Last time I checked there were specialised laptops for the battlefield, carried by troops./quote My statements stand, you will NEVER be able to get a laptop weighing several kilos and over a square foot of material, as well as a non-embedded OS, to be as Rugged as a TI-82, which costs around $40 or so on ebay right now (unless your pricetag and materials start to get rather exotic). TI82 needs no cooling, has no moving parts, and has an embedded OS. I am not aware of the OS being able to be permenently disabled with anything other than a hardware failure.
As for fixing mistakes, I really suspect at this point youve never used a basic graphing calculator. Somehow correcting mistakes was never a problem in high school on the TI-8x line of calculators; they always made it a cinch to work things out.
"Republican" is generally synonomous with "politically conservative", and thus NOT "expansive government powers". For instance, I will note the recent attempt to cut a chunk out of the budget by the Republicans, which was fought tooth and nail by Dems. WHAT they were trying to cut isnt that relevant, as it would have been fought tooth and nail no matter what it was. Or the semi-recent healthcare bill, which was fought tooth and nail by republicans.
Now, there are times Rs will vote for expanding government powers, particularly in what is percieved as "wartime", but they are still more "small government" than Democrats, by a long shot (though Im not sure I can see a republican actually voting to get rid of existing powers, just to vote against new powers).
Ive tried OpenOffice in corporate environments, when we were short on Office 2003 licenses. The end users eventually just went out and bought Office. Their reason? OpenOffice is terrible, looks terrible, doesnt have the functions they need, and they dont know where anything is.
Somehow not many have had issue with the Office2007 upgrade-- perhaps its perception that "its microsoft", but if you think you can argue a VP out of wanting Office, you are sadly mistaken.
I have a 4 year old laptop that Im trying to upgrade, but it will not accept 1GB sticks, and its starting to look like it wont accept 512 MB sticks. It may very well be restricted to ~490 MB of RAM (after accounting for AGP aperature, which cannot be lowered further).
Do you know how much of a PITA it is to run recent OSes on this laptop, which is otherwise fine? It has a brand new battery ($40), and does everything I need.
If you think you can toughen a laptop, with a 10+" screen, large keyboard, large LION battery, heatsinks, fans, and all, up to the same standard you can with a 2" by 4" calculator, you are sadly mistaken. Larger more complex devices are by nature harder to ruggedize, especially when the screen gets large enough to be able to flex and break.
Not to mention ruggedizing it (adding a solid steel frame to the screen, for example) would add quite a bit to the weight and cost, so all of a sudden we're talking about a $1500 laptop weighing 3kg, vs a $100 calculator weighing 250 grams. And for what gain? To use an OS not designed for mathmatics, on a device with 1/50th of the battery life?
Er, I wasnt aware you could do 3d graphing on LibreOffice calc, factor algebraic equations, solve for x, or any of the other basic things a good decent TI-82 equivalent can do (and those things are like 20 years old). Octave appears to be a programming language, that is, that I cant simply plug in Y=3x+z^2 and get a graph. Hooray for reducing simplicity! Hooray for complexity for its own sake!
Seriously, it sounds like youre either trolling, or have never used a TI-82+ equivalent. They are easy enough for a budding 7th grader to use, powerful enough for real world use, and have a quite nice BASIC programming function (which I credit for getting me into the world of computers). And honestly, I dont know what math class would allow you to bring a laptop in, or why its fair to compare a $100 (new) TI or HP calc to a $450 laptop.
I wasnt aware that "sanctions" and "tying aid to their anti-terrorism efforts" could be equated with "war".
1/3rd of the human population in the US on food stamps. At the rate it is increasing, half of all Americans will be on public assistance in just 4-5 years.
Less than 15% of Americans are below the (by world standards, quite lavish) poverty level. We arent at some all-time high here-- in fact, we're a full 10% lower today than we were 50 years ago. And if you keep increasing benefits for the poor (which I would note are at an all time high), I fail to see why more people would not avail themselves of handouts.
Our cities crumbling, once shining jewels of industry and innovation and opportunity for the future of children, now destroyed by this government and its policies to the fascist corporate state. Our youth will know no security, will own no home and will have no food let alone a career.
Could you possibly use more hyperbole? Have you decided the rhetoric of the media is something to be imitated? Heres a tip-- its not, and it doesnt lead to meaningful or productive discussion.
Congress is plotting with the centralized agricultural fascists to make it illegal to grow food.
And here we see that youre either a troll, or a lunatic.
Or, if you want to get back to us here in reality, the term is "representative democracy", since a lot more than a small number of people
vote on policy here.
I mean, unless I remember wrongly, the presidential vote usually tends to go with the popular vote (with a few rare exceptions); and the populations of states have the power to select their representatives.
Because he was comparing to a LiveCD non-install of fedora (the reason being unclear), and Im not sure you can switch between Gnome2 and Unity on a LiveCD (one potential reason being limited ramdisk space).
Absolutely worthless comparison, as it compares vastly different distributions. He isnt even comparing 2 debian based distros, or trying to control for different running services; why is there not even an attempt to isolate the memory usage of the DE / WM?
Perhaps this could have been useful as a comparison of distro memory usage, but even in that it fails-- its comparing an installed Debian distro to live-CD based Fedora; why wasnt fedora installed and compared (perhaps using VMs?), or Ubuntu run from LiveCD?
ctrl+k youtube enter does the job with fewer buttons, and has the side benefit of making several machines on the internet furiously discuss my intention, all for the benefit of my laziness. That alone makes it worth it.
Im not really clear, what is the problem with hiding HTTP? If it is an HTTPS connection, it displays "https://", if FTP it shows "ftp://".... its a web browser, it makes HTTP connections and renders HTML. I dont really expect to see a gigantic tag at the top of every webpage either.
Seriously I can kind of see the outrage with the address bar thing, but seeing "http" is really not helping anyone.
Its value in electronics-- when by all rights copper seems to beat the pants off of it (except for corrosion resistance)-- in no way reflects the actual current market price. Heck, silver is more conductive than gold, and it is less expensive.
More directly to the point, to quote wikipedia:
The world consumption of new gold produced is about 50% in jewelry, 40% in investments, and 10% in industry
I think that about sums it up. Gold is valuable PRECISELY because people put value in it.
What a load of garbage. There are basically 2 classes of exploit that are responsible for 99.9% of infections running around these days:
1) 3rd-party vulnerabilities that are exploited to effect no-click infections (adobe reader plugins, flash, java, quicktime, etc). These do not rely on the underlying OS except insofar as the OS's security mechanisms (ASLR, DEP, protected mode, least-privelege/UAC/gksudo, etc) provide additional mitigation.
2) The "trojan" style of user-initiated exploit, which cannot really be addressed except by revoking users rights to run executable content.
For the first one, I will note that Windows' security is-- no shill, no troll-- quite good when stacked up with Linux, Mac, etc-- it has ASLR, which if memory serves they had "mainstream" before Mac OSX, DEP since 2003 or something, protected mode (for internet explorer, which I dont believe there is an analogue for in Mac-- i think AppArmor or SELinux would be the Linux equiv), etc. Linux is perhaps better off in a hardened config, since it has autoupdates and the like, but I cannot fathom why a Mac user would be so smug about this.
For the second scenario, Windows is a breeze to lock down with a GPO forbidding the running of executables from an untrusted location, network wide-- it takes 1 GPO and about 5 minutes. UAC is in place for a reason (non-admins cant install bootkit code), and with GPOs you can do all sorts of things that I imagine a Mac admin could only dream of (unless someone can enlighten me).
Quite frankly, this is one of those things where, even if it were exhaustively proven by a joint study by RMS, Schnieier, Torvalds, and the entire IETF that Mac users have NO cause for smugness, they would CONTINUE to claim that "windows has terrible security holes" despite the fact that these PDF and flash exploits are on their way to your OS, in a very short period of time.
And once again if youre crying "easy" but then amending it with "but first, RTFM", then youre doing it wrong. The word your looking for is possibly "powerful", or "intuitive", but NOT easy.
Whats hard to understand here? Pirated games were not necessarily sales, whereas someone plunking down cash for a used game may very well have bought new-- but used, no money goes to the dev.
Id say from a business perspective his comments were accurate. And youll note that he said "and theres not much we can do about it", not "we're hoping to crack down on this soon".
Yea, gee whiz, I cant imagine why we do that. Something about one of our founding documents indicating that states were to be independently run, or something.
For the uninitiated, the idea was that we never wanted the government to become too big, and that we wanted the federal government to be very limited with the majority of governance occurring at a local level. The irony of it all, and of your accusation, is that we now more than ever delegate powers to the Fed that have historically been state or private powers.
I get can have a machine spend years without needing a SINGLE line of CLI, ever. Can YOU do that? Try this experiment if you think Linux is ready for the desktop: Remove ALL shells. C'mon, Linux is modular, yes? Then remove the shell or mod them down so you can NOT use them! I bet the machine won't even make 6 months, and you sure as hell won't be updating the thing, because without CLI Linux falls down like a house of cards.
Troll is troll. Lets start with the issues in your statement:
1) If you want to start doing things out-of-the box in windows, you often have to fall back to CLI. For instance, if you hit the file-path length limit, you will likely need to resort to something like scripting renaming directories recursively, or setting up directory junctions (which will result in a shorter path). Try doing those without CLI, go on... And what about unhiding files that have been marked system/superhidden by a virus? Or changing the boot priorities on Vista+ (Bcdedit isnt GUI, last I checked....)? Or running a checkdisk, with verbose output, on next system boot?
And if you had ANY experience whatsoever on Server 2008/ Exchange2007, you would know that there are many many many functions that absolutely RELY on powershell. Example-- trying to view the size of a mailbox; it used to be possible from GUI, but now requires powershell. Example 2: assigning an SSL cert to Exchange (something that is a once-a-year occurance with self-signed certs)-- requires powershell to enable and assign the cert.
2) You cant remove "all shells" in Linux, as you would know if you had the SLIGHTEST knowledge of what on earth you were talking about. Neither can you remove it from windows, or Mac, or FreeBSD, or any other flavor of OS that I am familiar with. If you COULD, it would be the most retarded move ever-- no CLI means no method of editing boot order (windows), no way of recovering from a failed boot (Linux), no way of accessing verbose program output as it runs, etc etc. Shells are behind the GUI in any sensible OS, because relying on the graphical subsystem+drivers in order to fix a system is about as bass-ackwards as relying on a cars engine to be functional and running in order to pop the hood.
3) If you install PeppermintOS, or Ubuntu 9.04 (or 9.10, or 10.04, etc), there is a good chance you will not need to touch the CLI. And from experience, the need to touch the CLI in Linux is about as common as the need to screw around with drivers and registry settings when installing a secondary OS on windows-- that is, installing XP on a Vista machine, or vice versa. There is a good chance with several of those machines that you need to screw around with all sorts of windows-based voodoo to get vaguely similar drivers to work with everything.
Sound breaks? Bash, Wireless fucks up? Bash. Video problems? Bash. Hell the answer to EVERY question in Linux is bash.
These things can all be accomplished through GUI, using Gedit, gconf-editor, jockey, synaptic, etc. However, copying and pasting a 3-line fix is much quicker and less painful than digging through the registry or running Microsoft's "Fix-It" and hoping it just works.
Heres a real life example of just how screwed up this kind of thinking is-- this Friday, I will be dealing with a batch of machines that has been endlessly trying to install 60 updates. I dealt with this problem on a few other machines last week. Problem is, you cant really run "update-all" from the commandline and get some kind of meaningful output; no, you have to dig through eventlogs, generic errors that mean nothing (noone having these errors has posted a workable solution), and forum posts, and hope it gets fixed-- if it doesnt, youre SOL, since you dont really have a command that gives you access to the Windows Updates internals. With Ubuntu, if the update database gets corrupted, I can use dpkg or apt to fix it in all of 3 minutes (ie, by purging the database or cache, or fixing broken dependenc
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Last time I checked there were specialised laptops for the battlefield, carried by troops./quote
My statements stand, you will NEVER be able to get a laptop weighing several kilos and over a square foot of material, as well as a non-embedded OS, to be as Rugged as a TI-82, which costs around $40 or so on ebay right now (unless your pricetag and materials start to get rather exotic). TI82 needs no cooling, has no moving parts, and has an embedded OS. I am not aware of the OS being able to be permenently disabled with anything other than a hardware failure.
As for fixing mistakes, I really suspect at this point youve never used a basic graphing calculator. Somehow correcting mistakes was never a problem in high school on the TI-8x line of calculators; they always made it a cinch to work things out.
"Republican" is generally synonomous with "politically conservative", and thus NOT "expansive government powers". For instance, I will note the recent attempt to cut a chunk out of the budget by the Republicans, which was fought tooth and nail by Dems. WHAT they were trying to cut isnt that relevant, as it would have been fought tooth and nail no matter what it was. Or the semi-recent healthcare bill, which was fought tooth and nail by republicans.
Now, there are times Rs will vote for expanding government powers, particularly in what is percieved as "wartime", but they are still more "small government" than Democrats, by a long shot (though Im not sure I can see a republican actually voting to get rid of existing powers, just to vote against new powers).
Ive tried OpenOffice in corporate environments, when we were short on Office 2003 licenses. The end users eventually just went out and bought Office. Their reason? OpenOffice is terrible, looks terrible, doesnt have the functions they need, and they dont know where anything is.
Somehow not many have had issue with the Office2007 upgrade-- perhaps its perception that "its microsoft", but if you think you can argue a VP out of wanting Office, you are sadly mistaken.
I have a 4 year old laptop that Im trying to upgrade, but it will not accept 1GB sticks, and its starting to look like it wont accept 512 MB sticks. It may very well be restricted to ~490 MB of RAM (after accounting for AGP aperature, which cannot be lowered further).
Do you know how much of a PITA it is to run recent OSes on this laptop, which is otherwise fine? It has a brand new battery ($40), and does everything I need.
If you think you can toughen a laptop, with a 10+" screen, large keyboard, large LION battery, heatsinks, fans, and all, up to the same standard you can with a 2" by 4" calculator, you are sadly mistaken. Larger more complex devices are by nature harder to ruggedize, especially when the screen gets large enough to be able to flex and break.
Not to mention ruggedizing it (adding a solid steel frame to the screen, for example) would add quite a bit to the weight and cost, so all of a sudden we're talking about a $1500 laptop weighing 3kg, vs a $100 calculator weighing 250 grams. And for what gain? To use an OS not designed for mathmatics, on a device with 1/50th of the battery life?
Er, I wasnt aware you could do 3d graphing on LibreOffice calc, factor algebraic equations, solve for x, or any of the other basic things a good decent TI-82 equivalent can do (and those things are like 20 years old).
Octave appears to be a programming language, that is, that I cant simply plug in Y=3x+z^2 and get a graph. Hooray for reducing simplicity! Hooray for complexity for its own sake!
Seriously, it sounds like youre either trolling, or have never used a TI-82+ equivalent. They are easy enough for a budding 7th grader to use, powerful enough for real world use, and have a quite nice BASIC programming function (which I credit for getting me into the world of computers). And honestly, I dont know what math class would allow you to bring a laptop in, or why its fair to compare a $100 (new) TI or HP calc to a $450 laptop.
Sorry for double post, I just couldnt resist on this bit
The Europeans get it
You mean like Ireland, Portugal, Greece? Yea, theyre doing swell.
Seriously, how the hell did you pull off a +4 insightful, your post just gets more ridiculous the farther down you go.
Endless wars...Pakistan is now up to bat.
I wasnt aware that "sanctions" and "tying aid to their anti-terrorism efforts" could be equated with "war".
1/3rd of the human population in the US on food stamps. At the rate it is increasing, half of all Americans will be on public assistance in just 4-5 years.
Less than 15% of Americans are below the (by world standards, quite lavish) poverty level. We arent at some all-time high here-- in fact, we're a full 10% lower today than we were 50 years ago. And if you keep increasing benefits for the poor (which I would note are at an all time high), I fail to see why more people would not avail themselves of handouts.
Our cities crumbling, once shining jewels of industry and innovation and opportunity for the future of children, now destroyed by this government and its policies to the fascist corporate state. Our youth will know no security, will own no home and will have no food let alone a career.
Could you possibly use more hyperbole? Have you decided the rhetoric of the media is something to be imitated? Heres a tip-- its not, and it doesnt lead to meaningful or productive discussion.
Congress is plotting with the centralized agricultural fascists to make it illegal to grow food.
And here we see that youre either a troll, or a lunatic.
Or, if you want to get back to us here in reality, the term is "representative democracy", since a lot more than a small number of people
vote on policy here.
I mean, unless I remember wrongly, the presidential vote usually tends to go with the popular vote (with a few rare exceptions); and the populations of states have the power to select their representatives.
The irony here is that roughly 40% of the people modding you up (statistically) will go out and vote for a government with ever expanding powers.
I imagine theyd make a rather bigger deal about it on the news, which is more relevant to the discussion than "how dangerous" something is.
Perception plays a big role in all of this.
Ah slashdot, where no comparison is too much of a reach, and no perspective is necessary to make a +5 insightful comment.
Because he was comparing to a LiveCD non-install of fedora (the reason being unclear), and Im not sure you can switch between Gnome2 and Unity on a LiveCD (one potential reason being limited ramdisk space).
Absolutely worthless comparison, as it compares vastly different distributions. He isnt even comparing 2 debian based distros, or trying to control for different running services; why is there not even an attempt to isolate the memory usage of the DE / WM?
Perhaps this could have been useful as a comparison of distro memory usage, but even in that it fails-- its comparing an installed Debian distro to live-CD based Fedora; why wasnt fedora installed and compared (perhaps using VMs?), or Ubuntu run from LiveCD?
ctrl+k youtube enter does the job with fewer buttons, and has the side benefit of making several machines on the internet furiously discuss my intention, all for the benefit of my laziness. That alone makes it worth it.
Im not really clear, what is the problem with hiding HTTP? If it is an HTTPS connection, it displays "https://", if FTP it shows "ftp://".... its a web browser, it makes HTTP connections and renders HTML. I dont really expect to see a gigantic tag at the top of every webpage either.
Seriously I can kind of see the outrage with the address bar thing, but seeing "http" is really not helping anyone.
Its value in electronics-- when by all rights copper seems to beat the pants off of it (except for corrosion resistance)-- in no way reflects the actual current market price. Heck, silver is more conductive than gold, and it is less expensive.
More directly to the point, to quote wikipedia:
The world consumption of new gold produced is about 50% in jewelry, 40% in investments, and 10% in industry
I think that about sums it up. Gold is valuable PRECISELY because people put value in it.
World of Warcraft uses LUA for mods, and noone seems to be having any problems with it. If anything, theres too many mods.
When someone remarks
The security model of OSX is fairly proven, Windows struggles due to backward compatibility at times.
I think that either qualifies as ignorant, or smug, or both.
What a load of garbage. There are basically 2 classes of exploit that are responsible for 99.9% of infections running around these days:
1) 3rd-party vulnerabilities that are exploited to effect no-click infections (adobe reader plugins, flash, java, quicktime, etc). These do not rely on the underlying OS except insofar as the OS's security mechanisms (ASLR, DEP, protected mode, least-privelege/UAC/gksudo, etc) provide additional mitigation.
2) The "trojan" style of user-initiated exploit, which cannot really be addressed except by revoking users rights to run executable content.
For the first one, I will note that Windows' security is-- no shill, no troll-- quite good when stacked up with Linux, Mac, etc-- it has ASLR, which if memory serves they had "mainstream" before Mac OSX, DEP since 2003 or something, protected mode (for internet explorer, which I dont believe there is an analogue for in Mac-- i think AppArmor or SELinux would be the Linux equiv), etc. Linux is perhaps better off in a hardened config, since it has autoupdates and the like, but I cannot fathom why a Mac user would be so smug about this.
For the second scenario, Windows is a breeze to lock down with a GPO forbidding the running of executables from an untrusted location, network wide-- it takes 1 GPO and about 5 minutes. UAC is in place for a reason (non-admins cant install bootkit code), and with GPOs you can do all sorts of things that I imagine a Mac admin could only dream of (unless someone can enlighten me).
Quite frankly, this is one of those things where, even if it were exhaustively proven by a joint study by RMS, Schnieier, Torvalds, and the entire IETF that Mac users have NO cause for smugness, they would CONTINUE to claim that "windows has terrible security holes" despite the fact that these PDF and flash exploits are on their way to your OS, in a very short period of time.
And once again if youre crying "easy" but then amending it with "but first, RTFM", then youre doing it wrong. The word your looking for is possibly "powerful", or "intuitive", but NOT easy.
Whats hard to understand here? Pirated games were not necessarily sales, whereas someone plunking down cash for a used game may very well have bought new-- but used, no money goes to the dev.
Id say from a business perspective his comments were accurate. And youll note that he said "and theres not much we can do about it", not "we're hoping to crack down on this soon".
Yea, gee whiz, I cant imagine why we do that. Something about one of our founding documents indicating that states were to be independently run, or something.
For the uninitiated, the idea was that we never wanted the government to become too big, and that we wanted the federal government to be very limited with the majority of governance occurring at a local level. The irony of it all, and of your accusation, is that we now more than ever delegate powers to the Fed that have historically been state or private powers.
I get can have a machine spend years without needing a SINGLE line of CLI, ever. Can YOU do that? Try this experiment if you think Linux is ready for the desktop: Remove ALL shells. C'mon, Linux is modular, yes? Then remove the shell or mod them down so you can NOT use them! I bet the machine won't even make 6 months, and you sure as hell won't be updating the thing, because without CLI Linux falls down like a house of cards.
Troll is troll. Lets start with the issues in your statement:
1) If you want to start doing things out-of-the box in windows, you often have to fall back to CLI. For instance, if you hit the file-path length limit, you will likely need to resort to something like scripting renaming directories recursively, or setting up directory junctions (which will result in a shorter path). Try doing those without CLI, go on... And what about unhiding files that have been marked system/superhidden by a virus? Or changing the boot priorities on Vista+ (Bcdedit isnt GUI, last I checked....)? Or running a checkdisk, with verbose output, on next system boot?
And if you had ANY experience whatsoever on Server 2008/ Exchange2007, you would know that there are many many many functions that absolutely RELY on powershell. Example-- trying to view the size of a mailbox; it used to be possible from GUI, but now requires powershell. Example 2: assigning an SSL cert to Exchange (something that is a once-a-year occurance with self-signed certs)-- requires powershell to enable and assign the cert.
2) You cant remove "all shells" in Linux, as you would know if you had the SLIGHTEST knowledge of what on earth you were talking about. Neither can you remove it from windows, or Mac, or FreeBSD, or any other flavor of OS that I am familiar with. If you COULD, it would be the most retarded move ever-- no CLI means no method of editing boot order (windows), no way of recovering from a failed boot (Linux), no way of accessing verbose program output as it runs, etc etc. Shells are behind the GUI in any sensible OS, because relying on the graphical subsystem+drivers in order to fix a system is about as bass-ackwards as relying on a cars engine to be functional and running in order to pop the hood.
3) If you install PeppermintOS, or Ubuntu 9.04 (or 9.10, or 10.04, etc), there is a good chance you will not need to touch the CLI. And from experience, the need to touch the CLI in Linux is about as common as the need to screw around with drivers and registry settings when installing a secondary OS on windows-- that is, installing XP on a Vista machine, or vice versa. There is a good chance with several of those machines that you need to screw around with all sorts of windows-based voodoo to get vaguely similar drivers to work with everything.
Sound breaks? Bash, Wireless fucks up? Bash. Video problems? Bash. Hell the answer to EVERY question in Linux is bash.
These things can all be accomplished through GUI, using Gedit, gconf-editor, jockey, synaptic, etc. However, copying and pasting a 3-line fix is much quicker and less painful than digging through the registry or running Microsoft's "Fix-It" and hoping it just works.
Heres a real life example of just how screwed up this kind of thinking is-- this Friday, I will be dealing with a batch of machines that has been endlessly trying to install 60 updates. I dealt with this problem on a few other machines last week. Problem is, you cant really run "update-all" from the commandline and get some kind of meaningful output; no, you have to dig through eventlogs, generic errors that mean nothing (noone having these errors has posted a workable solution), and forum posts, and hope it gets fixed-- if it doesnt, youre SOL, since you dont really have a command that gives you access to the Windows Updates internals. With Ubuntu, if the update database gets corrupted, I can use dpkg or apt to fix it in all of 3 minutes (ie, by purging the database or cache, or fixing broken dependenc
If youre crying "user friendly" and then talking about Vim, I daresay youre doing it wrong. Vim may be many things, but easy it is not.
Now if you had said "nano", then you might be on to something.