It might actually bring back some truth to the consumer. 686-Mobile/2.2GHz vs 686/3GHz vs 4c868/1.8Ghz
No, what it'll do is bring-back the MHz myth, in full-force.
Gee, Intel has this 4Ghz CPU, and AMD has this 3GHz CPU for a bit less, and VIA has this 2.5GHz CPU for half the price...
Buy VIA CPU... Go home and spend the next two years wondering why the hell your computer is ridiculously slow, and pondering the meaning of MHz myth.
IMHO, AMD is the only one making even the slightest attempt at an honest rating. Intel doesn't WANT their customers to be be able to tell how fast one CPU is versus another. VIA wants to keep the MHz myth going as long as they can (as do ARM/MIPS/etc. suppliers).
He will think the new names are less confusing, because they make sense to him. And he says it will make things less confusing for customers, because he projects his own feeling onto his customers. And perhaps the new names really are a little less confusing. But in reality it will make things more confusing, because of the name change.
And we'll all have to read posts like yours, which make things more confusing...
The parent company of Lindows purchased the rights to the codecs' IP already, so it's really a matter of taking them and working the licenses into Ubuntu or a similar, more popular distro.
Bah! Lindows purchased a bunch of closed-source codecs for formats which have been reversed engineered in serveral Open Source projects already.
Just use libavcodec, pay the $5 to the MPEGIP, and be on your way. The code is still completely free, and you're legal in the US.
There are only two reasons to go non-free. 1) If the codec is proprietary and the licensor demands closed source. 2) If you want to play DRMed files...
In the first case, dammed near everything (MPEG-2, Divx/MPEG-4, AVC/h.264, WMV/VC-1) is an open standard now, and you are not subject to the patent-holder's whims. In the other cases, well, RealNetworks has long provided a binary-only player for Linux. On2 owns VP6 outright (for Flash v7+ Videos) but they are extremely open-source friendly, so I don't see a problem.
In the second case, I've been extremely happy to go without DRM for many, many years. In most cases, DRM is vendor-specific anyhow, and there's nothing you can do. You'll just simply have to wait for them to create a Linux binary of their player (when they see the profit).
None of the current hunting around on forums for instructions that come with a lot of "wink, wink, nudge, nudge, informational-purposes-only" disclaimers.
No idea what you're talking about. Install MPlayer, and you're set. They're outside the US, so it's 100% open and legal.
Linux *will* cost at least some money for retailers if they want customers to really take it seriously since they'll need to pay royalties to the owners of formats like mp3 etc,
Really? Until perhaps 2000, Windows didn't come with MP3 support. To this day, it still doesn't come with AAC support, and WMA is a joke.
Windows doesn't include popular video codecs, either. Divx/MPEG-4 is everywhere, but NOT included with Windows... Everyone's still forced to download the codec from Divx.com... And, you guessed it, they provide a Linux version as well.
So, nobody is going to take Linux seriously, because it requires a couple clicks in Synaptic to install every audio and video codec you could ever want (MPlayer/libavcodec). But everyone takes Windows seriously, because it forces you to trawl the web to find every single individual video and audio codec you want to use...
I can see you're right. Linux* is going in the wrong direction... It should be MORE Windows-like, and make multimedia encoding and playback infinitely more difficult.
And as for MP3s... The patent expires in a couple years, and the point becomes moot (see: GIFs).
* (Disclaimer: I'm actually a FreeBSDer... Long live Slackware)
As hardware prices fall, OEMs simply up the specs of their base systems so that they maintain their profit sweet spot.
Then Walmart comes out with a $100 PC, sells them like crazy, the OEMs shit themselves, and offer a $100 PC themselves.
There, fixed.
Happened with PCs; Happened with Laptops. When hardware prices drop significantly, and OEMs drag their feet, expect it to happen again.
Of course the converse is true as well... When the price of bundled Windows gets to be prohibitive relative to the hardware, expect Microsoft to lower the OEM price. See Microsoft Windows Vista: Basic/Pro/Kitchen-Sink
If it's a true story, link to the forum, and the actual thread if at all possible. It would certainly make it easy for readers to form a non-biased opinion of what actually happened.
I've seen far too many examples where people vastly exaggerate their experiences.
From his story, I'm going to assume they hadn't, didn't have the answer, and simply wanted to appear that they knew what they were talking about.
You're assuming a ridiculous amount of decidedly non-obvious facts...
If the answer was really that simple, it would have been easier to give him a link or just tell him how, rather than repeatedly insult him. Insulting him as well is optional.
People don't tend to maintain a list of links to every subject they've ever discussed. So somebody has to do the searching, rightfully it should be the one who wants to know the answer...
And also: No. Insulting someone is really much quicker and easier than posting a link of typing an answer... umm... you idiot.
but he -can- expect a civil response, or no response at all if they can't be civil.
Again, you're assuming that's what happened, as opposed to just what he SAID happened. I've seen several people on/. complaining about their experiences with mailing list XYZ, and gone through the trouble of looking the threads up in the archive, only to find people almost always VASTLY exaggerate their experiences, if not outright lie.
Assuming that everyone running a server is going to be a super-genius who wants to spend all day researching everything-- having that expectation is retarded.
No, what's stupid is suggesting that a mailing-list or forum full of unpaid experts should be compelled to answer your trivial questions is the 'retarded' part.
So you get to save a couple hours, not having to search the archives for the last 100Xs they answered the exact same question, and they get to give that 5 minute answer to you, and also the 100,000 people who ask that question after you, because they, too, didn't want to spend any of their own time looking for the answers themselves.
If you ask the experts, and don't get as much advice as you wanted, you're still better off than when you started. Insults aren't good, but of course I don't know that anyone was really insulted, as this is just one person's account of what happened... Some people have extremely thin skin, and will also often leave out the fact that they were spewing insults left and right when they didn't get the answer they wanted...
Uhhh, why is a regular user allowed to create a file owned by root?
ln doesn't create files, just POINTERS to them. Creating a link to bash, which was owned by you, would presumably allow to modify the contents of bash, owned by root.
And that trick only works in/tmp to begin with, where the sticky bit is set on the folder, and only if/bin is on the same mount point as/tmp.
I can see how it would be a minor annoyance, not much of a bug.
It's terribly oversimplified to say that chroot is useless. What's stupid is to chroot a process running as root. Most programs that have the built-in ability to chroot themselves (eg. Apache) immediately drop root privileges and drop to a non-privileged account.
That said, even done properly chroot really only provides a little protection, and only in the case of horribly configured systems... IMHO, the sole benefit of chrooting a process is that anyone who successfully breaks-in can't execute SUID/SGID applications located elsewhere on the filesystem, which very, very commonly have security holes. Proper use of either sudo, or setting-up groups that are the only ones allowed to exec SUID/SGID applications, eliminates this big security hole.
People like to say that chroot prevents attackers from running anything within the chroot, but it really doesn't... No doubt the exploit code used to break-in directly overwrites locations in memory. A similar method can be used to run any code you wish, no matter what is or isn't available inside the chroot. It certainly won't stop someone from exploiting kernel bugs, generating/reading network traffic, etc.
Of course, these are the same types of people that think their systems are safer for having removed the compilers, and other (non-SUID/SGID) binaries that harmlessly occupy HDD space.
Computer monitors generally use more power than (standard def) TVs. A 19" CRT monitor will probably use 60watts, while a 19" CRT TV will probably use 40watts.
The flat-screen monitor trend will no doubt reverse this, eventually, but the disparity is big, and there's a tremendous installed base of CRT monitors out there. Not to mention that flat-screen TVs are slowly catching on.
The president of Iran for example has spoken many times of using a nuke to wipe Israel off the planet (in direct violation of UN law) so many times, we're pretty sure he means it. So...what do you think he'd do if he had one?
The presidency of Iran is a powerless position, about as important as the King/Queen of England. Nothing about Ahmadinejad has any bearing.
What's more, even if he was the President, the US is really the only major country where the political figurehead is also the military figurehead, so it's a pretty ignorant mistake to make.
"Pave Arizona with solar cells" vs "Build new nuclear plants" is a false dichotomy. All of these things are better than oil,
Unless you plan to build that nuclear plant in the trunk of my car, it's not going to replace ANY oil. Grid generation is about 50% coal, with very little petroleum.
They would have to build their own network, unless they are NSA, FBI or AT&T they cannot do that easily.
What the hell is happening to/.? Has NOBODY here ever heard of a LEASED LINE?
Call up Verizon or AT&T, tell them you want a T1 from point A to point B. You pay them a few dollars every month, and you have a direct, and fully-private connection from A to B.
Public networks aren't the only way to communicate.
Their selection is probably larger than Amazon's at this point.
"Larger" only in the most literal sense. eMusic is doesn't have major label support at all, unlike Amazon. If there's a current artist on eMusic, it's only a few quite old, unpopular, out-of-print albums.
Quick searches for the top artists from Amazon's MP3 service on eMusic turns up crap.
No albums from NIN, Pink Floyd, Kayne West, etc. One 12+ year-old Radiohead album.
eMusic at best has a couple individual songs via "compilation" albums, but that's about it. Amazon is just a "beta" and it's already got ALL the albums from all these major groups.
aiming at an average of 256 kilobits per second (kbps) [...] Some of our content is encoded using a constant bitrate of 256 kbps. This content will have the same excellent audio quality at a slightly larger file size.
Someone at Amazon.com doesn't know what "average" means.
It will have the effect of destabilizing the grid because it puts the power company in the position of standing by ready to supply energy at night and when the sun doesn't shine but meanwhile when the sun is shinning their expensive infrastructure sits idle.
No, as demand drops, it will have the effect of lowering electricity prices. Lower prices will bring-in new, or lead to expansion of existing businesses, that need more and cheaper power (eg. aluminum).
Energy requirements are always increasing, so any excess capacity will be just a short-term problem.
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Except Coke has ~5% less sugar than Pepsi, and the two taste nothing alike.
Good, because the US is by far #1 in manufacturing, far ahead of China, many times over...
Good. I hope China buys up as many of our unprofitable business as possible. It's free money to us. An idiot tax in China, if you will.
No, what it'll do is bring-back the MHz myth, in full-force.
Gee, Intel has this 4Ghz CPU, and AMD has this 3GHz CPU for a bit less, and VIA has this 2.5GHz CPU for half the price...
Buy VIA CPU... Go home and spend the next two years wondering why the hell your computer is ridiculously slow, and pondering the meaning of MHz myth.
IMHO, AMD is the only one making even the slightest attempt at an honest rating. Intel doesn't WANT their customers to be be able to tell how fast one CPU is versus another. VIA wants to keep the MHz myth going as long as they can (as do ARM/MIPS/etc. suppliers).
And we'll all have to read posts like yours, which make things more confusing...
Bah! Lindows purchased a bunch of closed-source codecs for formats which have been reversed engineered in serveral Open Source projects already.
Just use libavcodec, pay the $5 to the MPEGIP, and be on your way. The code is still completely free, and you're legal in the US.
There are only two reasons to go non-free. 1) If the codec is proprietary and the licensor demands closed source. 2) If you want to play DRMed files...
In the first case, dammed near everything (MPEG-2, Divx/MPEG-4, AVC/h.264, WMV/VC-1) is an open standard now, and you are not subject to the patent-holder's whims. In the other cases, well, RealNetworks has long provided a binary-only player for Linux. On2 owns VP6 outright (for Flash v7+ Videos) but they are extremely open-source friendly, so I don't see a problem.
In the second case, I've been extremely happy to go without DRM for many, many years. In most cases, DRM is vendor-specific anyhow, and there's nothing you can do. You'll just simply have to wait for them to create a Linux binary of their player (when they see the profit).
No idea what you're talking about. Install MPlayer, and you're set. They're outside the US, so it's 100% open and legal.
Really? Until perhaps 2000, Windows didn't come with MP3 support. To this day, it still doesn't come with AAC support, and WMA is a joke.
Windows doesn't include popular video codecs, either. Divx/MPEG-4 is everywhere, but NOT included with Windows... Everyone's still forced to download the codec from Divx.com... And, you guessed it, they provide a Linux version as well.
So, nobody is going to take Linux seriously, because it requires a couple clicks in Synaptic to install every audio and video codec you could ever want (MPlayer/libavcodec). But everyone takes Windows seriously, because it forces you to trawl the web to find every single individual video and audio codec you want to use...
I can see you're right. Linux* is going in the wrong direction... It should be MORE Windows-like, and make multimedia encoding and playback infinitely more difficult.
And as for MP3s... The patent expires in a couple years, and the point becomes moot (see: GIFs).
* (Disclaimer: I'm actually a FreeBSDer... Long live Slackware)
Then Walmart comes out with a $100 PC, sells them like crazy, the OEMs shit themselves, and offer a $100 PC themselves.
There, fixed.
Happened with PCs; Happened with Laptops. When hardware prices drop significantly, and OEMs drag their feet, expect it to happen again.
Of course the converse is true as well... When the price of bundled Windows gets to be prohibitive relative to the hardware, expect Microsoft to lower the OEM price. See Microsoft Windows Vista: Basic/Pro/Kitchen-Sink
A leased line is NOT part of the PSTN.
Continuing to provide evidence of your wonderful manners...
Let's see... In your first post you called random people "retarded" and then you unprovokedly called me "somehow impaired."
I think I'll reserve judgment on just how incredibly polite you are.
Besides, that was only one of the points I brought up. I'm not going to take the rest of your assertions on faith, either.
If it's a true story, link to the forum, and the actual thread if at all possible. It would certainly make it easy for readers to form a non-biased opinion of what actually happened.
I've seen far too many examples where people vastly exaggerate their experiences.
You're assuming a ridiculous amount of decidedly non-obvious facts...
People don't tend to maintain a list of links to every subject they've ever discussed. So somebody has to do the searching, rightfully it should be the one who wants to know the answer...
And also: No. Insulting someone is really much quicker and easier than posting a link of typing an answer... umm... you idiot.
Again, you're assuming that's what happened, as opposed to just what he SAID happened. I've seen several people on
You think Windows is better, just because there isn't a public record of every screaming rant Microsoft's heads deliver to their employees?
As a beginner, you certainly shouldn't be mailing the Linux Kernel lists, and suggesting security methods...
No, what's stupid is suggesting that a mailing-list or forum full of unpaid experts should be compelled to answer your trivial questions is the 'retarded' part.
So you get to save a couple hours, not having to search the archives for the last 100Xs they answered the exact same question, and they get to give that 5 minute answer to you, and also the 100,000 people who ask that question after you, because they, too, didn't want to spend any of their own time looking for the answers themselves.
If you ask the experts, and don't get as much advice as you wanted, you're still better off than when you started. Insults aren't good, but of course I don't know that anyone was really insulted, as this is just one person's account of what happened... Some people have extremely thin skin, and will also often leave out the fact that they were spewing insults left and right when they didn't get the answer they wanted...
ln doesn't create files, just POINTERS to them. Creating a link to bash, which was owned by you, would presumably allow to modify the contents of bash, owned by root.
And that trick only works in
I can see how it would be a minor annoyance, not much of a bug.
It's terribly oversimplified to say that chroot is useless. What's stupid is to chroot a process running as root. Most programs that have the built-in ability to chroot themselves (eg. Apache) immediately drop root privileges and drop to a non-privileged account.
That said, even done properly chroot really only provides a little protection, and only in the case of horribly configured systems... IMHO, the sole benefit of chrooting a process is that anyone who successfully breaks-in can't execute SUID/SGID applications located elsewhere on the filesystem, which very, very commonly have security holes. Proper use of either sudo, or setting-up groups that are the only ones allowed to exec SUID/SGID applications, eliminates this big security hole.
People like to say that chroot prevents attackers from running anything within the chroot, but it really doesn't... No doubt the exploit code used to break-in directly overwrites locations in memory. A similar method can be used to run any code you wish, no matter what is or isn't available inside the chroot. It certainly won't stop someone from exploiting kernel bugs, generating/reading network traffic, etc.
Of course, these are the same types of people that think their systems are safer for having removed the compilers, and other (non-SUID/SGID) binaries that harmlessly occupy HDD space.
Computer monitors generally use more power than (standard def) TVs. A 19" CRT monitor will probably use 60watts, while a 19" CRT TV will probably use 40watts.
The flat-screen monitor trend will no doubt reverse this, eventually, but the disparity is big, and there's a tremendous installed base of CRT monitors out there. Not to mention that flat-screen TVs are slowly catching on.
Congratulations on so thoroughly demonstrating that you didn't RTFA at all.
The presidency of Iran is a powerless position, about as important as the King/Queen of England. Nothing about Ahmadinejad has any bearing.
What's more, even if he was the President, the US is really the only major country where the political figurehead is also the military figurehead, so it's a pretty ignorant mistake to make.
Unless you plan to build that nuclear plant in the trunk of my car, it's not going to replace ANY oil. Grid generation is about 50% coal, with very little petroleum.
What the hell is happening to
Call up Verizon or AT&T, tell them you want a T1 from point A to point B. You pay them a few dollars every month, and you have a direct, and fully-private connection from A to B.
Public networks aren't the only way to communicate.
Looks like you just created your very own self-fulfilling prophecy...
"Larger" only in the most literal sense. eMusic is doesn't have major label support at all, unlike Amazon. If there's a current artist on eMusic, it's only a few quite old, unpopular, out-of-print albums.
Quick searches for the top artists from Amazon's MP3 service on eMusic turns up crap.
No albums from NIN, Pink Floyd, Kayne West, etc.
One 12+ year-old Radiohead album.
eMusic at best has a couple individual songs via "compilation" albums, but that's about it. Amazon is just a "beta" and it's already got ALL the albums from all these major groups.
Someone at Amazon.com doesn't know what "average" means.
No, as demand drops, it will have the effect of lowering electricity prices. Lower prices will bring-in new, or lead to expansion of existing businesses, that need more and cheaper power (eg. aluminum).
Energy requirements are always increasing, so any excess capacity will be just a short-term problem.