Mac once accounted for over 10% of the desktop market. Linux now accounts for about 4%.
I have no idea where you get these figures from but anyway (suppose these figures are right).
According to the article:
According to IDC market research, Linux users comprise only 4 percent of the desktop operating systems in the United States (not bad for an OS that's been around only since 1991).
That's pretty badly worded, though. Does that mean that 4% of the computers in the workplace are running Linux? That 4% of users run Linux? That they run Linux exclusively?
From an "advocacy" stance, I'm not really sure I see the point here: I can't see scores of LAN admins getting all excited about this. If they wanted to try Linux, they probably would have already. If they didn't, that copy of TurboLinux is about as useful as yet another AOL coaster^M^M^M^M^M^M^M CD.
David Thomas Bell, 33, of Coon Rapids, faces 11 felony charges. They include three counts of unauthorized computer access, two counts of theft of trade secrets, two counts of attempted theft of trade secrets, two counts of computer theft and two counts of possession of burglary or theft tools (specifically, a software program for extracting user IDs and passwords from a computer system).
In short, as has been pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, these people weren't busted for having l0phtcrack. They were busted because they had it, and actually used it gain unauthorized access to computers. Also found in Bell's possession was the confidential list of clients for the company in question, username and (cracked) password pairs, and the contents of a restricted file on the system.
If this shouldn't be against the law, I ask you to tell me what should.
Re:"It was all I could do, as a woman!". :PPPPPP
on
X-Files FPS Episode
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· Score: 3
I watched last night's episode with my wife and two friends. As soon as blubbering geek-girl uttered the line which you quoted, she rolled her eyes. "This show is offensive," she said, and I had to agree with her.
It's not that I mind leering at a voluptous woman from the comfort of my living room, but I do mind when the only characters on a show are either oversexed boy-men (any male character in the show), oversexualized prostitutes (the Basic Instinct wanna-be questioned by the police), or women who can only deal with sexual energy by sublimation into code (geek girl) or violence (Scully, 'round about the end of the show).
Usually, I give less than half a rat's ass about sexism on TV (it's easy when you start with the assumption that it's all crap anyway), but that was bad. Like, Cleopatra 2525 bad.
In closing, however, I'll give in to some of my own testosterone-fuled urges. To wit: god damn, I don't think I've ever seen anyone whose legs went up as high as that.
Frankly, I've always been skeptical of 3D desktop environments. I've yet to see one that I'd even want to try, let alone use on a regular basis. A lot of the time, they consist mostly of nausea-inducing zooming in of 3D icons - I see this as being like "expanding windows" on a desktop, only more annoying.
Actually, one of the best quasi-3D interfaces I ever saw was in Homeworld, but it was for a game, and basically "special purpose."
I'm pretty convinced that the reason for this is that we're trained to reduce problems to 2D representations wherever possible, if only because they're so easy to manipulate. (I got my training with crayons in nursery school - how about you?)
If a 3D GUI is gonna work, it'd have to be done by making the three dimensional space not only easy to navigate, but non-annoying. I see possibilities for something that looks like an orthagonal map (maybe rotatable & scalable), but that's about it.
Just a guess: the Google guys claim that what sets their search engine apart from so many others is that it weights sites based on other sites that link to it - if your site gets linked from one that sells widgets, a search for widgets is more likely to pull your site.
Now, think of how many pr0n sites make you click one of those "I understand and agree with the terms of service" links. Almost invariably, the "I don't agree - I'm under 18" link takes you to Disney's page.
So, searches for some "adult" key phrases bring up Disney, by sheer force of association. (Dear god. I can't imagine what would happen if their lawyers got wind of this.)
That's a very good point. I've seen pages that use more than a dozen shim/spacer images just to line things up. If I have to wade through hundreds of "spacer" alts while using Lynx, I'll stab someone.
This story was posted here wasn't it. VA free publicity?
Right. And the sun didn't fall from the sky today, so I can safely assume that the gods approved of my blood sacrifice of your cats.
I can understand general concerns about the influence of VA on/., but let's be real. VA is probably the most trusted name in the field of Linux OEMs. If they had acquired just about any web site of note, I'd have expected to see it here.
Actually, that isn't too hard, on either Linux or Windows 9x (haven't tried it on NT or 2000). Under Linux, pop open your/etc/hosts file and make an entry for each site at 127.0.0.1. All those requests will get sent right back to you, at which point they die the death.
Same thing under Windows, except the file is C:\Windows\hosts. (There's a sample file located at C:\Windows\hosts.sam. Rename it to get it to work).
If you're using Internet Explorer, you can use custom "security zones" to assign arbitrary permissions to pages. I don't think you can use it to block a site entirely, but you can disable cookies, java, javascript, activeX, yada yada.
Finally, any proxy server or firewall worth its salt will allow you to restrict access to certain web sites.
That's not to say that they actually will - getting every last instruction set in there probably would be more work than it's worth. (Of course, I can make this bold statement because I have precisely no idea how much work it is.) But if it can perfectly emulate (and optimize!) the x86 set, I don't see why they couldn't build the code morphing layer around whatever set they feel like.
Ahem. "Replace Windows on the desktop," is not even close to "Give everyone root on their own little server," at least not in a corporate environment. Even if most users were given full blown Linux boxen instead of X-Terminals (the more likely choice), it's highly unlikely that they'd all have root access on their own machines. Furthermore, Joe Blow user isn't going to be compiling his own programs anyway, and since we don't see a lot of macro viruses for Linux...
Of course, if you always boot a system to single-user mode, or if you always log in as root, yes, you can do some serious damage. But anyone who has spent time in QA will tell you that "idiotproof" really means "not yet subjected to critical levels of stupidity."
Except that IBM has total control over the architecture, and uses what they call the TIMI (Technology Independent Machine Interface) to translate between applications and various versions of the AS400 hardware.
Whereas Crusoe can translate between... well, theoretically, any instruction set, and its native enviornment.
WAP is an API for making systems which interface with mobile phones, specifically the kind marketed to the "I'm so cool I need to surf the Internet on my mobile phone" set. You can find more about WAP here.
This may or may not be what you're saying, but if it's not the general educated public that decides what is and isn't law, then something is horribly wrong with the judicial system
It isn't. Deciding what is or isn't law at a given moment is an issue argued by state and federal judges, and legal counsel for concerned parties. Deciding on what is to become law is the concern of the legislature. The "general educated public" doesn't have a say.
Really? I'm a little surprised by that point of view. Given the amount of T.V. watching that most kids have done by the age of 10, I'd think that an hour or so in front of the computer would be inconsequential in comparison.
On the other hand, I certainly haven't actually studied the matter at all, so. Several large grains of salt.
I agree with the main thrust of your argument completely, but I differ on the specifics.
I see the disinterest among teachers in computers as the ultimate result of a time in which bright young men were expected to be doctors, lawyers, or engineers, and bright young women were expected to be teachers, nurses, or housewives. The feminization of the teaching profession led to an environment where teachers (predominantly female, though I don't at all mean to indicate a personal gender bias) saw their profession as being in a sense, "seperate, but equal" from technology.
That view is changing, even among the "old guard" in the teachning profession. But the attitude of most of the people I talk to in this position is one of reluctance, bordering on dismay: they know they should learn how to use computers, possibly even that they must, but they fear and delay the process. Even worse, this situation leaves our schools open to school staff and faculty with "dangerously small" amounts of knowledge, more interested in personal glory than providing technology solutions that work for schools. (Fact: I personally know of a district who's technology director singlehandedly raised the local tax rate by requiring a T3 and two Cisco 7500s. For a high school. Not even a very big one, at that.)
(My credentials, not that you asked: two family members working in the public school system, two years as a systems administrator for an ISP providing access to several districts and private schools.)
The problem is that at some level, the client has to know that a character is nonexistent, especially if it's doing any client-side prediction at all. (Quake 1 didn't, but the subsequent QuakeWorld did, as did Q2 and pretty much every game that followed.) Remember, the bot is actually part of the client, so you can't pass the bot any information that you wouldn't want to pass a client anyway. If you send a message to a client saying that there's a player there, you have to be prepared for it to shoot. What are you going to do if it hits - label it a bot and kick it out? What if it was just a random shot?
For a second there, I thought it said Transmeta Corporation, rather than Transasia. I spent about five minutes staring at it in shock before I snapped out of it.
On the other hand, I'm sure many "right wing people" have pointed out that ignoring traditional moral values increase your odds of getting AIDS dramatically. And it does: the only way I know of to catch aids within tradition morality on the part of all parties is blood transfer in a medical context.
I don't want to get too far off on this tangent (moderators, this thread has gotten to be somewhat off topic), but I have to take issue with your defense of the theory that ignoring "traditional moral values" causes AIDS. The implication, intended or not, is that being immoral is the cause of AIDS. This is simply not the case: I have never heard of anyone contracting HIV by robbing little old ladies, cussing, or bearing false witness against his neighbor.
You claim that the respondent was objecting to "unimbellished, scientific truth," but I have yet to see a scientific proclimation on the relative safety of moral vs. immoral behavior. The truth is that unprotected sexual intercourse, oral sex, or blood-to-blood contact are the major vectors of AIDS. The only embellishment is in calling these activities immoral: science renders no such judgement.
If you want to label having unprotected sex with many partners as immoral, fine, but don't conflate immorality with high-risk behavior. To do so is to lend credence to those who think that AIDS is retribution for past sins, whether you hold that belief or not.
It's a classic manifestation of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD, for short). The poster was indicating that many instances of OCD can be traced to a minor chemical imbalance in the brain which is treatable with medication.
If you have a symptom like this, I strongly recommend that you talk to a therapist. Not because it's necessarily earth shattering, or life threatening, but because it's just dumb not to. If you have reason to think something's wrong with your heart, you go to a doctor. If you have reason to think somethings wrong for your brain, what can it hurt to ask?
Well, to be perfectly fair, my philosophy prof loved the The Matrix, and went to some lengths in class to relate it to Plato's story of the cave. That was something of a trip.
On the other hand, I liked it for the stuff blowing up. So, yeah, I wouldn't exactly call it a deep movie.;)
Note: after seeing Reeves in Johnny Mnemonic, my friends and I kept deliberately mangling one of the lines from the movie: "I can store 360 gigabytes of data in my brain... because there's nothing else there."
Don't know if anyone else here are Click & Clack fans, but this reminds me of one of their puzzlers. There are lots of cars with names that are verbs (Ford Aspire), and many more with names that are nouns (Honda Accord), and even a couple of adjectives (Honda Civic), but very few plural nouns. Name one.
Slashdot Mirror
According to the article:
That's pretty badly worded, though. Does that mean that 4% of the computers in the workplace are running Linux? That 4% of users run Linux? That they run Linux exclusively?
I knew that. I just... er... um. Wanted to skip some lines. Or something.
From an "advocacy" stance, I'm not really sure I see the point here: I can't see scores of LAN admins getting all excited about this. If they wanted to try Linux, they probably would have already. If they didn't, that copy of TurboLinux is about as useful as yet another AOL coaster^M^M^M^M^M^M^M CD.
From a "cool stuff" stance... well, okay, maybe.
Directly from the article:
In short, as has been pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, these people weren't busted for having l0phtcrack. They were busted because they had it, and actually used it gain unauthorized access to computers. Also found in Bell's possession was the confidential list of clients for the company in question, username and (cracked) password pairs, and the contents of a restricted file on the system.
If this shouldn't be against the law, I ask you to tell me what should.
I watched last night's episode with my wife and two friends. As soon as blubbering geek-girl uttered the line which you quoted, she rolled her eyes. "This show is offensive," she said, and I had to agree with her.
It's not that I mind leering at a voluptous woman from the comfort of my living room, but I do mind when the only characters on a show are either oversexed boy-men (any male character in the show), oversexualized prostitutes (the Basic Instinct wanna-be questioned by the police), or women who can only deal with sexual energy by sublimation into code (geek girl) or violence (Scully, 'round about the end of the show).
Usually, I give less than half a rat's ass about sexism on TV (it's easy when you start with the assumption that it's all crap anyway), but that was bad. Like, Cleopatra 2525 bad.
In closing, however, I'll give in to some of my own testosterone-fuled urges. To wit: god damn, I don't think I've ever seen anyone whose legs went up as high as that.
Frankly, I've always been skeptical of 3D desktop environments. I've yet to see one that I'd even want to try, let alone use on a regular basis. A lot of the time, they consist mostly of nausea-inducing zooming in of 3D icons - I see this as being like "expanding windows" on a desktop, only more annoying.
Actually, one of the best quasi-3D interfaces I ever saw was in Homeworld, but it was for a game, and basically "special purpose."
I'm pretty convinced that the reason for this is that we're trained to reduce problems to 2D representations wherever possible, if only because they're so easy to manipulate. (I got my training with crayons in nursery school - how about you?)
If a 3D GUI is gonna work, it'd have to be done by making the three dimensional space not only easy to navigate, but non-annoying. I see possibilities for something that looks like an orthagonal map (maybe rotatable & scalable), but that's about it.
Hey. That's pretty funny. :)
Just a guess: the Google guys claim that what sets their search engine apart from so many others is that it weights sites based on other sites that link to it - if your site gets linked from one that sells widgets, a search for widgets is more likely to pull your site.
Now, think of how many pr0n sites make you click one of those "I understand and agree with the terms of service" links. Almost invariably, the "I don't agree - I'm under 18" link takes you to Disney's page.
So, searches for some "adult" key phrases bring up Disney, by sheer force of association. (Dear god. I can't imagine what would happen if their lawyers got wind of this.)
That's a very good point. I've seen pages that use more than a dozen shim/spacer images just to line things up. If I have to wade through hundreds of "spacer" alts while using Lynx, I'll stab someone.
Right. And the sun didn't fall from the sky today, so I can safely assume that the gods approved of my blood sacrifice of your cats.
I can understand general concerns about the influence of VA on /., but let's be real. VA is probably the most trusted name in the field of Linux OEMs. If they had acquired just about any web site of note, I'd have expected to see it here.
Actually, that isn't too hard, on either Linux or Windows 9x (haven't tried it on NT or 2000). Under Linux, pop open your /etc/hosts file and make an entry for each site at 127.0.0.1. All those requests will get sent right back to you, at which point they die the death.
Same thing under Windows, except the file is C:\Windows\hosts. (There's a sample file located at C:\Windows\hosts.sam. Rename it to get it to work).
If you're using Internet Explorer, you can use custom "security zones" to assign arbitrary permissions to pages. I don't think you can use it to block a site entirely, but you can disable cookies, java, javascript, activeX, yada yada.
Finally, any proxy server or firewall worth its salt will allow you to restrict access to certain web sites.
That's not to say that they actually will - getting every last instruction set in there probably would be more work than it's worth. (Of course, I can make this bold statement because I have precisely no idea how much work it is.) But if it can perfectly emulate (and optimize!) the x86 set, I don't see why they couldn't build the code morphing layer around whatever set they feel like.
Ahem. "Replace Windows on the desktop," is not even close to "Give everyone root on their own little server," at least not in a corporate environment. Even if most users were given full blown Linux boxen instead of X-Terminals (the more likely choice), it's highly unlikely that they'd all have root access on their own machines. Furthermore, Joe Blow user isn't going to be compiling his own programs anyway, and since we don't see a lot of macro viruses for Linux...
Of course, if you always boot a system to single-user mode, or if you always log in as root, yes, you can do some serious damage. But anyone who has spent time in QA will tell you that "idiotproof" really means "not yet subjected to critical levels of stupidity."
Except that IBM has total control over the architecture, and uses what they call the TIMI (Technology Independent Machine Interface) to translate between applications and various versions of the AS400 hardware.
Whereas Crusoe can translate between... well, theoretically, any instruction set, and its native enviornment.
Which means they're not the same at all.
WAP is an API for making systems which interface with mobile phones, specifically the kind marketed to the "I'm so cool I need to surf the Internet on my mobile phone" set. You can find more about WAP here.
WML is like HTML for mobile phones.
It isn't. Deciding what is or isn't law at a given moment is an issue argued by state and federal judges, and legal counsel for concerned parties. Deciding on what is to become law is the concern of the legislature. The "general educated public" doesn't have a say.
Advanced tea substitute, perhaps?
Really? I'm a little surprised by that point of view. Given the amount of T.V. watching that most kids have done by the age of 10, I'd think that an hour or so in front of the computer would be inconsequential in comparison.
On the other hand, I certainly haven't actually studied the matter at all, so. Several large grains of salt.
I agree with the main thrust of your argument completely, but I differ on the specifics.
I see the disinterest among teachers in computers as the ultimate result of a time in which bright young men were expected to be doctors, lawyers, or engineers, and bright young women were expected to be teachers, nurses, or housewives. The feminization of the teaching profession led to an environment where teachers (predominantly female, though I don't at all mean to indicate a personal gender bias) saw their profession as being in a sense, "seperate, but equal" from technology.
That view is changing, even among the "old guard" in the teachning profession. But the attitude of most of the people I talk to in this position is one of reluctance, bordering on dismay: they know they should learn how to use computers, possibly even that they must, but they fear and delay the process. Even worse, this situation leaves our schools open to school staff and faculty with "dangerously small" amounts of knowledge, more interested in personal glory than providing technology solutions that work for schools. (Fact: I personally know of a district who's technology director singlehandedly raised the local tax rate by requiring a T3 and two Cisco 7500s. For a high school. Not even a very big one, at that.)
(My credentials, not that you asked: two family members working in the public school system, two years as a systems administrator for an ISP providing access to several districts and private schools.)
The problem is that at some level, the client has to know that a character is nonexistent, especially if it's doing any client-side prediction at all. (Quake 1 didn't, but the subsequent QuakeWorld did, as did Q2 and pretty much every game that followed.) Remember, the bot is actually part of the client, so you can't pass the bot any information that you wouldn't want to pass a client anyway. If you send a message to a client saying that there's a player there, you have to be prepared for it to shoot. What are you going to do if it hits - label it a bot and kick it out? What if it was just a random shot?
But if you used it to do your taxes, you did register it, right?
Right?
I gotta stop reading when I'm this tired.
I don't want to get too far off on this tangent (moderators, this thread has gotten to be somewhat off topic), but I have to take issue with your defense of the theory that ignoring "traditional moral values" causes AIDS. The implication, intended or not, is that being immoral is the cause of AIDS. This is simply not the case: I have never heard of anyone contracting HIV by robbing little old ladies, cussing, or bearing false witness against his neighbor.
You claim that the respondent was objecting to "unimbellished, scientific truth," but I have yet to see a scientific proclimation on the relative safety of moral vs. immoral behavior. The truth is that unprotected sexual intercourse, oral sex, or blood-to-blood contact are the major vectors of AIDS. The only embellishment is in calling these activities immoral: science renders no such judgement.
If you want to label having unprotected sex with many partners as immoral, fine, but don't conflate immorality with high-risk behavior. To do so is to lend credence to those who think that AIDS is retribution for past sins, whether you hold that belief or not.
It's a classic manifestation of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD, for short). The poster was indicating that many instances of OCD can be traced to a minor chemical imbalance in the brain which is treatable with medication.
If you have a symptom like this, I strongly recommend that you talk to a therapist. Not because it's necessarily earth shattering, or life threatening, but because it's just dumb not to. If you have reason to think something's wrong with your heart, you go to a doctor. If you have reason to think somethings wrong for your brain, what can it hurt to ask?
On the other hand, I liked it for the stuff blowing up. So, yeah, I wouldn't exactly call it a deep movie. ;)
Note: after seeing Reeves in Johnny Mnemonic, my friends and I kept deliberately mangling one of the lines from the movie: "I can store 360 gigabytes of data in my brain... because there's nothing else there."
(This is the only answer I can think of.)