Ooooh yeah! Doh! I totally forgot about that... I remember posting something about including two "standard options" in every poll - one for the "Slashdot sucks" variations, the other for the "Hemos rulez" variations. Maybe I should put that into my sig or something:-)
What is the main reason you'd like to assemble your own Linux distro?
It's a good learning experience for people who want to know exactly how the different parts fit together.
It allows total control over what you put into your system.
The standard Linux distributions are too bloated for my tastes.
I just like re-inventing the wheel, especially square ones.
'cos RedHat sucks.
'cos CmdrTaco rules.
Yuck. I prefer to stick with an existing distro.
What, you mean anybody from highschool can actually assemble their own Linux system?!! God forbid! This is a security hazard! We better report this to the FBI!
And before some GUI zealot posts their rebuttal to this, I'd like to add:
I fully agree and endorse the idea that users should be trained to use a computer at a reasonable level of proficiency; computers should not be dumbed down to "their" level.
Just think of the ancient world. Mathematics was something only educated people understood (and mind you, literacy was almost nil back then) and only philosophers enjoyed. Today, if you don't know math, you can hardly make a decent living. Does this mean we should "dumb down" the world so that "everybody" can understand it without needing to go through all that hectic trouble of actually learning how to count?
Of course not. This is called "education". I don't see why the same principle shouldn't apply in computers. Let's just face it -- our young generation today grew up with computers. They are educated with a high level of proficiency with computers. We do not need to ruin them with dumbed-down UI's that only limits their full utility of these machines.
This is just the same as the ancient generations who did not know how to count beyond trivial numbers. Today's generation throw around multi-digit numbers every day (and how few of them are actually mathematicians!). Keep the requirements high, and the future generations will grow up to it. Believe me, in a few decades' time, computer proficiency will become as integral to our lives as basic arithmetic is. Dumbing down only slows down literacy.
Indeed. All too often, we see the Recursive Slashdot Problem... slashdotters attract more people to slashdot, and so slashdot slashdots more sites causing more slashdotters to come to slashdot, with the slashdot effect that slashdot becomes slashdotted because of the slashdot effect caused by slashdotters endlessly slashdotting on slashdot and slashdotting more sites bringing more slashdotters to the slashdotted slashdot...
Gah, I lost my train of thought... my brain got slashdotted!:-P
You missed my point. The underlying concept behind my whole idea was to encrypt the HTTP requests at the client's machine. So the ISP's proxy never gets to see the HTTP requests at all. The proxy (which preferably resides outside the ISP, but doesn't have to) decodes these HTTP requests and forwards them to the webserver they were intended for. The underlying idea is to keep the HTTP stream unrecognizable as a HTTP stream (ie. encrypted) until it has reached a place where the traces of its true origin can be removed.
So. They are tracking your "HTTP click stream". Apparently they think the Web = the Internet. Then they say, "You can obtain your ID by clicking on... ". So apparently you have to be using Windows and have their software of some kind installed. Great.
So what if I don't use Windows? I fancy any Linux client can be easily hacked/cracked to not send this "click stream" information... Or does that mean I'm not allowed to use that ISP just because I use Linux and not Windows?!?! Or perhaps they are doing it from the ISP's connection, so that any form of outgoing HTTP requests will be attributed to my client...
All this Web activity tracking makes me sick. I think it's about time we built our own proxies with encrypted HTTP requests so that nobody can track our browsing history. All we need is to have special connection code in Mozilla (or perhaps even a Linux kernel module, anyone?) that encrypts the HTTP stream, perhaps send it via some unknown port (definitely not 80, perhaps some esoteric port like 12529) to a proxy that decrypts the HTTP stream and forwards it to the real Web server.
The proxy itself may be open to the tracking -- it's irrelevent because they would just be tracking the combined traffic of a large number of proxy users and they can't determine the source of the forwarded HTTP requests anyway. Besides, I for one am going to filter out doubleclick and other such domains completely on my firewall. Banner ads suck. If I want something there are places I can look it up. I don't need to be spoonfed garbage like ads. I can't stand this incessant bombardment of "buy me! Buy this! buy that!" trash. As if TV commercials aren't bad enough.
Another idea that just came to mind is to have the proxy code available to everybody. We can then use each other's machines as proxies and make the data they collect totally useless and not resemble any real information about you at all. I haven't thought this through so it might be a bad idea, but anyway, it's an idea for slashdotters to talk about.
This may sound like flamebait, but it's not... lately, it seems that there is a lot of hype about biological systems and how it "exploits evolution" or "uses the solution mother nature has been using for all this time", or some such nonsense.
If you actually read till the end of the article, you'll realize that what they have done is merely to re-encode the TSP (travelling salesman problem) in terms of DNA reactions. As far as I can see, there is no gain whatsoever from doing this -- a computer doing a brute-force search on the TSP problem would have yielded the solution much quicker than the DNA method. The only potential advantage of the DNA method appears to be the "compactness" of data and the "stochastic, massively parallel" nature of it. But at the end of the article, it specifically says that this stochastic nature of DNA reactions (or any chemical reaction, that is) itself is the barrier -- it doesn't scale well. WTF??? That means that you have a method of solving TSP which is "massively parallel" (and therefore, by some strange fuzzy reasoning, it is "better" than silicon-based methods) but which doesn't scale well. Big deal, back to square one.
IMNSHO a lot of this hype is just riding on the unfounded assumption that "stochastic" is "better" because "that's what Nature uses". BS, I say. Just because something is stochastic doesn't make it any better (except by superstitious association with "stochastic" processes like evolution or some-such.) You can get something useful like strong cryptography from randomness. But you can also get white noise from randomness. Until it's proven that a particular process actually has its merits (and not merely duplicating what can already be done by an existing computer or other method), it's all just hype.
Granted, the "massively parallel" claim seems to be more credible; but in this case, they've just shot themselves in the foot -- the supposedly good "massively parallel" nature of the DNA method turned out to be a limiting factor, as you wuold need impractical amounts of DNA to conduct any non-trivial computation. Except perhaps for some hype value associated with the phrase "massively parallel" (boy, don't we love that term. Beowulf clusters, "massive" multi-CPU systems, etc.), I see no value whatsoever in this whole thing. As far as I'm concerned, somebody just hit upon something in the lab. Big deal, scientists have been doing that for centuries. Let's see something real produced before it's hyped like the Next Revolution.
Yet another poll suggestion from the Poll Mastah
on
RMS On eBooks
·
· Score: 1
What do you think of the way publishers are pushing for copyright enforcement on eBooks?
Copyrights are evil! We want freedom! Information wants to be free!
You guys know nothing at all. Authors and artists need to live! Without copyrights there will be no books! Selling services is not proven to work!
What copyright? We hate the middleman! All we need is technology to pay the author by clicking a button!
Who cares, any copy protection scheme is crackable. We'll just pirate them if they don't give books to us for free!
The copyright law needs major reform so that it will profit the authors/artists instead of letting the middleman milk the cash-cow.
What do you think will happen to tech stocks in the stock market?
The stocks will continue to go down, because people will begin to realize that tech stocks nowadays are waaaay overvalued.
It will stabilize after a reasonable value is reached
It will skyrocket again when the Next Big Thing hits, just like it did when Linux first became the Next Hot Thing.
Man, we better convince all those clueless business people that their investment in tech stocks is worthwhile! 'cos although it's way overvalued, I *ahem* *cough* I live on stocks and I need to feed my kids!
Who cares about the stock market?! I live in a cave^H^H^H^Hcomputer lab!
This is off-topic! Stop posting such garbage to slashdot!
Everything else on Slashdot is off-topic! Post more articles like this!
What should we do if we're in this guy's shoes, and want to use a GPL'd library but need it to be LGPL?
It's a DLL, so screw it, just apply the LGPL to it.
Talk to the author. LGPL is quite close to GPL and the author will probably give you the permission.
Whaddya mean, LGPL?!?! Why don't you just GPL your code and make the world a communism^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hbetter place?!
IANAL, but, you know, according to the copyright law, blah blah blah, I *think* you can just apply the LGPL in this particular case, blah blah blah, IANAL but I'm probably right, blah blah blah.
IANAL, but, blah blah blah, I *think* you have no choice but to use the GPL on your code, if you don't want to, too bad, you're screwed, blah blah blah (disclaimer: IANAL)
GPL is a virus! RMS is a freak! (huh?)
I see all these posts with IANAL... what does IANAL stand for?! (duh)
(BTW, just in case your mouse moves over to the -1 Off-topic button, I'm just trying to parody the typical Slashdot response to an article like this...)
Slashdot Mirror
Poll suggestion from the Poll Mastah...
Slashdot is:
Ooooh yeah! Doh! I totally forgot about that... I remember posting something about including two "standard options" in every poll - one for the "Slashdot sucks" variations, the other for the "Hemos rulez" variations. Maybe I should put that into my sig or something :-)
What is the main reason you'd like to assemble your own Linux distro?
- It's a good learning experience for people who want to know exactly how the different parts fit together.
- It allows total control over what you put into your system.
- The standard Linux distributions are too bloated for my tastes.
- I just like re-inventing the wheel, especially square ones.
- 'cos RedHat sucks.
- 'cos CmdrTaco rules.
- Yuck. I prefer to stick with an existing distro.
- What, you mean anybody from highschool can actually assemble their own Linux system?!! God forbid! This is a security hazard! We better report this to the FBI!
.And before some GUI zealot posts their rebuttal to this, I'd like to add:
I fully agree and endorse the idea that users should be trained to use a computer at a reasonable level of proficiency; computers should not be dumbed down to "their" level.
Just think of the ancient world. Mathematics was something only educated people understood (and mind you, literacy was almost nil back then) and only philosophers enjoyed. Today, if you don't know math, you can hardly make a decent living. Does this mean we should "dumb down" the world so that "everybody" can understand it without needing to go through all that hectic trouble of actually learning how to count?
Of course not. This is called "education". I don't see why the same principle shouldn't apply in computers. Let's just face it -- our young generation today grew up with computers. They are educated with a high level of proficiency with computers. We do not need to ruin them with dumbed-down UI's that only limits their full utility of these machines.
This is just the same as the ancient generations who did not know how to count beyond trivial numbers. Today's generation throw around multi-digit numbers every day (and how few of them are actually mathematicians!). Keep the requirements high, and the future generations will grow up to it. Believe me, in a few decades' time, computer proficiency will become as integral to our lives as basic arithmetic is. Dumbing down only slows down literacy.
What is the best language to implement HTTPD in?
Indeed. All too often, we see the Recursive Slashdot Problem... slashdotters attract more people to slashdot, and so slashdot slashdots more sites causing more slashdotters to come to slashdot, with the slashdot effect that slashdot becomes slashdotted because of the slashdot effect caused by slashdotters endlessly slashdotting on slashdot and slashdotting more sites bringing more slashdotters to the slashdotted slashdot...
Gah, I lost my train of thought ... my brain got slashdotted! :-P
You missed my point. The underlying concept behind my whole idea was to encrypt the HTTP requests at the client's machine. So the ISP's proxy never gets to see the HTTP requests at all. The proxy (which preferably resides outside the ISP, but doesn't have to) decodes these HTTP requests and forwards them to the webserver they were intended for. The underlying idea is to keep the HTTP stream unrecognizable as a HTTP stream (ie. encrypted) until it has reached a place where the traces of its true origin can be removed.
So. They are tracking your "HTTP click stream". Apparently they think the Web = the Internet. Then they say, "You can obtain your ID by clicking on ... ". So apparently you have to be using Windows and have their software of some kind installed. Great.
So what if I don't use Windows? I fancy any Linux client can be easily hacked/cracked to not send this "click stream" information... Or does that mean I'm not allowed to use that ISP just because I use Linux and not Windows?!?! Or perhaps they are doing it from the ISP's connection, so that any form of outgoing HTTP requests will be attributed to my client...
All this Web activity tracking makes me sick. I think it's about time we built our own proxies with encrypted HTTP requests so that nobody can track our browsing history. All we need is to have special connection code in Mozilla (or perhaps even a Linux kernel module, anyone?) that encrypts the HTTP stream, perhaps send it via some unknown port (definitely not 80, perhaps some esoteric port like 12529) to a proxy that decrypts the HTTP stream and forwards it to the real Web server.
The proxy itself may be open to the tracking -- it's irrelevent because they would just be tracking the combined traffic of a large number of proxy users and they can't determine the source of the forwarded HTTP requests anyway. Besides, I for one am going to filter out doubleclick and other such domains completely on my firewall. Banner ads suck. If I want something there are places I can look it up. I don't need to be spoonfed garbage like ads. I can't stand this incessant bombardment of "buy me! Buy this! buy that!" trash. As if TV commercials aren't bad enough.
Another idea that just came to mind is to have the proxy code available to everybody. We can then use each other's machines as proxies and make the data they collect totally useless and not resemble any real information about you at all. I haven't thought this through so it might be a bad idea, but anyway, it's an idea for slashdotters to talk about.
This may sound like flamebait, but it's not... lately, it seems that there is a lot of hype about biological systems and how it "exploits evolution" or "uses the solution mother nature has been using for all this time", or some such nonsense.
If you actually read till the end of the article, you'll realize that what they have done is merely to re-encode the TSP (travelling salesman problem) in terms of DNA reactions. As far as I can see, there is no gain whatsoever from doing this -- a computer doing a brute-force search on the TSP problem would have yielded the solution much quicker than the DNA method. The only potential advantage of the DNA method appears to be the "compactness" of data and the "stochastic, massively parallel" nature of it. But at the end of the article, it specifically says that this stochastic nature of DNA reactions (or any chemical reaction, that is) itself is the barrier -- it doesn't scale well. WTF??? That means that you have a method of solving TSP which is "massively parallel" (and therefore, by some strange fuzzy reasoning, it is "better" than silicon-based methods) but which doesn't scale well. Big deal, back to square one.
IMNSHO a lot of this hype is just riding on the unfounded assumption that "stochastic" is "better" because "that's what Nature uses". BS, I say. Just because something is stochastic doesn't make it any better (except by superstitious association with "stochastic" processes like evolution or some-such.) You can get something useful like strong cryptography from randomness. But you can also get white noise from randomness. Until it's proven that a particular process actually has its merits (and not merely duplicating what can already be done by an existing computer or other method), it's all just hype.
Granted, the "massively parallel" claim seems to be more credible; but in this case, they've just shot themselves in the foot -- the supposedly good "massively parallel" nature of the DNA method turned out to be a limiting factor, as you wuold need impractical amounts of DNA to conduct any non-trivial computation. Except perhaps for some hype value associated with the phrase "massively parallel" (boy, don't we love that term. Beowulf clusters, "massive" multi-CPU systems, etc.), I see no value whatsoever in this whole thing. As far as I'm concerned, somebody just hit upon something in the lab. Big deal, scientists have been doing that for centuries. Let's see something real produced before it's hyped like the Next Revolution.
What do you think of the way publishers are pushing for copyright enforcement on eBooks?
What do you think will happen to tech stocks in the stock market?
What should we do if we're in this guy's shoes, and want to use a GPL'd library but need it to be LGPL?
Should articles like this be posted?
What do you think of Star Wars on DVD?
What is the significance of these developers resigning from Stampede?
What do you think will be the future of Khronos?
Linux on the Brain.
(BTW, just in case your mouse moves over to the -1 Off-topic button, I'm just trying to parody the typical Slashdot response to an article like this...)
The Poll Mastah
Suggestion for a slashdot poll:
How much do you trust benchmarks?
The Poll Mastah