I think it had to do with writing RAM cache to disk, and to allow ultra fast restarts
Maybe on windows, but I don't seem to have a cache file other than the web page one. And closing a single opera window takes a noticable amount of time (especially if opera has been running for a few days). Unlike a real exit this is actually irritating, rather than just curious.
Closing a single pane within a window is fast.
So, I suspect it is a feature of the GUI toolkit they are using wanting to sign off nicely on each resource, and soe kind of caching which means a window which has been around a while is holding on to lots of resources it never uses (and so which get paged out to disk).
Or maybe it's a plot to dissuade me from exiting opera ever.
Applications take longer to load in linux. Mozilla for example, takes longer to load than it did in windows on the same computer.
This is not the OS, but the GUI. Starting a big process on a unix like system should be fast, only linking of shared libraries takes any time at all.
Tie in lots of pointless GUI stuff and suddenly the machine is really working hard. Start NS4 and Mozilla and see the difference made by 3D everything, themes, masses of font libraries etc. From my POV they both do the same thing (look at web pages).
In Windows the pointless GUI stuff has had a lot more work to make it fast and integrate it into the run time environment so that much of that slow stuff is done once as the GUI starts up.
Ok, and unless you go out of your way, windows mozilla doesn't exit when you close it, so next time you run it it `starts' really quickly, so be sure to disable that when making comparisons.
The way to get speed on linux, bsd etc is to avoid Gnome, KDE and all such abominations.
What puzzles me is that Opera under FBSD starts quite fast, but takes _ages_ to close down, thrashing all the time. I get the impression it is swapping all it's memory in just to saya final tearfull farewell.
This goggles thing is a PR stunt. The pirate copies which matter will already be out there, snarfed from review copies etc, on their way to be pressed into pirate DVDs and videoes.
I think small shifts in opening like this are for PR reasons -- they want the stars, director etc to be available for interview for both openings without them having to do it all in one extended day. The longer (months) delays which sometimes result in the UK getting B list US christmass films released in the summer are down to the studioes being tight about making extra copies, if the film won't make that much anyway, they like to save a few dollars. Digital screens are meant to make this much less of an issue.
If you compile everything on your system with a compiler to which you have access to the source code, then you should be able to scrutinize these sources.
No, that is the main point. The compiler is spoofed to put the trapdoor into login/pgp/whatever AND into itself. You don't need to touch the source of either for the trapdoor to stick.
You can't have a compiler you trust, because you have to start at some point with a compiler someone gives you pre-compiled. Why would an intel compiler, which you can't see the source to be more trustworthy than GCC? And in any case, what if they have spoofed the linker not the compiler. Or the run time libraries.
Now, if you are really, really paranoid you can widen your baseline, write a simple compiler for some language in perl, run it under windows95 to compile a better compiler to object code, hand edit that into an executable and move it to your target machine..., but you can't really trust 100%, unless you start with bare metal and toggle your own OS in from scratch. And even then you have to worry about the firmware and hardware.
The main point is that the simple claim that source code availability prevents trapdoors is false. It's one thing which can make the spooks work harder, but it doesn't make you bullet proof.
If I were a bad guy, I'd just assume that the spooks knew everything I did at all times and act accordingly. Everything has to have an obvious, innocent explanation.
However, for this scenario to be effective, a binary-level infection needs to be in place before there's any actual risk.
It's hard to avoid installing your compiler chain as a binary package at some point. Ditto the kernel.
In any case, I suspect most Windoze and Linux users install pgp and it's kin as binary packages, making indirection unecessary except to attack the very careful and BSD folks.
You are working on the assumption that they need to use the evidence in court. Ther are many stages before that at which evidence is useful in an investigation.
All they may acually need is enough to have a case which will give them a warant to search your physical property. Or they may be looking to pick you out from a sea of other suspects as a probable bad guy, at which time they introduce you to the joys of falling down the stairs. Or they may just want to find your associates.
Similarly, if you destroy the key, they can get you for not handing over the key. This may or may not get a conviction, but can be used as suspicious behaviour to get them to the next stage.
You may or may not respond to a non-authenticated message, not all bad guys will make the correct decision every time. IIRC they caught some wanted characters not too long ago by sending you-have-won-X mail to their family/wives. Also it can be used to detect your attitudes: what if you get notice of something criminal happening locally, or a death threat and don't go to the police, why are you avoiding Plod?
As for entrapment, how will you prove they sent it to you? They have a list of your known associates to `make it come from'.
Basicly these powers are as useful as being able to examine your post without opening it, being able to get your phone bill and being able to watch your home. There are all kinds of legitimate and illegitimate uses for such powers.
What's the point of an 'internet wiretap' when anything important to law enforcement is probably encrypted with a key long enough to take years to crack?
Traffic analysis
Archive it until hardware catches up and it takes minutes to crack.
Get a law passed which makes it illegal for you (or your correspondant) to refuse to give up the key.
Make up something you could have sent and use the existance of the tap to give it credability.
Send something to you and watch your response.
Send something to you and use the tap evidence to convict you of posession of it (as in posting kiddie porn or drugs through the snail mail).
Give you a trapdoored PGP.
And no doubt a real spook could think up moany more.
As a SuSE user there is no way in hell would I trust it to a server.
I know this is common wisdom (linux for desktop, bds for servers and firewalls), but I want to suggest another POV.
Once you have it set up and working, linux seems to work. It's only when you try to change something that it comes apart at the seams (literally, where package meets package).
Since servers get less fiddling with than desktops (no one comes along wanting to plug in something bizzare, or install the latest gee-wizzo software), I have far less problem with linux on a server than I would if somene were to try and persuade me to use it as a desktop.
My servers can get rebooted every so often, that just interrupts work for a minute or so. My desktop should run for months, or I lose my emacs context and I HATE that.
I suspect this is my age showing again. I remember when the computer I typed at went down once a year for backups and anything beyond that was sign of a major screw up somewhere.
The true boombox feel would be to run the OS from bootable CDs. You can walk down the street with the box and a case of music and OS CDs, and when you hang about on the corner with your mates have conversations like:
Seen that new XP CD?
Yea, got it here
[click] [clunk] [whirrrr]
Oh, that's crap manufactured stuff, here, stick this in, it's a bootleg HURD CD from an unadvertised release in a small club in Cambridge...
(passer by)
Bloody kids today, why can't they play real software with a file system you can hum along to!
So, if I understand this correctly, the ports for 4.9 are already upgrade to 4.10?
No, the OS and the ports are separate. The OS is all maintained as one chunk, and is what you would upgrade with cvsup (or a binary upgrade from CD). The ports just get new versions when someone somewhere updates something.
Usually most installed ports will continue to work when you upgrade the OS. The FBSD peopel are reasonably conservative about that kind of thing. And the 4.X branch isn't chaging fast at this stage in its life anyway.
where does it say whether you are on 4.9 or 4.10?
$ uname -a
FreeBSD pele.r.caley.org.uk 4.8-STABLE FreeBSD 4.8-STABLE #11: Tue Dec 2 18:34:40 GMT 2003 rjc@bast.r.caley.org.uk:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/Pele i386
It seems to me that he is just saying the music industry has matured. Every other artform related industry works this way.
The people who sell prints of Sunflowers or table mats with The Hay Wain on them are no different form the reocred labels. They sell an unchallenging mass product to people with a mild interest in maybe having something no one can object to. Publishers whi sell airport novels and TV novelisations are doing the same thing. Productions of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals or yet another bloody LaBoheme are doing the same.
Yet there are still people writing books worth reading, still artists, still people putting on new plays etc. etc.
If the recorded music industry has reached the point where the people producing the latest Briteny-a-like or the latest yet-another-emperor-concerto can go off and do what they do best, then that is probably healthy.
If Crossby is so upset about being screwed by the record labels, why isn't he happy that the only people being screwed now are the talentless bimboes?
No, just the core OS and kernel. Basicly what was there when the machine was a clean install, except X.
Obviously, if something in the upgrade were to change something in the OS which Java or Gnome relied upon, but that would be true for any method of upgrading. In any case 9 -> 10 is fairly small from a functionality POV I think.
...rather than it sitting there and compiling stuff.
You are allowed to go and do something else while it compiles this is not Windows!
The basic choice is between waiting for it to download, and getting a generic package which may or may not work with the libraries you have to hand etc (consider RedHat RPM hell) and waiting for it to compile and getting something which should use what you have or get what it needs.
I think that an automated system for installation/upgrading of software packages are a must for desktop installations
Does anyone have recommendations for the best way to upgrade from 4.9 to 4.10?
Cvsup and build from source. The actual time you need to have it out of use can be very small, Eg you can build a custom kernel before starting to do any of the instalation, and it's easy to upgrade multiple machines this way.
Unless they are linking thousands of telescopes, they are getting one *hell* of a lot larger boost in resolution than they are in light-gathering power by linking telescopes.
If this was themlinking the telescopes up for the first time you'd have a pont,
but they already have the resolution, they already to interferrometry on the array. They aren't, so far as I can see, adding extra, further away, telescopes to the array which is what would be needed for better resolution.
If "Cook's Illustrated" used words like 'so burned' to write off every variety of the world's most successful coffee franchise [...]
Mass popularity is down to marketing, not quality. Consider Microsoft. Consider McDonalds. Consider all those mass market beers made with rice and god knows what.
Also consider the sheer volume of beans they get through. Obviously, this is not a `gourmet' product, it's the coffee equivalent of a big mac.
They are not in the business of supplying high quality. Like McDs they are supplying a consistant , more or less acceptable product.
I had wondered why they do such a very dark roast. One would expect a company aiming at a mass market to be middle of the road in matters of taste (eg like blended whisky). The idea that it is to remove any variability (read interest) in the end product does make sense. Same reason crap beer is made very fizzy and served very cold.
If you've got kids, don't put them in public schools - home-school them
So, you want to totally infantalise them by tieing them to their parents?
One of the most important aspects of rites of passage into adulthood in traditional societies is that the child is taken away from their parents and comes back a notional man or woman.
As for `channelling yourthful energies', you make my point. It is their need to have someone else provide a channel which defines them as not yet adult. Take a look at the road accident or violent crime statistics.
Traditionally, societies have needed a steady supply of physically mature, but emotionally undeveloped people. Who else can you get to go and beat up the tribe next door (or abuse people in jails in Iraq, or become suicide bombers).
Unless people start using this as a free remote backup service.
Or slow access disk.
<OldFartMode>
Way back in the day, I went through a period where I had too little disk quota to hold the temporary data I was generating in some experiments.
I used to email large (but non critical) files to myself via several US uucp sites then do the work. In a couple of days the prodigal files would return, by which time I'd have gotten rid of the temporary data.
Of course, `large' in those days was measured in KB, not GB.
</OldFartMode>
A little ingenuity with fetchmail and google has given you a terabyte disk. If they come looking for you with big sticks, I never said this.
In the US I've never seen a Supermarket do this.. just about all of them DO however have banks operating in the building.
It's just brand name building. The bank and the supermarket both win.
The bank is getting their services in front of people every time they are queueing, and people may feel more comfoprtable taking a load from `friendly' Tesco than from a percieved to be cold and distant financial organisation.
The supermarket gets a cut of the profits and also to look like a far more important organisation. I suspect there are also loyalty card like features to the credit cards, I've never looked into the details far enough to see.
The supermarket itself generally only does paycheck cashing from local buisnesses up to a realitively low dollar value.
So far as I know none of the mainstream UK supermarkets do any kind of over-the-counter banking operations. I think all the banking stuff is by mail/web etc. The only thing which shows in the shop is racks of leaflets.
The Co-Op on the other hand do run a real bank, and have for a long long time, and where I grew up the local Co-Op did have a banking counter. IIRC my parents mortgage was under a scheme run by the local council and the Co-Op bank.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe on windows, but I don't seem to have a cache file other than the web page one. And closing a single opera window takes a noticable amount of time (especially if opera has been running for a few days). Unlike a real exit this is actually irritating, rather than just curious.
Closing a single pane within a window is fast.
So, I suspect it is a feature of the GUI toolkit they are using wanting to sign off nicely on each resource, and soe kind of caching which means a window which has been around a while is holding on to lots of resources it never uses (and so which get paged out to disk).
Or maybe it's a plot to dissuade me from exiting opera ever.
This is not the OS, but the GUI. Starting a big process on a unix like system should be fast, only linking of shared libraries takes any time at all.
Tie in lots of pointless GUI stuff and suddenly the machine is really working hard. Start NS4 and Mozilla and see the difference made by 3D everything, themes, masses of font libraries etc. From my POV they both do the same thing (look at web pages).
In Windows the pointless GUI stuff has had a lot more work to make it fast and integrate it into the run time environment so that much of that slow stuff is done once as the GUI starts up.
Ok, and unless you go out of your way, windows mozilla doesn't exit when you close it, so next time you run it it `starts' really quickly, so be sure to disable that when making comparisons.
The way to get speed on linux, bsd etc is to avoid Gnome, KDE and all such abominations.
What puzzles me is that Opera under FBSD starts quite fast, but takes _ages_ to close down, thrashing all the time. I get the impression it is swapping all it's memory in just to saya final tearfull farewell.
This goggles thing is a PR stunt. The pirate copies which matter will already be out there, snarfed from review copies etc, on their way to be pressed into pirate DVDs and videoes.
I think small shifts in opening like this are for PR reasons -- they want the stars, director etc to be available for interview for both openings without them having to do it all in one extended day. The longer (months) delays which sometimes result in the UK getting B list US christmass films released in the summer are down to the studioes being tight about making extra copies, if the film won't make that much anyway, they like to save a few dollars. Digital screens are meant to make this much less of an issue.
No, that is the main point. The compiler is spoofed to put the trapdoor into login/pgp/whatever AND into itself. You don't need to touch the source of either for the trapdoor to stick.
You can't have a compiler you trust, because you have to start at some point with a compiler someone gives you pre-compiled. Why would an intel compiler, which you can't see the source to be more trustworthy than GCC? And in any case, what if they have spoofed the linker not the compiler. Or the run time libraries.
Now, if you are really, really paranoid you can widen your baseline, write a simple compiler for some language in perl, run it under windows95 to compile a better compiler to object code, hand edit that into an executable and move it to your target machine..., but you can't really trust 100%, unless you start with bare metal and toggle your own OS in from scratch. And even then you have to worry about the firmware and hardware.
The main point is that the simple claim that source code availability prevents trapdoors is false. It's one thing which can make the spooks work harder, but it doesn't make you bullet proof.
If I were a bad guy, I'd just assume that the spooks knew everything I did at all times and act accordingly. Everything has to have an obvious, innocent explanation.
It's hard to avoid installing your compiler chain as a binary package at some point. Ditto the kernel.
In any case, I suspect most Windoze and Linux users install pgp and it's kin as binary packages, making indirection unecessary except to attack the very careful and BSD folks.
All they may acually need is enough to have a case which will give them a warant to search your physical property. Or they may be looking to pick you out from a sea of other suspects as a probable bad guy, at which time they introduce you to the joys of falling down the stairs. Or they may just want to find your associates.
Similarly, if you destroy the key, they can get you for not handing over the key. This may or may not get a conviction, but can be used as suspicious behaviour to get them to the next stage.
You may or may not respond to a non-authenticated message, not all bad guys will make the correct decision every time. IIRC they caught some wanted characters not too long ago by sending you-have-won-X mail to their family/wives. Also it can be used to detect your attitudes: what if you get notice of something criminal happening locally, or a death threat and don't go to the police, why are you avoiding Plod?
As for entrapment, how will you prove they sent it to you? They have a list of your known associates to `make it come from'.
Basicly these powers are as useful as being able to examine your post without opening it, being able to get your phone bill and being able to watch your home. There are all kinds of legitimate and illegitimate uses for such powers.
And no doubt a real spook could think up moany more.
Have you read the Ken Thompson's classic paper on putting trapdoors into open source systems?
I know this is common wisdom (linux for desktop, bds for servers and firewalls), but I want to suggest another POV.
Once you have it set up and working, linux seems to work. It's only when you try to change something that it comes apart at the seams (literally, where package meets package).
Since servers get less fiddling with than desktops (no one comes along wanting to plug in something bizzare, or install the latest gee-wizzo software), I have far less problem with linux on a server than I would if somene were to try and persuade me to use it as a desktop.
My servers can get rebooted every so often, that just interrupts work for a minute or so. My desktop should run for months, or I lose my emacs context and I HATE that.
I suspect this is my age showing again. I remember when the computer I typed at went down once a year for backups and anything beyond that was sign of a major screw up somewhere.
No, the OS and the ports are separate. The OS is all maintained as one chunk, and is what you would upgrade with cvsup (or a binary upgrade from CD). The ports just get new versions when someone somewhere updates something.
Usually most installed ports will continue to work when you upgrade the OS. The FBSD peopel are reasonably conservative about that kind of thing. And the 4.X branch isn't chaging fast at this stage in its life anyway.
where does it say whether you are on 4.9 or 4.10?
But he's saying that the businessman have left music alone and gone off to produce Justin Timberlake.
The people who sell prints of Sunflowers or table mats with The Hay Wain on them are no different form the reocred labels. They sell an unchallenging mass product to people with a mild interest in maybe having something no one can object to. Publishers whi sell airport novels and TV novelisations are doing the same thing. Productions of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals or yet another bloody LaBoheme are doing the same.
Yet there are still people writing books worth reading, still artists, still people putting on new plays etc. etc.
If the recorded music industry has reached the point where the people producing the latest Briteny-a-like or the latest yet-another-emperor-concerto can go off and do what they do best, then that is probably healthy.
If Crossby is so upset about being screwed by the record labels, why isn't he happy that the only people being screwed now are the talentless bimboes?
Oh my god, like, back to the 70s man!!!!
You should be a recod executive with that kind of wish for the distant past.
No, just the core OS and kernel. Basicly what was there when the machine was a clean install, except X.
Obviously, if something in the upgrade were to change something in the OS which Java or Gnome relied upon, but that would be true for any method of upgrading. In any case 9 -> 10 is fairly small from a functionality POV I think.
Redhat, at least, does this, I know because one of our client's machines got this behaviour when it was upgraded.
It is also evil beyond belief and whoever thought of it should be lynched, but that is a religious issue.
You are allowed to go and do something else while it compiles this is not Windows!
The basic choice is between waiting for it to download, and getting a generic package which may or may not work with the libraries you have to hand etc (consider RedHat RPM hell) and waiting for it to compile and getting something which should use what you have or get what it needs.
I think that an automated system for installation/upgrading of software packages are a must for desktop installations
Then close that window and get on with some work.
Cvsup and build from source. The actual time you need to have it out of use can be very small, Eg you can build a custom kernel before starting to do any of the instalation, and it's easy to upgrade multiple machines this way.
If this was themlinking the telescopes up for the first time you'd have a pont, but they already have the resolution, they already to interferrometry on the array. They aren't, so far as I can see, adding extra, further away, telescopes to the array which is what would be needed for better resolution.
The artists agreed to letting the labels make that decision, so same difference.
Mass popularity is down to marketing, not quality. Consider Microsoft. Consider McDonalds. Consider all those mass market beers made with rice and god knows what.
Also consider the sheer volume of beans they get through. Obviously, this is not a `gourmet' product, it's the coffee equivalent of a big mac.
They are not in the business of supplying high quality. Like McDs they are supplying a consistant , more or less acceptable product.
I had wondered why they do such a very dark roast. One would expect a company aiming at a mass market to be middle of the road in matters of taste (eg like blended whisky). The idea that it is to remove any variability (read interest) in the end product does make sense. Same reason crap beer is made very fizzy and served very cold.
I was a student, what I was doing wasn't relted to my work and disk was very tight on that machine at that time.
So, you want to totally infantalise them by tieing them to their parents?
One of the most important aspects of rites of passage into adulthood in traditional societies is that the child is taken away from their parents and comes back a notional man or woman.
As for `channelling yourthful energies', you make my point. It is their need to have someone else provide a channel which defines them as not yet adult. Take a look at the road accident or violent crime statistics.
Traditionally, societies have needed a steady supply of physically mature, but emotionally undeveloped people. Who else can you get to go and beat up the tribe next door (or abuse people in jails in Iraq, or become suicide bombers).
Or slow access disk.
<OldFartMode>
Way back in the day, I went through a period where I had too little disk quota to hold the temporary data I was generating in some experiments.
I used to email large (but non critical) files to myself via several US uucp sites then do the work. In a couple of days the prodigal files would return, by which time I'd have gotten rid of the temporary data.
Of course, `large' in those days was measured in KB, not GB.
</OldFartMode>
A little ingenuity with fetchmail and google has given you a terabyte disk. If they come looking for you with big sticks, I never said this.
It's just brand name building. The bank and the supermarket both win.
The bank is getting their services in front of people every time they are queueing, and people may feel more comfoprtable taking a load from `friendly' Tesco than from a percieved to be cold and distant financial organisation.
The supermarket gets a cut of the profits and also to look like a far more important organisation. I suspect there are also loyalty card like features to the credit cards, I've never looked into the details far enough to see.
The supermarket itself generally only does paycheck cashing from local buisnesses up to a realitively low dollar value.
So far as I know none of the mainstream UK supermarkets do any kind of over-the-counter banking operations. I think all the banking stuff is by mail/web etc. The only thing which shows in the shop is racks of leaflets.
The Co-Op on the other hand do run a real bank, and have for a long long time, and where I grew up the local Co-Op did have a banking counter. IIRC my parents mortgage was under a scheme run by the local council and the Co-Op bank.