Would someone kindly explain why it's "apt-get" instead of "app-get"? what's with the 't'?
It's hard thinking up intuitive names for things if you have to worry about word conflicts further down the road. "App" could mean a lot of things, especially in different contexts. Yes, this is "apt-get" and not "apt", but still...
Of course, that doesn't account for true stupidity, such as abbreviating "diskcheck" to "dskchk". The shortened version isn't even 8 characters for crying out loud.
Most of the stuff in my dad's home entertainment theater takes a few minutes to boot up, including the stuff not connected to the internet or downloading stuff off the satellite. My brother-in-law develops Java software for cell phones, and I was shocked at the boot times for the phone he showed me. Whenever I reset my router after a firewall change, the restart takes a good couple minutes. Even HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies have long load times.
Sadly, embedded computers are becoming just as bad as the general-purpose variety. Bad design is everywhere. I don't know why people tolerate it (though it's probably related to tolerating advertisements on legally purchased movie discs).
If you don't know how to use google, and can't follow a two-line set of instructions, then yeah you might have trouble. But we aren't talking about browser-hacking geek level, we're talking basic competence.
You think it's reasonable for people to have to Google for documentation to disable a nag method, especially considering that documentation might come from a 3rd-party source?
You think it's reasonable for someone to have to scroll through hundreds to thousands of lines of config values with obscure name and set values manually? How is that better than asking people to edit the system registry?
You think bad design can be easily justified by suggesting regular people lack basic competence?
Not to mention that the oil industry is doing quite well, but GM is on the brink of collapse. If GM has been so cooperative with helping big oil, letting the company just die without some angelic investment isn't very smart.
So, I pretty much have to be a browser-hacking geek to opt-out? It pains me when programmers complain how stupid users are. I feel sorry for them most of the time.
Hell, I have to go into "about:config" just to fix the damn scroll-wheel support. There used to be a GUI for this in Mozilla and Firebird, and it was removed for Firefox. Firefox also used to be able to add cookies to the block list with one click, and now you have to type them out one at a time in one of the most idiotic listboxes I've seen in quite a while.
It's rather interesting what baseline functionality was removed to make the browser smaller and lighter, only to have that support re-implemented with those clever, efficient, and never buggy 3rd-party extensions.
I just got this error message today through my message console:
Failed to load XPCOM component: C:\Documents and Settings\Waccoon\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\qesmqq4h.default\extensions\{DDC359D1-844A-42a7-9AA1-88A850A938A8}\components\contenthandling.idl
Okay, Firefox, is there a reason why you're encrypting the name of the extension that causes the error? Would you mind telling me what part is freaking out the application?
And here, people are talking about web browsers being the platform of the future, possibly acting like its own OS. I don't want to go back to the MacOS years where they only way to diagnose a problem with an extension was to enable and disable each one to find out what causes the browser to crash on startup.
It doesn't help that some standards were based on other standards and then broken. HTML was syntactically incompatible with SGML on purpose to make it "easier" to use. The most notable example is the fact that early in the HTML standard, you didn't have to close paragraph elements.
When you create something with built-in gotchas, of course parsing it correctly is going to be a problem. It continued to be for years until XHTML finally came around, but that still has its own design faults. Many web sites (including my own site which I haven't updated in years) still use the old, broken, but "standards compliant" HTML spec.
Personally, I think the whole WWW was b0rked from the beginning, and even the new browser wars aren't going to straighten it out in the foreseeable future. JavaScript imported from a 3rd party web site through an ad has all the same privileges as your own site's code? Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Thanks, Netscape.
Why don't they wave their magic wand to make it all go away?
Re:looks like it still loses history
on
BASH 4.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Are you worried one of your own programs might sabotage another??
Yes, because they are not my programs.
I realize this is out of place in an article about BASH, but it is a very real problem. With all these plugins, extensions, and VMs these days, security is almost exclusively an application-level problem. The OS will cover its own butt, but can't keep your Home folder safe from anything running on your account. FOSS or not, thinking that all software running under the same account will get along perfectly is naive.
And anyone or thing with root access will be able to read it anyway.
If you grant such access, of course. Unless you're stuck in the Windows world, there's not much out there that really needs root access. I've used dozens of OSes over the years, so when somebody brings up the issue of security, I tend to talk about more than just UNIX/GNU or shells. I'm sorry if that wasn't clear.
Re:looks like it still loses history
on
BASH 4.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
When will it finally be commonplace to encrypt all histories and caches? More importantly, when will applications have private temp folders inaccessible to other processes on the same login, so they can keep their keys secure?
I had a friend in Britain who couldn't access my web site for a good 2 months, either by DNS or IP, and I couldn't ping his IP at all. I figured it was some kind of stupid ISP filtering thing.
Also, twice so far, I've not been able to access my own web site by DNS, due to a screw up of some kind with my ISP's local DNS cache. Lots of people in my area (meaning "Massachusetts") were seeing someone else's site until the TTL expired and the local cache refreshed. T'was annoying. Of course, my site has a clock face as a logo, and the other site was dedicated to showcasing watches, so at least I got some level of enjoyment out of it.
It also causes really strange side effects where basically the computer gets slower and less responsive over time until you restart it.
I've had this problem with Intel systems, too, ever since I started working with Core Duo machines. I can't offer any insight, but I noticed right away that on multiple computers, the GUI of every program on WindowsXP noticeably slows down during the course of an hour. Benchmark performance doesn't seem to be affected, but responsiveness slows down a LOT. The good news is, restarting the affected program fixes the problem -- a Windows restart isn't needed. I've only seen this problem on dual core systems.
I've been wondering for a while if this wouldn't be a problem if I had bought an AMD system. I use Linux on my old single core computer, and my Mac is PPC, so I haven't tested anything other than Windows so far.
Why do it yourself when you can have other people do it for you, while you take all the credit?
Frankly, I wish Mozilla would beef up their core development tools. I'm afraid of being without my development extensions every time Firefox gets a new version. They can still be extensions, but I really wish they were maintained as 1st party software.
My biggest problem with JavaScript is that browsers will download code from any 3rd party web site and run that code as if it was from a 1st party web site. 3rd party sites can't read domain-specific cookies, so why can they run scripting code?
What is this, 1980?
Sorry, we live in an age where if you buy a USB memory stick and plug it into your computer, it will automatically try to install encryption software on your system without permission. Companies don't care, and not enough of the sheep complain. If you really think that any off-site advertising service isn't going to slip in some kind of leeching code now and then, you're naive.
JavaScript, and the whole philosophy of security in "modern" web browsers, has a HELL of a long way to go (hint: JavaScript can still wipe out your navigation bar if it wants to. Why that is allowed is anyone's guess).
When I was at college, I used to be a Mac network sysadmin in the newspaper office. We used the Name01, Name02, Name03, etc. convention for all our workstations, and we called our file server The Big Apple.
One day, a computer science student joined the staff. A week later, I got a frantic call in the middle of the night, a few hours before deadline, that the network went down, and I rushed to the office to investigate. As it turns out, our lovely new computer geek had renamed all our Macs and the printer to Greek gods, and thus, none of the machines would talk to each other.
It was about that time that I started to hate computer science and decided to start a career in interface design.
Plugins:
- Adobe Acrobat
- Java(TM) Platform SE 6 U10
- Java(TM) Platform SE 6 U11
- Java(TM) Platform SE 6 U11 (Yes, again)
- Microsoft(R) DRM
- Microsoft(R) DRM (Yes, again)
- QuickTime Plug-in 7.4.5 (I'll send it to the external player, please)
- RealPlayer Version Plugin (RealAlternative, please)
- RealPlayer(tm) G2 LiveConnet-Enabled Plug-IN (32-bit)
- Windows Media Player Plug-in Dynamic Link Library
So far, that's Sun, Apple, Real, Adobe, and Microsoft messing with my browser without telling me... and only because I'm quite strict with what I install on my system. This isn't Microsoft up to their old tricks, it's just them keeping up with the Joneses, and forcing me to keep up with everyone with an agenda. What else is new?
I do have Silverlight installed, too, but at least the installer for that told me it would work with multiple browsers. Thank goodness the Mozilla people had the fine sense to let people see plugins and extensions, unlike IE6 and friends. Quite a few time I've had to fix someone's compter by hacking out IE extensions from the system registry, and that's not pleasant at all.
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Would someone kindly explain why it's "apt-get" instead of "app-get"? what's with the 't'?
It's hard thinking up intuitive names for things if you have to worry about word conflicts further down the road. "App" could mean a lot of things, especially in different contexts. Yes, this is "apt-get" and not "apt", but still...
Of course, that doesn't account for true stupidity, such as abbreviating "diskcheck" to "dskchk". The shortened version isn't even 8 characters for crying out loud.
Most of the stuff in my dad's home entertainment theater takes a few minutes to boot up, including the stuff not connected to the internet or downloading stuff off the satellite. My brother-in-law develops Java software for cell phones, and I was shocked at the boot times for the phone he showed me. Whenever I reset my router after a firewall change, the restart takes a good couple minutes. Even HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies have long load times.
Sadly, embedded computers are becoming just as bad as the general-purpose variety. Bad design is everywhere. I don't know why people tolerate it (though it's probably related to tolerating advertisements on legally purchased movie discs).
If you don't know how to use google, and can't follow a two-line set of instructions, then yeah you might have trouble. But we aren't talking about browser-hacking geek level, we're talking basic competence.
You think it's reasonable for people to have to Google for documentation to disable a nag method, especially considering that documentation might come from a 3rd-party source?
You think it's reasonable for someone to have to scroll through hundreds to thousands of lines of config values with obscure name and set values manually? How is that better than asking people to edit the system registry?
You think bad design can be easily justified by suggesting regular people lack basic competence?
Given that they would be targeting households instead of people, could this also be considered a form of discrimination?
I'm only halfway serious.
Not to mention that the oil industry is doing quite well, but GM is on the brink of collapse. If GM has been so cooperative with helping big oil, letting the company just die without some angelic investment isn't very smart.
about:config
app.update.enabled = false
So, I pretty much have to be a browser-hacking geek to opt-out? It pains me when programmers complain how stupid users are. I feel sorry for them most of the time.
Hell, I have to go into "about:config" just to fix the damn scroll-wheel support. There used to be a GUI for this in Mozilla and Firebird, and it was removed for Firefox. Firefox also used to be able to add cookies to the block list with one click, and now you have to type them out one at a time in one of the most idiotic listboxes I've seen in quite a while.
It's rather interesting what baseline functionality was removed to make the browser smaller and lighter, only to have that support re-implemented with those clever, efficient, and never buggy 3rd-party extensions.
I just got this error message today through my message console:
Failed to load XPCOM component: C:\Documents and Settings\Waccoon\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\qesmqq4h.default\extensions\{DDC359D1-844A-42a7-9AA1-88A850A938A8}\components\contenthandling.idl
Okay, Firefox, is there a reason why you're encrypting the name of the extension that causes the error? Would you mind telling me what part is freaking out the application?
And here, people are talking about web browsers being the platform of the future, possibly acting like its own OS. I don't want to go back to the MacOS years where they only way to diagnose a problem with an extension was to enable and disable each one to find out what causes the browser to crash on startup.
It doesn't help that some standards were based on other standards and then broken. HTML was syntactically incompatible with SGML on purpose to make it "easier" to use. The most notable example is the fact that early in the HTML standard, you didn't have to close paragraph elements.
When you create something with built-in gotchas, of course parsing it correctly is going to be a problem. It continued to be for years until XHTML finally came around, but that still has its own design faults. Many web sites (including my own site which I haven't updated in years) still use the old, broken, but "standards compliant" HTML spec.
Personally, I think the whole WWW was b0rked from the beginning, and even the new browser wars aren't going to straighten it out in the foreseeable future. JavaScript imported from a 3rd party web site through an ad has all the same privileges as your own site's code? Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Thanks, Netscape.
I think graphics with an integrated motherboard will fare much better than the opposite.
Remember folks, be sure to filter ALL user input!
I'd consider it a big deal if they used the same anti-scratch coating on CDs that is used on Blu-ray discs.
Why don't they wave their magic wand to make it all go away?
Are you worried one of your own programs might sabotage another??
Yes, because they are not my programs.
I realize this is out of place in an article about BASH, but it is a very real problem. With all these plugins, extensions, and VMs these days, security is almost exclusively an application-level problem. The OS will cover its own butt, but can't keep your Home folder safe from anything running on your account. FOSS or not, thinking that all software running under the same account will get along perfectly is naive.
And anyone or thing with root access will be able to read it anyway.
If you grant such access, of course. Unless you're stuck in the Windows world, there's not much out there that really needs root access. I've used dozens of OSes over the years, so when somebody brings up the issue of security, I tend to talk about more than just UNIX/GNU or shells. I'm sorry if that wasn't clear.
When will it finally be commonplace to encrypt all histories and caches? More importantly, when will applications have private temp folders inaccessible to other processes on the same login, so they can keep their keys secure?
I had a friend in Britain who couldn't access my web site for a good 2 months, either by DNS or IP, and I couldn't ping his IP at all. I figured it was some kind of stupid ISP filtering thing.
Also, twice so far, I've not been able to access my own web site by DNS, due to a screw up of some kind with my ISP's local DNS cache. Lots of people in my area (meaning "Massachusetts") were seeing someone else's site until the TTL expired and the local cache refreshed. T'was annoying. Of course, my site has a clock face as a logo, and the other site was dedicated to showcasing watches, so at least I got some level of enjoyment out of it.
It also causes really strange side effects where basically the computer gets slower and less responsive over time until you restart it.
I've had this problem with Intel systems, too, ever since I started working with Core Duo machines. I can't offer any insight, but I noticed right away that on multiple computers, the GUI of every program on WindowsXP noticeably slows down during the course of an hour. Benchmark performance doesn't seem to be affected, but responsiveness slows down a LOT. The good news is, restarting the affected program fixes the problem -- a Windows restart isn't needed. I've only seen this problem on dual core systems.
I've been wondering for a while if this wouldn't be a problem if I had bought an AMD system. I use Linux on my old single core computer, and my Mac is PPC, so I haven't tested anything other than Windows so far.
Supply and demand? I think there would have been a difference between buying a thousand slaves in bulk and buying out an entire population.
Why do it yourself when you can have other people do it for you, while you take all the credit?
Frankly, I wish Mozilla would beef up their core development tools. I'm afraid of being without my development extensions every time Firefox gets a new version. They can still be extensions, but I really wish they were maintained as 1st party software.
Oh, right. Dev tools are a fringe market.
My biggest problem with JavaScript is that browsers will download code from any 3rd party web site and run that code as if it was from a 1st party web site. 3rd party sites can't read domain-specific cookies, so why can they run scripting code?
What is this, 1980?
Sorry, we live in an age where if you buy a USB memory stick and plug it into your computer, it will automatically try to install encryption software on your system without permission. Companies don't care, and not enough of the sheep complain. If you really think that any off-site advertising service isn't going to slip in some kind of leeching code now and then, you're naive.
JavaScript, and the whole philosophy of security in "modern" web browsers, has a HELL of a long way to go (hint: JavaScript can still wipe out your navigation bar if it wants to. Why that is allowed is anyone's guess).
When I was at college, I used to be a Mac network sysadmin in the newspaper office. We used the Name01, Name02, Name03, etc. convention for all our workstations, and we called our file server The Big Apple.
One day, a computer science student joined the staff. A week later, I got a frantic call in the middle of the night, a few hours before deadline, that the network went down, and I rushed to the office to investigate. As it turns out, our lovely new computer geek had renamed all our Macs and the printer to Greek gods, and thus, none of the machines would talk to each other.
It was about that time that I started to hate computer science and decided to start a career in interface design.
Here's a look at all the plugins I didn't want and had to disable:
Extensions: .NET Framework Assistant 1.0
- Java Quick Starter 1.0
- Microsoft
Plugins: - Adobe Acrobat
- Java(TM) Platform SE 6 U10
- Java(TM) Platform SE 6 U11
- Java(TM) Platform SE 6 U11 (Yes, again)
- Microsoft(R) DRM
- Microsoft(R) DRM (Yes, again)
- QuickTime Plug-in 7.4.5 (I'll send it to the external player, please)
- RealPlayer Version Plugin (RealAlternative, please)
- RealPlayer(tm) G2 LiveConnet-Enabled Plug-IN (32-bit)
- Windows Media Player Plug-in Dynamic Link Library
So far, that's Sun, Apple, Real, Adobe, and Microsoft messing with my browser without telling me... and only because I'm quite strict with what I install on my system. This isn't Microsoft up to their old tricks, it's just them keeping up with the Joneses, and forcing me to keep up with everyone with an agenda. What else is new?
I do have Silverlight installed, too, but at least the installer for that told me it would work with multiple browsers. Thank goodness the Mozilla people had the fine sense to let people see plugins and extensions, unlike IE6 and friends. Quite a few time I've had to fix someone's compter by hacking out IE extensions from the system registry, and that's not pleasant at all.
Windows 98 -> Windows ME -> Windows XP -> Windows Vista
OSX Jaguar -> OSX Panther -> OSX Tiger -> OSX Leopard
Give them the source HTML, which obviously could not have been tampered.
Aren't they just charging for the brand name and the IP?
Oh, come on. How many regular cars are there under $20,000?