user can try the distribution out first before taking the shot in the dark that is the installation process). In essence, the distribution should have Firefox (well-integrated), OpenOffice.org (well-integrated), hardware support (as per my webcam), and a reasonably fast live mode.
Although the newest version of KDE is 4.5, all of these distributions come with 4.4, which isn't a whole lot worse as far as I know. The distributions are openSUSE 11.3 (live CD), PCLinuxOS 2010.07, Sabayon 5.3, Pardus 2009.2, and PC-BSD 8.1 (live CD) along with a mystery contender that shall be revealed at the end of this post. Many of these distributions implement KDE specifically to better serve the new user, as many of these distributions are based on other distributions that are notoriously hard to work with.
As I was running low on blank CDs and DVDs at this time, I decided to try to put each of these distributions on my USB stick as a live USB. Only Sabayon and PCLinuxOS cooperated, so I decided then to test all of these distributions in VirtualBox. All of the impressions I have written are from these tests in VirtualBox; Sabayon and PCLinuxOS's performances as live USBs have not crept into this post (I hope).
With these things in mind, follow the jump to see how each contender fared. (NOTE: There are a lot of pictures after the jump, so your browser will probably slow down a bit. Please continue reading, but keep this in mind.)
Read more »
Each of these distributions aims to provide a hospitable and workable environment for the new user/Windows migrant. As such, there are a few features I expect to see included out-of-the-box. One of these is Firefox. A lot of implementations of KDE provide Konqueror instead of Firefox; while Konqueror may be faster and doubles as an excellent file manager, in terms of extensibility, ability to handle pretty much any webpage, and name recognition, Konqueror doesn't come close to Firefox. Along with this, I expect to see proprietary codecs included out-of-the-box. The story is similar for KOffice versus OpenOffice.org, so I also expect to see OpenOffice.org present and integrated nicely with KDE. I also want to see good hardware support (as tested by checking for support of my Logitech Quickcam Communicate STX USB webcam) out-of-the-box. The distribution shouldn't be too sluggish in live mode (but before that, it should have a live mode so that the user can try the distribution out first before taking the shot in the dark that is the installation process). In essence, the distribution should have Firefox (well-integrated), OpenOffice.org (well-integrated), hardware support (as per my webcam), and a reasonably fast live mode.
Although the newest version of KDE is 4.5, all of these distributions come with 4.4, which isn't a whole lot worse as far as I know. The distributions are openSUSE 11.3 (live CD), PCLinuxOS 2010.07, Sabayon 5.3, Pardus 2009.2, and PC-BSD 8.1 (live CD) along with a mystery contender that shall be revealed at the end of this post. Many of these distributions implement KDE specifically to better serve the new user, as many of these distributions are based on other distributions that are notoriously hard to work with.
As I was running low on blank CDs and DVDs at this time, I decided to try to put each of these distributions on my USB stick as a live USB. Only Sabayon and PCLinuxOS cooperated, so I decided then to test all of these distributions in VirtualBox. All of the impressions I have written are from these tests in VirtualBox; Sabayon and PCLinuxOS's performances as live USBs have not crept into this post (I hope).
With these things in mind, follow the jump to see how each contender fared. (NOTE: There are a lot of pictures after the jump, so your browser will probably slow down a bit. Please continue reading, but keep this in mind.)
Read more »
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