Interesting thoughts... I don't see the makers being worried about encrypted filesystems though. In fact, with the mood on gov't in the US now, it might earn them big brownie points to be able to say "Look, encryption of the info on this disk is physically impossible"
Writing to your Congressman/MP/whatever political wonk makes no difference, really. It is satisfying, and makes you feel like you have made a difference the same way writing to the newspaper does.
In reality, when writing to {insert target}, you are exerting a greater influence on the makers of the paper, envelope, pen, and stamps you bought for money. You support the stationary industry, more than you influence laws. That's the vote that counts - the one you make with your wallet. So, don't write to politicians, they don't understand any of this anyway, and if they did they wouldn't care.
Vote the important way, with money. Write to IBM, Seagate, Maxtor, whoever your favbourite hard drive makers are. Tell them how much money you have spent on their hard drives in the past. Tell them that if they implement this consumer-serfdom scheme, you will never buy another drive from them. Outline precisely how much extra you will be willing to pay to whichever of their competitors offers drives that are uncrippled.
Corporations aren't afraid of governments in N AMerica anyway, they already own the governments. They are afraid of you, their customer, because they are petrified that you might figure out that you own the corps, not the other way around.
You're right, this would be done in software. And the software involved is in the HD's firmware. It doesn't run on your computer's CPU, but on the drive's CPU. So it doesn't matter if you stick the drive in a Mac, a Wintel PC, a Sun Ultrasparc, or the trunk of your car, the enforcement software goes with it.
OK, never mind that that wasn't even vaguely on topic, I'll bite...
Why not create a distribution that puts everything in the same places... as is available in a default install of Windows ME?
Because then it wouldn't be Unix. These are two very different design philosphies - in Win 95^H^H98^H^HME there is only one kind of user, and that user has access to everything from his rhubarb pie recipes, to the video card drivers, and can loose both just as easily. Mac OS X is the first Mac OS to have Unix underneath, and what do you suppose the biggest change is? Yeah, all the files are in different spots, fancy that.
MACs stole their interfaces from Xerox; Windows from MACs; now Linux should take their design from Windows.
At each successive level of theft, the good bits somehow got left out, and the interface hampered the user more and more. Unix desktop environments are stealing their design from Windows. That's why they are so clunky to use, and why every time you want to do something that you couldn't do just as easily in Windows, you have to open an xterm. (Yes, I know I'm oversimplifying a fair amount there)
And, incidentally, there is a Linux distro like the one you describe, that imitates Windows as faithfully as possible. It's made by Corel, the pride of the Canadian software industry, that is constantly on the brink of bankruptcy. The consensus on that distro is by and large, that if you want an OS that looks and feels just like Windows, and that makes it easy to do the stuff you can do with Windows (and only that stuff) then you're better of getting Windows, because they do a better job of it.
Americans listen to music; they don't make music
That is a generalization of people that has always been true about all socities.
That isn't true at all. Why do you think that just about every agricultural society has harvest songs, planting songs, and for all I know weeding, watering and fruit picking songs? Herding societies have songs for hauling water from the wells for their cattle. Potters sing while they turn pots, Woodsmen sing while they saw logs, and weavers sing while they make cloth. It isn't the select few with the best voices who sings these songs, it is every worker.
To make repetitive work more enjoyable, they sing songs whose rhythm is that of the work at hand. Not only do they make the work more pleasant, they often help people get into the rhythm of the work. This is especially true of cooperative work - when you have to hand a bucket of water to the guy above you exactly when he is reaching down and passing you an empty bucket, it sure makes it easier if you're always trading buckets on the same beat in the song.
Incidentally, some of the coolest sounding music I've heard is a rice planting song. The 'drum beats' are made by people slapping the water of the paddy with their hands as they reach down to plant the rice shoots (or something). I don't understand the words at all, but it sounds a bit like a round.
Re:Use encryption needlessly, constantly! [MUCH MO
on
The Encryption Wars
·
· Score: 1
I can't even explain to her how to send encrypted mail because it's just too difficult
Heck, never mind explaining it to anyone, I can't get it to work myself. Maybe the PGP versions for Windows or Unix are better to use than the Mac version. They could hardly be worse. After a week of struggle, the posting of half a dozen ruined public keys, and a complete failure to reasonably integrate PGP with Eudora, I gave up.
I'm not even a computer illiterate Mac-target-market type either, I'm a fourth year computer science student. For heaven's sake, this should not happen.
To get the average person using encryption, you should not even be noticing that you are using encryption, except to be warned whenever you send mail to troglodytic AOL users who do not have it. And, as has been mentioned here already, a flaming big warning should be appended to any such messages unless you actively uncheck the "warn this person that their e-mail is unsafe" checkbox.
There is apparently a fair amount of research being done on using two mice for various tasks. The approach I've read about is the idea of a transparent tool - instead of moving the mouse over to a tool selection palette, then back to the work area, over and over again, you move the tool palette over the work area with one mouse, and then click through it with the other mouse.
The idea, I think, is it's a bit like driving in nails - your off hand does the work that uses less coordination, positioning and holding the nail in place, while your good hand does the accurate work of pounding it in without smashing your thumb.
Here's a link to what if I'm not mistaken is an influential paper on the subject, some work done at Xerox PARC.
Just about every application and OS out there will use black text on a white backgound by default, by analogy with white paper and black ink. This looks pretty, granted, but all that glaring white is hard on the eyes.
Wherever it's possible to set the appearance defaults of a program or environment, it's a good idea to use light text on a dark background. I find I need far fewer "eye breaks" if I set my editor, terminal, browser, etc, to use light text on a black background.
Apparently this also makes computers easier (or possible) to use for people with some sorts of visual handicaps.
you can have an "infinite-height" menu across the top
The only times I've used the KDE, you couldn't actually get an infinite height menu. You could have the menus across the top of the screen, but the blasted things worked like buttons / MS Windows menus - you could still run off the top of them, because the top row or two of pixels on the screen wasn't part of the menu. It struck me as remarkably stupid, to put the menus along the top of the screen, but then to have the very top row or two of pixels not actually activate the menus.
Maybe in KDE 2 this has been fixed, I don't know...
I really question whether this isn't just a bad way of not learning where the new equivalent is.
That's the point. There is no new equivalent. I have been using OS X beta for months now, and there is no new equivalent. The Dock is supposed to replace the application switcher, the Apple menu, tabbed windows, and the launcher. Every one of these things is supposed to be subsumed by the Dock. No matter how cool it is (and it even has lot of bad design, from a Fitt's law perspective, among others), there's no way it can replace all that.
The Dock, incidentally, does a better job than the applications switcher / process menu did - you can drag running apps to any position, and that will change the command-tab keyboard switching order, so you don't have to tab through four apps one way, then four apps the other way to get between frequently-used apps - just drag the two next to each other in the Dock, and they're a single keystroke apart.
However, it comes nowhere near replacing the Apple menu or tabbed windows. There is a real need for a way of getting at a very large number of items hierarchically, and this is not provided. There is only a very small amount of stuff you can put in the Dock before it gets stupidly cluttered and useless.
Apple's users were asking for years and years for a hierarchical Apple menu. Just imagine, prior to that, something like the Windows Start menu (OK, it wasn't an undisciplined munge like the Start menu, but stil) as a flat menu. Agony. There were lots of free/shareware apps out there for System 7.x that gave you a hierarchical Apple menu. Finally (after a lot of years), Apple listened to their users, and included a hierarchical Apple menu in OS 8 (maybe it was 8.5). Now in OS X there isn't even a flat menu, just a row of buttons.
This in an example of Apple's abysmal (sp?) record of not listening to users.
OpenBSD has much more potential to swipe users from FreeBSD than NetBSD does
Or, to put it another way, FreeBSD has much more potential to swipe users from OpenBSD than from NetBSD. Specifically, ain't nobody stealing NetBSD's obscure-hardware corner of the market without a heckuva lotta work.
Like HAL, the Omniputer will, its backers claim, have an instinct to protect itself.
It is operated by a touchscreen display
Does that mean that if someone tries to clean all the disgusting fingerprints off the monitor, and accidentally deletes some vital files, HAL will spray them in the face with their own glass cleaner?
Anyway, does anybody see a mass market for a device to "address issues of consciousness"?
Well, bongs seem to sell pretty well in North America, and I suspect that they do alright in the U.K. too, but what has this got to do with this computer?
Re:The REAL reason Darwin isn't widely used
on
No Love For Darwin?
·
· Score: 1
No package system. Darwin doesn't have anything resembling ports or dpkg or whatever. Everything is being distributed in.tar.gz and often in source only. When the package system is finished at www.openpackages.org Darwin will be a lot easier to deal with
That's interesting. Some OS X software I've installed was released in.pkg format, which is essentially another type of bundle, just like.app or.kext. I was poking through the guts of the system, and found some.pkg installer receipts, documenting what went where and so on, so there is obviously such a system for OS X. I'm surprised that this isn't being released as part of Darwin, since other sorts of bundles are.
When you download these packages, they are tarballs, but since a bundle is a directory with a specified format / internal hierarchy, all you have to do is untar them, and you have a.pkg installer (or whatever type of bundle).
X windows ( I know, not really part of Unix, but... )
I especially like pathname parsing. Alright, none of this unlicensed pathname parsing nonsense, we'll all have to start referring to files by inode number.
vacuum tubes... are harder to disable via electromagnetic pulse weapons.
Apparently, a lot of the missile detecting radar stations installed by the U.S. in the Canadian and Alaskan arctic used tubes (for that reason, perhaps?). There was a period (must have been after the cold war) when the the tubes had been discontinued by the American company, but not all the stations had been converted to transistor electronics. During that time, the only source of vacuum tubes of that type was a Russian company.
I'm Canadian, actually. Either spelling is accepted here. My father is English, my mother American, so I'm not sure what that says about the origin of my English.
I suspect it has more to do with the books I read as a kid, which were largely European.
4 Foreign Languages (i will try to avoid these at all costs); 2 Social Science(Will not be history for me);
Well, that's enough for me, I wouldn't hire you. Fleeing before knowledge is never a good sign.
Knowing foreign languages helps you look at things from new angles, think clearly and objectively about what you're dealing with, etc. Far more than any Comp Sci class I've ever taken. I'd say the uni is doing you a big favour with those four languages. Assuming you don't just do the minimum of work to get a pass, but if you do that, you're shooting yourself in the foot, there's nothing the uni can do about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting thoughts... I don't see the makers being worried about encrypted filesystems though. In fact, with the mood on gov't in the US now, it might earn them big brownie points to be able to say "Look, encryption of the info on this disk is physically impossible"
In reality, when writing to {insert target}, you are exerting a greater influence on the makers of the paper, envelope, pen, and stamps you bought for money. You support the stationary industry, more than you influence laws. That's the vote that counts - the one you make with your wallet. So, don't write to politicians, they don't understand any of this anyway, and if they did they wouldn't care.
Vote the important way, with money. Write to IBM, Seagate, Maxtor, whoever your favbourite hard drive makers are. Tell them how much money you have spent on their hard drives in the past. Tell them that if they implement this consumer-serfdom scheme, you will never buy another drive from them. Outline precisely how much extra you will be willing to pay to whichever of their competitors offers drives that are uncrippled.
Corporations aren't afraid of governments in N AMerica anyway, they already own the governments. They are afraid of you, their customer, because they are petrified that you might figure out that you own the corps, not the other way around.
You're right, this would be done in software. And the software involved is in the HD's firmware. It doesn't run on your computer's CPU, but on the drive's CPU. So it doesn't matter if you stick the drive in a Mac, a Wintel PC, a Sun Ultrasparc, or the trunk of your car, the enforcement software goes with it.
Why not create a distribution that puts everything in the same places ... as is available in a default install of Windows ME?
Because then it wouldn't be Unix. These are two very different design philosphies - in Win 95^H^H98^H^HME there is only one kind of user, and that user has access to everything from his rhubarb pie recipes, to the video card drivers, and can loose both just as easily. Mac OS X is the first Mac OS to have Unix underneath, and what do you suppose the biggest change is? Yeah, all the files are in different spots, fancy that.
MACs stole their interfaces from Xerox; Windows from MACs; now Linux should take their design from Windows.
At each successive level of theft, the good bits somehow got left out, and the interface hampered the user more and more. Unix desktop environments are stealing their design from Windows. That's why they are so clunky to use, and why every time you want to do something that you couldn't do just as easily in Windows, you have to open an xterm. (Yes, I know I'm oversimplifying a fair amount there)
And, incidentally, there is a Linux distro like the one you describe, that imitates Windows as faithfully as possible. It's made by Corel, the pride of the Canadian software industry, that is constantly on the brink of bankruptcy. The consensus on that distro is by and large, that if you want an OS that looks and feels just like Windows, and that makes it easy to do the stuff you can do with Windows (and only that stuff) then you're better of getting Windows, because they do a better job of it.
Wow! I have a headache just imagining that! The worst part is, I can see how that might be a good idea
Is it just me, or was everyone's immediate reaction something like "Keybowl? Surely they mean Keyboobs."
That's ripe. A bill banning crypto will enhance internet security...
"But, officer, I sent it using PGP. I only have her public key."
"I don't care if you sent it by pony express with the keys to the city, son. You're going to decrypt that right now."
Choose your own adventureTM!
That is a generalization of people that has always been true about all socities.
That isn't true at all. Why do you think that just about every agricultural society has harvest songs, planting songs, and for all I know weeding, watering and fruit picking songs? Herding societies have songs for hauling water from the wells for their cattle. Potters sing while they turn pots, Woodsmen sing while they saw logs, and weavers sing while they make cloth. It isn't the select few with the best voices who sings these songs, it is every worker.
To make repetitive work more enjoyable, they sing songs whose rhythm is that of the work at hand. Not only do they make the work more pleasant, they often help people get into the rhythm of the work. This is especially true of cooperative work - when you have to hand a bucket of water to the guy above you exactly when he is reaching down and passing you an empty bucket, it sure makes it easier if you're always trading buckets on the same beat in the song.
Incidentally, some of the coolest sounding music I've heard is a rice planting song. The 'drum beats' are made by people slapping the water of the paddy with their hands as they reach down to plant the rice shoots (or something). I don't understand the words at all, but it sounds a bit like a round.
Heck, never mind explaining it to anyone, I can't get it to work myself. Maybe the PGP versions for Windows or Unix are better to use than the Mac version. They could hardly be worse. After a week of struggle, the posting of half a dozen ruined public keys, and a complete failure to reasonably integrate PGP with Eudora, I gave up.
I'm not even a computer illiterate Mac-target-market type either, I'm a fourth year computer science student. For heaven's sake, this should not happen.
To get the average person using encryption, you should not even be noticing that you are using encryption, except to be warned whenever you send mail to troglodytic AOL users who do not have it. And, as has been mentioned here already, a flaming big warning should be appended to any such messages unless you actively uncheck the "warn this person that their e-mail is unsafe" checkbox.
The idea, I think, is it's a bit like driving in nails - your off hand does the work that uses less coordination, positioning and holding the nail in place, while your good hand does the accurate work of pounding it in without smashing your thumb.
Here's a link to what if I'm not mistaken is an influential paper on the subject, some work done at Xerox PARC.
Wherever it's possible to set the appearance defaults of a program or environment, it's a good idea to use light text on a dark background. I find I need far fewer "eye breaks" if I set my editor, terminal, browser, etc, to use light text on a black background.
Apparently this also makes computers easier (or possible) to use for people with some sorts of visual handicaps.
The only times I've used the KDE, you couldn't actually get an infinite height menu. You could have the menus across the top of the screen, but the blasted things worked like buttons / MS Windows menus - you could still run off the top of them, because the top row or two of pixels on the screen wasn't part of the menu. It struck me as remarkably stupid, to put the menus along the top of the screen, but then to have the very top row or two of pixels not actually activate the menus.
Maybe in KDE 2 this has been fixed, I don't know...
That's the point. There is no new equivalent. I have been using OS X beta for months now, and there is no new equivalent. The Dock is supposed to replace the application switcher, the Apple menu, tabbed windows, and the launcher. Every one of these things is supposed to be subsumed by the Dock. No matter how cool it is (and it even has lot of bad design, from a Fitt's law perspective, among others), there's no way it can replace all that.
The Dock, incidentally, does a better job than the applications switcher / process menu did - you can drag running apps to any position, and that will change the command-tab keyboard switching order, so you don't have to tab through four apps one way, then four apps the other way to get between frequently-used apps - just drag the two next to each other in the Dock, and they're a single keystroke apart.
However, it comes nowhere near replacing the Apple menu or tabbed windows. There is a real need for a way of getting at a very large number of items hierarchically, and this is not provided. There is only a very small amount of stuff you can put in the Dock before it gets stupidly cluttered and useless.
Apple's users were asking for years and years for a hierarchical Apple menu. Just imagine, prior to that, something like the Windows Start menu (OK, it wasn't an undisciplined munge like the Start menu, but stil) as a flat menu. Agony. There were lots of free/shareware apps out there for System 7.x that gave you a hierarchical Apple menu. Finally (after a lot of years), Apple listened to their users, and included a hierarchical Apple menu in OS 8 (maybe it was 8.5). Now in OS X there isn't even a flat menu, just a row of buttons.
This in an example of Apple's abysmal (sp?) record of not listening to users.
Or, to put it another way, FreeBSD has much more potential to swipe users from OpenBSD than from NetBSD. Specifically, ain't nobody stealing NetBSD's obscure-hardware corner of the market without a heckuva lotta work.
It is operated by a touchscreen display
Does that mean that if someone tries to clean all the disgusting fingerprints off the monitor, and accidentally deletes some vital files, HAL will spray them in the face with their own glass cleaner?
Well, bongs seem to sell pretty well in North America, and I suspect that they do alright in the U.K. too, but what has this got to do with this computer?
That's interesting. Some OS X software I've installed was released in .pkg format, which is essentially another type of bundle, just like .app or .kext. I was poking through the guts of the system, and found some .pkg installer receipts, documenting what went where and so on, so there is obviously such a system for OS X. I'm surprised that this isn't being released as part of Darwin, since other sorts of bundles are.
When you download these packages, they are tarballs, but since a bundle is a directory with a specified format / internal hierarchy, all you have to do is untar them, and you have a .pkg installer (or whatever type of bundle).
It does. That's the one on the left, written in German.
- multitasking
- remote program execution
- protected memory
- pathname parsing
- X windows ( I know, not really part of Unix, but... )
I especially like pathname parsing. Alright, none of this unlicensed pathname parsing nonsense, we'll all have to start referring to files by inode number.ping: unknown host archie.au
[poppacrow:~] mark% ping archie.doc.ic.ac.uk
ping: unknown host archie.doc.ic.ac.uk
[poppacrow:~] mark% ping archie.internic.net
ping: unknown host archie.internic.net
Didn't try all of them, but... I don't really know how Archie works though, so perhaps I'm using this information wrong
defaults read com.apple.internet ArchieAll
And got the following output:
{
"ic-data" = (
"Australia:archie.au:",
"Austria:archie.univie.ac.at:",
"Belgium:archie.belnet.be:",
"Canada, Bunyip:archie.bunyip.com:",
"Canada, McGill:archie.mcgill.ca:",
"Finland:archie.funet.fi:",
"France:archie.univ-rennes1.fr:",
"Germany:archie.th-darmstadt.de:",
"Japan, Kyoto-u:archie.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp:",
"Japan, Wide:archie.wide.ad.jp:",
"Korea, Kornet:archie.kornet.nm.kr:",
"Korea, Sogang:archie.sogang.ac.kr:",
"Norway:archie.uninett.no:",
"Poland:archie.icm.edu.pl:",
"Spain:archie.rediris.es:",
"Sweden:archie.luth.se:",
"Switzerland:archie.switch.ch:",
"Taiwan:archie.ncu.edu.tw:",
"UK, Hensa:archie.hensa.ac.uk:",
"UK, IC:archie.doc.ic.ac.uk:",
"USA, InterNIC:archie.internic.net:",
"USA, Rutgers:archie.rutgers.edu:"
);
}
Output was indented too, but Slashcode ate that
Apparently, a lot of the missile detecting radar stations installed by the U.S. in the Canadian and Alaskan arctic used tubes (for that reason, perhaps?). There was a period (must have been after the cold war) when the the tubes had been discontinued by the American company, but not all the stations had been converted to transistor electronics. During that time, the only source of vacuum tubes of that type was a Russian company.
I suspect it has more to do with the books I read as a kid, which were largely European.
Well, that's enough for me, I wouldn't hire you. Fleeing before knowledge is never a good sign.
Knowing foreign languages helps you look at things from new angles, think clearly and objectively about what you're dealing with, etc. Far more than any Comp Sci class I've ever taken. I'd say the uni is doing you a big favour with those four languages. Assuming you don't just do the minimum of work to get a pass, but if you do that, you're shooting yourself in the foot, there's nothing the uni can do about it.