The only good thing of M$ is, that it loads really fast.
After you install MS Office, Windows loads big portions of it during Windows boot. So your initial boot takes longer, but then your Office apps launch quickly. This tradeoff makes sense for desktop systems with large amounts of RAM, which is all of them these days. But it kind of sucks for laptops, which are booted more often than desktops, and not always to run Office.
I have the Open Office Quickstart Applet running in my GNOME desktop, and this does the same trick for OO.o; large portions of OO.o are preloaded for me. On my laptop, I don't run that. I like having the choice.
Palm might be counting on third-party software to cover their Mac users, or counting on iSync. In this case, they blew it big-time by not making that clear.
Or, Palm could have decided that they just don't need any Mac customers, and didn't give much thought to how their existing Mac customers would feel about it. This would be amazingly stupid.
I don't see any evidence that the second one is true; I'm sure it's the first one. Palm has been pretty good in the past about supporting their Mac customers; why would they suddenly abandon them, just when they are trying to win mindshare for their new Cobalt platform?
Hmmm, I just checked. Missing Sync costs $40. I'm starting to think "amazingly stupid" again.
Thinking about this some more, Apple customers are unlikely to embrace PocketPC. Maybe Palm figures those guys will buy Palm PDAs even if Palm doesn't do anything to support them. That's playing with fire, if true. If you drive customers away, it's hard to get them back.
What Palm ought to do is make sure that Apple has all the data they need to make iSync just work out of the box with all new Palm PDAs. This ought to just mean keeping Apple up to date with some information. Easy, inexpensive. And they ought to brag to all their Mac-using customers that they are doing it!
And if Palm wants to walk away from their Mac desktop application, they should either gift it to Apple, or open-source it, not just throw it in the bin.
The real problem is that there simply is NO standardized user-interface across applications.
Actually, there is. The topic of discussion is GNOME, and GNOME has a standard for how apps are supposed to work.
For example, you can fire up a GNOME program you've never used before in your life and Ctrl+X will cut, Ctrl+C will copy, and Ctrl+V will paste. I'm not sure if the GNOME version of Vim does, by default, but a) you could customize Vim, if you are a Vim user, and b) there are many other editors for GNOME, and they will follow the standard.
So, just run GNOME apps, and you'll be happy. (Or, choose KDE and run KDE apps only. They are standardized too.)
By the way, the reason Engines of Creation rocks so hard is because it's all about existance proofs. K. Eric Drexler claims that we will be able to build little machines to do this or that, and then he shows how there are already bacteria, or viruses or something in nature that does something similar.
For example, he describes a nanocomputer with moving parts. There's no reason to think that nanocomputers will always use moving parts, but there aren't any electronic or quantum computing devices in nature, while there are lots of microscopic things with moving parts.
I could easily create a dirty bomb with your few kilograms and nuke New York (hmm...)
You could also take a bunch of asbestos (from an old building, say), and make a dirty asbestos bomb. Both will really suck for the people who breathe near where they went off. How much worse would the nuclear waste be compared to the asbestos? How do you know -- have you really compared them?
Neither one can kill the whole city. A "dirty nuclear bomb" does have the word "nuclear" in it, so it will be scarier, though.
the waste will still be there when your grandchildren walk this earth
The nuclear waste that will last for millions of years is not very radioactive. The more radioactive it is, the shorter the half-life, and if it will last millions of years the half-life can't be all that short.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I thought diamonds were subject to cracking just like other materials. If you make a diamond-tipped saw, the diamond can flake off, especially when you cut really hard things, thus giving you little sharp chips of diamond.
Yes, if you take a nail and try to scratch a diamond-tipped chisel, you will scratch the nail if anything. But if you start pounding on the chisel with a hammer, are you certain that the diamond will perfectly stay intact? I'm not.
I just did a google search on "diamond-tipped saw" and I found a place that sells them. They claim that the diamond-tipped saw blades last 100 times as long as some other blades... they don't claim they last forever.
Flying to Australia is cheap because the aircraft you fly on was a massive, incredibly expensive engineering project.
Perhaps so. Of course, what I actually said was that once we have cheap access to space we can "try stuff" in space.
But also of course, we can use incremental development (build and test, then build and test some more) to get our reusable spacecraft. Yes it requires engineering; I never said otherwise.
The important difference between a Boeing 747 and a Space Shuttle is that it takes an army to overhaul the Shuttle after each flight, whereas the 747 can be maintained by a few people and spend most of its time flying.
The blunt fact is nobody is working on re-useable spacecraft
Perhaps so. The blunt fact is NASA will not build the spacecraft we need, and our only hope is private industry.
The existing industry is trying to crawl before it tries to walk, and walk before it tries to run. In other words, they aren't making bold promises about cheap access to orbit -- yet.
It's a closer step from an X-Prize winner to a real spacecraft, than it is from a Shuttle to a real spacecraft.
steveha
Re:Inevitable Evolution of Explosive Growth
on
The Law of Disassembly
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The concept of grey goo is a nanite that can eat anything and build copies of itself. I'm not too worried about that.
But it would be bad enough if someone designed a nanite that was very efficient at eating, say, grass and making copies of itself. Call it Nanite.MyDoom.A. Next is Nanite.MyDoom.B, that eats trees. Next...
You know, I'm much more worried about humans designing bad nanites, than about nanites evolving in scary ways. If we design a nanite to make solid-diamond rocket motors by swimming around in a vat full of special chemicals, what are the odds it will suddenly evolve to be able to live outside the vat? Not too scary. (What was K. Eric Drexler's comment? It would be like our cars suddenly evolving to drive themselves and run off of tree sap instead of gasoline.)
But nanites actually designed to live on their own in the wild could be just a mutation or two away from a "cancer" form that runs wild.
I'm actually hoping that some large, responsible organization will release defensive nanites before the ability to make nanites becomes generally available.
Which is more dangerous: a few kilograms of nuclear waste, packed up in (for example) ceramic blocks; or thousands of kilograms of coal smoke, dispersed into the air we breathe? And by the way, how many people get hurt or killed mining coal (and let's be sure to count "black lung")? (People get hurt and killed mining uranium, too, but you don't need anywhere near as much for a power plant, compared with coal.)
Which is more dangerous: a few kilograms of nuclear waste, or a few kilograms of concentrated weird chemical byproducts from heavy industry?
It would be a good idea to really look at the whole cost/benefit analysis for nuclear power vs. other things we have that don't contain the word "nuclear".
Right now we have teen-age kids writing viruses, spyware, and worms--and releasing them into the Internet. Right now I need to run a spam filter on my email, because I get about 20 real emails and 150 spams every day.
Imagine, in the future, teen-age kids creating badly-designed nano-assemblers and turning them loose into the wild. I'm a bit worried about this.
One of the first things we will try to do with assemblers is make medical nanites that make us all live longer. It may turn out that resistance to natural diseases isn't as important as resistance to brand-new designed diseases.
The flawed but interesting novel The Diamond Age pictured cities in the future as pockets of safety, ringed with clouds of defensive nanites that were constantly repulsing attacks by destructive nanites. Poor kids would try to make a little bit of money by running out into the clouds with capture devices, trying to bring back interesting/useful samples of nanites, to sell to researchers. (Breath masks recommended, if you didn't want to die young with nano-scale junk in your lungs.)
That may never happen, but we can already make artificial diamonds for use on tools. Imagine diamond-tipped chisels. Imagine tiny flakes of diamond dust in the air... tiny, sharp flakes of diamond. Could this be a problem in the near future? (Not a rhetorical question; I don't know enough about artificial diamonds, or the properties of diamond dust, to answer it.)
steveha
Re:Long-feedback cycles and good design
on
A Deep Space Primer
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· Score: 4, Interesting
You are absolutely right -- for the current way we do space.
But I look forward to the day when we can develop space hardware the same incremental way we develop other things. When flying into space is as cheap as flying to Australia, we won't have to have massive, incredibly careful engineering projects. We can just try stuff and go with what works.
P.S. Am I naive to think we can go to space as cheaply as going to Australia? No. We can't do it with the Space Shuttle, which requires many man-years of labor to rebuild after each flight. And we can't do it with expendable boosters, which are completely destroyed when you use them. We will need actually reusable spacecraft. I fear that NASA is no longer, as an organziation, able to build them, but someone else will. Go Xcor! Go Armadillo Aerospace! Go... anyone building these things.
steveha
Re:Really? Infamous?
on
Review: KDE 3.2
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· Score: 2, Insightful
What do you care about which language the GNOME guys use to do their thing? If you just want to write GNOME apps, you can use C, C++, Python, or whatever.
One of the major reasons the GNOME guys chose C was to make it as easy as possible to use other languages to write GNOME apps. It's pretty easy to write language bindings for a C API, and much harder for C++. With C, it's easy to know what symbols the linker will see when you export things from your API. With C++, the compiler does "name mangling" and it's much harder to know what the linker will see -- and different C++ compilers do name mangling in different, incompatible ways, so you might have to modify your bindings for each platform you support.
And anyway, I don't buy the whole "C can never do OO" idea. The language doesn't natively have OO idioms, but you can write OO code in C if you want to; it's just not as pretty.
C++: foo.bar(a, b, c) C: FooBar(&foo, a, b, c)
C++: foo1 + foo2 C: FooAdd(&foo1, &foo2)
You can still have a nice, tidy FOO object, with nice tidy operations you can perform on it. That's what OO is about.
I was mostly interested because it's a non-x86 processor, so it should be immune to the most common (x86-specific) attacks.
You may have a point about the reliability. But keep in mind that a Linux-based firewall will just sit there, with Linux and your firewall rules and everything loaded in RAM. And the worst stress on a system is turning it on and off, and a firewall will be on 24/7. And the firewall wouldn't be using the graphics processor at all, so another whole source of problems would be out of the loop.
As I said, I'll probably just end up with a Mini-ITX motherboard. Maybe I'll be lucky and find a Mini-ITX motherboard with a PowerPC chip or something.
Actually, another option would be to buy whatever Linksys product it was that had all the source code released under GPL. But that is probably underpowered, and I don't trust Linksys hardware all that much anyway.
I was thinking that they just wish the hard drive problem would go away; that they can't figure to make money on sales of the hard drive accessory, and at most would break even.
On the other hand, maybe they can mark it up enough to make money. And the part of Microsoft that wants iTunes to fail would want to avoid encouraging people to buy iPods, so that part of MS would argue against a standard FireWire connector.
Speaking of the iPod, I wonder if MS could buy the 4GB tiny drive the mini-iPod uses, and use that for the pluggable hard drive. It might be cheaper in quantity than other hard drives (such as the one in the current XBox).
Wouldn't one of those $30-$40 Linksys/D-Link/Netgear router/switches be a better solution?
As long as they work the way you want, sure. But you can't really customize the way they work. And I consider my firewall to be an important thing, and I would like to build it from source so I can be sure I know what it does. (*cough* Belkin *cough*)
most people realy dont understand what a real modern firewall does
I had in mind a computer with two network ports, which looks at each IP packet and decides whether to let that packet in to the home network. No packet would go on the network without being actively copied from the in port to the home network port.
about calling a linux box a router it can route yes it's ok at it yes but it's latency is horid.
I have a Netgear home firewall/router, and its latency seems fine for my home use. I would like to replace it with something running Linux, that I can tweak. I imagine that the GameCube latency would be pretty similar, unless the networking hardware is horrid somehow. I don't know what kind of CPU is in my Netgear box, nor how much RAM it has, but I have to figure a GameCube would exceed its specs.
Not that it matters; if I can't get two network ports, that's a deal-breaker. I will probably just build something with a Mini-ITX motherboard in it.
This bit about the hard drive might be a "trial balloon". This isn't an official announcement, so MS can still say "we never said we would do that; it was only a rumor." Now they will see how much people care about the hard disk.
If they do release without a hard disk, you will still be able to get one. It will be in an external box. They will probably have a special "storage" port, which should be a FireWire port, because FireWire can provide enough power to run a hard disk (only one cable needed).
If they are smart, they will not make some wacky custom connector; people should be able, for instance, to use their iPod as their XBox2 hard disk, and then take it with them to their friends' homes for gaming. (Even if they make a wacky connector, someone will make a custom cable so you can connect your iPod anyway.)
Initially I thought this was just a wild rumor. But the quotes in the newspaper article, about how most games don't even use the hard disk, were interesting.
The basic idea, to make spamming too expensive to be worth it, will work. But I don't want to have Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. collect the money; the email account owner should set the fee and collect it.
The whitelist uses digital signatures, not easily-forged header fields.
It doesn't really work unless we have a micropayment system that can charge small amounts (five cents) without expensive overhead.
In the discussion attached to that article, one person pointed out that this system could be exploited like this: advertise a job, one that looks like it's really worth applying for. Charge about 20 cents per email to accept resumes. Pocket all the money. It's a perfect small-time fraud scheme: you steal so little, from so many people; who would be motivated enough to check up on whether there was ever really a job to apply for?
I have to say, even without the charging of fees, a whitelist based on digital signatures would be great. You could have a special folder where known-good emails go, and another one for the rest. I'd have my email client play a chime sound when known-good emails arrive, but not the rest.
UserLinux will include Qt, because Debian includes it.
Er, I meant to say "Qt will be available in UserLinux, because Debian includes it." UserLinux will not include Qt; if you want it, you will have to use apt-get to install it.
Bruce has jumped all over the place with his reasoning/rationale.
Usually, when people make claims like this, they provide examples to support their claims. You say that "Anyone who has monitored the actual UL list can see this", so it should be easy for you to provide a few examples.
Here, I'll help. The UserLinux mailing list archives can be found on this web page:
I read through the whole GNOME-KDE debate on the UserLinux mailing list in December, and I say you are wrong. I went back today and re-read every email Bruce Perens wrote in the month of December, and I still say you are wrong.
God, why are people so lazy!
When you are trying to convince people of something, you are expected to provide some sort of evidence to back up your position. If you aren't going to provide any evidence, you can't expect anyone to pay much attention to your bare, unsupported assertions.
Find out for yourself.
I did. You are telling me I'm wrong, but you haven't shown me any examples that support your position.
Juggling? I just broke it down, to make sure you could follow me. I guess you still didn't.
Juggling?
Still I say, WTF?
You seem to have trouble understanding this, but it's very simple. The whole point of basing UserLinux on Debian is to inherit all the wonderful Debian packages. This actually includes all the KDE packages.
Bruce Perens will do nothing against KDE. UserLinux will do nothing against KDE. People who want KDE can use it.
This was true before a customer hired Bruce Perens and it is still true after. Nothing has changed.
Now, Bruce is learning from real commercial companies that KDE/Qt support is mandatory and he's having to distance himself from the craving anti-Qt trolls on his own list.
From the very beginning of the UserLinux project, Bruce Perens has been consistent. UserLinux will use GNOME, but KDE will be available as an option. Now he, through his consulting business, will be helping a customer put KDE on UserLinux. So what? Nothing has changed; he isn't "learning" anything, he already knew this was possible (and has said so from the very beginning).
The sad thing? Bruce missed a valuable opportunity to really work with KDE developers and the broader community by choosing instead to cater to his own bias and that of his sympathetic community of anti-Qt trolls.
And I should believe you when you say these things... why? Bruce Perens has given his reasons, but you say he wants to cater to anti-Qt trolls. Why should I believe you instead of him?
this is supposed to be a unifying representative of the linux community
Huh?
This is supposed to be a business-ready distro. One that will have broad freedom of support contracts (as opposed to vendor lockin with per-machine licensing).
I don't recall seeing Bruce Perens promising to unify the Linux community.
Your other points make little sense. UserLinux will be able to run KDE apps, because Debian can do so. UserLinux will include Qt, because Debian includes it. And I'm glad you and your wife like KDE and think it is more like Windows than GNOME is, but some people prefer GNOME to KDE so that one could be argued either way.
Slashdot Mirror
The only good thing of M$ is, that it loads really fast.
After you install MS Office, Windows loads big portions of it during Windows boot. So your initial boot takes longer, but then your Office apps launch quickly. This tradeoff makes sense for desktop systems with large amounts of RAM, which is all of them these days. But it kind of sucks for laptops, which are booted more often than desktops, and not always to run Office.
I have the Open Office Quickstart Applet running in my GNOME desktop, and this does the same trick for OO.o; large portions of OO.o are preloaded for me. On my laptop, I don't run that. I like having the choice.
steveha
I see several possibilites here.
Palm might be counting on third-party software to cover their Mac users, or counting on iSync. In this case, they blew it big-time by not making that clear.
Or, Palm could have decided that they just don't need any Mac customers, and didn't give much thought to how their existing Mac customers would feel about it. This would be amazingly stupid.
I don't see any evidence that the second one is true; I'm sure it's the first one. Palm has been pretty good in the past about supporting their Mac customers; why would they suddenly abandon them, just when they are trying to win mindshare for their new Cobalt platform?
Hmmm, I just checked. Missing Sync costs $40. I'm starting to think "amazingly stupid" again.
Thinking about this some more, Apple customers are unlikely to embrace PocketPC. Maybe Palm figures those guys will buy Palm PDAs even if Palm doesn't do anything to support them. That's playing with fire, if true. If you drive customers away, it's hard to get them back.
What Palm ought to do is make sure that Apple has all the data they need to make iSync just work out of the box with all new Palm PDAs. This ought to just mean keeping Apple up to date with some information. Easy, inexpensive. And they ought to brag to all their Mac-using customers that they are doing it!
And if Palm wants to walk away from their Mac desktop application, they should either gift it to Apple, or open-source it, not just throw it in the bin.
steveha
The real problem is that there simply is NO standardized user-interface across applications.
Actually, there is. The topic of discussion is GNOME, and GNOME has a standard for how apps are supposed to work.
For example, you can fire up a GNOME program you've never used before in your life and Ctrl+X will cut, Ctrl+C will copy, and Ctrl+V will paste. I'm not sure if the GNOME version of Vim does, by default, but a) you could customize Vim, if you are a Vim user, and b) there are many other editors for GNOME, and they will follow the standard.
So, just run GNOME apps, and you'll be happy. (Or, choose KDE and run KDE apps only. They are standardized too.)
steveha
I do not understand why cut and paste cannot be corrected. If a program is closed, what was just copied from it disappears from the buffer.
a emon/index.html
This falls out from the way X was designed. I agree it's annoying. There is a fix now:
http://members.chello.nl/~h.lai/gnome-clipboard-d
steveha
You don't need to buy Engines of Creation in dead-trees format; you can read it from the web.
http://www.foresight.org/EOC/
Lots of free resources available at foresight.org:
http://www.foresight.org/NanoRev/index.html
By the way, the reason Engines of Creation rocks so hard is because it's all about existance proofs. K. Eric Drexler claims that we will be able to build little machines to do this or that, and then he shows how there are already bacteria, or viruses or something in nature that does something similar.
For example, he describes a nanocomputer with moving parts. There's no reason to think that nanocomputers will always use moving parts, but there aren't any electronic or quantum computing devices in nature, while there are lots of microscopic things with moving parts.
steveha
I could easily create a dirty bomb with your few kilograms and nuke New York (hmm...)
You could also take a bunch of asbestos (from an old building, say), and make a dirty asbestos bomb. Both will really suck for the people who breathe near where they went off. How much worse would the nuclear waste be compared to the asbestos? How do you know -- have you really compared them?
Neither one can kill the whole city. A "dirty nuclear bomb" does have the word "nuclear" in it, so it will be scarier, though.
the waste will still be there when your grandchildren walk this earth
The nuclear waste that will last for millions of years is not very radioactive. The more radioactive it is, the shorter the half-life, and if it will last millions of years the half-life can't be all that short.
steveha
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I thought diamonds were subject to cracking just like other materials. If you make a diamond-tipped saw, the diamond can flake off, especially when you cut really hard things, thus giving you little sharp chips of diamond.
Yes, if you take a nail and try to scratch a diamond-tipped chisel, you will scratch the nail if anything. But if you start pounding on the chisel with a hammer, are you certain that the diamond will perfectly stay intact? I'm not.
I just did a google search on "diamond-tipped saw" and I found a place that sells them. They claim that the diamond-tipped saw blades last 100 times as long as some other blades... they don't claim they last forever.
steveha
Flying to Australia is cheap because the aircraft you fly on was a massive, incredibly expensive engineering project.
Perhaps so. Of course, what I actually said was that once we have cheap access to space we can "try stuff" in space.
But also of course, we can use incremental development (build and test, then build and test some more) to get our reusable spacecraft. Yes it requires engineering; I never said otherwise.
The important difference between a Boeing 747 and a Space Shuttle is that it takes an army to overhaul the Shuttle after each flight, whereas the 747 can be maintained by a few people and spend most of its time flying.
The blunt fact is nobody is working on re-useable spacecraft
Perhaps so. The blunt fact is NASA will not build the spacecraft we need, and our only hope is private industry.
The existing industry is trying to crawl before it tries to walk, and walk before it tries to run. In other words, they aren't making bold promises about cheap access to orbit -- yet.
It's a closer step from an X-Prize winner to a real spacecraft, than it is from a Shuttle to a real spacecraft.
steveha
The concept of grey goo is a nanite that can eat anything and build copies of itself. I'm not too worried about that.
But it would be bad enough if someone designed a nanite that was very efficient at eating, say, grass and making copies of itself. Call it Nanite.MyDoom.A. Next is Nanite.MyDoom.B, that eats trees. Next...
You know, I'm much more worried about humans designing bad nanites, than about nanites evolving in scary ways. If we design a nanite to make solid-diamond rocket motors by swimming around in a vat full of special chemicals, what are the odds it will suddenly evolve to be able to live outside the vat? Not too scary. (What was K. Eric Drexler's comment? It would be like our cars suddenly evolving to drive themselves and run off of tree sap instead of gasoline.)
But nanites actually designed to live on their own in the wild could be just a mutation or two away from a "cancer" form that runs wild.
I'm actually hoping that some large, responsible organization will release defensive nanites before the ability to make nanites becomes generally available.
steveha
Which is more dangerous: a few kilograms of nuclear waste, packed up in (for example) ceramic blocks; or thousands of kilograms of coal smoke, dispersed into the air we breathe? And by the way, how many people get hurt or killed mining coal (and let's be sure to count "black lung")? (People get hurt and killed mining uranium, too, but you don't need anywhere near as much for a power plant, compared with coal.)
Which is more dangerous: a few kilograms of nuclear waste, or a few kilograms of concentrated weird chemical byproducts from heavy industry?
It would be a good idea to really look at the whole cost/benefit analysis for nuclear power vs. other things we have that don't contain the word "nuclear".
steveha
Right now we have teen-age kids writing viruses, spyware, and worms--and releasing them into the Internet. Right now I need to run a spam filter on my email, because I get about 20 real emails and 150 spams every day.
Imagine, in the future, teen-age kids creating badly-designed nano-assemblers and turning them loose into the wild. I'm a bit worried about this.
One of the first things we will try to do with assemblers is make medical nanites that make us all live longer. It may turn out that resistance to natural diseases isn't as important as resistance to brand-new designed diseases.
The flawed but interesting novel The Diamond Age pictured cities in the future as pockets of safety, ringed with clouds of defensive nanites that were constantly repulsing attacks by destructive nanites. Poor kids would try to make a little bit of money by running out into the clouds with capture devices, trying to bring back interesting/useful samples of nanites, to sell to researchers. (Breath masks recommended, if you didn't want to die young with nano-scale junk in your lungs.)
That may never happen, but we can already make artificial diamonds for use on tools. Imagine diamond-tipped chisels. Imagine tiny flakes of diamond dust in the air... tiny, sharp flakes of diamond. Could this be a problem in the near future? (Not a rhetorical question; I don't know enough about artificial diamonds, or the properties of diamond dust, to answer it.)
steveha
You are absolutely right -- for the current way we do space.
But I look forward to the day when we can develop space hardware the same incremental way we develop other things. When flying into space is as cheap as flying to Australia, we won't have to have massive, incredibly careful engineering projects. We can just try stuff and go with what works.
P.S. Am I naive to think we can go to space as cheaply as going to Australia? No. We can't do it with the Space Shuttle, which requires many man-years of labor to rebuild after each flight. And we can't do it with expendable boosters, which are completely destroyed when you use them. We will need actually reusable spacecraft. I fear that NASA is no longer, as an organziation, able to build them, but someone else will. Go Xcor! Go Armadillo Aerospace! Go... anyone building these things.
steveha
What do you care about which language the GNOME guys use to do their thing? If you just want to write GNOME apps, you can use C, C++, Python, or whatever.
One of the major reasons the GNOME guys chose C was to make it as easy as possible to use other languages to write GNOME apps. It's pretty easy to write language bindings for a C API, and much harder for C++. With C, it's easy to know what symbols the linker will see when you export things from your API. With C++, the compiler does "name mangling" and it's much harder to know what the linker will see -- and different C++ compilers do name mangling in different, incompatible ways, so you might have to modify your bindings for each platform you support.
And anyway, I don't buy the whole "C can never do OO" idea. The language doesn't natively have OO idioms, but you can write OO code in C if you want to; it's just not as pretty.
C++: foo.bar(a, b, c)
C: FooBar(&foo, a, b, c)
C++: foo1 + foo2
C: FooAdd(&foo1, &foo2)
You can still have a nice, tidy FOO object, with nice tidy operations you can perform on it. That's what OO is about.
steveha
I was mostly interested because it's a non-x86 processor, so it should be immune to the most common (x86-specific) attacks.
You may have a point about the reliability. But keep in mind that a Linux-based firewall will just sit there, with Linux and your firewall rules and everything loaded in RAM. And the worst stress on a system is turning it on and off, and a firewall will be on 24/7. And the firewall wouldn't be using the graphics processor at all, so another whole source of problems would be out of the loop.
As I said, I'll probably just end up with a Mini-ITX motherboard. Maybe I'll be lucky and find a Mini-ITX motherboard with a PowerPC chip or something.
Actually, another option would be to buy whatever Linksys product it was that had all the source code released under GPL. But that is probably underpowered, and I don't trust Linksys hardware all that much anyway.
steveha
I was thinking that they just wish the hard drive problem would go away; that they can't figure to make money on sales of the hard drive accessory, and at most would break even.
On the other hand, maybe they can mark it up enough to make money. And the part of Microsoft that wants iTunes to fail would want to avoid encouraging people to buy iPods, so that part of MS would argue against a standard FireWire connector.
Speaking of the iPod, I wonder if MS could buy the 4GB tiny drive the mini-iPod uses, and use that for the pluggable hard drive. It might be cheaper in quantity than other hard drives (such as the one in the current XBox).
steveha
Wouldn't one of those $30-$40 Linksys/D-Link/Netgear router/switches be a better solution?
As long as they work the way you want, sure. But you can't really customize the way they work. And I consider my firewall to be an important thing, and I would like to build it from source so I can be sure I know what it does. (*cough* Belkin *cough*)
steveha
most people realy dont understand what a real modern firewall does
I had in mind a computer with two network ports, which looks at each IP packet and decides whether to let that packet in to the home network. No packet would go on the network without being actively copied from the in port to the home network port.
about calling a linux box a router it can route yes it's ok at it yes but it's latency is horid.
I have a Netgear home firewall/router, and its latency seems fine for my home use. I would like to replace it with something running Linux, that I can tweak. I imagine that the GameCube latency would be pretty similar, unless the networking hardware is horrid somehow. I don't know what kind of CPU is in my Netgear box, nor how much RAM it has, but I have to figure a GameCube would exceed its specs.
Not that it matters; if I can't get two network ports, that's a deal-breaker. I will probably just build something with a Mini-ITX motherboard in it.
steveha
So far, they are just playing with software. They convince the GameCube to load the software over the network port.
:-(
I'm probably not very interested in this unless I can hack the hardware a bit: add a hard drive, add a second network port, etc.
A GameCube would make a sweet firewall/router box if you could get two network ports on it and Linux. The price would be right too.
Note that the optical drive is fairly useless: you cannot burn a disk that will work in a GameCube, not with a conventional CD burner.
steveha
This bit about the hard drive might be a "trial balloon". This isn't an official announcement, so MS can still say "we never said we would do that; it was only a rumor." Now they will see how much people care about the hard disk.
If they do release without a hard disk, you will still be able to get one. It will be in an external box. They will probably have a special "storage" port, which should be a FireWire port, because FireWire can provide enough power to run a hard disk (only one cable needed).
If they are smart, they will not make some wacky custom connector; people should be able, for instance, to use their iPod as their XBox2 hard disk, and then take it with them to their friends' homes for gaming. (Even if they make a wacky connector, someone will make a custom cable so you can connect your iPod anyway.)
Initially I thought this was just a wild rumor. But the quotes in the newspaper article, about how most games don't even use the hard disk, were interesting.
steveha
I wrote it up here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=94145&cid=807
The key points:
You set the fee, and collect it.
You can refund the fee if you wanted the email.
You can add people to a whitelist.
The whitelist uses digital signatures, not easily-forged header fields.
It doesn't really work unless we have a micropayment system that can charge small amounts (five cents) without expensive overhead.
In the discussion attached to that article, one person pointed out that this system could be exploited like this: advertise a job, one that looks like it's really worth applying for. Charge about 20 cents per email to accept resumes. Pocket all the money. It's a perfect small-time fraud scheme: you steal so little, from so many people; who would be motivated enough to check up on whether there was ever really a job to apply for?
I have to say, even without the charging of fees, a whitelist based on digital signatures would be great. You could have a special folder where known-good emails go, and another one for the rest. I'd have my email client play a chime sound when known-good emails arrive, but not the rest.
steveha
UserLinux will include Qt, because Debian includes it.
Er, I meant to say "Qt will be available in UserLinux, because Debian includes it." UserLinux will not include Qt; if you want it, you will have to use apt-get to install it.
steveha
Bruce has jumped all over the place with his reasoning/rationale.
Usually, when people make claims like this, they provide examples to support their claims. You say that "Anyone who has monitored the actual UL list can see this", so it should be easy for you to provide a few examples.
Here, I'll help. The UserLinux mailing list archives can be found on this web page:
http://lists.userlinux.com/pipermail/discuss/
I read through the whole GNOME-KDE debate on the UserLinux mailing list in December, and I say you are wrong. I went back today and re-read every email Bruce Perens wrote in the month of December, and I still say you are wrong.
God, why are people so lazy!
When you are trying to convince people of something, you are expected to provide some sort of evidence to back up your position. If you aren't going to provide any evidence, you can't expect anyone to pay much attention to your bare, unsupported assertions.
Find out for yourself.
I did. You are telling me I'm wrong, but you haven't shown me any examples that support your position.
steveha
That required a lot of semantic juggling.
Juggling? I just broke it down, to make sure you could follow me. I guess you still didn't.
Juggling?
Still I say, WTF?
You seem to have trouble understanding this, but it's very simple. The whole point of basing UserLinux on Debian is to inherit all the wonderful Debian packages. This actually includes all the KDE packages.
Bruce Perens will do nothing against KDE. UserLinux will do nothing against KDE. People who want KDE can use it.
This was true before a customer hired Bruce Perens and it is still true after. Nothing has changed.
steveha
Now, Bruce is learning from real commercial companies that KDE/Qt support is mandatory and he's having to distance himself from the craving anti-Qt trolls on his own list.
From the very beginning of the UserLinux project, Bruce Perens has been consistent. UserLinux will use GNOME, but KDE will be available as an option. Now he, through his consulting business, will be helping a customer put KDE on UserLinux. So what? Nothing has changed; he isn't "learning" anything, he already knew this was possible (and has said so from the very beginning).
The sad thing? Bruce missed a valuable opportunity to really work with KDE developers and the broader community by choosing instead to cater to his own bias and that of his sympathetic community of anti-Qt trolls.
And I should believe you when you say these things... why? Bruce Perens has given his reasons, but you say he wants to cater to anti-Qt trolls. Why should I believe you instead of him?
steveha
this is supposed to be a unifying representative of the linux community
Huh?
This is supposed to be a business-ready distro. One that will have broad freedom of support contracts (as opposed to vendor lockin with per-machine licensing).
I don't recall seeing Bruce Perens promising to unify the Linux community.
Your other points make little sense. UserLinux will be able to run KDE apps, because Debian can do so. UserLinux will include Qt, because Debian includes it. And I'm glad you and your wife like KDE and think it is more like Windows than GNOME is, but some people prefer GNOME to KDE so that one could be argued either way.
steveha