>As a desktop linux user, has anyone EVER gotten a virus? Or better yet has any anti-virus program saved your ass?
As another desktop Linux user, I have ClamAV on my computer.
I haven't got any virus infection, not because I use Linux, but because I know what I'm doing.
I still have ClamAV, because I must communicate with other people, most of whom use Windoze(TM). Sometimes I have to receive mails/files from one of them and send them to another. Usually I'd prefer getting the files through ClamAV before sending them out, in the hope of stopping the (possible) chain of infection.
Of course I hate the idea of on-access scan. Unless the machine is a file/mail server AND the scan is affordable.
In the case of Java, you can use GCJ (http://gcc.gnu.org/java/) to compile Java to bytecode / native code, and, and,... "Because that's what programming languages are there to do, right?" (from TFA).
I've heard an old song by the Carpenters (sister and brother) which had a line "... and solitaire is the only game in town... ". The song has the word "Solitaire" in the title, if I remember correctly. Of course, it refers the game played with real paper cards and on a real desktop.
They are not shut down. E.g. mp3.baidu.com, the music search (which is hated by MPAA) part of Baidu is still up, with logo changed to black-and-white instead of the usual color one.
tudou.com, a Chinese imitation of Youtube, has all quake-related videos on the front page, but is still operating and hosting various entertainment videos.
and there are many more.
And by the way, my connection to opendns.com's name servers are getting worse (with 50% lost packets) these days. Related or not?
Comparing Solitaire (TM) and AisleRiot, a game bundled with GNOME, may be interesting.
Solitaire: When you play solitaire, you play solitaire. You have no choice but playing solitaire. And we at Redmond knows you better than yourself and we know you want solitaire. We lock you in (OUR version of) solitaire and you feel it's good so you waste a lot of CPU quanta with it. And more important, it's part of the OS as IE is. It's fairly quick to get familiar with.
AisleRiot: You have choice and control. You have more than 90 solitaire-like card games to play. You are free to choose, but most of them are completely unknown to you. So, you are likely to RTFM first. And you find out AisleRiot is rather a platform than a specific game (or in ESR's words, "mechanism, not policy", referring to the X windows system). You learn the game-independent ideas and terms first and only then can you understand the manual for a particular game. You end up playing only a few out of the 90+ games.
Actually, I found AisleRiot more fun. BTW, obligatory advert for AisleRiot: It's free as in freedom. If you can't beat a game, you can rewrite the code and recompile so that you always win!
I know Fedora is not the easiest to install, but instead, let's look at the other side of the matter.
Being a Fedora user myself, I walked through the install process in about ten minutes (excl. the time of merely waiting for file extraction/copying). And everything worked fine.
Installing Fedora is not a click-through. For new users it may appear to be more intimidating than it actually is. But don't forget the old practice of RTFM. Fedora has an excellent installation guide available from their wiki. The guide is very readable even for new users. In the doc there are actually things a new user can learn useful knowledge, e.g. the basic ideas of disk partition and logical volume management. A scan through the manual also helps reducing the risk of data loss caused by mis-operation.
Sadly, most new users don't know the value of a manual.
Perhaps that's what Fedora differens from the *buntu families. Fedora is a desktop distro, but meanwhile it is always a testing distro; it isn't even meant to be very stable or user-friendly like the *buntus do. You'll have to be a little tech-aware. If you don't feel like reading through a few man pages to find the answer, then consider something else.
I have travelled to that area three years ago. There used to be a fairly good road into the mountains, but in summer it is constantly threated by pouring rains and collapsing rocks from the mountain on both sides. The road passes a place named Diexi, which used to be a town but sank into the bottom of the river Min-Jiang after an earthquake during the reign of Republic of China. Up the river is Wenchuan, one of the most heavily inflicted area.
I read some reports based on the info obtained 3 hours ago. The quake came with heavy rain. Almost all communications and power supply are down and the road (which I once travelled on) was completely destroyed. Now the only way to get in there is walking on foot (not even by airplane or helicopters, since there're no guiding signal up, and visibility is next to nothing, and there are thunder clouds). There was attemps with paratroopers but turned out not effective (4 soldiers died in the operation among the 100 total).
There are several resevoir/power plants along the river there. Some of them are being damaged, and it's possible that the reserverd water could got flowing out uncontrolled...
And everything that can go wrong is going wrong there.
If you read the "SHA-1" article on wikipedia, you'll see it is Chinese scientists that first discovered weak points in the widely used algorithm.
In China, there are state-funded CS projects aimed at cracking SSL, SSH and alike. Apart from military uses, they are mainly used to implement censorship over private, encrypted communications.
China can't ban its citizens use encrytion on the legal level. If so, many business (e.g. online banking, and everything using HTTPS) would not exist. But they are working hard so that when they decide to pwn you they'll be able to make it.
6 666 666 666 = 0x00 00 00 01 8D 5D 42 AA
For me that looks like some random invalid address causing a core dump.
What's the difference to say "passing 6.7e9" and "passing 6 666 666 666"?
>How about a disclaimer saying, "Some results may have been censored" at the top of every results page? That would give no clues as to which results were censored (it would be hard to talk the Chinese into it otherwise), but at least keeps the censorship out in the open.
They are doing something similar. Sometimes I ran into a note telling me "In compliance with local law, not all results are displayed" or so (just like the DMCA notices).
But most of the time, the whole thing works on a different level. The Great Firewall cuts down your communications for 10 minutes or so whenever your're receiving plain-text message matching their blacklist of "dirty" keywords.
That means your connection to the Google server is silenced for a while, and that's not what Google wants. Certainly they will choose to bow to the communist party without losing your click on their ads. As long as Google perform self-censorship in the first place they can maximize the coverage.
And some mentions Baidu. Google is the 1st shareholder of Baidu.
Speaking from my angle as a Chinese, Google has a fairly clean human right record in China, if compared with Yahoo!, which is known to hand the email account of dissidents to the authority. It is quite understandable that Google choose the middle ground between being shot by the Party and being strictly obedient to the Big Brother, because that's what EVERYONE is doing here. Many of us respect the way Google dealing with the authority.
Something off-topic: practically, we here in China can read anything from the Internet. SSH tunneling, HTTP over SSL, and VPN are all effective in beating the Firewall (or at least some aspects of it). Perhaps that can expain why Chinsese hackers first claimed to find weakness in the SHA-1 algorithm. A pretty good sum of our taxes are dumped to the state-funded universities' CS research groups who are experts in cryptanalysis and cracking. They have fucked up the HTTP and they are fucking up with secure connections.
"make all" doesn't work with the default Makefile coming with the release. In order to compile, issue the command "make love", then link the resulting "egg.o" with libreptile.so, libbird.so, and libmammal.so.
> The average adult has nothing to worry about, and even in children the effects are rather mild with appropriate medical care.
Adults are NOT immune from HFMD. Most of the adults infected by this virus show no sign of symptons, no harming to themselves done, but they can carry the virii and pass them to their children.
The HFMD is not a massive killer, indeed. However, in China the public health system is really fragile, and much worse in the rural area. Too few experienced doctors. Too little financial support, so that most people still pay for the huge medical bills draining all they have. Too poor sanitation. That is the killer.
Does overclocking indeed improve the performance? Unless you can show that the CPU clock freq. is the true bottleneck of your computing tasks. Often it is not so. Clock rate != performance and vice versa.
For most users the CPU works just fine out of the box. My laptop with a Pentium-M class chip even works underclocked by default to reduce power usage. BTW, it runs Linux of course.
I hope the whole overclocking thing could be stopped if you care about energy consumption.
There's a classical joke that the "MIPS" (million instructions per second) == "Meaningless Information Provided by Salesmen". Similar with clock rate.
The BASIC language was designed for pedagogic purposes. Students completely new to computers could quickly get some concepts of programming with BASIC. They could test the algorithms in a fairly straight-forward manner (first make it work, then make it right, though BASIC is not fast).
Although it has never been (and should not be) a language of choice, it's educational purposes may still be there. Today we have much more powerful scripting languages like Python / Perl for getting real work done, but what about using BASIC as an example of teaching about compiler/interpreter design? There are many open-source implementations of BASIC that can be used as references and examples. Instead of coding in BASIC, coding a BASIC interpreter may be a more worthwhile training.
This is feasible only if you can boot from his CD. Many people (me included), for security concerns, use a password to protect the BIOS settings and make it default to boot from local harddisk. In that case, you should crack his BIOS also. If this is true, you can still open the machine and remove his hard disk, mount it on your own machine, if the HDD is not encrypted.
Slashdot Mirror
>As a desktop linux user, has anyone EVER gotten a virus? Or better yet has any anti-virus program saved your ass?
As another desktop Linux user, I have ClamAV on my computer.
I haven't got any virus infection, not because I use Linux, but because I know what I'm doing.
I still have ClamAV, because I must communicate with other people, most of whom use Windoze(TM). Sometimes I have to receive mails/files from one of them and send them to another. Usually I'd prefer getting the files through ClamAV before sending them out, in the hope of stopping the (possible) chain of infection.
Of course I hate the idea of on-access scan. Unless the machine is a file/mail server AND the scan is affordable.
slashdot with the big round-corner buttons?
In the case of Java, you can use GCJ (http://gcc.gnu.org/java/) to compile Java to bytecode / native code, and, and, ... "Because that's what programming languages are there to do, right?" (from TFA).
>Outlook/Exchange - Using "Evolution". The jury is still out on whether "Evolution" is worth using verses online calendar and scheduling web sites.
Use Thunderbird + PGP extension(Enigmail). Thunderbird is lightweight while still has quite a few good features like LDAP support, etc.
I've heard an old song by the Carpenters (sister and brother) which had a line "... and solitaire is the only game in town... ". The song has the word "Solitaire" in the title, if I remember correctly. Of course, it refers the game played with real paper cards and on a real desktop.
They are not shut down. E.g. mp3.baidu.com, the music search (which is hated by MPAA) part of Baidu is still up, with logo changed to black-and-white instead of the usual color one.
tudou.com, a Chinese imitation of Youtube, has all quake-related videos on the front page, but is still operating and hosting various entertainment videos.
and there are many more.
And by the way, my connection to opendns.com's name servers are getting worse (with 50% lost packets) these days. Related or not?
Comparing Solitaire (TM) and AisleRiot, a game bundled with GNOME, may be interesting.
Solitaire: When you play solitaire, you play solitaire. You have no choice but playing solitaire. And we at Redmond knows you better than yourself and we know you want solitaire. We lock you in (OUR version of) solitaire and you feel it's good so you waste a lot of CPU quanta with it. And more important, it's part of the OS as IE is. It's fairly quick to get familiar with.
AisleRiot: You have choice and control. You have more than 90 solitaire-like card games to play. You are free to choose, but most of them are completely unknown to you. So, you are likely to RTFM first. And you find out AisleRiot is rather a platform than a specific game (or in ESR's words, "mechanism, not policy", referring to the X windows system). You learn the game-independent ideas and terms first and only then can you understand the manual for a particular game. You end up playing only a few out of the 90+ games.
Actually, I found AisleRiot more fun. BTW, obligatory advert for AisleRiot: It's free as in freedom. If you can't beat a game, you can rewrite the code and recompile so that you always win!
I know Fedora is not the easiest to install, but instead, let's look at the other side of the matter.
Being a Fedora user myself, I walked through the install process in about ten minutes (excl. the time of merely waiting for file extraction/copying). And everything worked fine.
Installing Fedora is not a click-through. For new users it may appear to be more intimidating than it actually is. But don't forget the old practice of RTFM. Fedora has an excellent installation guide available from their wiki. The guide is very readable even for new users. In the doc there are actually things a new user can learn useful knowledge, e.g. the basic ideas of disk partition and logical volume management. A scan through the manual also helps reducing the risk of data loss caused by mis-operation.
Sadly, most new users don't know the value of a manual.
Perhaps that's what Fedora differens from the *buntu families. Fedora is a desktop distro, but meanwhile it is always a testing distro; it isn't even meant to be very stable or user-friendly like the *buntus do. You'll have to be a little tech-aware. If you don't feel like reading through a few man pages to find the answer, then consider something else.
I have travelled to that area three years ago. There used to be a fairly good road into the mountains, but in summer it is constantly threated by pouring rains and collapsing rocks from the mountain on both sides. The road passes a place named Diexi, which used to be a town but sank into the bottom of the river Min-Jiang after an earthquake during the reign of Republic of China. Up the river is Wenchuan, one of the most heavily inflicted area.
I read some reports based on the info obtained 3 hours ago. The quake came with heavy rain. Almost all communications and power supply are down and the road (which I once travelled on) was completely destroyed. Now the only way to get in there is walking on foot (not even by airplane or helicopters, since there're no guiding signal up, and visibility is next to nothing, and there are thunder clouds). There was attemps with paratroopers but turned out not effective (4 soldiers died in the operation among the 100 total).
There are several resevoir/power plants along the river there. Some of them are being damaged, and it's possible that the reserverd water could got flowing out uncontrolled...
And everything that can go wrong is going wrong there.
If you read the "SHA-1" article on wikipedia, you'll see it is Chinese scientists that first discovered weak points in the widely used algorithm.
In China, there are state-funded CS projects aimed at cracking SSL, SSH and alike. Apart from military uses, they are mainly used to implement censorship over private, encrypted communications.
China can't ban its citizens use encrytion on the legal level. If so, many business (e.g. online banking, and everything using HTTPS) would not exist. But they are working hard so that when they decide to pwn you they'll be able to make it.
>"Microsoft is launching a program to promote the use of its Windows OS in ultra low-cost PCs"
Sorry, we don't need that elaborate oxymoron.
... But they might be aided by Python.
6 666 666 666 = 0x00 00 00 01 8D 5D 42 AA
For me that looks like some random invalid address causing a core dump.
What's the difference to say "passing 6.7e9" and "passing 6 666 666 666"?
>How about a disclaimer saying, "Some results may have been censored" at the top of every results page? That would give no clues as to which results were censored (it would be hard to talk the Chinese into it otherwise), but at least keeps the censorship out in the open.
They are doing something similar. Sometimes I ran into a note telling me "In compliance with local law, not all results are displayed" or so (just like the DMCA notices).
But most of the time, the whole thing works on a different level. The Great Firewall cuts down your communications for 10 minutes or so whenever your're receiving plain-text message matching their blacklist of "dirty" keywords.
That means your connection to the Google server is silenced for a while, and that's not what Google wants. Certainly they will choose to bow to the communist party without losing your click on their ads. As long as Google perform self-censorship in the first place they can maximize the coverage.
And some mentions Baidu. Google is the 1st shareholder of Baidu.
Speaking from my angle as a Chinese, Google has a fairly clean human right record in China, if compared with Yahoo!, which is known to hand the email account of dissidents to the authority. It is quite understandable that Google choose the middle ground between being shot by the Party and being strictly obedient to the Big Brother, because that's what EVERYONE is doing here. Many of us respect the way Google dealing with the authority.
Something off-topic: practically, we here in China can read anything from the Internet. SSH tunneling, HTTP over SSL, and VPN are all effective in beating the Firewall (or at least some aspects of it). Perhaps that can expain why Chinsese hackers first claimed to find weakness in the SHA-1 algorithm. A pretty good sum of our taxes are dumped to the state-funded universities' CS research groups who are experts in cryptanalysis and cracking. They have fucked up the HTTP and they are fucking up with secure connections.
"make all" doesn't work with the default Makefile coming with the release. In order to compile, issue the command "make love", then link the resulting "egg.o" with libreptile.so, libbird.so, and libmammal.so.
and that is the problem.
Most of the matches of "Paris Hilton" appear, rather unsurprisingly, appear in bot- or spam-blocking programs.
But this one is more interesting: Category theory is the Paris Hilton of mathematics.
Hey, don't do that. If you guys in the US cut off China's Internet, we would have no Slashdot to read here!
> The average adult has nothing to worry about, and even in children the effects are rather mild with appropriate medical care.
Adults are NOT immune from HFMD. Most of the adults infected by this virus show no sign of symptons, no harming to themselves done, but they can carry the virii and pass them to their children.
The HFMD is not a massive killer, indeed. However, in China the public health system is really fragile, and much worse in the rural area. Too few experienced doctors. Too little financial support, so that most people still pay for the huge medical bills draining all they have. Too poor sanitation. That is the killer.
Does overclocking indeed improve the performance? Unless you can show that the CPU clock freq. is the true bottleneck of your computing tasks. Often it is not so. Clock rate != performance and vice versa.
For most users the CPU works just fine out of the box. My laptop with a Pentium-M class chip even works underclocked by default to reduce power usage. BTW, it runs Linux of course.
I hope the whole overclocking thing could be stopped if you care about energy consumption.
There's a classical joke that the "MIPS" (million instructions per second) == "Meaningless Information Provided by Salesmen". Similar with clock rate.
The BASIC language was designed for pedagogic purposes. Students completely new to computers could quickly get some concepts of programming with BASIC. They could test the algorithms in a fairly straight-forward manner (first make it work, then make it right, though BASIC is not fast).
Although it has never been (and should not be) a language of choice, it's educational purposes may still be there. Today we have much more powerful scripting languages like Python / Perl for getting real work done, but what about using BASIC as an example of teaching about compiler/interpreter design? There are many open-source implementations of BASIC that can be used as references and examples. Instead of coding in BASIC, coding a BASIC interpreter may be a more worthwhile training.
This is feasible only if you can boot from his CD. Many people (me included), for security concerns, use a password to protect the BIOS settings and make it default to boot from local harddisk. In that case, you should crack his BIOS also. If this is true, you can still open the machine and remove his hard disk, mount it on your own machine, if the HDD is not encrypted.
>"The Cross Platform and Interop team at Microsoft"
What an elaborate oxymoron.
btw Why don't they develop a Linux tool for managing Windows machines instead? We already have OpenSSH.
Give me your root password or I'll fire.
from theregister, the new logo of UK's Office of Government Commerce: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/22/ogc_logo/