see, the way i see it, if you have time to migrate to another distro, you have time to migrate to the newer release of the same distro, but with less pain
The LTS bit of Ubuntu LTS means 'long term support' (sorry if you knew this). Presumably the parent's point is that he can switch to Ubuntu once and have 5 years guaranteed support for the server version, wheras upgrading to the newer Fedora/RH offering gives no certainty as to how long support will last. It's not always non-trivial to upgrade to a newer release, so if he/she is going to do it then they should do it once and stick with the distro for a few years.
I currently own about 200 games, all of them work...
Fine, but my point is that your assertion that all games ever released for DOS/Windows will run on XP is blatantly false. MS went to a lot of trouble to get a lot of popular legacy games that wouldn't run on 2000 to run on XP, but by no means all.
True BUT drivers for Windows are typically the first out the door, with linux lagging behind as it depends on the manufactuer to support it and failing this the community.
You miss my point. You claimed that you can buy any hardware and it will just work. I point out that, in fact, far from being 'first out the door' it often takes many months for a new version of Windows to catch up as far as drivers go. In fact, some hardware support will simply be dropped, even in the XP to Vista upgrade path, where the driver model is pretty similar. This also relies on the manufacturer and community. I agree that if I go to my local computer store and grab something exotic off the shelf, there's a better chance of getting it running on Windows without a headache. However for established hardware (e.g. a graphics tablet) there's a good chance there's drivers in the stock kernel that will work, plug and play, no CD required. On Windows it may require a CD, a reboot, if it's a new release of the OS then good luck.
You are purposely making it seem like there are 500 versions of the same OS, which there aren't. The point is the answer to the problem typically is much easier to find when you compare windows to linux.
No, you claimed that 'Windows is one version', which is clearly nonsense. Not only are there currently three supported versions of Windows (2000, XP, Vista), plus numerous unsupported versions still in production use, but each one has a multitude of service packs and hotfixes which have unpredictable and sometimes serious effects on the system. My experience is that it's certainly not 'much easier' to find an answer to a problem with Windows that Linux; often it depends on what software you're trying to run in what environment. In fact, with a decent Linux distro there's a fixed target - the latest, fully updated stable release, e.g. 'Debian stable', is identical no matter what, no confusion, whereas in Windows it's perfectly possible for apparently identical boxes to actually have wildly different versions of dll libraries etc. due to the poor package management on Windows.
Like I said I would rather run linux, there driver and software (mainly games) support sucks, if they could concentrate on this and get it to the point of windows you would have another user willing to switch.. I don't like not having a choice but if you're honest you can admit Windows makes it easier to just get up and running with any hardware or software out there...
Honestly, I have found Linux much easier to get up and running with any hardware or software. Stick my Ubuntu disk in, wait 20 minutes or so, run one software update and there is my OS, up to date with the latest patches, complete office suite, web browser, graphics software etc. etc. If I stick my Windows CD in, I wait much longer, boot into VGA 640x480, download graphics drivers, sound drivers, motherboard drivers, printer drivers. Run Windows update, reboot, run it again, reboot again. Install Office. Run Office update, reboot again. Go through that stupid validation thing, phone Microsoft and reassure them that I have a licensed OS, reboot again... The only time I would agree with you is that Windows is easier in setting up a games machine, but then there's so few games that you'd want to run on Linux that it's a bit of a moot point. If you don't get drivers for your ethernet card on Windows in the first shot then you're into downloading drivers on another machine, copying across... I really don't have the time.
1. I can play any game I want from past to present.. recently I have ben playing Dungeon keeper 2 again (game from 1998) runs just as well (actually better) than it did when i first got it because it is a windows platform game and they backward compatibility is pretty strong.
Well, you lucked out with Dungeon Keeper 2. I challenge you to get "any game" to work on XP or Vista. Lots of old DOS games won't run; in fact you may have more luck using something like Freedos for some of the very old ones.
2. I can run out and buy ANY hardware I want and it will "just work", I know there will be a driver, precompiled, ready to go.
Well, this goes in cycles. XP is very well supported at the moment, because it's a mature OS. When it was first released, and for many months, there was plenty of hardware for which there wasn't a driver and lots of old hardware (like my mid-range video capture card) that was dropped entirely. Expect the same with Vista; it should be better this time round because XP and Vista will have closer driver models than 98/ME (which most home users were running) and XP, but there will still be plenty of esoteric or cheap 'n' chearful hardware that won't be supported. Incidentally, I haven't had to find a driver for anything on my Linux box - absolutely everything was detected on install and ran without problems. Most Windows installs will still default to a generic 640x480 VGA and require hunting for drivers etc. You win some, you lose some.
3. Ton's of software to choose from, i'm not platform limited like Macs are and I don't have to be a guru to get it to work in linux. Install it and there I go.. a lot of times you can find what you want for free as well.
There's thousands of software titles for both platforms. Package management is certainly better on Linux, where I would be happy to install a new piece of software on a production machine if the package manager was happy and I didn't need to override dependencies. On Windows it's still very easy for a new piece of software to silently break other packages or cause subtle problems that aren't apparent until much further down the line. 'Guru' knowledge is sometimes required on either platform.
4. Support, if there is a problem with the Software or OS i know there is a ton of other people who have seen the problem and most likely have a fix for it.. google and boom got the answer, linux has a great support community as well, but with linux it's which platform, which kernel, which driver version, errors in the compile, do I have the right library to compile, etc, etc, etc... Windows is one version, no forks, 90+% market share.. so the answer has already been found.
Windows 2000, XP, or Vista? Service pack 1, 2, 3, 4a, or 5b? Hotfix 1234a in Knowledge Base article #1456474 or Hotfix 1345c in Knowledge Base article #1234563? Did you apply that Hotfix _before_ or _after_ upgrading Exchange? Is that Exchange from the standalone CD or the subtly different version from the Small Business Server package? Oh, by the way, that has dependencies on Internet Explorer that aren't immediately obvious, and if you upgraded to IE7 you need to download another patch.
The real problem?
"MySQL Quietly Drops Support..." ?
Ok - so what should they do? Place posters all around your city saying "WE DROP SUPPORT FOR DEBIAN USERS!!!"?
I think the point is that they haven't made it clear, even on their website that they have made a business decision to ignore everything but Red Hat and Suse. From the story: "We learned of this when MySQL declined to sell us support for some new Debian-based servers. Our sales rep 'found out from engineering that the current Enterprise offering is no longer supported on Debian OS.'". So a company got bitten by using a generic (Debian) Linux then asking for support and finding out that "generic" means anything but.
They really should make some sort of statement, even if it's market spun, e.g. "...for the benefit of our enterprise customers we are concentrating on supporting the two most popular commercial distributions... we expect third-party support companies and the active MySQL community to continue supporting less popular and non-commercial distributions". (P.S. for the benefit of anyone flicking through, I made that up!)
There's an easy countermeasure to this. The method described is effectively causing the phone to make a call without the GUI showing that a call is being made. You can get very cheap toys that detect the microwave signal when the phone is making a call and light up - some are in the form of a novelty hand or other cradle that the phone sits in. I've found with mine that is will blink every so often as the phone syncs up with the nearest cell. If a call is being made it blinks all the time. So just carry one of these, and if you see it blinking constantly, somebody within 30cm or so is making a call. Take the battery out of your cellphone and see if it stops - if it does, you've been bugged.
AFAIK, only the Player and Server are free-as-in-beer. The Player can't actually create the VM, or install a guest OS, etc...and I'm assuming that the free Server is crippled as well.
Actually, it's pretty trivial to set up new VMs and install Guest OSs using the free Player, it just requires editing simple text files rather than using a nice GUI. There's dozens of Howtos on the 'Net, most of which make things more complicated than they need to be.
Printing news stories critical of the Government is illegal in China. Both activities are not illegal in many other juristictions. So how is it different?
Because freedom of information across national and international boundaries is essential to the general freedom of the human race - freedom in terms of free from torture, free from oppression and exploitation, etc. The blocking of very specific forms of commerce in order to preserve business rules and local laws on what is considered acceptable business practive, if applied within reason, will have little impact on the planet overall.
Clearly there is a similarity between the desire to control information in general and the desire to control commercial activities, but there is always going to be some kind of regulation of any communications medium (the alternative being anarchy - which I'm sure some people would support). The question is whether the regulation being proposed is reasonable. Curtailing freedom of the press will probably facilitate abuse of human rights. Curtailing of gambling activities will most likely not.
Time and money are clearly not the same thing. Time is a property of the universe which describes the order of events, money is a system to facilitate the trading of goods and services by the exchange of (almost) valueless objects which symbolically represent gold and other precious materials.
It is true that time is usually required to obtain money, and that the spending of money can often result in more time being free in the future, but to claim that they are the "same thing" is ridiculous. The phrase 'time is money' is linguistic shorthand to indicate that, within a given discrete context, time and money are so closely linked that it is convenient to regard them as equivalent.
Surely it's not necessary to sacrifice openoffice.org, can't it just be tuned a bit to keep its processor useage down? Maybe it will be the bottleneck for a few more years to come, but eventually it will make better use of system resources, I'm sure. Or are you just a Microsoft Office fanboy?
I hear you, and had kind of figured that out (hence why I have a working setup!) but hadn't put it as succinctly as you. However, they do have a lot to do with listings sources since the configuration GUI (at least on 0.19) has the listings data settings on the video sources configuration screen.
When I first used the configuration GUI I couldn't work out the difference between 'capture cards' and 'video sources', and presumed that the latter referred to some sort of ancillary system, e.g. the composite video input on an analogue capture card used to import from VHS. Perhaps a clearer term would be 'signal sources', particularly since the sources don't only pick up video but may also have radio and teletext data. At least to my mind I would have understood better when I first looked at the GUI that I needed to set up my capture card and then define what signal sources are going into it.
I've used Linux as a server OS since Slackware 1.0, and have no problems configuring most things, but to date I've spent three solid days over the last 18 months on various attempts to get Myth working.
Hmm... I've had server experience but it sounds like less than you, and I managed to get usable mythtv in under 2 hours. I've been tinkering with it for three weeks since then, but it was working acceptably almost straight away. The main thing you need to do is take a structured approach - if you were putting together a LAMP system you wouldn't mess around with PHP until you knew Apache could serve a static page. Same thing for myth - get known-supported cards and get them working with a standalone TV app, check your sound card is working well, maybe get DVD playback working because that's a known quantity and will test your display drivers, then look at installing myth. I was using DVB-T so followed one of the several howtos I found on google.
The only weird, non-obvious thing I found is that what the configuration GUI calls "video sources" really should be called "channel allocation/listings sources" - although this may be a quirk of DVB and make more sense in analogue (can anyone enlighten me?).
Some stress ? Sir, you have a Panic Attack Disorder
Having up and downs ? Well, you have a Bipolar Disorder
Sometimes bored ? That is Attention Deficit Disorder
No, you don't know what you're talking about. A disorder is diagnosed when someone experiences feelings and/or impulses that are well beyond that which a person could be expected to cope with. The experiences could be normal in their content (panic is a normal response to a stressful situation) or in the case of a psychosis totally bizarre.
To take the example of panic, if it can be controlled by some positive thinking, breathing deeply and carrying on, then it's not a disorder by definition. If the individual cannot control it, and it is beginning to seriously affect their life, then it is appropriate to consider diagnosing a 'disorder' and giving treatment. That treatment might just be reassurance and some breathing exercises, it might be medication or a formal psychological therapy - whatever will help.
Someone with bipolar disorder cannot function and live a normal life - they really can't. Their ability to function in the world is severely affected by what they are experiencing, and the change when given treatment can be dramatic. To say they have "ups and downs" is insulting. Same for ADD. There are formal diagnostic criteria for most psychiatric diagnoses that must be fulfilled: DSM-IV and ICD-10.
I do agree that often psychiatric disorders are over-diagnosed, often becuase of a desire not to 'blame' someone for their predicament and find a reason why it's not their fault. But occasional or even frequent mis-diagnosis doesn't mean something isn't real. Lots of people say they have 'flu' when in fact they just have a common cold. If someone really has influenza they will feel absolutely awful and may need medical care (older adults in Britain are given influenza vaccine because many will die if they contract it). Just because lots of people claim to have 'flu' doesn't mean that those who really are suffering from it should be dismissed as 'someone with a cold who's just whineing'.
It runs well on old hardware.. Plenty of us have old pentium 1/2 machines around that aren't doing a whole lot. Windows 98 keeps becoming a worse and worse option with viruses and now the lack of updates. It provides life for an old computer.
I never understood the claim that DSL is a good way to breathe life into an old computer. I've run modern (grin!) Debian on a P75 then a P200 and just used dselect to prune out all of the packages I don't need. I can't see how DSL could improve on that, particularly given that the package management system isn't at all obvious, so I'm sure most users have lots of stuff installed that they really don't need.
Nice rant.
Let me guess : you're 22 years old with no kids but you know exactly how people should deal with their teenage children.
Right?
No, I'm 27 years old. I'm a doctor, I've studied paediatrics and child development as part of my medicine degree. I've been involved in volunteer and semi-professional youth work since I was 18, working in deprived inner city and leafy suburbs. I'm the oldest of seven children, so I've seen and received a fair bit of parenting. The best I've ever seen has been the parenting received by my wife's cousins (who now call us Aunt and Uncle since we were married!) which comes pretty close to what I've described. We don't have kids yet, but when we do I know what parenting style I'll be going for.
Children heal very well physically and mentally, and know that if it looks dangerous, or feels too hot, to not touch it. The danger is in things that are deceptive (boilling water on a stove) or unnaturally quick (cars). Teens can become secretive and get sufficiently conditioned out of their natural instincts in the name of bravado, so IMHO teens are the ones we should be monitoring, not children.
Interesting, but I still maintain that good parenting starts when children are very young, and they understand that they can rely on parents to maintain a safe environment in which to explore the world and make mistakes without those mistakes being permanently damaging. Of course the definition of 'safe' changes dramatically as the child matures, so that as they reach mid-teens 'safe' means that they live their lives more or less independently but know that they can always fall back on parents for advice and loving care.
You disagree with my assertion that children aren't born with an ability to understand the world, but then go on to qualify your disagreement with examples that prove my point! Babies do have a stranger awareness, although this is a stage they grow out of and have to be taught again (google 'stranger awareness' to see how many groups are available to help with this!). Boiling water and fast traffic are examples of non-obvious danger that parents must teach children to avoid.
Part of child development is 'attachment' to parents, and young children will learn to explore their environment within a certain radius around their parents without having to have their parent by their side at every point. If something concerns them they will look for parental reassurance before carrying on. I think that model can carry on until early- to mid-teens very healthily. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory)
Man it's Nazis like you that take a childs trust and piss all over it - I don't care if you are dressing it up in nicey nicey language and giving a couple of half-assed exceptions to your draconian behavior. I give my child the privacy he wants, he respects me and listens to what I say and then he does it too.
But how did he learn that trust and respect in the first place? It doesn't happen by magic. Sure, children need to learn from mistakes, but those mistakes need to happen in a safe environment to start with so that the consequences are limited. When children are learning to walk we don't let them wander all over town and across busy streets - they're encouraged to try walking from one person to another in the home, and then outside holding an adults hand. Their freedom to walk without direct involvement of an adult is gradually increased, and if a worrying trend develops their their freedom is reined back a little, for instance if they keep wandering into the road then they might be made to hold hands for the rest of that trip and that pattern repeated until they've learnt the lesson.
Social interactions are no different, children gradually build up an understanding of how the world works and how to recognise danger in social situations. They aren't born with an innate ability to understand the world that would flourish if only parents didn't hold them back (as you seem to suggest). I can see your point: over-protectiveness can be just as damaging as neglect, but it's about being appropriate to the child's level of development. The majority of (but clearly not absolutely all) 14 year-olds are not ready to move about in the adult world completely unsupervised, be it virtually via the Internet or physically, as this story clearly illustrates.
I warn him of the consequence, which is all I can do, and if he fucks up then its his fault.
Yes - but a responsible parent will ensure that the "fuck up" will not do serious damage to the mental or physical health of the child. In the case of this story the 'hands off' approach has been shown not to work - the mental and possibly physical heath of a minor has been seriously damaged through sexual assult that should not have been possible if appropriate supervision had been in place.
You can't monitor everything they do on the Internet anymore
Yes... you can. Seriously, I really don't buy this. It's part of a growing idea (certainly in Britain) that it's impossible to parent properly and monitor what children get up to, and it's an absolute myth. Up until the age of about 11 or 12 children should have no guaranteed privacy in terms of what they say and do, and if they've been used to loving oversight for all of their lives they won't have a problem with this. Sure, they can have conversations with their friends, but parents should be aware of what's going on and step in if something isn't right.
They should be gradually introduced to having independent passtimes and activities - like a Scout group or sports team - but understand that they are supervised by the adult that's in charge there. Only when they're entering their teens should they start to do any activities really on their own, and to begin with they should be clearly definined things like meeting some friends for a milkshake and then picked up again in the car. By the time they hit mid-teens they should be responsible enough to go and do things without running everything past mom and dad, but always know that they can come and talk about any problems.
The idea that a 14 year-old girl can meet a 19 year-old man without parents being aware until afterwards should raise questions about the parents' responsibility (neglect is a form of child abuse, although I don't know enough details to allege that in this case).
Where does the Internet fit into this? Web usage should follow the same pattern: a 14 year-old saying "I'm using the Internet" is even less specific than saying "I'm going to the mall" - in both cases the answer should be "no you're not". If they say "I'm just messaging Jane" then 20 minutes later they should be asked "are you still messaging Jane - why not invite her over for dinner if you're talking for so long?" If they're researching something for school then that's what they should stick to. Social time on the 'net should be limited and checked. If they abuse trust and lie about what they're doing then it should be withdrawn for a period of time.
This may sound terribly draconian but I think it's the only way to bring up children safely and with an understanding of what's right and safe and what's wrong and dangerous. I spent hours on the computer alone as a child, but we didn't have a modem and my parents knew what software was there. I also spent hours in the street playing with friends, but my parents knew every other parent on the street and it was a quiet cul-de-sac. Things have changed now, and it's not safe to let children play outside alone, and neither is it safe for them to play on the Internet alone. If parents aren't available to supervise then the children can't play in the street; if they can't supervise the 'net then it should be unplugged or password protected until they can.
RTFA - it doesn't work with SLR cameras and probably never will. I don't think the paparazzi use point and shoot compact digitals, they use SLRs with three foot long lenses. It's use is going to be at museums and trade shows where people pop away with a little handheld and in movie theatres to prevent piracy.
How in the heck did they forge a 256 bit SSL certificate?!
Can't this just be revoked or traced back to the owner?
They didn't forge it. They used cross-site scripting to inject malicious code into the real Paypal page - in other words there is a vulnerability in the scripting used that takes information probably encoded in the URL and displays it on the page as the Netcraft write-up shows. This is then used to redirect the unsuspecting user to the fake page.
No, that would be if they decreased their downtime by 20%. It's not the same thing, and the GP had it right (despite all of the posts to the contrary). Somebody's not doing their math right, but it's not the GP.
Sorry - but here's the way it works. Your ISP says "We're going to a two-tier network and we're going to give you the option to get a better tier."
We say "go eat dirt" (or something analagous) and find another ISP. Been there, done that.
No...no... listen:- You're running a relatively popular website, say an e-commerce site, not up there with the big boys like Amazon but you're making money and you've given up your day job. The ISP providing connectivity for millions of users (say AOL) says "we're going to a two-tier network and we're going to give you the option to get a better tier." You can't find another ISP because it's not your ISP - it's your customer's ISP who's allocated so much bandwidth to your block of IPs and you won't get anymore unless you pay up.
Your options will be to pay up, or put up with the fact that millions of your customers find your website is ridiculously slow. As less people use your website it will speed up again, but your customers and potential customers have gone back to Amazon and have taken your site of their bookmarks list. Getting a better rack server or changing ISPs won't help because the artificial bottleneck is elsewhere and outside of your control unless you pay to move onto the priority tier.
I am gung-ho about net neutrality, but how is what you just said any different than how things work now? I host my blog off of my 384Kbps-upload DSL. If my blog all of a sudden gets 4000 visitors per day, and I want all of them to be able to see it, I'll currently have to pay more to move it to a datacenter or get a better Internet connection, correct?
Read the article. The proposal is that the big ISPs will have two tiers/channels/whatever, one that is high speed and only available to paying customers, and the other for everybody else. Note that the paying customers not only pay for their hosting and bandwidth, but also pay the ISP serving the broadband/cable/cell connection to the end user for the right to have their content served over the faster channel.
Presumably the idea of getting 'too popular' is that the ISPs would not only have the option of limiting bandwidth in the last mile to each individual subscriber, but also ISPs may have limited bandwidth across the whole network allocated e.g. by IP block, effectively slowing access to that server down as it becomes more popular, which would obviously cause a drop in popularity/revenue for the online business providing content. At the moment the bottleneck would be with their own hosting, for which they would have to pay for more transfer (GB/month) and a faster pipe (GB/sec). If these proposals are successful they may also have to pay one or more ISPs to be put on the faster pipe through their network and at the subscriber end so that the end users can access the service at an acceptable speed.
The nasty side of this is that, again presumably, the ISPs would allocate a reasonable bandwidth to non-fasttrack traffic so that end users don't notice a slowdown in less popular, niche websites, otherwise customers would complain that 'the whole internet is slow'. The big players would naturally pay up immediately, so it's only the middle group who are too popular for their own good who would be stuck.
Re:Not a cop-out, just a fact
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The CVS Cop-Out
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Would a better response about the bug have been this? "Yes, that is true with the current release. However, we have already fixed that in CVS and are working to make that into the next stable branch."
Well, I have to say that although I do agree with the article writer, I've not found myself up against this problem personally, so I don't know what my response would be; my feeling as an advocate of Free/OSS software in general is as I've already stated. A polite response is always a good idea, but then again there are lots of of people who like to complain about free things as if it's their right to have it fixed yesterday (I used to run a community broadband wi-fi net so I know the feeling) I can understand why people may want to respond negatively.
I think the real issue is being clear about what the project is trying to acheive - if the aim is to produce something that will be used by a large community many of whom will be relatively non-technical users (complaints about Gaim elsewhere in this story being a good example) then efforts need to be made to addres major flaws in the current stable, unless the next stable is _very_ nearly ready. This is good because F/OSS projects often have a cycle whereby they acheive a critical mass, become a de facto standard, gain support from people with money like distros, get more paid or unpaid programmers on board (or the original authors get employed by someone) etc. etc. Projects that don't get users will end up stale when the original author's itch has not only been scratched but has gone away because they've moved on to something else.
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You miss my point. You claimed that you can buy any hardware and it will just work. I point out that, in fact, far from being 'first out the door' it often takes many months for a new version of Windows to catch up as far as drivers go. In fact, some hardware support will simply be dropped, even in the XP to Vista upgrade path, where the driver model is pretty similar. This also relies on the manufacturer and community. I agree that if I go to my local computer store and grab something exotic off the shelf, there's a better chance of getting it running on Windows without a headache. However for established hardware (e.g. a graphics tablet) there's a good chance there's drivers in the stock kernel that will work, plug and play, no CD required. On Windows it may require a CD, a reboot, if it's a new release of the OS then good luck.
No, you claimed that 'Windows is one version', which is clearly nonsense. Not only are there currently three supported versions of Windows (2000, XP, Vista), plus numerous unsupported versions still in production use, but each one has a multitude of service packs and hotfixes which have unpredictable and sometimes serious effects on the system. My experience is that it's certainly not 'much easier' to find an answer to a problem with Windows that Linux; often it depends on what software you're trying to run in what environment. In fact, with a decent Linux distro there's a fixed target - the latest, fully updated stable release, e.g. 'Debian stable', is identical no matter what, no confusion, whereas in Windows it's perfectly possible for apparently identical boxes to actually have wildly different versions of dll libraries etc. due to the poor package management on Windows.
Honestly, I have found Linux much easier to get up and running with any hardware or software. Stick my Ubuntu disk in, wait 20 minutes or so, run one software update and there is my OS, up to date with the latest patches, complete office suite, web browser, graphics software etc. etc. If I stick my Windows CD in, I wait much longer, boot into VGA 640x480, download graphics drivers, sound drivers, motherboard drivers, printer drivers. Run Windows update, reboot, run it again, reboot again. Install Office. Run Office update, reboot again. Go through that stupid validation thing, phone Microsoft and reassure them that I have a licensed OS, reboot again... The only time I would agree with you is that Windows is easier in setting up a games machine, but then there's so few games that you'd want to run on Linux that it's a bit of a moot point. If you don't get drivers for your ethernet card on Windows in the first shot then you're into downloading drivers on another machine, copying across... I really don't have the time.
Well, this goes in cycles. XP is very well supported at the moment, because it's a mature OS. When it was first released, and for many months, there was plenty of hardware for which there wasn't a driver and lots of old hardware (like my mid-range video capture card) that was dropped entirely. Expect the same with Vista; it should be better this time round because XP and Vista will have closer driver models than 98/ME (which most home users were running) and XP, but there will still be plenty of esoteric or cheap 'n' chearful hardware that won't be supported. Incidentally, I haven't had to find a driver for anything on my Linux box - absolutely everything was detected on install and ran without problems. Most Windows installs will still default to a generic 640x480 VGA and require hunting for drivers etc. You win some, you lose some.
There's thousands of software titles for both platforms. Package management is certainly better on Linux, where I would be happy to install a new piece of software on a production machine if the package manager was happy and I didn't need to override dependencies. On Windows it's still very easy for a new piece of software to silently break other packages or cause subtle problems that aren't apparent until much further down the line. 'Guru' knowledge is sometimes required on either platform.
Windows 2000, XP, or Vista? Service pack 1, 2, 3, 4a, or 5b? Hotfix 1234a in Knowledge Base article #1456474 or Hotfix 1345c in Knowledge Base article #1234563? Did you apply that Hotfix _before_ or _after_ upgrading Exchange? Is that Exchange from the standalone CD or the subtly different version from the Small Business Server package? Oh, by the way, that has dependencies on Internet Explorer that aren't immediately obvious, and if you upgraded to IE7 you need to download another patch.
I think the point is that they haven't made it clear, even on their website that they have made a business decision to ignore everything but Red Hat and Suse. From the story: "We learned of this when MySQL declined to sell us support for some new Debian-based servers. Our sales rep 'found out from engineering that the current Enterprise offering is no longer supported on Debian OS.'". So a company got bitten by using a generic (Debian) Linux then asking for support and finding out that "generic" means anything but.
They really should make some sort of statement, even if it's market spun, e.g. "...for the benefit of our enterprise customers we are concentrating on supporting the two most popular commercial distributions... we expect third-party support companies and the active MySQL community to continue supporting less popular and non-commercial distributions". (P.S. for the benefit of anyone flicking through, I made that up!)
There's an easy countermeasure to this. The method described is effectively causing the phone to make a call without the GUI showing that a call is being made. You can get very cheap toys that detect the microwave signal when the phone is making a call and light up - some are in the form of a novelty hand or other cradle that the phone sits in. I've found with mine that is will blink every so often as the phone syncs up with the nearest cell. If a call is being made it blinks all the time. So just carry one of these, and if you see it blinking constantly, somebody within 30cm or so is making a call. Take the battery out of your cellphone and see if it stops - if it does, you've been bugged.
Actually, it's pretty trivial to set up new VMs and install Guest OSs using the free Player, it just requires editing simple text files rather than using a nice GUI. There's dozens of Howtos on the 'Net, most of which make things more complicated than they need to be.
It was an example, to illustrate the point.
Because freedom of information across national and international boundaries is essential to the general freedom of the human race - freedom in terms of free from torture, free from oppression and exploitation, etc. The blocking of very specific forms of commerce in order to preserve business rules and local laws on what is considered acceptable business practive, if applied within reason, will have little impact on the planet overall.
Clearly there is a similarity between the desire to control information in general and the desire to control commercial activities, but there is always going to be some kind of regulation of any communications medium (the alternative being anarchy - which I'm sure some people would support). The question is whether the regulation being proposed is reasonable. Curtailing freedom of the press will probably facilitate abuse of human rights. Curtailing of gambling activities will most likely not.
It is true that time is usually required to obtain money, and that the spending of money can often result in more time being free in the future, but to claim that they are the "same thing" is ridiculous. The phrase 'time is money' is linguistic shorthand to indicate that, within a given discrete context, time and money are so closely linked that it is convenient to regard them as equivalent.
Surely it's not necessary to sacrifice openoffice.org, can't it just be tuned a bit to keep its processor useage down? Maybe it will be the bottleneck for a few more years to come, but eventually it will make better use of system resources, I'm sure. Or are you just a Microsoft Office fanboy?
When I first used the configuration GUI I couldn't work out the difference between 'capture cards' and 'video sources', and presumed that the latter referred to some sort of ancillary system, e.g. the composite video input on an analogue capture card used to import from VHS. Perhaps a clearer term would be 'signal sources', particularly since the sources don't only pick up video but may also have radio and teletext data. At least to my mind I would have understood better when I first looked at the GUI that I needed to set up my capture card and then define what signal sources are going into it.
Hmm... I've had server experience but it sounds like less than you, and I managed to get usable mythtv in under 2 hours. I've been tinkering with it for three weeks since then, but it was working acceptably almost straight away. The main thing you need to do is take a structured approach - if you were putting together a LAMP system you wouldn't mess around with PHP until you knew Apache could serve a static page. Same thing for myth - get known-supported cards and get them working with a standalone TV app, check your sound card is working well, maybe get DVD playback working because that's a known quantity and will test your display drivers, then look at installing myth. I was using DVB-T so followed one of the several howtos I found on google.
The only weird, non-obvious thing I found is that what the configuration GUI calls "video sources" really should be called "channel allocation/listings sources" - although this may be a quirk of DVB and make more sense in analogue (can anyone enlighten me?).
Sure - the "integrator" is called Apple.
No, you don't know what you're talking about. A disorder is diagnosed when someone experiences feelings and/or impulses that are well beyond that which a person could be expected to cope with. The experiences could be normal in their content (panic is a normal response to a stressful situation) or in the case of a psychosis totally bizarre.
To take the example of panic, if it can be controlled by some positive thinking, breathing deeply and carrying on, then it's not a disorder by definition. If the individual cannot control it, and it is beginning to seriously affect their life, then it is appropriate to consider diagnosing a 'disorder' and giving treatment. That treatment might just be reassurance and some breathing exercises, it might be medication or a formal psychological therapy - whatever will help.
Someone with bipolar disorder cannot function and live a normal life - they really can't. Their ability to function in the world is severely affected by what they are experiencing, and the change when given treatment can be dramatic. To say they have "ups and downs" is insulting. Same for ADD. There are formal diagnostic criteria for most psychiatric diagnoses that must be fulfilled: DSM-IV and ICD-10.
I do agree that often psychiatric disorders are over-diagnosed, often becuase of a desire not to 'blame' someone for their predicament and find a reason why it's not their fault. But occasional or even frequent mis-diagnosis doesn't mean something isn't real. Lots of people say they have 'flu' when in fact they just have a common cold. If someone really has influenza they will feel absolutely awful and may need medical care (older adults in Britain are given influenza vaccine because many will die if they contract it). Just because lots of people claim to have 'flu' doesn't mean that those who really are suffering from it should be dismissed as 'someone with a cold who's just whineing'.
I never understood the claim that DSL is a good way to breathe life into an old computer. I've run modern (grin!) Debian on a P75 then a P200 and just used dselect to prune out all of the packages I don't need. I can't see how DSL could improve on that, particularly given that the package management system isn't at all obvious, so I'm sure most users have lots of stuff installed that they really don't need.
No, I'm 27 years old. I'm a doctor, I've studied paediatrics and child development as part of my medicine degree. I've been involved in volunteer and semi-professional youth work since I was 18, working in deprived inner city and leafy suburbs. I'm the oldest of seven children, so I've seen and received a fair bit of parenting. The best I've ever seen has been the parenting received by my wife's cousins (who now call us Aunt and Uncle since we were married!) which comes pretty close to what I've described. We don't have kids yet, but when we do I know what parenting style I'll be going for.
Interesting, but I still maintain that good parenting starts when children are very young, and they understand that they can rely on parents to maintain a safe environment in which to explore the world and make mistakes without those mistakes being permanently damaging. Of course the definition of 'safe' changes dramatically as the child matures, so that as they reach mid-teens 'safe' means that they live their lives more or less independently but know that they can always fall back on parents for advice and loving care.
You disagree with my assertion that children aren't born with an ability to understand the world, but then go on to qualify your disagreement with examples that prove my point! Babies do have a stranger awareness, although this is a stage they grow out of and have to be taught again (google 'stranger awareness' to see how many groups are available to help with this!). Boiling water and fast traffic are examples of non-obvious danger that parents must teach children to avoid.
Part of child development is 'attachment' to parents, and young children will learn to explore their environment within a certain radius around their parents without having to have their parent by their side at every point. If something concerns them they will look for parental reassurance before carrying on. I think that model can carry on until early- to mid-teens very healthily. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory)
But how did he learn that trust and respect in the first place? It doesn't happen by magic. Sure, children need to learn from mistakes, but those mistakes need to happen in a safe environment to start with so that the consequences are limited. When children are learning to walk we don't let them wander all over town and across busy streets - they're encouraged to try walking from one person to another in the home, and then outside holding an adults hand. Their freedom to walk without direct involvement of an adult is gradually increased, and if a worrying trend develops their their freedom is reined back a little, for instance if they keep wandering into the road then they might be made to hold hands for the rest of that trip and that pattern repeated until they've learnt the lesson.
Social interactions are no different, children gradually build up an understanding of how the world works and how to recognise danger in social situations. They aren't born with an innate ability to understand the world that would flourish if only parents didn't hold them back (as you seem to suggest). I can see your point: over-protectiveness can be just as damaging as neglect, but it's about being appropriate to the child's level of development. The majority of (but clearly not absolutely all) 14 year-olds are not ready to move about in the adult world completely unsupervised, be it virtually via the Internet or physically, as this story clearly illustrates.
Yes - but a responsible parent will ensure that the "fuck up" will not do serious damage to the mental or physical health of the child. In the case of this story the 'hands off' approach has been shown not to work - the mental and possibly physical heath of a minor has been seriously damaged through sexual assult that should not have been possible if appropriate supervision had been in place.
Yes... you can. Seriously, I really don't buy this. It's part of a growing idea (certainly in Britain) that it's impossible to parent properly and monitor what children get up to, and it's an absolute myth. Up until the age of about 11 or 12 children should have no guaranteed privacy in terms of what they say and do, and if they've been used to loving oversight for all of their lives they won't have a problem with this. Sure, they can have conversations with their friends, but parents should be aware of what's going on and step in if something isn't right.
They should be gradually introduced to having independent passtimes and activities - like a Scout group or sports team - but understand that they are supervised by the adult that's in charge there. Only when they're entering their teens should they start to do any activities really on their own, and to begin with they should be clearly definined things like meeting some friends for a milkshake and then picked up again in the car. By the time they hit mid-teens they should be responsible enough to go and do things without running everything past mom and dad, but always know that they can come and talk about any problems.
The idea that a 14 year-old girl can meet a 19 year-old man without parents being aware until afterwards should raise questions about the parents' responsibility (neglect is a form of child abuse, although I don't know enough details to allege that in this case).
Where does the Internet fit into this? Web usage should follow the same pattern: a 14 year-old saying "I'm using the Internet" is even less specific than saying "I'm going to the mall" - in both cases the answer should be "no you're not". If they say "I'm just messaging Jane" then 20 minutes later they should be asked "are you still messaging Jane - why not invite her over for dinner if you're talking for so long?" If they're researching something for school then that's what they should stick to. Social time on the 'net should be limited and checked. If they abuse trust and lie about what they're doing then it should be withdrawn for a period of time.
This may sound terribly draconian but I think it's the only way to bring up children safely and with an understanding of what's right and safe and what's wrong and dangerous. I spent hours on the computer alone as a child, but we didn't have a modem and my parents knew what software was there. I also spent hours in the street playing with friends, but my parents knew every other parent on the street and it was a quiet cul-de-sac. Things have changed now, and it's not safe to let children play outside alone, and neither is it safe for them to play on the Internet alone. If parents aren't available to supervise then the children can't play in the street; if they can't supervise the 'net then it should be unplugged or password protected until they can.
RTFA - it doesn't work with SLR cameras and probably never will. I don't think the paparazzi use point and shoot compact digitals, they use SLRs with three foot long lenses. It's use is going to be at museums and trade shows where people pop away with a little handheld and in movie theatres to prevent piracy.
They didn't forge it. They used cross-site scripting to inject malicious code into the real Paypal page - in other words there is a vulnerability in the scripting used that takes information probably encoded in the URL and displays it on the page as the Netcraft write-up shows. This is then used to redirect the unsuspecting user to the fake page.
No, that would be if they decreased their downtime by 20%. It's not the same thing, and the GP had it right (despite all of the posts to the contrary). Somebody's not doing their math right, but it's not the GP.
We say "go eat dirt" (or something analagous) and find another ISP. Been there, done that.
No...no... listen:- You're running a relatively popular website, say an e-commerce site, not up there with the big boys like Amazon but you're making money and you've given up your day job. The ISP providing connectivity for millions of users (say AOL) says "we're going to a two-tier network and we're going to give you the option to get a better tier." You can't find another ISP because it's not your ISP - it's your customer's ISP who's allocated so much bandwidth to your block of IPs and you won't get anymore unless you pay up.
Your options will be to pay up, or put up with the fact that millions of your customers find your website is ridiculously slow. As less people use your website it will speed up again, but your customers and potential customers have gone back to Amazon and have taken your site of their bookmarks list. Getting a better rack server or changing ISPs won't help because the artificial bottleneck is elsewhere and outside of your control unless you pay to move onto the priority tier.
Read the article. The proposal is that the big ISPs will have two tiers/channels/whatever, one that is high speed and only available to paying customers, and the other for everybody else. Note that the paying customers not only pay for their hosting and bandwidth, but also pay the ISP serving the broadband/cable/cell connection to the end user for the right to have their content served over the faster channel.
Presumably the idea of getting 'too popular' is that the ISPs would not only have the option of limiting bandwidth in the last mile to each individual subscriber, but also ISPs may have limited bandwidth across the whole network allocated e.g. by IP block, effectively slowing access to that server down as it becomes more popular, which would obviously cause a drop in popularity/revenue for the online business providing content. At the moment the bottleneck would be with their own hosting, for which they would have to pay for more transfer (GB/month) and a faster pipe (GB/sec). If these proposals are successful they may also have to pay one or more ISPs to be put on the faster pipe through their network and at the subscriber end so that the end users can access the service at an acceptable speed.
The nasty side of this is that, again presumably, the ISPs would allocate a reasonable bandwidth to non-fasttrack traffic so that end users don't notice a slowdown in less popular, niche websites, otherwise customers would complain that 'the whole internet is slow'. The big players would naturally pay up immediately, so it's only the middle group who are too popular for their own good who would be stuck.
Well, I have to say that although I do agree with the article writer, I've not found myself up against this problem personally, so I don't know what my response would be; my feeling as an advocate of Free/OSS software in general is as I've already stated. A polite response is always a good idea, but then again there are lots of of people who like to complain about free things as if it's their right to have it fixed yesterday (I used to run a community broadband wi-fi net so I know the feeling) I can understand why people may want to respond negatively.
I think the real issue is being clear about what the project is trying to acheive - if the aim is to produce something that will be used by a large community many of whom will be relatively non-technical users (complaints about Gaim elsewhere in this story being a good example) then efforts need to be made to addres major flaws in the current stable, unless the next stable is _very_ nearly ready. This is good because F/OSS projects often have a cycle whereby they acheive a critical mass, become a de facto standard, gain support from people with money like distros, get more paid or unpaid programmers on board (or the original authors get employed by someone) etc. etc. Projects that don't get users will end up stale when the original author's itch has not only been scratched but has gone away because they've moved on to something else.