Yes they are aren't they? Now tell me how many people you could kill in the same time with one of these weapons compared to a firearm before the cops close in?
I'll tell you - fewer, much fewer. Wackos who go on sword/knife/club wielding rampages tend to be overpowered very quickly.
I have been impressed by the strides taken by Mandrake recently to secure their distribution. If you choose the server/high security options during installation you get a very nice secure machine from which to fashion into a server.
I installed 7.2 onto an old box. After tweaking a few accept/deny rules, and some other nips and tucks I have the thing running very nicely now as a masquerading firewall.
So what you're saying is that this somehow makes for a better interface? An interface that works without fail for you but sporadically for me and not at all for others such as those with disabilities. Aside from the hit and miss reliability, gestures take considerably longer to perform than either with a mouse click on a button, or a keyboard press.
Personally I think gestures are great if you work with a stylus, but mice are too clumsy to precisely use them. Even with my Palm Pilot it is not uncommon for it to screw up a gesture I make.
Well you don't get AIM with Mozilla, but assuming you meant NS 6.0 then it is possible to remove it even if the installer doesn't give you the choice.
Like the rest of the frontend in NS/Mozilla, the built-in AIM is just some chrome and a few DLLs. Edit the installed-chrome.txt file to remove references to aim.jar and NS will no longer contain AIM. Then you can delete AIM permenantly by removing aim.jar and the AIM component DLLs.
Anyone who's played Black and White will know that gesture navigation is actually a major pain in the butt to use. Sure it's novel, but frantically waving the mouse around for several seconds in some pattern does not make for a quick and useful interface, especially when it fails a good portion of the time.
Don't forget who is funding Mozilla. AOL have 29 million subscribers, all of whom may eventually be using Gecko in the AOL client.
It's not as if AOL is inextricably dependent on IE since they've wisely ensured that their content and that of their partners is viewable with any browser.
Yes they do. It's a useful diagnostic tool to make sure things are working correctly without annoying the hell out of other users.
Thanks for the tip about Jabberbot though. Perhaps you should make this feature more prominent since it sounds quite neat. Perhaps you could even use it or something like it for games, stock quotes, flight info etc.?
I doubt he's using email, more likely he's sending out NNTP cancels. Each of these is a few lines, digitally signed (for authentication) to cancel a spam message. I'd say most news servers would be grateful to receive them.
Spam is the bane of Usenet. If weren't for people like him Usenet would be totally unusable.
I think you'll find the likes of Mr Ritz will leave you alone once you pull your thumb out of your ass and lock down your news servers.
Really, it's not that difficult to seriously dampen the amount of spam that your server receives and sends just by changing some lines in some configuration file. And think of the bandwidth and diskspace you'll save.
Re:Couldn't compete with MS...
on
Indrema No More
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· Score: 3
I agree with most of your points to a certain extend but I totally disagree that Linux isn't stable.
It's extremely stable. I can't even recall the last time I had a kernel panic even though I run it every day as a router on one machine and as a desktop on another. On the other hand w2k (whilst better than NT 4.0) which I also run daily crashes about once a week for me for one reason or another. I also use Mac OS 9.1 daily and this is by far the worst for stability and unrecoverable app crashes.
As for the other points.
Scalability. I believe Linux is pretty scalable already, far more than any other kernel. Obviously if you're running a high end database or a 16 CPU box you may hit some of its limitations but it's fine for the rest of us. It scales downwards well too.
Best Unix ever. Arguably it is if your criteria counts acessibility, price, hardware support. It certainly isn't performance wise but it's good enough for most tasks.
Ready for the desktop. Linux will be ready when the distros pay some attention to usability. The likes of Ximian will help a lot here.
Microsoft stealing code. They wouldn't dare steal the code wholesale for fear of being caught but I don't doubt their engineers sneak a peek at GPL code when they want to see how to do something.
Linux being the best for consoles. Linux makes a rock solid foundation for consoles, handhelds, network appliances, set top boxes etc. with significant advantages to manufacturers such as zero licence costs and complete ability to chop and change it around. However, consumers have no interest in what OS their PDA or Tivo is running. They just expect the thing to work properly. The likes of Indrema and Agenda seem to have forgotten this, appealing the geek community to bail them out.
I don't like extreme right wing politics at all but I'm glad they got this guy. Obviously he's one fucked up individual to spend so much time and effort disrupting a site just because his tiny, child-like brain can't take it when they ban him.
Good for them I say.
Re:The OS doesn't matter that much
on
Agenda VR3 Review
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· Score: 2
Just because the Agenda is running Linux (the kernel) doesn't say squat about how easy it is to port applications across to it.
PDAs are handheld devices, with limited memory (management), display and input capabilities. Most Linux apps don't even think about these things. By the time you've gotten to work slashing the footprint and rewriting the UI, it would have been just as quick porting it to any other PDA.
I hope the Agenda eventually does succeed, but touting the fact that runs Linux as the main feature should set off big alarm bells.
For PDAs the bottom line is the applications, battery life and form factor. What operating system it's running comes in a long distance behind these biggies. The OS certainly plays a part in all of the above things, but the end user simply doesn't care that much. Get the apps running right and it could be running CrapOS 0.1 for all the user cares.
Personally I think Linux has the potential to be great for PDAs but maybe not with the Agenda.
People shouldn't get hung up on whether it uses Linux or not. Who cares apart from a few geeks? More important is whether it's any good as a PDA. If the software sucks, or the battery life measures in hours, or the screen is rotten then why would anyone in their right mind want to buy it?
It wasn't a troll. MacOS is quite deliberately designed for clueless users. There's nothing wrong with that.
But running a lot of apps (even with memory to spare) does affect performance for example when power saving kicks in and it takes a minute for it to become responsive again. Or when a supposedly "co-operative" task starts hogging CPU cycles or hitting the disk.
As for displaying an error message, perhaps it's meant to but it doesn't always. It's not an uncommon for my Mac to lock up when it runs low on resources.
The differences is that MacOS is intended for clueless users. Clueless users don't realise that running umpteen applications at the same time is going to adversely affect performance. I suppose OS 9 got around this issue by simply crashing if you loaded too many apps, thus training users to run fewer but OS X degrades gracefully will stick work even if the harddrive is thrashing to keep up.
Don't forget that the AOL servers have the same problem. They can't store all possible combinations either and it would be too much load on them to generate random range/offsets and the checksum for every connection.
Therefore it's likely that in any given period they'll randomly pick a handful of range/offset pairs, compute the checksums and keep asking for those.
So your server load wouldn't necessarily go through the roof. If AOL keeps challenging with this same handful of ranges and offsets then your server can cache the MD5 result for each unique pair and just spew that out the next time it is requested.
So people can look forward to suffering permenant brain damage instead of carpal tunnel syndrome as they flail their heads around trying to move a pointer on the screen?
Mike Singleton, Mathew Smith & David Braben?
on
Godfathers Of Gaming
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· Score: 2
These guys were gaming gods in the 80s. Lords of Midnight, Elite and Manic Miner were probably the most important games of their time.
Email is provided by your ISP. You've already paid for it. When ISPs implement IM gateways you'll pay for that too.
In the meantime AOL is free to block whoever it likes from its service. If you're not a subscriber and you're not using their AIM client, what's in it for them? If Microsoft, Yahoo! and Jabber etc. all gained access it would cost AOL millions.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll tell you - fewer, much fewer. Wackos who go on sword/knife/club wielding rampages tend to be overpowered very quickly.
They also support work on Bastille and Plex86. I'm sure there are others too.
I installed 7.2 onto an old box. After tweaking a few accept/deny rules, and some other nips and tucks I have the thing running very nicely now as a masquerading firewall.
Personally I think gestures are great if you work with a stylus, but mice are too clumsy to precisely use them. Even with my Palm Pilot it is not uncommon for it to screw up a gesture I make.
Like the rest of the frontend in NS/Mozilla, the built-in AIM is just some chrome and a few DLLs. Edit the installed-chrome.txt file to remove references to aim.jar and NS will no longer contain AIM. Then you can delete AIM permenantly by removing aim.jar and the AIM component DLLs.
Anyone who's played Black and White will know that gesture navigation is actually a major pain in the butt to use. Sure it's novel, but frantically waving the mouse around for several seconds in some pattern does not make for a quick and useful interface, especially when it fails a good portion of the time.
It's not as if AOL is inextricably dependent on IE since they've wisely ensured that their content and that of their partners is viewable with any browser.
Some people are never happy. If you don't want an IRC client, uncheck the option box during installation. It's not hard to do.
Thanks for the tip about Jabberbot though. Perhaps you should make this feature more prominent since it sounds quite neat. Perhaps you could even use it or something like it for games, stock quotes, flight info etc.?
This is silly since its the first thing that everyone tries to do after installing IM software.
Spam is the bane of Usenet. If weren't for people like him Usenet would be totally unusable.
Really, it's not that difficult to seriously dampen the amount of spam that your server receives and sends just by changing some lines in some configuration file. And think of the bandwidth and diskspace you'll save.
It's extremely stable. I can't even recall the last time I had a kernel panic even though I run it every day as a router on one machine and as a desktop on another. On the other hand w2k (whilst better than NT 4.0) which I also run daily crashes about once a week for me for one reason or another. I also use Mac OS 9.1 daily and this is by far the worst for stability and unrecoverable app crashes.
As for the other points.
Good for them I say.
PDAs are handheld devices, with limited memory (management), display and input capabilities. Most Linux apps don't even think about these things. By the time you've gotten to work slashing the footprint and rewriting the UI, it would have been just as quick porting it to any other PDA.
For PDAs the bottom line is the applications, battery life and form factor. What operating system it's running comes in a long distance behind these biggies. The OS certainly plays a part in all of the above things, but the end user simply doesn't care that much. Get the apps running right and it could be running CrapOS 0.1 for all the user cares.
Personally I think Linux has the potential to be great for PDAs but maybe not with the Agenda.
People shouldn't get hung up on whether it uses Linux or not. Who cares apart from a few geeks? More important is whether it's any good as a PDA. If the software sucks, or the battery life measures in hours, or the screen is rotten then why would anyone in their right mind want to buy it?
But running a lot of apps (even with memory to spare) does affect performance for example when power saving kicks in and it takes a minute for it to become responsive again. Or when a supposedly "co-operative" task starts hogging CPU cycles or hitting the disk.
As for displaying an error message, perhaps it's meant to but it doesn't always. It's not an uncommon for my Mac to lock up when it runs low on resources.
The differences is that MacOS is intended for clueless users. Clueless users don't realise that running umpteen applications at the same time is going to adversely affect performance. I suppose OS 9 got around this issue by simply crashing if you loaded too many apps, thus training users to run fewer but OS X degrades gracefully will stick work even if the harddrive is thrashing to keep up.
Therefore it's likely that in any given period they'll randomly pick a handful of range/offset pairs, compute the checksums and keep asking for those.
So your server load wouldn't necessarily go through the roof. If AOL keeps challenging with this same handful of ranges and offsets then your server can cache the MD5 result for each unique pair and just spew that out the next time it is requested.
So people can look forward to suffering permenant brain damage instead of carpal tunnel syndrome as they flail their heads around trying to move a pointer on the screen?
These guys were gaming gods in the 80s. Lords of Midnight, Elite and Manic Miner were probably the most important games of their time.
What's so compelling about the XBox that someone wishing to buy a console would hangon rather than buy a PS2 right now?
In the meantime AOL is free to block whoever it likes from its service. If you're not a subscriber and you're not using their AIM client, what's in it for them? If Microsoft, Yahoo! and Jabber etc. all gained access it would cost AOL millions.
And does that mean they don't make money from them? Of course they do.