The thought that someone could remotely tell an infected box to DoS a box is unreal. It's so simple, yet brilliant, yet scary. Does anyone know how this gets distributed to a box? Does someone purposefully have to install it or is it a Trojan Horse?
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
There are pros and cons to using a package management system like RPM's. You covered the cons, so I'll tell you why I use them.
Ease of removal: removing an application manually installed by a "make install" is difficult, and usually not thorough.
Ease of upgrading: you don't have to remove/replace manually all your old files. If the application has moved/removed/added/changed files since the last version, the package manager handles everything for you.
Auto-dependencies: The package can tell you what other packages it needs to function.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Umm... no offense to anyone who lives out of the states, but the US has enough potential customers to make PayPals very wealthy. Sure, they'd have more potential customers if they went global, but they are relatively small now (400 employees) and the complexeties of international trade coupled with the ever-changing mess of currency conversions. Again, the US has enough money changing hands to make PayPals very successful.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
If that is the case, what possible arguements can we muster against things like internet regulation.
One very important argument: our freedom. If we wish to take the risks of communing online, then it's partially our own fault. I believe in taking personal responsibility for my system, that's why my personal lan is protected by a carefully managed firewall, and I do backups of any crucial data regularly. Any sensitive information (such as code I'm working on) is kept on another machine, on another network, that is not directly accessable to the outside world. The only way to get it would be to slice through my firewall, gain access to one of my workstations, and then hack the system containing the data, which they don't know is there. If they do all this, which is very possible, I do have backups.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
I don't quite understand what this is about from reading the article. Although I despise Microsoft and use Linux almost exclusively at home, I don't think Windows or Microsoft products are that expensive. Commercial UNIXes are (or used to be) much higher. Windows 98 retails for $99. Just a few years ago, Solaris x86 was like $1200, SCO was like $800. Word 2000 is $300. Adobe Acrobat is $249, FrameMaker is $799.
Please don't flame me... I'm comparing types of applications, not quality. I don't care what you like better... the things I listed are comparable in base feature sets;
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
I was seriously dismayed that RAMBUS, seeing that it's technology was losing the battle badly, decided that if they can't win, they are going to try to extort revenues out of all other DRAM manufacturers. I was shocked that Hitachi and Toshiba buckled without much of a fight; numerous corporations have been making SDRAM for years before RAMBUS came on to the scene. I'm putting my money on DDR SDRAM for the next generation RAM technology, as it's cheap and higher performance that the expensive, high-latency, high-clocked serial RAMBUS modules.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
You're forgeting something... if you release unstable software to the public, you could always distribute a patch later to fix the problems. This is not true of CPU's...
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Both GNOME and KDE are driving toward a set of user interface guidelines. But at this time, they really seem to be focusing on making flexible and powerful toolkits (GTK+/Bonobo and Qt/KParts/DCOP) and interoperability communication mechanisms. If they are going to beat Microsoft and win some users for the Linux desktop, they have to have technology that Microsoft and Apple don't have. A large base of highly flexible, consistent, themable components is important... And the UI guidlines are coming around. I don't use GNOME, so I can't comment on the consistency of its apps, but KDE (particularly KDE 2 betas) seems to follow the standards set by Windows and Mac very nicely. In fact, Mosfet is(was) a huge Mac fan, and has designed the KDE2 theme engine, a number of components, and a number of themes that are somewhat Mac-like.
What I'm really trying to say, is they are both getting there. Mac has a 20 year history, and Windows has like a 15-year history... obviously the developers of those systems developed standards that evolved over the years. KDE And GNOME are both quickly catching up.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
There is a problem with this two-tiered pricing you propose: production costs. To illistrate my point, I will use Anime as an example. When you purchase an Anime title on VHS, you generally have two products to choose from: The english dubbed, or the Japanese language with english subtitles. Anyone should be able to realize that it costs significantly more money to dub the title than subtitle it, as you have to hire voice atcors, buy studio time, hire a sound engineer, etc... Yet the subtitled VHS tapes are usually $5-10 MORE EXPENSIVE! Why is this? Because the anime distributers sell 10 times more copies of the subtitled tapes.
Enter DVDs...
On a DVD you can store up to 8 language tracks, and 32 subtitle tracks, and switch between them dynamically. Thus, subbed and dubbed become one product, and everybody buys that one product, thus quantities go up and cost per unit goes down. The DVD's are usually the same price as the dubbed VHS.
The point I'm trying to make is that to do the two-tiered pricing you suggest, they'd have to split the market in two. The expensive disc that contained pretty packaging would wind up costing more like $40, due to VERY limited demand. Also, they would be a "collector's" type market, which means they would be purchased regardless by a limited few, so theycould jack up the price even higher.
Also, most of the cost of CD's is artificially inflated. Audio cassets cost a good deal more to manufacture, and only cost a fraction as much. What the RIAA is doing is building in another $8 or so because they know CD's will never wear out like a cassette will, thus you will never need to buy another.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Try your ears on some foriegn music. I like a lot of Japanese stuff. Here's some cool things to try:
Maaya Sakamoto: Grapefruit
T.M. Revolution: Heart of Sword
Boa: Race of a Thousand Camels
Siam Shade: IV Zero
Something to be wary of... there is a lot of Piracy in Japanese CD's by a taiwanese company called Son May (abbreviated SM). Japanese discs are usually very expensive ($30-$40). The SM versions are usually found in the states between $10-$15 a piece.
My place of choice to shop is Tokyo Pop. Check it out.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
How would TUX perform using CGI/Servlets/PHP/etc. compared to Apache or IIS? The ability to serve static pages fast is not that useful in the real world, as all the sites that get really big hits-per-second are those with dynamic content (Yahoo, Slashdot, Amazon.com, etc.)
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Getting the entire PC on one chip is ludicrus at our current technology level, and may always be. The Thunderbird already has 22 million transistors, which generate tons of heat and suck lots of power. Adding 128 MB of RAM on chip would increase that transistor count by a VERY large factor, and the increased complexity will decrease yields.
Integrating stuff like the core logic (northbridge/southbridge) makes sense... maybe even audio, IDE/SCSI, etc... but RAM... no. Too big and expensive. What you want can be found in a single board computer, which is basically a computer that fits into a PCI slot. They're used a lot in rackmounts and such, where space is at a premium.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
You don't need to cool the whole motherboard. If you can just get the main chip, the memory, and the video accelerator chips (and the other chips you need to make them talk to each other) into a tiny sealed case of the stuff, this could be in every high-performance home-computer.
Not entirely true. I've found when overclocking a system, it helps to cool the mobo's core logic chipset (in this case, the Intel 440BX chipset), as it can prevent crashes when o/c'ing a system. When I o/c'ed my ABit BP6 w/ 2 Celeron 366's to 550 mhz, it would lock up and crash, until I removed the heatsink of the 440BX, applied thermal grease, replaced it, and glued on a fan the size of one of the old 486's. Works beautifully now.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
I've been dying to see what lucas does with the clone wars in this (or possibly the next) film... but why did he have to bring back Jar Jar? I don't know a single person who wasn't irritated by Lucas' "look what I can do with my multi-million dollar special-effects budget" character. Seriously... Jar Jar looked incredible for a completely digital character, but added zero substance. His time on camera could have been better spent developing the other characters, or elongating the Jedi fight scenes.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Slashdot Mirror
The thought that someone could remotely tell an infected box to DoS a box is unreal. It's so simple, yet brilliant, yet scary. Does anyone know how this gets distributed to a box? Does someone purposefully have to install it or is it a Trojan Horse?
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
I think the correct question for the Slashdot crowd would be "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!"
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Ease of removal: removing an application manually installed by a "make install" is difficult, and usually not thorough.
Ease of upgrading: you don't have to remove/replace manually all your old files. If the application has moved/removed/added/changed files since the last version, the package manager handles everything for you.
Auto-dependencies: The package can tell you what other packages it needs to function.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Umm... no offense to anyone who lives out of the states, but the US has enough potential customers to make PayPals very wealthy. Sure, they'd have more potential customers if they went global, but they are relatively small now (400 employees) and the complexeties of international trade coupled with the ever-changing mess of currency conversions. Again, the US has enough money changing hands to make PayPals very successful.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
If that is the case, what possible arguements can we muster against things like internet regulation.
One very important argument: our freedom. If we wish to take the risks of communing online, then it's partially our own fault. I believe in taking personal responsibility for my system, that's why my personal lan is protected by a carefully managed firewall, and I do backups of any crucial data regularly. Any sensitive information (such as code I'm working on) is kept on another machine, on another network, that is not directly accessable to the outside world. The only way to get it would be to slice through my firewall, gain access to one of my workstations, and then hack the system containing the data, which they don't know is there. If they do all this, which is very possible, I do have backups.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
I don't quite understand what this is about from reading the article. Although I despise Microsoft and use Linux almost exclusively at home, I don't think Windows or Microsoft products are that expensive. Commercial UNIXes are (or used to be) much higher. Windows 98 retails for $99. Just a few years ago, Solaris x86 was like $1200, SCO was like $800. Word 2000 is $300. Adobe Acrobat is $249, FrameMaker is $799.
Please don't flame me... I'm comparing types of applications, not quality. I don't care what you like better... the things I listed are comparable in base feature sets;
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
I was seriously dismayed that RAMBUS, seeing that it's technology was losing the battle badly, decided that if they can't win, they are going to try to extort revenues out of all other DRAM manufacturers. I was shocked that Hitachi and Toshiba buckled without much of a fight; numerous corporations have been making SDRAM for years before RAMBUS came on to the scene. I'm putting my money on DDR SDRAM for the next generation RAM technology, as it's cheap and higher performance that the expensive, high-latency, high-clocked serial RAMBUS modules.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
You're forgeting something... if you release unstable software to the public, you could always distribute a patch later to fix the problems. This is not true of CPU's...
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Sorry... I forgot to mention... KDE *does* have UI guidelines up at the developer site: http:/ /developer.kde.org/documentation/standards/kde/sty le/basics/index.html
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Both GNOME and KDE are driving toward a set of user interface guidelines. But at this time, they really seem to be focusing on making flexible and powerful toolkits (GTK+/Bonobo and Qt/KParts/DCOP) and interoperability communication mechanisms. If they are going to beat Microsoft and win some users for the Linux desktop, they have to have technology that Microsoft and Apple don't have. A large base of highly flexible, consistent, themable components is important... And the UI guidlines are coming around. I don't use GNOME, so I can't comment on the consistency of its apps, but KDE (particularly KDE 2 betas) seems to follow the standards set by Windows and Mac very nicely. In fact, Mosfet is(was) a huge Mac fan, and has designed the KDE2 theme engine, a number of components, and a number of themes that are somewhat Mac-like.
What I'm really trying to say, is they are both getting there. Mac has a 20 year history, and Windows has like a 15-year history... obviously the developers of those systems developed standards that evolved over the years. KDE And GNOME are both quickly catching up.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Next time she complains that I'm not giving her my undivided attention, I'll bring this up and go play Quake III for several hours.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
There is a problem with this two-tiered pricing you propose: production costs. To illistrate my point, I will use Anime as an example. When you purchase an Anime title on VHS, you generally have two products to choose from: The english dubbed, or the Japanese language with english subtitles. Anyone should be able to realize that it costs significantly more money to dub the title than subtitle it, as you have to hire voice atcors, buy studio time, hire a sound engineer, etc... Yet the subtitled VHS tapes are usually $5-10 MORE EXPENSIVE! Why is this? Because the anime distributers sell 10 times more copies of the subtitled tapes.
Enter DVDs...
On a DVD you can store up to 8 language tracks, and 32 subtitle tracks, and switch between them dynamically. Thus, subbed and dubbed become one product, and everybody buys that one product, thus quantities go up and cost per unit goes down. The DVD's are usually the same price as the dubbed VHS.
The point I'm trying to make is that to do the two-tiered pricing you suggest, they'd have to split the market in two. The expensive disc that contained pretty packaging would wind up costing more like $40, due to VERY limited demand. Also, they would be a "collector's" type market, which means they would be purchased regardless by a limited few, so theycould jack up the price even higher.
Also, most of the cost of CD's is artificially inflated. Audio cassets cost a good deal more to manufacture, and only cost a fraction as much. What the RIAA is doing is building in another $8 or so because they know CD's will never wear out like a cassette will, thus you will never need to buy another.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Try your ears on some foriegn music. I like a lot of Japanese stuff. Here's some cool things to try:
Something to be wary of... there is a lot of Piracy in Japanese CD's by a taiwanese company called Son May (abbreviated SM). Japanese discs are usually very expensive ($30-$40). The SM versions are usually found in the states between $10-$15 a piece.
My place of choice to shop is Tokyo Pop. Check it out.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
How would TUX perform using CGI/Servlets/PHP/etc. compared to Apache or IIS? The ability to serve static pages fast is not that useful in the real world, as all the sites that get really big hits-per-second are those with dynamic content (Yahoo, Slashdot, Amazon.com, etc.)
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Getting the entire PC on one chip is ludicrus at our current technology level, and may always be. The Thunderbird already has 22 million transistors, which generate tons of heat and suck lots of power. Adding 128 MB of RAM on chip would increase that transistor count by a VERY large factor, and the increased complexity will decrease yields.
Integrating stuff like the core logic (northbridge/southbridge) makes sense... maybe even audio, IDE/SCSI, etc... but RAM... no. Too big and expensive. What you want can be found in a single board computer, which is basically a computer that fits into a PCI slot. They're used a lot in rackmounts and such, where space is at a premium.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
You don't need to cool the whole motherboard. If you can just get the main chip, the memory, and the video accelerator chips (and the other chips you need to make them talk to each other) into a tiny sealed case of the stuff, this could be in every high-performance home-computer.
Not entirely true. I've found when overclocking a system, it helps to cool the mobo's core logic chipset (in this case, the Intel 440BX chipset), as it can prevent crashes when o/c'ing a system. When I o/c'ed my ABit BP6 w/ 2 Celeron 366's to 550 mhz, it would lock up and crash, until I removed the heatsink of the 440BX, applied thermal grease, replaced it, and glued on a fan the size of one of the old 486's. Works beautifully now.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
I've been dying to see what lucas does with the clone wars in this (or possibly the next) film... but why did he have to bring back Jar Jar? I don't know a single person who wasn't irritated by Lucas' "look what I can do with my multi-million dollar special-effects budget" character. Seriously... Jar Jar looked incredible for a completely digital character, but added zero substance. His time on camera could have been better spent developing the other characters, or elongating the Jedi fight scenes.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
To the best of my knowledge, the PCI bus is limited in bandwidth to the following speedss:
With the max theoretical bus bandwidth at 520MB/sec, wouldn't that cause serious bottlenecks when you throw on an extra 3-4 CPU's?
Just a thought...
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"