The closed nature of that wretched program makes my life miserable at the moment. The calendar stuffs in Outlook are not even compatible with other Microsoft Windows mail programs[1], let alone stuff like Scalix[2].
[1] So I was told this morning.
[2] Which I am most unfortunately forced to use at times.
Linux was made to be like Unix which was proprietary
That's a partial truth. The source code itself is proprietary, but the interfaces have been fully disclosed and public (allowing for alternate implementations) for almost 3 decades, starting with the Blue & Green Version 7 books in 1980, then SVID, and finally POSIX.
Agreed though about software patents being the problem.
I am lost. Just what is Microsoft supposed to do to make people who use (F)OSS happy?
Open up their protocols/file formats so that non-Microsoft tools can interact with them. Otherwise, I really don't care. They've made too many mistakes in the past (Outlook, ActiveX, auto-executing document macros/email attachments/media) for me to ever trust them with anything important.
I like Unix and the Unix shell. I like KDE. I like the way X11 networks. For any system that I rely on, I must have source code that I can fix and recompile. I see no reason to ever switch. One size does not fit all, and I'm O.K. with that.
if you have a system that is powerful enough to play any modern graphics intensive video game, you have a machine that is more than capable of doing everything else the average consumer would do.
This has been true for two decades.
Corporate use? Maybe. But consumer use? no way. This is not going to be the "next Windows".
An additional point here:
The world was moving towards thin clients in the late 80's and early 90's largely due to the cost of upper end hardware and the cost of O/S and other software licenses (the SCO's of the Unix world really blew it there). Microsoft killed that dead in its tracks and the movement towards thin clients was replaced with a move towards Microsoft Windows fat clients.
My guess would be that they are preparing for a time when they are no longer permitted the Microsoft Tax on new computers. Even the Microsofties here recommend ditching a preinstall with a system free of preinstalled crapplications. Personally, I do not think the consumer market sustains them anywhere near what they get from corporate enterprise usage and cloud computing (so long as the cloud is located in a local data center) would be just fine for the company I work for.
I read through the patent and do not see anything which distinguishes it from a bridal registry - wishlist of presents posted by a couple to-be-wed so they do not get duplicate wedding presents.
Hmm. Almost 2 million hits on that term, the first page is all ads. Just how many people are these clowns suing?
Getting rid of a single, fixed format and replacing it with a wysiwyp (...is what you prefer) would eliminate this religious argument once and for all.
Not even close. That does not solve the problem of reading diffs (stuff in patch(1) format).
Yeah, I stopped doing 80 columns a while ago, and switched to 120. 120 happens to line up perfectly on my monitor when VS is maximized.
If you are writing any kind of meaningful code, then you are not writing it for yourself to be able to read, but those who come after you. I do not know what VS means, but it sounds like something to avoid like the plague.
Standards in line length will always be arbitrary. The reason why 80 columns was chosen was because it was pretty universal - everything displayed in 80 columns. Something that displays fine on your monitor (I once coded a program to 132 column width because I could get 132 column printouts) is dumb - I cursed myself out for stupidity when I had to debug it later on different equipment.
Something that displays "correctly" in your environment will rarely display decently any where else. 80 columns is nice actually because you can usually get more than 2 editor windows side by side displaying in that width and lines longer than that suck for reading.
If someone passed out and died during a movie from a blow dart, for example, it would not be prudent to arrest a random person if they had tickets to the movie; similarly, if there is a particular DNA profile on the dart that 10,000 people match, those 10K should not be brought in.
This is extraordinarily insightful. By the same logic, one can condemn the "no fly" potential terrorist list, which has in fact, caught no one and was no doubt accumulated in a similar fashion.
how often do we compare email to sending postcards?
On the Cypherpunks mailing list, all the time. On Slashdot, I don't think I've ever seen anyone bring it up. Email is just that - a postcard. If you care about the privacy of your mail, encrypt it.
Why was this allowed to happen? In San Francisco, where you think they'd have no problem finding competent replacements.
This man was living in Pittsburg. They could not find *anyone* in SF to do the job.
I knew there was more to the story when we got the first article. The fact that he built the network, management allowed him to be the sole caretaker of the configuration *and* that the system is still running smoothly unattended makes it hard to accuse him of sabotage or "hijacking". The time to beg a system administrator to document his work is certainly not after you have him arrested.
How can we put out there the idea that the internet has all this potential for individual freedom and that any kind of attempt to enforce any kind of legal stuff in it will only hinder the potential it has FOR THE COMMON JOE?
It's a lost cause, really. We can fight stuff like this one at a time, but then along comes something "Patriot" Act that enacts all the bad stuff anyway (every one of the worst provisions were trial ballooned by the Clinton administration and shot down).
The kneejerk American reaction to something they don't like to see or hear is to ban it. But certainly, the "best" way to enforce any kind of ban on child pornography is to only allow certain people to publish information and then regulate them.
Personally, I think the child pornography issue is blown way out of proportion and the biggest distributer on the internet is probably the US government (in the form of stings and such). So anything done To Stop The Evil Of Child Pornography is an over reaction to a problem that really does not exist.
you don't ever hear cases where people are forced to use Linux for their jobs...
Every job I've had since 1995 has either required me to run Linux or given me a choice what desktop O/S I used. I'm picky about that sort of thing and I tell people straight off that I DO NOT do Microsoft Windows. I've used desktop Unix both at home and at work since 1986.
My current job requires me to run Linux because I've been involved in porting software to run on Linux.
One amusing case was at Turbolinux when clueless management types tried to foist off some Microsoft-only web app time reporting system down our throats. We revolted and made them run Turbolinux and the problem was resolved.
It'd be great if some laptops were sold with a blank harddrive. If someone wants Windows, chances are they'll take Vista. If someone wants Linux, chances are they won't want the distribution that is preloaded on the laptop.
Octagon in Manila had a pretty fair inventory the last time I was there. They offered machines with Linux (unspecified distro), Microsoft (XP or Vista), or no O/S fairly evenly distributed 1/3 - 1/3 - 1/3.
The main reason you should want _something_ installed on a notebook is that the only O/S that's really guaranteed to work on it is whatever it came preinstalled with. It's a crazy market - the hardware changes so fast. In the case of a Linuxn preinstall, you can at least use the preinstall to torrent in the distro of your choice.
Americans PAY to receive cellphone calls? Can someone confirm that?
I've had both T-Mobile and AT&T/Cingular and after you run out of prepaid minutes, yes you pay for both incoming and outgoing calls. My Cingular contract requires me to pay for incoming SMS text messages as well.
It's "fair" in the sense that nearly all of my usage is to another network (SMART), except that none of the 3g features work in international calls.
No, what is hurting Linux is that numbering is way to geeky. The next version shouldn't be 2.6.X. For more widespread adoption, we might try cutesy names like Fluffy Rabbit to attract more females and kids.
This is not a new idea. From the top level Makefile:
VERSION = 2 PATCHLEVEL = 6 SUBLEVEL = 25 EXTRAVERSION = -rc9 NAME = Funky Weasel is Jiggy wit it
This has been done and dropped. Back in the late 1.3 days, Linus was giving (sometimes) cute names to each kernel release. The most memorable was the Greased Weasel series. I distributed a small kernelnames package that set/etc/motd from the Linus name at system boot.
It's a pity Linus did not keep it up, because it was fun. As I later learned from XEmacs, finding endless lists of names to use is a lot of work though.
Essentially, one finds a buffer overflow in a parser. MP3 stacks and video codecs are favorites to find holes and stupid stuff in. Also, exe's can be put in WMV's and other MS codecs too.
That sounds suspiciously like executable stuff to me and terrible, terrible design.
Note for the usoft 'turfers: I presume QuickTime does the same thing, so I'm not singling anyone out in particular.
8. Again, some of the security enhancements on Microsoft's servers are absurd. I can't remember all the details, but recent versions of their servers won't allow you to download anything from the Internet, won't let you install plugins or ActiveX controls (it won't even ask you, it just won't allow it), and even if you manage to download something, Windows won't run it.
Except for the "download anything from the Internet" (non-executable stuff is always safe to download) those are exactly the sanest things to do. Wow, maybe Microsoft really has learned something.
Pretty much all Unix systems are hackable with local access.
Any system is hackable with local access.
This is an amazing situation. First:
Childs, according to payroll records, earned $126,735 in base pay in 2007 and additional premium pay of $22,534, for a total of $149,269. Vinson said the extra money was apparently compensation for being on-call as a trouble-shooter.
That's good pay, especially since he apparently lives in Pittsburg. Second:
Childs has worked for the city for about five years. One official with knowledge of the case said he had been disciplined on the job in recent months for poor performance and that his supervisors had tried to fire him.
What on earth constitutes "poor performance" in an IT department in the government that it is too clueless to be able to bottle him up when they are considering firing him?
Slashdot Mirror
The closed nature of that wretched program makes my life miserable at the moment. The calendar stuffs in Outlook are not even compatible with other Microsoft Windows mail programs[1], let alone stuff like Scalix[2].
[1] So I was told this morning.
[2] Which I am most unfortunately forced to use at times.
Linux was made to be like Unix which was proprietary
That's a partial truth. The source code itself is proprietary, but the interfaces have been fully disclosed and public (allowing for alternate implementations) for almost 3 decades, starting with the Blue & Green Version 7 books in 1980, then SVID, and finally POSIX.
Agreed though about software patents being the problem.
I am lost. Just what is Microsoft supposed to do to make people who use (F)OSS happy?
Open up their protocols/file formats so that non-Microsoft tools can interact with them. Otherwise, I really don't care. They've made too many mistakes in the past (Outlook, ActiveX, auto-executing document macros/email attachments/media) for me to ever trust them with anything important.
I like Unix and the Unix shell. I like KDE. I like the way X11 networks. For any system that I rely on, I must have source code that I can fix and recompile. I see no reason to ever switch. One size does not fit all, and I'm O.K. with that.
if you have a system that is powerful enough to play any modern graphics intensive video game, you have a machine that is more than capable of doing everything else the average consumer would do.
This has been true for two decades.
Corporate use? Maybe. But consumer use? no way. This is not going to be the "next Windows".
An additional point here:
The world was moving towards thin clients in the late 80's and early 90's largely due to the cost of upper end hardware and the cost of O/S and other software licenses (the SCO's of the Unix world really blew it there). Microsoft killed that dead in its tracks and the movement towards thin clients was replaced with a move towards Microsoft Windows fat clients.
My guess would be that they are preparing for a time when they are no longer permitted the Microsoft Tax on new computers. Even the Microsofties here recommend ditching a preinstall with a system free of preinstalled crapplications. Personally, I do not think the consumer market sustains them anywhere near what they get from corporate enterprise usage and cloud computing (so long as the cloud is located in a local data center) would be just fine for the company I work for.
I find the level of ignorance here quite astounding considering who the site is aimed at.
You must be new here.
There are actually drinking games in World of Warcraft. See http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/events/brewfest/
Games include getting drunk in the various capital cities until you see pink elephants and advertising beer in Ironforge.
Free virtual beer is served on New Years Eve as well.
I read through the patent and do not see anything which distinguishes it from a bridal registry - wishlist of presents posted by a couple to-be-wed so they do not get duplicate wedding presents.
Hmm. Almost 2 million hits on that term, the first page is all ads. Just how many people are these clowns suing?
Coders that write code that needs a ruler to find the start of a block get fired much more frequently than those who don't.
After they are gone, someone still has to clean up the mess. There is not always the luxury of rewriting a passably working program.
Who the hell holds a ruler up to the monitor?
I do, but then I'm working on maintaining a most unevenly coded system right now.
Getting rid of a single, fixed format and replacing it with a wysiwyp (...is what you prefer) would eliminate this religious argument once and for all.
Not even close. That does not solve the problem of reading diffs (stuff in patch(1) format).
Real coders write code that you can take a ruler from any given close brace and draw a vertical line right up to the matching open brace, every time.
What is the difference between that, and matching indentation with the line with the opening brace? One less screen line.
Everybody else gets fired.
That's wanking and unprofessional.
Yeah, I stopped doing 80 columns a while ago, and switched to 120. 120 happens to line up perfectly on my monitor when VS is maximized.
If you are writing any kind of meaningful code, then you are not writing it for yourself to be able to read, but those who come after you. I do not know what VS means, but it sounds like something to avoid like the plague.
Standards in line length will always be arbitrary. The reason why 80 columns was chosen was because it was pretty universal - everything displayed in 80 columns. Something that displays fine on your monitor (I once coded a program to 132 column width because I could get 132 column printouts) is dumb - I cursed myself out for stupidity when I had to debug it later on different equipment.
Something that displays "correctly" in your environment will rarely display decently any where else. 80 columns is nice actually because you can usually get more than 2 editor windows side by side displaying in that width and lines longer than that suck for reading.
If someone passed out and died during a movie from a blow dart, for example, it would not be prudent to arrest a random person if they had tickets to the movie; similarly, if there is a particular DNA profile on the dart that 10,000 people match, those 10K should not be brought in.
This is extraordinarily insightful. By the same logic, one can condemn the "no fly" potential terrorist list, which has in fact, caught no one and was no doubt accumulated in a similar fashion.
how often do we compare email to sending postcards?
On the Cypherpunks mailing list, all the time. On Slashdot, I don't think I've ever seen anyone bring it up. Email is just that - a postcard. If you care about the privacy of your mail, encrypt it.
How can you possibly argue otherwise? Sure, he's the network admin, but does that authorize him to read people's email without authorization?
It's routinely done, we had an article about that not too long ago.
I'm not passing any judgment on his innocence or guilt, but I am positive this was not a "hijacking" or any sort of terrorist act.
Why was this allowed to happen? In San Francisco, where you think they'd have no problem finding competent replacements.
This man was living in Pittsburg. They could not find *anyone* in SF to do the job.
I knew there was more to the story when we got the first article. The fact that he built the network, management allowed him to be the sole caretaker of the configuration *and* that the system is still running smoothly unattended makes it hard to accuse him of sabotage or "hijacking". The time to beg a system administrator to document his work is certainly not after you have him arrested.
Heads should be rolling in the city government.
How can we put out there the idea that the internet has all this potential for individual freedom and that any kind of attempt to enforce any kind of legal stuff in it will only hinder the potential it has FOR THE COMMON JOE?
It's a lost cause, really. We can fight stuff like this one at a time, but then along comes something "Patriot" Act that enacts all the bad stuff anyway (every one of the worst provisions were trial ballooned by the Clinton administration and shot down).
The kneejerk American reaction to something they don't like to see or hear is to ban it. But certainly, the "best" way to enforce any kind of ban on child pornography is to only allow certain people to publish information and then regulate them.
Personally, I think the child pornography issue is blown way out of proportion and the biggest distributer on the internet is probably the US government (in the form of stings and such). So anything done To Stop The Evil Of Child Pornography is an over reaction to a problem that really does not exist.
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.child? Gee, I wonder what that could contain?
That's an easy one. Thousands upon thousands of SPAM messages.
you don't ever hear cases where people are forced to use Linux for their jobs...
Every job I've had since 1995 has either required me to run Linux or given me a choice what desktop O/S I used. I'm picky about that sort of thing and I tell people straight off that I DO NOT do Microsoft Windows. I've used desktop Unix both at home and at work since 1986.
My current job requires me to run Linux because I've been involved in porting software to run on Linux.
One amusing case was at Turbolinux when clueless management types tried to foist off some Microsoft-only web app time reporting system down our throats. We revolted and made them run Turbolinux and the problem was resolved.
It'd be great if some laptops were sold with a blank harddrive. If someone wants Windows, chances are they'll take Vista. If someone wants Linux, chances are they won't want the distribution that is preloaded on the laptop.
Octagon in Manila had a pretty fair inventory the last time I was there. They offered machines with Linux (unspecified distro), Microsoft (XP or Vista), or no O/S fairly evenly distributed 1/3 - 1/3 - 1/3.
The main reason you should want _something_ installed on a notebook is that the only O/S that's really guaranteed to work on it is whatever it came preinstalled with. It's a crazy market - the hardware changes so fast. In the case of a Linuxn preinstall, you can at least use the preinstall to torrent in the distro of your choice.
Americans PAY to receive cellphone calls? Can someone confirm that?
I've had both T-Mobile and AT&T/Cingular and after you run out of prepaid minutes, yes you pay for both incoming and outgoing calls. My Cingular contract requires me to pay for incoming SMS text messages as well.
It's "fair" in the sense that nearly all of my usage is to another network (SMART), except that none of the 3g features work in international calls.
No, what is hurting Linux is that numbering is way to geeky. The next version shouldn't be 2.6.X. For more widespread adoption, we might try cutesy names like Fluffy Rabbit to attract more females and kids.
This is not a new idea. From the top level Makefile:
VERSION = 2
PATCHLEVEL = 6
SUBLEVEL = 25
EXTRAVERSION = -rc9
NAME = Funky Weasel is Jiggy wit it
This has been done and dropped. Back in the late 1.3 days, Linus was giving (sometimes) cute names to each kernel release. The most memorable was the Greased Weasel series. I distributed a small kernelnames package that set /etc/motd from the Linus name at system boot.
It's a pity Linus did not keep it up, because it was fun. As I later learned from XEmacs, finding endless lists of names to use is a lot of work though.
I wrote:
non-executable stuff is always safe to download
Essentially, one finds a buffer overflow in a parser. MP3 stacks and video codecs are favorites to find holes and stupid stuff in. Also, exe's can be put in WMV's and other MS codecs too.
That sounds suspiciously like executable stuff to me and terrible, terrible design.
Note for the usoft 'turfers: I presume QuickTime does the same thing, so I'm not singling anyone out in particular.
8. Again, some of the security enhancements on Microsoft's servers are absurd. I can't remember all the details, but recent versions of their servers won't allow you to download anything from the Internet, won't let you install plugins or ActiveX controls (it won't even ask you, it just won't allow it), and even if you manage to download something, Windows won't run it.
Except for the "download anything from the Internet" (non-executable stuff is always safe to download) those are exactly the sanest things to do. Wow, maybe Microsoft really has learned something.
Pretty much all Unix systems are hackable with local access.
Any system is hackable with local access.
This is an amazing situation. First:
Childs, according to payroll records, earned $126,735 in base pay in 2007 and additional premium pay of $22,534, for a total of $149,269. Vinson said the extra money was apparently compensation for being on-call as a trouble-shooter.
That's good pay, especially since he apparently lives in Pittsburg. Second:
Childs has worked for the city for about five years. One official with knowledge of the case said he had been disciplined on the job in recent months for poor performance and that his supervisors had tried to fire him.
What on earth constitutes "poor performance" in an IT department in the government that it is too clueless to be able to bottle him up when they are considering firing him?
I have lots of questions about this case ...