Growing up with Unix - there were horror stories of a 'Hello World' X11 program compiling to a 500K executable. I was flabergasted - as my TRS-80 only had 32K. (and I was a lucky TRS-80 owner with the memory upgrade). Now days, the perceived bloat of X Windows isen't a big deal anymore - hell, my poket Psion device has 16,385K of memory and it fits in my pocket.
Now some talking paperclip is going to say to me "It look like you've been R00T3D" and a security 'wizard' will pop up to teach me (in five easy to follow steps) how it unplug my Windows BS Professional box from the network in order to make it secure.
I'll spell it out for those who can't see it: Word has no competition.
That may be true a few years ago when people loaded their whole office with one copy of Word. Now that Office XP is locked to one computer - I've found that my customers are quite happy with the MS Windows version of AbiWord for short memos and small letters.
A copy of Word 2000
A decent net connection
A brain
could set up a web site that converted word.doc files into RTF - by using an actuall copy of Word. Word is scriptable using VB, and there is a whole group of people who are experts at Word VB...Windows-virus writers. Just my USD.02 .
As I uderstand it - any hash function just maps your file (A large number) into another number(smaller). A particular hash number can represent many files - yours and a bunch of junk files. If you add a clue to the message, like your file originally was 5432323 Bytes large and contains the string "I'm a weasel, here me roar", than the combined clue and hash number and seperator strings between the cules and hash number will either be larger than your original file, or will not describe the origional file precisly - your message will describe many more files than you'd like.
If it is true that the Yopy is being killed after - it's most likly that Microsoft told them that they had to do it. Samsung, the parent of G.Mate, is really getting in bed with Microsoft : Their new phones are Stinger (WinCE) based, their new DVD will play Windows WMF audio files and their new tablet is WinCE based.
In fact, I'll even say that it's easier to replace / than/home/*.
This is the crux of the mater!/home/* has all of my carfully handmade files. The rest of the tree is all GPL/BSD stuff that I can get off the net and have reinstalled in under an hour. Trash my/usr/local/bin directory and I really won't cry. Trash my/home/posgres directory and I'll loose my billable hours for today.
If anything Unix needs to push it over the top as far as a secure server operating systems is the ability to tell the OS that "This File can never be deleted and can only be appended to by Postmaster. Forever. No matter what. Even if I want to get rid of it later." If I could give my clints that, they would jump to UNIX no matter what hurdels thay had to jump - they have lost too many Outlook folders and too many database tables due to the insecurity of Windows. They would RUN to Unix.
Just me and my rambelings. And yes I know about backups and rsyncing from a locked down OpenBSD box.
Why wouldn't a Linux PDA ever replace a "small effecient Palm style PDA" ?
It's the form factor that I was refering to..
The form factor of a Palm machen is perfect for your average user - if Palm was smart an concentrated on making their devices wafer thin and indestuctable, then they would get more "normal" people to buy them.
A functional Linux PDA, by nesessity would be larger in size. Thats not a problem for people like you and me, but the soccer moms don't like them - or WinCE devices for that mater.
Your right - I don't think we'll ever get a decent terminal application, or a word processor for a PDA - It would suck. The types of applications that would be good for a powerful Linux PDA would be things like car license database for bicycle police, or a map of the entire USA for hikers.
Palms are great - Cool small-apps on a functional device and a Linux PDA will never replace a small and efficient Palm style PDA. But they do have a nich to fill: Case in point, one of my customers would like to his workers to do Job costing in the field. Palm deceives don't have enough memory and I'm too lazy to work around the 64K barriers. WinCE devices are too flaky - they crash way too often. Symbian is cool, but you can't buy Revos anymore. Linux based Sharp looks to us to be a good development platform and were really looking forward to getting things up and running.
And since Linux doesn't seem to be making its way into the mainstream PDA market I somehow doubt that it'll ever get the amount of programs it deserves...
Any Linux PDA, though, has the entire OpenSource/GPL universe to draw applications from if the device itself is capable of running them hardware-wise. While the PalmOS does have many purpous built applications for it - I woulden't want to program that thing with it's 64K barriers and non POSIX 'operating system.' As applications for PDA's mature, then Linux becomes a great choice, not for the 'address book/organiser' of tomorrow but for the database connected point of sale sytem that can only be now dreamed about.
So you either start load testing it yourself, understand why it's broken and fix it. Or go with a commercial product that has already been through this process.
A Samba server that I installed for a client has an uptime of around 500 days - it has never crashed. The reason I installed Samba: the NT server it replaced would crash about once a week.
It looks like the open source Samba is better than the comercial NT.
There are other examples:
OpenSSH has less secutity holes than SSH
IPF is better than XP's 'firewall'
LaTex is better than.. well anything
MIT Kerberos is better than MS Kerberos
So your blanket statment that comercial is nesessarly better than OpenSource is false. Enjoy.
A cheap new laptop with your expensive PCMICA sound card would still be under $2000. Thats much cheaper than any of the decent luggables, and less expensive than making your own luggable - if your time is worth more than $20 an hour. If price is an issue, than a used MicroATX form factor computer with a 15" LCD monitor strapped to it permently coulden't cost more than $1000 and would weigh about 15 poinds. Paint the whole thing black with Krylon and it might even look cool.
Re:More viri on MS- why?
on
Linux Virus Alert
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Why is is there are more viruses for MS platforms than Linux platforms?
The main reaseons are thus:
1) Microsoft attemps to grab marketshare by adding any 'feature' that appeals to the masses, rather than adding security that appeals to a few smart people.
2) Microsoft's security model has had only a few years of evolution, the UNIX/Linux/BSD model has had almost twenty years of networked connected time to get it right.
3) Microsoft is gready. Raher than give you a patch to fix the secutity problems of your old Microsoft software - they would rather force you to pay for their newer version.
4) Microsoft programmers are inept. Microsoft attracts greedy and underqualified programmers with the lure of stock options. Good programmers either work for themselves or for a company that puts pride in their work. Good programmers seldom do it for the money - witness the wonderfull security of the shoestring-budget OpenBSD versus the 1.2 billion USD Windows XP that had to be pathced within a month of it's consumer release.
In short - Microsoft's bad security is actually good for their bottom line, it forces you to pay money for their 'upgrades.'
Microsoft has Already named the next XBox!
on
Xbox Sequel Rumors
·
· Score: 2
I put a visible non-working video camera pointed at the street and our local crack-house, and their business collapsed. The house in question was rented by a slum-lord to the lowest bidder and the drug traffic was driving me nuts. I made a good show of the camera and suddenly, the 'customers' were a bit leery. The druggies soon moved out and were replaced by a rather nice poor family.
I was set to get the camera working, but the it's presence was enough. Highly recomended. PS: I removed the camera once it became obvious that the new tenants were cool.
The push for the semantic web [w3.org] is a push for a richer web experience by adding more meta data to the content of the web.
Uh ohh... You just said 'richer web experience.' Please, shut down the Balmer-Monkeyboy video and step away from the XP box. Put away the Microsoft Actimates Barney and refrain from using Microsoft products untill your marketing bullshit filter comes back on-line.
There's a 25 year lifespan discrepancy, in which evolution has no effect, because the population (at least of women) can't reproduce!
In most primate cultures, old females still help with rearing the young. There is a hypothesis that this is the reason that females live longer than males - an old male is useless as a 'hunter' while an old femail is moderatly usefull as a child raiser.
People were refusing to use KDE due to Trolltech's licencing restrictions on QT - and even a few KDE developers started to create a free version of QT. Trooltech then decided to GPL their Unix version of QT and kept the QPL for the Windows in order to keep the revenue. Basically, Trolltech wants money.
Slashdot Mirror
Growing up with Unix - there were horror stories of a 'Hello World' X11 program compiling to a 500K executable. I was flabergasted - as my TRS-80 only had 32K. (and I was a lucky TRS-80 owner with the memory upgrade). Now days, the perceived bloat of X Windows isen't a big deal anymore - hell, my poket Psion device has 16,385K of memory and it fits in my pocket.
... "Why do they hate us so much?"
Wrong!
People love the US so much they are dying to get into it.
Maybe people treat you badly when you travel, but I suspect your ill treatment has nothing to do with your nationality.
Now some talking paperclip is going to say to me "It look like you've been R00T3D" and a security 'wizard' will pop up to teach me (in five easy to follow steps) how it unplug my Windows BS Professional box from the network in order to make it secure.
don't think there is a simple way to create a pdf under linux.
Mandrake 8.1 has a PDF printer automatically installed in CUPS(KUPS). Just tell your app to print to it and it pesters you for a file name to save to.
I'll spell it out for those who can't see it: Word has no competition.
That may be true a few years ago when people loaded their whole office with one copy of Word. Now that Office XP is locked to one computer - I've found that my customers are quite happy with the MS Windows version of AbiWord for short memos and small letters.
Sombody with:
.doc files into RTF - by using an actuall copy of Word. Word is scriptable using VB, and there is a whole group of people who are experts at Word VB...Windows-virus writers. Just my USD .02 .
A copy of Word 2000
A decent net connection
A brain
could set up a web site that converted word
As I uderstand it - any hash function just maps your file (A large number) into another number(smaller). A particular hash number can represent many files - yours and a bunch of junk files. If you add a clue to the message, like your file originally was 5432323 Bytes large and contains the string "I'm a weasel, here me roar", than the combined clue and hash number and seperator strings between the cules and hash number will either be larger than your original file, or will not describe the origional file precisly - your message will describe many more files than you'd like.
If it is true that the Yopy is being killed after - it's most likly that Microsoft told them that they had to do it. Samsung, the parent of G.Mate, is really getting in bed with Microsoft : Their new phones are Stinger (WinCE) based, their new DVD will play Windows WMF audio files and their new tablet is WinCE based.
It has the Folding feature, making it great for coding. Trust me.
That is cool! Thanks!
One OS to rule them all, one OS to find them, one OS to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.
Please stop saying nasty things about my precious Emacs.
In fact, I'll even say that it's easier to replace / than /home/*.
/home/* has all of my carfully handmade files. The rest of the tree is all GPL/BSD stuff that I can get off the net and have reinstalled in under an hour. Trash my /usr/local/bin directory and I really won't cry. Trash my /home/posgres directory and I'll loose my billable hours for today.
This is the crux of the mater!
If anything Unix needs to push it over the top as far as a secure server operating systems is the ability to tell the OS that "This File can never be deleted and can only be appended to by Postmaster. Forever. No matter what. Even if I want to get rid of it later." If I could give my clints that, they would jump to UNIX no matter what hurdels thay had to jump - they have lost too many Outlook folders and too many database tables due to the insecurity of Windows. They would RUN to Unix.
Just me and my rambelings. And yes I know about backups and rsyncing from a locked down OpenBSD box.
If you like the DOC Edit.com the you'd like EE (Easy Editor)
s /h andbook/editors.html
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/book
It's got the menuing hand-holding of DOS Edit - and it's small.
look at the pictures from WWI where artillery shelling stripped the land of trees down to the ground
Why wouldn't a Linux PDA ever replace a "small effecient Palm style PDA" ?
It's the form factor that I was refering to..
The form factor of a Palm machen is perfect for your average user - if Palm was smart an concentrated on making their devices wafer thin and indestuctable, then they would get more "normal" people to buy them.
A functional Linux PDA, by nesessity would be larger in size. Thats not a problem for people like you and me, but the soccer moms don't like them - or WinCE devices for that mater.
Your right - I don't think we'll ever get a decent terminal application, or a word processor for a PDA - It would suck. The types of applications that would be good for a powerful Linux PDA would be things like car license database for bicycle police, or a map of the entire USA for hikers.
Palms are great - Cool small-apps on a functional device and a Linux PDA will never replace a small and efficient Palm style PDA. But they do have a nich to fill: Case in point, one of my customers would like to his workers to do Job costing in the field. Palm deceives don't have enough memory and I'm too lazy to work around the 64K barriers. WinCE devices are too flaky - they crash way too often. Symbian is cool, but you can't buy Revos anymore. Linux based Sharp looks to us to be a good development platform and were really looking forward to getting things up and running.
And since Linux doesn't seem to be making its way into the mainstream PDA market I somehow doubt that it'll ever get the amount of programs it deserves...
Any Linux PDA, though, has the entire OpenSource/GPL universe to draw applications from if the device itself is capable of running them hardware-wise. While the PalmOS does have many purpous built applications for it - I woulden't want to program that thing with it's 64K barriers and non POSIX 'operating system.' As applications for PDA's mature, then Linux becomes a great choice, not for the 'address book/organiser' of tomorrow but for the database connected point of sale sytem that can only be now dreamed about.
So you either start load testing it yourself, understand why it's broken and fix it. Or go with a commercial product that has already been through this process.
A Samba server that I installed for a client has an uptime of around 500 days - it has never crashed. The reason I installed Samba: the NT server it replaced would crash about once a week.
It looks like the open source Samba is better than the comercial NT.
There are other examples:
OpenSSH has less secutity holes than SSH
IPF is better than XP's 'firewall'
LaTex is better than.. well anything
MIT Kerberos is better than MS Kerberos
So your blanket statment that comercial is nesessarly better than OpenSource is false. Enjoy.
It's Volkswagen [vw.com],
I some backward parts of Idaho, it's simply known as "Zie Kar."
A cheap new laptop with your expensive PCMICA sound card would still be under $2000. Thats much cheaper than any of the decent luggables, and less expensive than making your own luggable - if your time is worth more than $20 an hour. If price is an issue, than a used MicroATX form factor computer with a 15" LCD monitor strapped to it permently coulden't cost more than $1000 and would weigh about 15 poinds. Paint the whole thing black with Krylon and it might even look cool.
Why is is there are more viruses for MS platforms than Linux platforms?
The main reaseons are thus:
1) Microsoft attemps to grab marketshare by adding any 'feature' that appeals to the masses, rather than adding security that appeals to a few smart people.
2) Microsoft's security model has had only a few years of evolution, the UNIX/Linux/BSD model has had almost twenty years of networked connected time to get it right.
3) Microsoft is gready. Raher than give you a patch to fix the secutity problems of your old Microsoft software - they would rather force you to pay for their newer version.
4) Microsoft programmers are inept. Microsoft attracts greedy and underqualified programmers with the lure of stock options. Good programmers either work for themselves or for a company that puts pride in their work. Good programmers seldom do it for the money - witness the wonderfull security of the shoestring-budget OpenBSD versus the 1.2 billion USD Windows XP that had to be pathced within a month of it's consumer release.
In short - Microsoft's bad security is actually good for their bottom line, it forces you to pay money for their 'upgrades.'
It's going to be called "My Videogame Box."
(not my joke)
I put a visible non-working video camera pointed at the street and our local crack-house, and their business collapsed. The house in question was rented by a slum-lord to the lowest bidder and the drug traffic was driving me nuts. I made a good show of the camera and suddenly, the 'customers' were a bit leery. The druggies soon moved out and were replaced by a rather nice poor family.
I was set to get the camera working, but the it's presence was enough. Highly recomended. PS: I removed the camera once it became obvious that the new tenants were cool.
The push for the semantic web [w3.org] is a push for a richer web experience by adding more meta data to the content of the web.
Uh ohh... You just said 'richer web experience.' Please, shut down the Balmer-Monkeyboy video and step away from the XP box. Put away the Microsoft Actimates Barney and refrain from using Microsoft products untill your marketing bullshit filter comes back on-line.
There's a 25 year lifespan discrepancy, in which evolution has no effect, because the population (at least of women) can't reproduce!
In most primate cultures, old females still help with rearing the young. There is a hypothesis that this is the reason that females live longer than males - an old male is useless as a 'hunter' while an old femail is moderatly usefull as a child raiser.
People were refusing to use KDE due to Trolltech's licencing restrictions on QT - and even a few KDE developers started to create a free version of QT. Trooltech then decided to GPL their Unix version of QT and kept the QPL for the Windows in order to keep the revenue. Basically, Trolltech wants money.