Chuck Norris is the new David Hasselhof. Frankly I'm very pleased that the prior David Hasselhof meme has finally died.
Besides, he's one of the last conservative action-hero actors that isn't in public office. That's almost as special as being one of the last liberal actors who hasn't threatened to move to Canada.
The judge can make no judgements until all of the evidence has been argued.
But your analogy is a very poor one. It assumes a prior indictment. The current dispute regarding wiretaps is more on the other of "Can not! Can too!" So here's a better analogy:
Nancy Pelosi goes to the police and says "write George Bush a ticket for jaywalking!" George Bush then says "there's no ordinance against jaywalking in this town." In this case it doesn't matter at all how shrill Nancy Pelosi is, but instead matters entirely on the whether or not there is an ordinance against jaywalking.
You have completely and utterly missed the point. Is Mac OSX an alternative to Windows? YES!YES!YES!
This isn't about whether or not *you* like Macs. It's not about whether or not Mac Mini's are aoverpriced. It's not about whether Aqua is better than KDE.
Mac Mini's with OSX are affordable alternatives to Dell's with MS Windows. Thus, there is an alternative to MS Windows. Period.
The analogy would be rather like a known narcotics pusher handing over a brown paper bag to the someone in the house in exchange for cash. Do you now have probable cause to search the house? Do you need to ask Nancy Pelosi's permission?
Correct. The assumption is that the wiretapping is illegal, but that's only because the media is telling us it is illegal. The administration is telling us otherwise. I know it's fashionable and chic for Slashdotters to despise the president, but blindly believing the media just because you don't like the other side is pretty stupid.
While I personally may not personally like the president's policies, the administration does make some good arguments that it is authorized to perform these wiretaps. You cannot automatically declare these acts illegal on the basis of not liking the guy.
A) You can get a Mac Mini for $449. This is perfectly adequate for most users. Need for diskspace? Just plug in another drive. The GUI and most apps are fast and responsive. You only notice the limitations of the slower CPU when you're running CPU intensive apps like the compiler.
B) You're running OpenSuSE, but the discussion is regarding Windows alternatives.
I would second that. For what he wants to do, he could snap it together with a few lines of code. But he did mention he wanted something quick and easy to learn. No GUI toolkit is going to offer that, but if he knows C++, Qt has great documentation and is easy to learn.
1. Usability. Google should have this pretty well covered
Linux with KDE or GNOME on a well integrated distro already has this covered. In many cases, Linux sytems have MORE usability than Windows. We've got that problem licked. There's still a lot of usability work to be done, but that's because we don't want to settle with "good enough" like Microsoft has done.
The biggest perceived "usability" problems with Linux have nothing to do with usability. Hardware drivers and their related configuration, for example. Or dual booting for another. Dual booting Windows XP and Windows 2003 is actually more difficult than dual booting Windows XP and SuSE Linux.
Mac OS X is a great alternative, but Apple's giving no indication of any intention to ship it on the generic x86 machines.
So what? Apple has been an alternative for decades. Yet people keep saying they don't have any choice but to use Windows. Why, are they stupid? On your next computer, just go buy a Mac. It's almost like you guys WANT Microsoft to be a monopoly. "No! You can't switch! Don't you know you don't have a choice!" Sheesh.
Here's the biggest reason people aren't switching to the Mac: They don't think they can. After spending thousands of dollars on proprietary Windows-only software, they think their locked in without a choice. They bought a real expensive Photoshop for Windows, and don't want to buy another real expensive Photoshop for Mac. Mac on generic x86 won't help the problem, because it still won't run Windows software natively. It could run it via an emulator, but you can do that right now with Macs, so what's the difference?
The only advantage with Mac on generic x86 is that you can dual boot it. But Windows people don't dual boot, that's the province of geeks.
Re:Fuzzing and Obfuscation
on
Mitnick on OSS
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· Score: 1
Do you have any source code examples of this? I understand the concept but I still can't figure out how it works. When I return from a function I am popping information off the stack, so it doesn't matter what I overflow onto the stack while I'm in the function. It gets thrown away when I return. What I would need to do is "underflow" the stack instead, so I overwrite my own return address. Again, a real example may clarify this for me.
What the difference between an indie developer and a publisher? At what point does one stop being a independent.
p.s. One reason I ask is that a friend's rpg game company, with all of three employees, is not considered "indie", and thus finds their products frequently panned and derided on indie-oriented forums.
Re:Fuzzing and Obfuscation
on
Mitnick on OSS
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· Score: 1
So how does that chunk of hex end up writing your executable into their home directory? That's what's always confused me. I understand what a buffer overflow is, but I can't for the life of my figure out how to write a buffer overflow that would do anything other than crash. Why do so many of them result in escalation of priviledge? Please explain.
Ditto! FreeBSD/KDE is my desktop at home. It used to be my workstation at work as well, until I was forcibly migrated over to Explorer/Outlook by company policy.
Buy why should the operating system be named after optional and replaceable stuff sitting on top of the operating system. Why name my automobile after the brand of tires it uses? If we're going to call it "GNU/Linux" after the libc, then why not call it "X.org/GNU/Linux" after the graphical subsystem? After all, X.org is an essential part to all big name 'distros'.
And this is what RMS means: These distributions are relying on the GNU "infrastructure" to compile the kernel (gcc), provide a kernel language API (glibc), etc. You can't, for the most part, take the Linux source code and make a bootable Linux kernel without using a GNU tool or eight. I doubt he would dispute that there can be BSD/Linux, or perhaps even Microsoft/Linux.
No, that is emphatically NOT what he means. Why don't you read what he has actually written, instead of making it up?
He has said in the past that that compiler used is irrelevant to the OS name, which is why we don't have "GNU/FreeBSD" and "GNU/OSX" even though those systems were built with gcc. And glibc does NOT provide a kernel language API, the kernel does that. Linux and Hurd do not have identical kernel calls, yet they both use glibc.
The "infrastructure" I am talking about is stuff GNU never bothered with until after Linux had it: rc, init scripts, mkfs, etc. Many embedded Linux systems have no GNU software are all. They're just a kernel, busybox, ash shell, and dietlibc. Heck, some don't even have the latter and statically compile all software.
What toolchain did/does Linus use to develop Linux?
That's immaterial. You don't name an automobile after the tools used to build it. Mac OSX also uses the GNU toolchain, but no one, not even RMS, suggests it be called "GNU".
Take the Linux kernel, add the core GNU utils, libc, bash, etc. Hey look, a real OS!
But all of those parts are replaceable. Take the linux kernel, add the BSD utils, diet libc, tcsh, etc. Hey look, UNG/Linux! Or use Busybox, BSD libc, and ash instead. Whatever.
The contention comes about because most people don't understand what an operating system is. RMS plays upon this confusion when he insists upon the name "GNU/Linux", because "GNU" is not an operating system.
Part of the blame for this confusion must go to Microsoft )and Apple), who has convinced too many people that everything on the install CDs are integral parts of the OS.
Pop quiz: What was the operating system on a Windows 3.1 system? A Windows 98 system? A Windows XP system? Hint: none of the answers is "Windows".
Pick up nearly any book on operating system internals, and they dwell almost entirely with the kernel. When they do cover other topics, they are always tangental to the kernel. You'll never see such a book talk about the internals of compilers or editors or graphical interfaces. They won't even talk about shells, except to the extent that it involves the kernel terminal facilities. To the authors of these books, the operating system is the kernel and the various infrastructure needed to get the kernel up and running.
Linux operating systems typically come with GNU operating environments, but that is no more excuse to rename the former is it is to rename the latter.
Maybe I've been blind to the views of the majority in this proudly secular country? It appears that way. It just goes to show that the nation you read about in your national newspapers isn't necessarily the nation you live in.
I realize that this is a contentious subject, second only to abortion in the hatred and bile it consumes, but I do want to add one tiny comment. As an athiest, you probably view evolution as axiomatic (an article of faith almost). But most non-atheists, the idea that the life is entirely random and without meaning is a very tough one to swallow. When people say they don't beleive in evolution, they are not saying they believe the literal creation account in Genesis. Rather they are saying that a higher intelligence was probably involved in bringing about this process we call life.
But it also means that people who follow a particular candidate or party will only be even more isolated and less exposed to the counter arguments of the other party/candidates.
The opposite is happening. If you want to hear current Libertarian or Green thought, you won't find it in traditional media, but you'll find scads of it on the blogosphere. And not at the bottom of the pile either, as many of the top blogs are libertarian or progressive.
Slashdot Mirror
Chuck Norris is the new David Hasselhof. Frankly I'm very pleased that the prior David Hasselhof meme has finally died.
Besides, he's one of the last conservative action-hero actors that isn't in public office. That's almost as special as being one of the last liberal actors who hasn't threatened to move to Canada.
The judge can make no judgements until all of the evidence has been argued.
But your analogy is a very poor one. It assumes a prior indictment. The current dispute regarding wiretaps is more on the other of "Can not! Can too!" So here's a better analogy:
Nancy Pelosi goes to the police and says "write George Bush a ticket for jaywalking!" George Bush then says "there's no ordinance against jaywalking in this town." In this case it doesn't matter at all how shrill Nancy Pelosi is, but instead matters entirely on the whether or not there is an ordinance against jaywalking.
You have completely and utterly missed the point. Is Mac OSX an alternative to Windows? YES! YES! YES!
This isn't about whether or not *you* like Macs. It's not about whether or not Mac Mini's are aoverpriced. It's not about whether Aqua is better than KDE.
Mac Mini's with OSX are affordable alternatives to Dell's with MS Windows. Thus, there is an alternative to MS Windows. Period.
The analogy would be rather like a known narcotics pusher handing over a brown paper bag to the someone in the house in exchange for cash. Do you now have probable cause to search the house? Do you need to ask Nancy Pelosi's permission?
Correct. The assumption is that the wiretapping is illegal, but that's only because the media is telling us it is illegal. The administration is telling us otherwise. I know it's fashionable and chic for Slashdotters to despise the president, but blindly believing the media just because you don't like the other side is pretty stupid.
While I personally may not personally like the president's policies, the administration does make some good arguments that it is authorized to perform these wiretaps. You cannot automatically declare these acts illegal on the basis of not liking the guy.
A) You can get a Mac Mini for $449. This is perfectly adequate for most users. Need for diskspace? Just plug in another drive. The GUI and most apps are fast and responsive. You only notice the limitations of the slower CPU when you're running CPU intensive apps like the compiler.
B) You're running OpenSuSE, but the discussion is regarding Windows alternatives.
I would second that. For what he wants to do, he could snap it together with a few lines of code. But he did mention he wanted something quick and easy to learn. No GUI toolkit is going to offer that, but if he knows C++, Qt has great documentation and is easy to learn.
1. Usability. Google should have this pretty well covered
Linux with KDE or GNOME on a well integrated distro already has this covered. In many cases, Linux sytems have MORE usability than Windows. We've got that problem licked. There's still a lot of usability work to be done, but that's because we don't want to settle with "good enough" like Microsoft has done.
The biggest perceived "usability" problems with Linux have nothing to do with usability. Hardware drivers and their related configuration, for example. Or dual booting for another. Dual booting Windows XP and Windows 2003 is actually more difficult than dual booting Windows XP and SuSE Linux.
Mac OS X is a great alternative, but Apple's giving no indication of any intention to ship it on the generic x86 machines.
So what? Apple has been an alternative for decades. Yet people keep saying they don't have any choice but to use Windows. Why, are they stupid? On your next computer, just go buy a Mac. It's almost like you guys WANT Microsoft to be a monopoly. "No! You can't switch! Don't you know you don't have a choice!" Sheesh.
Here's the biggest reason people aren't switching to the Mac: They don't think they can. After spending thousands of dollars on proprietary Windows-only software, they think their locked in without a choice. They bought a real expensive Photoshop for Windows, and don't want to buy another real expensive Photoshop for Mac. Mac on generic x86 won't help the problem, because it still won't run Windows software natively. It could run it via an emulator, but you can do that right now with Macs, so what's the difference?
The only advantage with Mac on generic x86 is that you can dual boot it. But Windows people don't dual boot, that's the province of geeks.
Do you have any source code examples of this? I understand the concept but I still can't figure out how it works. When I return from a function I am popping information off the stack, so it doesn't matter what I overflow onto the stack while I'm in the function. It gets thrown away when I return. What I would need to do is "underflow" the stack instead, so I overwrite my own return address. Again, a real example may clarify this for me.
What the difference between an indie developer and a publisher? At what point does one stop being a independent.
p.s. One reason I ask is that a friend's rpg game company, with all of three employees, is not considered "indie", and thus finds their products frequently panned and derided on indie-oriented forums.
So how does that chunk of hex end up writing your executable into their home directory? That's what's always confused me. I understand what a buffer overflow is, but I can't for the life of my figure out how to write a buffer overflow that would do anything other than crash. Why do so many of them result in escalation of priviledge? Please explain.
For a non Linux type could some one explain the USER difference in Fedora, SuSE and Mandriva in 10 word or less.
What strange world do you live in where the media is the military's controlling organism?
And even more important: Is it important that donations from rich billionaires be public or should they remain private?
That's up to the rich billionaires now, isn't it?
Who actually uses FreeBSD?
I do, and that's all that matters to me. Why the hell do you care what other people are using? Find your own operating system and be content with it.
Ditto! FreeBSD/KDE is my desktop at home. It used to be my workstation at work as well, until I was forcibly migrated over to Explorer/Outlook by company policy.
OT: FreeBSD 6.0 got a huge improvement in this area. Finally I can plug in a 2.0 USB thumbdrive and have it attach to EHCI and a high speed interface.
Buy why should the operating system be named after optional and replaceable stuff sitting on top of the operating system. Why name my automobile after the brand of tires it uses? If we're going to call it "GNU/Linux" after the libc, then why not call it "X.org/GNU/Linux" after the graphical subsystem? After all, X.org is an essential part to all big name 'distros'.
And this is what RMS means: These distributions are relying on the GNU "infrastructure" to compile the kernel (gcc), provide a kernel language API (glibc), etc. You can't, for the most part, take the Linux source code and make a bootable Linux kernel without using a GNU tool or eight. I doubt he would dispute that there can be BSD/Linux, or perhaps even Microsoft/Linux.
No, that is emphatically NOT what he means. Why don't you read what he has actually written, instead of making it up?
He has said in the past that that compiler used is irrelevant to the OS name, which is why we don't have "GNU/FreeBSD" and "GNU/OSX" even though those systems were built with gcc. And glibc does NOT provide a kernel language API, the kernel does that. Linux and Hurd do not have identical kernel calls, yet they both use glibc.
The "infrastructure" I am talking about is stuff GNU never bothered with until after Linux had it: rc, init scripts, mkfs, etc. Many embedded Linux systems have no GNU software are all. They're just a kernel, busybox, ash shell, and dietlibc. Heck, some don't even have the latter and statically compile all software.
What toolchain did/does Linus use to develop Linux?
That's immaterial. You don't name an automobile after the tools used to build it. Mac OSX also uses the GNU toolchain, but no one, not even RMS, suggests it be called "GNU".
Take the Linux kernel, add the core GNU utils, libc, bash, etc. Hey look, a real OS!
But all of those parts are replaceable. Take the linux kernel, add the BSD utils, diet libc, tcsh, etc. Hey look, UNG/Linux! Or use Busybox, BSD libc, and ash instead. Whatever.
The contention comes about because most people don't understand what an operating system is. RMS plays upon this confusion when he insists upon the name "GNU/Linux", because "GNU" is not an operating system.
Part of the blame for this confusion must go to Microsoft )and Apple), who has convinced too many people that everything on the install CDs are integral parts of the OS.
Pop quiz: What was the operating system on a Windows 3.1 system? A Windows 98 system? A Windows XP system? Hint: none of the answers is "Windows".
Pick up nearly any book on operating system internals, and they dwell almost entirely with the kernel. When they do cover other topics, they are always tangental to the kernel. You'll never see such a book talk about the internals of compilers or editors or graphical interfaces. They won't even talk about shells, except to the extent that it involves the kernel terminal facilities. To the authors of these books, the operating system is the kernel and the various infrastructure needed to get the kernel up and running.
Linux operating systems typically come with GNU operating environments, but that is no more excuse to rename the former is it is to rename the latter.
but this restriction is restricting your own use... arghhh... logical paradox loop... brain hurtz...
Welcome to the wonderful world of GNU!
Maybe I've been blind to the views of the majority in this proudly secular country?
It appears that way. It just goes to show that the nation you read about in your national newspapers isn't necessarily the nation you live in.
I realize that this is a contentious subject, second only to abortion in the hatred and bile it consumes, but I do want to add one tiny comment. As an athiest, you probably view evolution as axiomatic (an article of faith almost). But most non-atheists, the idea that the life is entirely random and without meaning is a very tough one to swallow. When people say they don't beleive in evolution, they are not saying they believe the literal creation account in Genesis. Rather they are saying that a higher intelligence was probably involved in bringing about this process we call life.
But it also means that people who follow a particular candidate or party will only be even more isolated and less exposed to the counter arguments of the other party/candidates.
The opposite is happening. If you want to hear current Libertarian or Green thought, you won't find it in traditional media, but you'll find scads of it on the blogosphere. And not at the bottom of the pile either, as many of the top blogs are libertarian or progressive.