What about tele-riding a car on the Moon? Just send tele-commanded mini-cars on the Moon and set some relay satellites. It should be possible to drive a car with a latency of 2 secs, if speed is not eccessive and the car has good bumpers.
(Mars will have to wait for faster-than-light communications:-( ).
Or, even better, what about organizing a car race of several day, where the drivers have to figure out ou to reach point B from point A and how to go around obstacles? I guess you could call it a space-tele-rally.
Entartainement industry today has much more money than any government agency. Having fun with space might be the solution to restart the space race
(yes, we live in an absurd world.)
On the same line, I wonder if it is feasible to install userland software without becoming root ( maybe using an account 'installer' which just owns the right files and directories).
This should work at least for packages not containing root setuid files, and reduce the harm which can be done by a rogue instrallation script.
Because I'm not sure that an audit can easily detect few armful lines in a long configure script.
I'm looking forward to a stable Nautilus also because I'm REALLY finding gmc lacking
gmc development has been abandoned by its project leader and others, to favor Nautilus, a supposedly more advanced File Manager (and kitchen sink).
OK, it's their right to do so. And yes, gmc is basically a bad hack of mc. But after so much efforts it has become stable, is not too heavy (I can use it with my 150 MHz laptop) and it has almost all features I really need. It's a pity it has been abandoned just now.
Yes, I know. If you want it, do it yourself. Maybe I will. I'll name it yafm, of course;-)
I do agree that there is much redundancy in the open-source world. There are many factors in it which will keep it in this way:
personal : free software developers may have different agendas; re-inventing the wheel is still a good way to learn and is often more fun that reading someone else's code.
cultural : different projects reflect different views (even political) about 'computing life'.
economics : distros and other linux-based companies need a 'flagship product' on which to base ther service offer, and which will allow to be distinguish from others; so they'll tend to develop their own version of whatever they think is 'strategical' for their kind of busingess (e.g. installers, packet managers,... ). Collaboration will happen when a goal is too difficult to be achieved alone, or when there is already a free software product to use for all ( a product not already 'branded' by another company, that is ).
Given the above points, I don't think we can expect the Linux world to behave as a single company.As for any real-life system, there will always be redundancy and competition. This will be bad for short-term goals but hopefully good in the long run.
The cross-fertilization of ideas due to the open-source model will help, I think, as well as the tradition of open standards of the unix/internet world.
I was amazed to find-out, however, that Napster is well known and used even in relatively back-water South Italy ( which might be back-water as for technology but which spends huge money on electronics consumables ). Many click-and-run computer users have downloaded a copy of Napster client. I know people which switched to flat-rate dial-up( still dialup, but you don't pay for the telephone call, just pay a fixed amount per month to the provider ), only because of Napster.
According to the media, many artists see Napster/MP3 as only a tool for pirating their music. There are exceptions, however. In one interview, an Italian rock-star of 80s (I believe) said that the only way he found to publish his new pieces was Internet. While he is still famous, all the companies he contacted requested him to go throu all the media show ( radiso, tv's and such ) before publishing, while he just wanted to publish his music.
Italian 'anty-piracy' regulations have just been strengthened, making them too much similar to the ones in US and in other countries ( now for instance also to publish free software CD you need a special permission from SIAE ).
I just spent some weeks in the Netherlands for work. Last week I heard a local(?) radio, english-speeking, saying that they tried out a couple of MP3s of a band which only publish via Internet. The public liked them, and now they are among the most requested and played.
The DJ reported this fact as a proof that MP3s are not only evil, while talking with a local(?) rock star (which knew nothing about).
Sorry but I can't remeber the names - for me music is just something I occasionally hear while driving.
Then you have a large number of God-Numbers to choose from ( and as we say here in slashdot, Choice is God,er,Good ).
We can halso postulate that, since every piece of knowledge is in PI, *each piece* of PI encodes some kind of knowledge. It is just matter to decode it.
It means that if you do:./compute_pi >/dev/dsp, sooner or later you will ear Behetoven's fifth, last Madonna's song etc...
(well, maybe not at the right speed)
Or if you stream the PI digits to the framebuffer, you (or your grand-grand-grand-children) will see a digital representation of Da Vinci's gioconda.
I wonder if this wold be accepted as 'prior art' in a patent or copyright lawsuit
OTOH, I have seen exactly the same post in another story, yesterday. So, a bit of suspicion is legitim I think.
If this was a troll, I don't think it worked, however. It only generated an impressive flow of good will and very few snappy remarks. Considering that this is./, this is remarkable;-)
God, what pathetic moderation. The above poster hasn't used any of the last THREE releases of Mandrake.
Yep, and I said so. And BTW, noone modded me up - it's just that nobody modded me down... yet.
Okay, Mandrake has a feature called supermount for quite some time...
Ok, you did answer my question ( it was a plain question, not an attempt to praise a solution over another - since I use neither ). Only one thing : then why it is needed the icon, if removable media are mounted/unmounted automagically? (another plain question, you see... ).
And re: dumbifying the user, nobodies removing your GCLI apps and replacing them with GUIs...
I can't see the problem with it myself.
The problem ( a small one ) is that if the user doesn't know that removable media on Linux need to be mounted/unmounted, he can be lost without the GUI. Said so, I agree that any computer user relies on some level on the black-box concept (I push buttons and things just work). But being allowed to raise the lid of the box is a nice bonus.
I wonder : why these end-user oriented distro do not set-up automount by default? It would be much more easy for the user coming from windows world.
I remember that the version of RH which I tried a few months ago (6.2?) had it, and it seemed to work; it event fired automatically either the file manager (for normal CD) or gnomeRPM (for RH Installation CD).
So why Mandrake did not pick up the hint? I don't have much a use for such a featrure, but any windows user would appreciate it. Does currently automount implementation have any flaw?
P.S. I DO NOT like the way Linux distros are trying to imitate Windows in 'dumbifying' user, but this is another thread.
Re:No Security on a Windows Network
on
Microsoft Cracked
·
· Score: 2
I'm just waiting for the first "for-newbies" distro (oh, wait, Corel comes to mind )
Actually, when I tried out the network edition of Colel 1.0 ( the one you find on magazines and on the 'Net), I was astonished to find out that the installer did not ask for root password ( I guess it was considered too complex a concept for newbies to grasp). As a result my box was perfectly installed - and anybody could became root with no password.
Not a big thing, for a unix/linux user - but I would not be surprising if Corel users are still surfing the Net without protection for their root accounts.
Re:See what happens when you rely on NT
on
Microsoft Cracked
·
· Score: 2
Once again this prooves the weakest link in any security is the human factor.
Not sure about that. IMO the problem was that a *stupid* computer was let to take decisions (i.e. running a program) instead of a - supposedly - *intelligent* human operator.
The policy of dumbifying computer users to sell more software is backfiring on M$oft ( not much, but some).
Good automation practice should rely on *sinergy* between man and computer, allowing each one to do what it does bests : computer to quicly perform repeated stupid tasks ; human to analyze data and take decisions.
Think of it : common modems are 56 K download and only 33K upload. In my country, the standard ADSL offering is 512K download and 128K upload.
These things do favor a server-centric internet over peer-to-peer connections. The common user is supposed to be a content consumer more than a content producer ( well, honestly this is quite true for 99% of users - including me ).
Let's say you are an engineer designing a critical system for the local hospital. You got a set of requirements (including safety and reliability reqs) and now you have to define you architecture.
Case 1 : you choose an open source solution. Your system fails. YOU are f*ked.
Case 2 : you choose a proprietary solution. Your system fails. YOU are f*ked. Can you take 'revenge' on the software vendor? Not with most commercial software, AFAIK (which is not far).
In both cases you are the responsible that your system meets its requirements. It's your responsibility to pick up the right components.
There is no difference in responsibility wether you choose open-source or proprietary software.
Open-source gives you more control - provided that you have the skills and the budget to excercise that control, which include *qualifying* any component before deployment in critical systems.
Note that you shall qualify your system even in case you use proprietary solutions - but in that case you can only rely on black-box analysis, not having the source at hand.
If you don't have the skills or the budget to qualify your system - well, better do your business where a failure does not mean loss of life.
DISCLAIMER : luckily for me, I don't do critical systems.
I think the concept of the JVM is still quite valid, even for applications - however, what really needs to be done is to make it so that
multiple Java apps share the same VM.
Interesting concept. I noticed that when you have seveal Java apps running, even big machines start bending under the weight of several JVM.
Anyway, I'd really like to skip the WM for apps I don't need to have portable binaries.
As for the libraries - what sort of list are you talking about? The Java Collections framework (standard in 1.2 and above, availiable as library for 1.1.x) provides most of the collections you'd need.
Yes, and I use most of them quite often. But IMO they imposes a quite lengthy notation stile, which could be shortened without loosing elegance if the language itself supported high-leve data structures (not as libraries,albeit standard ones). If you'd look at lists or ash in Perl, or at lists/tuples/dictionaries in python, you would know what I mean : same functions, but with a more compact notation style.
there are other GUI toolkits (like bonobo(sp?)
The only bonobo I know of is the component-model being developed with gnome... there are others?
another poster said that you can get a lot of the benefits of generic programming through use of interfaces
That was me (I talked a lot today;-). Nice that we agree on something (more that that actually : I like Java - mostly the language itself, but I'm also comfortable with the libraries ).
Yes, C++ is very powerful. But it also awfully easy to shot your foot with. Java took away some of the power, putting it some more discipline.
One example are templates. One other examples are multiple inheritance vs interface.
In my job, which currently involves both C++ and Java, I don't miss much what Java took away from C++. I don't miss much templates : generic programming can be carried out with well-conceived interface classes : it is less easy and you have to write more code, but it is also IMO more readable than templates, and more safe. And last time I used templates (admittedly, 1 year ago ), I was annoyed by the fact that most errors only shown up when I instantiated a template.
Not that I like everithing of Java, and that I wouldn't like some more feature. And not that I dislike all of C++. It is just that in my expierience the compromise 'power vs easiness' made by Java is more appealing that the one made by C++.
ASAIK, there is an on-going project to add Java front-end (native and byte-code) to the suit og GNU compilers.
I hope they succeed. Java-the-language managed to clear most of the worst nasty things of C++ without taking away much power.
I share the idea that the JVM is the worst part of Java - for people not developing applets but full-blown applications, there should be the option of blowing it away and going native. In the meanwhile, I hope the JVM of 1.3 is improved.
Java libraries are OK, but too involuted sometimes ( and something basic like lists and such should become part of standard language, as in python/perl). MMI API is nice, but awt looks awful and Swing is veeery slow. Anyway, I don't like languages too much bound to one set of API - I like the choice C/perl/python gives you in terms of libraries.
It crashed on my WinNT office PC just yesterday, for the second time in 4 months. Luckily, it did not take the system with it ( It did it the first time, still on NT).
OTOH, M17 on my Linux box crashed consistently at least once every 2 weeks in the last few months (twice while posting on/. ). Running the talkback, I have been able to file several bug reports.
Despite that, I still use M17 as my primary browser at home. I quite like it. I hope M18 is really less buggy and faster, as someone says. I'll try it this evening.
Actually, any *nix OS imposes a limit on the number of file descriptors a single process can open(try 'man 2 open'). Therefore a normal application cannot use up all file descriptors. Probably however the update agent runs with super-user privileges ( I don't know for sure: does it also automatically update packages?)
I see this bug as a result of a worrying tendence of open-source software to copy M$oft software in giving too much control to the computer and too few control to the user (outlook viruses, anyone?)
In these matters my motto is : the dumbest of users is still more intelligent than the smartest of computers.
Red Hat's "product" is the service of gathering up all the bleeding-edge stuff, testing it for a certain level of usability, and then packaging it in a convenient format for you to get at. To expect a distro- any distro - to be bug-free is to miss the whole point!
True but... why then they market it ( and price it ) as a full out-of-the-box Operating System ?
And when I say *they*, I'm not referring to RH only.
/*** RANT BEGIN ***********************************
One issue I have with Linux commercial distros is that they offer their products on the newbie market as complete, perfectly integrated systems, while they are only a collection of beautiful, powerfool tools, which need some *user* work to be assembled and tuned to fit in the user box.
I used to buy two or three distributions per year, just for the fun of it, when they were marketed - and priced - accordingly. Now I don't even try out the light versions which come with Magazines. I have Debian, the Internet, my programming skills and my knowledge of Linux, and that's enough for me to get all the 'bleeding edge' I need.
**************** RANT END *********************/
I guess the answer to my rethorical question above is : Money. Yeah, I understand it. But this does not mean that I like it.
the human element is THE WEAKEST link in the whole chain of security.
1 ) People knows how to deal with people defects and survive... most of times. Only a restrict number of them knows how to deal with computer defects.
2 ) Computers are and will stay incredibly rigid and unapt to react to real-word situations. Uman brain evolved over millions of years to adapt itself to real-world.
That's wy I believe people (well-trained and carefully selected people) should be an essential part of any mission-critical system using computers.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, even better, what about organizing a car race of several day, where the drivers have to figure out ou to reach point B from point A and how to go around obstacles? I guess you could call it a space-tele-rally.
Entartainement industry today has much more money than any government agency. Having fun with space might be the solution to restart the space race (yes, we live in an absurd world.)
This should work at least for packages not containing root setuid files, and reduce the harm which can be done by a rogue instrallation script.
Because I'm not sure that an audit can easily detect few armful lines in a long configure script.
Have a look to the Commandement n. 7 ...
gmc development has been abandoned by its project leader and others, to favor Nautilus, a supposedly more advanced File Manager (and kitchen sink).
OK, it's their right to do so. And yes, gmc is basically a bad hack of mc. But after so much efforts it has become stable, is not too heavy (I can use it with my 150 MHz laptop) and it has almost all features I really need. It's a pity it has been abandoned just now.
Yes, I know. If you want it, do it yourself. Maybe I will. I'll name it yafm, of course ;-)
personal : free software developers may have different agendas; re-inventing the wheel is still a good way to learn and is often more fun that reading someone else's code.
cultural : different projects reflect different views (even political) about 'computing life'.
economics : distros and other linux-based companies need a 'flagship product' on which to base ther service offer, and which will allow to be distinguish from others; so they'll tend to develop their own version of whatever they think is 'strategical' for their kind of busingess (e.g. installers, packet managers, ... ). Collaboration will happen when a goal is too difficult to be achieved alone, or when there is already a free software product to use for all ( a product not already 'branded' by another company, that is ).
Given the above points, I don't think we can expect the Linux world to behave as a single company.As for any real-life system, there will always be redundancy and competition. This will be bad for short-term goals but hopefully good in the long run.
The cross-fertilization of ideas due to the open-source model will help, I think, as well as the tradition of open standards of the unix/internet world.
According to the media, many artists see Napster/MP3 as only a tool for pirating their music. There are exceptions, however. In one interview, an Italian rock-star of 80s (I believe) said that the only way he found to publish his new pieces was Internet. While he is still famous, all the companies he contacted requested him to go throu all the media show ( radiso, tv's and such ) before publishing, while he just wanted to publish his music.
Italian 'anty-piracy' regulations have just been strengthened, making them too much similar to the ones in US and in other countries ( now for instance also to publish free software CD you need a special permission from SIAE ).
The DJ reported this fact as a proof that MP3s are not only evil, while talking with a local(?) rock star (which knew nothing about).
Sorry but I can't remeber the names - for me music is just something I occasionally hear while driving.
We can halso postulate that, since every piece of knowledge is in PI, *each piece* of PI encodes some kind of knowledge. It is just matter to decode it.
It means that if you do: ./compute_pi > /dev/dsp, sooner or later you will ear Behetoven's fifth, last Madonna's song etc...
(well, maybe not at the right speed)
Or if you stream the PI digits to the framebuffer, you (or your grand-grand-grand-children) will see a digital representation of Da Vinci's gioconda.
I wonder if this wold be accepted as 'prior art' in a patent or copyright lawsuit
If this was a troll, I don't think it worked, however. It only generated an impressive flow of good will and very few snappy remarks. Considering that this is ./, this is remarkable ;-)
GNOME is part of the GNU project, and is free software (some times referred to as open source software.)
Yep, and I said so. And BTW, noone modded me up - it's just that nobody modded me down ... yet.
Okay, Mandrake has a feature called supermount for quite some time ...
Ok, you did answer my question ( it was a plain question, not an attempt to praise a solution over another - since I use neither ). Only one thing : then why it is needed the icon, if removable media are mounted/unmounted automagically? (another plain question, you see... ).
And re: dumbifying the user, nobodies removing your GCLI apps and replacing them with GUIs ...
I can't see the problem with it myself.
The problem ( a small one ) is that if the user doesn't know that removable media on Linux need to be mounted/unmounted, he can be lost without the GUI. Said so, I agree that any computer user relies on some level on the black-box concept (I push buttons and things just work). But being allowed to raise the lid of the box is a nice bonus.
I remember that the version of RH which I tried a few months ago (6.2?) had it, and it seemed to work; it event fired automatically either the file manager (for normal CD) or gnomeRPM (for RH Installation CD).
So why Mandrake did not pick up the hint? I don't have much a use for such a featrure, but any windows user would appreciate it. Does currently automount implementation have any flaw?
P.S. I DO NOT like the way Linux distros are trying to imitate Windows in 'dumbifying' user, but this is another thread.
Actually, when I tried out the network edition of Colel 1.0 ( the one you find on magazines and on the 'Net), I was astonished to find out that the installer did not ask for root password ( I guess it was considered too complex a concept for newbies to grasp). As a result my box was perfectly installed - and anybody could became root with no password.
Not a big thing, for a unix/linux user - but I would not be surprising if Corel users are still surfing the Net without protection for their root accounts.
Not sure about that. IMO the problem was that a *stupid* computer was let to take decisions (i.e. running a program) instead of a - supposedly - *intelligent* human operator.
The policy of dumbifying computer users to sell more software is backfiring on M$oft ( not much, but some).
Good automation practice should rely on *sinergy* between man and computer, allowing each one to do what it does bests : computer to quicly perform repeated stupid tasks ; human to analyze data and take decisions.
These things do favor a server-centric internet over peer-to-peer connections. The common user is supposed to be a content consumer more than a content producer ( well, honestly this is quite true for 99% of users - including me ).
Case 1 : you choose an open source solution. Your system fails. YOU are f*ked.
Case 2 : you choose a proprietary solution. Your system fails. YOU are f*ked. Can you take 'revenge' on the software vendor? Not with most commercial software, AFAIK (which is not far).
In both cases you are the responsible that your system meets its requirements. It's your responsibility to pick up the right components. There is no difference in responsibility wether you choose open-source or proprietary software.
Open-source gives you more control - provided that you have the skills and the budget to excercise that control, which include *qualifying* any component before deployment in critical systems. Note that you shall qualify your system even in case you use proprietary solutions - but in that case you can only rely on black-box analysis, not having the source at hand.
If you don't have the skills or the budget to qualify your system - well, better do your business where a failure does not mean loss of life.
DISCLAIMER : luckily for me, I don't do critical systems.
Interesting concept. I noticed that when you have seveal Java apps running, even big machines start bending under the weight of several JVM.
Anyway, I'd really like to skip the WM for apps I don't need to have portable binaries.
As for the libraries - what sort of list are you talking about? The Java Collections framework (standard in 1.2 and above, availiable as library for 1.1.x) provides most of the collections you'd need.
Yes, and I use most of them quite often. But IMO they imposes a quite lengthy notation stile, which could be shortened without loosing elegance if the language itself supported high-leve data structures (not as libraries,albeit standard ones). If you'd look at lists or ash in Perl, or at lists/tuples/dictionaries in python, you would know what I mean : same functions, but with a more compact notation style.
there are other GUI toolkits (like bonobo(sp?)
The only bonobo I know of is the component-model being developed with gnome ... there are others?
another poster said that you can get a lot of the benefits of generic programming through use of interfaces
That was me (I talked a lot today ;-). Nice that we agree on something (more that that actually : I like Java - mostly the language itself, but I'm also comfortable with the libraries ).
In my job, which currently involves both C++ and Java, I don't miss much what Java took away from C++. I don't miss much templates : generic programming can be carried out with well-conceived interface classes : it is less easy and you have to write more code, but it is also IMO more readable than templates, and more safe. And last time I used templates (admittedly, 1 year ago ), I was annoyed by the fact that most errors only shown up when I instantiated a template.
Not that I like everithing of Java, and that I wouldn't like some more feature. And not that I dislike all of C++. It is just that in my expierience the compromise 'power vs easiness' made by Java is more appealing that the one made by C++.
This makes things even funnier, anyway, because expanding the OS macro, is definitions becomes:
An operating system is the software which comes with the computer ( or Operating System distribution ) ....
Somebody should teach him the danger or recursion.
I hope they succeed. Java-the-language managed to clear most of the worst nasty things of C++ without taking away much power.
I share the idea that the JVM is the worst part of Java - for people not developing applets but full-blown applications, there should be the option of blowing it away and going native. In the meanwhile, I hope the JVM of 1.3 is improved.
Java libraries are OK, but too involuted sometimes ( and something basic like lists and such should become part of standard language, as in python/perl). MMI API is nice, but awt looks awful and Swing is veeery slow. Anyway, I don't like languages too much bound to one set of API - I like the choice C/perl/python gives you in terms of libraries.
It crashed on my WinNT office PC just yesterday, for the second time in 4 months. Luckily, it did not take the system with it ( It did it the first time, still on NT).
OTOH, M17 on my Linux box crashed consistently at least once every 2 weeks in the last few months (twice while posting on /. ). Running the talkback, I have been able to file several bug reports.
Despite that, I still use M17 as my primary browser at home. I quite like it. I hope M18 is really less buggy and faster, as someone says. I'll try it this evening.
Therefore a normal application cannot use up all file descriptors. Probably however the update agent runs with super-user privileges ( I don't know for sure: does it also automatically update packages?)
I see this bug as a result of a worrying tendence of open-source software to copy M$oft software in giving too much control to the computer and too few control to the user (outlook viruses, anyone?)
In these matters my motto is : the dumbest of users is still more intelligent than the smartest of computers.
True but ... why then they market it ( and price it ) as a full out-of-the-box Operating System ?
And when I say *they*, I'm not referring to RH only.
One issue I have with Linux commercial distros is that they offer their products on the newbie market as complete, perfectly integrated systems, while they are only a collection of beautiful, powerfool tools, which need some *user* work to be assembled and tuned to fit in the user box.
I used to buy two or three distributions per year, just for the fun of it, when they were marketed - and priced - accordingly. Now I don't even try out the light versions which come with Magazines. I have Debian, the Internet, my programming skills and my knowledge of Linux, and that's enough for me to get all the 'bleeding edge' I need.
**************** RANT END *********************/
I guess the answer to my rethorical question above is : Money. Yeah, I understand it. But this does not mean that I like it.
1 ) People knows how to deal with people defects and survive ... most of times. Only a restrict number of them knows how to deal with computer defects.
2 ) Computers are and will stay incredibly rigid and unapt to react to real-word situations. Uman brain evolved over millions of years to adapt itself to real-world.
That's wy I believe people (well-trained and carefully selected people) should be an essential part of any mission-critical system using computers.