You took a high school class and from their you can extrapolate out the entire scope and range of all CS curriculum in world?
Go back and read it again. It's an AP CS course. It's taken so you can skip college-level courses. It should be quite good, but it sucks.
Besides which, I was creating quite a few great programs on my Apple//c when I just learned how to read (6-8 years old). Sure they were in BASIC, but I learned more during that time then I ever did in that class.
No one would hire an architect or mechanical engineer who didn't have at least a piece of paper from a college.
Architecture and mechanical engineers have had centuries to develop well-thought-out standerds for doing things. Computer Science has had about 30 years.
Do you really think Microsoft actualy hires people that haven't gotten that scrap of paper? They have plenty of money to do so (yes, BillG never did graduate, but thats just BillG). They have no reason to hire anyone else. Yet, their software sucks.
And just what do CS majors learn? I've taken a High School CS course for AP and I'm not sure how I came out of it not hateing programing. For instance, when it came time to learn about linked lists, the book talked about what a linked list was. Then, it talked about what a linked list was. Then, it talked about what a linked list was. It never really said how to code the blasted thing. Not surprisingly, everyone failed the linked list test.
I don't hold out much hope on college, being that AP courses are designed to place you at or above the level of a college-level course.
I can understand that the leader is feeling a bit moaned at and undervalued, the stuff does work at the heart of it and he and the other people working on it do deserve credit for it.
As some who is working on stuff over Freenet (through the new Everything Over Freenet project; check it out at eof.sourceforge.net) and has been on the mailing lists for about a year, I can tell you that most of the developers and mailing list regs hate Freenet's publicity. The project really hasn't accomplished that much and the media is screaming over it.
The problem that they don't seem to have addressed in their efforts to dodge censorship is that they will ultimately make the posession and propogation of the key names themselves illegal, undoing all of the good work they have planned for. For example, it will be the posession or use of the key name ''secrets/food/soylent green'' that will be used to repress people who might like to look up the document belonging to the key.
KHK--These were deprecated in 0.3 and replaced by KSKs (see bellow) due to similar problems that you described above. KSKs now do the same job (i.e., have a guessable, human-readable string for a key name), but much more securly.
KSK--Provides a human-readable, guessable key. Despite being more secure then KHKs, they are not as secure as CHKs (see bellow). Its suggested use is as a redirect to a CHK. This is accomplished by setting the CLI option "-autoRedirect" for inserts to "yes". That is also the default behavior for FProxy.
CHK--Is not human-readable. Instead, its a cryptographic hash of the data inside.
There are a few others, such as SVK and SSK, but they're not as important for this disccusion (see the link above for more detials on them if you're interested).
So, lets say KSK@how-to-build-a-nuke.txt (note: Freenet URIs are formed like this: keytype@key) is a redirect to CHK@fjdskalf879934q2823rl,ekf;qnieof (I don't think I have the correct number of charecters for the CHK's crypto hash, I just type it randomly, but it doesn't matter). If a given node operator has their house broken into by Them and their node searched for a specific key name, they may find the KSK name, but that doesn't mean the operator was actualy holding that key (its just like a link on the web . . . oh no:). Nor does it mean that he had requested the data, much less had been the one to put it there in the first place.
There are a few things that Freenet needs to get rid of, but was known all along that they were just crutches to be gotten out of latter. The first is key indecies, which list names of keys. The second is inform.php, which is how a new node discovers other nodes already in the network. The latter will require being replaced by searching, and the former will be replaced by "discovery probes". The inform.php is the more serious of the two and will probably be fixed first (should be in 0.5 at the latest). Searching is a lower priority so it may not be touched until we get closer to 1.0 (some predict even longer, others a lot shorter. I think it will be there in 0.5).
The last few releases have come with something called "FProxy" which acts as a proxy between your web browser and Freenet. Freenet is now as easy to use as putting a few lines of text into an HTML field. I assume you know how to figure that out or you couldn't post to Slashdot:)
FProxy also brings up an interesting solution to using Debian's Apt-get over Freenet (which is what I'm working on), since FProxy has to send stuff to the browser via HTTP and Apt-get already understands HTTP.
A tangent: I've never been a real fan of Kevin J. Anderson's work. In terms of the Star Wars series, Timothy Zahn pretty much defined that series, IMHO. So, to be upfront, Anderson is fighting an uphill battle with me
Tell it, brother! Anderson's stuff stinks of trying to emulate Zahn and failing. Miserably. When I saw Kevin's name on this book, I immediatly thought back to his Star Wars books.
Anderson's Admerial Dallaa is a far cry from the kick-butt strategy of Zahn's Thrawn.
Is there anything Tripwire can do that can't be done by a few shell scripts, a crontab, and the md5sum program? I mention this specificly because of a Secrurity Focus article that mentions this (Section 8. Tripwires).
I got out of physics class last school year, dumped much of my knowledge over the summer, and by now I can remember lots of concepts but few equations. (Thats why my 30,000 km/s was so far off!)
Every second, Earth (and any other object, for that matter) pulls a smaller object tward it at a set ammount acceleration (on Earth, its 9.81 m/s/s). So, if you travel at 30,000 km/s (just the throw out a number) you will still fall twards the Earth at 9.81 m/s/s. However, since the Earth is round, you will go out 30,000 km every second, while falling 9.81 m. Repeat this over and over and you will form an orbit around the planet. Objects in orbit are quite literaly falling around the Earth.
If you want to go higher in orbit, you mearly go faster and you will automaticly be pushed there. To go lower, just go slower. This is why there is a set speed and height for objects in geosyncronis orbit (which is when you are hovering over a specific point on the planet's surface).
This shows that there is a practical limit to just how slow you can go around the Earth, or else gravity won't care how fast you're going, you're going to hit that mountian!:)
So, the answer is, yes, you could, if gravity were low enough and your craft manuverable enough.
I hope this was clear. It helps if you have a few diagrams to show, but I don't have the time to make a few and give you the links to them, sorry.
The new Pentium XXIII comes out in 2014. It creates so much heat that there is a 50/50 chance that when you turn it on, it will burn a hole to the Earth's center.
I am no fan of Intel in particular, but I think their aproach to the problem (just start over) has much better long term potential then "lets play nice and use old stuff."
And if propreity kernels and software eats GNU/Linux's dust, so much the better. We'll all be running smoothly on 64-bit while Microserfs are still trying to stop the rush of bluescreens:)
At work we use a server running Linux+Samba on a 45 GB hard drive. hda1 (/) is 100 MB, hda2 (/usr) is 5 GB, hda3 (swap) is 64 MB, and hda4 (/madtimes; I know thats against convention) is all the rest (~40 GB).
Upon installing Debian 2.1, the first boot up ran fsck on hda4. Wondering if there might be something wrong with the drive, I low-level formated the drive. On reinstalling, it did it again. Thats when I found out that
However, you are correct taht the 2 GB limit still exists, but its rare that you need more then that. One time when I did was when I was getting an image of my 6.4 GB hard drive onto my 30.7 GB hard drive for backup (I was reinstalling Windows on the smaller drive and wanted to fall back on the orginal if soemthing went wrong). To get around the limit, here's the command I ran (or some variation of it, can't remeber exactly):
dd if=/dev/hda1 | split -b2048M - hda1
Then, if I needed the back up (fortuantly, I didn't) I could run:
it just strikes me that things like hard drives don't respond well to axes and chain saw blades
Well, you could put some armor around your hard drive, but that might take up a lot of weight. You might also ditch the hard drive entirely, boot from a floppy drive and load everything into a RAM disk. Or you could even get rid of all magnetic media and boot the entire system using an embeded EPROM(s).
Floppy -> RAM disk system seems to the the cheapist and easyist if you can find enough RAM. Once the system is booted, remove the disk from the drive and put it in a safe place. Its too bad you can't remove the floppy entirely while the system is on. Be sure to have plenty of stand-by floppy drives for a quick replacement, just in case (this shouldn't cost too much, 3.5" floppy drives are cheep).
As for the distro itself, you can either make your own (time consuming, but it will be more custimized), or you can use a pre-build mini-distro. I suggest Small Linux, as it has a very-low memory footprint and already loads itslef into a RAM disk. Its based on a 2.0.x kernel and libc5, but there doesn't seem to be any loadable module support (the programs to load modules aren't there, anyway).
I dont know: whats easier, adding stability to Windows, or adding hardware support and UI to linux?
Good question. The UI is something built into the system at a much higher level. This means that, programming-wise, a UI is far easier. However, hackers tend to have problems doing the part of the UI you actualy see, at least as far as your average users is concerned. This is why corperate funding thourgh the Gnome Foundation is very important to the future of Linux on the desktop: It gets rid of that achillies heal.
On the other hand, stability is something you have to deal with at a very low level; right down to places where you're using ASM in your kernel and libraries. This is a place where hackers rule. Microsoft started with a base system (DOS) that was OK for simple, single-user, single-tasking jobs at a command line. Then they started adding a GUI on top . . .
WinNT/Win2000 got rid of the DOS core. There was still some DOS functionality as of NT 4.0, but I beleive it was mostly removed for Win2000. In any case, it was put in more for backwards-compatibilty then anything else.
NT is also a microkernel, which means it naturaly has some extra overhead in it that Linux's monolithic kernel does not. The still-mostly-vapor GNU HURD is also a microkernel. If done properly, the extra overhead isn't that much. The question is, did Microsoft do it properly? I don't really know.
In any case, its much easier for hackers to create a stable and speedy core system, while difficult for them to make a good UI. On the other hand, its far easier for a corperate project to make a reasonably good UI, but diffcult to make a stable and speedy core system.
The good news for Linux is that we're not limited to using the hacker-meathod. Alredy the Gnome Foundation has been formed to make a great UI with lots of corperate funding. Also, don't forget Eazel, with some of the orginal MacOS UI guys working on a Gnome project. Whatever else you say about MacOS, it has a great UI.
This is very bad news for Microsoft, which is fine by me. Without turning entirely in the other direction, Microsoft has no way of harnessing the power of hackers to create a good core system, while the hackers have a way of harnessing the corperate-backed projects to create a good UI.
Did you even look at the website. This isn't "just another distro." You compile the entire system from source (using a pre-built distro to do it, of course). I'm almost finished with mine; just have to get networking and X+GNOME running.
I wonder whats going to happen when Hillary Rosen and her pal good ol' Jack discovers IRC.
" . . . and thats why sharks don't get cancer. In totaly unrelated news, the RIAA has sent threatening letters to several operators of IRC, a totaly new way of trading pirated MP3 files over then Internet. The RIAA has posted losses of $300 bazillion due to this new service."
**Insert sounds of geeks laughing so hard at the reporter's technical illiteracy here**
I think 2600 considers this type of thing implicit in all their articles. However, maybe they shouldn't be so surprised when the whole world doesn't see it that way, and maybe they should be a little more explicit there.
It is also correct that destroying the "security through obscurity" philosiphy of many corperations is a good thing. How long does it take a security hole to be fixed after its seen in 2600? The day it hits the stands?
For higher level thoughts, Language plays a very important role in how we think. "Higher level", in this case, refers to more abstract ideas. Simple ideas, such as hunger, rain, rock, etc. are fairly easy to express accross all languages, or even with no spoken language at all.
If there is any task that requires a lot of high level thought, its programing. People of diffrent language backgrounds use words in their heads to express ideas, but some words and language constructs are better then others for describing an idea. This means that people of diffrent languages, quite literaly, don't think the same way as others. The approach to solving problems will be affected accordingly. These diffrences aren't as noticable when two languages stem closely from a common root; it would be more noticeable between, say, German and Chinees.
This wide veriety of ways to solve problems could be harnessed if and only if programing becomes a multi-lingual, multi-national activity. This is certianly not to say that any language is better then another, just that the diffrent approach to solving the problem may bring a better result.
Its for these reasons that, although I was boarn and raised in the US, I am against the Internet becoming Amercianized and English dominated. It is true, though, that we need a standered language for communicating, or any benifits we may get from being a multi-lingual Internet will be lost.
I also think that English is quite possibly the worst language for this job. Its just like that one OS we all love to hate: Its bulky, inefficent, and everybody uses it:)
Maybe its best that they didn't. Its nearly impossible for a website about even normal things to follow all the laws out there. Are we to try to block all accsess to all those websites about fishing, nature, etc., because they make some wussy 30 sq. mi. country in Europe mad?
Let the Internet be governed seperatly from the rest of the world. The only trubble is keeping control of that government away from greedy corperatists. They can have their say, of course, which is only fair. However, they should not control it the way the control the US government today.
It looks like Intel was trying to back away from RAMBUS gracefuly after they hyped it for so long. Its good to see that they finaly came to their senses, but it seems like we could have been spared a lot of problems if they had been more farsighted.
Now if only all corperations could back away so gracefuly. [*caugh*]MPAA[*caugh*]RIAA[*caugh*].
The freenet developers just can't decide what they want this tool to be. Is this a tool for violating copyright, or is it a tool for the real propagation of free speech?
As someone who follows the development of Freenet closely, I can tell you that the core developers agree that it is for free speech. Copyright gets draged along for the ride, but since they don't particularly like copyright anyway, they continue. However, they don't apreaciate people calling it "a better Napster", and neither do I.
I also find it interesting, that the developers believe in deleting documents that are unpopular
It wasn't intended to be an infinate storage space, like the
Eternity Service was, but big hard drives make it so that only the most unpopular documents aren't there. Also, if there is a specific group of people who are allways asking for a specific set of docs, it will propagate around that group, whereas the rest of the network dropped it long ago.
Additionaly, as hard drive space becomes cheeper, it will be less likly that stuff will drop out. I personaly have a 30 GB drive, with one partition of 20 GB just sitting there, unused. I have no issues with devoting this to Freenet. Even Microsoft bloatware would have a hard time filling that space:). If I had a big pipe on that computer, lots of stuff could be stored and requested, but it would take a very long time for a very unpopular file to ever drop out of my storage space. Unpopular in the sense that absolutely no one was asking for it.
Even in addition to that, the drop out provides a protection against those who would spam the network by requesting a useless file. As they request the Freenet key, it will propagate to machines closer to them. The next time the user requests that file, it will call a node it knows its on and no others. That means the rest of the network would drop the file and only a few nodes close to the would-be spammer would have it.
but won't let people who enter keys delete their own documents.
For one good a simple reason: If the FBI came a raided you, demanding at gun point that you delete that doc describing, in detail, say, the Carnivore, you couldn't do it, even though you inserted it into the network. Why exactly is it so important to delete files you inserted, anyways?
Freenet wasn't designed to be a permenant datastore. Also, as more disk space is allocated to Freenet, it becomes less likely that things will drop out.
The way Freenet works, there is a stack that represents all the information in a particular node. When a peice of info is requested, its put higher in the stack. If it gets to a certain point, its deleted. A big hard drive == bigger stack == less likely to drop out.
In this way, only really unpopular stuff will drop out, like a twenty-year-old doc about Intel's new 8086 processor.
At least that still gives you Napster users 35 years of the "The record companies are ripping off the artists so it's OK for me to steal their music" excuse.
Why use Napster? All it has is crappy artists from the RIAA. There are only a few songs I've actualy liked and are worth my time to download that have been made over the past ten years. Otherwise, I go to much better places, where music is allways free and more likely to be worth listening to.
They should make their money selling T-shirts
They already do. That and concert tickets. No artists ever made money off their CD. Remeber TLC? A top-ten band a few years back? They went bankrupt because they couldn't get enough money off their CD (namely, "Crazy Sexy Cool") sales because the RIAA screwed them over so bad.
"If I could program, I'd write open source software so how dare they copyright their music?"
I can program, and I do write free (speach) software (better then just plain old open source). In fact, I'm starting to grok at this one.
Slashdot Mirror
You took a high school class and from their you can extrapolate out the entire scope and range of all CS curriculum in world?
Go back and read it again. It's an AP CS course. It's taken so you can skip college-level courses. It should be quite good, but it sucks.
Besides which, I was creating quite a few great programs on my Apple //c when I just learned how to read (6-8 years old). Sure they were in BASIC, but I learned more during that time then I ever did in that class.
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No one would hire an architect or mechanical engineer who didn't have at least a piece of paper from a college.
Architecture and mechanical engineers have had centuries to develop well-thought-out standerds for doing things. Computer Science has had about 30 years.
Do you really think Microsoft actualy hires people that haven't gotten that scrap of paper? They have plenty of money to do so (yes, BillG never did graduate, but thats just BillG). They have no reason to hire anyone else. Yet, their software sucks.
And just what do CS majors learn? I've taken a High School CS course for AP and I'm not sure how I came out of it not hateing programing. For instance, when it came time to learn about linked lists, the book talked about what a linked list was. Then, it talked about what a linked list was. Then, it talked about what a linked list was. It never really said how to code the blasted thing. Not surprisingly, everyone failed the linked list test.
I don't hold out much hope on college, being that AP courses are designed to place you at or above the level of a college-level course.
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I can understand that the leader is feeling a bit moaned at and undervalued, the stuff does work at the heart of it and he and the other people working on it do deserve credit for it.
As some who is working on stuff over Freenet (through the new Everything Over Freenet project; check it out at eof.sourceforge.net) and has been on the mailing lists for about a year, I can tell you that most of the developers and mailing list regs hate Freenet's publicity. The project really hasn't accomplished that much and the media is screaming over it.
The problem that they don't seem to have addressed in their efforts to dodge censorship is that they will ultimately make the posession and propogation of the key names themselves illegal, undoing all of the good work they have planned for. For example, it will be the posession or use of the key name ''secrets/food/soylent green'' that will be used to repress people who might like to look up the document belonging to the key.
This is actualy already solved to some extent. Let me give a crash course on the types of keys on Freenet (a more complete list is at http://www.freenetproject.org/index.php?page=keys) :
KHK--These were deprecated in 0.3 and replaced by KSKs (see bellow) due to similar problems that you described above. KSKs now do the same job (i.e., have a guessable, human-readable string for a key name), but much more securly.
KSK--Provides a human-readable, guessable key. Despite being more secure then KHKs, they are not as secure as CHKs (see bellow). Its suggested use is as a redirect to a CHK. This is accomplished by setting the CLI option "-autoRedirect" for inserts to "yes". That is also the default behavior for FProxy.
CHK--Is not human-readable. Instead, its a cryptographic hash of the data inside.
There are a few others, such as SVK and SSK, but they're not as important for this disccusion (see the link above for more detials on them if you're interested).
So, lets say KSK@how-to-build-a-nuke.txt (note: Freenet URIs are formed like this: keytype@key) is a redirect to CHK@fjdskalf879934q2823rl,ekf;qnieof (I don't think I have the correct number of charecters for the CHK's crypto hash, I just type it randomly, but it doesn't matter). If a given node operator has their house broken into by Them and their node searched for a specific key name, they may find the KSK name, but that doesn't mean the operator was actualy holding that key (its just like a link on the web . . . oh no :). Nor does it mean that he had requested the data, much less had been the one to put it there in the first place.
There are a few things that Freenet needs to get rid of, but was known all along that they were just crutches to be gotten out of latter. The first is key indecies, which list names of keys. The second is inform.php, which is how a new node discovers other nodes already in the network. The latter will require being replaced by searching, and the former will be replaced by "discovery probes". The inform.php is the more serious of the two and will probably be fixed first (should be in 0.5 at the latest). Searching is a lower priority so it may not be touched until we get closer to 1.0 (some predict even longer, others a lot shorter. I think it will be there in 0.5).
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The last few releases have come with something called "FProxy" which acts as a proxy between your web browser and Freenet. Freenet is now as easy to use as putting a few lines of text into an HTML field. I assume you know how to figure that out or you couldn't post to Slashdot :)
FProxy also brings up an interesting solution to using Debian's Apt-get over Freenet (which is what I'm working on), since FProxy has to send stuff to the browser via HTTP and Apt-get already understands HTTP.
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A tangent: I've never been a real fan of Kevin J. Anderson's work. In terms of the Star Wars series, Timothy Zahn pretty much defined that series, IMHO. So, to be upfront, Anderson is fighting an uphill battle with me
Tell it, brother! Anderson's stuff stinks of trying to emulate Zahn and failing. Miserably. When I saw Kevin's name on this book, I immediatly thought back to his Star Wars books.
Anderson's Admerial Dallaa is a far cry from the kick-butt strategy of Zahn's Thrawn.
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Is there anything Tripwire can do that can't be done by a few shell scripts, a crontab, and the md5sum program? I mention this specificly because of a Secrurity Focus article that mentions this (Section 8. Tripwires).
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Thanks. Just what I need, more equations.
I got out of physics class last school year, dumped much of my knowledge over the summer, and by now I can remember lots of concepts but few equations. (Thats why my 30,000 km/s was so far off!)
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Sorry, I've been out of physics class too long.
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Quick crash course in orbital flight:
Every second, Earth (and any other object, for that matter) pulls a smaller object tward it at a set ammount acceleration (on Earth, its 9.81 m/s/s). So, if you travel at 30,000 km/s (just the throw out a number) you will still fall twards the Earth at 9.81 m/s/s. However, since the Earth is round, you will go out 30,000 km every second, while falling 9.81 m. Repeat this over and over and you will form an orbit around the planet. Objects in orbit are quite literaly falling around the Earth.
If you want to go higher in orbit, you mearly go faster and you will automaticly be pushed there. To go lower, just go slower. This is why there is a set speed and height for objects in geosyncronis orbit (which is when you are hovering over a specific point on the planet's surface).
This shows that there is a practical limit to just how slow you can go around the Earth, or else gravity won't care how fast you're going, you're going to hit that mountian! :)
So, the answer is, yes, you could, if gravity were low enough and your craft manuverable enough.
I hope this was clear. It helps if you have a few diagrams to show, but I don't have the time to make a few and give you the links to them, sorry.
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The new Pentium XXIII comes out in 2014. It creates so much heat that there is a 50/50 chance that when you turn it on, it will burn a hole to the Earth's center.
All in the name of progress . . .
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I am no fan of Intel in particular, but I think their aproach to the problem (just start over) has much better long term potential then "lets play nice and use old stuff."
And if propreity kernels and software eats GNU/Linux's dust, so much the better. We'll all be running smoothly on 64-bit while Microserfs are still trying to stop the rush of bluescreens :)
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Took a day for me to reply to this, but . . .
At work we use a server running Linux+Samba on a 45 GB hard drive. hda1 (/) is 100 MB, hda2 (/usr) is 5 GB, hda3 (swap) is 64 MB, and hda4 (/madtimes; I know thats against convention) is all the rest (~40 GB).
Upon installing Debian 2.1, the first boot up ran fsck on hda4. Wondering if there might be something wrong with the drive, I low-level formated the drive. On reinstalling, it did it again. Thats when I found out that
However, you are correct taht the 2 GB limit still exists, but its rare that you need more then that. One time when I did was when I was getting an image of my 6.4 GB hard drive onto my 30.7 GB hard drive for backup (I was reinstalling Windows on the smaller drive and wanted to fall back on the orginal if soemthing went wrong). To get around the limit, here's the command I ran (or some variation of it, can't remeber exactly):
dd if=/dev/hda1 | split -b2048M - hda1
Then, if I needed the back up (fortuantly, I didn't) I could run:
dd if=hda1* of=/dev/hda1
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All kernels 2.2.14 and beyond (or is it .15?) can do more then 2GB. ext2 itself handled >2GB fine.
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Not sure if this was mentioned already, but:
it just strikes me that things like hard drives don't respond well to axes and chain saw blades
Well, you could put some armor around your hard drive, but that might take up a lot of weight. You might also ditch the hard drive entirely, boot from a floppy drive and load everything into a RAM disk. Or you could even get rid of all magnetic media and boot the entire system using an embeded EPROM(s).
Floppy -> RAM disk system seems to the the cheapist and easyist if you can find enough RAM. Once the system is booted, remove the disk from the drive and put it in a safe place. Its too bad you can't remove the floppy entirely while the system is on. Be sure to have plenty of stand-by floppy drives for a quick replacement, just in case (this shouldn't cost too much, 3.5" floppy drives are cheep).
As for the distro itself, you can either make your own (time consuming, but it will be more custimized), or you can use a pre-build mini-distro. I suggest Small Linux, as it has a very-low memory footprint and already loads itslef into a RAM disk. Its based on a 2.0.x kernel and libc5, but there doesn't seem to be any loadable module support (the programs to load modules aren't there, anyway).
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I dont know: whats easier, adding stability to Windows, or adding hardware support and UI to linux?
Good question. The UI is something built into the system at a much higher level. This means that, programming-wise, a UI is far easier. However, hackers tend to have problems doing the part of the UI you actualy see, at least as far as your average users is concerned. This is why corperate funding thourgh the Gnome Foundation is very important to the future of Linux on the desktop: It gets rid of that achillies heal.
On the other hand, stability is something you have to deal with at a very low level; right down to places where you're using ASM in your kernel and libraries. This is a place where hackers rule. Microsoft started with a base system (DOS) that was OK for simple, single-user, single-tasking jobs at a command line. Then they started adding a GUI on top . . .
WinNT/Win2000 got rid of the DOS core. There was still some DOS functionality as of NT 4.0, but I beleive it was mostly removed for Win2000. In any case, it was put in more for backwards-compatibilty then anything else.
NT is also a microkernel, which means it naturaly has some extra overhead in it that Linux's monolithic kernel does not. The still-mostly-vapor GNU HURD is also a microkernel. If done properly, the extra overhead isn't that much. The question is, did Microsoft do it properly? I don't really know.
In any case, its much easier for hackers to create a stable and speedy core system, while difficult for them to make a good UI. On the other hand, its far easier for a corperate project to make a reasonably good UI, but diffcult to make a stable and speedy core system.
The good news for Linux is that we're not limited to using the hacker-meathod. Alredy the Gnome Foundation has been formed to make a great UI with lots of corperate funding. Also, don't forget Eazel, with some of the orginal MacOS UI guys working on a Gnome project. Whatever else you say about MacOS, it has a great UI.
This is very bad news for Microsoft, which is fine by me. Without turning entirely in the other direction, Microsoft has no way of harnessing the power of hackers to create a good core system, while the hackers have a way of harnessing the corperate-backed projects to create a good UI.
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Did you even look at the website. This isn't "just another distro." You compile the entire system from source (using a pre-built distro to do it, of course). I'm almost finished with mine; just have to get networking and X+GNOME running.
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you aren't *doing* anything new, you're merely attempting (feebly) to be different
I used to use Debian because it was something a little diffrent, but just a week ago I switched to something totaly diffrent (not *BSD): LFS.
Does that qualify for being diffrent?
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I wonder whats going to happen when Hillary Rosen and her pal good ol' Jack discovers IRC.
" . . . and thats why sharks don't get cancer. In totaly unrelated news, the RIAA has sent threatening letters to several operators of IRC, a totaly new way of trading pirated MP3 files over then Internet. The RIAA has posted losses of $300 bazillion due to this new service."
**Insert sounds of geeks laughing so hard at the reporter's technical illiteracy here**
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Talking about social responsibility . . .
I think 2600 considers this type of thing implicit in all their articles. However, maybe they shouldn't be so surprised when the whole world doesn't see it that way, and maybe they should be a little more explicit there.
It is also correct that destroying the "security through obscurity" philosiphy of many corperations is a good thing. How long does it take a security hole to be fixed after its seen in 2600? The day it hits the stands?
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For higher level thoughts, Language plays a very important role in how we think. "Higher level", in this case, refers to more abstract ideas. Simple ideas, such as hunger, rain, rock, etc. are fairly easy to express accross all languages, or even with no spoken language at all.
If there is any task that requires a lot of high level thought, its programing. People of diffrent language backgrounds use words in their heads to express ideas, but some words and language constructs are better then others for describing an idea. This means that people of diffrent languages, quite literaly, don't think the same way as others. The approach to solving problems will be affected accordingly. These diffrences aren't as noticable when two languages stem closely from a common root; it would be more noticeable between, say, German and Chinees.
This wide veriety of ways to solve problems could be harnessed if and only if programing becomes a multi-lingual, multi-national activity. This is certianly not to say that any language is better then another, just that the diffrent approach to solving the problem may bring a better result.
Its for these reasons that, although I was boarn and raised in the US, I am against the Internet becoming Amercianized and English dominated. It is true, though, that we need a standered language for communicating, or any benifits we may get from being a multi-lingual Internet will be lost.
I also think that English is quite possibly the worst language for this job. Its just like that one OS we all love to hate: Its bulky, inefficent, and everybody uses it :)
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how do national laws apply to the Internet?
Maybe its best that they didn't. Its nearly impossible for a website about even normal things to follow all the laws out there. Are we to try to block all accsess to all those websites about fishing, nature, etc., because they make some wussy 30 sq. mi. country in Europe mad?
Let the Internet be governed seperatly from the rest of the world. The only trubble is keeping control of that government away from greedy corperatists. They can have their say, of course, which is only fair. However, they should not control it the way the control the US government today.
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It looks like Intel was trying to back away from RAMBUS gracefuly after they hyped it for so long. Its good to see that they finaly came to their senses, but it seems like we could have been spared a lot of problems if they had been more farsighted.
Now if only all corperations could back away so gracefuly. [*caugh*]MPAA[*caugh*]RIAA[*caugh*].
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The freenet developers just can't decide what they want this tool to be. Is this a tool for violating copyright, or is it a tool for the real propagation of free speech?
As someone who follows the development of Freenet closely, I can tell you that the core developers agree that it is for free speech. Copyright gets draged along for the ride, but since they don't particularly like copyright anyway, they continue. However, they don't apreaciate people calling it "a better Napster", and neither do I.
I also find it interesting, that the developers believe in deleting documents that are unpopular
It wasn't intended to be an infinate storage space, like the Eternity Service was, but big hard drives make it so that only the most unpopular documents aren't there. Also, if there is a specific group of people who are allways asking for a specific set of docs, it will propagate around that group, whereas the rest of the network dropped it long ago.
Additionaly, as hard drive space becomes cheeper, it will be less likly that stuff will drop out. I personaly have a 30 GB drive, with one partition of 20 GB just sitting there, unused. I have no issues with devoting this to Freenet. Even Microsoft bloatware would have a hard time filling that space :). If I had a big pipe on that computer, lots of stuff could be stored and requested, but it would take a very long time for a very unpopular file to ever drop out of my storage space. Unpopular in the sense that absolutely no one was asking for it.
Even in addition to that, the drop out provides a protection against those who would spam the network by requesting a useless file. As they request the Freenet key, it will propagate to machines closer to them. The next time the user requests that file, it will call a node it knows its on and no others. That means the rest of the network would drop the file and only a few nodes close to the would-be spammer would have it.
but won't let people who enter keys delete their own documents.
For one good a simple reason: If the FBI came a raided you, demanding at gun point that you delete that doc describing, in detail, say, the Carnivore, you couldn't do it, even though you inserted it into the network. Why exactly is it so important to delete files you inserted, anyways?
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Freenet wasn't designed to be a permenant datastore. Also, as more disk space is allocated to Freenet, it becomes less likely that things will drop out.
The way Freenet works, there is a stack that represents all the information in a particular node. When a peice of info is requested, its put higher in the stack. If it gets to a certain point, its deleted. A big hard drive == bigger stack == less likely to drop out.
In this way, only really unpopular stuff will drop out, like a twenty-year-old doc about Intel's new 8086 processor.
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At least that still gives you Napster users 35 years of the "The record companies are ripping off the artists so it's OK for me to steal their music" excuse.
Why use Napster? All it has is crappy artists from the RIAA. There are only a few songs I've actualy liked and are worth my time to download that have been made over the past ten years. Otherwise, I go to much better places, where music is allways free and more likely to be worth listening to.
They should make their money selling T-shirts
They already do. That and concert tickets. No artists ever made money off their CD. Remeber TLC? A top-ten band a few years back? They went bankrupt because they couldn't get enough money off their CD (namely, "Crazy Sexy Cool") sales because the RIAA screwed them over so bad.
"If I could program, I'd write open source software so how dare they copyright their music?"
I can program, and I do write free (speach) software (better then just plain old open source). In fact, I'm starting to grok at this one.
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