I've done some more research, and this FTP site makes the source code available, but only for the version that they market in the UK. I would need the Australian version if I wanted to hack my router (which I would like to do, because there are several stupid things about it).
Looking again, I can see that the system used is BusyBox. I notice that BusyBox have already successfully prosecuted corporations for stealing their code.
I doubt that this is the only D-Link product using BusyBox. The website-hijacking firmware in the article is probably running infringing code too.
BusyBox v0.61.pre (2008.08.02-02:38+0000) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
# ls bin etc proc usr var.tar dev lib sbin var
# ls */*linu* etc/linux-igd
Here is the page where you can download the firmware. The release notes mention a series of modifications made by D-Link, after an "initial release" that makes no mention of where it came from.
Saying that even good decisions can make people suffer doesn't mean "Siberia stuff is no longer evil".
The last part was simply an example of a decision causing suffering, and still being good.
It is so tiresome to have to explain this. It reminds me of why I now only tutor motivated private students instead of annoying brats who don't want to learn.
The example of evil that Bheer gave was about people being sent to Siberia to die. I presume that he places it in the evil category due to the suffering caused (I did ask whether there was a more specific reason, and got no reply). I presume that you agree with him (I detect no disagreement).
You then try to make excuses for terrible actions of US presidents by saying that good decision can cause great suffering. This is a tautology: by definition, a good decision cannot cause great suffering (decisions that seemed good at the time are covered under the topic of mistakes). If I pluck a splinter from my finger, then I have reduced my suffering, not increased it. In the same way, x + 2 - 4 gives me a number which is lower than x. It is meaningless to describe it as an increase. The reverse is also true: if I remove a splinter with a machete, then I have increased my suffering, in the same way that x + 4 - 2 gives me a number higher than x.
Why, then, would you say "good, splinter-removing decisions sometimes cause suffering" when I object to machete-wielding presidents? It can only be that you think that x + 4 - 2 is an improved level of suffering, that you are being disingenuous, or that the + 4 made up of foreigners' blood just doesn't count for you.
In answer to your disingenuous (or clueless) question about what I consider evil, I must direct you back to my very first post. I clearly stated that bringing suffering to millions of people is evil. A demand for greater precision than that can only be interpreted as a bigoted belief in the idea that it depends who those people are.
If you want examples of suffering being caused, one only has to look at the rape of Iraq, which has claimed a million Iraqi lives, and done huge damage to the USA. The splinter removed is tiny in comparison, and put there by the US in the first place. McCain is an enthusiastic supporter of this adventure, and is fanatically opposed to negotiations that might prevent the same happening in Iran.
Exactly. I consider myself ultra-left, and I find it depressing that so many good people waste so much energy arguing for extra rights for gays. They deserve the same rights as everyone else.
Marriage is not even a "right" anyway. It is a cultural custom involving a man and a woman from different families forming a long-term sexual union.
State recognition for gay marriage is silly. Even recognition for normal marriage should probably be done away with. If it is convenient for the calculation of taxes and suchlike to consider two people to have a legal bond between them, then the government ought to recognise civil unions, free of cultural baggage, that can be signed between any two adults.
We lefties should be fully satisfied that absolutely everyone has the same legal rights, and there would be nothing sexually deviant for conservatives to be outraged by.
Unfortunately, most people seem more set on being pro- or anti-gay than they are on finding compromises that make the world a better place for us all.
What annoys be about my D-Link DSL-504T router is that although it runs some sort of customised GNU/Linux (I did "ssh admin@10.1.1.1" and had a look inside), their documentation and website make not the slightest mention of this, let alone make the source code available.
By your reasoning, the previously-mentioned Siberia stuff is no longer evil, because a good decision could lead to it.
I said "Good decisions may bring suffering to millions of people", not "Decisions that bring suffering to millions of people are good".
As an example: Was Allied involvement in World War II evil because it brought suffering (death, even) to millions of people? The generally accepted answer is NO, because it was in response to an attack and prevented something far worse.
You're now setting up straw men through sheer cluelessness. What you're saying cannot be seen to have a clear relation to what I said.
When you're the leader of a nation of 300 million people, your slightest mistake can bring suffering to millions of people. Good decisions may even bring suffering to millions of people.
By your reasoning, the previously-mentioned Siberia stuff is no longer evil, because a good decision could lead to it.
your your political opponent isn't automatically evil incarnate? That may work for vi-vs-emacs and Apple-vs-MS wars on/., but it's just juvenile in the real world.
You have it backward.
It is juvenile to think someone is evil because they use a different text editor. It is just clarity to see evil in someone who will bring suffering to millions of people.
The reality is that people will name their children whatever they damn please. I do realize that the language cabal in France (and to a lesser extent in Quebec) frown upon such things, but most people these days do not care.
The "cabal" consists of the vast majority of people who are not jibbering idiots.
The fact that you don't care that your son is called LaJennifer and your daughter's name is jimBobMan (perhaps with a few creative diacritics added) does not mean that the rest of us aren't going to rightfully find you hilarious.
Off the top of my head, unisex names of people I have known from France or Quebec: Jean, Jolie, Jules, Michele, Noel, Patrice, Rene, Sacha, and Sidney.
No.
Jean is masculine (you may be thinking of Jeanne, or of the English name Jean, with a totally different pronunciation), Jolie is feminine, Michele is feminine (you may be thinking of Michel), Jules is masculine (you may be thinking of Julie), Noel is masculine (you may be thinking of Noelle), Patrice is common gender (yes, you've found one!), Rene is masculine (you may be thinking of Renee), Sacha is common gender (but it's Russian), and finally, Sidney is masculine and English. I am aware that a few idiots have started misapplying it to their daughters, though, Paris-Hilton-style.
Several people have responded to this saying that you should have sent a PDF, and others have countered this by saying that agencies require Word documents.
However, agencies were not under discussion. The question was how to make sure that a CV displays correctly on an employer's screen. The fact is that only PDF (or XPS/PS/DVI) can offer this. Simply saving a.doc file in Word rather than OOo is not sufficient. No version of Word is compatible with all other versions, and the target computer will not necessarily have the same fonts as yours. The anecdote about getting an immediate response with a Word CV proves nothing.
There's nothing stopping you sending out a nice, professional PDF, and providing the source too, with an explantory note in the e-mail.
Here's another anecdote. I was accepted for a teaching job, and I got to see the folder on the boss's PC which contained all the CVs. There were about a hundred. Mine was one of about five that were in.pdf. There were about ten in.rtf, and the rest in.doc. Just looking at that folder, I could see how I had stood out as being more knowledgeable.
These days, I don't even use OOo. I write my CV in LaTeX and send out a PDF from that. I haven't had a request for a Word document in quite a while, since I apply straight to companies.
When a company sends me a Word document to edit for them, I work on it in AbiWord, and send it back to them as.rtf.zip. They never have a problem with it.
Well, this is what I did to improve the colour scheme on Ubuntu (to black and cyan):
sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop
If you love GNOME, then install something like Linux Mint. It's based on Ubuntu, but themed totally differently from top to bottom. You'll have to like green.
I don't think that GDM and Usplash are that hard to customise.
If they can double-click on IE (oops, Firefox, since we're on Slashdot) sooner they will be happy, even if the system is only semi-responsive.
Not at all. A useless desktop is highly annoying. You were right a sentence before that, when you mentioned progress. People need to see that the thing hasn't just crashed. They want an idea of how much longer it will be. I make sure that Ubuntu gives me as many start-up messages as possible, so that I can see exactly what it is doing.
What really gets me is not just the boot time but the shutdown time. Especially because I often reboot (shutdown time + boot time).
When I tell my PC to shut down, all it really needs to do is make sure that no files are currently being written to disk, force a dismount of all drives, and then cut the power. Everything else is bad programming, as far as I can see. Why does the network have to shut down? Why do a whole load of separate processes have to be given signals? Why does KDE need time to save settings (it should have already saved them in real time)?
If the computer is not doing anything, a clean shutdown should take no more than a second, and yet it can take much longer.
Your colorful rant perfectly shows how you don't know a thing about marketing, or to be more specific, "first impressions last".
But don't worry, it's a reason geeks aren't exactly the best business types, and you're in good company.
/me sighs
I did not imply for a moment that one should not try to make a product attractive, or that putting thought into a colour scheme was not an important part of making a product attractive.
It's just that, no matter what you do, there will always be someone who doesn't like it. Individual opinions about colours are therefore worthless anecdotal evidence. Only surveys of users/customers can give a clear picture of which schemes have a better chance of appealing to a larger number of people. I haven't seen any specific survey about desktop colour schemes, but it seems to me that the pre-eminence of Ubuntu in the world of gratis operating systems indicates that the chosen earthy colour scheme is one that people feel matches Ubuntu's African roots (and pretentions). And the minority who dislike it can change it easily.
What is it with these morons complaining about default colours? The unspoken premise of all their whinges is that the chosen hues are bad, and that if only a different (and obviously superior) colour had been chosen, then there would be no complaints.
What these idiots don't realise is that if it were XP-blue instead of earthy African reds and browns, then a million other idiots would be making exactly the same complaint in reverse.
Fools, please try to understand: a strange quirk of human beings is that we each have a favourite colour. This means that you will never be able to design a colour scheme that nobody dislikes. Your whining is therefore utterly pointless. It's redundant before it even leaves your mouth. I have three machines: they run Ubuntu Hardy, Kubuntu Intrepid beta, and Xubuntu Hardy. They are red-brown, cyan-black, and white-cerulean, respectively. And you know what? They are all perfectly fine. No, they do not "make me hurl with those turd colours"; no, they do not "give me a headache". They're just fucking colours. If the defaults are not in line with your personal inclinations, then learn how to click on the Preferences menu. Fuck.
What WAS the IOC granting the Olympics to Beijing but a pass for Tiananmen?
In the context of your sentence, you were clearly referring to the idea of me giving them a pass, not the IOC giving them a pass. Since there's no hint of me excusing any particular government act, that was nonsensical.
It still doesn't make sense even if the IOC is the subject, because the IOC makes no particular judgements about specific political events many years in the past. It just deals with the Olympics, which is a time for countries to put aside their very real and serious differences to compete with each other in a civilised fashion, and have a chance to see each other as human beings.
I understand the pressure on the IOC to be partisan, but they rejected that, and chose to give China no special treatment. This is what I am applauding, because I would not like to see the Olympics end. Make no mistake: that is the choice to be made. Either we have an Olympic tradition of peace and brotherhood, or we decide that since only unbloodstained countries may compete, the Games must end. There is no other moral option. To clarify further: allowing Oceania to choose to compete only with Eurasia and to exclude Eastasia because today Eastasia is evil, is simply not a moral option.
OK, perhaps that last bit won't clarify anything unless you have read and understood a certain book. But someone else reading this might have.
A "pass for Tiananmen"? Comments like that just show how divorced from reality you are. How can anyone be expected to discuss with you? Perhaps you are just joking, as I first thought.
Yes, but being an ass implies that one is deliberately acting in an asinine manner (as in, "what an asshole.")
OK, I'll grant you that it's probably thus for Americans (since you've merged "arse" with "ass"), but, for me, a person who is an ass is someone who acts idiotically, as though they had no more brain than an ass (equus asinus, whence both the words "ass" and "asinine"). Someone who deliberately behaves in a stupidly objectionable way is an arsehole, bastard, prick, or any number of other obscenities.
Slashdot Mirror
Any editor where you have to take a hand off the keyboard in order to move the cursor is fundamentally broken.
It's fortunate that Kate is not one of those then.
but that the idiocracy that is Neues Arbeit still believes the bullshit that their highly paid, poorly educated advisors spew out.
As they say, Neue Arbeit macht nicht frei.
I'm glad I got out of the UK. Unfortunately, Australia is going the same way too.
I've done some more research, and this FTP site makes the source code available, but only for the version that they market in the UK. I would need the Australian version if I wanted to hack my router (which I would like to do, because there are several stupid things about it).
OK, thanks. I have now.
Looking again, I can see that the system used is BusyBox. I notice that BusyBox have already successfully prosecuted corporations for stealing their code.
I doubt that this is the only D-Link product using BusyBox. The website-hijacking firmware in the article is probably running infringing code too.
david@chameleon:~$ ssh admin@router
admin@router's password:
BusyBox v0.61.pre (2008.08.02-02:38+0000) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
# ls
bin etc proc usr var.tar
dev lib sbin var
# ls */*linu*
etc/linux-igd
Here is the page where you can download the firmware. The release notes mention a series of modifications made by D-Link, after an "initial release" that makes no mention of where it came from.
Saying that even good decisions can make people suffer doesn't mean "Siberia stuff is no longer evil".
The last part was simply an example of a decision causing suffering, and still being good.
It is so tiresome to have to explain this. It reminds me of why I now only tutor motivated private students instead of annoying brats who don't want to learn.
The example of evil that Bheer gave was about people being sent to Siberia to die. I presume that he places it in the evil category due to the suffering caused (I did ask whether there was a more specific reason, and got no reply). I presume that you agree with him (I detect no disagreement).
You then try to make excuses for terrible actions of US presidents by saying that good decision can cause great suffering. This is a tautology: by definition, a good decision cannot cause great suffering (decisions that seemed good at the time are covered under the topic of mistakes). If I pluck a splinter from my finger, then I have reduced my suffering, not increased it. In the same way, x + 2 - 4 gives me a number which is lower than x. It is meaningless to describe it as an increase. The reverse is also true: if I remove a splinter with a machete, then I have increased my suffering, in the same way that x + 4 - 2 gives me a number higher than x.
Why, then, would you say "good, splinter-removing decisions sometimes cause suffering" when I object to machete-wielding presidents? It can only be that you think that x + 4 - 2 is an improved level of suffering, that you are being disingenuous, or that the + 4 made up of foreigners' blood just doesn't count for you.
In answer to your disingenuous (or clueless) question about what I consider evil, I must direct you back to my very first post. I clearly stated that bringing suffering to millions of people is evil. A demand for greater precision than that can only be interpreted as a bigoted belief in the idea that it depends who those people are.
If you want examples of suffering being caused, one only has to look at the rape of Iraq, which has claimed a million Iraqi lives, and done huge damage to the USA. The splinter removed is tiny in comparison, and put there by the US in the first place. McCain is an enthusiastic supporter of this adventure, and is fanatically opposed to negotiations that might prevent the same happening in Iran.
Exactly. I consider myself ultra-left, and I find it depressing that so many good people waste so much energy arguing for extra rights for gays. They deserve the same rights as everyone else.
Marriage is not even a "right" anyway. It is a cultural custom involving a man and a woman from different families forming a long-term sexual union.
State recognition for gay marriage is silly. Even recognition for normal marriage should probably be done away with. If it is convenient for the calculation of taxes and suchlike to consider two people to have a legal bond between them, then the government ought to recognise civil unions, free of cultural baggage, that can be signed between any two adults.
We lefties should be fully satisfied that absolutely everyone has the same legal rights, and there would be nothing sexually deviant for conservatives to be outraged by.
Unfortunately, most people seem more set on being pro- or anti-gay than they are on finding compromises that make the world a better place for us all.
What annoys be about my D-Link DSL-504T router is that although it runs some sort of customised GNU/Linux (I did "ssh admin@10.1.1.1" and had a look inside), their documentation and website make not the slightest mention of this, let alone make the source code available.
By your reasoning, the previously-mentioned Siberia stuff is no longer evil, because a good decision could lead to it.
I said "Good decisions may bring suffering to millions of people", not "Decisions that bring suffering to millions of people are good".
As an example: Was Allied involvement in World War II evil because it brought suffering (death, even) to millions of people? The generally accepted answer is NO, because it was in response to an attack and prevented something far worse.
You're now setting up straw men through sheer cluelessness. What you're saying cannot be seen to have a clear relation to what I said.
When you're the leader of a nation of 300 million people, your slightest mistake can bring suffering to millions of people. Good decisions may even bring suffering to millions of people.
By your reasoning, the previously-mentioned Siberia stuff is no longer evil, because a good decision could lead to it.
Is there something particularly evil about Siberia versus elsewhere, or about starving versus being being killed otherwise?
your your political opponent isn't automatically evil incarnate? That may work for vi-vs-emacs and Apple-vs-MS wars on /., but it's just juvenile in the real world.
You have it backward.
It is juvenile to think someone is evil because they use a different text editor. It is just clarity to see evil in someone who will bring suffering to millions of people.
The reality is that people will name their children whatever they damn please. I do realize that the language cabal in France (and to a lesser extent in Quebec) frown upon such things, but most people these days do not care.
The "cabal" consists of the vast majority of people who are not jibbering idiots.
The fact that you don't care that your son is called LaJennifer and your daughter's name is jimBobMan (perhaps with a few creative diacritics added) does not mean that the rest of us aren't going to rightfully find you hilarious.
Off the top of my head, unisex names of people I have known from France or Quebec: Jean, Jolie, Jules, Michele, Noel, Patrice, Rene, Sacha, and Sidney.
No.
Jean is masculine (you may be thinking of Jeanne, or of the English name Jean, with a totally different pronunciation), Jolie is feminine, Michele is feminine (you may be thinking of Michel), Jules is masculine (you may be thinking of Julie), Noel is masculine (you may be thinking of Noelle), Patrice is common gender (yes, you've found one!), Rene is masculine (you may be thinking of Renee), Sacha is common gender (but it's Russian), and finally, Sidney is masculine and English. I am aware that a few idiots have started misapplying it to their daughters, though, Paris-Hilton-style.
Contrary to popular rumour, and "a" ending on a name isn't necessarily feminine in all societies.
You're assuming that's the only reason for thinking that "Hua" sounds feminine.
The fact that, for instance, the Mandarin for "flower" is "hua" is another reason.
Several people have responded to this saying that you should have sent a PDF, and others have countered this by saying that agencies require Word documents.
However, agencies were not under discussion. The question was how to make sure that a CV displays correctly on an employer's screen. The fact is that only PDF (or XPS/PS/DVI) can offer this. Simply saving a .doc file in Word rather than OOo is not sufficient. No version of Word is compatible with all other versions, and the target computer will not necessarily have the same fonts as yours. The anecdote about getting an immediate response with a Word CV proves nothing.
There's nothing stopping you sending out a nice, professional PDF, and providing the source too, with an explantory note in the e-mail.
Here's another anecdote. I was accepted for a teaching job, and I got to see the folder on the boss's PC which contained all the CVs. There were about a hundred. Mine was one of about five that were in .pdf. There were about ten in .rtf, and the rest in .doc. Just looking at that folder, I could see how I had stood out as being more knowledgeable.
These days, I don't even use OOo. I write my CV in LaTeX and send out a PDF from that. I haven't had a request for a Word document in quite a while, since I apply straight to companies.
When a company sends me a Word document to edit for them, I work on it in AbiWord, and send it back to them as .rtf.zip. They never have a problem with it.
Interesting. I've never seen an option to do that on any operating system.
Well, this is what I did to improve the colour scheme on Ubuntu (to black and cyan):
sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop
If you love GNOME, then install something like Linux Mint. It's based on Ubuntu, but themed totally differently from top to bottom. You'll have to like green.
I don't think that GDM and Usplash are that hard to customise.
If they can double-click on IE (oops, Firefox, since we're on Slashdot) sooner they will be happy, even if the system is only semi-responsive.
Not at all. A useless desktop is highly annoying. You were right a sentence before that, when you mentioned progress. People need to see that the thing hasn't just crashed. They want an idea of how much longer it will be. I make sure that Ubuntu gives me as many start-up messages as possible, so that I can see exactly what it is doing.
I mean, with hibernation and standby modes, outside the need to restart for some sort of update--why even shutdown?
If you suspend to RAM, power is still being used. With a laptop, or an area prone to powercuts, this is a problem.
If you suspend to disk, the motherboard's initial boot process is not bypassed, so you need the optimisation that we're talking about.
Also, very many of us dual-boot. I can't play Rome: Total War on Ubuntu.
What really gets me is not just the boot time but the shutdown time. Especially because I often reboot (shutdown time + boot time).
When I tell my PC to shut down, all it really needs to do is make sure that no files are currently being written to disk, force a dismount of all drives, and then cut the power. Everything else is bad programming, as far as I can see. Why does the network have to shut down? Why do a whole load of separate processes have to be given signals? Why does KDE need time to save settings (it should have already saved them in real time)?
If the computer is not doing anything, a clean shutdown should take no more than a second, and yet it can take much longer.
Your colorful rant perfectly shows how you don't know a thing about marketing, or to be more specific, "first impressions last".
But don't worry, it's a reason geeks aren't exactly the best business types, and you're in good company.
/me sighs
I did not imply for a moment that one should not try to make a product attractive, or that putting thought into a colour scheme was not an important part of making a product attractive.
It's just that, no matter what you do, there will always be someone who doesn't like it. Individual opinions about colours are therefore worthless anecdotal evidence. Only surveys of users/customers can give a clear picture of which schemes have a better chance of appealing to a larger number of people. I haven't seen any specific survey about desktop colour schemes, but it seems to me that the pre-eminence of Ubuntu in the world of gratis operating systems indicates that the chosen earthy colour scheme is one that people feel matches Ubuntu's African roots (and pretentions). And the minority who dislike it can change it easily.
What is it with these morons complaining about default colours? The unspoken premise of all their whinges is that the chosen hues are bad, and that if only a different (and obviously superior) colour had been chosen, then there would be no complaints.
What these idiots don't realise is that if it were XP-blue instead of earthy African reds and browns, then a million other idiots would be making exactly the same complaint in reverse.
Fools, please try to understand: a strange quirk of human beings is that we each have a favourite colour. This means that you will never be able to design a colour scheme that nobody dislikes. Your whining is therefore utterly pointless. It's redundant before it even leaves your mouth. I have three machines: they run Ubuntu Hardy, Kubuntu Intrepid beta, and Xubuntu Hardy. They are red-brown, cyan-black, and white-cerulean, respectively. And you know what? They are all perfectly fine. No, they do not "make me hurl with those turd colours"; no, they do not "give me a headache". They're just fucking colours. If the defaults are not in line with your personal inclinations, then learn how to click on the Preferences menu. Fuck.
What WAS the IOC granting the Olympics to Beijing but a pass for Tiananmen?
In the context of your sentence, you were clearly referring to the idea of me giving them a pass, not the IOC giving them a pass. Since there's no hint of me excusing any particular government act, that was nonsensical.
It still doesn't make sense even if the IOC is the subject, because the IOC makes no particular judgements about specific political events many years in the past. It just deals with the Olympics, which is a time for countries to put aside their very real and serious differences to compete with each other in a civilised fashion, and have a chance to see each other as human beings.
I understand the pressure on the IOC to be partisan, but they rejected that, and chose to give China no special treatment. This is what I am applauding, because I would not like to see the Olympics end. Make no mistake: that is the choice to be made. Either we have an Olympic tradition of peace and brotherhood, or we decide that since only unbloodstained countries may compete, the Games must end. There is no other moral option. To clarify further: allowing Oceania to choose to compete only with Eurasia and to exclude Eastasia because today Eastasia is evil, is simply not a moral option.
OK, perhaps that last bit won't clarify anything unless you have read and understood a certain book. But someone else reading this might have.
A "pass for Tiananmen"? Comments like that just show how divorced from reality you are. How can anyone be expected to discuss with you? Perhaps you are just joking, as I first thought.
Yes, but being an ass implies that one is deliberately acting in an asinine manner (as in, "what an asshole.")
OK, I'll grant you that it's probably thus for Americans (since you've merged "arse" with "ass"), but, for me, a person who is an ass is someone who acts idiotically, as though they had no more brain than an ass (equus asinus, whence both the words "ass" and "asinine"). Someone who deliberately behaves in a stupidly objectionable way is an arsehole, bastard, prick, or any number of other obscenities.