This may be true, and it's certainly something to be remedied. However, I must say that this is usually just because the developers only have access to Linux boxes. As open-source software becomes more popular, things like GNOME, KDE, Gaim, HAL, cdrecord get modified to be more standards-compliant and work on more flavors of Unix.
As always, this the great thing about open source... if it doesn't compile on your box, you can tweak it until it does, then submit the patch and help everyone else out. I did this a few months ago when I wanted the Ogg Theora video codec to use MMX optimizations on x86_64... patched the code, and now everyone with a 64-bit box can use optimized video encoding. Yay!
I could even imagine that, before Linux, Solaris was the major development platform for GNU, but I could be wrong there.
Yeah, that's probably about right. I imagine most of the GNU development was done under Solaris, NextStep, and AIX... in that order. The first time I got my grubby little 11-year-old hands on a Unix shell account, in 1993, it was on a NeXT box. Most of the utilities on that box were GNU utilities... GCC, binutils, tar, gzip, etc. I remember learning to unpack tarballs and running./configure to build a GNU Bison package that I downloaded.
Once I heard about Linux around 1996-ish, there was no going back. Here was a Unix-type operating system I could install on my own Cyrix 486SX PC, awesome:-)
I haven't seen anything come along that's more versatile and all-around better than Linux. Sure, I think OpenBSD is great for ultra-secure servers, and they've been doing fabulous things with wireless driver support recently. Some Linux distros (cough, Mandrake, cough) have gotten way too far out on the bleeding-edge features curve and had stability and configuration problems.
But overall Linux has become everything I'd hoped it would be and more: free, good hardware support, well-documented, high performance, good community support, and UBIQUITOUS (my wireless router runs Linux, and I'm sorely tempted to put Linux on my girlfriend's iPod).
The "game port" joysticks for old x86 boxes worked the exact same way! The joystick axis was basically a variable resistor, and its position would vary the time constant of an RC circuit. The voltage would drain at a rate dependent on the joystick position, and you used a do-nothing timing loop to wait for the voltage to fall past a threshold and flip a bit.
I remember trying to learn to program the PC joystick in assembly language around 1993, and it was a real pain in the ass to get it right. You had to constantly poll the joystick and put in all kinds of delay loops. Apparently, proper analog-to-digital converters were very expensive when the PC game port was designed, and so this crude circuit design was used instead. See the wikipedia article for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port#Circuits
Bottom line: this patent ain't new technology. In fact, it's OBSOLETE technology. There are much better ways to get an analog measurement from a joystick, and there were even in 1998 when the patent was filed.
I don't care how drunk I am, if the government cannot provide me with safety with other methods of transports due to their own incompetency, then they have no right to tell me I can't drive home.
Grow up, dude. It's not the government's responsibility to cater to your every need. If you have to drive home, then you should NOT GET DRUNK!!! It's as easy as that.
Oh, and how about you how think about the other innocent people who you could harm with your drunk driving? Such as this guy William mentioned above? Or such as me, legally and soberly riding my bicycle on public roads.
The product is only as secure as its users. If the mainstream Windows userbase switched to Linux, they'd take their bad habits (neglecting security hole patches, installing supposedly-required software to view web pages, logging in as root by default, etc.) with them. Linux would be the new hot target for malware. The same goes for OSX or any other operating system. Sure, there would be fewer holes, assuming that people made sure to apply the appropriate security patches, but we're assuming again that they wouldn't take their bad habits with them again, aren't we?
I disagree completely.
Windows makes it easy to practice these bad habits... default Administrator login, programs that don't work correctly when run without Admin access, ActiveX, etc. Contrast this with, say, Ubuntu... an excellent Linux distro even for newbies: by default the root account is disabled, when you want to do something system-alterating (e.g. temporarily gain root access), you have to put in your PASSWORD, not just click "Okay". The whole thing is so well-integrated that these password prompts aren't annoying or confusing. The system in general tries to explain to you what you're doing when it's something unusual.
Furthermore, most Linux distros are based on a central software repository which is supported, or at least approved, by the distro's developers. When you install open-source software from this repository, you can have confidence that you're not going to get spyware... and if you're running the stable distribution you can be pretty sure that you're installing software that has been thoroughly debugged as well--as opposed to some IE toolbar crap rushed out the door after a week's dev time.
I also think that Firefox 2.0 is far superior to IE 6 (haven't used 7 yet) in terms of alerting the user to potentially dangerous actions. When you install extensions, Firefox adds a 5-second time delay before you can click on "OK" to force you to actually read those stupid pop-up boxes. It detects suspicious obfuscated URLs, won't run downloaded executables without additional intervention, and checks HTTPS sites that improperly mix secure and non-secure content.
So I *do* think that PC security would improve substantially if the Windows userbase switched en masse to Linux. Granted, there'd be some of the problems with people doing stupid things and not reading warnings, but I don't think it'd just be same-old-same-old...
Jason Fry apparently concludes from his research that the power used by computers isn't that much. But I think that's the wrong conclusion! His two PCs use $16 worth of electricity a month, compared to $30 worth for the lights.
To me, that's a LOT of electricity used by the PCs. I start from the premise that lighting uses a lot of electricity (common sense?)... and the fact that the computers use half that much is surprisingly large. I would be happier if my always-on PC used maybe 5% as much energy as the lighting in my house.
Yeah, I agree about quality of CF bulbs. I got an 8-pack at Costco and they turn on so quickly I can't tell the difference from incandescent. The quality of the light is also very similar. They were only about $2.50 a bulb in an 8-pack.
Interesting... I don't use Wine so haven't run into this issue. I suspect the Wine problems may stem partly from the fact that Wine is trying to emulate Windows, which as I mentioned, has lots of problems with 64-bit.
Any other apps you've had trouble with under 64-bit Ubuntu??
First of all, I prefer AMD processors myself, though I prefer to believe that I am not an unthinking fanboy. AMD does not make any non-64-bit processors anymore, so that makes the choice easy:-)
64-bit support under Linux is YEARS ahead of where it is under Windows! With Ubuntu Linux, 64-bit support "just works." I downloaded the x86_64 Install CD and burnt it, and everything installed flawlessly. Basically every single open source package compiles correctly in 64-bit mode, from the kernel to all the drivers to my favorite games. The *only* things that don't work are closed-source packages (yech!). For example, Flash and the Windows Media codecs still aren't available compiled natively for x86_64... which is entirely the fault of those particular software companies. If you need to install a few 32-bit closed-source apps under 64-bit Linux, you can do it but it takes a little know-how.
Under Windows, I'm told that there are vanishingly few native 64-bit apps and drivers. I haven't tried 64-bit Windows myself, but I gather that support isn't there yet. Proprietary software vendors don't want to release 64-bit versions because it means supporting multiple versions and possibly conflicting configurations.
Moving up to 64-bit makes obvious sense if you need to use >4gb of memory or do lots of number-crunching. But it has advantages for "ordinary" Desktop use as well... for one thing, the x86_64 instruction set adds more general-purpose registers, which allows more efficient compilation of code. Based on the expert information I've read, I believe this alone should result in a 10-20% speedup between 32-bit and 64-bit code.
So if you're using Linux, 64-bit is a no-brainer. With Windows, you probably won't see any benefit immediately, but once 64-bit apps and drivers become widely available, you'll appreciate the additional performance.
What happens is that your rockets get loaded a truck and an internet delivers those trucks to the server, its faster because your rockets are traveling en-mass.
I believe it was Andrew Tannenbaum who wrote, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
Unfortunately, that setup has a lot of BANDWIDTH, but terrible latency (the latency is basically how long it takes for the station wagon to get to its destination).
I thought Microsoft no longer allowed "phone in" activation... but perhaps I misunderstood that. I haven't used Windows at home in about 5 years, so I'm starting to get hazy on the details.
What does Microsoft do for government customers like the CIA/NSA/DIA? Some of those networks are completely and totally isolated from the public Internet.
I imagine Microsoft must provide them with a KMS that doesn't itself require activation, which can be run on a secure, closed network. I imagine it's not widely publicized...
Not a bad idea. Michigan (my home state) could sure as hell use the boost to the economy. Plenty of land reasonably cheap, and plenty of network infrastructure as well at least in the lower peninsula.
I agree completely. nmapfe is great about that. When I know the command line options I want to use, I run nmap. When I don't, I fire up nmapfe and use it to LEARN the appropriate command line options.
GUIs done right, as front-ends for command-line programs or configuration files, can be very powerful and useful tools.
Why not? Using a user-friendly GUI to configure a Linux firewall is a great way to *LEARN* to use more advanced features down the road.
I am an experienced Linux user and do pretty much everything from the command line. But I find there is a lot to like about the new GUI utilities like gnome-system-tools, especially compared to their MS Windows counterparts.
One of the great things about most Linux GUI configuration utilities is that they use the *same* configuration files that you could edit by hand, and generally try to modify them in a human-readable way. For example, under Debian or Ubuntu, you can edit your/etc/apt/sources.list file by hand, or have Synaptic do it for you. Synaptic will correctly parse any changes that you make, and if it modifies the file, it will do so in an easy-to-read way. I recently installed Ubuntu for a friend of mine and explained to him that a good way to learn to use the command line configuration files is to play around with the GUI utilities and study the changes they make to those files.
Contrast this with Windows where a lot of things can ONLY be configured with the GUI utilities, which often write their changes to impenetrable, undocumented binary registry keys... very hard to track down. If you try to configure things from the command line in Windows, you'll run into inconsistencies. For example, Windows XP actually has an/etc/hosts file like Linux somewhere under the \winnt\system32 directory... I made the mistake of editing it by hand, and then trying to undo the changes with the GUI. The changes made by the GUI were somehow silently ignored, which led to a mistifying series of DNS problems.
So I see the gnome-system-tools style of GUI configuration tools to be a Very Good Thing. These utilities make configuration easier for many people, without preventing them from accessing the underlying configuration in a comprehensive manner, and without leaving the system in an inconsistent state.
The reason hardware for MythTV costs more is because Tivo sells their hardware at a loss, because they can count on making up for it in high subscription fees.
I recently spec'ed out a MythTV box with an 80gb hard drive and hardware MPEG encoding and a nice media center case for $350 shipped from NewEgg. A pretty good deal, I'd say, and it can actually be used for other things than just watching TV (it's got an Athlon 64, 512 mb RAM, and NVidia GeForce 6150 graphics).
Well, some languages are not national languages:-) I mean, let's say you want the Apple web page in Malayalam... that's a language that's spoken by 40 million people in India. What URL would you go to for that page? By comparison, Danish is spoken by only 6 million people, but since it's the national language of Denmark you can easily find it at www.apple.dk
I'd rather see web sites make consistent use of LANGUAGE codes rather than COUNTRY codes, like wikipedia does, e.g: en.wikipedia.org for English, nah.wikipedia.org for Nahuatl, etc.
How is this flamebait? The GP is obviously a fairly well-informed technical person who tries to make intelligent choices about technology and standards and stuff... and yet, as the parent points out, the GP has chosen to keep all his music in a totally proprietary locked-down Microsoft format.
I'd say the parent's comments are entirely appropriate...
Um, no. The energy is *drawn* from the outlet at a comparatively slow rate (say, over a period of a few seconds) and then *released* into the laser extraordinarily fast (10^-15 seconds).
The technical meaning of the word "power" is energy consumed or produced per unit time. So a fairly small amount of energy can result in a huge amount of power if it's produced or consumed quickly.
... it's best to legislate on the side of caution.
And to expect enforcement to tend in the opposite direction!
I believe that legislators who truly value liberty--such as the founding fathers of the USA--will indeed err on the side of caution, because they know that zealous law enforcers, prosecutors, and politicians will try to abuse the laws as far as they can when it suits them.
Greylisting might be very effective for now, but of course the "fix" is quite easy: the spammers can reprogram the zombies to retry after temporary failures. In that case, greylisting won't slow them down more than proportionally to the rate at which they encounter temporary failures... I'd say a maximum rate of maybe 1 in 3 would be acceptable before legitimate email would be impacted too severely.
1/3 less spam is still waaaaay too much spam. I'm afraid that even though greylisting is a smart trick, it's not sustainable. Then again, I'm beginning to believe there's *NO* long-term way to slay SPAM, that it will be a permanent back-and-forth battle for years or decades.
Slashdot Mirror
This may be true, and it's certainly something to be remedied. However, I must say that this is usually just because the developers only have access to Linux boxes. As open-source software becomes more popular, things like GNOME, KDE, Gaim, HAL, cdrecord get modified to be more standards-compliant and work on more flavors of Unix.
As always, this the great thing about open source... if it doesn't compile on your box, you can tweak it until it does, then submit the patch and help everyone else out. I did this a few months ago when I wanted the Ogg Theora video codec to use MMX optimizations on x86_64... patched the code, and now everyone with a 64-bit box can use optimized video encoding. Yay!
Yeah, that's probably about right. I imagine most of the GNU development was done under Solaris, NextStep, and AIX... in that order. The first time I got my grubby little 11-year-old hands on a Unix shell account, in 1993, it was on a NeXT box. Most of the utilities on that box were GNU utilities... GCC, binutils, tar, gzip, etc. I remember learning to unpack tarballs and running
Once I heard about Linux around 1996-ish, there was no going back. Here was a Unix-type operating system I could install on my own Cyrix 486SX PC, awesome
I haven't seen anything come along that's more versatile and all-around better than Linux. Sure, I think OpenBSD is great for ultra-secure servers, and they've been doing fabulous things with wireless driver support recently. Some Linux distros (cough, Mandrake, cough) have gotten way too far out on the bleeding-edge features curve and had stability and configuration problems.
But overall Linux has become everything I'd hoped it would be and more: free, good hardware support, well-documented, high performance, good community support, and UBIQUITOUS (my wireless router runs Linux, and I'm sorely tempted to put Linux on my girlfriend's iPod).
The "game port" joysticks for old x86 boxes worked the exact same way! The joystick axis was basically a variable resistor, and its position would vary the time constant of an RC circuit. The voltage would drain at a rate dependent on the joystick position, and you used a do-nothing timing loop to wait for the voltage to fall past a threshold and flip a bit.
I remember trying to learn to program the PC joystick in assembly language around 1993, and it was a real pain in the ass to get it right. You had to constantly poll the joystick and put in all kinds of delay loops. Apparently, proper analog-to-digital converters were very expensive when the PC game port was designed, and so this crude circuit design was used instead. See the wikipedia article for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port#Circuits
Bottom line: this patent ain't new technology. In fact, it's OBSOLETE technology. There are much better ways to get an analog measurement from a joystick, and there were even in 1998 when the patent was filed.
Grow up, dude. It's not the government's responsibility to cater to your every need. If you have to drive home, then you should NOT GET DRUNK!!! It's as easy as that.
Oh, and how about you how think about the other innocent people who you could harm with your drunk driving? Such as this guy William mentioned above? Or such as me, legally and soberly riding my bicycle on public roads.
I disagree completely.
Windows makes it easy to practice these bad habits... default Administrator login, programs that don't work correctly when run without Admin access, ActiveX, etc. Contrast this with, say, Ubuntu... an excellent Linux distro even for newbies: by default the root account is disabled, when you want to do something system-alterating (e.g. temporarily gain root access), you have to put in your PASSWORD, not just click "Okay". The whole thing is so well-integrated that these password prompts aren't annoying or confusing. The system in general tries to explain to you what you're doing when it's something unusual.
Furthermore, most Linux distros are based on a central software repository which is supported, or at least approved, by the distro's developers. When you install open-source software from this repository, you can have confidence that you're not going to get spyware... and if you're running the stable distribution you can be pretty sure that you're installing software that has been thoroughly debugged as well--as opposed to some IE toolbar crap rushed out the door after a week's dev time.
I also think that Firefox 2.0 is far superior to IE 6 (haven't used 7 yet) in terms of alerting the user to potentially dangerous actions. When you install extensions, Firefox adds a 5-second time delay before you can click on "OK" to force you to actually read those stupid pop-up boxes. It detects suspicious obfuscated URLs, won't run downloaded executables without additional intervention, and checks HTTPS sites that improperly mix secure and non-secure content.
So I *do* think that PC security would improve substantially if the Windows userbase switched en masse to Linux. Granted, there'd be some of the problems with people doing stupid things and not reading warnings, but I don't think it'd just be same-old-same-old...
Jason Fry apparently concludes from his research that the power used by computers isn't that much. But I think that's the wrong conclusion! His two PCs use $16 worth of electricity a month, compared to $30 worth for the lights.
To me, that's a LOT of electricity used by the PCs. I start from the premise that lighting uses a lot of electricity (common sense?)... and the fact that the computers use half that much is surprisingly large. I would be happier if my always-on PC used maybe 5% as much energy as the lighting in my house.
Yeah, I agree about quality of CF bulbs. I got an 8-pack at Costco and they turn on so quickly I can't tell the difference from incandescent. The quality of the light is also very similar. They were only about $2.50 a bulb in an 8-pack.
:-)
I plan never to use an incandescent bulb again
Interesting... I don't use Wine so haven't run into this issue. I suspect the Wine problems may stem partly from the fact that Wine is trying to emulate Windows, which as I mentioned, has lots of problems with 64-bit.
Any other apps you've had trouble with under 64-bit Ubuntu??
First of all, I prefer AMD processors myself, though I prefer to believe that I am not an unthinking fanboy. AMD does not make any non-64-bit processors anymore, so that makes the choice easy :-)
64-bit support under Linux is YEARS ahead of where it is under Windows! With Ubuntu Linux, 64-bit support "just works." I downloaded the x86_64 Install CD and burnt it, and everything installed flawlessly. Basically every single open source package compiles correctly in 64-bit mode, from the kernel to all the drivers to my favorite games. The *only* things that don't work are closed-source packages (yech!). For example, Flash and the Windows Media codecs still aren't available compiled natively for x86_64... which is entirely the fault of those particular software companies. If you need to install a few 32-bit closed-source apps under 64-bit Linux, you can do it but it takes a little know-how.
Under Windows, I'm told that there are vanishingly few native 64-bit apps and drivers. I haven't tried 64-bit Windows myself, but I gather that support isn't there yet. Proprietary software vendors don't want to release 64-bit versions because it means supporting multiple versions and possibly conflicting configurations.
Moving up to 64-bit makes obvious sense if you need to use >4gb of memory or do lots of number-crunching. But it has advantages for "ordinary" Desktop use as well... for one thing, the x86_64 instruction set adds more general-purpose registers, which allows more efficient compilation of code. Based on the expert information I've read, I believe this alone should result in a 10-20% speedup between 32-bit and 64-bit code.
So if you're using Linux, 64-bit is a no-brainer. With Windows, you probably won't see any benefit immediately, but once 64-bit apps and drivers become widely available, you'll appreciate the additional performance.
Unfortunately, that setup has a lot of BANDWIDTH, but terrible latency (the latency is basically how long it takes for the station wagon to get to its destination).
I thought Microsoft no longer allowed "phone in" activation... but perhaps I misunderstood that. I haven't used Windows at home in about 5 years, so I'm starting to get hazy on the details.
What does Microsoft do for government customers like the CIA/NSA/DIA? Some of those networks are completely and totally isolated from the public Internet.
I imagine Microsoft must provide them with a KMS that doesn't itself require activation, which can be run on a secure, closed network. I imagine it's not widely publicized...
Best Soviet comment ever...
For crying out loud, the parent is probably the most substantive and informative post on here... someone frickin' mod it up.
Not a bad idea. Michigan (my home state) could sure as hell use the boost to the economy. Plenty of land reasonably cheap, and plenty of network infrastructure as well at least in the lower peninsula.
I agree completely. nmapfe is great about that. When I know the command line options I want to use, I run nmap. When I don't, I fire up nmapfe and use it to LEARN the appropriate command line options.
GUIs done right, as front-ends for command-line programs or configuration files, can be very powerful and useful tools.
Why not? Using a user-friendly GUI to configure a Linux firewall is a great way to *LEARN* to use more advanced features down the road.
/etc/apt/sources.list file by hand, or have Synaptic do it for you. Synaptic will correctly parse any changes that you make, and if it modifies the file, it will do so in an easy-to-read way. I recently installed Ubuntu for a friend of mine and explained to him that a good way to learn to use the command line configuration files is to play around with the GUI utilities and study the changes they make to those files.
/etc/hosts file like Linux somewhere under the \winnt\system32 directory... I made the mistake of editing it by hand, and then trying to undo the changes with the GUI. The changes made by the GUI were somehow silently ignored, which led to a mistifying series of DNS problems.
I am an experienced Linux user and do pretty much everything from the command line. But I find there is a lot to like about the new GUI utilities like gnome-system-tools, especially compared to their MS Windows counterparts.
One of the great things about most Linux GUI configuration utilities is that they use the *same* configuration files that you could edit by hand, and generally try to modify them in a human-readable way. For example, under Debian or Ubuntu, you can edit your
Contrast this with Windows where a lot of things can ONLY be configured with the GUI utilities, which often write their changes to impenetrable, undocumented binary registry keys... very hard to track down. If you try to configure things from the command line in Windows, you'll run into inconsistencies. For example, Windows XP actually has an
So I see the gnome-system-tools style of GUI configuration tools to be a Very Good Thing. These utilities make configuration easier for many people, without preventing them from accessing the underlying configuration in a comprehensive manner, and without leaving the system in an inconsistent state.
The reason hardware for MythTV costs more is because Tivo sells their hardware at a loss, because they can count on making up for it in high subscription fees.
I recently spec'ed out a MythTV box with an 80gb hard drive and hardware MPEG encoding and a nice media center case for $350 shipped from NewEgg. A pretty good deal, I'd say, and it can actually be used for other things than just watching TV (it's got an Athlon 64, 512 mb RAM, and NVidia GeForce 6150 graphics).
Well, some languages are not national languages :-) I mean, let's say you want the Apple web page in Malayalam... that's a language that's spoken by 40 million people in India. What URL would you go to for that page? By comparison, Danish is spoken by only 6 million people, but since it's the national language of Denmark you can easily find it at www.apple.dk
I'd rather see web sites make consistent use of LANGUAGE codes rather than COUNTRY codes, like wikipedia does, e.g: en.wikipedia.org for English, nah.wikipedia.org for Nahuatl, etc.
Beta testers found it oddly unsatisfying.
MOD PARENT UP!
How is this flamebait? The GP is obviously a fairly well-informed technical person who tries to make intelligent choices about technology and standards and stuff... and yet, as the parent points out, the GP has chosen to keep all his music in a totally proprietary locked-down Microsoft format.
I'd say the parent's comments are entirely appropriate...
Um, no. The energy is *drawn* from the outlet at a comparatively slow rate (say, over a period of a few seconds) and then *released* into the laser extraordinarily fast (10^-15 seconds).
The technical meaning of the word "power" is energy consumed or produced per unit time. So a fairly small amount of energy can result in a huge amount of power if it's produced or consumed quickly.
And to expect enforcement to tend in the opposite direction!
I believe that legislators who truly value liberty--such as the founding fathers of the USA--will indeed err on the side of caution, because they know that zealous law enforcers, prosecutors, and politicians will try to abuse the laws as far as they can when it suits them.
These haters have dissed the GPL. Please lay the smack down.
Thanks,
Dan
Greylisting might be very effective for now, but of course the "fix" is quite easy: the spammers can reprogram the zombies to retry after temporary failures. In that case, greylisting won't slow them down more than proportionally to the rate at which they encounter temporary failures... I'd say a maximum rate of maybe 1 in 3 would be acceptable before legitimate email would be impacted too severely.
1/3 less spam is still waaaaay too much spam. I'm afraid that even though greylisting is a smart trick, it's not sustainable. Then again, I'm beginning to believe there's *NO* long-term way to slay SPAM, that it will be a permanent back-and-forth battle for years or decades.