I know I'm in the minority, but in most things aesthetics are of little importance to me. I like eye candy for its technical merit, but the artistry is not that interesting to me. I listen to heavy metal for the technical elements (difficult to play pieces, clever use of effects), not because they sound good. I don't care what colors my clothes, car, apartment, food, or friends are. I'll admit there are some realms in which artistic merit does matter to me, but there are a lot of times when the fluff really doesn't matter.
One of my favorite things about software libris(sp?) is that I can customize my environments for technical superiority, at the expense of aesthetics if need be. It's my choice.
I extend my thanks to all the developers who generously give their time and energy to me in the form of crappy-looking, but technically awesome software.
It's duplication of effort, but not of result
on
Gnumeric 1.0 Has Arrived
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Each of the office suits you name has benefits and drawbacks of its own. If all the developers of all those projects were going to try to colaborate on The One True Suite, they'd have to set aside their differences and make comprimises. The result would be mediocre and would squash the individual efforts.
If all the kernel hackers in the world tried to colaborate on The One True Kernel, their results would be mediocre as well.
When all the best musicians get together to make an album you get Hands Across America and The Three Tenors, not Mozart or Van Halen. (Your tastes may vary, clearly.)
I was going to mark this post 'redundant', since this issue comes up in every thread, but I thought it more constructive to explain in words, rather than a moderation: it is false to call the efforts of these various projects wasted, since each developer works towards whatever is important to him or her. Their efforst would only truely be wasted if they all came up with the same result (identical software AND developer experience).
This kind of research is valuable in that it will help some people get closer to their computers. However, there will never be an 'ultimate' interface, any more than there will be a single way to learn, to love, to create, or to be happy.
No matter how much we condense ourselves down into bell curves and types, we will always be infinitely diverse, and how we interact with each other and our tools will always be a very personal thing.
That being said, I'd like to do some research into teaching people enough science and art to begin with so that whatever interface they come across will quickly become easy for them. This is already the case with most geeks, and I don't accept the idea that we are somehow gifted, or that the so-called average joe must be provided with a toy interface if they ever hope to get anything out of computers.
I wager that as long as we assume users are stupid, they will continue to be.
It's true that individualistic programing styles can slow down a project, and it's true that perl allows almost infinite programming style, or lack of same. However, the two issues are orthogonal, and Perl itself is not bad for cooperation. Just ask the CPAN developers.
Next, 'programming' is not the same as 'coding'. Programming has come to mean all the terms the author of the above post used: Design, Engineering, Requirements, Documentation.
The author of this post is half-right, but missing the big picture. There are folks who develop with maturity and discipline with Perl, and there are folks who write garbage in every language. The freedom to screw ourselves over is necessary for us to learn how not to screw ourselves over.
So no, Perl isn't bad for teams, self-centered programers are bad for teams. I should know, I've been that programmer.
(If I felt like invoking flame-mode, I'd suggest that perhaps the poster is coming from an academic or corporate background where individualism is bad for the hierarchy...:)
It should be 'interesting'. Even if you don't agree with it, it's concise and well written, on topic, provides new information related to the topic, as well as not provoking flames. I hope the moderator who marked it 'flaimbait' got meta-moderated down.
I was going to say the same thing as ChadN, but it would have been redundant. The post he replied to was redundant (in the context of Slashdot itself) and useless. It was neither interesting nor insightful.
This would probably still be front page news if it was Bill Gates talking, and he certainly isn't worshiped here.
Linus got where he is through hard work and a little luck. I'd want to hear what he has to say, even if it was about pencils, because it's much less likely to be mere background noise in a sea of information. This has nothing to do with worship and everything to do with filtering and statistics.
As of this writing there are 21 posts at threshold 3, and none of them look at what I consider to be the bigest flaw in this conflict: The 'music industry' seems to think the 'pirates' have disposable income which they are witholding from the industry out of greed.
In other words, the industry seems to think they will get more money if they crack down on so-calleed piracy. However, even if they get perfect control of the data (impossible, I know), they won't get any more money out of consumers. If we had more money we'd be spending it. If I can't get the music I want within my budget, I will simply buy less music. It's true that there are unscrupulous people charging for pirated data, but eliminating that won't improve the industries' position significantly because the people buying those pirated disks probably won't buy official disks ever.
I admit this is a broad over-generalization, but it should be obvious that the effort invested in anti-piracy is squandered. Cut back on the legal staff if you want to keep more money, Mr. Industry!
Theo himself is happy to admit how abusive he is (see the interview). This is petty. He's says, "I'm abusive, and other people just have to put up with me or go away." This is uncalled for. This kind of behavior is destructive, wasteful, hurtful, and in the case we're talking about, it was divisive.
The poster was not out of line calling him petty for these things.
Further, there is nothing petty about refusing to interact with someone who is destructive.
From m-w.com: "3 : marked by or reflective of narrow interests and sympathies : SMALL-MINDED"
It's true that we choose our own reactions to other people's words, but even in that context, there is no reason why anyone should tolerate an individual who has no tact.
"The reason it is worth mining ice is that it can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen via electrolysis and then you've got fuel and oxidizer for a Mars mission located at the bottom of a shallow gravity well."
Excuse me? The energy you spend separating the hydrogen from the oxygen is slightly more than the energy you get combining them when you 'burn' the hydrogen. It's like saying we should make lots of rubber bands because we can stretch the rubber bands and then run our cars on them, or slingshot ourselves somewhere.
Whatever energy you use could just as easily go directly into your vessel. Using solar power to split the water? Put solar panels on your rocket, or use a solar sail. Using nuclear fission? You had to get the materials for that up to the moon in the first place, might as well put them on your mars-bound rocket.
There may be some source of energy in the moon, but it isn't going to be ice.
"The_code_poet clearly asked about compatibility going from sh to bash."
You replied "Having things work under bash that won't work under sh is exactly what makes it hard to test sh scripts in an environment that only has bash."
That's exactly the opposite of what the original question was about AND what the response you replied to was about.
The point is not "how we can write scripts.. when we're developing on linux", it's how to be sure a/bin/sh script written outside of linux will work on linux, and the answer is not to depend on any of the sh-isms listed in the parent.
While what you say is factually true (spoofing the source is tricky), the principle of not fighting fire with fire is still reasonable. Whenever you automatically respond to an attack with another attack you open up the potential for an explosive situation.
The best defense is a good defense. Education and superior software are the safest, most effective cure for network-transmitted-infections.:)
"Through simple one-line commands, entire applications are downloaded, integrity checked, built, and installed making system administration amazingly simple."
If you aren't a "I must compile all my apps" nazi:
If your partition system reserves the beginning of the disk for a boot loader, then only the boot loader and OS care what the partition scheme is. You don't even have to use partitions at all on a disk that you're not booting from:
mke2fs/dev/hdb
Linux already has support for other OS's partition schemes (BSD, Macintosh, Solaris Sparc/i86, Unixware). Adding another would probably be a lot easier then most of the other work people happily do. LILO wouldn't care what the partion system is if you installed it at the beginning of the device (boot=/dev/hda). Grub could probably be patched to understand the new scheme just as easily as Linux could.
The only downside is that you couldn't dual-boot any OS that didn't understand the new partition scheme. That's probably why noone has done it yet.
I'd be very surprised if the poster's mother didn't pay insurance or hospital bills to compensate those who helped out with his or her birth. Firthermore, just because something isn't a "right" doesn't mean it isn't desireable. It just isn't useful to "guarentee" these things in the formal structure of state, church, or company.
Family relationships are usually voluntary.
"desperate need to justify ones own beliefs" - You're not even trying to see the other side.
Our whole society _IS_ built on personal initiative, no matter what kind of structures we put in place. Cooercion is nowhere near as effective as voluntary (especially compensated) action. You could turn your whole last paragraph around on yourself. Don't think about how hard it would be to live without an inheritance, think about how easy it can be. Think about how free you would be if you weren't dependent on large impersonal orginizations (govt, church, Proctor and Gamble) to feed you your information, your job, and your safety.
Many would claim that the lack of opportunity in many areas can be attributed to 50% taxation, laws written to support monopolies, and people looking for the wrong kind of work. You can't fix that with more of the same.
What this does is open up cheating to everyone equally instead of restricting it to insiders and extremely dedicated cracker types. Wheras in Ultima Online (the current benchmark) you have to pay $10 extra per month per account to get a sanctioned "cheat" program (UOAssist), if the client were GPL'd there would be competition in "cheat" programs and many decent ones would be given away. More exactly, people would trade improved clients and contribute the results back to the community.
Likewise with a GPL'd server, anyone can compete with this company, insuring that users can choose to visit the world which meets there desires and expectations. Is the world they are visiting "cheating" them? It doesn't matter what the answer is, because if they don't like the experience they get, they can try a different one.
The best advantage to opening up the protocols this way is that it focuses game design on systems which cannot be cheated by their design. Make time increments large so that bandwidth doesn't give you an advantage. Make a wide array of client fancyness so that machine speed becomes less important.
The only way you're going to have cheat-proof action is by taking over the user's I/O completely. Otherwise they will always have a way of cheating. Their hacked client can show them secrets they aren't supposed to see, auto-avoid threats, give users perfect aim, etc. If you're going to give up the action element and go with a strategy approach, or even focus on *gasp!* ROLE PLAYING then this project will probably suit your goals nicely.
So, if you're just looking at the obvious questions and answers, then opening up the client and server does give an advantage to geeks, but if you're looking at the long-term/big-picture, then opening up these programs is the ONLY way to solve some of the biggest problems with these games.
This is three and half years of Ultima Online, four years of quake and 10 years of MUD experience talking.
This is sounding much more like the perfect moderation system then anything I've heard yet. I believe this would make an excellent model for moderation of other forms of data as well. This model would allow parents to define "pr0n" for their own family.
The problem with the systems we have in place now (on and offline) are exactly the one-dimensionality you describe. There is certainly a "goodness" we can all agree on at the extremes (love good, murder bad), but outside of those extremes our own personalities and freewill make simple value judgements a detriment, be they restrictive or merely descriptive.
I'm going to save a copy of your post for later re-hashing and possible implementation. I'll try to give what credit I can.
What are you afraid of? That you'll lose a message? That you won't get it on time? That it will be delivered to the wrong person?
Email isn't supposed to be what you describe, any more than snail mail is. Yes, you can make it do what you want, and you can flip burgers with a garden implement, too, but why ask how? What is it that you _really_ want, and is there perhaps a better way to accomplish that goal?
All OSs have strengths for different environments. If, like me, all you ever need is ssh and a browser, then Debian GNU/Linux is better than NT4. I wish I could run IE, but even without it I prefer Linux for responsiveness and lack of "surprises".
If, like a lot of people I know, you run proprietary applications that don't exist for Unix, then NT is the clear choice. No argument is possible.
For games it depends on the game. Benchmarks be damned, I'd rather run Quake on Unix (Linux or BSD).
For CAD it depends on the app. Some aren't even available for NT.
For video editing, depends on the app, NT is probably first choice, or for super high-end, maybe IRIX or something obscure.
For medical data manipulation, it depends entirely on the application, but I suspect Unix comes out a little ahead for stability.
This debate isn't one which can be answered definitively, any more than you can answer a car debate definitively. I like VWs for personality. Some Japenese cars get better milage. Some American cars get style or raw horsepower/dollar bonuses. You get the picture.
"...I prove to myself that NT4 is in fact better"
Then you're right. NT4 is best for you, hands down. You must be very happy, you've found your "soul operating system".
The only viable solution to the virus problem is a secure machine (OS and apps). Anti-virus software is to computer security as an automatic sentry gun is to home security. It does more harm than good, no matter how well it's administrated.
So now the virus writers can check their virii against the latest definitions without even hitting the main servers? They'll appreciate that.:)
Why make a different app for sharing of each kind of file? Why not a single distributed master-less network with distributed trust and market-based load balancing that is content-agnostic? (MojoNation)
p2p group messaging:
Oh great, another way my friends who've just discovered the internet can bug me.
Why just text messages? Why not extend existing protocols to be peer2peer broadcast rather than simply point-to-point? Oh wait, we have that already. It's called EMAIL.
What's wrong with a MUD (or MOO)? Is it so hard to run one or find a friendly one? I don't seem to have any trouble...
Looks like more attempts by TheMan(tm) to capitalize on and control the one thing He can never completely own.
The files distributed are not binaries, and are signed. If you can't trust the AV update software to compare signatures, then it doesn't matter where the file came from. Furthermore, the most damage an invalid AV rule can do is give a false positive and cause an uninfected file to be..."cleaned". You do back up your workstations, don't you?
Slashdot Mirror
I know I'm in the minority, but in most things aesthetics are of little importance to me. I like eye candy for its technical merit, but the artistry is not that interesting to me. I listen to heavy metal for the technical elements (difficult to play pieces, clever use of effects), not because they sound good. I don't care what colors my clothes, car, apartment, food, or friends are. I'll admit there are some realms in which artistic merit does matter to me, but there are a lot of times when the fluff really doesn't matter.
One of my favorite things about software libris(sp?) is that I can customize my environments for technical superiority, at the expense of aesthetics if need be. It's my choice.
I extend my thanks to all the developers who generously give their time and energy to me in the form of crappy-looking, but technically awesome software.
Each of the office suits you name has benefits and drawbacks of its own. If all the developers of all those projects were going to try to colaborate on The One True Suite, they'd have to set aside their differences and make comprimises. The result would be mediocre and would squash the individual efforts.
If all the kernel hackers in the world tried to colaborate on The One True Kernel, their results would be mediocre as well.
When all the best musicians get together to make an album you get Hands Across America and The Three Tenors, not Mozart or Van Halen. (Your tastes may vary, clearly.)
I was going to mark this post 'redundant', since this issue comes up in every thread, but I thought it more constructive to explain in words, rather than a moderation: it is false to call the efforts of these various projects wasted, since each developer works towards whatever is important to him or her. Their efforst would only truely be wasted if they all came up with the same result (identical software AND developer experience).
This kind of research is valuable in that it will help some people get closer to their computers. However, there will never be an 'ultimate' interface, any more than there will be a single way to learn, to love, to create, or to be happy.
No matter how much we condense ourselves down into bell curves and types, we will always be infinitely diverse, and how we interact with each other and our tools will always be a very personal thing.
That being said, I'd like to do some research into teaching people enough science and art to begin with so that whatever interface they come across will quickly become easy for them. This is already the case with most geeks, and I don't accept the idea that we are somehow gifted, or that the so-called average joe must be provided with a toy interface if they ever hope to get anything out of computers.
I wager that as long as we assume users are stupid, they will continue to be.
It's true that individualistic programing styles can slow down a project, and it's true that perl allows almost infinite programming style, or lack of same. However, the two issues are orthogonal, and Perl itself is not bad for cooperation. Just ask the CPAN developers.
:)
Next, 'programming' is not the same as 'coding'. Programming has come to mean all the terms the author of the above post used: Design, Engineering, Requirements, Documentation.
The author of this post is half-right, but missing the big picture. There are folks who develop with maturity and discipline with Perl, and there are folks who write garbage in every language. The freedom to screw ourselves over is necessary for us to learn how not to screw ourselves over.
So no, Perl isn't bad for teams, self-centered programers are bad for teams. I should know, I've been that programmer.
(If I felt like invoking flame-mode, I'd suggest that perhaps the poster is coming from an academic or corporate background where individualism is bad for the hierarchy...
It should be 'interesting'. Even if you don't agree with it, it's concise and well written, on topic, provides new information related to the topic, as well as not provoking flames. I hope the moderator who marked it 'flaimbait' got meta-moderated down.
Yeesh.
I was going to say the same thing as ChadN, but it would have been redundant. The post he replied to was redundant (in the context of Slashdot itself) and useless. It was neither interesting nor insightful.
This would probably still be front page news if it was Bill Gates talking, and he certainly isn't worshiped here.
Linus got where he is through hard work and a little luck. I'd want to hear what he has to say, even if it was about pencils, because it's much less likely to be mere background noise in a sea of information. This has nothing to do with worship and everything to do with filtering and statistics.
Go cry to your mommy.
As of this writing there are 21 posts at threshold 3, and none of them look at what I consider to be the bigest flaw in this conflict: The 'music industry' seems to think the 'pirates' have disposable income which they are witholding from the industry out of greed.
In other words, the industry seems to think they will get more money if they crack down on so-calleed piracy. However, even if they get perfect control of the data (impossible, I know), they won't get any more money out of consumers. If we had more money we'd be spending it. If I can't get the music I want within my budget, I will simply buy less music. It's true that there are unscrupulous people charging for pirated data, but eliminating that won't improve the industries' position significantly because the people buying those pirated disks probably won't buy official disks ever.
I admit this is a broad over-generalization, but it should be obvious that the effort invested in anti-piracy is squandered. Cut back on the legal staff if you want to keep more money, Mr. Industry!
Theo himself is happy to admit how abusive he is (see the interview). This is petty. He's says, "I'm abusive, and other people just have to put up with me or go away." This is uncalled for. This kind of behavior is destructive, wasteful, hurtful, and in the case we're talking about, it was divisive.
The poster was not out of line calling him petty for these things.
Further, there is nothing petty about refusing to interact with someone who is destructive.
From m-w.com: "3 : marked by or reflective of narrow interests and sympathies : SMALL-MINDED"
It's true that we choose our own reactions to other people's words, but even in that context, there is no reason why anyone should tolerate an individual who has no tact.
"The reason it is worth mining ice is that it can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen via electrolysis and then you've got fuel and oxidizer for a Mars mission located at the bottom of a shallow gravity well."
Excuse me? The energy you spend separating the hydrogen from the oxygen is slightly more than the energy you get combining them when you 'burn' the hydrogen. It's like saying we should make lots of rubber bands because we can stretch the rubber bands and then run our cars on them, or slingshot ourselves somewhere.
Whatever energy you use could just as easily go directly into your vessel. Using solar power to split the water? Put solar panels on your rocket, or use a solar sail. Using nuclear fission? You had to get the materials for that up to the moon in the first place, might as well put them on your mars-bound rocket.
There may be some source of energy in the moon, but it isn't going to be ice.
doesn't mean the post wasn't funny.
Grow up.
Did you even read the post you replied to?
.. when we're developing on linux", it's how to be sure a /bin/sh script written outside of linux will work on linux, and the answer is not to depend on any of the sh-isms listed in the parent.
"The_code_poet clearly asked about compatibility going from sh to bash."
You replied "Having things work under bash that won't work under sh is exactly what makes it hard to test sh scripts in an environment that only has bash."
That's exactly the opposite of what the original question was about AND what the response you replied to was about.
The point is not "how we can write scripts
Pay more attention next time, AC.
Scientist #1: OH MY GOD! The tunnel is coming apart!
Scientist #2: DUCK!
While what you say is factually true (spoofing the source is tricky), the principle of not fighting fire with fire is still reasonable. Whenever you automatically respond to an attack with another attack you open up the potential for an explosive situation.
:)
The best defense is a good defense. Education and superior software are the safest, most effective cure for network-transmitted-infections.
"Through simple one-line commands, entire applications are downloaded, integrity checked, built, and installed making system administration amazingly simple."
If you aren't a "I must compile all my apps" nazi:
apt-get install package
Otherwise:
apt-get build-dep package
apt-get --compile source package
dpkg -i package.deb
Hm, my raid's running a little slow, and I smell something funny...should I look in the machine room? Nah...
...
/dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target3/lun0 on fire, deploying miniature firemen
/proc/fires/0 under control
# dmesg | tail
raid5: switching cache buffer size, 4096 --> 1024
raid5: switching cache buffer size, 1024 --> 4096
reiserfs: checking transaction log (device 09:00)
Using r5 hash to sort names
ReiserFS version 3.6.25
devfs: devfs_register(): device already registered: "lvm"
kernel: WARNING: device
raid5: marking md0 disk3 bad
firemand:
raid5: marking md0 disk3 good
Now that's what I call high availability!
That's gotta be a first: Support for a card in XFree86 which isn't even available to consumers yet.
If your partition system reserves the beginning of the disk for a boot loader, then only the boot loader and OS care what the partition scheme is. You don't even have to use partitions at all on a disk that you're not booting from:
/dev/hdb
mke2fs
Linux already has support for other OS's partition schemes (BSD, Macintosh, Solaris Sparc/i86, Unixware). Adding another would probably be a lot easier then most of the other work people happily do. LILO wouldn't care what the partion system is if you installed it at the beginning of the device (boot=/dev/hda). Grub could probably be patched to understand the new scheme just as easily as Linux could.
The only downside is that you couldn't dual-boot any OS that didn't understand the new partition scheme. That's probably why noone has done it yet.
I'd be very surprised if the poster's mother didn't pay insurance or hospital bills to compensate those who helped out with his or her birth. Firthermore, just because something isn't a "right" doesn't mean it isn't desireable. It just isn't useful to "guarentee" these things in the formal structure of state, church, or company.
Family relationships are usually voluntary.
"desperate need to justify ones own beliefs" - You're not even trying to see the other side.
Our whole society _IS_ built on personal initiative, no matter what kind of structures we put in place. Cooercion is nowhere near as effective as voluntary (especially compensated) action. You could turn your whole last paragraph around on yourself. Don't think about how hard it would be to live without an inheritance, think about how easy it can be. Think about how free you would be if you weren't dependent on large impersonal orginizations (govt, church, Proctor and Gamble) to feed you your information, your job, and your safety.
Many would claim that the lack of opportunity in many areas can be attributed to 50% taxation, laws written to support monopolies, and people looking for the wrong kind of work. You can't fix that with more of the same.
What this does is open up cheating to everyone equally instead of restricting it to insiders and extremely dedicated cracker types. Wheras in Ultima Online (the current benchmark) you have to pay $10 extra per month per account to get a sanctioned "cheat" program (UOAssist), if the client were GPL'd there would be competition in "cheat" programs and many decent ones would be given away. More exactly, people would trade improved clients and contribute the results back to the community.
Likewise with a GPL'd server, anyone can compete with this company, insuring that users can choose to visit the world which meets there desires and expectations. Is the world they are visiting "cheating" them? It doesn't matter what the answer is, because if they don't like the experience they get, they can try a different one.
The best advantage to opening up the protocols this way is that it focuses game design on systems which cannot be cheated by their design. Make time increments large so that bandwidth doesn't give you an advantage. Make a wide array of client fancyness so that machine speed becomes less important.
The only way you're going to have cheat-proof action is by taking over the user's I/O completely. Otherwise they will always have a way of cheating. Their hacked client can show them secrets they aren't supposed to see, auto-avoid threats, give users perfect aim, etc. If you're going to give up the action element and go with a strategy approach, or even focus on *gasp!* ROLE PLAYING then this project will probably suit your goals nicely.
So, if you're just looking at the obvious questions and answers, then opening up the client and server does give an advantage to geeks, but if you're looking at the long-term/big-picture, then opening up these programs is the ONLY way to solve some of the biggest problems with these games.
This is three and half years of Ultima Online, four years of quake and 10 years of MUD experience talking.
This is sounding much more like the perfect moderation system then anything I've heard yet. I believe this would make an excellent model for moderation of other forms of data as well. This model would allow parents to define "pr0n" for their own family.
The problem with the systems we have in place now (on and offline) are exactly the one-dimensionality you describe. There is certainly a "goodness" we can all agree on at the extremes (love good, murder bad), but outside of those extremes our own personalities and freewill make simple value judgements a detriment, be they restrictive or merely descriptive.
I'm going to save a copy of your post for later re-hashing and possible implementation. I'll try to give what credit I can.
What are you afraid of? That you'll lose a message? That you won't get it on time? That it will be delivered to the wrong person?
:)
Email isn't supposed to be what you describe, any more than snail mail is. Yes, you can make it do what you want, and you can flip burgers with a garden implement, too, but why ask how? What is it that you _really_ want, and is there perhaps a better way to accomplish that goal?
Maybe you should consider getting a cell phone?
"Do you people actually..."
A lot of books are produced entirely with *NIX.
All OSs have strengths for different environments. If, like me, all you ever need is ssh and a browser, then Debian GNU/Linux is better than NT4. I wish I could run IE, but even without it I prefer Linux for responsiveness and lack of "surprises".
If, like a lot of people I know, you run proprietary applications that don't exist for Unix, then NT is the clear choice. No argument is possible.
For games it depends on the game. Benchmarks be damned, I'd rather run Quake on Unix (Linux or BSD).
For CAD it depends on the app. Some aren't even available for NT.
For video editing, depends on the app, NT is probably first choice, or for super high-end, maybe IRIX or something obscure.
For medical data manipulation, it depends entirely on the application, but I suspect Unix comes out a little ahead for stability.
This debate isn't one which can be answered definitively, any more than you can answer a car debate definitively. I like VWs for personality. Some Japenese cars get better milage. Some American cars get style or raw horsepower/dollar bonuses. You get the picture.
"...I prove to myself that NT4 is in fact better"
Then you're right. NT4 is best for you, hands down. You must be very happy, you've found your "soul operating system".
- The only viable solution to the virus problem is a secure machine (OS and apps). Anti-virus software is to computer security as an automatic sentry gun is to home security. It does more harm than good, no matter how well it's administrated.
- So now the virus writers can check their virii against the latest definitions without even hitting the main servers? They'll appreciate that.
:)
- Why make a different app for sharing of each kind of file? Why not a single distributed master-less network with distributed trust and market-based load balancing that is content-agnostic? (MojoNation)
p2p group messaging:- Oh great, another way my friends who've just discovered the internet can bug me.
- Why just text messages? Why not extend existing protocols to be peer2peer broadcast rather than simply point-to-point? Oh wait, we have that already. It's called EMAIL.
- What's wrong with a MUD (or MOO)? Is it so hard to run one or find a friendly one? I don't seem to have any trouble...
Looks like more attempts by TheMan(tm) to capitalize on and control the one thing He can never completely own.The files distributed are not binaries, and are signed. If you can't trust the AV update software to compare signatures, then it doesn't matter where the file came from. Furthermore, the most damage an invalid AV rule can do is give a false positive and cause an uninfected file to be..."cleaned". You do back up your workstations, don't you?
Right?