Great... now, with just a little more development, the FBI can drive their
bugs around to get a better angle for picking up voices. And they get video.
They'll need some skilled operators to dodge the vacuum cleaner, though.
Ebay keeps coming to mind as I read this thread... you get to see all the good and bad about a person over the last 6 months. Since everyone is encouraged to contribute with every sale, there's little negative bias.
If a little-known server gets cracked, that hits, say, a few hundred
people.
If a megaserver (MSN/.NET, Yahoo) gets cracked... millions of people are
screwed. Since popular servers can afford more advertising, they can grow
faster, quickly becoming a juicy target for crackers everywhere.
To me, this makes the NC (Non Computer) totally worthless: you pay $500
for access to a server that is outside your control, presumably with monthly
charges as well, when you could've gotten a second-hand PC that could kick
the crap out of any NC for that same $500. After all, I/O bandwidth is
limited... compare 7 SCSI disks shared among 2,000 users to a local EIDE
disk.
Many web pages look the same from Lynx... hives of [spacer] and [Click
Here!] and [USEMAP:buttons.gif]. Nobody should be allowed to design web pages
without viewing existing ones (and previewing their own) in Lynx. Ever notice
how many pages are broken by SortaSGML parsing mode?
Music, software, books, and the like are fundamentally abundent. I can easily make copies of any of them and increase the world's supply.
You can easily copy books? Great! I'll take _War and Peace_ by Tolstoy.
Music and software are more abundant than books, but the media they're on aren't. You can't make 60 copies of Civilization II if you don't have 60 CD-Rs and/or the necessary hard disk space.
It makes sense to me that when you "buy" music, you pay not for the music itself, but for the privilege of time- and space-shifting... with Vivaldi's Four Seasons, I don't have to wait for the local classical station to play it, I can just toss it in the CD player.
Software is a different animal entirely. Spacetime shifting isn't important. So you have to pay for a share of development directly. The problem comes when the price never drops below $70; anyone not willing and able to pay that, with access to a copy from someone else, becomes a pirate.
...policy was to train children in school to turn in their classmates, their parents, and anyone else who they believed was "subversive."
Just like the children in Orwell's classic (and accurate) _1984_ when they turn in Winston's neighbor (I think. I remember the concepts, not the details.)
Yeah... "You have a link to goatse.cx being passed off as a link to somewhere Informative. We now arrest Rob Malda for carrying the content of an Anonymous Coward..."
Re:The question is not whether there is a problem
on
Information Poisoning
·
· Score: 1
Today, the vast majority of people are products of public education
...most of the stuff that gets posted on/. gets horribly skewed by raging paranoia.
Paranoia of what? That an Evil Corporation(tm) is going to arrest them---even though they live in a DMCA-free country---for writing software to use said corporation's products? DeCSS already happened. Paranoia that Big Brother will distribute thousands of email sniffers to hunt down... anyone they want? They're working on Carnivore. Given the government's record, why do you trust them?
I liked Enlightenment, but there's one HUGE problem with using it with Gnome: it doesn't pass a right-click on the root window through, so I couldn't make new URLs (to/. and redhat errata), symlinks, etc. So, back to Sawfish the Inferior until I figure out how to start KDE (which will be tougher than doing "startx").
1) A huge number of possible converts to Linux use windows.
Then it'd lose it's 1337ness. And it would be a cracker's dream: all those Linux boxes with inetd and wu-ftpd and sendmail... so much for the security of open source.
2) A user interface is designed to help people access the power of the computer in terms they already understand (like files being movable with the mouse, or text showing up like it will print, or the keyboard matching that of a typewriter)
Hmm. And how do you propose translating firewalling to these mythical terms that people are familiar with? What about permissions: "Why can't Jeff read my files?" "Because nobody's allowed to read your files for security. You've gotta mail it or copy it to/tmp where they can see it or something." "Why can't everyone just read my files?" (Any explanation will be ignored...)
What about users who have the capacity to learn, who don't just say "I don't get this" and quit trying? Is your UI going to shackle them (Mac, Windows), or will it be done right (Amiga)?
<rant>What Linux needs is ease of use, not Redmond95 themes. The worst part is having to tinker with stuff just because of one brain-damaged decision. I'd burn CDs under Linux, but it sounds so tedious/time-consuming to set up the ide-scsi driver, that I just cp everything to/win/linux and burn from Windows. (Don't get me started on X, apropos/man/sometimes info for help, ipchains, PAM, emacs, or kernel compiling.)</rant>
OK, who wants to distribute their code as several binaries compiled against libc, glibc, PAM, shadow passwd, RH, Slackware, etc.? (And possibly even Linux and Hurd flavors...)
Source is fine if you can untar it, type make, and go. Editing the Makefile is tolerable. Binary packages are good for complexicated things like Mozilla, which takes a bit of kicking to get in place, but this means there'd have to be a standard package for all distros.
The Way Not To Do It is to release a source RPM with no info on what order to apply patches in (or even if they need applied) like Red Hat 7.0. Sure, you've got the source... but do you know what to do with it? I don't.
1. IBM would've gotten a real OS, or Amiga or Mac would've taken over the world.
2. It's harder to figure out how to rape your system; you have to edit lilo.conf and then run LILO instead of simply right-clicking and hitting "format". (I learned the hard way that "warning" meant "your bootblock is dead".)
3. debian; they sound more 1337.
Has anyone mentioned too: If you use Linux only, then sit short time in front of a windows box, your brain start telling you, wow, this system is so poor, why does anyone use it?
No, I usually only think "Damn, this thing is slow. Why can't it auotdetect the user and load DOS?"
Seriously, what I really think is "Damn, this thing is (a) easy or (b) scary." "A" for normal use, "B" when (un)installing something. Linux docs currently assume to much... I'm thinking of writing a HOWTO on the subject of getting started (what if you want open(3) and you get open(1)? Took me a week to figure out something other than "man -a open"... and WTF decided searching for help should be "apropos" and "help" should give you Bash internals that scroll off the top of the screen?) unless someone did it already.
What is required for business? Each party requires the mailto: address of the other, an agreed medium of exchange (sheep, gold, paper with somebody's portrait on it, or anything else), and an agreed value of the good/service being sold in terms of the medium of exchange (4 sheep, 1 oz. gold, $250, or three furballs).
This leads to an interesting conclusion: I need not even be human to do business with you. I could be a Furby-class device linked to the net...
Someone should make make, diff, and/or patch HOWTOs. As a newbie, I'm not even going to try. (although I can do basic diff/patch stuff) If you want people with no experience to contribute sometime, they must be taught how.
BTW... I want to make a kernel for hardware probing; I reconfigured 2.4.0-test11 and followed the Kernel-HOWTO ("make bzdisk"); this nuked the existing kernel on hde7 as well as creating a floppy without its own root (VFS can't mount root on 21:06). Any links or different HOWTOs?
So, where can I get one of these 64bit machines for $2K that will run Windows ME?
I expect Intel/AMD are entering the 64bit market in order to bring it to the home user. That 64bit market is nonexistent, and won't exist until they create it and leave the 32bit home user market behind.
-- LoonXTall
"Microsoft is the only vendor as of yet that has a fix...."
IIRC, it ran 16bit at the exact same speed, and 32bit faster. The problem was it got thrashed for this by benchmarkoids, and it cost more anyway (due to the full core speed on-die cache; needing a new socket didn't help either.) So Intel left the P5 in the dust with higher clockspeeds on the P6, renamed it, and the BMoids were happy.
wrt IA-64, I'm willing to bet that the main holdup will be the compiler, which must extract parallelism from the (sequential) code to take advantage of IA64's predicated execution. That's been a Holy Grail of compiler construction for years....
-- LoonXTall
"Microsoft is the only vendor as of yet that has a fix...."
Here in America, it's incredibly easy to find an Intel box... hard to walk into a store without tripping over one. You pretty much have to specify AMD to get one.
-- LoonXTall
"Microsoft is the only vendor as of yet that has a fix...."
Don't jump to unfounded conclusions.... My logitech mouse driver...
Ah. That's not the _vanilla_ mouse control panel. If we're considering nonstandard controls, the MS Intellipoint panel has an actual blur checkbox, but I've never noticed the difference at 60 Hz refresh (which is all I can test it on, since it's in a public lab).
A far as problems on public computers, the next user can simply change the mouse settings to something more reasonable. I just don't see this as a problem that needs solving.
Er... my dad spent _hours_ trying to change the _player names_ in MS Hearts... what are his chances of finding/changing the mouse panel? "My Computer" and "Start" aren't very intuitive places to look.
Besides, what about the raw coolness factor of a motion blur?
Leave X out of this. In Windoze (which has more than 5% of the desktop market, in case you didn't notice), there is one "speed" setting; you adjust a slider on the fast-slow continuum. Pointer velocity is directly proportional to mouse velocity, which is rather "intuitive" (having been that way on the Amiga as well, where I learned to mouse, and on Macs, which my school used.)
Anyway, motion-blur would be useful in a public lab where anyone (or, depending on security, anyone with poledit.exe on a floppy) can speed up the mouse to maximum. Our visual hardware creates motion blurs in meatspace, and interprets them better (faster) than 6 separate images of something (mouse trails or high-speed mouse motion). This would make it easier to interpret where the pointer is when the mouse/pointer speed ratio is wrong, as you would see it race across the screen instead of hopping.
Only if you've got an Intellimouse, or maybe a version of Windoze later than 95a. I don't know what the mouse panel looks like in Win98---that box dual-boots to Linux, so it has Logitech's control panel for the 3-button mouse.
Slashdot Mirror
Great... now, with just a little more development, the FBI can drive their bugs around to get a better angle for picking up voices. And they get video.
They'll need some skilled operators to dodge the vacuum cleaner, though.
Ebay keeps coming to mind as I read this thread... you get to see all the good and bad about a person over the last 6 months. Since everyone is encouraged to contribute with every sale, there's little negative bias.
If a PC gets cracked, that hits one person.
If a little-known server gets cracked, that hits, say, a few hundred people.
If a megaserver (MSN/.NET, Yahoo) gets cracked... millions of people are screwed. Since popular servers can afford more advertising, they can grow faster, quickly becoming a juicy target for crackers everywhere.
To me, this makes the NC (Non Computer) totally worthless: you pay $500 for access to a server that is outside your control, presumably with monthly charges as well, when you could've gotten a second-hand PC that could kick the crap out of any NC for that same $500. After all, I/O bandwidth is limited... compare 7 SCSI disks shared among 2,000 users to a local EIDE disk.
Many web pages look the same from Lynx... hives of [spacer] and [Click Here!] and [USEMAP:buttons.gif]. Nobody should be allowed to design web pages without viewing existing ones (and previewing their own) in Lynx. Ever notice how many pages are broken by SortaSGML parsing mode?
I portrayed the part of the loon in a skit once so well that the Loon name stuck; the XTall represents my 6 foot 3 inch height.
Music, software, books, and the like are fundamentally abundent. I can easily make copies of any of them and increase the world's supply.
You can easily copy books? Great! I'll take _War and Peace_ by Tolstoy.
Music and software are more abundant than books, but the media they're on aren't. You can't make 60 copies of Civilization II if you don't have 60 CD-Rs and/or the necessary hard disk space.
It makes sense to me that when you "buy" music, you pay not for the music itself, but for the privilege of time- and space-shifting... with Vivaldi's Four Seasons, I don't have to wait for the local classical station to play it, I can just toss it in the CD player.
Software is a different animal entirely. Spacetime shifting isn't important. So you have to pay for a share of development directly. The problem comes when the price never drops below $70; anyone not willing and able to pay that, with access to a copy from someone else, becomes a pirate.
Just like the children in Orwell's classic (and accurate) _1984_ when they turn in Winston's neighbor (I think. I remember the concepts, not the details.)
no Slashdot, for example.
Yeah... "You have a link to goatse.cx being passed off as a link to somewhere Informative. We now arrest Rob Malda for carrying the content of an Anonymous Coward..."
Today, the vast majority of people are products of public education
Scary, isn't it?
Paranoia of what? That an Evil Corporation(tm) is going to arrest them---even though they live in a DMCA-free country---for writing software to use said corporation's products? DeCSS already happened. Paranoia that Big Brother will distribute thousands of email sniffers to hunt down... anyone they want? They're working on Carnivore. Given the government's record, why do you trust them?
how will super geeks differentiate themselves from the rest of us?
Easy. They'll be the ones with FreeBSD.
I liked Enlightenment, but there's one HUGE problem with using it with Gnome: it doesn't pass a right-click on the root window through, so I couldn't make new URLs (to /. and redhat errata), symlinks, etc. So, back to Sawfish the Inferior until I figure out how to start KDE (which will be tougher than doing "startx").
1) A huge number of possible converts to Linux use windows.
Then it'd lose it's 1337ness. And it would be a cracker's dream: all those Linux boxes with inetd and wu-ftpd and sendmail... so much for the security of open source.
2) A user interface is designed to help people access the power of the computer in terms they already understand (like files being movable with the mouse, or text showing up like it will print, or the keyboard matching that of a typewriter)
Hmm. And how do you propose translating firewalling to these mythical terms that people are familiar with? What about permissions: "Why can't Jeff read my files?" "Because nobody's allowed to read your files for security. You've gotta mail it or copy it to /tmp where they can see it or something." "Why can't everyone just read my files?" (Any explanation will be ignored...)
What about users who have the capacity to learn, who don't just say "I don't get this" and quit trying? Is your UI going to shackle them (Mac, Windows), or will it be done right (Amiga)?
<rant>What Linux needs is ease of use, not Redmond95 themes. The worst part is having to tinker with stuff just because of one brain-damaged decision. I'd burn CDs under Linux, but it sounds so tedious/time-consuming to set up the ide-scsi driver, that I just cp everything to /win/linux and burn from Windows. (Don't get me started on X, apropos/man/sometimes info for help, ipchains, PAM, emacs, or kernel compiling.)</rant>
OK, who wants to distribute their code as several binaries compiled against libc, glibc, PAM, shadow passwd, RH, Slackware, etc.? (And possibly even Linux and Hurd flavors...)
Source is fine if you can untar it, type make, and go. Editing the Makefile is tolerable. Binary packages are good for complexicated things like Mozilla, which takes a bit of kicking to get in place, but this means there'd have to be a standard package for all distros.
The Way Not To Do It is to release a source RPM with no info on what order to apply patches in (or even if they need applied) like Red Hat 7.0. Sure, you've got the source... but do you know what to do with it? I don't.
2. It's harder to figure out how to rape your system; you have to edit lilo.conf and then run LILO instead of simply right-clicking and hitting "format". (I learned the hard way that "warning" meant "your bootblock is dead".)
3. debian; they sound more 1337.
-- LoonXTall
/* Sautee STRING briskly. */
Has anyone mentioned too: If you use Linux only, then sit short time in front of a windows box, your brain start telling you, wow, this system is so poor, why does anyone use it?
No, I usually only think "Damn, this thing is slow. Why can't it auotdetect the user and load DOS?"
Seriously, what I really think is "Damn, this thing is (a) easy or (b) scary." "A" for normal use, "B" when (un)installing something. Linux docs currently assume to much... I'm thinking of writing a HOWTO on the subject of getting started (what if you want open(3) and you get open(1)? Took me a week to figure out something other than "man -a open"... and WTF decided searching for help should be "apropos" and "help" should give you Bash internals that scroll off the top of the screen?) unless someone did it already.
-- LoonXTall
/* Sautee STRING briskly. */
They need information about you.
Do they...?
What is required for business? Each party requires the mailto: address of the other, an agreed medium of exchange (sheep, gold, paper with somebody's portrait on it, or anything else), and an agreed value of the good/service being sold in terms of the medium of exchange (4 sheep, 1 oz. gold, $250, or three furballs).
This leads to an interesting conclusion: I need not even be human to do business with you. I could be a Furby-class device linked to the net...
-- LoonXTall
/* Sautee STRING briskly. */
Someone should make make, diff, and/or patch HOWTOs. As a newbie, I'm not even going to try. (although I can do basic diff/patch stuff) If you want people with no experience to contribute sometime, they must be taught how.
BTW... I want to make a kernel for hardware probing; I reconfigured 2.4.0-test11 and followed the Kernel-HOWTO ("make bzdisk"); this nuked the existing kernel on hde7 as well as creating a floppy without its own root (VFS can't mount root on 21:06). Any links or different HOWTOs?
-- LoonXTall
/* Sautee STRING briskly. */
Even if the contents can be uniquely identified as containing sound data, how can we know this isn't some internet equivalent of a radio station?
Radio is a one-way transmission. Sufficiently advanced firewalls could detect the asymmetry and ignore it.
Can't the telco charge a per-packet rate or a percentage and effectively tax ALL traffic on its way through?
-- LoonXTall
$ whoami
Nobody. Quit bothering me.
well established 64 bit market.
So, where can I get one of these 64bit machines for $2K that will run Windows ME?
I expect Intel/AMD are entering the 64bit market in order to bring it to the home user. That 64bit market is nonexistent, and won't exist until they create it and leave the 32bit home user market behind.
-- LoonXTall
"Microsoft is the only vendor as of yet that has a fix...."
it ran legacy code slower.
IIRC, it ran 16bit at the exact same speed, and 32bit faster. The problem was it got thrashed for this by benchmarkoids, and it cost more anyway (due to the full core speed on-die cache; needing a new socket didn't help either.) So Intel left the P5 in the dust with higher clockspeeds on the P6, renamed it, and the BMoids were happy.
wrt IA-64, I'm willing to bet that the main holdup will be the compiler, which must extract parallelism from the (sequential) code to take advantage of IA64's predicated execution. That's been a Holy Grail of compiler construction for years....
-- LoonXTall
"Microsoft is the only vendor as of yet that has a fix...."
Here in America, it's incredibly easy to find an Intel box... hard to walk into a store without tripping over one. You pretty much have to specify AMD to get one.
-- LoonXTall
"Microsoft is the only vendor as of yet that has a fix...."
Don't jump to unfounded conclusions. ... My logitech mouse driver...
Ah. That's not the _vanilla_ mouse control panel. If we're considering nonstandard controls, the MS Intellipoint panel has an actual blur checkbox, but I've never noticed the difference at 60 Hz refresh (which is all I can test it on, since it's in a public lab).
A far as problems on public computers, the next user can simply change the mouse settings to something more reasonable. I just don't see this as a problem that needs solving.
Er... my dad spent _hours_ trying to change the _player names_ in MS Hearts... what are his chances of finding/changing the mouse panel? "My Computer" and "Start" aren't very intuitive places to look.
Besides, what about the raw coolness factor of a motion blur?
-- LoonXTall
Leave X out of this. In Windoze (which has more than 5% of the desktop market, in case you didn't notice), there is one "speed" setting; you adjust a slider on the fast-slow continuum. Pointer velocity is directly proportional to mouse velocity, which is rather "intuitive" (having been that way on the Amiga as well, where I learned to mouse, and on Macs, which my school used.)
Anyway, motion-blur would be useful in a public lab where anyone (or, depending on security, anyone with poledit.exe on a floppy) can speed up the mouse to maximum. Our visual hardware creates motion blurs in meatspace, and interprets them better (faster) than 6 separate images of something (mouse trails or high-speed mouse motion). This would make it easier to interpret where the pointer is when the mouse/pointer speed ratio is wrong, as you would see it race across the screen instead of hopping.
-- LoonXTall
Only if you've got an Intellimouse, or maybe a version of Windoze later than 95a. I don't know what the mouse panel looks like in Win98---that box dual-boots to Linux, so it has Logitech's control panel for the 3-button mouse.
-- LoonXTall