You just remap Ctrl over Capslock and be done with it And then be messed up whenever you try to use any other machine but your own, as well as adding unnecessary difficulty for anyone else who tries to use your computer and who isn't as obsessed as you with preserving minor historical relics of keyboard design.
(Plus, if I mapped Ctrl to Capslock, I'd have to find somewhere else to map Compose.)
Just take the time to learn vi; then you won't need to use Ctrl anywhere near as often!:)
Yes, I probably could learn the intricacies of CPU branch-prediction and pipelining well enough to understand the timing of my programs as well as I did when CPU instruction timing was a simple matter of adding cycles, but by the time I accomplished that, the machine I understood would probably be obsolete and replaced with a new machine with enough subtle differences to render my previous knowledge all-but useless.
As computers have grown more complex, not only has the difficulty of understanding the various elements grown, but the benefit of understanding any given element has shrunk. Unless you're seriously obsessive-compulsive (or a masochist), I think the rewards of taking an increasingly higher-level black-box view of your system is a net win. Remember, for programmers, "lazy" is often a virtue, not a vice!
In biology, evolution doesn't mean changes for the better, but the biological term was borrowed from an older English word which generally did mean changes for the better.
The biologically equivalent concept is "more fit", but even that is subject to heavy misinterpretation. I'd go on about the details of the misinterpretation (e.g. apex predators like wolves and tigers are generally far less fit than insects or grasses), but that's getting off-topic. My main point is still that evolution (or even the neologism "de-evolution") is an accurate term in this context despite the now-widespread association of the term with biology. My dictionary still lists the non-biological meaning of "evolution" first.
Any interface I cannot grep through and trivially script is a step backwards.
You don't understand! Actual experts have proclaimed that point-and-grunt...er, pardon me, point-and-click is far more empowering than any form of communication using language! After all, chimpanzees can point and grunt, so clearly its a superior interface for humans as well. Sorry, I meant point and click again.
You're not going to argue with actual experts, are you? I mean, are you some kind of Luddite who wants us to return to the primitive ways of our ancestors? (Or is it the UI experts and Human Interface Guidelines that want that? I get a bit confused sometimes.)
I don't know about you, but my search box on Firefox has about a dozen different options--Google is the first, but I can also directly search Wikipedia, IMBD, the Internet Archive, the Debian package repository, Youtube, Allmusic, Yahoo, Amazon, Creative Commons, Facebook, Netflix, etc., all without going to Google or using the URL bar. As it happens, these are all implemented by transforming the text I enter into the search bar into a URL. I could make a null option that didn't do any transformation at all, and the result would be pretty much the same as I have now with two text entry fields, except I'd only need one.
The complaints about how this would make it harder to detect phishing are legitimate: if you have to push extra keys to see what site you actually ended up on, it does indeed make you a little more vulnerable to phishing (although I suspect most people don't know how to detect this even if the URL is plainly visible), but the idea that this forces all web access to go through Google is simply incorrect.
Let me guess: you live alone. I won't speculate on whether your parents might live upstairs in the actual house.:)
I have to ask: do you also use your computer as your TV, or do you have your TV's audio running to your computer, or do you simply use your TV's built-in audio? Whichever it might be, I assure you that there are people who will not find that a satisfactory solution.
I actually disagree with both you and the person you were responding to. There has always been a market for both integrated and modular components, and I don't see that changing any time soon. Integrated stereo dates back to at least the sixties, but modular stereo equipment is still widely available and popular. The exact details will vary--turntables, which were a key element of the first integrated systems, have become such a small and specialized market that they are almost exclusively modular these days--but the market will continue to have both those who want a simple one-size-fits-all solution (like your computer) and those who want to pick-and-choose high quality equipment and not be forced to replace everything when the opportunity comes to upgrade or add a new component. (Like me with a networked computer as just one of the devices plugged into our amplifier.)
As for the original topic--streaming media players--my feeling is that many are currently overspecialized and too prone to obsolescence, as online services appear and disappear. But the general idea of having a standalone computer as an essential component of a modular media center (for those who prefer modular) will remain.
Seriously, though, I have to offer kudos to MS for this, but I still can't help thinking that it's a trap of some sort, given MS's long and sordid history of misdeeds and betrayal. But this is a move I can applaud, even as I eye it with caution (and a rather severe lack of personal interest).
All assuming its true, which seems to be less than certain at this point.
Did I say anything about Pluto? Did I even begin to suggest that Pluto or other Kuiper belt objects should be a planet? No, I mentioned Mercury, Jupiter and Ceres. Period!
Saying "we have eight" is stupid no matter how you view Pluto, because it ignores Ceres. The only correct thing the IAU did was reclassify Ceres, but they did a half-assed job of that! Is there really any sensible reason to classify Ceres with those tens of thousands of Kuiper belt objects, rather than putting it in the same category as its close cousin Mercury?
On the other hand, I have no idea why you think "the solar system has tens of thousands of planets" is idiotic if it falls out from a more sensible definition of planet, even though that's not the position I'm arguing. Would you call classifying birds (Aves) in the category-formerly-known-as-lizards idiotic? Classifying quarks as elementary objects, even though it means the proton and neutron no longer meet that definition? Science marches on, dude!
Thinking the current definition of planet is stupid is not the same thing as being confused about it. I agree that Pluto and Eris are a different class of object from the traditional planets (you notice I didn't mention Pluto in my complaint), but we already have two very different classes of object covered by the classical term (gas giants and rocky planets). The insistence that dwarf planets aren't "really" planets makes about as much sense to me as adding "has hair" to the definition of mammal, and then insisting that naked mole rats aren't "really" mammals, but instead fall into a separate category of "hairless mammals", which is not (for some unfathomable reason) a subset of mammal.
The IAU went to all the trouble of reclassifying Ceres (long overdue in my opinion), but they didn't take the sensible approach of putting it in the same category as Mercury, which it strongly resembles. Instead, they left Mercury lumped in with the very different Jupiter, and put Ceres in the same class as the very different Pluto and Eris. That's just stupid!
Note that we still haven't (technically) discovered any planets that we know of outside of our own system, because the ridiculous current definition of planet makes it impossible to determine for sure whether an exoplanet (even a Jovian one) has cleaned its neighborhood. Its entirely possible that there are Jovian objects or even sub-brown dwarves that will have to be classified as "dwarf planets". Again, insanely stupid, IMO.
I won't even get into the question of why Luna and Ganymede shouldn't be classified as planets (while still being classified as moons), though I think they should be.
Bottom line, the IAU hijacked a common English term and gave it a bizarre, counter-intuitive, and illogical definition for obscure reasons that smell strongly of internal politics. I mean, I understand that the IAU may have been sick and tired of arguing about nomenclature, and were actively looking for a compromise position, but the compromise they (or at least, some subset large enough to form a quorum) chose sounds more like a joke proposal someone came up with after too many post-session drinks, rather than anything anyone should have ever taken seriously.
There's a decent chance that the box that's actually trying to connect is already pwned by the person making the login attempt. Retribution against the (owner of the) box is likely to be retribution against a fellow victim. At least—I dunno about ftp—I use ssh with hosts.allow/deny to control access, which does a reverse DNS lookup so I get the host names of attackers in my logs, and a high percentage of them look like small mail servers and the like, so I'm pretty sure they're already pwned. Maybe ftp has a different set of attackers than ssh, but I'd want to verify that before blindly handing out retribution.
Speaking of ssh, I have to wonder why the original poster isn't using sftp? It sounds like it would be a perfect fit for his needs.
You still left out one additional requirement. They not only have to like them, but also have to like them enough to pay eight to ten times as much as the Netflix subscription for the privilege. But given all that, then yeah, we're in agreement.
Note, I'm assuming your comment is still addressed to the original poster, since I never said anything about what I watch or what technologies I use to do so.:)
Tch, they're not really planets, right? I mean, if they're not orbiting a star, then they can't have "cleared the neighborhood of their orbit". Yet one more reason the IAU's current definition is so idiotic. (Besides the fact that it suggests that Mercury is more like Jupiter than it is like Ceres.)
Interesting. My guess is that it must have to do with the difficulty of the mapping from fs to physical disk sectors by the installer app rather than any limitation of the LILO boot loader itself, but I admit to less-than-complete expertise in this area.
What does any of that have to do with the gross overgeneralization I was responding to? Yes, not everyone who cares about sports is going to be willing to give up cable, but some are, for exactly the reasons you listed, so cable is not a requirement for everyone who cares about sports and news. Period, end statement.
I get can have a machine spend years without needing a SINGLE line of CLI, ever. Can YOU do that?
My brother's logged over two years running Ubuntu without ever going near the shell, so, yes. Nor, before you ask, have I been forced to come over and do CLI-based maintenance for him. He did the whole thing, from installation on, by himself with no CLI involved at any point.
Remove ALL shells.
And it won't boot--init runs shell scripts (as does cron). But that's different from the user not running a CLI. On any vaguely modern Linux, the user is "forced" to use the CLI about as often as a windows user is "forced" to use regedit, but, unlike regedit, the CLI is actually useful, fast, and efficient if you do decide to learn to use it.
I would have thought that it would have been possible using LILO for about as long as btrfs has been available, since LILO doesn't read the filesystem and needs a list of physical disk sectors. (Hence the PITA flaw of needing to rerun the installer app, lilo(8), every time you updated your kernel.)
Both radio hams and Hollywood hams bear children on a regular basis.
Granted, it was almost certainly the letter, not the writer, that came from a ham, but if you were to believe that the word "ham" could only refer to pork, the idea of a ham writing a letter would be just as confusing to you as the idea of a ham having a child.
The mere $9 a month I pay (and that's ALL I pay for TV since I cancelled my cable)
Let me guess: You don't live with people who like to watch live news or live sports.
Let me guess. You're unaware that news and sports are frequently broadcast over the air, or you're unaware that over-the-air broadcasts are free of charge, or you're unaware that some people live in large cities with a wide variety of free over-the-air channels to choose from.
If the issue is obscenity laws, they should be going after the Japanese cartoon porn, rather than a whole category of homoerotic fiction of which only a moderate percentage is porn.
They stand to lose a lot more money from that than a few dozen pedos
If the issue is "pedos", then they should be going after child porn, rather than a whole category of homoerotic fiction of which only a moderate percentage is about children, only a moderate percentage is porn, and only the even-smaller overlap of those two categories can be called child porn. But worst of all, only a small percentage of Japanese cartoon kiddie porn is Yaoi, so if their excuse is really that they're trying to protect themselves, they're failing completely!
I can think of no excuse for banning Yaoi as a category except sheer, unvarnished, homophobia. All this BS about obscenity and child porn is clearly just that: pure BS.
As someone else mentioned, they might as well ban Twilight, which, tempting a thought as it is, certainly doesn't further the agenda of trying to protect themselves against any sort of legal action.
I think it means a whole lot more than you think it does. Even perfectly legal activities like plagiarizing public domain works are called "stealing" in English. The authors of Forbidden Planet stole liberally from Shakespeare.
I understand and even agree with the point you were trying to make--I just wish you'd find a less incorrect way of making it, because it actually undermines your point when your arguments are blatantly wrong.
You prefer the more usual Slashdot practice of linking to some random guy's blog where he misquotes two sentences from a site like IT World, and then uses his misinterpretation of those to spin some elaborate paranoid fantasy about how Google is planning to embed chips in our brains to beam us advertising 24/7?
VTs 1-6 all have login screens on Debian and RH. (Not sure about the others.) A login prompt won't really help you that much--not like having a nice, already-logged-in console session with startx sitting in the foreground.
Yes you can, but killing X is not the way you do it. Shutting down the *DM and then reconfiguring is the way you do it. Or, since you're not using it, simply remove the package—it's definitely not going to restart if its not there!
I still prefer text mode and typing startx command to start my X
We used to love people like you at work, since we could simply switch to the login VT, press ctrl-Z, mess with their system as much as we wanted, neatly passing any xlock protection, then type "cls; fg" when we were done. We had several people convinced that their machines were haunted, since "linux is secure".:)
Slashdot Mirror
You just remap Ctrl over Capslock and be done with it
And then be messed up whenever you try to use any other machine but your own, as well as adding unnecessary difficulty for anyone else who tries to use your computer and who isn't as obsessed as you with preserving minor historical relics of keyboard design.
(Plus, if I mapped Ctrl to Capslock, I'd have to find somewhere else to map Compose.)
Just take the time to learn vi; then you won't need to use Ctrl anywhere near as often! :)
Yes, I probably could learn the intricacies of CPU branch-prediction and pipelining well enough to understand the timing of my programs as well as I did when CPU instruction timing was a simple matter of adding cycles, but by the time I accomplished that, the machine I understood would probably be obsolete and replaced with a new machine with enough subtle differences to render my previous knowledge all-but useless.
As computers have grown more complex, not only has the difficulty of understanding the various elements grown, but the benefit of understanding any given element has shrunk. Unless you're seriously obsessive-compulsive (or a masochist), I think the rewards of taking an increasingly higher-level black-box view of your system is a net win. Remember, for programmers, "lazy" is often a virtue, not a vice!
evolution doesn't mean changes for the better.
In biology, evolution doesn't mean changes for the better, but the biological term was borrowed from an older English word which generally did mean changes for the better.
The biologically equivalent concept is "more fit", but even that is subject to heavy misinterpretation. I'd go on about the details of the misinterpretation (e.g. apex predators like wolves and tigers are generally far less fit than insects or grasses), but that's getting off-topic. My main point is still that evolution (or even the neologism "de-evolution") is an accurate term in this context despite the now-widespread association of the term with biology. My dictionary still lists the non-biological meaning of "evolution" first.
Any interface I cannot grep through and trivially script is a step backwards.
You don't understand! Actual experts have proclaimed that point-and-grunt...er, pardon me, point-and-click is far more empowering than any form of communication using language! After all, chimpanzees can point and grunt, so clearly its a superior interface for humans as well. Sorry, I meant point and click again.
You're not going to argue with actual experts, are you? I mean, are you some kind of Luddite who wants us to return to the primitive ways of our ancestors? (Or is it the UI experts and Human Interface Guidelines that want that? I get a bit confused sometimes.)
I don't know about you, but my search box on Firefox has about a dozen different options--Google is the first, but I can also directly search Wikipedia, IMBD, the Internet Archive, the Debian package repository, Youtube, Allmusic, Yahoo, Amazon, Creative Commons, Facebook, Netflix, etc., all without going to Google or using the URL bar. As it happens, these are all implemented by transforming the text I enter into the search bar into a URL. I could make a null option that didn't do any transformation at all, and the result would be pretty much the same as I have now with two text entry fields, except I'd only need one.
The complaints about how this would make it harder to detect phishing are legitimate: if you have to push extra keys to see what site you actually ended up on, it does indeed make you a little more vulnerable to phishing (although I suspect most people don't know how to detect this even if the URL is plainly visible), but the idea that this forces all web access to go through Google is simply incorrect.
Let me guess: you live alone. I won't speculate on whether your parents might live upstairs in the actual house. :)
I have to ask: do you also use your computer as your TV, or do you have your TV's audio running to your computer, or do you simply use your TV's built-in audio? Whichever it might be, I assure you that there are people who will not find that a satisfactory solution.
I actually disagree with both you and the person you were responding to. There has always been a market for both integrated and modular components, and I don't see that changing any time soon. Integrated stereo dates back to at least the sixties, but modular stereo equipment is still widely available and popular. The exact details will vary--turntables, which were a key element of the first integrated systems, have become such a small and specialized market that they are almost exclusively modular these days--but the market will continue to have both those who want a simple one-size-fits-all solution (like your computer) and those who want to pick-and-choose high quality equipment and not be forced to replace everything when the opportunity comes to upgrade or add a new component. (Like me with a networked computer as just one of the devices plugged into our amplifier.)
As for the original topic--streaming media players--my feeling is that many are currently overspecialized and too prone to obsolescence, as online services appear and disappear. But the general idea of having a standalone computer as an essential component of a modular media center (for those who prefer modular) will remain.
I plan to do the same sorts of things I did the dozen or so times the Rapture occurred.
And nothing of value was gained! :)
Seriously, though, I have to offer kudos to MS for this, but I still can't help thinking that it's a trap of some sort, given MS's long and sordid history of misdeeds and betrayal. But this is a move I can applaud, even as I eye it with caution (and a rather severe lack of personal interest).
All assuming its true, which seems to be less than certain at this point.
Did I say anything about Pluto? Did I even begin to suggest that Pluto or other Kuiper belt objects should be a planet? No, I mentioned Mercury, Jupiter and Ceres. Period!
Saying "we have eight" is stupid no matter how you view Pluto, because it ignores Ceres. The only correct thing the IAU did was reclassify Ceres, but they did a half-assed job of that! Is there really any sensible reason to classify Ceres with those tens of thousands of Kuiper belt objects, rather than putting it in the same category as its close cousin Mercury?
On the other hand, I have no idea why you think "the solar system has tens of thousands of planets" is idiotic if it falls out from a more sensible definition of planet, even though that's not the position I'm arguing. Would you call classifying birds (Aves) in the category-formerly-known-as-lizards idiotic? Classifying quarks as elementary objects, even though it means the proton and neutron no longer meet that definition? Science marches on, dude!
Thinking the current definition of planet is stupid is not the same thing as being confused about it. I agree that Pluto and Eris are a different class of object from the traditional planets (you notice I didn't mention Pluto in my complaint), but we already have two very different classes of object covered by the classical term (gas giants and rocky planets). The insistence that dwarf planets aren't "really" planets makes about as much sense to me as adding "has hair" to the definition of mammal, and then insisting that naked mole rats aren't "really" mammals, but instead fall into a separate category of "hairless mammals", which is not (for some unfathomable reason) a subset of mammal.
The IAU went to all the trouble of reclassifying Ceres (long overdue in my opinion), but they didn't take the sensible approach of putting it in the same category as Mercury, which it strongly resembles. Instead, they left Mercury lumped in with the very different Jupiter, and put Ceres in the same class as the very different Pluto and Eris. That's just stupid!
Note that we still haven't (technically) discovered any planets that we know of outside of our own system, because the ridiculous current definition of planet makes it impossible to determine for sure whether an exoplanet (even a Jovian one) has cleaned its neighborhood. Its entirely possible that there are Jovian objects or even sub-brown dwarves that will have to be classified as "dwarf planets". Again, insanely stupid, IMO.
I won't even get into the question of why Luna and Ganymede shouldn't be classified as planets (while still being classified as moons), though I think they should be.
Bottom line, the IAU hijacked a common English term and gave it a bizarre, counter-intuitive, and illogical definition for obscure reasons that smell strongly of internal politics. I mean, I understand that the IAU may have been sick and tired of arguing about nomenclature, and were actively looking for a compromise position, but the compromise they (or at least, some subset large enough to form a quorum) chose sounds more like a joke proposal someone came up with after too many post-session drinks, rather than anything anyone should have ever taken seriously.
You can pwn their box...
There's a decent chance that the box that's actually trying to connect is already pwned by the person making the login attempt. Retribution against the (owner of the) box is likely to be retribution against a fellow victim. At least—I dunno about ftp—I use ssh with hosts.allow/deny to control access, which does a reverse DNS lookup so I get the host names of attackers in my logs, and a high percentage of them look like small mail servers and the like, so I'm pretty sure they're already pwned. Maybe ftp has a different set of attackers than ssh, but I'd want to verify that before blindly handing out retribution.
Speaking of ssh, I have to wonder why the original poster isn't using sftp? It sounds like it would be a perfect fit for his needs.
You still left out one additional requirement. They not only have to like them, but also have to like them enough to pay eight to ten times as much as the Netflix subscription for the privilege. But given all that, then yeah, we're in agreement.
Note, I'm assuming your comment is still addressed to the original poster, since I never said anything about what I watch or what technologies I use to do so. :)
Tch, they're not really planets, right? I mean, if they're not orbiting a star, then they can't have "cleared the neighborhood of their orbit". Yet one more reason the IAU's current definition is so idiotic. (Besides the fact that it suggests that Mercury is more like Jupiter than it is like Ceres.)
Interesting. My guess is that it must have to do with the difficulty of the mapping from fs to physical disk sectors by the installer app rather than any limitation of the LILO boot loader itself, but I admit to less-than-complete expertise in this area.
What does any of that have to do with the gross overgeneralization I was responding to? Yes, not everyone who cares about sports is going to be willing to give up cable, but some are, for exactly the reasons you listed, so cable is not a requirement for everyone who cares about sports and news. Period, end statement.
I get can have a machine spend years without needing a SINGLE line of CLI, ever. Can YOU do that?
My brother's logged over two years running Ubuntu without ever going near the shell, so, yes. Nor, before you ask, have I been forced to come over and do CLI-based maintenance for him. He did the whole thing, from installation on, by himself with no CLI involved at any point.
Remove ALL shells.
And it won't boot--init runs shell scripts (as does cron). But that's different from the user not running a CLI. On any vaguely modern Linux, the user is "forced" to use the CLI about as often as a windows user is "forced" to use regedit, but, unlike regedit, the CLI is actually useful, fast, and efficient if you do decide to learn to use it.
I would have thought that it would have been possible using LILO for about as long as btrfs has been available, since LILO doesn't read the filesystem and needs a list of physical disk sectors. (Hence the PITA flaw of needing to rerun the installer app, lilo(8), every time you updated your kernel.)
Both radio hams and Hollywood hams bear children on a regular basis.
Granted, it was almost certainly the letter, not the writer, that came from a ham, but if you were to believe that the word "ham" could only refer to pork, the idea of a ham writing a letter would be just as confusing to you as the idea of a ham having a child.
The mere $9 a month I pay (and that's ALL I pay for TV since I cancelled my cable)
Let me guess: You don't live with people who like to watch live news or live sports.
Let me guess. You're unaware that news and sports are frequently broadcast over the air, or you're unaware that over-the-air broadcasts are free of charge, or you're unaware that some people live in large cities with a wide variety of free over-the-air channels to choose from.
Ever heard of obscenity laws?
If the issue is obscenity laws, they should be going after the Japanese cartoon porn, rather than a whole category of homoerotic fiction of which only a moderate percentage is porn.
They stand to lose a lot more money from that than a few dozen pedos
If the issue is "pedos", then they should be going after child porn, rather than a whole category of homoerotic fiction of which only a moderate percentage is about children, only a moderate percentage is porn, and only the even-smaller overlap of those two categories can be called child porn. But worst of all, only a small percentage of Japanese cartoon kiddie porn is Yaoi, so if their excuse is really that they're trying to protect themselves, they're failing completely!
I can think of no excuse for banning Yaoi as a category except sheer, unvarnished, homophobia. All this BS about obscenity and child porn is clearly just that: pure BS.
As someone else mentioned, they might as well ban Twilight, which, tempting a thought as it is, certainly doesn't further the agenda of trying to protect themselves against any sort of legal action.
I think it means a whole lot more than you think it does. Even perfectly legal activities like plagiarizing public domain works are called "stealing" in English. The authors of Forbidden Planet stole liberally from Shakespeare.
I understand and even agree with the point you were trying to make--I just wish you'd find a less incorrect way of making it, because it actually undermines your point when your arguments are blatantly wrong.
You prefer the more usual Slashdot practice of linking to some random guy's blog where he misquotes two sentences from a site like IT World, and then uses his misinterpretation of those to spin some elaborate paranoid fantasy about how Google is planning to embed chips in our brains to beam us advertising 24/7?
VTs 1-6 all have login screens on Debian and RH. (Not sure about the others.) A login prompt won't really help you that much--not like having a nice, already-logged-in console session with startx sitting in the foreground.
Yes you can, but killing X is not the way you do it. Shutting down the *DM and then reconfiguring is the way you do it. Or, since you're not using it, simply remove the package—it's definitely not going to restart if its not there!
I still prefer text mode and typing startx command to start my X
We used to love people like you at work, since we could simply switch to the login VT, press ctrl-Z, mess with their system as much as we wanted, neatly passing any xlock protection, then type "cls; fg" when we were done. We had several people convinced that their machines were haunted, since "linux is secure". :)