Wow, SOMEBODY woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Are you always this negative? Talk about the glass being half empty... Yours is half empty with cigarette butts floating in it and lipstick on the rim.
I don't buy into your view of everything as being a big downer. I don't focus on the negative results of our progress, because those negative results pale in comparison with the positive things we've done.
By the way, since you decided to drag out the old "Boo, hoo, America nuked Japan" argument, let me remind you about the atrocities Japan committed during that war such as the rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the wide-scale slaughter of American POW's, and the brutal and evil medical experiments they carried out on American POWs without anasthesia. We weren't feeling too charitable towards them at the time, for many good reasons. Everything that happened back then happened and can't be altered now. Let it go.
Anyway, you can't think about WWII without considering the context. You can't consider the validity of an action without remembering the framework within which it took place. The nuclear bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were comparable in destructive power to the firebombing and heavy bombing campaigns that were already taking place; the destruction just happened all at once instead of over a period of hours. They had more psychological effect because the explosion was something nobody had ever seen before; the actual level of destruction and loss of life, however, was nothing new in that war.
Bottom line: Relax, man. All that negativity isn't good for you.
Ok; that's absolutely fair and I wouldn't disagree with you. Maybe I wasn't clear on this point: I don't think it's people of European DESCENT that are the special something that we have; it's the European-derived CULTURE, which has grown into American culture, that does the trick. Since the dark ages, about 500 years of incubation have gone into creating the unique mixture of characteristics that make up this culture. I don't believe any other culture has achieved the same mix. So my thesis, here, is that there's something very special about American and European culture that makes us important to the world at large.
Now, you are absolutely right in saying that asians, africans, and other races have come here and become a part of the U.S, contributing to progress and being a part of what we've achieved. But notice that when they came here, they adopted this culture and merged with it. They didn't remain in their own cultures -- their innovations happened within ours, while they were operating according to our mindset and values.
One strength of American culture in particular is that we have a strange capacity for cherry-picking and absorbing the most productive habits and approaches from other cultures, modifying them somewhat and making them our own. When people come in, we pick and choose from them what we want to adopt and we merge it into our society as a whole; you could think of this as a sort of open-source culture in a way. We're one of the only cultures that does this so readily, by the way -- many other cultures are very hostile to foreign influences and they complain bitterly about "westernization".
I believe part of this comes from the English language itself. One of its weirder characteristics is that it can adopt and absorb virtually any foreign concept or word effortlessly. It's a pure stroke of luck that our language is entirely phonetic, composed of 26 multipurpose glyphs. Any sound a human throat can make can be represented in English in one way or another (except maybe for some clicks used in certain African languages, but that's not that big a limitation overall). Perhaps the fact that English can suck in any expressible thought influences our culture's ability to suck in and absorb concepts. Then the language kind of becomes a framework for the society itself. They say people think in their own languages; perhaps this flexibility forces itself on the mind that is using the language as well. So you think in English, which is flexible, and as a result you become more flexible, like catching a virus... ?
Just thinking out loud.
Not that I think other European languages don't have the same facility, they do. So does Japanese; they have tons of what they call "loan words" (did I get that right? I think they created a whole alphabet for them, Hiragana, right?).
This is pretty interesting to me, anyway. I love playing around with this stuff. It's so similar to software. Heh, I think language as software isn't a bad analogy!
Well, first of all, "industrial quantities" are not required for innovation or progress. Thomas Edison did all his work by hand, with the hand tools of the time. And he gave us DC electrical power, the light bulb, and hundreds of other inventions. His entire laboratory probably used less energy than a single modern house in the suburbs, and yet he managed to change an entire culture with it.
By the way, ANYONE can make steel in their back yard. Ok? It's ancient technology, and not particularly hard to implement. Stop pretending it's rocket science, because it's not. You're desperately trying to prove a theorem that doesn't work. Free your mind!
Since you brought it up, we have an unlimited supply of energy available to us, and once the oil runs out we'll be forced to actually tap into it. The thing holding us back currently is "Big Oil" which puts out propaganda that tries to equate energy with oil reserves, mostly in hopes of convincing Americans that oil is so important that it justifies war. You've obviously bought into this already, but you really ought to try and reconsider it.
First of all, there are many alternative energy sources that are maturing rapidly. They should be able to replace oil within the next hundred years, at which point your entire argument will collapse in a puff of logic.
Some of the processes currently being researched include improved solar power (getting cheaper every year!), wave power, geothermal, wind, hydroelectric, mining methane hydrate from coastal areas off the SouthEastern United States, and (eventually) fusion. Currently we can generate power from natural gas, coal, shale oil, and methane produced from waste decomposition.
The idea that Big Oil is the only energy source in the world is pure propaganda and should be roundly mocked.
Some things people RIGHT HERE in upstate New York have done include:
* Setting up a small heat exchanger on an artesian well to cool a house in summer and avoid air conditioning bills;
* Setting up a water wheel to generate DC current for a house near a stream;
* Rigging an entire house to use solar panels and marine batteries;
* Using wind generators, which only cost a few thousand bucks when you buy the small, individual-house models.
So, DO try and relax. The crisis you imagine is all in your head, planted there by Big Oil to make you fear and loathe foreigners competing with you for a supply of a soon to be obsolete fuel source. It's a dirty trick, don't fall for it.
Do me a favor before you reply with more info about your theory. Google the things I've talked about. See for yourself. Keep an open mind and actually THINK about the POSSIBILITIES.
What really stands out in your post is that you have an adversarial relationship with your users. That's very Microsoft of you. You said:
"Then you're a fool. End users will, at every turn, try to break your software, either deliberately or accidentally. Bad input is the primary weapon they will utilise in these efforts."
Yeah, so what? You don't hang around with Open-Source types much, do you? See, if they want to break the software, hell, let them have fun. Because the config file is just a flat file, they can put it right back the way it was at any time, so there's no risk. Try THAT with your registry.
Here's something else your registry can't do. Some customer tinkers with his config file. He breaks the software. He calls me up. "Hey, I broke the config file or something", he says. I say "Ok, put your cd in and copy this file to your install directory". Wow, it's working again. Flat files are neat, aren't they? Fixing them is so simple you can actually EFFECTIVELY help someone do it right over the phone! See, I love the way you try to blow off this very important feature. You're the fox, looking up at the grapes. Oh, well, they must be sour, right?
Gotcha there, ha ha. But I'm not one to rub it in. (Rub, rub).
So, ok, Mr. Straw Man, I said that my users can do whatever they want with my software, and God Bless. At which point you nastily said this:
"Right. Because that way it's easier to just blame the end user for your badly written software."
Oh, my oh me. You know nothing about me OR my software. Wanna buy a "Jump to conclusions mat"? See, it has these... Conclusions! That you can... Jump to!
Sorry. I forgot how humorless you were. Never mind (harrrumph). It's probably all that Microsoft dreck that's got you so grouchy. Hey, buy me a case of corona and I'll set up Slackware for you. It'll take only a couple of hours, but it'll make you SO much happier! I'm pretty sure your face won't crack if you grin, but we'll take it slow just in case.
By the way, your poorly thought out point towards the end of your screed in which you say that I can "allow" my user to copy my software to another machine even if I use the registry forgot to mention the most important thing, which you implied (and I think that was a tactical error on your part):
The way you would allow the user to copy software from machine to machine despite the presence of a registry would be to NOT USE THE REGISTRY FOR THAT SOFTWARE. Meaning, in order to give the user the power I claimed, you have to use my approach! Too funny.
But I guess that would have wrecked your argument.
On OSX: Eeewww. I did not know that. But, still, serialized objects aren't THAT bad compared to the registry. That seems like a way of simplifying reading in the config files more than anything else... And it's similar to a flat file system, isn't it? You can still edit them, right?
As far as Gnome goes, XML files are flat files. You can hand edit them, as you said. I prefer XML for config files, myself.
I don't think finding flat files is all that difficult. The program documentation or man page usually mentions any config file you need to know about. I don't think there's an issue here.
As far as Microsoft's intent for how companies use the registry, set that aside for a second. How is it actually USED? What are people doing with it? What is Microsoft doing with it? You yourself admit that Microsoft uses it to hold license key information for MS Word. What is a license key but a tool for restricting piracy? One key per computer, right? Take Windows Genuine Advantage for example. How does it "know" a system has been pirated? Serial numbers? License keys? Where would those be kept? The registry? If not, where else?
I'm not saying they don't have a zillion other reasons why they went with a registry, I'm just saying this one CERTAINLY figures in. I don't believe their motives were pure.
Now, on paranoia. I'm going to give you a big pile of buttery link goodness! It's an interesting story anyway. Here goes:
3. Microsoft embeds a Global Unique Identifier in Word Files. This is interesting because they used the GUID embedded in the Melissa virus, plus the MAC ID stored when it was uploaded to a website, to identify files on another site written by the same copy of Word (or something along those lines). This nabbed them the author. http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-514170.html
See? NOT PARANOID. But it's interesting, isn't it? Anyway, the registry is the obvious place to store settings like this. If they put them in flat files, people would go in and change them to bogus numbers. In the registry doing so is a pain in the ass, and most people would be afraid to even TOUCH the registry. Nobody's afraid of a config file; you can always back it up and put it back if you break something. Not so with the registry... Or at least, not as easily.
ABOUT WINDOWS 98: Norton Ghost was probably out by then, so the cat was out of the bag and Microsoft didn't care anymore. Or other solutions had been released.
About your 2 justifications of a database approach, I agree that those are very nice, but you can get them using XML flat files without having to deal with a registry. And each application should still maintain their own config files as a matter of principle. Otherwise, who knows if one application won't accidentally step on another?
God, you're killing me here! Take the knife out, man...
Look, all your objections to using flat files are straw man arguments. If I'm building an application and I want to set up a config file, it's trivially easy to set up an XML file, read it in and parse it. If I'm a halfway decent programmer, I'll be done in half an hour and it'll be perfect. What makes it much better than your registry is that my USERS can edit the file themselves, because I TRUST THEM. See, I'm from New York, not Redmond. A user who just gave me money for something is my brand-new Best Friend. He can do whatever the hell he wants with my project; hell, he can print out the code and roll around naked in it for all I care.
The POINT is, using a registry makes you a pain in the ass. Your user can't just copy your install directory to his new computer. He has to go through your buggy installer. He loses all his settings. And so on.
Using flat files means I'm NOT a pain in the ass. If one of MY users wants to copy my software to a new machine, he can just copy the directory and the config file over. Piece of cake, really.
It's really about being POLITE more than anything else. Don't you think?
No, I don't mean the U.S. is guarding the pumps. I mean that Americans and Europeans ARE the pumps, or at least have been up until now. Other countries are trying to set up pumps of their own, but this takes a lot of time -- you don't create the equivalent of 500 years of Western culture overnight! Meanwhile, idiot corporate types are running around smashing all the pumps we currently have on the assumption that the new pumps will be ready in time to handle the load.
See what I was trying to get at? It's not that Americans are the only source of innovation; that would be ridiculous. It's that we're particularly good at it, and we're useful to the world, and these corporate half-wits are trying to cut us out of the mix. It's not a good idea; this may sound pushy, but the world still needs us and will for a long while. And why shouldn't it? We're useful. "We" being the American PEOPLE, and our relatively unrestrained way of doing things -- NOT the government, or the military; these are a separate issue entirely, and most of us Americans don't like 'em anyway.
It's too bad the corporate crowd doesn't get it.
ABOUT THE CURRENT GOVERNMENT BEING PRETTY ANTI-PROGRESS:
Yes, obviously you're correct about that. Stem Cells, Kyoto, naturally, I'm with you. Many Americans are. Our government doesn't listen to us any more than our corporations do. This is part of the problem I'm complaining about.
Think of it this way, going back to my "Golden Goose" analogy. The goose that lays the golden eggs represents American and European technologists and scientists. The golden egg is the progress we share with the rest of the world. It's considerable! A nice gold egg. And it's made a ton of money for a lot of unpleasant rich people who would probably be doing something rather more awful if they weren't distracted by all that cash.
One day, the farmer and his wife (representing the rich corporation owners) decide that it costs too much to feed the goose, and after all, they can probably just cut it open and take out all the eggs at once. So they do, they cut open the goose and kill it. Too bad, the goose is just an ordinary goose. No golden eggs. Now the farmer and his wife are shit out of luck. It's a typical European fable meant to teach the lesson "don't be so greedy".
Now, to take account of the president, stem cells, and kyoto, we've got to really abuse poor Aesop's fable, but let's have some fun with it. Maybe it'll show you how I view the whole thing.
The President is the person who owns the land the farmer and his wife rent. Kyoto is represented by crop rotation and proper irrigation, which really is all about thinking ahead. But the President doesn't like that. It costs money, it inconveniences him, blah blah blah. So, no crop rotation or irrigation for you! Of course, the crops are going to get worse and worse and eventually the land will be barren, but he figures he'll have collected enough rent by then, he'll retire, pass the screwed up farm down to his kids and move somewhere else.
Now, stem cells are a tough one... Hmm... Ok. Let's say that one of the farmer's kids has an idea for cross-pollenating two types of corn that will result in better crops with less fertilizer and so on. He knows a thing or two about botany, so he gets ready to begin his experiments. But the President's neighbor is on some kind of religious "WHEAT PURITY" kick and he finds out about the cross-pollenation. It's a sin! It cannot be permitted! And if he sees the kid doing any cross pollenating, he's going to beat him up and burn his grain. The President agrees with him, but he doesn't want to start a ruckus because the farmer pays him rent, the wife is friends with his wife, and so on, so he just refuses to let the kid do any of his work on his land. He makes all kinds of excuses.
Meanwhile, down the road is another farm run by a Chinese family. They're interested in the idea the kid had with the wheat, so they're going to let him give it a try. He goes over there and does it. The wheat bl
All of your examples are extremely recent, long after American and European colleges began admitting students from these other countries. We taught THEM physics, and now they're contributing. Reminding the world that we invented the stuff doesn't diminish the value of their current contributions. But do realize that if it weren't for Western culture, none of this would even EXIST.
Furthermore, you have to accept the fact that there is something special about Western culture that results naturally in innovation and rapid progress. Of all the cultures in the world, OURS is the culture that split the atom. OURS is the culture that put a man on the moon. OURS is the culture that determined the root causes of illness and learned how to treat it -- not with magic, but with science.
I'm not saying that it is impossible for other cultures to be innovative. However, I am saying that it is in our culture's NATURE to be innovative and I don't believe any other culture will be able to fill our shoes once our idiot leaders have poisoned the well (if they even succeed -- Americans tend to be pretty stubborn folk, who take their hobbies underground if they can't be paid to enjoy them).
Note that I am talking culture, not race. I live in New York, and MY culture is comprised not only of Europeans, but of people from every race on the planet. HOWEVER, everyone living here is living within a European-derived culture. Everyone whose family has been here for more than a generation or two has fully absorbed it and is effectively native to it.
You've got to look at the big picture.
I understand this is a matter of pride with you, but I'm actually correct.
Go back BEFORE we had access to modern forms of energy. We managed to INVENT these forms of energy starting with NOTHING. Think about the steam engine. Where do you think that came from in the first place? Someone invented it. And steel has been in use since the Roman Empire, so don't use that as an example. All you need to make steel is iron ore, a form of carbon to work into it, a hammer to work the metal, and a forge to heat it in. It's VERY ancient technology that predates the use of coal or steam.
By focusing entirely on energy you've managed to miss ALL of the action. Where do these things COME from? How does a culture create them in the FIRST place? They don't just appear, poof, like Moses' stone tables. Aliens didn't drop them off on their way to Tau Ceti.
We CREATED them. Before we had the energy sources you're obsessed with. Your energy line of reasoning is overly simplistic and misses what's really going on. While the rest of the world wasn't changing their way of doing things, Europeans and later Americans went from a totally ordinary agrarian culture to a world-spanning industrial, high tech culture capable of spaceflight in a matter of centuries. You cannot explain that with your energy theorem.
Nor can you explain (for example) the Persian Gulf's failure to accomplish the same thing even though they're sitting on enormous energy reserves. You can't explain India's or China's failure to accomplish the same thing even though they have vastly more manpower and untapped energy resources of their own (and they even had a couple of thousand year head start, which makes it even MORE significant a failure).
Your theoretical framework fails to explain the situation and you must adopt a new one.
Now, back to my point.
The suits, having as they do a very poor understanding of where innovation comes from and how they may support the intellectual structures that made this country great, are doing their level best to ruin everything that gave them their wealth in the first place. And, clearly I believe that they're trying to "kill the goose that laid the golden eggs".
To expand on this point, let me add that not only are they ruining lives by outsourcing the American middle class, in their zealous desire to protect their "intellectual property" legally with patents and trademarks, they are making it impossible for independent people to invent and release new and interesting ideas to the world. This impoverishes the entire planet, not just the American middle class, because an idea, once lost, may not be reinvented for decades, if ever. And even if an idea IS invented, if some corporation sits on it, stowing it away in their patent arsenal because they don't believe it's profitable, it's not going to help anyone.
An interesting point, though, is that Americans will still continue to invent because it is in our nature to invent. And we will share our inventions with each other, only it'll be on a face to face basis, crazy hobbyists sharing ideas with other crazy hobbyists. Some of this might flow around the world if we encounter a like mind over in Japan, say, or the Netherlands. But it'll all be underground because nobody wants to get sued by some giant, lumbering corporation.
Think of the result of all this. Just think about what I'm saying. Consider how it's going to retard human progress. Or, if you're interested, consider how it's going to affect the American and European economy (we're in the same boat, after all). First, the middle class shrinks and people spend much less money, then the first world nations lose their lead in innovation because it's all being done at the grassroots level and none of that is finding its way up to the mainstream... Then nobody's buying all those gadgets being constructed en masse in China, and as a result there's no demand for IT systems built by Indian companies... The world economy could collapse like the house of cards it's always been.
No, no, the "yous" were for Slashdot in general; i.e. the reader. Not you specifically. I've been in many arguments before where someone started talking about this german rocket scientist or that English computer specialist. I thought I'd head that thread off at the pass.:)
I disagree about your energy related point. Wealth does not come from energy resources. It comes from development and progress. If wealth came from energy resources, the West would not have become wealthy and powerful before they were invented, now, would it? I seem to remember that prior to the 1800's, the most energy you could generate was in your fireplace. Yet Europeans and later, Americans, without any major energy sources (besides that coal-fed fireplace!) mastered physics, chemistry, electronics, medicine, earth science, metallurgy, engineering... I mean, I could go on and on listing all the things OUR ANCESTORS created and shared with the rest of the world, but maybe you see my point already.
What was the rest of the world doing while all this was going on? Nothing at all. They mostly just reached a state of status quo and remained in that state until the West showed up and dragged them into the 20th century.
My point is that an Indian (for example) does not become an American just because he watches a few movies and practices his accent. He's still tied hand and foot by his culture, which penalizes original thought and non-conformity and values a crushing, limiting respect for the existing institutions of his system. I think that most Indians may not be CAPABLE of adopting an American mindset. You must remember that people are limited from birth by the cultural framework in which they're raised. You can't just wave your hand and magic up a bunch of innovators; it just doesn't work that way.
Energy utilization is completely and totally beside the point.
What was SUPPOSED to happen was the U.S. was supposed to respect its innovators and technologists and allow them to do what they do best -- design the future. We could have formed a mutually beneficial relationship with the rest of the world in which we design and invent things everyone wants, and they trade us some of the things we want (like energy) in return for them. We all could have focused on our strengths and teamed up.
Instead, the suits (who don't understand ANY of this and really only think about their precious "bottom line") betrayed all their technologists -- they fired them so they could hire cut-rate contractors from India and save a buck. Now, nobody wants to study science or engineering anymore (because most people don't want to be unemployed) and our greatest strength is diminishing rapidly. Mark my words: India and China are NOT going to be able to fill the very large shoes we are leaving behind.
The Aesop's fable I referred you to is an excellent analogy for this situation.:)
>>The whole point of the registry is to "make piracy difficult". The ONLY reason >>they created it in the FIRST place was because Bill >>Gates et al thought their third-rate operating system was so special and important >>that to protect it from nasty "pirates" they had >>to essentially lobotomize it.
>Um, no, not quite
Oh, I disagree.
Consider these related points:
1. All other commercially available operating systems use flat files to store configuration information. And almost every other operating system out there works better than Windows in a variety of ways, not least of which being performance.
2. Operating systems that use flat files to store configuration information are trivially easy to back up. They're also trivially easy to clone and distribute.
3. People who run operating systems that use flat files tend to READ those flat files. The registry, on the other hand, is so huge and byzantine (again, WHY???) that finding entries in it is like going on a fishing expedition. Nobody really knows what's in their registry. I believe this is by design, not by accident.
4. The registry is IN FACT used to make piracy difficult. Virtually every piece of commercial Windows software stores registration information in the registry, usually in literally dozens of different locations so that to clear out a botched install you have to use a search tool and guess at all the possible names the company may have used for its keys. First, do you think Microsoft isn't doing the same thing??? Second, do you think this isn't by design???
5. When a hacker creates a Word Macro Virus and the cops catch him like, a week later, how do you think that happens? Word, installed, puts serial number information in the registry and later, into documents. Again, by design.
6. When they spent millions of dollars building Windows 95 and created long filename support, do you think it was by mistake that they just happened to leave long filename support out of their new version of DOS? Or that you couldn't boot to a command prompt that had long filename support? Again, it was to make piracy difficult. At the time, you couldn't boot to a CD. You had to use a floppy. Live CDs didn't even exist. And there was NO WAY to boot with a floppy and get long filename support. So where before you could use pkzip to zip up your whole windows and dos directory and back up your system to about twenty floppies, with Windows 95 you were basically hosed. Even if you DID zip up all the directories, when you unzipped them during the restore process they'd look like "Progra~1" instead of "Program Files" and you'd be hosed.
IF YOU ARE CORRECT, you must have a reasonable justification for the use of the registry that is credibly better than using a flat-file approach. I bet you don't have one.:)
The amount of wealth in the world is NOT like a tank of water which, when the valves are opened, empties out and distributes the water all around. It's more like a large set of fountains fed by a small set of pumps. And corporate America isn't opening valves to let the water (money?) flow all around. They're taking sledgehammers to the pumps because they stupidly believe that by doing so, they'll get more than their fair share of the water. For the first few hits, they get doused pretty well, and they think "look at all this water! Hit it again!" But then the pumps shut down and that's the end of that.
Wealth is actively created by some groups of people and consumed by others. The United States is so wealthy because for most of this century we were CREATING much more wealth than anyone else in the world. We were able to do this due to a number of cultural and structural factors that aren't replicated anywhere else. For example, among all the people in the world, we are easily the most independent minded, the least bound by dogma and tradition (at least when it comes to science and technology). Our inventors have a "what the hell, let's give it a shot" mindset you won't find in many other places.
And before you start screaming "No, your innovators call came from Europe" let me state the obvious: WE ALL CAME FROM EUROPE. Americans are Europeans who decided to live somewhere else. We didn't just magically appear here; we colonized this place. Europeans may not want to hear this considering the unfortunate current state of the U.S. government, but we and they are the SAME PEOPLE, with the SAME CULTURE and SAME INTELLIGENCE LEVEL. The only discernible difference between Americans and Europeans is that Europeans try to behave more calmly than we do. We're a bit nuttier than they are. EXCEPT at soccer matches, of course.
If you want a perfect analogy for what's going to happen when corporations finally kill off technological innovation in the first-world countries, or at least strip people of the desire to do technical work for them (I don't think you can really kill off our ability to innovate, you'll always have inventors) just read this article:
I remember when Windows 95 first came out, and a bunch of us (comp sci majors) immediately tried out Linux. One guy who was an assembly language freak (and who knew quite a bit about Windows programming) wrote his own start menu, taskbar, and sort of Windows 95 emulator; he said "why upgrade? looks the same, doesn't it?"
The thing that really burned our asses was the registry and the implementation of long filenames (which worked in Win95, but NOT the DOS underneath it that you could boot to).
We could not figure out why anyone in their right mind would stop using flat files for system configuration. And we asked each other, "how the hell are we going to back up our machines?" The long filenames meant that you couldn't boot to DOS and do a zip backup the way we used to under DOS/Win3.1. You could back up, but never restore, because DOS couldn't put the long filenames back! Oh, how we hated it. If Knoppix had existed back then, it would have been a non-issue, and we would have laughed it off, but you usually couldn't even boot off a CD in those days (which is why Windows came with a boot floppy at the time).
The whole point of the registry is to "make piracy difficult". The ONLY reason they created it in the FIRST place was because Bill Gates et al thought their third-rate operating system was so special and important that to protect it from nasty "pirates" they had to essentially lobotomize it.
UGH.
But, hey! We sure had fun with Linux! So it wasn't ALL bad...
For me, setting up a Slackware box takes about 3 hours. Here are my steps:
1. Actual Slackware install: an hour or so, maybe an hour and a half.
2. I set up my firewall script, remove all rc.d scripts I'm not using (I store them in another directory called "NotInUse"), change the default umask to 077, and do an SUID audit. Then I check my setup with Nmap.
3. I download and install patches that relate to the things I'm using. I may not apply all the patches yet; some of them may relate to extras I install in (4) below.
4. Now I install some extra packages I like. This includes the installation of Firefox 2.0 and K3B from the extras collection, the installation of my NVidia driver (it recompiles my kernel and sets up X), and the setup of Splix, which lets me use Samsung laser printers. Note: the RPM for the current version of Splix looks for the "sh" package which of course isn't on Slackware (it uses "bash" instead). I got the previous version and did the make/make install boogie; that worked great. Oh, and I set up Java 1.6, Netbeans 5.5, and OpenOffice (I downloaded a Slackware package from a third party linked from the OpenOffice webpage).
5. Finally, I log on as my main user and I grab my "personal files" off a CD backup. Everything relating to that user goes in this directory, which makes that user totally portable. Then I update FireFox, grabbing NoScript, AdBlock, GreaseMonkey, and the NOIA theme, and grab the theme for Thunderbird too. I set up Thunderbird and check my email, then set my wallpaper and KDE theme.
Total time: maybe 3 hours. Maybe a little more if I have other users. But I'm a geek, no girlfriend, ha ha.
The past six years has been rather hard on the American programmer.
We were pretty much always looked down on by the rest of society as a bunch of geeks, and no small number of us were picked on growing up just because we were studious and not particularly into sports. For a few years in the late nineties, we got a little bit of respect, and it was good. But we got deluged with carpetbaggers who claimed to be programmers after a weekend HTML course, until the word "programmer" barely meant ANYTHING. Finally, the bubble burst and the carpetbaggers were scattered to the wind, but in the process we got leveled right along with them. And the outsourcing boom has killed the market value of our skills, exactly as the bastard corporations intended.
The worst people on Earth, the people who run these corporations, happily betray not only their own countrymen but their fellow geeks in some cases (Fuck YOU, Bill Gates) when they tell our idiot Congress that Americans aren't smart enough, talented enough, skilled enough, GOOD enough to fill the positions they've got on offer.
They have the nerve to post job offers that insist on expertise in twenty different in-demand skills for a lousy 40K sub-entry-level job. Then they claim they made a good-faith effort to find someone to fill it and hire an Indian on an H1-B, paying him as little as possible.
In the end, the market for the American programmer is being demolished. We have all been sold out, viciously, because we wanted to be paid a fair wage and some filthy rich asshole with more money than he could ever spend wasn't willing to pay what we were worth.
Now it seems that a portion of these disenfranchised technologists have decided to become vandals. Well, CRY ME A RIVER.
As you reap, so shall you sow. It's the way of things, really.
Ok, in the case of MySpace, I can see how this might not be TERRIFICALLY significant, IF it's as bad as you say (I wouldn't know, being about sixteen years too old for that demographic).
My comments are more pointed at the phenomenon in general, i.e. the whole "Month of X Bugs" fad that's been going around. I hate it. I wish it would go off and die the ignoble death of Disco and shoes with goldfish swimming in them. I see the whole thing as a sort of macro version of Dick Cheney shooting that old fart in the face.
You know...
Ok, gonna get a quail... Quail... Quail... Quail... OLD MAN! BLAM!
Yes, yes, but that ISP has to wait for the guys who build PhP to come out with patches, do they not? And someone already posted some info elsewhere in this thread mentioning how bad they often are with patches.
Therefore, not the fault of the ISP. I'm sure that most of the ones using PhP are Linux servers, anyway, and they get automatically updated nightly. If it's anyone's fault at all, it's the PhP guys' fault.
Again, not the ISP's fault.
And being on the web wouldn't BE quite such a shark tank if CERTAIN people weren't making things so EASY for hackers in the FIRST place.
(Before anyone freaks out over my use of "hacker", do realize that the language has changed over the past thirty years and its current common usage is NOT the one you fondly remember from your minicomputer days).
Nah, not depressed. Just wishing these guys would get a different hobby, that's all.
See, what bugs me is, most of this stuff is totally out of a sysadmin's hands. He's got to wait for patches in most cases. Even if he's got an open-source system and can patch his own stuff, often his boss won't let him.
Things are bad enough when there are unpatched vulnerabilities out there and your vendor is sitting on them. But guys like this make it worse by putting out sample exploit code. A vulnerability that might not have been that big a deal, and might have gotten patched before anything widespread happened, now can be exploited as soon as someone downloads the sample exploit and works it up into something more "interesting".
It's like I keep saying. Doing a "month of bugs" is a dick move. Us admins have it rough enough. Why add insult to injury? Why not just disclose the vulnerability and leave it at that? Why is it necessary to put out a friggin' TOOLKIT?
What? Gimme a fucking break! I'm not the head of I.T. I don't get to choose the software.
Listen, KID, you wanna know what it's like to work in this business? The higher ups give you a shit sandwich and you have to figure out how to eat it. You tell them you want pastrami, they tell you "maybe you can get pastrami at some OTHER job" and you shut up and get back to work.
And don't tell me about your "better alternatives" because one of the alternatives YOU people always suggest, PhP, got nailed by the "thirty days" shmucks ALREADY. Oh, and by the way, sport: I won't tell you which systems I support, but NONE of them have had a "thirty days" experience yet. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
You're obviously (at best) a college kid who's never had to hold down a real job. You've got some real nasty surprises up ahead.
Slashdot Mirror
Ha! That's funny. My "tone". Am I a tenor or a baritone? I always thought I was a bass...
Do relax. And do some googling.
Wow, SOMEBODY woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Are you always this negative? Talk about the glass being half empty... Yours is half empty with cigarette butts floating in it and lipstick on the rim.
I don't buy into your view of everything as being a big downer. I don't focus on the negative results of our progress, because those negative results pale in comparison with the positive things we've done.
By the way, since you decided to drag out the old "Boo, hoo, America nuked Japan" argument, let me remind you about the atrocities Japan committed during that war such as the rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the wide-scale slaughter of American POW's, and the brutal and evil medical experiments they carried out on American POWs without anasthesia. We weren't feeling too charitable towards them at the time, for many good reasons. Everything that happened back then happened and can't be altered now. Let it go.
Anyway, you can't think about WWII without considering the context. You can't consider the validity of an action without remembering the framework within which it took place. The nuclear bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were comparable in destructive power to the firebombing and heavy bombing campaigns that were already taking place; the destruction just happened all at once instead of over a period of hours. They had more psychological effect because the explosion was something nobody had ever seen before; the actual level of destruction and loss of life, however, was nothing new in that war.
Bottom line: Relax, man. All that negativity isn't good for you.
Ok; that's absolutely fair and I wouldn't disagree with you. Maybe I wasn't clear on this point: I don't think it's people of European DESCENT that are the special something that we have; it's the European-derived CULTURE, which has grown into American culture, that does the trick. Since the dark ages, about 500 years of incubation have gone into creating the unique mixture of characteristics that make up this culture. I don't believe any other culture has achieved the same mix. So my thesis, here, is that there's something very special about American and European culture that makes us important to the world at large.
Now, you are absolutely right in saying that asians, africans, and other races have come here and become a part of the U.S, contributing to progress and being a part of what we've achieved. But notice that when they came here, they adopted this culture and merged with it. They didn't remain in their own cultures -- their innovations happened within ours, while they were operating according to our mindset and values.
One strength of American culture in particular is that we have a strange capacity for cherry-picking and absorbing the most productive habits and approaches from other cultures, modifying them somewhat and making them our own. When people come in, we pick and choose from them what we want to adopt and we merge it into our society as a whole; you could think of this as a sort of open-source culture in a way. We're one of the only cultures that does this so readily, by the way -- many other cultures are very hostile to foreign influences and they complain bitterly about "westernization".
I believe part of this comes from the English language itself. One of its weirder characteristics is that it can adopt and absorb virtually any foreign concept or word effortlessly. It's a pure stroke of luck that our language is entirely phonetic, composed of 26 multipurpose glyphs. Any sound a human throat can make can be represented in English in one way or another (except maybe for some clicks used in certain African languages, but that's not that big a limitation overall). Perhaps the fact that English can suck in any expressible thought influences our culture's ability to suck in and absorb concepts. Then the language kind of becomes a framework for the society itself. They say people think in their own languages; perhaps this flexibility forces itself on the mind that is using the language as well. So you think in English, which is flexible, and as a result you become more flexible, like catching a virus... ?
Just thinking out loud.
Not that I think other European languages don't have the same facility, they do. So does Japanese; they have tons of what they call "loan words" (did I get that right? I think they created a whole alphabet for them, Hiragana, right?).
This is pretty interesting to me, anyway. I love playing around with this stuff. It's so similar to software. Heh, I think language as software isn't a bad analogy!
Well, first of all, "industrial quantities" are not required for innovation or progress. Thomas Edison did all his work by hand, with the hand tools of the time. And he gave us DC electrical power, the light bulb, and hundreds of other inventions. His entire laboratory probably used less energy than a single modern house in the suburbs, and yet he managed to change an entire culture with it.
:)
By the way, ANYONE can make steel in their back yard. Ok? It's ancient technology, and not particularly hard to implement. Stop pretending it's rocket science, because it's not. You're desperately trying to prove a theorem that doesn't work. Free your mind!
Since you brought it up, we have an unlimited supply of energy available to us, and once the oil runs out we'll be forced to actually tap into it. The thing holding us back currently is "Big Oil" which puts out propaganda that tries to equate energy with oil reserves, mostly in hopes of convincing Americans that oil is so important that it justifies war. You've obviously bought into this already, but you really ought to try and reconsider it.
First of all, there are many alternative energy sources that are maturing rapidly. They should be able to replace oil within the next hundred years, at which point your entire argument will collapse in a puff of logic.
Some of the processes currently being researched include improved solar power (getting cheaper every year!), wave power, geothermal, wind, hydroelectric, mining methane hydrate from coastal areas off the SouthEastern United States, and (eventually) fusion. Currently we can generate power from natural gas, coal, shale oil, and methane produced from waste decomposition.
The idea that Big Oil is the only energy source in the world is pure propaganda and should be roundly mocked.
Some things people RIGHT HERE in upstate New York have done include:
* Setting up a small heat exchanger on an artesian well to cool a house in summer and avoid air conditioning bills;
* Setting up a water wheel to generate DC current for a house near a stream;
* Rigging an entire house to use solar panels and marine batteries;
* Using wind generators, which only cost a few thousand bucks when you buy the small, individual-house models.
So, DO try and relax. The crisis you imagine is all in your head, planted there by Big Oil to make you fear and loathe foreigners competing with you for a supply of a soon to be obsolete fuel source. It's a dirty trick, don't fall for it.
Do me a favor before you reply with more info about your theory. Google the things I've talked about. See for yourself. Keep an open mind and actually THINK about the POSSIBILITIES.
You'll feel better! Honest.
What really stands out in your post is that you have an adversarial relationship with your users. That's very Microsoft of you. You said:
"Then you're a fool. End users will, at every turn, try to break your software, either deliberately or accidentally. Bad input is the primary weapon they will utilise in these efforts."
Yeah, so what? You don't hang around with Open-Source types much, do you? See, if they want to break the software, hell, let them have fun. Because the config file is just a flat file, they can put it right back the way it was at any time, so there's no risk. Try THAT with your registry.
Here's something else your registry can't do. Some customer tinkers with his config file. He breaks the software. He calls me up. "Hey, I broke the config file or something", he says. I say "Ok, put your cd in and copy this file to your install directory". Wow, it's working again. Flat files are neat, aren't they? Fixing them is so simple you can actually EFFECTIVELY help someone do it right over the phone! See, I love the way you try to blow off this very important feature. You're the fox, looking up at the grapes. Oh, well, they must be sour, right?
Gotcha there, ha ha. But I'm not one to rub it in. (Rub, rub).
So, ok, Mr. Straw Man, I said that my users can do whatever they want with my software, and God Bless. At which point you nastily said this:
"Right. Because that way it's easier to just blame the end user for your badly written software."
Oh, my oh me. You know nothing about me OR my software. Wanna buy a "Jump to conclusions mat"? See, it has these... Conclusions! That you can... Jump to!
Sorry. I forgot how humorless you were. Never mind (harrrumph). It's probably all that Microsoft dreck that's got you so grouchy. Hey, buy me a case of corona and I'll set up Slackware for you. It'll take only a couple of hours, but it'll make you SO much happier! I'm pretty sure your face won't crack if you grin, but we'll take it slow just in case.
By the way, your poorly thought out point towards the end of your screed in which you say that I can "allow" my user to copy my software to another machine even if I use the registry forgot to mention the most important thing, which you implied (and I think that was a tactical error on your part):
The way you would allow the user to copy software from machine to machine despite the presence of a registry would be to NOT USE THE REGISTRY FOR THAT SOFTWARE. Meaning, in order to give the user the power I claimed, you have to use my approach! Too funny.
But I guess that would have wrecked your argument.
On OSX: Eeewww. I did not know that. But, still, serialized objects aren't THAT bad compared to the registry. That seems like a way of simplifying reading in the config files more than anything else... And it's similar to a flat file system, isn't it? You can still edit them, right?
t ifier
:)
As far as Gnome goes, XML files are flat files. You can hand edit them, as you said. I prefer XML for config files, myself.
I don't think finding flat files is all that difficult. The program documentation or man page usually mentions any config file you need to know about. I don't think there's an issue here.
As far as Microsoft's intent for how companies use the registry, set that aside for a second. How is it actually USED? What are people doing with it? What is Microsoft doing with it? You yourself admit that Microsoft uses it to hold license key information for MS Word. What is a license key but a tool for restricting piracy? One key per computer, right? Take Windows Genuine Advantage for example. How does it "know" a system has been pirated? Serial numbers? License keys? Where would those be kept? The registry? If not, where else?
I'm not saying they don't have a zillion other reasons why they went with a registry, I'm just saying this one CERTAINLY figures in. I don't believe their motives were pure.
Now, on paranoia. I'm going to give you a big pile of buttery link goodness! It's an interesting story anyway. Here goes:
1. About what might be stored in a word document (very amusing!):
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223790
2. Those wacky hidden tags!
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i33/33a04101.htm
3. Microsoft embeds a Global Unique Identifier in Word Files. This is interesting
because they used the GUID embedded in the Melissa virus, plus the MAC ID stored when
it was uploaded to a website, to identify files on another site written by the same
copy of Word (or something along those lines). This nabbed them the author.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-514170.html
4. Here's some info on GUID:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globally_Unique_Iden
See? NOT PARANOID. But it's interesting, isn't it? Anyway, the registry is the obvious place to store settings like this. If they put them in flat files, people would go in and change them to bogus numbers. In the registry doing so is a pain in the ass, and most people would be afraid to even TOUCH the registry. Nobody's afraid of a config file; you can always back it up and put it back if you break something. Not so with the registry... Or at least, not as easily.
ABOUT WINDOWS 98: Norton Ghost was probably out by then, so the cat was out of the bag and Microsoft didn't care anymore. Or other solutions had been released.
About your 2 justifications of a database approach, I agree that those are very nice, but you can get them using XML flat files without having to deal with a registry. And each application should still maintain their own config files as a matter of principle. Otherwise, who knows if one application won't accidentally step on another?
I like flat files. Mmm... Flat files.
God, you're killing me here! Take the knife out, man...
Look, all your objections to using flat files are straw man arguments. If I'm building an application and I want to set up a config file, it's trivially easy to set up an XML file, read it in and parse it. If I'm a halfway decent programmer, I'll be done in half an hour and it'll be perfect. What makes it much better than your registry is that my USERS can edit the file themselves, because I TRUST THEM. See, I'm from New York, not Redmond. A user who just gave me money for something is my brand-new Best Friend. He can do whatever the hell he wants with my project; hell, he can print out the code and roll around naked in it for all I care.
The POINT is, using a registry makes you a pain in the ass. Your user can't just copy your install directory to his new computer. He has to go through your buggy installer. He loses all his settings. And so on.
Using flat files means I'm NOT a pain in the ass. If one of MY users wants to copy my software to a new machine, he can just copy the directory and the config file over. Piece of cake, really.
It's really about being POLITE more than anything else. Don't you think?
No, I don't mean the U.S. is guarding the pumps. I mean that Americans and Europeans ARE the pumps, or at least have been up until now. Other countries are trying to set up pumps of their own, but this takes a lot of time -- you don't create the equivalent of 500 years of Western culture overnight! Meanwhile, idiot corporate types are running around smashing all the pumps we currently have on the assumption that the new pumps will be ready in time to handle the load.
See what I was trying to get at? It's not that Americans are the only source of innovation; that would be ridiculous. It's that we're particularly good at it, and we're useful to the world, and these corporate half-wits are trying to cut us out of the mix. It's not a good idea; this may sound pushy, but the world still needs us and will for a long while. And why shouldn't it? We're useful. "We" being the American PEOPLE, and our relatively unrestrained way of doing things -- NOT the government, or the military; these are a separate issue entirely, and most of us Americans don't like 'em anyway.
It's too bad the corporate crowd doesn't get it.
ABOUT THE CURRENT GOVERNMENT BEING PRETTY ANTI-PROGRESS:
Yes, obviously you're correct about that. Stem Cells, Kyoto, naturally, I'm with you. Many Americans are. Our government doesn't listen to us any more than our corporations do. This is part of the problem I'm complaining about.
Think of it this way, going back to my "Golden Goose" analogy. The goose that lays the golden eggs represents American and European technologists and scientists. The golden egg is the progress we share with the rest of the world. It's considerable! A nice gold egg. And it's made a ton of money for a lot of unpleasant rich people who would probably be doing something rather more awful if they weren't distracted by all that cash.
One day, the farmer and his wife (representing the rich corporation owners) decide that it costs too much to feed the goose, and after all, they can probably just cut it open and take out all the eggs at once. So they do, they cut open the goose and kill it. Too bad, the goose is just an ordinary goose. No golden eggs. Now the farmer and his wife are shit out of luck. It's a typical European fable meant to teach the lesson "don't be so greedy".
Now, to take account of the president, stem cells, and kyoto, we've got to really abuse poor Aesop's fable, but let's have some fun with it. Maybe it'll show you how I view the whole thing.
The President is the person who owns the land the farmer and his wife rent. Kyoto is represented by crop rotation and proper irrigation, which really is all about thinking ahead. But the President doesn't like that. It costs money, it inconveniences him, blah blah blah. So, no crop rotation or irrigation for you! Of course, the crops are going to get worse and worse and eventually the land will be barren, but he figures he'll have collected enough rent by then, he'll retire, pass the screwed up farm down to his kids and move somewhere else.
Now, stem cells are a tough one... Hmm... Ok. Let's say that one of the farmer's kids has an idea for cross-pollenating two types of corn that will result in better crops with less fertilizer and so on. He knows a thing or two about botany, so he gets ready to begin his experiments. But the President's neighbor is on some kind of religious "WHEAT PURITY" kick and he finds out about the cross-pollenation. It's a sin! It cannot be permitted! And if he sees the kid doing any cross pollenating, he's going to beat him up and burn his grain. The President agrees with him, but he doesn't want to start a ruckus because the farmer pays him rent, the wife is friends with his wife, and so on, so he just refuses to let the kid do any of his work on his land. He makes all kinds of excuses.
Meanwhile, down the road is another farm run by a Chinese family. They're interested in the idea the kid had with the wheat, so they're going to let him give it a try. He goes over there and does it. The wheat bl
It's... It's... It's a series of TUBES!!!
Hehehehe
Thank you kindly!
All of your examples are extremely recent, long after American and European colleges began admitting students from these other countries. We taught THEM physics, and now they're contributing. Reminding the world that we invented the stuff doesn't diminish the value of their current contributions. But do realize that if it weren't for Western culture, none of this would even EXIST.
Furthermore, you have to accept the fact that there is something special about Western culture that results naturally in innovation and rapid progress. Of all the cultures in the world, OURS is the culture that split the atom. OURS is the culture that put a man on the moon. OURS is the culture that determined the root causes of illness and learned how to treat it -- not with magic, but with science.
I'm not saying that it is impossible for other cultures to be innovative. However, I am saying that it is in our culture's NATURE to be innovative and I don't believe any other culture will be able to fill our shoes once our idiot leaders have poisoned the well (if they even succeed -- Americans tend to be pretty stubborn folk, who take their hobbies underground if they can't be paid to enjoy them).
Note that I am talking culture, not race. I live in New York, and MY culture is comprised not only of Europeans, but of people from every race on the planet. HOWEVER, everyone living here is living within a European-derived culture. Everyone whose family has been here for more than a generation or two has fully absorbed it and is effectively native to it.
You've got to look at the big picture.
I understand this is a matter of pride with you, but I'm actually correct.
You're still missing it.
Go back BEFORE we had access to modern forms of energy. We managed to INVENT these forms of energy starting with NOTHING. Think about the steam engine. Where do you think that came from in the first place? Someone invented it. And steel has been in use since the Roman Empire, so don't use that as an example. All you need to make steel is iron ore, a form of carbon to work into it, a hammer to work the metal, and a forge to heat it in. It's VERY ancient technology that predates the use of coal or steam.
By focusing entirely on energy you've managed to miss ALL of the action. Where do these things COME from? How does a culture create them in the FIRST place? They don't just appear, poof, like Moses' stone tables. Aliens didn't drop them off on their way to Tau Ceti.
We CREATED them. Before we had the energy sources you're obsessed with. Your energy line of reasoning is overly simplistic and misses what's really going on. While the rest of the world wasn't changing their way of doing things, Europeans and later Americans went from a totally ordinary agrarian culture to a world-spanning industrial, high tech culture capable of spaceflight in a matter of centuries. You cannot explain that with your energy theorem.
Nor can you explain (for example) the Persian Gulf's failure to accomplish the same thing even though they're sitting on enormous energy reserves. You can't explain India's or China's failure to accomplish the same thing even though they have vastly more manpower and untapped energy resources of their own (and they even had a couple of thousand year head start, which makes it even MORE significant a failure).
Your theoretical framework fails to explain the situation and you must adopt a new one.
Now, back to my point.
The suits, having as they do a very poor understanding of where innovation comes from and how they may support the intellectual structures that made this country great, are doing their level best to ruin everything that gave them their wealth in the first place. And, clearly I believe that they're trying to "kill the goose that laid the golden eggs".
To expand on this point, let me add that not only are they ruining lives by outsourcing the American middle class, in their zealous desire to protect their "intellectual property" legally with patents and trademarks, they are making it impossible for independent people to invent and release new and interesting ideas to the world. This impoverishes the entire planet, not just the American middle class, because an idea, once lost, may not be reinvented for decades, if ever. And even if an idea IS invented, if some corporation sits on it, stowing it away in their patent arsenal because they don't believe it's profitable, it's not going to help anyone.
An interesting point, though, is that Americans will still continue to invent because it is in our nature to invent. And we will share our inventions with each other, only it'll be on a face to face basis, crazy hobbyists sharing ideas with other crazy hobbyists. Some of this might flow around the world if we encounter a like mind over in Japan, say, or the Netherlands. But it'll all be underground because nobody wants to get sued by some giant, lumbering corporation.
Think of the result of all this. Just think about what I'm saying. Consider how it's going to retard human progress. Or, if you're interested, consider how it's going to affect the American and European economy (we're in the same boat, after all). First, the middle class shrinks and people spend much less money, then the first world nations lose their lead in innovation because it's all being done at the grassroots level and none of that is finding its way up to the mainstream... Then nobody's buying all those gadgets being constructed en masse in China, and as a result there's no demand for IT systems built by Indian companies... The world economy could collapse like the house of cards it's always been.
Back to square one! Tra, la la. Maybe next t
No, no, the "yous" were for Slashdot in general; i.e. the reader. Not you specifically. I've been in many arguments before where someone started talking about this german rocket scientist or that English computer specialist. I thought I'd head that thread off at the pass. :)
:)
I disagree about your energy related point. Wealth does not come from energy resources. It comes from development and progress. If wealth came from energy resources, the West would not have become wealthy and powerful before they were invented, now, would it? I seem to remember that prior to the 1800's, the most energy you could generate was in your fireplace. Yet Europeans and later, Americans, without any major energy sources (besides that coal-fed fireplace!) mastered physics, chemistry, electronics, medicine, earth science, metallurgy, engineering... I mean, I could go on and on listing all the things OUR ANCESTORS created and shared with the rest of the world, but maybe you see my point already.
What was the rest of the world doing while all this was going on? Nothing at all. They mostly just reached a state of status quo and remained in that state until the West showed up and dragged them into the 20th century.
My point is that an Indian (for example) does not become an American just because he watches a few movies and practices his accent. He's still tied hand and foot by his culture, which penalizes original thought and non-conformity and values a crushing, limiting respect for the existing institutions of his system. I think that most Indians may not be CAPABLE of adopting an American mindset. You must remember that people are limited from birth by the cultural framework in which they're raised. You can't just wave your hand and magic up a bunch of innovators; it just doesn't work that way.
Energy utilization is completely and totally beside the point.
What was SUPPOSED to happen was the U.S. was supposed to respect its innovators and technologists and allow them to do what they do best -- design the future. We could have formed a mutually beneficial relationship with the rest of the world in which we design and invent things everyone wants, and they trade us some of the things we want (like energy) in return for them. We all could have focused on our strengths and teamed up.
Instead, the suits (who don't understand ANY of this and really only think about their precious "bottom line") betrayed all their technologists -- they fired them so they could hire cut-rate contractors from India and save a buck. Now, nobody wants to study science or engineering anymore (because most people don't want to be unemployed) and our greatest strength is diminishing rapidly. Mark my words: India and China are NOT going to be able to fill the very large shoes we are leaving behind.
The Aesop's fable I referred you to is an excellent analogy for this situation.
>>The whole point of the registry is to "make piracy difficult". The ONLY reason
:)
>>they created it in the FIRST place was because Bill
>>Gates et al thought their third-rate operating system was so special and important
>>that to protect it from nasty "pirates" they had
>>to essentially lobotomize it.
>Um, no, not quite
Oh, I disagree.
Consider these related points:
1. All other commercially available operating systems use flat files to store configuration information. And almost every other operating system out there works better than Windows in a variety of ways, not least of which being performance.
2. Operating systems that use flat files to store configuration information are trivially easy to back up. They're also trivially easy to clone and distribute.
3. People who run operating systems that use flat files tend to READ those flat files. The registry, on the other hand, is so huge and byzantine (again, WHY???) that finding entries in it is like going on a fishing expedition. Nobody really knows what's in their registry. I believe this is by design, not by accident.
4. The registry is IN FACT used to make piracy difficult. Virtually every piece of commercial Windows software stores registration information in the registry, usually in literally dozens of different locations so that to clear out a botched install you have to use a search tool and guess at all the possible names the company may have used for its keys. First, do you think Microsoft isn't doing the same thing??? Second, do you think this isn't by design???
5. When a hacker creates a Word Macro Virus and the cops catch him like, a week later, how do you think that happens? Word, installed, puts serial number information in the registry and later, into documents. Again, by design.
6. When they spent millions of dollars building Windows 95 and created long filename support, do you think it was by mistake that they just happened to leave long filename support out of their new version of DOS? Or that you couldn't boot to a command prompt that had long filename support? Again, it was to make piracy difficult. At the time, you couldn't boot to a CD. You had to use a floppy. Live CDs didn't even exist. And there was NO WAY to boot with a floppy and get long filename support. So where before you could use pkzip to zip up your whole windows and dos directory and back up your system to about twenty floppies, with Windows 95 you were basically hosed. Even if you DID zip up all the directories, when you unzipped them during the restore process they'd look like "Progra~1" instead of "Program Files" and you'd be hosed.
IF YOU ARE CORRECT, you must have a reasonable justification for the use of the registry that is credibly better than using a flat-file approach. I bet you don't have one.
You're missing something.
t he_Golden_Eggs
The amount of wealth in the world is NOT like a tank of water which, when the valves are opened, empties out and distributes the water all around. It's more like a large set of fountains fed by a small set of pumps. And corporate America isn't opening valves to let the water (money?) flow all around. They're taking sledgehammers to the pumps because they stupidly believe that by doing so, they'll get more than their fair share of the water. For the first few hits, they get doused pretty well, and they think "look at all this water! Hit it again!" But then the pumps shut down and that's the end of that.
Wealth is actively created by some groups of people and consumed by others. The United States is so wealthy because for most of this century we were CREATING much more wealth than anyone else in the world. We were able to do this due to a number of cultural and structural factors that aren't replicated anywhere else. For example, among all the people in the world, we are easily the most independent minded, the least bound by dogma and tradition (at least when it comes to science and technology). Our inventors have a "what the hell, let's give it a shot" mindset you won't find in many other places.
And before you start screaming "No, your innovators call came from Europe" let me state the obvious: WE ALL CAME FROM EUROPE. Americans are Europeans who decided to live somewhere else. We didn't just magically appear here; we colonized this place. Europeans may not want to hear this considering the unfortunate current state of the U.S. government, but we and they are the SAME PEOPLE, with the SAME CULTURE and SAME INTELLIGENCE LEVEL. The only discernible difference between Americans and Europeans is that Europeans try to behave more calmly than we do. We're a bit nuttier than they are. EXCEPT at soccer matches, of course.
If you want a perfect analogy for what's going to happen when corporations finally kill off technological innovation in the first-world countries, or at least strip people of the desire to do technical work for them (I don't think you can really kill off our ability to innovate, you'll always have inventors) just read this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goose_that_Laid_
I remember when Windows 95 first came out, and a bunch of us (comp sci majors) immediately tried out Linux. One guy who was an assembly language freak (and who knew quite a bit about Windows programming) wrote his own start menu, taskbar, and sort of Windows 95 emulator; he said "why upgrade? looks the same, doesn't it?"
The thing that really burned our asses was the registry and the implementation of long filenames (which worked in Win95, but NOT the DOS underneath it that you could boot to).
We could not figure out why anyone in their right mind would stop using flat files for system configuration. And we asked each other, "how the hell are we going to back up our machines?" The long filenames meant that you couldn't boot to DOS and do a zip backup the way we used to under DOS/Win3.1. You could back up, but never restore, because DOS couldn't put the long filenames back! Oh, how we hated it. If Knoppix had existed back then, it would have been a non-issue, and we would have laughed it off, but you usually couldn't even boot off a CD in those days (which is why Windows came with a boot floppy at the time).
The whole point of the registry is to "make piracy difficult". The ONLY reason they created it in the FIRST place was because Bill Gates et al thought their third-rate operating system was so special and important that to protect it from nasty "pirates" they had to essentially lobotomize it.
UGH.
But, hey! We sure had fun with Linux! So it wasn't ALL bad...
For me, setting up a Slackware box takes about 3 hours. Here are my steps:
1. Actual Slackware install: an hour or so, maybe an hour and a half.
2. I set up my firewall script, remove all rc.d scripts I'm not using (I store them in another directory called "NotInUse"), change the default umask to 077, and do an SUID audit. Then I check my setup with Nmap.
3. I download and install patches that relate to the things I'm using. I may not apply all the patches yet; some of them may relate to extras I install in (4) below.
4. Now I install some extra packages I like. This includes the installation of Firefox 2.0 and K3B from the extras collection, the installation of my NVidia driver (it recompiles my kernel and sets up X), and the setup of Splix, which lets me use Samsung laser printers. Note: the RPM for the current version of Splix looks for the "sh" package which of course isn't on Slackware (it uses "bash" instead). I got the previous version and did the make/make install boogie; that worked great. Oh, and I set up Java 1.6, Netbeans 5.5, and OpenOffice (I downloaded a Slackware package from a third party linked from the OpenOffice webpage).
5. Finally, I log on as my main user and I grab my "personal files" off a CD backup. Everything relating to that user goes in this directory, which makes that user totally portable. Then I update FireFox, grabbing NoScript, AdBlock, GreaseMonkey, and the NOIA theme, and grab the theme for Thunderbird too. I set up Thunderbird and check my email, then set my wallpaper and KDE theme.
Total time: maybe 3 hours. Maybe a little more if I have other users. But I'm a geek, no girlfriend, ha ha.
Let's be realistic.
The past six years has been rather hard on the American programmer.
We were pretty much always looked down on by the rest of society as a bunch of geeks, and no small number of us were picked on growing up just because we were studious and not particularly into sports. For a few years in the late nineties, we got a little bit of respect, and it was good. But we got deluged with carpetbaggers who claimed to be programmers after a weekend HTML course, until the word "programmer" barely meant ANYTHING. Finally, the bubble burst and the carpetbaggers were scattered to the wind, but in the process we got leveled right along with them. And the outsourcing boom has killed the market value of our skills, exactly as the bastard corporations intended.
The worst people on Earth, the people who run these corporations, happily betray not only their own countrymen but their fellow geeks in some cases (Fuck YOU, Bill Gates) when they tell our idiot Congress that Americans aren't smart enough, talented enough, skilled enough, GOOD enough to fill the positions they've got on offer.
They have the nerve to post job offers that insist on expertise in twenty different in-demand skills for a lousy 40K sub-entry-level job. Then they claim they made a good-faith effort to find someone to fill it and hire an Indian on an H1-B, paying him as little as possible.
In the end, the market for the American programmer is being demolished. We have all been sold out, viciously, because we wanted to be paid a fair wage and some filthy rich asshole with more money than he could ever spend wasn't willing to pay what we were worth.
Now it seems that a portion of these disenfranchised technologists have decided to become vandals. Well, CRY ME A RIVER.
As you reap, so shall you sow. It's the way of things, really.
Maybe you should have thought of that.
Ok, in the case of MySpace, I can see how this might not be TERRIFICALLY significant, IF it's as bad as you say (I wouldn't know, being about sixteen years too old for that demographic).
My comments are more pointed at the phenomenon in general, i.e. the whole "Month of X Bugs" fad that's been going around. I hate it. I wish it would go off and die the ignoble death of Disco and shoes with goldfish swimming in them. I see the whole thing as a sort of macro version of Dick Cheney shooting that old fart in the face.
You know...
Ok, gonna get a quail... Quail... Quail... Quail... OLD MAN! BLAM!
Wrong target. You know?
Wow... That wasn't particularly neighborly of him. :)
Yes, yes, but that ISP has to wait for the guys who build PhP to come out with patches, do they not? And someone already posted some info elsewhere in this thread mentioning how bad they often are with patches.
Therefore, not the fault of the ISP. I'm sure that most of the ones using PhP are Linux servers, anyway, and they get automatically updated nightly. If it's anyone's fault at all, it's the PhP guys' fault.
Again, not the ISP's fault.
And being on the web wouldn't BE quite such a shark tank if CERTAIN people weren't making things so EASY for hackers in the FIRST place.
(Before anyone freaks out over my use of "hacker", do realize that the language has changed over the past thirty years and its current common usage is NOT the one you fondly remember from your minicomputer days).
Nah, not depressed. Just wishing these guys would get a different hobby, that's all.
See, what bugs me is, most of this stuff is totally out of a sysadmin's hands. He's got to wait for patches in most cases. Even if he's got an open-source system and can patch his own stuff, often his boss won't let him.
Things are bad enough when there are unpatched vulnerabilities out there and your vendor is sitting on them. But guys like this make it worse by putting out sample exploit code. A vulnerability that might not have been that big a deal, and might have gotten patched before anything widespread happened, now can be exploited as soon as someone downloads the sample exploit and works it up into something more "interesting".
It's like I keep saying. Doing a "month of bugs" is a dick move. Us admins have it rough enough. Why add insult to injury? Why not just disclose the vulnerability and leave it at that? Why is it necessary to put out a friggin' TOOLKIT?
That's all I'm saying.
What? Gimme a fucking break! I'm not the head of I.T. I don't get to choose the software.
Listen, KID, you wanna know what it's like to work in this business? The higher ups give you a shit sandwich and you have to figure out how to eat it. You tell them you want pastrami, they tell you "maybe you can get pastrami at some OTHER job" and you shut up and get back to work.
And don't tell me about your "better alternatives" because one of the alternatives YOU people always suggest, PhP, got nailed by the "thirty days" shmucks ALREADY. Oh, and by the way, sport: I won't tell you which systems I support, but NONE of them have had a "thirty days" experience yet. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
You're obviously (at best) a college kid who's never had to hold down a real job. You've got some real nasty surprises up ahead.
Try to keep a stiff upper lip.
I'm not arguing for obscurity. I'm arguing for responsible disclosure.
Disclose to the vendor and CERT.
Don't disclose to the world unless you have a workaround and/or patch to offer. And when you do, DON'T include exploit code. EVER.
Common sense, really.
It's one thing to say "there's a bug in this software, and it should be fixed."
It's another to say "here are 30 bugs in this software, with thirty sets of sample exploit code".
The former is a free security audit.
The latter is a free library for script kiddies.
See what I mean?