I recommend working at a car wash - there's absolutely no thought involved in the work (well, unless you're learning to drive a manual transmission on the customers' cars:) and you can get really buff (for most readers, this will be the most buff you'll ever be).
Of course, most of your deep thoughts involve how you'll never trash your car as much as the customers have, but you could probably think about other stuff too.
Re:Nice to know how reliable VA's own hardware is.
on
Themes.org Returning
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· Score: 1
The AC has a point - real web hosting is never supposed to go down. You use redundant hardware, failover, etc., but the service remains available. Of course hardware fails from time to time, but with a properly designed system your site doesn't die with it.
Of course, t.o probably isn't the most important site that VA is running gratis; imagine if SourceForge had been down...
Actually, no, in some parts of the world TV broadcasts are free, like radio. You do pay for cable, but the theory is that this is because otherwise you couldn't pick up those stations at all.
It's true that it's not a technology problem, though - according to some news reports, the government knew there were problems but didn't want to embark on a redesign effort until they had secured funding for a full production run of the aircraft. Like most software issues, this one only became a huge bug when coupled with management's inability to properly manage software development.
I'm aware that both can be forked, thanks. I'm just trying to figure out how "Linus Torvalds has been described as a benevolent dictator; the modifications he likes are added" is any different from "The OpenBSD team has been described as a benevolent dictator; the modifications they like are added". I've got nothing against OpenBSD or Linux, but I don't think that it makes Linux any worse that it only has one guy running the show, rather than several. All I ask is that the trolls make a little bit of sense, OK !?
(Personally I'm afraid of anything designed by a committee, but I don't hold that against OpenBSD because it's pretty clearly proved its worth.)
I believe the argument is with Mach, not with OS X. It's pretty clear that Linus has never been one to keep quiet in the presence of a bad idea. He's more entitled to have an opinion than many in this forum, that's for sure.
Linus Torvalds has been described as a benevolent dictator; the modifications he likes are added. (taken from Daemon News)
But somehow any old guy on the street can add modifications into OpenBSD? I didn't think so. There's little difference in governance between a kernel with one gatekeeper, and an OS with a committee of gatekeepers.
Or maybe its because some authors claim OSX is a threat to Linux users somehow...
OS X is only currently a threat to Linux PPC; it would have to be available on x86 and alpha to really be a threat to Linux as a whole.
Here's a hint - collect a big pile of gold and jewels, and sleep on it all the time. This should armor you up just fine. I'd like to see those damn Lakemen try something now. Who's your King under the Mountain now, punk!
That would work, except Congress is prohibited from creating ex post facto laws, so it would have no effect on already existing cases. Not to mention the lawsuits that we'd see if a federal law tried to abrogate state law in this regard.
Real sailboats aren't really "pushed" by the air, really the sail is used as a vertical wing-shape, so that the passage of air over the sail creates "lift" in a forward direction. If sailboats were just pushed by the wind, they wouldn't be able to tack upwind at all.
As far as the solar sail, I wonder if they could alter the direction of the reflection in order to steer. Does the direction in which the light bounces off of the mirror affect the resultant acceleration?
At the very least you could angle the aspect ration of the sail to the sun in order to modify your acceleration; if your sail catches less photons then you won't accelerate as fast.
I would say the reviewer was fairly unintelligent to have not managed to get at the plot of the movie correctly, considering that there was a ton of exposition provided specifically so that people wouldn't be confused by the whole alternate reality thing. It's a bad review if you try to make it look worse than it is just because the reviewer didn't like it, and this reviewer never missed a chance to comment on how confusing it all was. I admit Keanu Reeves was questionable at times, but just calling the plot "mumbo-jumbo" and dismissing it is a disservice to the readers. This is a man who apparently has never reviewed any foreign films, or he wouldn't be calling "The Matrix" confusing.
(Not that I have anything but the highest respect for international cinema, in fact I really prefer movies that make you figure things out for yourself rather than just explaining it all prior to entering ass-kicking mode. In that respect "The Matrix" could have been a lot better, but on the other hand they had to make enough money to pay for the sequels, and allowing people to leave the theatre even a little bit confused would have been detrimental to that.)
Did you actually watch the movie? She didn't have to circumvent the security systems at all, she was already running a system configuration tool as (presumeably) root, she just had to fly around and find the right widget that would turn on the power again.
I don't find it so unbelieveable that a pre-teen could do that, considering that I remember programming Apple Basic at that age and it was a little tougher than a graphical system conf/flight sim:) (which BTW is apparently a real tool, available from SGI I believe).
Although there was a pretty bad portrayal of a hacker in that movie to be sure: Dennis Nedry, otherwise known as "Newman". He's fat, slobby, unethical, money-grubbing, arrogant, and playful in a very annoying way. Although part of that could be chalked up to the fact that he was apparently the low bidder on a very tough contract.
I found it amazing that such a genius hacker wouldn't have modified the system so that it couldn't be be repaired by simply power cycling it. C'mon, Dennis, get a decent root kit or something!
It's true that little actual hacking went on (or at least it wasn't shown onscreen), but on the other hand "The Matrix" probably exposed a lot of people to new ideas about hackers:
people wearing black trenchcoats can be the good guys
people who are knowledgeable about computers and networks can be the good guys
you can't necessarily trust authority to tell you that "hackers" are bad
authority often has its own intentions for the use of technology which might not match up with the wishes of the people
knowledge of computers and networking can be an effective defense against the misuse of power by authority
Sure, all of this was metaphorical, but that's the point. The public at large won't watch two hours of RMS writing the GPL 3.0, or the OpenLaw mailing list debating the finer points of encryption, even though those are the real actions which are being taken to defend the public interest. Instead you give people surrogates like Keanu and Carrie-Anne kicking ass, and at the end of the movie people feel that they identify a little more with the goals, they see things a little less as black-and-white, and they're more open to the issues that RMS or Emmanuel Goldstein might raise in the press that are relevant to real life.
Identification with your cause and its goals (even if through an inaccurate depication of your day-to-day efforts) is the first step towards getting public mindshare on "hacker" issues.
How does this make it any more unstable than a general-purpose PC OS that includes ps and kill (or the NT alternatives)? Just because you have the ability doesn't mean it is required or even used very often at all.
You sound like a guy that buys pencils w/o erasers, because the presence of an eraser will cause you to make mistakes...
Re:3 results from websters.com
on
CPRM Lecture
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· Score: 1
All I can say is:
"I never heard that word where I grew up in Shelbyville."
"I don't know why, it's a perfectly cromulent word."
I think it's a reasonable argument to make in certain circumstances. For example, say the site made $100 after it was stolen from you. But you have better content, a better team, and better marketing, and so you could have made $500 off of it in that time. In this case it makes sense that the damages would be close to what your actual losses were. To do otherwise would be to penalize the victim because they were ripped off by someone who had less business sense.
This wouldn't work in the licensing situation, of course, because no one would agree to that. But no one's asking the defendant to agree to the damages assessed against them. Things are different if a crime has been committed.
I don't find that particularly disturbing to see at sex.com, I'm sure you as well as minors the world over knew what to expect. It is impossible to prevent minors from viewing porn on the Internet if they are interested enough in it. Let's face it - few things are as motivated as a horny 14-year-old. I'm not one anymore but I can remember...
As my first grade teacher pointed out to my everlasting shame, there's no such word as "firstly".:)
Firstly, as players like Microsoft move towards, the leased software.NET model of distribution, there will be a decreasing need for
copy protection as there will be less software to copy.
The big issue with CPRM is content (music, video), not software protection. Software copyright protection has been tried and pretty much rejected by consumers. Although if CPRM becomes a reality, I could see software companies making use of it.
Although I applaud the efforts that have prevented CPRM from being part of the spec., there will continue to be some sort of HW-based protection mechanism in the works as long as hardware makers think they can make money off of the content industries from it. Consumer disdain is the only real deterrent to CPRM, and it remains to be seen if consumers will care enough or even notice. You might say I'm prepared to be disappointed:)
I use that one every day. In fact, if you just click on the Netscape Search button, on the page that this takes you to you can pick which search engine to use for this feature. So I always have a Google search built into my NS 4.x browser.
The only problem is that if I search for words that end with "com" or "net", Netscape thinks it's an actual domain name and tries to go to that site rather than searching. Or at least it used to, when I tried it just now with 4.75 it searched correctly.
Now we just need search engines to index enough and rank things appropriately enough for me to find what I want quickly. Google's the best of a bad lot, so far.
Re:No problems saving it
on
CPRM Lecture
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· Score: 1
Makes you wonder what sort of desktop box Michael is using, doesn't it? Ah well, as long as you can get perl on it it's good enough for/.:)
I think it's pretty clear that Microsoft sees "Linux" and reads "RedHat" or "Caldera" or "Corel", etc. They mistake the movement for the businesses that are the froth on top of the wave. He's correct in that there is not a Microsoft-style business model for Linux, but that's the rub.
One of the most insightful comments I've ever seen was in an interview with one of RH's founders a year or two ago, when he said that their goal is not to take a sizeable chunk of the current billion-dollar OS market. Their goal is to shrink the size of that market, and once it's much smaller their current share will be very competitive.
This is why all the "business model" arguments against Linux are ultimately wrong - Linux is only going to get better, and it is always going to be free. There will always be some price point where companies can eke out a living as Linux integrators, it just won't be anywhere near the premiums that Microsoft is used to charging. Linux-as-business-model probably is never going to be extremely rewarding in the capitalistic sense, but Linux-as-user-solution is going to be increasingly rewarding on the basis of cost, ease of use, flexibility, and power. LinuxCo has and will continue to fail (stock bubble or not); Linux itself will be the answer to more and more user questions as time goes on.
Sure, Linux isn't there right now, but it is a movement that Microsoft can't destroy and can't even face without seriously adjusting its costs. IMHO this is better than any business model in this industry for quite a while.
It is narrow minded, but from the perspective of a software vendor, you don't want to have to support multiple platforms or desktop environments. I agree that this isn't the user's perspective, but Microsoft (and really most business) is officially in the business of selling what they tell you you want rather than what you really need.
Of course they share, they're open source!
Anything that goes into one can be used by the other.
I don't think it's as straightforward a relationship as that - can anyone name significant portions of code that are shared between Gnome and KDE? The gecko engine has been, but of course that was developed by a 3rd party. I mean code that was written for KDE specifically and later picked up by Gnome, or vice versa.
I think it would be better if they did share, and I agree that there's nothing stopping them from doing so, but I'm not sure that such sharing is really taking place. I would be happy to be proved wrong, though.
It seems like in many areas where there would be a great advantage in sharing, like printing support, object paradigm, advanced font handling, etc. the two projects are implementing parallel development efforts. These are things which the user doesn't experience directly (they're not look-and-feel) and so it wouldn't detract from end-user choice to standardize these components somewhat. Or at the very least a compatibility layer - my understanding is that menu options are interoperable now, so how about drag-n-drop for a next step?
Slashdot Mirror
I recommend working at a car wash - there's absolutely no thought involved in the work (well, unless you're learning to drive a manual transmission on the customers' cars :) and you can get really buff (for most readers, this will be the most buff you'll ever be).
Of course, most of your deep thoughts involve how you'll never trash your car as much as the customers have, but you could probably think about other stuff too.
The AC has a point - real web hosting is never supposed to go down. You use redundant hardware, failover, etc., but the service remains available. Of course hardware fails from time to time, but with a properly designed system your site doesn't die with it.
Of course, t.o probably isn't the most important site that VA is running gratis; imagine if SourceForge had been down...
Actually, no, in some parts of the world TV broadcasts are free, like radio. You do pay for cable, but the theory is that this is because otherwise you couldn't pick up those stations at all.
It's true that it's not a technology problem, though - according to some news reports, the government knew there were problems but didn't want to embark on a redesign effort until they had secured funding for a full production run of the aircraft. Like most software issues, this one only became a huge bug when coupled with management's inability to properly manage software development.
I'm aware that both can be forked, thanks. I'm just trying to figure out how "Linus Torvalds has been described as a benevolent dictator; the modifications he likes are added" is any different from "The OpenBSD team has been described as a benevolent dictator; the modifications they like are added". I've got nothing against OpenBSD or Linux, but I don't think that it makes Linux any worse that it only has one guy running the show, rather than several. All I ask is that the trolls make a little bit of sense, OK !?
(Personally I'm afraid of anything designed by a committee, but I don't hold that against OpenBSD because it's pretty clearly proved its worth.)
I believe the argument is with Mach, not with OS X. It's pretty clear that Linus has never been one to keep quiet in the presence of a bad idea. He's more entitled to have an opinion than many in this forum, that's for sure.
But somehow any old guy on the street can add modifications into OpenBSD? I didn't think so. There's little difference in governance between a kernel with one gatekeeper, and an OS with a committee of gatekeepers.
OS X is only currently a threat to Linux PPC; it would have to be available on x86 and alpha to really be a threat to Linux as a whole.
OK, I've been officially corrected by a lawyer on /., I guess it's time to shut my big, argumentative mouth :)
Seriously, thanks for the much needed perspective that your posts inject into this forum.
Here's a hint - collect a big pile of gold and jewels, and sleep on it all the time. This should armor you up just fine. I'd like to see those damn Lakemen try something now. Who's your King under the Mountain now, punk!
That would work, except Congress is prohibited from creating ex post facto laws, so it would have no effect on already existing cases. Not to mention the lawsuits that we'd see if a federal law tried to abrogate state law in this regard.
Real sailboats aren't really "pushed" by the air, really the sail is used as a vertical wing-shape, so that the passage of air over the sail creates "lift" in a forward direction. If sailboats were just pushed by the wind, they wouldn't be able to tack upwind at all.
As far as the solar sail, I wonder if they could alter the direction of the reflection in order to steer. Does the direction in which the light bounces off of the mirror affect the resultant acceleration?
At the very least you could angle the aspect ration of the sail to the sun in order to modify your acceleration; if your sail catches less photons then you won't accelerate as fast.
I would say the reviewer was fairly unintelligent to have not managed to get at the plot of the movie correctly, considering that there was a ton of exposition provided specifically so that people wouldn't be confused by the whole alternate reality thing. It's a bad review if you try to make it look worse than it is just because the reviewer didn't like it, and this reviewer never missed a chance to comment on how confusing it all was. I admit Keanu Reeves was questionable at times, but just calling the plot "mumbo-jumbo" and dismissing it is a disservice to the readers. This is a man who apparently has never reviewed any foreign films, or he wouldn't be calling "The Matrix" confusing.
(Not that I have anything but the highest respect for international cinema, in fact I really prefer movies that make you figure things out for yourself rather than just explaining it all prior to entering ass-kicking mode. In that respect "The Matrix" could have been a lot better, but on the other hand they had to make enough money to pay for the sequels, and allowing people to leave the theatre even a little bit confused would have been detrimental to that.)
Did you actually watch the movie? She didn't have to circumvent the security systems at all, she was already running a system configuration tool as (presumeably) root, she just had to fly around and find the right widget that would turn on the power again.
I don't find it so unbelieveable that a pre-teen could do that, considering that I remember programming Apple Basic at that age and it was a little tougher than a graphical system conf/flight sim :) (which BTW is apparently a real tool, available from SGI I believe).
Although there was a pretty bad portrayal of a hacker in that movie to be sure: Dennis Nedry, otherwise known as "Newman". He's fat, slobby, unethical, money-grubbing, arrogant, and playful in a very annoying way. Although part of that could be chalked up to the fact that he was apparently the low bidder on a very tough contract.
I found it amazing that such a genius hacker wouldn't have modified the system so that it couldn't be be repaired by simply power cycling it. C'mon, Dennis, get a decent root kit or something!
It's true that little actual hacking went on (or at least it wasn't shown onscreen), but on the other hand "The Matrix" probably exposed a lot of people to new ideas about hackers:
Sure, all of this was metaphorical, but that's the point. The public at large won't watch two hours of RMS writing the GPL 3.0, or the OpenLaw mailing list debating the finer points of encryption, even though those are the real actions which are being taken to defend the public interest. Instead you give people surrogates like Keanu and Carrie-Anne kicking ass, and at the end of the movie people feel that they identify a little more with the goals, they see things a little less as black-and-white, and they're more open to the issues that RMS or Emmanuel Goldstein might raise in the press that are relevant to real life.
Identification with your cause and its goals (even if through an inaccurate depication of your day-to-day efforts) is the first step towards getting public mindshare on "hacker" issues.
I heard the same thing, but I'm pretty sure that's "Lennox" or "Lenox" street. I have the same issues every time my wife gets a new "Lenox" catalog :)
Whomever rated this Informative obviously didn't read the whole post...
How does this make it any more unstable than a general-purpose PC OS that includes ps and kill (or the NT alternatives)? Just because you have the ability doesn't mean it is required or even used very often at all.
You sound like a guy that buys pencils w/o erasers, because the presence of an eraser will cause you to make mistakes...
All I can say is:
"I never heard that word where I grew up in Shelbyville."
"I don't know why, it's a perfectly cromulent word."
(now I'm mad I didn't stand up to her!)
I think it's a reasonable argument to make in certain circumstances. For example, say the site made $100 after it was stolen from you. But you have better content, a better team, and better marketing, and so you could have made $500 off of it in that time. In this case it makes sense that the damages would be close to what your actual losses were. To do otherwise would be to penalize the victim because they were ripped off by someone who had less business sense.
This wouldn't work in the licensing situation, of course, because no one would agree to that. But no one's asking the defendant to agree to the damages assessed against them. Things are different if a crime has been committed.
I don't find that particularly disturbing to see at sex.com, I'm sure you as well as minors the world over knew what to expect. It is impossible to prevent minors from viewing porn on the Internet if they are interested enough in it. Let's face it - few things are as motivated as a horny 14-year-old. I'm not one anymore but I can remember...
As my first grade teacher pointed out to my everlasting shame, there's no such word as "firstly". :)
The big issue with CPRM is content (music, video), not software protection. Software copyright protection has been tried and pretty much rejected by consumers. Although if CPRM becomes a reality, I could see software companies making use of it.
Although I applaud the efforts that have prevented CPRM from being part of the spec., there will continue to be some sort of HW-based protection mechanism in the works as long as hardware makers think they can make money off of the content industries from it. Consumer disdain is the only real deterrent to CPRM, and it remains to be seen if consumers will care enough or even notice. You might say I'm prepared to be disappointed :)
I use that one every day. In fact, if you just click on the Netscape Search button, on the page that this takes you to you can pick which search engine to use for this feature. So I always have a Google search built into my NS 4.x browser.
The only problem is that if I search for words that end with "com" or "net", Netscape thinks it's an actual domain name and tries to go to that site rather than searching. Or at least it used to, when I tried it just now with 4.75 it searched correctly.
Now we just need search engines to index enough and rank things appropriately enough for me to find what I want quickly. Google's the best of a bad lot, so far.
Makes you wonder what sort of desktop box Michael is using, doesn't it? Ah well, as long as you can get perl on it it's good enough for /. :)
I think it's pretty clear that Microsoft sees "Linux" and reads "RedHat" or "Caldera" or "Corel", etc. They mistake the movement for the businesses that are the froth on top of the wave. He's correct in that there is not a Microsoft-style business model for Linux, but that's the rub.
One of the most insightful comments I've ever seen was in an interview with one of RH's founders a year or two ago, when he said that their goal is not to take a sizeable chunk of the current billion-dollar OS market. Their goal is to shrink the size of that market, and once it's much smaller their current share will be very competitive.
This is why all the "business model" arguments against Linux are ultimately wrong - Linux is only going to get better, and it is always going to be free. There will always be some price point where companies can eke out a living as Linux integrators, it just won't be anywhere near the premiums that Microsoft is used to charging. Linux-as-business-model probably is never going to be extremely rewarding in the capitalistic sense, but Linux-as-user-solution is going to be increasingly rewarding on the basis of cost, ease of use, flexibility, and power. LinuxCo has and will continue to fail (stock bubble or not); Linux itself will be the answer to more and more user questions as time goes on.
Sure, Linux isn't there right now, but it is a movement that Microsoft can't destroy and can't even face without seriously adjusting its costs. IMHO this is better than any business model in this industry for quite a while.
It is narrow minded, but from the perspective of a software vendor, you don't want to have to support multiple platforms or desktop environments. I agree that this isn't the user's perspective, but Microsoft (and really most business) is officially in the business of selling what they tell you you want rather than what you really need.
I don't think it's as straightforward a relationship as that - can anyone name significant portions of code that are shared between Gnome and KDE? The gecko engine has been, but of course that was developed by a 3rd party. I mean code that was written for KDE specifically and later picked up by Gnome, or vice versa.
I think it would be better if they did share, and I agree that there's nothing stopping them from doing so, but I'm not sure that such sharing is really taking place. I would be happy to be proved wrong, though.
It seems like in many areas where there would be a great advantage in sharing, like printing support, object paradigm, advanced font handling, etc. the two projects are implementing parallel development efforts. These are things which the user doesn't experience directly (they're not look-and-feel) and so it wouldn't detract from end-user choice to standardize these components somewhat. Or at the very least a compatibility layer - my understanding is that menu options are interoperable now, so how about drag-n-drop for a next step?
I wouldn't go into that market if I were you - if you thought Microsoft had a jealously guarded monopoly, ....