The problem with that idea is that you have just introduced a bottle-neck into your bus. Every time you need to do a cryptographic operation you need to access that chipset. Another way to implement a crypto accelerator is to embed the crypto acellerator in the processor. Even if you had cryptographic routines in the CPU you would not want every I/O transfer to go through the processor anyway, since it would increase CPU utilization.
I think a better way to handle it is to have a cryptographic support build into the storage.
Are they a hardware company, a system solutions company, a software company, or a professional services company. I don't even fscking know anymore.
Say for the time being they are a hardware company their strategy is to find large contracts develop a solution an pump the customer with as much hardware as the customer can afford. They then drop parasitic professional service representatives to bleed money out for the life of the project.
I agree with you on the point that the goal of solaris is not to make money. Logically it is there to attract and lock you into the hardware platform. Problem is they make no money if you put solaris 9 intel on a dell machine
This $20 download scheme is dwarfed by the costs of developement, validation, and support. If solaris intel was the cash cow you claim it was why did they try to kill it?
I'm guessing the reason why they didn't charge more is that Marketing did not want to give customers the idea that it is a cheaper (thus lower quality) OS than Microsoft.
The problem with Solaris 8 Intel was that they developed it, few companies used it, and it costed a crap load of money to support and maintain. They tried to kill the project which was bleeding money, and the small community that did use it fought back. They had no choice to update and rerelease for Solaris 9.
There is no strategic masterstroke here. They f*cked up and now they are trapped.
Which reinforces my point. Sun sells x86 hardware.
Now customers have a choice to go with sun and use solaris or go with dell, hp/compaq, joe schmoe's hardware shop, ibm, etc. Sun is doing a good job at giving other hardware providers an edge over their sparc market. That edge would be a cheaper price!
If having a cheap Solaris front end available makes it more likely for a customer to buy an expensive Solaris back end, then of course they make money on it.
Why do you think a customer would want to use a Sun as a backend solution. You only could hope that they would want to unify the front and backend. And hope is a bad business plan.
That's an awfully narrow view of the world.
No it is just reality. Even on the kernel level Linux has adapted Sun technology such as the Slab Allocator. I use linux and solaris every day the interface is pretty damn close. Not exact but any competent administrator should be able to work with the differences.
At the very least you would need the API stubs to compile against,
What mystery APIs are you talking about libc, libm, curses? A cross compilier should be able to manage compiling and linking to any target platform. A cross compiler/linker does not care what hardware it runs on, it only cares that the machine code it generates is proper. I could easy download Solaris API's from a free solaris CD and link to any "special" API I want from a linux machine. That is the point of a cross-compiler.
That's correct. And irrelevant. Your one person. That's not where they're going to make their money.
That was rhetoric; It does not make any sense to reply to that ^_^.
That works if you are a software company like microsoft. Sun is a hardware company. If you do not buy sun hardware sun's stock price goes down (as if it can go down any lower). Platform portability for a free operating system is not a business plan especially when you are a hardware company.
I cannot understand why this is such a hard idea to grasp for some slashdotters.
Forte C++ allows you to compile 64-bit programs. GCC only has a 32-bit target. If you purchase mid-level to high-level servers sun gives you a free single user license for Forte C++. That is an intelligent strategy.
If you buy hardware you get free software, thus attracting developers to your hardware platform. If you like the software and want to upgrade to a multiuser license you buy a multiuser license. Money is made either way.
No you're missing the point. Sun = Sparc = Solaris = Solid is an admirable point but they should be thinking: Sun = Sparc = I don't care = $$$$.
Not Sun = I don't care = Java = Slow Not Sun = Intel = Solaris x86 = No Money, wasted resources, more software expense, more validation costs, trapped. Not Sun = Intel = Linux x86 = Validation of Linux as a server platform, thus customers believe that SPARC is irrelivant.
I am convinced that the people running sun do not want to make money.
Not really. x86 servers do not compete with UltraSPARC servers in features. $/MHz is only 10% or so of the whole picture.[Are you kidding me!?]
Sun Hardware is in a life or death stuggle against Intel Hardware. I agree that the old Sun hardware was as solid as a rock, but there quality assurance for hardware is minimal these days.
Dont give me that lame-o well the SPARC architecture can support 100+ processors and how fireplane is ultra fast. Administrators are thinking in terms of Server Farms and distributed processing today not SMP or NUMA. In a distibuted world you want the best bang for the buck for each node and that is where intel kicks sun's ass. Monolithic reliability is a dying issue, distributed reliability has taken over.
Sun sells x86 hardware. Now it runs Solaris as well as Linux.
Sun sells x86 hardware at an inflated price. I could go with Dell or build my own cheapo PC box, then install Solaris 9 or Linux on the cheap. Sun makes nothing.
People who buy $1M database servers also need cheap web servers to run the front end. If they can run the same OS on both sets of machines, it makes the whole package more appealing.
So what? Sun does not make any money from that. You are basically condeming the low-end SPARC machines e.g. netra X1 to a slow death. And linux is close enough to solaris on the command line interface.
People who buy big SPARC machines need software to run on them. Solaris x86 makes a damn cheap way for ISVs to develop software. As long as you don't do anything stupid, it's a simple recompile from Solaris x86 to Solaris SPARC.
Big deal I could cross compile from a Linux machine anyway. I don't really need Solaris x86 for that. That argument is moot anyway since I don't have to pay sun for the hardware to develop on. My point is that sun makes no money from me if they don't sell me hardware. Sun should want me develop code on sparc machines only not intel because their core business is hardware!
I don't get why sun is releasing solaris 9 to the intel platform. I thought they were supposed to be a hardware company?
By releasing solaris for free on the sparc platform they increase the value of their hardware business. By releasing solaris for the intel platform they are decreasing the value of their core sparc platform, because they are giving users the choice of going with cheaper hardware companies. All of sun's engineering talent and effort is going to waste.
What they should be doing is making operating systems like OpenBSD and linux as easy as possible to port to the sparc platform. This way potential sun hardware customers would not need to have these stupid "which unix is better?" debates.
It seems that sun does not want to make any money.
That is somewhat of a contradiction. Why did FarScape's ratings go down after the cancellation of I-Man, but not recover while being paired with the hit series SG1? I believe the answer is that FarScape's early success had nothing to do with the fact it was paired with I-Man. Maybe, FarScape's fourth season really is not as good as the previous three seasons.
I actually stopped watching after the third season. IMHO Farscape really does not deserve to be cancelled after one bad season. They should have just lowered the production costs of the series and released a final fifth season.
Because developers do not intentionally create vulnerabilities in their products.
Check out this "contrived" situation: The application in question is a spread sheet program.
Module A created 5 years ago allows any caller to load a file into a buffer.
Module B created 3 years ago allows any caller to transfer a buffer over a network interface to another buffer.
Module C created 1 year ago allows you to embed and execute a scripting language into the data file. This was used to replace an old macro language written 6 years ago, but wasn't flexible enough to handle new features for your application. The developers do not want to create a scripting language from scratch. They smartly choose to use a well tested and widely used language.
Module C version 2 allows the script to make library calls (like calling a.so or.dll library). This was done at the request of a customer who wanted to import numbers from a legacy database with the scripting language. In this case the database didn't have support for the scripting language and had API libraries in built in another language.
Now a hacker discovers she could link module A and module B and embed that into any spreadsheet datafile using module C version 2. She works for a bank and creates the spreadsheet which then downloads other spreadsheets with confidential account numbers and passwords.
Who is responsible? What should be done?
Well IMHO the hacker is responsible for any harm she has caused by using this exploit.
This is the state of the industry today. And before you say this does not happen in other engineering practices (trust me it does to a lesser degree). There is even a term for this "The Law of Unintended Consequenes."
Most software of sufficient age and compexity will run into problems like this. The problem is when you know the problem exists and you cannot do anything to remedy it.
I agree Open Source developers are no more responsible than Proprietary Software Developers when it comes to fixing security flaws.
Open Source developers need to get the point across that if a closed source software company does not feel the bug is worth fixing there is nothing that the customer can do. When dealing with opensource you have the power to fix the problem. If you do not have the knowledge to fix the problem you could probably hire someone with the knowlege to fix it.
About your security rant: You contradict yourself by saying "if all the people out there trying to find cracks and exploits for MS Software were instead going agains Linux, or other open sourced applications, you'd find just as many problems."
Then you say: Put up an appache web page on a linux box, or what ever opensourced so. Now have the only line on the page say "You can't hack this box". Get a link somewhere that people are going to see it, and then talk to me in a month as to how safe your page was.
If hackers were'nt trying to find linux exploits, then why whould they bother with the apache box in that example?
The truth is Windows Software tends to be less secure because of feature bloat. They need a reason to keep selling newer versions of Word even though they got 99% of the needed features finished in Word 97. When you keep adding features your software looses focus and starts to do things they were not intended to do. This bug is a perfect example. The bug does not exist because Microsoft coders a bad per-se (I know a few who kick ass), but because features are laid on top of more features. The software grows exponentially as more communication paths between objects increase.
Have each user vote for each server they download from. If a specific server gives out bad files, the users would vote as a bad server. Then it would not be able to connect to the P2P network.
A voting system can be abused by creating a large group of malicious users giving each other positive feedback. Andrew already mentioned this on his webpage. Routing on a P2P network may not be direct, so you may not be able to give a site bad feedback anyhow.
What you are really talking about is infrastructure not redhat hiding things from you. Redhat needs to keep a consistent interface for everything. Thus they make things a little bit harder to hand configure, by forcing you to configure things via their gui/console interface. You can remove this and set up everything yourself. Some people try to merge their changes in redhats infrastructure and it causes chaos. To make a long story short if you don't like this use slack or gentoo.
Since when did white Slashdot users become experts in being black in the inner-city. Many of you can spout all of the uniformed rhetoric you want but unless you are black you will never understand what it means to be black.
I've heard everything from "If I see two guys of African descent on the street, I will [to paraphrase] run and hide like a little baby." or "Different breeds are better suited to do different things (as if humans were dogs)."
Everytime a Slashdot reader posts an article about Microsoft doing something that discriminates against Linux. I see the slashdot rapid freedom response team. When I see an article about social ills such as police misconduct against minorities, many in the slashdot community say blacks deserve what they get, or there no such thing as racism.
The biggest problem I see with most of the posts on this thread is that whenever people talk about blacks they slap them all together like a herd of cows. It becomes a them versus me argument instead of a we argument.
Primer:
Africa is not a country it is a continent with over 50 countries of people speaking over 400 languages with > 4000 years of history.
African are genetically deversity from skin tone to facial features.
Sure african-americans (whatever that title means) may perform lower on average on academics, but that does not mean there are no african-americans that score above average on tests. Whites and Asians like to comfort themselves by saying their races as a whole do better in academics, but then when I ask many of them how they did in college they usually change the issue.
Not all blacks listen to rap music, and not all whites listen to rock music. There are blacks who listen to rock music as well as play in bands.
Not all blacks dress up as thugs, do drugs, carry guns, etc.
Not all blacks are good at sports.
Not all black neighborhoods are run down. Not all houses in black communities have low realistate value. This is why the term gentrification exists.
Not all blacks are southern christian, 1/2 Africans in Africa are muslim. Ethiopia has a significant Jewish population.
I could go on and on, but I hope you get the point. Just remember, you like to look at yourself as an individual not as a class of people, treat others with the same respect.
No No Nooooooooooooo! Every time a slashdot thread degrades to Nazi name calling people make the same mistake.
The Nazis were not socialist (history newbie mistake). I bet your logic was they were called the National Socialist Party so they must be socialists! They were actual ultra right wing extremists. See the Communists, Socialists, Democrates are to the left. The Nazis and Republicans are to the right. The Nazis actually hated communists and fought a good part of the war (WW2) against the communists. If the Nazis were socialists why whould they hate communists?
Please take a deep breath and think before you post.
You missed the point that we (humanity) are not animals. Poodles and German Shepard have more genetic variance than an Irishman and a Kenyan. Skin color is really only a cosmetic difference. As far as the SATs go the argument is the reading section of the general SAT focuses more on the experience of white students then of other minority groups. Not that it was racist. I don't agree with the ETS, and I think the problem is deeper than that.
From an US perspective: Nazism is what you get when you veer too far to the extreme right, and Communism is what you get when you veer too far to the left. Extremes on both sides have similar consequences (tyranny, genocide, the whole shibang).
Socialism is in between liberal and communist (far left). Nazism is as far from socialism as you could get.
1. No 'best' browser. I think mozilla is a great browser that is available to anybody on any Window Manager.
2. Prompting for file scan. yes | fsck
3. Printing needs to be easier to configure. Right on!
4. Make it easy for the user to find out how to do things.
I agree, too much choice is a bad thing. Many distributions want to appease every-one by loading the core distribution with thousands of apps.
What they should do is have the core distribution be a simple as slackware. Then have additional CDs with the applications nicely categorized with detailed descriptions. Solaris does this well and many distribution vendors should follow.
5. Cleaner redraws. I see this problem most often in java applications, you move a window and you get a ugly grey rectangle in the place of a window. With well written applications and enough CPU/memory resources this is a non issue.
6. Die stray processes, die! Bad idea. There is a seperation between X an its corresponding applications. Some applications work in both X and the console. If you want to switch window managers you would not want the manager to kill all of the applications. Also when you have many displays running it could get very complicated.
7. Easy way of sharing files. This is not a linux problem this is a samba issue. They should probably do what solaris does: share/directory unshare/directory
8. Sound support. This is up to the sound card designers.
9. No common editor which supports "soft wrapping." Run pico or nano. ^_^
10. No easy way to configure X - especially change resolution on the fly. I agree to a point. Although the X config file is extremely logical, I do wish the options were more obvious. For instance setting the scroll wheel is a bit archaic under input device: Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" You can change resolutions by setting up multiple resolutions in Xconfig and hitting crtl,alt,+/-. Good graphical X set up tools allow you to add multiple resolutions.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with that idea is that you have just introduced a bottle-neck into your bus. Every time you need to do a cryptographic operation you need to access that chipset. Another way to implement a crypto accelerator is to embed the crypto acellerator in the processor. Even if you had cryptographic routines in the CPU you would not want every I/O transfer to go through the processor anyway, since it would increase CPU utilization.
I think a better way to handle it is to have a cryptographic support build into the storage.
Say for the time being they are a hardware company their strategy is to find large contracts develop a solution an pump the customer with as much hardware as the customer can afford. They then drop parasitic professional service representatives to bleed money out for the life of the project.
I agree with you on the point that the goal of solaris is not to make money. Logically it is there to attract and lock you into the hardware platform. Problem is they make no money if you put solaris 9 intel on a dell machine
This $20 download scheme is dwarfed by the costs of developement, validation, and support. If solaris intel was the cash cow you claim it was why did they try to kill it?
I'm guessing the reason why they didn't charge more is that Marketing did not want to give customers the idea that it is a cheaper (thus lower quality) OS than Microsoft.
So they give it away for free, huh?
The problem with Solaris 8 Intel was that they developed it, few companies used it, and it costed a crap load of money to support and maintain. They tried to kill the project which was bleeding money, and the small community that did use it fought back. They had no choice to update and rerelease for Solaris 9.
There is no strategic masterstroke here. They f*cked up and now they are trapped.
Now customers have a choice to go with sun and use solaris or go with dell, hp/compaq, joe schmoe's hardware shop, ibm, etc. Sun is doing a good job at giving other hardware providers an edge over their sparc market. That edge would be a cheaper price!
If having a cheap Solaris front end available makes it more likely for a customer to buy an expensive Solaris back end, then of course they make money on it.
Why do you think a customer would want to use a Sun as a backend solution. You only could hope that they would want to unify the front and backend. And hope is a bad business plan.
That's an awfully narrow view of the world.
No it is just reality. Even on the kernel level Linux has adapted Sun technology such as the Slab Allocator. I use linux and solaris every day the interface is pretty damn close. Not exact but any competent administrator should be able to work with the differences.
At the very least you would need the API stubs to compile against,
What mystery APIs are you talking about libc, libm, curses? A cross compilier should be able to manage compiling and linking to any target platform. A cross compiler/linker does not care what hardware it runs on, it only cares that the machine code it generates is proper. I could easy download Solaris API's from a free solaris CD and link to any "special" API I want from a linux machine. That is the point of a cross-compiler.
That's correct. And irrelevant. Your one person. That's not where they're going to make their money.
That was rhetoric; It does not make any sense to reply to that ^_^.
Everybody wins.
Everyone but Sun unfortunately.
That works if you are a software company like microsoft. Sun is a hardware company. If you do not buy sun hardware sun's stock price goes down (as if it can go down any lower). Platform portability for a free operating system is not a business plan especially when you are a hardware company.
I cannot understand why this is such a hard idea to grasp for some slashdotters.
Forte C++ allows you to compile 64-bit programs. GCC only has a 32-bit target. If you purchase mid-level to high-level servers sun gives you a free single user license for Forte C++. That is an intelligent strategy.
If you buy hardware you get free software, thus attracting developers to your hardware platform. If you like the software and want to upgrade to a multiuser license you buy a multiuser license. Money is made either way.
No you're missing the point. Sun = Sparc = Solaris = Solid is an admirable point but they should be thinking: Sun = Sparc = I don't care = $$$$.
Not Sun = I don't care = Java = Slow
Not Sun = Intel = Solaris x86 = No Money, wasted resources, more software expense, more validation costs, trapped.
Not Sun = Intel = Linux x86 = Validation of Linux as a server platform, thus customers believe that SPARC is irrelivant.
I am convinced that the people running sun do not want to make money.
Sun Hardware is in a life or death stuggle against Intel Hardware. I agree that the old Sun hardware was as solid as a rock, but there quality assurance for hardware is minimal these days.
Dont give me that lame-o well the SPARC architecture can support 100+ processors and how fireplane is ultra fast. Administrators are thinking in terms of Server Farms and distributed processing today not SMP or NUMA. In a distibuted world you want the best bang for the buck for each node and that is where intel kicks sun's ass. Monolithic reliability is a dying issue, distributed reliability has taken over.
Sun sells x86 hardware at an inflated price. I could go with Dell or build my own cheapo PC box, then install Solaris 9 or Linux on the cheap. Sun makes nothing.
People who buy $1M database servers also need cheap web servers to run the front end. If they can run the same OS on both sets of machines, it makes the whole package more appealing.
So what? Sun does not make any money from that. You are basically condeming the low-end SPARC machines e.g. netra X1 to a slow death. And linux is close enough to solaris on the command line interface.
People who buy big SPARC machines need software to run on them. Solaris x86 makes a damn cheap way for ISVs to develop software. As long as you don't do anything stupid, it's a simple recompile from Solaris x86 to Solaris SPARC.
Big deal I could cross compile from a Linux machine anyway. I don't really need Solaris x86 for that. That argument is moot anyway since I don't have to pay sun for the hardware to develop on. My point is that sun makes no money from me if they don't sell me hardware. Sun should want me develop code on sparc machines only not intel because their core business is hardware!
I don't get why sun is releasing solaris 9 to the intel platform. I thought they were supposed to be a hardware company?
By releasing solaris for free on the sparc platform they increase the value of their hardware business. By releasing solaris for the intel platform they are decreasing the value of their core sparc platform, because they are giving users the choice of going with cheaper hardware companies. All of sun's engineering talent and effort is going to waste.
What they should be doing is making operating systems like OpenBSD and linux as easy as possible to port to the sparc platform. This way potential sun hardware customers would not need to have these stupid "which unix is better?" debates.
It seems that sun does not want to make any money.
That is somewhat of a contradiction. Why did FarScape's ratings go down after the cancellation of I-Man, but not recover while being paired with the hit series SG1? I believe the answer is that FarScape's early success had nothing to do with the fact it was paired with I-Man. Maybe, FarScape's fourth season really is not as good as the previous three seasons.
I actually stopped watching after the third season. IMHO Farscape really does not deserve to be cancelled after one bad season. They should have just lowered the production costs of the series and released a final fifth season.
Yep, On Sun you need to specify cc -xarch=v9 foo.c and you'll get 64 bit programs. You also need the Forte C compiler to do it.
Can you explain the difference between "real resolution changing" and switching resolution with ctrl-alt-(keypad +)???
Nah, I just bought the antec full tower sx1240. This behemoth has 6 drive bays and is 3ft tall. IMHO bigger is better!!
Why whould this work?
Because developers do not intentionally create vulnerabilities in their products.
.so or .dll library). This was done at the request of a customer who wanted to import numbers from a legacy database with the scripting language. In this case the database didn't have support for the scripting language and had API libraries in built in another language.
Check out this "contrived" situation:
The application in question is a spread sheet program.
Module A created 5 years ago allows any caller to load a file into a buffer.
Module B created 3 years ago allows any caller to transfer a buffer over a network interface to another buffer.
Module C created 1 year ago allows you to embed and execute a scripting language into the data file. This was used to replace an old macro language written 6 years ago, but wasn't flexible enough to handle new features for your application. The developers do not want to create a scripting language from scratch. They smartly choose to use a well tested and widely used language.
Module C version 2 allows the script to make library calls (like calling a
Now a hacker discovers she could link module A and module B and embed that into any spreadsheet datafile using module C version 2. She works for a bank and creates the spreadsheet which then downloads other spreadsheets with confidential account numbers and passwords.
Who is responsible? What should be done?
Well IMHO the hacker is responsible for any harm she has caused by using this exploit.
This is the state of the industry today. And before you say this does not happen in other engineering practices (trust me it does to a lesser degree). There is even a term for this "The Law of Unintended Consequenes."
Most software of sufficient age and compexity will run into problems like this. The problem is when you know the problem exists and you cannot do anything to remedy it.
I agree Open Source developers are no more responsible than Proprietary Software Developers when it comes to fixing security flaws.
Open Source developers need to get the point across that if a closed source software company does not feel the bug is worth fixing there is nothing that the customer can do. When dealing with opensource you have the power to fix the problem. If you do not have the knowledge to fix the problem you could probably hire someone with the knowlege to fix it.
About your security rant:
You contradict yourself by saying "if all the people out there trying to find cracks and exploits for MS Software were instead going agains Linux, or other open sourced applications, you'd find just as many problems."
Then you say: Put up an appache web page on a linux box, or what ever opensourced so. Now have the only line on the page say "You can't hack this box". Get a link somewhere that people are going to see it, and then talk to me in a month as to how safe your page was.
If hackers were'nt trying to find linux exploits, then why whould they bother with the apache box in that example?
The truth is Windows Software tends to be less secure because of feature bloat. They need a reason to keep selling newer versions of Word even though they got 99% of the needed features finished in Word 97. When you keep adding features your software looses focus and starts to do things they were not intended to do. This bug is a perfect example. The bug does not exist because Microsoft coders a bad per-se (I know a few who kick ass), but because features are laid on top of more features. The software grows exponentially as more communication paths between objects increase.
Have each user vote for each server they download from. If a specific server gives out bad files, the users would vote as a bad server. Then it would not be able to connect to the P2P network.
A voting system can be abused by creating a large group of malicious users giving each other positive feedback. Andrew already mentioned this on his webpage. Routing on a P2P network may not be direct, so you may not be able to give a site bad feedback anyhow.
I use redhat in the workplace, but that is another story. You misunderstood what I was talking about.
/etc/sysconfig directory to configure your system is alot more complicated hand editing /etc/rc.d in slackware.
In redhat you could configure the network yourself if your willing to spend the time to understand how the infrastructure works.
If you decide to do that your changes may cause chaos with that infrastructure or break programs such as netconfig if you decide to use it again.
In essence poking through the
This is not an anti-redhat argument.
What you are really talking about is infrastructure not redhat hiding things from you. Redhat needs to keep a consistent interface for everything. Thus they make things a little bit harder to hand configure, by forcing you to configure things via their gui/console interface. You can remove this and set up everything yourself. Some people try to merge their changes in redhats infrastructure and it causes chaos. To make a long story short if you don't like this use slack or gentoo.
Since when did white Slashdot users become experts in being black in the inner-city. Many of you can spout all of the uniformed rhetoric you want but unless you are black you will never understand what it means to be black.
I've heard everything from "If I see two guys of African descent on the street, I will [to paraphrase] run and hide like a little baby." or "Different breeds are better suited to do different things (as if humans were dogs)."
Everytime a Slashdot reader posts an article about Microsoft doing something that discriminates against Linux. I see the slashdot rapid freedom response team. When I see an article about social ills such as police misconduct against minorities, many in the slashdot community say blacks deserve what they get, or there no such thing as racism.
The biggest problem I see with most of the posts on this thread is that whenever people talk about blacks they slap them all together like a herd of cows. It becomes a them versus me argument instead of a we argument.
Primer:
Africa is not a country it is a continent with over 50 countries of people speaking over 400 languages with > 4000 years of history.
African are genetically deversity from skin tone to facial features.
Sure african-americans (whatever that title means) may perform lower on average on academics, but that does not mean there are no african-americans that score above average on tests. Whites and Asians like to comfort themselves by saying their races as a whole do better in academics, but then when I ask many of them how they did in college they usually change the issue.
Not all blacks listen to rap music, and not all whites listen to rock music. There are blacks who listen to rock music as well as play in bands.
Not all blacks dress up as thugs, do drugs, carry guns, etc.
Not all blacks are good at sports.
Not all black neighborhoods are run down. Not all houses in black communities have low realistate value. This is why the term gentrification exists.
Not all blacks are southern christian, 1/2 Africans in Africa are muslim. Ethiopia has a significant Jewish population.
I could go on and on, but I hope you get the point. Just remember, you like to look at yourself as an individual not as a class of people, treat others with the same respect.
No No Nooooooooooooo! Every time a slashdot thread degrades to Nazi name calling people make the same mistake.
The Nazis were not socialist (history newbie mistake). I bet your logic was they were called the National Socialist Party so they must be socialists! They were actual ultra right wing extremists. See the Communists, Socialists, Democrates are to the left. The Nazis and Republicans are to the right. The Nazis actually hated communists and fought a good part of the war (WW2) against the communists. If the Nazis were socialists why whould they hate communists?
Please take a deep breath and think before you post.
You missed the point that we (humanity) are not animals. Poodles and German Shepard have more genetic variance than an Irishman and a Kenyan. Skin color is really only a cosmetic difference.
As far as the SATs go the argument is the reading section of the general SAT focuses more on the experience of white students then of other minority groups. Not that it was racist. I don't agree with the ETS, and I think the problem is deeper than that.
From an US perspective: Nazism is what you get when you veer too far to the extreme right, and Communism is what you get when you veer too far to the left. Extremes on both sides have similar consequences (tyranny, genocide, the whole shibang).
Socialism is in between liberal and communist (far left). Nazism is as far from socialism as you could get.
1. No 'best' browser.
/directory /directory
I think mozilla is a great browser that is available to anybody on any Window Manager.
2. Prompting for file scan.
yes | fsck
3. Printing needs to be easier to configure.
Right on!
4. Make it easy for the user to find out how to do things.
I agree, too much choice is a bad thing. Many distributions want to appease every-one by loading the core distribution with thousands of apps.
What they should do is have the core distribution be a simple as slackware. Then have additional CDs with the applications nicely categorized with detailed descriptions. Solaris does this well and many distribution vendors should follow.
5. Cleaner redraws.
I see this problem most often in java applications, you move a window and you get a ugly grey rectangle in the place of a window. With well written applications and enough CPU/memory resources this is a non issue.
6. Die stray processes, die!
Bad idea. There is a seperation between X an its corresponding applications. Some applications work in both X and the console. If you want to switch window managers you would not want the manager to kill all of the applications. Also when you have many displays running it could get very complicated.
7. Easy way of sharing files.
This is not a linux problem this is a samba issue. They should probably do what solaris does:
share
unshare
8. Sound support.
This is up to the sound card designers.
9. No common editor which supports "soft wrapping."
Run pico or nano. ^_^
10. No easy way to configure X - especially change resolution on the fly.
I agree to a point. Although the X config file is extremely logical, I do wish the options were more obvious. For instance setting the scroll wheel is a bit archaic under input device:
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
You can change resolutions by setting up multiple resolutions in Xconfig and hitting crtl,alt,+/-. Good graphical X set up tools allow you to add multiple resolutions.