I figured some fanboy would scream foul and try to call me on my credentials.
Of course all evidence is anecdotal, even your acer story. I know what I'm talking about as much as you do.
So, umm, yes. I really do use Linux. I am a Linux system administrator and developer. I last touched windows on anything I owned over 10 years ago. I don't consider myself an evangelist, but I do promote linux as much as possible and our organization runs its server room 100% on linux and has for years. In short, Linux kicks butt.
Here's the deal. I've wanted to replace my PowerBook 12" for a couple of years now, so I've looked at the options. I'd prefer a Linux laptop. Every laptop I've looked at (Thinkpad X61, Dell Latitude D420, etc) all look really good in terms of specifications and do generally run Linux pretty well. But everyone that owns them and runs linux on them puts up with things like suspend to disk instead of suspend to RAM, and abysmal battery life, like 4 hours on the biggest batteries (like 8 or 9 cells). Right now I have a Windows user (XP) with a D420 and the standard battery. He gets 5 hours when aggressive management is turned on. Another user running Linux, on the other hand, hits 3 hours at most. *Every* linux laptop user I know has to fudge with ACPI scripts and things to get the various suspend and hibernate modes to work. This is partly the fault of linux distributions and partly fault of hardware manufacturers.
Running powertop on a laptop is also very revealing. Typical desktop software on linux is not very friendly to power management. Rarely does the CPU enter the lowest power mode on linux (forget the designation).
So do a bit of research and you'll see that what I'm talking about is generally true. Thinks are improving dramatically, but there's a long, long ways to go. Until then, it's really hard to leave my 5 year old PowerBook with OS X.
Sure, but that's ridiculous to have to resort to giant batteries just to get a decent amount of battery life. The real problem is Linux's lack of decent power management, as well as the hardware manufacturers' reluctance to support Linux in any way. In this case, though, you'd think ASUS would have some incentive to work with Linux kernel developers to improve the situation. Sadly, though, Linux on laptops of any king is pretty abysmal when it comes to basic features like power management, suspend-and-resume, etc. windows Vista, sadly, is quite far ahead when it comes to this now. Quite usable on a laptop. Of course my 5 year-old PowerBook still beats it in terms of these things.
Don't you think that you were trying to use the wrong tool for the job to begin with? Gimp is an "Image Manipulation Program" first and foremost. If you are trying to create a web comic, I'd think that a vector graphics program would be you first choice of tools.
Sure Paint.NET and Photoshop blur the lines a bit, but the better tool still, in the proprietary world, would be Adobe Illustrator, or something like Inkscape in the OSS world.
And I'd bet you a twinkie that nearly all (and possibly ALL) of the 4-star apps aren't independently developed from the spec, but are using rebranded versiond of OO.o's code.
At least it's possible and legal to do this, though. OO.org as a reference implementation with source code can at least make it possible to get 100% compatibility. That's the main difference here.
The open source vpnc works pretty well on my linux box. I'm permanently vpn'd into my work's Cisco VPN concentrator. Granted it still can't do key rotation, so I have to reconnect it every 8 hours or so.
Cisco's linux support sucks in general, though. Their management software won't support it in any way. Ironic, really, since most work gets done in a terminal on cisco hardware. At least a serial port can't be made to be linux-incompatible.
Now that OOXML has been made an ISO standard (called now OXML I think), we can differentiate between MS's bastardized implementation of this format and the ISO standard. If anyone thinks that now third parties can freely implement OXML and be able to read and write with 100% accuracy formats created in MS Office, they are sadly mistaken. Sure OXML file should be able to be read and written by any applications that implement the ISO format just fine (provided they can implement every detail of the hundreds of pages of specifications), but MS Office will always be able to produce files that don't quite look right everywhere else because of the way MS interprets/wrote the specification, or deliberately left out some important little detail. This will create a second-class landscape of OXML users, which will always be minor plays and insignificant next to the continuing Office hegemony. This is a fantastic move on MS's part. They've managed to totally play the part and even go through the motions without giving up a single thing! The ultimate deception. In the meantime a bunch of us rag-tag Linux hippies will continue to promote a standard that's truly open in the ways that count (ODF), and hopefully have some success in certain circles. The rest of the clueless masses seem preoccupied with other things to care, sadly. Anyway, it will be interesting to see exactly how this situation plays out. The EU, at least, has the guts to stand up to MS (sort of anyway), so hopefully they will slap MS hard if things do go the way I predict they will.
For major roads with higher speed limits, there is a simple solution. Install flashers ahead of the light such that if you reach that point and see them flashing, start slowing down because by the time you reach the intersection, they'll be red. If the lights aren't flashing, keep on going at the speed you are going (the speed limit, presumably) and you're guaranteed to make it through the light on green. For those cars close to the intersection when this happens, the yellow light is long enough to let cars that are already committed through. No more slapping on the breaks or racing through. There's just no need for it, and no excuse for it either.
Another good idea is how many countries in the world operate their lights. When the green is getting pretty stale, rather than switch to yellow, they blink green. That's a sign to slow down or speed up, depending on where you are. After that a short yellow light is sufficient. There are not many excuses to end up running red lights in this system. It works extremely well, particularly on city roads. The difference between a yellow and blinking green light is just a psychological thing, but it does work very well in the cities I've seen it.
Under some state's laws, a private road just means that you happen to maintain the road. Whether or not people can access that road is another issue entirely. In Utah, for example, if the road allows public access continually over a period of years, then you permanently lose the ability to control who accesses this road. IE you can still tow people who park on the road, but you can never ban anyone from driving on the road. One large private university completely blocks off campus every couple of years so that it's roads, which link to city roads, can still be privately controlled if desired. Hence I don't think it's illegal in many states for Google's contractors to drive down any private road that normally allows public access, and take pictures. If the road was behind a gate, that's another story. But it does not appear to be the case in this situation.
Now, naturally, I'm curious to see a picture of this incredible house that's worth so much, and maybe even this couple so I can judge for myself how much anguish they have suffered!
Vista already virtualizes access to both the registry and the file system from older programs that required administrator access to run. If you call that innovation, then Vista is proof that MS does innovate from time to time and does listen to end users on rare occasion (make the OS secure by default!). In general, I'm not sure any OS truly innovates most of the time. Linux and OS X represent gradual evolutions more than revolutions. Getting the OS out of my face and into the background is most important to me. In this area, OS X is clearly ahead, and Linux isn't far behind, *once it's set up*. Windows XP and Vista still seem a little too in your face still. I doubt Windows 7 will dramatically change that.
No, the world is not actually cooling. It just happens that this winter is, for many parts of the world, colder and wetter than normal. As global warming progresses, the climates will continue to change and we will most certainly experience even greater extremes, cold and hot. The overall average temperature, however, is still climbing, it appears, particularly sea temperatures. Sea temperatures are arguably much more important on changing climate than the temperature in Chicago today. Whether or not this rise in sea temperature will disrupt the warming currents that keep northern Europe balmy is unknown. Maybe eventually global warming will cause an ice age. No one knows.
The fact is that Natives in Alaska have had to adapt to changing climates for generations. They successfully weathered the middle ages ice age, and the periods of warm and cold before that. They, like all of us, must adapt or die. Along the way stopping the killing of the earth with CO2 would be helpful too. And polluting our waters and air. As was pointed out these same native groups drive dirty 2-stroke snow mobiles and ATVs (depend on them, in fact), heat their homes with fossil fuels, and have electricity. Perhaps they should start first by making themselves carbon-neutral and energy self-sufficient. Suing gas companies, and winning, will just enrich the villages a bit. It won't do anything to fix the real problems. The new-found wealth in the village will fund the buying of more ATVs, snowmobiles, and other things. Maybe it will allow them to move their villages inland a bit more to escape the rising sea levels. But it won't fix the environment. That will have to start right here in mainland america with the changing of the hearts and minds of the American people.
If you look at the FA, and then read the referenced paper, you'll find your questions are all answered by the original author. It's an interesting paper; just skip over the statistical analysis if you don't understand it.
FTP servers have been doing this for years
on
Chroot in OpenSSH
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· Score: 3, Informative
The purpose of this feature doesn't seem to be to restrict what a shell user can do. Rather, if I read this correctly, it restricts what files a user can access via sftp. Without this feature, a user can sftp in, and then cd to / or any other folder that he has rights too. This chroot feature lets the admin limit the root to, say, his home directory, or some other folder such as a virtual web root or something.
It's only natural that this same chroot feature would be added to sftp.
Apple actually doesn't use the TPM to lock MacOS to the machine. It turns out that MacOS merely requires a native EFI firmware to install and boot. That's it. Now that an EFI layer has been developed to run on normal PCs, you can actually install Leopard and do system updates and everything, running an unmodified kernel.
Hate to break it to you, but as popular as Ubuntu is, Ubuntu is not === linux. Every x86 Linux machine I've tried this exploit on today has been vulnerable. SuSE, Redhat, Fedora, etc. Who's crying wolf? An exploit is an exploit and this one is a pretty big one, in terms of broad impact.
No, it is a universal problem. If you want any vendor support at all, you have to be running stock packages, especially for the kernels. So this is a huge deal. It will affect most linux installations out there. People don't recompile their own kernels on a regular basis. Crap like this happens from time to time and it does hurt Linux' reputation. Frankly, going around speaking like this doesn't promote Linux at all with PHBs and the people who actually pay the bills and buy the technology.
No, the headline is not misleading. Most installations of linux that use the 2.6 kernel *are* vulnerable.
Sure, but if that tanker was powered by biofuel in the first place (presuming we can make it without a carbon debt), then that fact becomes moot. As for the tarsands, the process itself is very environmentally damaging. Of course the need to even use the tarsands would, in theory, be eliminated by the use of sustainable biofuels. So actually fuel can be very clean. Especially when that fuel is used in its own production, rather than fossil fuels.
Besides the problem of fertilizer production, irrigation, machines burning diesel fuel, the biofuel craze is increasing pressures on farm land, promoting deforestation, and contributing to global food price rises. But that doesn't mean we won't eventually get a biofuel that has more energy in it than we put into it. Once we reach this point, then the biofuel itself can fuel its production. But in the mean time there are some other intriguing alternatives.
Just today I was listening to CBC's "Quirks and Quarks" talking to Sandia labs about using solar energy to convert CO2 and H2O into H2 and CO, which can be effectively combined to make hydrocarbons. Unlike bacteria or algae, this process uses a special solid substance that, when exposed to the intense light, has its oxygen molecules stripped off, releasing O2 into the atmosphere. Then this substance is taken out of the sunlight, exposed to CO2 and Water, and it rips the oxygen molecules out of those substances, leaving H2 and CO behind, both of which can be fairly economically combined into hydrocarbons like methanol and gasoline. What's intriguing is that the substance they are using to rip the oxygen out of the water and CO2 can do this over and over again. Right now they are using CO2 from sources other than the atmosphere, making this not carbon neutral. However they plan to work towards harvesting CO2 from the atmosphere. In the meantime, though, this is a great way of increasing the efficiency of energy extraction from, say coal. If, someday, we could capture all CO2 from coal plants and convert it to gasoline for use in autos, that would have an overall decrease in our CO2 emissions because the coal could now be used to generate electricity *and* drive cars, reducing the CO2 emissions from refined gasoline. Assuming we can control particulates, nitrous oxides, and sulfur dioxides from burning gasoline, in the future perhaps gasoline-burning cars will be the cleanest things on the planet! Certainly as the scientist pointed out, gasoline (hydrocarbons anyway) is the best way of storying energy. Generating electricity is nice, but we have to use it as we generate it. Batteries and H2 production aren't really that good at storing energy as densely. The radio program is http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/archives/07-08/feb09.html and the Sandia press release is http://www.sandia.gov/news/resources/releases/2007/sunshine.html
If we are wise, then I think the push to biodiesel or solar gasoline will ultimately be our ticket.
With the exception of the ipod issue, trying to sell Linux or OS X to these types is a complete and utter waste of time. What you say they are asking for is basically a free version of Windows (IE a pirated version of windows). The fact if the natter is, games are still on Windows, and not OS X or linux, largely because there is *zero* demand for them on the other platforms. Sure lots of that has to do with API lock-in. Seems to me many games should be and are moving to the console, and off PCs. I think the next wave will soon hit us, like it already has in Japan. Whereas many american families have more than one computer, which the kids often use for chat and gaming, in Japan a household might have one personal computer. Probably used by the kids for writing papers. Chatting with friends, checking up on the latest movie showings, is all done on their cell phones. Where the OS just doesn't matter, plain and simple. For gaming, families typically own a console. From what I've been told, Japanese kids do not SMS either. It's all e-mail. Text, pictures, movies, whatever. SMTP.
If American cell networks had more competition for features and price like the Japanese companies do, and if costs dropped pretty dramatically, I'd have just one computer in the house. Then I'd buy my kids smart phones (iPhone or some other device -- who knows what the future will bring) and they can use that to browse the web, keep in touch with friends. If they've done their chores, they can use their Xbox or whatever.
Sure, but having to click "alt" is one more needless keystroke an an operation that formerly required only a couple of obvious mouse clicks. Even worse, hiding the menu bar while still allowing its use violates several UI design principles, since it's not obvious how to get to it, and you can't know what's on it until you do go there. Hiding the menu further makes it totally unapparent what any keyboard short-cuts are. Previously, I might click on file->open, and notice that "Ctrl-O" was a shortcut for this operation. This made it very easy to learn common operations. With vista, users are only ever going to discover these operations by accident. Heck even MacOS, though it is more mouse-oriented made it easy to discover keyboard shortcuts, provided you could figure out that stupid icon for "option/alt"
As for the up button, I can see it both ways. I am still annoyed that Gnome did this. But since Gnome did it first, I guess you can say Vista is playing catch up. In OS X I always loved the tripled-pane file dialog, and in a way, the Gnome/Vista style combines the functionality of the triple pane with the ease of clicking on a nice large icon. So whatever.
As for telnet, the fact that ssh exists is completely besides his point. Yes if you are going to log into a computer, you're going to use ssh (putty, or something). If you'll read his comment, you'll find he never said anything about using telnet to log into server. I use linux exclusively and I use telnet several times a week. I use it to test mail servers, web servers, check to see if a service is really responding on a port. He mentions he frequently does "telnet somehost 80" to check the web server. With telnet I can type in some simple http requests, verifying the server's output (headers and all), check to make sure my mail server isn't relaying improperly, make sure pop3 is working, etc. So yes, people can and will install it themselves when they need it. That is a legitimate point. But bringing up ssh is a red herring here.
Sorry, but you're not making any sense. It's clear you don't understand the issues involved here, and don't even understand the technologies at play here. First of all, although you repeat your nonsense about Gnome being somehow tainted by Microsoft patents, then go and say that you understand that it's Mono and C# that are problematic, not the rest of gnome. But somehow C# magically taints the other parts of gnome (gtk, etc). You further seem to be confusing a desktop environment (and it's accompanying APIs) with a widget toolkit. From your point of view you needn't even worry about the desktop environment. I mean all you really need to support is some widget toolkit under Xlib. It shouldn't matter to you what desktop environment your users use or what window manager.
So if you want to use GTK (pyGTK), go for it! There's no reason at all not to.
wxPython is merely a python binding for wxWidgets (http://www.wxwidgets.org). Check it out, as it is c++ natively.
If you're worried about patents in general, be aware that virtually all widget kits out there probably infringe on some obscure patent. So you probably want consult with a good IP lawyer if you're not sleeping well at night over this.
The Japanese don't even use SMS, though. It's all done with e-mail on internet-enabled phones. From what I've been told, it's standard smtp. Cell companies don't differentiate between "text messaging" and other internet stuff like web browsing. It's all data in Japan. Also interesting is the fact that most kids don't own computers. They keep in touch via the internet on their cell phones. Rather than sit at home on facebook, they sit on trains, sit in cafes, etc, doing facebook (or whatever is popular in Japan these days) on their cell phones. Posting pictures and videos they took on their cell phones, etc. It's quite a different world. One that seems to be thriving pretty well with a plethora of competing cell providers. Unlike here where we get gouged on simple SMS messages!
That explains it! I was like, "snopes has ads?" Actually I'm mildly surprised to see ads on a lot of sites when I have to use a browser that doesn't have adblock or privoxy handy.
College yes, University, definitely no. The purpose of CS in university is to train computer scientists to be able to use and develop algorithms in any language on any platform. When faced with a problem, a CS major will not say, hey I can solve that in Java. Rather he or she says, that looks an awful lot like this other problem which is typically solved with this algorithm. Or, maybe I can solve this problem in some new algorithmic or with some new combination of algorithms and heuristics. One basic CS skill should be knowing what data structure to apply to what problem. Do I need a binary tree? A red-black tree? Right-sibling-left-child? Is there one in a standard library? Given a stream of BER-encoded data, what structure is best to represent the parsed tokens? None of this has anything inherently to do with Java. But I might have done it in Scheme in school, and the concept translates straight across into C, c++, Java, C# or whatever.
Seems like if we had more of a two-way communication system between universities and industry. If graduates would go out into industry and provide feedback to the unis, the courses could be improved. For example, grads could help professors with real world examples of problems that are solved with CS methods. Then students can learn by solving actual problems, rather than the contrived, busy-work problems most CS courses have.
Seems to me that Java isn't the best teaching tool for this. Scheme has its place, and I think python too for much of this. Although introductory data structures should be taught in some lower-level language that makes you manage memory. Just so you're not surprised when your cute little Java program completely and utterly runs out of memory.
Sounds like most people's experience with Linux on any laptop, even the thinkpad. I have many friends that have thinkpads and love them, and run Linux on them, but none of them have basic things like sleep working. Hibernate to disk doesn't cut it. Does Linux work on *any* current laptop out of the box (Ubuntu or Fedora)? Can I just close my lid and have it sleep and then wake it in a couple of seconds and resume where I left off? Can the battery life under Linux be as good as in Windows (yeah, even Vista) or OS X?
That Is Brilliant Please post this at every/. article on aviation.
In this case, then, the quote needs to be properly attributed and sourced, which I neglected to do. Apologies. The quote comes from this thread, post #6 by a user named IADCA.
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I figured some fanboy would scream foul and try to call me on my credentials.
Of course all evidence is anecdotal, even your acer story. I know what I'm talking about as much as you do.
So, umm, yes. I really do use Linux. I am a Linux system administrator and developer. I last touched windows on anything I owned over 10 years ago. I don't consider myself an evangelist, but I do promote linux as much as possible and our organization runs its server room 100% on linux and has for years. In short, Linux kicks butt.
Here's the deal. I've wanted to replace my PowerBook 12" for a couple of years now, so I've looked at the options. I'd prefer a Linux laptop. Every laptop I've looked at (Thinkpad X61, Dell Latitude D420, etc) all look really good in terms of specifications and do generally run Linux pretty well. But everyone that owns them and runs linux on them puts up with things like suspend to disk instead of suspend to RAM, and abysmal battery life, like 4 hours on the biggest batteries (like 8 or 9 cells). Right now I have a Windows user (XP) with a D420 and the standard battery. He gets 5 hours when aggressive management is turned on. Another user running Linux, on the other hand, hits 3 hours at most. *Every* linux laptop user I know has to fudge with ACPI scripts and things to get the various suspend and hibernate modes to work. This is partly the fault of linux distributions and partly fault of hardware manufacturers.
Running powertop on a laptop is also very revealing. Typical desktop software on linux is not very friendly to power management. Rarely does the CPU enter the lowest power mode on linux (forget the designation).
So do a bit of research and you'll see that what I'm talking about is generally true. Thinks are improving dramatically, but there's a long, long ways to go. Until then, it's really hard to leave my 5 year old PowerBook with OS X.
Sure, but that's ridiculous to have to resort to giant batteries just to get a decent amount of battery life. The real problem is Linux's lack of decent power management, as well as the hardware manufacturers' reluctance to support Linux in any way. In this case, though, you'd think ASUS would have some incentive to work with Linux kernel developers to improve the situation. Sadly, though, Linux on laptops of any king is pretty abysmal when it comes to basic features like power management, suspend-and-resume, etc. windows Vista, sadly, is quite far ahead when it comes to this now. Quite usable on a laptop. Of course my 5 year-old PowerBook still beats it in terms of these things.
Don't you think that you were trying to use the wrong tool for the job to begin with? Gimp is an "Image Manipulation Program" first and foremost. If you are trying to create a web comic, I'd think that a vector graphics program would be you first choice of tools.
Sure Paint.NET and Photoshop blur the lines a bit, but the better tool still, in the proprietary world, would be Adobe Illustrator, or something like Inkscape in the OSS world.
At least it's possible and legal to do this, though. OO.org as a reference implementation with source code can at least make it possible to get 100% compatibility. That's the main difference here.
The open source vpnc works pretty well on my linux box. I'm permanently vpn'd into my work's Cisco VPN concentrator. Granted it still can't do key rotation, so I have to reconnect it every 8 hours or so.
Cisco's linux support sucks in general, though. Their management software won't support it in any way. Ironic, really, since most work gets done in a terminal on cisco hardware. At least a serial port can't be made to be linux-incompatible.
Now that OOXML has been made an ISO standard (called now OXML I think), we can differentiate between MS's bastardized implementation of this format and the ISO standard. If anyone thinks that now third parties can freely implement OXML and be able to read and write with 100% accuracy formats created in MS Office, they are sadly mistaken. Sure OXML file should be able to be read and written by any applications that implement the ISO format just fine (provided they can implement every detail of the hundreds of pages of specifications), but MS Office will always be able to produce files that don't quite look right everywhere else because of the way MS interprets/wrote the specification, or deliberately left out some important little detail. This will create a second-class landscape of OXML users, which will always be minor plays and insignificant next to the continuing Office hegemony. This is a fantastic move on MS's part. They've managed to totally play the part and even go through the motions without giving up a single thing! The ultimate deception. In the meantime a bunch of us rag-tag Linux hippies will continue to promote a standard that's truly open in the ways that count (ODF), and hopefully have some success in certain circles. The rest of the clueless masses seem preoccupied with other things to care, sadly. Anyway, it will be interesting to see exactly how this situation plays out. The EU, at least, has the guts to stand up to MS (sort of anyway), so hopefully they will slap MS hard if things do go the way I predict they will.
For major roads with higher speed limits, there is a simple solution. Install flashers ahead of the light such that if you reach that point and see them flashing, start slowing down because by the time you reach the intersection, they'll be red. If the lights aren't flashing, keep on going at the speed you are going (the speed limit, presumably) and you're guaranteed to make it through the light on green. For those cars close to the intersection when this happens, the yellow light is long enough to let cars that are already committed through. No more slapping on the breaks or racing through. There's just no need for it, and no excuse for it either.
Another good idea is how many countries in the world operate their lights. When the green is getting pretty stale, rather than switch to yellow, they blink green. That's a sign to slow down or speed up, depending on where you are. After that a short yellow light is sufficient. There are not many excuses to end up running red lights in this system. It works extremely well, particularly on city roads. The difference between a yellow and blinking green light is just a psychological thing, but it does work very well in the cities I've seen it.
Under some state's laws, a private road just means that you happen to maintain the road. Whether or not people can access that road is another issue entirely. In Utah, for example, if the road allows public access continually over a period of years, then you permanently lose the ability to control who accesses this road. IE you can still tow people who park on the road, but you can never ban anyone from driving on the road. One large private university completely blocks off campus every couple of years so that it's roads, which link to city roads, can still be privately controlled if desired. Hence I don't think it's illegal in many states for Google's contractors to drive down any private road that normally allows public access, and take pictures. If the road was behind a gate, that's another story. But it does not appear to be the case in this situation.
Now, naturally, I'm curious to see a picture of this incredible house that's worth so much, and maybe even this couple so I can judge for myself how much anguish they have suffered!
Vista already virtualizes access to both the registry and the file system from older programs that required administrator access to run. If you call that innovation, then Vista is proof that MS does innovate from time to time and does listen to end users on rare occasion (make the OS secure by default!). In general, I'm not sure any OS truly innovates most of the time. Linux and OS X represent gradual evolutions more than revolutions. Getting the OS out of my face and into the background is most important to me. In this area, OS X is clearly ahead, and Linux isn't far behind, *once it's set up*. Windows XP and Vista still seem a little too in your face still. I doubt Windows 7 will dramatically change that.
No, the world is not actually cooling. It just happens that this winter is, for many parts of the world, colder and wetter than normal. As global warming progresses, the climates will continue to change and we will most certainly experience even greater extremes, cold and hot. The overall average temperature, however, is still climbing, it appears, particularly sea temperatures. Sea temperatures are arguably much more important on changing climate than the temperature in Chicago today. Whether or not this rise in sea temperature will disrupt the warming currents that keep northern Europe balmy is unknown. Maybe eventually global warming will cause an ice age. No one knows.
The fact is that Natives in Alaska have had to adapt to changing climates for generations. They successfully weathered the middle ages ice age, and the periods of warm and cold before that. They, like all of us, must adapt or die. Along the way stopping the killing of the earth with CO2 would be helpful too. And polluting our waters and air. As was pointed out these same native groups drive dirty 2-stroke snow mobiles and ATVs (depend on them, in fact), heat their homes with fossil fuels, and have electricity. Perhaps they should start first by making themselves carbon-neutral and energy self-sufficient. Suing gas companies, and winning, will just enrich the villages a bit. It won't do anything to fix the real problems. The new-found wealth in the village will fund the buying of more ATVs, snowmobiles, and other things. Maybe it will allow them to move their villages inland a bit more to escape the rising sea levels. But it won't fix the environment. That will have to start right here in mainland america with the changing of the hearts and minds of the American people.
If you look at the FA, and then read the referenced paper, you'll find your questions are all answered by the original author. It's an interesting paper; just skip over the statistical analysis if you don't understand it.
The purpose of this feature doesn't seem to be to restrict what a shell user can do. Rather, if I read this correctly, it restricts what files a user can access via sftp. Without this feature, a user can sftp in, and then cd to / or any other folder that he has rights too. This chroot feature lets the admin limit the root to, say, his home directory, or some other folder such as a virtual web root or something.
It's only natural that this same chroot feature would be added to sftp.
Apple actually doesn't use the TPM to lock MacOS to the machine. It turns out that MacOS merely requires a native EFI firmware to install and boot. That's it. Now that an EFI layer has been developed to run on normal PCs, you can actually install Leopard and do system updates and everything, running an unmodified kernel.
Hate to break it to you, but as popular as Ubuntu is, Ubuntu is not === linux. Every x86 Linux machine I've tried this exploit on today has been vulnerable. SuSE, Redhat, Fedora, etc. Who's crying wolf? An exploit is an exploit and this one is a pretty big one, in terms of broad impact.
No, it is a universal problem. If you want any vendor support at all, you have to be running stock packages, especially for the kernels. So this is a huge deal. It will affect most linux installations out there. People don't recompile their own kernels on a regular basis. Crap like this happens from time to time and it does hurt Linux' reputation. Frankly, going around speaking like this doesn't promote Linux at all with PHBs and the people who actually pay the bills and buy the technology.
No, the headline is not misleading. Most installations of linux that use the 2.6 kernel *are* vulnerable.
Sure, but if that tanker was powered by biofuel in the first place (presuming we can make it without a carbon debt), then that fact becomes moot. As for the tarsands, the process itself is very environmentally damaging. Of course the need to even use the tarsands would, in theory, be eliminated by the use of sustainable biofuels. So actually fuel can be very clean. Especially when that fuel is used in its own production, rather than fossil fuels.
Besides the problem of fertilizer production, irrigation, machines burning diesel fuel, the biofuel craze is increasing pressures on farm land, promoting deforestation, and contributing to global food price rises. But that doesn't mean we won't eventually get a biofuel that has more energy in it than we put into it. Once we reach this point, then the biofuel itself can fuel its production. But in the mean time there are some other intriguing alternatives.
Just today I was listening to CBC's "Quirks and Quarks" talking to Sandia labs about using solar energy to convert CO2 and H2O into H2 and CO, which can be effectively combined to make hydrocarbons. Unlike bacteria or algae, this process uses a special solid substance that, when exposed to the intense light, has its oxygen molecules stripped off, releasing O2 into the atmosphere. Then this substance is taken out of the sunlight, exposed to CO2 and Water, and it rips the oxygen molecules out of those substances, leaving H2 and CO behind, both of which can be fairly economically combined into hydrocarbons like methanol and gasoline. What's intriguing is that the substance they are using to rip the oxygen out of the water and CO2 can do this over and over again. Right now they are using CO2 from sources other than the atmosphere, making this not carbon neutral. However they plan to work towards harvesting CO2 from the atmosphere. In the meantime, though, this is a great way of increasing the efficiency of energy extraction from, say coal. If, someday, we could capture all CO2 from coal plants and convert it to gasoline for use in autos, that would have an overall decrease in our CO2 emissions because the coal could now be used to generate electricity *and* drive cars, reducing the CO2 emissions from refined gasoline. Assuming we can control particulates, nitrous oxides, and sulfur dioxides from burning gasoline, in the future perhaps gasoline-burning cars will be the cleanest things on the planet! Certainly as the scientist pointed out, gasoline (hydrocarbons anyway) is the best way of storying energy. Generating electricity is nice, but we have to use it as we generate it. Batteries and H2 production aren't really that good at storing energy as densely. The radio program is http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/archives/07-08/feb09.html and the Sandia press release is http://www.sandia.gov/news/resources/releases/2007/sunshine.html
If we are wise, then I think the push to biodiesel or solar gasoline will ultimately be our ticket.
With the exception of the ipod issue, trying to sell Linux or OS X to these types is a complete and utter waste of time. What you say they are asking for is basically a free version of Windows (IE a pirated version of windows). The fact if the natter is, games are still on Windows, and not OS X or linux, largely because there is *zero* demand for them on the other platforms. Sure lots of that has to do with API lock-in. Seems to me many games should be and are moving to the console, and off PCs. I think the next wave will soon hit us, like it already has in Japan. Whereas many american families have more than one computer, which the kids often use for chat and gaming, in Japan a household might have one personal computer. Probably used by the kids for writing papers. Chatting with friends, checking up on the latest movie showings, is all done on their cell phones. Where the OS just doesn't matter, plain and simple. For gaming, families typically own a console. From what I've been told, Japanese kids do not SMS either. It's all e-mail. Text, pictures, movies, whatever. SMTP.
If American cell networks had more competition for features and price like the Japanese companies do, and if costs dropped pretty dramatically, I'd have just one computer in the house. Then I'd buy my kids smart phones (iPhone or some other device -- who knows what the future will bring) and they can use that to browse the web, keep in touch with friends. If they've done their chores, they can use their Xbox or whatever.
Sure, but having to click "alt" is one more needless keystroke an an operation that formerly required only a couple of obvious mouse clicks. Even worse, hiding the menu bar while still allowing its use violates several UI design principles, since it's not obvious how to get to it, and you can't know what's on it until you do go there. Hiding the menu further makes it totally unapparent what any keyboard short-cuts are. Previously, I might click on file->open, and notice that "Ctrl-O" was a shortcut for this operation. This made it very easy to learn common operations. With vista, users are only ever going to discover these operations by accident. Heck even MacOS, though it is more mouse-oriented made it easy to discover keyboard shortcuts, provided you could figure out that stupid icon for "option/alt"
As for the up button, I can see it both ways. I am still annoyed that Gnome did this. But since Gnome did it first, I guess you can say Vista is playing catch up. In OS X I always loved the tripled-pane file dialog, and in a way, the Gnome/Vista style combines the functionality of the triple pane with the ease of clicking on a nice large icon. So whatever.
As for telnet, the fact that ssh exists is completely besides his point. Yes if you are going to log into a computer, you're going to use ssh (putty, or something). If you'll read his comment, you'll find he never said anything about using telnet to log into server. I use linux exclusively and I use telnet several times a week. I use it to test mail servers, web servers, check to see if a service is really responding on a port. He mentions he frequently does "telnet somehost 80" to check the web server. With telnet I can type in some simple http requests, verifying the server's output (headers and all), check to make sure my mail server isn't relaying improperly, make sure pop3 is working, etc. So yes, people can and will install it themselves when they need it. That is a legitimate point. But bringing up ssh is a red herring here.
Sorry, but you're not making any sense. It's clear you don't understand the issues involved here, and don't even understand the technologies at play here. First of all, although you repeat your nonsense about Gnome being somehow tainted by Microsoft patents, then go and say that you understand that it's Mono and C# that are problematic, not the rest of gnome. But somehow C# magically taints the other parts of gnome (gtk, etc). You further seem to be confusing a desktop environment (and it's accompanying APIs) with a widget toolkit. From your point of view you needn't even worry about the desktop environment. I mean all you really need to support is some widget toolkit under Xlib. It shouldn't matter to you what desktop environment your users use or what window manager.
So if you want to use GTK (pyGTK), go for it! There's no reason at all not to.
wxPython is merely a python binding for wxWidgets (http://www.wxwidgets.org). Check it out, as it is c++ natively.
If you're worried about patents in general, be aware that virtually all widget kits out there probably infringe on some obscure patent. So you probably want consult with a good IP lawyer if you're not sleeping well at night over this.
The Japanese don't even use SMS, though. It's all done with e-mail on internet-enabled phones. From what I've been told, it's standard smtp. Cell companies don't differentiate between "text messaging" and other internet stuff like web browsing. It's all data in Japan. Also interesting is the fact that most kids don't own computers. They keep in touch via the internet on their cell phones. Rather than sit at home on facebook, they sit on trains, sit in cafes, etc, doing facebook (or whatever is popular in Japan these days) on their cell phones. Posting pictures and videos they took on their cell phones, etc. It's quite a different world. One that seems to be thriving pretty well with a plethora of competing cell providers. Unlike here where we get gouged on simple SMS messages!
That explains it! I was like, "snopes has ads?" Actually I'm mildly surprised to see ads on a lot of sites when I have to use a browser that doesn't have adblock or privoxy handy.
College yes, University, definitely no. The purpose of CS in university is to train computer scientists to be able to use and develop algorithms in any language on any platform. When faced with a problem, a CS major will not say, hey I can solve that in Java. Rather he or she says, that looks an awful lot like this other problem which is typically solved with this algorithm. Or, maybe I can solve this problem in some new algorithmic or with some new combination of algorithms and heuristics. One basic CS skill should be knowing what data structure to apply to what problem. Do I need a binary tree? A red-black tree? Right-sibling-left-child? Is there one in a standard library? Given a stream of BER-encoded data, what structure is best to represent the parsed tokens? None of this has anything inherently to do with Java. But I might have done it in Scheme in school, and the concept translates straight across into C, c++, Java, C# or whatever.
Seems like if we had more of a two-way communication system between universities and industry. If graduates would go out into industry and provide feedback to the unis, the courses could be improved. For example, grads could help professors with real world examples of problems that are solved with CS methods. Then students can learn by solving actual problems, rather than the contrived, busy-work problems most CS courses have.
Seems to me that Java isn't the best teaching tool for this. Scheme has its place, and I think python too for much of this. Although introductory data structures should be taught in some lower-level language that makes you manage memory. Just so you're not surprised when your cute little Java program completely and utterly runs out of memory.
Sounds like most people's experience with Linux on any laptop, even the thinkpad. I have many friends that have thinkpads and love them, and run Linux on them, but none of them have basic things like sleep working. Hibernate to disk doesn't cut it. Does Linux work on *any* current laptop out of the box (Ubuntu or Fedora)? Can I just close my lid and have it sleep and then wake it in a couple of seconds and resume where I left off? Can the battery life under Linux be as good as in Windows (yeah, even Vista) or OS X?
In this case, then, the quote needs to be properly attributed and sourced, which I neglected to do. Apologies. The quote comes from this thread, post #6 by a user named IADCA.