Aren't there editors on slashdot approving stories? This post is pure troll/ridicule bait. There will be very few if any useful responses.
Time to get into the habit of read-only filesys?
on
First Mac OS X Virus?
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· Score: 1
I wonder if it would make sense for MacOSX (And user-oriented Linux distributions?) to keep all binaries and libraries etc. (i.e. not/home) normally read-only (unless you are in the middle of uninstalling/upgrading of course). (I know that some people keep servers and "appliance" type systems like this already). Until now, this kind of trojan has been localized and rare, but with the popularity of OSX, this one could be a turning point.
Anyone want to make a hack of dpkg to try this on Debian?
A Ferrari is pretty exotic to be a common computer, maybe it's more like a high-end Sun.
From Neal Stephenson's essay about computers, "In the beginning was the command line":
---
Imagine a crossroads where four competing auto dealerships are situated. One of them (Microsoft) is much, much bigger than the others. It started out years ago selling three-speed bicycles (MS-DOS); these were not perfect, but they worked, and when they broke you could easily fix them.
There was a competing bicycle dealership next door (Apple) that one day began selling motorized vehicles--expensive but attractively styled cars with their innards hermetically sealed, so that how they worked was something of a mystery.
The big dealership responded by rushing a moped upgrade kit (the original Windows) onto the market. This was a Rube Goldberg contraption that, when bolted onto a three-speed bicycle, enabled it to keep up, just barely, with Apple-cars. The users had to wear goggles and were always picking bugs out of their teeth while Apple owners sped along in hermetically sealed comfort, sneering out the windows. But the Micro-mopeds were cheap, and easy to fix compared with the Apple-cars, and their market share waxed.
Eventually the big dealership came out with a full-fledged car: a colossal station wagon (Windows 95). It had all the aesthetic appeal of a Soviet worker housing block, it leaked oil and blew gaskets, and it was an enormous success. A little later, they also came out with a hulking off-road vehicle intended for industrial users (Windows NT) which was no more beautiful than the station wagon, and only a little more reliable.
Since then there has been a lot of noise and shouting, but little has changed. The smaller dealership continues to sell sleek Euro-styled sedans and to spend a lot of money on advertising campaigns. They have had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! signs taped up in their windows for so long that they have gotten all yellow and curly. The big one keeps making bigger and bigger station wagons and ORVs.
On the other side of the road are two competitors that have come along more recently.
One of them (Be, Inc.) is selling fully operational Batmobiles (the BeOS). They are more beautiful and stylish even than the Euro-sedans, better designed, more technologically advanced, and at least as reliable as anything else on the market--and yet cheaper than the others.
With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They've been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free.
Customers come to this crossroads in throngs, day and night. Ninety percent of them go straight to the biggest dealership and buy station wagons or off-road vehicles. They do not even look at the other dealerships.
Of the remaining ten percent, most go and buy a sleek Euro-sedan, pausing only to turn up their noses at the philistines going to buy the station wagons and ORVs. If they even notice the people on the opposite side of the road, selling the cheaper, technically superior vehicles, these customers deride them cranks and half-wits.
The Batmobile outlet sells a few vehicles to the occasional car nut who wants a second vehicle to go with his station wagon, but seems to accept, at least for now, that it's a
"Come on. Which is more likely to be in business in five years, Home Depot, or Joe's Contractor Shack? "It's all about probabilities. Microsoft has a FAR higher probability of being around in five years than, say, Red Hat, which is the strongest player. How about Debian? Who knows? Manager Man sure the hell doesn't, and frankly neither does the OSS community. "
Any competent building contractor can fix your house. Your house is not "closed source". Similarly, any sufficently competent programmer can fix Linux (or other application). Nobody can fix Windows except Microsoft-- and they do it when and how they want to. Maybe they won't ever fix your problem.
If RedHat goes out of business, there are lots of consulting firms you can hire. If Windows decides to quit supporting Windows 2000 or NT or.NET or whatever, too bad, you have to upgrade, or work around it.
Debian is another animal entirely, and if you use Debian, you need to explain exactly what it is to your boss.
I also work on a Windows app that use GTK and it works pretty well (and it's plain C), though GTK apps look very slightly different (since it implements all the controls itself) and you need to include all the GTK and GLIB DLLs with your program.
Thing is, while it is essential that a proprietary system like Solaris provide binary compatability, in Linux it's not neccesary.
Instead, we just need to make it easy to compile and install drivers. The Linux build system does in fact provide a consistent infrastructure. We just need a quick and easy user/GUI tool to unpack the source code in the right place, and compile it for you.
I don't get the graphic design. Putting the headlines in a rounded grey box make them look like part of the preceding story summary (whose title is in rounded green box going the other direcection). The grey boxes actually look nice-- perhaps they could be used for the "Read More" part of a story summary.
But I would display the "extra" headlines In a different way. Maybe just as a bulleted list? Or round the grey box the full 180 degrees rather than halfway.
Use this to turn off power to external peripherals when you turn your PC off: http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/001087.php -- "hen you turn off your computer, the smart unit shuts the power off to the other sockets."
Would this be for cooling or heating? If cooling please elaborate.
A wall like this for heating is called a Trombe wall, and the material of the interior wall (not the glass) is also typically selected to store heat (stone usually).
I majored in communications, actually!... And only minored in compsci. It exposed me to random cultural theory and gave me a lot more time to take interesting classes in history, philosophy, linguistics, and other departments, read interesting books, learn to write decent prose. More importantly, it gave be a lot more time to work on free software projects, to work for researchers and grad students in a research lab, rather than churning through massive amounts of tedious time consuming work. Now I work for a great little company who hired me because of my experience in research labs and free software writing real code and becoming familiar with libraries and tools that they needed me to be familiar with. The only thing that I missed out on was learning higher math in depth, I have to teach myself that as needed now.
You need to do what you want to be doing and learn what you want to be learning in college. If you don't have the time to do the work in some class, you need to reorganize your academic situation around what you want to do, not fake it.
Some good ideas, but Greg is really out of touch with Linux and free software development in general.
He seems to miss the idea that (a) we can't throw out diversity of applications. It's confusion, but it's also a fact. (b) There *are* different distribution brands, though they try to lean on the common Linux name (RedHat Linux, Debian GNU/Linux, Gentoo Linux). (c) Most importantly, it's up to independent distributions to make the system into a cohesive user experience, and the success of GNU/Linux systems is precicely *because* of the ability for lots of independent developers to create software packages for it, not some central Linux authority. Linux *is* just the kernel,. It's up to other people to make more complete systems. He makes the very common mistake of confusing "Linux" with "OS consisting of a Linux kernel and GNU libraries and other tools with some user-oriented desktop environment".
There can be no Linux Inc. creating The One And Only Linux Desktop System. It shouldn't happen, and it fundamentally *can't*. There can only be a variety of Desktop Systems that are based on GNU/Linux.
I don't understand how your comment is in response to that text. The key words in it are "legally" and "without negotiation". The copyright idea behind Xanadu was that you aren't really copying, you are just referencing, and displaying the content in-line, so the original author remains in control of the segment your are referencing (and may control access to it, including asessing fees for its use... or not... it's up to the author.)
About the last assertion, the form always shapes so-called "content" (you meant that instead of comment, right?)-- by making some things easy to do and some things difficult. Xanadu very intentionally creates a new ways to construct "content" by making inclusion-by-reference. So when Nelson talks about a "new realm" he's really just talking about what the new technology lets you do that is not as easy to do today. This is not some weird fantasy, its simply a (marketing-oriented) description of what you can do with this kind of technology, which is real and implemented (and has been partially for 30 years, just never used, that's all).
Well the real idea is that the chunk-size must be flexibile. Xanadu addressed this by making the letter or character the atomic unit, and building up a new document by referencing character spans within the original document(s). So you could just grab page size chunks, or paragraphs, or sentences or phrases or just a lists of them or whatever the best chunk size is for your new document. The WWW as it is now, only allows links to another whole document, or a kind of transclusion using iframes at the "whole document" scale, unless you layer on additional technology atop HTTP and HTML.
A similar approach would be to use web-based aggregators or large trackers and factor the number of feed subscribers into a blog's PageRank. Nobody is going to subscribe to a spam-blog, and also, lots of people subscribe to blog feeds but don't neccesarily link to the blog from another web page.
Cool solution to dealing with overlapping windows, but why deal with them at all?
I've always thought that overlapping windows caused more trouble than problems they solve. It looked advanced back in the day, and was great with small screens, and sometimes you still want to use it, but I'd find it more useful for typical use if windows diddn't overlap unless you forced them to (by continuing to drag for instance).
Or, coming from the other direction, some wish-list ideas I had while using ion are the ability to detach windows into temporary floating windows, resize neigboring frames by dragging one frame's titlebar, and somehow making it easier to use things like the Gnome panel in ion.
I recommend trying ion and similar window managers like LarsWM and Ratpoison and WMI.
Unfortunately to make window managers truly helpful, they will need to have more information about what its windows *mean* than is currently available from X11. For example, it's error prone trying to deduce whether Window X and Window Y are considered part of the same application by the user. Gnome and KDE do a pretty good job of it (e.g. grouping windows by application in the window list/task bar) but it's not perfect. And this is just the most basic information. Other useful info which could modify window behavior is how often a window is used or updated, when it was run, by what means was it launched (menu, button, terminal?), various categorizations and semantic tagging attached to the application permanently or to the window temporarily, etc.
A great advantage of an X11 system is the flexibility to experiment with the window manager, I hope to see more cool stuff in the future, especially from Gnome, KDE, and the distributions' choices.
RSS and Atom are nice, but you still have to keep requesting the thing over HTTP to get updates, which seems completely counter to the concept of getting a concise update of changes or news.
Just run the "BSOD" screen saver. I run it at work, and its fooled my technically astute co-workers a couple times.
It has Win32 BSOD, Win NT panic, Mac "no startup disk", sad mac, and Bomb, Amiga Workbench, various Unices, VMS, endless DOS Abort/Retry/Fail, the cool BSD/PowerPC trace, some video crashes where the display is just messed up in a pretty rainbow fashion.
Actually, the previous article on this subject was filed in Hardware, which makes no sense. So really, this is the real article, that other one was the wrong one...
Slashdot Mirror
Aren't there editors on slashdot approving stories? This post is pure troll/ridicule bait. There will be very few if any useful responses.
I wonder if it would make sense for MacOSX (And user-oriented Linux distributions?) to keep all binaries and libraries etc. (i.e. not /home) normally read-only (unless you are in the middle of uninstalling/upgrading of course). (I know that some people keep servers and "appliance" type systems like this already). Until now, this kind of trojan has been localized and rare, but with the popularity of OSX, this one could be a turning point.
Anyone want to make a hack of dpkg to try this on Debian?
A Ferrari is pretty exotic to be a common computer, maybe it's more like a high-end Sun.
From Neal Stephenson's essay about computers, "In the beginning was the command line":
---
Imagine a crossroads where four competing auto dealerships are situated. One of them (Microsoft) is much, much bigger than the others. It started out years ago selling three-speed bicycles (MS-DOS); these were not perfect, but they worked, and when they broke you could easily fix them.
There was a competing bicycle dealership next door (Apple) that one day began selling motorized vehicles--expensive but attractively styled cars with their innards hermetically sealed, so that how they worked was something of a mystery.
The big dealership responded by rushing a moped upgrade kit (the original Windows) onto the market. This was a Rube Goldberg contraption that, when bolted onto a three-speed bicycle, enabled it to keep up, just barely, with Apple-cars. The users had to wear goggles and were always picking bugs out of their teeth while Apple owners sped along in hermetically sealed comfort, sneering out the windows. But the Micro-mopeds were cheap, and easy to fix compared with the Apple-cars, and their market share waxed.
Eventually the big dealership came out with a full-fledged car: a colossal station wagon (Windows 95). It had all the aesthetic appeal of a Soviet worker housing block, it leaked oil and blew gaskets, and it was an enormous success. A little later, they also came out with a hulking off-road vehicle intended for industrial users (Windows NT) which was no more beautiful than the station wagon, and only a little more reliable.
Since then there has been a lot of noise and shouting, but little has changed. The smaller dealership continues to sell sleek Euro-styled sedans and to spend a lot of money on advertising campaigns. They have had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! signs taped up in their windows for so long that they have gotten all yellow and curly. The big one keeps making bigger and bigger station wagons and ORVs.
On the other side of the road are two competitors that have come along more recently.
One of them (Be, Inc.) is selling fully operational Batmobiles (the BeOS). They are more beautiful and stylish even than the Euro-sedans, better designed, more technologically advanced, and at least as reliable as anything else on the market--and yet cheaper than the others.
With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They've been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free.
Customers come to this crossroads in throngs, day and night. Ninety percent of them go straight to the biggest dealership and buy station wagons or off-road vehicles. They do not even look at the other dealerships.
Of the remaining ten percent, most go and buy a sleek Euro-sedan, pausing only to turn up their noses at the philistines going to buy the station wagons and ORVs. If they even notice the people on the opposite side of the road, selling the cheaper, technically superior vehicles, these customers deride them cranks and half-wits.
The Batmobile outlet sells a few vehicles to the occasional car nut who wants a second vehicle to go with his station wagon, but seems to accept, at least for now, that it's a
Reality Master 101 wrote:
.NET or whatever, too bad, you have to upgrade, or work around it.
"Come on. Which is more likely to be in business in five years, Home Depot, or Joe's Contractor Shack?
"It's all about probabilities. Microsoft has a FAR higher probability of being around in five years than, say, Red Hat, which is the strongest player. How about Debian? Who knows? Manager Man sure the hell doesn't, and frankly neither does the OSS community. "
Any competent building contractor can fix your house. Your house is not "closed source". Similarly, any sufficently competent programmer can fix Linux (or other application). Nobody can fix Windows except Microsoft-- and they do it when and how they want to. Maybe they won't ever fix your problem.
If RedHat goes out of business, there are lots of consulting firms you can hire. If Windows decides to quit supporting Windows 2000 or NT or
Debian is another animal entirely, and if you use Debian, you need to explain exactly what it is to your boss.
I am a fan of wxWidgets. http://www.wxwidgets.org./ Write in C++, or in Python and compile.
I also work on a Windows app that use GTK and it works pretty well (and it's plain C), though GTK apps look very slightly different (since it implements all the controls itself) and you need to include all the GTK and GLIB DLLs with your program.
In general, binary compatability is convenient.
Thing is, while it is essential that a proprietary system like Solaris provide binary compatability, in Linux it's not neccesary.
Instead, we just need to make it easy to compile and install drivers. The Linux build system does in fact provide a consistent infrastructure. We just need a quick and easy user/GUI tool to unpack the source code in the right place, and compile it for you.
I don't get the graphic design. Putting the headlines in a rounded grey box make them look like part of the preceding story summary (whose title is in rounded green box going the other direcection). The grey boxes actually look nice-- perhaps they could be used for the "Read More" part of a story summary.
But I would display the "extra" headlines In a different way. Maybe just as a bulleted list? Or round the grey box the full 180 degrees rather than halfway.
"but it would probably save businesses a fair bit off their power bills too."
Not always, since some power companies charge based on a business customer's peak use per day, not total like your home meter.
How much power is being used even though that appliance is off? Measure with this: http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/001067.php -- Kill-a-watt.
Use this to turn off power to external peripherals when you turn your PC off: http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/001087.php -- "hen you turn off your computer, the smart unit shuts the power off to the other sockets."
These are tiny amounts of power, but they add up.
Would this be for cooling or heating? If cooling please elaborate.
A wall like this for heating is called a Trombe wall, and the material of the interior wall (not the glass) is also typically selected to store heat (stone usually).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trombe_wall
I majored in communications, actually! ... And only minored in compsci. It exposed me to random cultural theory and gave me a lot more time to take interesting classes in history, philosophy, linguistics, and other departments, read interesting books, learn to write decent prose. More importantly, it gave be a lot more time to work on free software projects, to work for researchers and grad students in a research lab, rather than churning through massive amounts of tedious time consuming work. Now I work for a great little company who hired me because of my experience in research labs and free software writing real code and becoming familiar with libraries and tools that they needed me to be familiar with. The only thing that I missed out on was learning higher math in depth, I have to teach myself that as needed now.
You need to do what you want to be doing and learn what you want to be learning in college. If you don't have the time to do the work in some class, you need to reorganize your academic situation around what you want to do, not fake it.
No, it's just that *way* more people watch the game than futurama (sorry), and therefore sports commercials bring in way more revenue.
Some good ideas, but Greg is really out of touch with Linux and free software development in general.
He seems to miss the idea that (a) we can't throw out diversity of applications. It's confusion, but it's also a fact. (b) There *are* different distribution brands, though they try to lean on the common Linux name (RedHat Linux, Debian GNU/Linux, Gentoo Linux). (c) Most importantly, it's up to independent distributions to make the system into a cohesive user experience, and the success of GNU/Linux systems is precicely *because* of the ability for lots of independent developers to create software packages for it, not some central Linux authority. Linux *is* just the kernel,. It's up to other people to make more complete systems. He makes the very common mistake of confusing "Linux" with "OS consisting of a Linux kernel and GNU libraries and other tools with some user-oriented desktop environment".
There can be no Linux Inc. creating The One And Only Linux Desktop System. It shouldn't happen, and it fundamentally *can't*. There can only be a variety of Desktop Systems that are based on GNU/Linux.
Wow, this story is one big troll. Which sucks, because (Open|Gnu|NeXT)Step is cool and Objective-c is even cooler.
I don't understand how your comment is in response to that text. The key words in it are "legally" and "without negotiation". The copyright idea behind Xanadu was that you aren't really copying, you are just referencing, and displaying the content in-line, so the original author remains in control of the segment your are referencing (and may control access to it, including asessing fees for its use... or not... it's up to the author.)
About the last assertion, the form always shapes so-called "content" (you meant that instead of comment, right?)-- by making some things easy to do and some things difficult. Xanadu very intentionally creates a new ways to construct "content" by making inclusion-by-reference. So when Nelson talks about a "new realm" he's really just talking about what the new technology lets you do that is not as easy to do today. This is not some weird fantasy, its simply a (marketing-oriented) description of what you can do with this kind of technology, which is real and implemented (and has been partially for 30 years, just never used, that's all).
Well the real idea is that the chunk-size must be flexibile. Xanadu addressed this by making the letter or character the atomic unit, and building up a new document by referencing character spans within the original document(s). So you could just grab page size chunks, or paragraphs, or sentences or phrases or just a lists of them or whatever the best chunk size is for your new document. The WWW as it is now, only allows links to another whole document, or a kind of transclusion using iframes at the "whole document" scale, unless you layer on additional technology atop HTTP and HTML.
A similar approach would be to use web-based aggregators or large trackers and factor the number of feed subscribers into a blog's PageRank. Nobody is going to subscribe to a spam-blog, and also, lots of people subscribe to blog feeds but don't neccesarily link to the blog from another web page.
Well, so were Einstein, Werner von Braun... etc. :)
I think you have some terms mixed up, at least your post confused me.
You're right-- learnability is not usabilty. And Blender is *usable* once you *learn* it, which is what takes time.
Yes, clearly:
6 0&spn=0.015750,0.014849&z=1&t=k&hl=en
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.711061,-74.0117
Cool solution to dealing with overlapping windows, but why deal with them at all?
I've always thought that overlapping windows caused more trouble than problems they solve. It looked advanced back in the day, and was great with small screens, and sometimes you still want to use it, but I'd find it more useful for typical use if windows diddn't overlap unless you forced them to (by continuing to drag for instance).
Or, coming from the other direction, some wish-list ideas I had while using ion are the ability to detach windows into temporary floating windows, resize neigboring frames by dragging one frame's titlebar, and somehow making it easier to use things like the Gnome panel in ion.
I recommend trying ion and similar window managers like LarsWM and Ratpoison and WMI.
Unfortunately to make window managers truly helpful, they will need to have more information about what its windows *mean* than is currently available from X11. For example, it's error prone trying to deduce whether Window X and Window Y are considered part of the same application by the user. Gnome and KDE do a pretty good job of it (e.g. grouping windows by application in the window list/task bar) but it's not perfect. And this is just the most basic information. Other useful info which could modify window behavior is how often a window is used or updated, when it was run, by what means was it launched (menu, button, terminal?), various categorizations and semantic tagging attached to the application permanently or to the window temporarily, etc.
A great advantage of an X11 system is the flexibility to experiment with the window manager, I hope to see more cool stuff in the future, especially from Gnome, KDE, and the distributions' choices.
RSS and Atom are nice, but you still have to keep requesting the thing over HTTP to get updates, which seems completely counter to the concept of getting a concise update of changes or news.
Feed files should be published over NNTP.
Just run the "BSOD" screen saver. I run it at work, and its fooled my technically astute co-workers a couple times.
It has Win32 BSOD, Win NT panic, Mac "no startup disk", sad mac, and Bomb, Amiga Workbench, various Unices, VMS, endless DOS Abort/Retry/Fail, the cool BSD/PowerPC trace, some video crashes where the display is just messed up in a pretty rainbow fashion.
http://interreality.org/~reed/tmp/google_copyright ed.png
Actually, the previous article on this subject was filed in Hardware, which makes no sense. So really, this is the real article, that other one was the wrong one ...