My hope is that we get to merge efforts to produce a desktop product that is not only beautiful to look at, but also a joy to work with.
Not only is it impossible to get everyone to agree on what makes a good desktop, but competition is vital for creating a good user experience. Why do you think Windows sucks so completely? One reason is that most people who use computers don't have any choice but to use Windows: there is no healthy competition to force MS to make it not suck.
Merging efforts is bad because it means we are all stuck with the lowest common denominator. Imagine an America On-line desktop. No thanks.
Once another account is setup, there is absolutely no reason to allow root logins on SSH. PermitRootLogin should be turned off. I took it further: on my setup, DenyHost instantly bans IPs that try to log in as root.
...why anyone would use a payment system, with no safety at all?
In terms of getting ripped off online, credit cards are probably the safest thing. In the US, the law says that you are not responsible for any charges you didn't make as long as you still have the physical card in your possession. And then there are protections on top of that for defective products and stuff. From what I have read, and in my experience and my friend's experiences, credit card companies honor this without giving you any trouble.
As long as you keep an eye on your charges, you are very safe. Because the credit card companies carry the responsibility, it is in their interest to have good security on credit card information.
For my website, I share a server with a bunch of other sites. I was poking around/tmp one day and came across dumps of credit card information. I forget the website, but apparently they thought/tmp, with global read permissions, was a safe place to generate HTML after a transaction. I reported it to the hosting service and the offending website fixed their scripts.
Luckily, credit cards have strong protections, so you aren't responsible for any fraud charges due to these leaks. Just check the charges every month.
I also loved Tribes. I spend hundreds of hours in that game. Once you mastered the jetpack, you could do some amazing things. Some of my favorite memories come from playing on the (Team Aerial Assault) TAC mod.
In TAC, you died instantly if you touched the dirt ground (structure floors were safe), the home bases were placed very far apart, and the action was all in the middle on an island (an island in a sea of deadly dirt) of some sort. This forced teamwork because the only way to the action was on transports, and only light armor could fly transports. So someone became the designated pilot and the rest would gear up in various types of heavy armor.
Sometimes these transports would even fight it out in the air: two transports, each has 1 pilot and 4 heavy armors, and the heavy armor players are launching mortars, disks, etc., at each other while the transports take evasive action. For those unfamiliar with Tribes, the transports are very open, so the passengers can easily shoot just about anywhere (see the video, which shows the smaller transports). That was amazing fun right there.
In the modless world, base raping was a lot of fun. Have several people from your team enter the enemy base in heavy armor. Destroy everything, especially their generator so they can't make ships, get weapons, and use their turrets. Then make camp with some portable inventory stations and keep your mortar gun pointed at the entrance. You own their base, and while the enemy is trying to remove you and fix their stuff, your other teammates concentrate on capping their flag.
Oh, and remember skiing? There was a bug in the game mechanics with how applying a jetpack while going downhill worked, which made the player glide very fast. This was dubbed skiing, and people liked it so much this "bug" turned into a feature. When they made the not-very-good Tribes 2, the had to write in the ski mechanism.
Just because the POSIX standards say it, doesn't mean it's right. POSIX is very old now, and was based around technological ideas which are out of date now.
POSIX is being very flexible here, and rightly so. Ext3 and ext4 represent different trade-offs between two extremes. On one extreme you have very high data reliability, where data immediately goes to the disk and it is rare that anything is lost. You can accomplish this my mounting with sync. However, this has terrible performance.
On the other extreme we have great performance because the OS never ever writes to the disk. It would be like a live CD (ignoring CD/DVD reads). However, if the system crashes, you lose everything.
Real filesystems go somewhere in the middle, trading some reliability for performance. Ext4 just shifts things more towards performance than ext3. If POSIX was more rigid, we wouldn't have the choice of where to make the trade-off without breaking the standards. It would be poor decision making had POSIX chosen some arbitrary time limit for disk writes. POSIX isn't this way because it is old, but because they were being flexible in preparation for the future. That was good forethought.
If you don't like the ext4 trade-offs, stick with ext3. Linux is rock solid, though, and I have seen a Linux kernel panic only once in my life. The only thing I have to worry about are power outages. And my cat stepping on the damn switch on the power strip. Shifting a bit towards performance sounds nice to me.
And if we ignore POSIX, then when what do we have? We end up getting crap like the arbitrary, undocumented mess that is the Windows API.
The only reason this gives any kind of performance benefits at all is because most applications are not calling fsync().
This is good, as they are deferring to the filesystem, letting the user choose the trade-off. Apps need to do fsync() if the data is very important (i.e. system logs) or if the application is destroying important old data (writing over old config files, like KDE). I am sure there are a few other situations too. But if they are always calling fsync() for every write they are doing it wrong.
"Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to Hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of Heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism." -- Isaac Asimov
The people seeing these fast releases aren't the end-users, but rather people that will be actively involved in the project and contributing back (coding, testing, etc.). This creates a fast feedback cycle. It's the core of running the development "bazaar", if you will.
After OpenBSD opened up their code repositories for anyone to read, everyone else started doing it. This pushed even further, so that anyone could access the exact state of a project at any time.
I guess this counts as a shameless plug, but I wrote about this using a sci-fi, self replicating minefield as an analogy: Controlling a Minefield. As someone else said, it simply comes down to digital signatures, though it doesn't even need to even be that complicated to do simple things.
Any method of generating a problem and its solution at the same time, where the problem is very difficult to solve, would work.
For a simple approach as an example, before the worms are spread, various one-time commands could be set up by first finding two large primes, multiplying them together, and storing that composite in the worms and associate it with a command. Finding the two primes from the composite is impractical, but if the authors wants to issue a command, they just broadcast the two primes. It would be easy for the worms to verify that these are the correct primes, and then execute the corresponding command.
I am still crossing my fingers that some low level person who has access to the documents will have the bravery, forethought, and knowledge to carefully leak them to Wikileaks.
He did the equivalent of taking somebody's work without payment. You spend a year of your life developing a program, with plans to sell it for income, but instead I simply TAKE the program off bittorrent.
Did you pay Linus Torvalds and all of the other Linux kernel hackers before using Linux? How about all the other free software you have used? Many of these people make money writing this software, and it is sold for income by companies too. This isn't an issue because they explicitly gave everyone permission to distribute it without royalty.
The question is, do we need this permission in the first place? The law says we usually do, but these same laws were written by corrupt, paid-for politicians. Personally, I don't think we need permission from anyone to share our own culture.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdotters HATE creators' rights.
Ignoring the error of lumping everyone on /. together, there is no such thing as "creators' rights".
My hope is that we get to merge efforts to produce a desktop product that is not only beautiful to look at, but also a joy to work with.
Not only is it impossible to get everyone to agree on what makes a good desktop, but competition is vital for creating a good user experience. Why do you think Windows sucks so completely? One reason is that most people who use computers don't have any choice but to use Windows: there is no healthy competition to force MS to make it not suck.
Merging efforts is bad because it means we are all stuck with the lowest common denominator. Imagine an America On-line desktop. No thanks.
Once another account is setup, there is absolutely no reason to allow root logins on SSH. PermitRootLogin should be turned off. I took it further: on my setup, DenyHost instantly bans IPs that try to log in as root.
I redoubt it.
I still play Nethack, ffs, and the graphics on that were far too primitive when I started playing that years ago.
"While NetHack's graphics may seem primitive by today's standards, today's gameplay seems primitive by NetHack standards."
(source)
There is no such agency in Fort Meade, Maryland.
The card agreement provides safety for purchasers by limiting their exposure to $50
That's only if the physical card is stolen. If the just the number is being used fraudulently, you are responsible for $0. See Credit, ATM and Debit Cards: What to do if They're Lost or Stolen.
We're liable - by federal law - for a maximum of $50 if our cards get misused.
That's only if the physical card is stolen. If the just the number is being used fraudulently, you are responsible for $0, which is what is happening here. See Credit, ATM and Debit Cards: What to do if They're Lost or Stolen.
...why anyone would use a payment system, with no safety at all?
In terms of getting ripped off online, credit cards are probably the safest thing. In the US, the law says that you are not responsible for any charges you didn't make as long as you still have the physical card in your possession. And then there are protections on top of that for defective products and stuff. From what I have read, and in my experience and my friend's experiences, credit card companies honor this without giving you any trouble.
As long as you keep an eye on your charges, you are very safe. Because the credit card companies carry the responsibility, it is in their interest to have good security on credit card information.
For my website, I share a server with a bunch of other sites. I was poking around /tmp one day and came across dumps of credit card information. I forget the website, but apparently they thought /tmp, with global read permissions, was a safe place to generate HTML after a transaction. I reported it to the hosting service and the offending website fixed their scripts.
Luckily, credit cards have strong protections, so you aren't responsible for any fraud charges due to these leaks. Just check the charges every month.
I also loved Tribes. I spend hundreds of hours in that game. Once you mastered the jetpack, you could do some amazing things. Some of my favorite memories come from playing on the (Team Aerial Assault) TAC mod.
In TAC, you died instantly if you touched the dirt ground (structure floors were safe), the home bases were placed very far apart, and the action was all in the middle on an island (an island in a sea of deadly dirt) of some sort. This forced teamwork because the only way to the action was on transports, and only light armor could fly transports. So someone became the designated pilot and the rest would gear up in various types of heavy armor.
I found a video on YouTube of some action.
Sometimes these transports would even fight it out in the air: two transports, each has 1 pilot and 4 heavy armors, and the heavy armor players are launching mortars, disks, etc., at each other while the transports take evasive action. For those unfamiliar with Tribes, the transports are very open, so the passengers can easily shoot just about anywhere (see the video, which shows the smaller transports). That was amazing fun right there.
In the modless world, base raping was a lot of fun. Have several people from your team enter the enemy base in heavy armor. Destroy everything, especially their generator so they can't make ships, get weapons, and use their turrets. Then make camp with some portable inventory stations and keep your mortar gun pointed at the entrance. You own their base, and while the enemy is trying to remove you and fix their stuff, your other teammates concentrate on capping their flag.
Oh, and remember skiing? There was a bug in the game mechanics with how applying a jetpack while going downhill worked, which made the player glide very fast. This was dubbed skiing, and people liked it so much this "bug" turned into a feature. When they made the not-very-good Tribes 2, the had to write in the ski mechanism.
Tribes was the best FPS I ever played online.
Just because the POSIX standards say it, doesn't mean it's right. POSIX is very old now, and was based around technological ideas which are out of date now.
POSIX is being very flexible here, and rightly so. Ext3 and ext4 represent different trade-offs between two extremes. On one extreme you have very high data reliability, where data immediately goes to the disk and it is rare that anything is lost. You can accomplish this my mounting with sync. However, this has terrible performance.
On the other extreme we have great performance because the OS never ever writes to the disk. It would be like a live CD (ignoring CD/DVD reads). However, if the system crashes, you lose everything.
Real filesystems go somewhere in the middle, trading some reliability for performance. Ext4 just shifts things more towards performance than ext3. If POSIX was more rigid, we wouldn't have the choice of where to make the trade-off without breaking the standards. It would be poor decision making had POSIX chosen some arbitrary time limit for disk writes. POSIX isn't this way because it is old, but because they were being flexible in preparation for the future. That was good forethought.
If you don't like the ext4 trade-offs, stick with ext3. Linux is rock solid, though, and I have seen a Linux kernel panic only once in my life. The only thing I have to worry about are power outages. And my cat stepping on the damn switch on the power strip. Shifting a bit towards performance sounds nice to me.
And if we ignore POSIX, then when what do we have? We end up getting crap like the arbitrary, undocumented mess that is the Windows API.
The only reason this gives any kind of performance benefits at all is because most applications are not calling fsync().
This is good, as they are deferring to the filesystem, letting the user choose the trade-off. Apps need to do fsync() if the data is very important (i.e. system logs) or if the application is destroying important old data (writing over old config files, like KDE). I am sure there are a few other situations too. But if they are always calling fsync() for every write they are doing it wrong.
Sorry no, but in your dreams. GIMP is not a professional tool
I guess being used to produce major films, including Harry Potter, doesn't count as professional?
It's really interesting how professionals pretty much ignore the GIMP in favor of Photoshop.
A fork of GIMP was used in producing the first Harry Potter movie, as well as several other movies.
"Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to Hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of Heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism." -- Isaac Asimov
Ok, here's an original sin for you: I poked a badger with a spoon.
The people seeing these fast releases aren't the end-users, but rather people that will be actively involved in the project and contributing back (coding, testing, etc.). This creates a fast feedback cycle. It's the core of running the development "bazaar", if you will.
After OpenBSD opened up their code repositories for anyone to read, everyone else started doing it. This pushed even further, so that anyone could access the exact state of a project at any time.
It really just needs to be reversed now, to "Australian Internet Blacklist Pages Added To Wikileaks".
I guess this counts as a shameless plug, but I wrote about this using a sci-fi, self replicating minefield as an analogy: Controlling a Minefield. As someone else said, it simply comes down to digital signatures, though it doesn't even need to even be that complicated to do simple things.
Any method of generating a problem and its solution at the same time, where the problem is very difficult to solve, would work.
For a simple approach as an example, before the worms are spread, various one-time commands could be set up by first finding two large primes, multiplying them together, and storing that composite in the worms and associate it with a command. Finding the two primes from the composite is impractical, but if the authors wants to issue a command, they just broadcast the two primes. It would be easy for the worms to verify that these are the correct primes, and then execute the corresponding command.
This can also be done with the knapsack problem.
I am still crossing my fingers that some low level person who has access to the documents will have the bravery, forethought, and knowledge to carefully leak them to Wikileaks.
Whoosh!
He did the equivalent of taking somebody's work without payment. You spend a year of your life developing a program, with plans to sell it for income, but instead I simply TAKE the program off bittorrent.
Did you pay Linus Torvalds and all of the other Linux kernel hackers before using Linux? How about all the other free software you have used? Many of these people make money writing this software, and it is sold for income by companies too. This isn't an issue because they explicitly gave everyone permission to distribute it without royalty.
The question is, do we need this permission in the first place? The law says we usually do, but these same laws were written by corrupt, paid-for politicians. Personally, I don't think we need permission from anyone to share our own culture.
How is a ballot initiative, passed by a clear majority of voters, a secret Mormon conspiracy all of the sudden?
This Google Trends term speaks volumes: http://www.google.com/trends?q=proposition+8
Oh, and that 0.05 script that's floating around. I am not sure how exactly it relates, but here it is.
CHK@VRgff5NObfXt5SXMsgGZFp-0jtMU9maKpK2n9Jv7wy0,leLmYUChr-782zUG9fh6EzPEO9CC3QEeRQG8GgMA7jk,AAIC--8/kindlefix.py
On censorship-resistant Freenet, (0.1 and 0.2 links)
CHK@dl2LtW8MY23bY~5bo7nU96RV3bgCFSJ-ZTvwC6U9L6M,wdjDGdjVIupIin1DpjTuLBbaaHIQgnKpH-97RgGkP9w,AAIC--8/azw-0.1.zip
CHK@ezRruzByixwIQ4GwkE8w96lHB1gwXbpO3pTgz4EhZwY,5nU5t7jRgFLtlDwJ2Tivj12rMAusv~T~zywKdAEfw-g,AAIC--8/azw-0.2.zip