As much as I like to configure my Linux here and there,
on every single edge to make it fit my needs, I really
appreciate it to be able to install a fresh system from
the newest RedHat or Debian or whatever if some bigger
update is neccessary (2.2->2.4, glibc, GNOME1->2 etc.).
I really want to have everything
configurable, even the desktop, be it GNOME or KDE.
But, IMHO, if for example the KDE people are going
to implement a simplified interface for configuring the
desktop and hide further options somewhere deeper, I
fear that this will be the DEFAULT for
distributions like RedHat; maybe they'll hide these
options even deeper to "not confuse new users".
RedHat already did this with BlueCurve and trying
to hide any differences between KDE and GNOME.
So, at least for me who wants to easily configure
my system after a fresh install, it will in fact become
harder to have the system behave as I like it
because I will have to spend quite some time just to
find out where all the options have gone.
Short: If KDE/GNOME offer less configuration options,
even as an option, distributions will adapt. And in my
very humble opinion, this is a bad move.
Google is still beating my photo album...I searched for pictures of mountains, and only found 3. And two of those are debatable.
Ever tried to turn off Google Images' "You-really-don't-want-to-see-this" filter?
I mean.. You were searching for "pictures" of "mountains"... Big breasts, that is?;-) Nah.
It's "&safe=off", and people outside
the US might want to change the language to English
before trying to use it (hint).
Funny thing here in Germany is: The filter is ALWAYS ON,
and in the German preferences, there's no option to turn it
off. After you change your language to English (URL), though, there
suddenly appears an option for disabling the filter...
Try talking about censorship (there are not even
clear rules about what exactly they are filtering, and there's no explanation why you can't turn it off over here; even worse: They don't even tell you that there
IS a filter and that it's always active).
I asked Google about this, but never got a response.
Where I grew up, the busses were sealed. If we wanted a ride, we'd have to chase after them, and grab on to a bit of barbed wire tied to the rear bumper, and hold on for dear life as we got dragged to our destination.
That was still before you joined the Phoenix
Foundation, right?
From who I met over the last years, there really seem
to be these two groups employed:
People who show you something "on paper"
People who tell you they can't show you something
"on paper".
The biggest difference you often
see if you look at how these two groups are actually
working is that the 2nd are far more interested in
looking things up and learn them if they encounter
a problem which they're not currently able to solve.
The 1st group rather likes to make workarounds
or look for documentation from someone on the 'net
who had the same problem before and solved it, instead
of learning the very matter themselves.
Personally, I'd rather trust somebody to solve a
problem for which it's not an exception to look
things up and learn about new techniques but for whom
it's the standard thing to do if something is missing -
read: it's embedded in the very way he works.
You usually find them in group 2, which is the
same group that thinks that having some degree
"on paper" is just a waste of time since you could've
learned real stuff in the meantime.
It's a different kind of thinking. But, if you
use it in reverse, you can judge how people'll work
a bit by looking at how many diploma they show you..
[...] And no, exposing someone to Shakira on screen, stage, and radio isn't going to make that person buy 10 of the same album. Exposing someone to 10 different artists might get them to buy 10 different albums. [...]
This (all of it) is perhaps the most "Insightful" posting on the
subject I've read for months. Thanks, I'm going to
bookmark it.
I have Opera set to identify as MSIE 6.0. Maybe there's something I'm missing out on by doing so, but at least this way I don't get warnings from Hotmail or, as this article says, different pages.
Yes, indeed, I think you're missing something:
How does Microsoft measure its market percentage
for browsers? Yes, they're checking (or let others check)
UserAgent strings sent by browsers visiting popular
sites (msn/hotmail may be quite popular, for example).
And how are these UserAgents set? Oops, you just changed
your browser (Opera) to identify as MS Internet Explorer...
You don't need to replace Opera by Internet Explorer.
It's enough for Microsoft if you just change your
UserAgent to MSIE and surf on for them to be able to
claim "we've just got another 10% of the browser market"
and everybody just believes it, because not many people
will fiddle with their UserAgent settings for no good
reason, right?
So, one could say, MS just gives those that don't want
to switch to IE a reason to change their UserAgents.
That's all they need.
I won't use IE as I don't like it and I don't visit
sites that look like crap in Mozilla. Meaning, I won't
change my UserAgent for these marketing drones'
benefits.
This code won't compile. You're required to put
an application-supplied utility
function in namespace std (remove the comment markers
above) or it just won't compile.
That's GCC 3.2 for you.:-( I'm not sure
whether it is to blame because of following strange
standard requirements, but IMHO you should not be
required to put custom functions
into namespace std just to output some data.
Title: Mike and Phani's Essential C++ Techniques
Authors: Michael Hyman and Phani Vaddadi
Publisher: APress
Copyright: 1999
ISBN: 1-893115-04-6
Pages: 300
It uses old-style C++ (#include , for example), ignores valuable contributions to C++ such as the STL and the standard string class, and generally provides nothing a decent C++ programmer should not already know.
Now read that "1999" bit again. How, exactly, did
"standard" C++ look back about 3.5 years ago?!
What did you expect? Hell, many modern C++ features
weren't even implemented by most available compilers
in 1999.
It's not the same if you know that Willy was only
really freed in the movie "Free Willy". After
that, he/she (the actual animal) was still in some presumably too small water bassin. Only years,
lot of protests and several tries later he was re-released
into the wild, AFAIR (which was especially hard, since
Willy just couln't cope with living on his/her own anymore).
btw, I stole this sentence from a.sig somebody
had on/. here a while ago. I like it and
it makes sense. Think freed code.
Ask "slaker", since it's him (or her) who wrote this.
Re: How can this possibly be useful?
on
ReactOS 0.1.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Despite the quality and feature rich nature of many open-source projects, there are still loads of important projects waiting to be written. This project seems like a waste of good programmers to me.
I know quite some people with this attitude,
and I'm afraid that most of them Just Don't Get It.
Most of the people writing Open Source software
are doing it because they like to do it. That's all.
If somebody is doing something special just for
the fun of it, you can't just kick him and say:
"That's of no use for anybody, why don't you just
do $THIS instead?"
Won't work at all if he's not interested in doing $THIS.
Things just don't work this way. And this is a Good Thing[tm].
And, coming back to your question, no, the world
wouldn't be a better place.:-) Definitely no.
[Footnote and rant: Maybe I should send good ol' George W.
a mail asking him to do something different because
that would make much more sense for everybody else
than what he's doing at the moment. But I'm afraid
this won't work either. He just likes what he's doing
ATM too much, I'd guess.]
A "free" machine that could run IIS would be a killer in some Windows shops.
And remember that it's already hard to buy new NT4
licenses and it will become even harder when MS completely
stops selling them (except from eBay, of course).
Yes, a free (as in bird, not as in Willy) replacement
for NT4 could save quite a lot of companies that did
"embedded NT4" and the like on their products until
they had time to reimplement it for something
less braindead.
Shareholders are what brought at least one company
I used to work for to bankruptcy. Once there were shares,
they started to smell "big money", which started with
telling all the employees on the very next full-company
meeting that they can always be replaced, that the
shareholders are now the uppermost important persons
to please, customers came next, and then us.
Well, replacing year-long employees that know
how the company was actually making money by
Wallstreet junkies never seemed to be a good
idea to me.
About one year later, there was nothing anymore to worry
about.
You see, we're talking about a company that made
real money before this IPO and shareholder shit.
Sorry for being a bit angry, but shareholders are
in no way more important than the people
that work for a company, brought it up and have
no choice but to see upper management start
playing Bullshit Bingo.
I personally don't have any understanding about
people buying shares of some company and not knowing
(or not wanting to know but prefer to listen to
quackers) about the risks. Shares are a game.
Games are not where you should put your money
if you REALLY need it. This only attracks all
the sharks and destroys even more people's lifes
that you never even heard about.
Have you ever bought a used computer, possibly at a failed dot-com auction or Boeing Surplus? Ever taken a look at what's on the hard drive? When the last dotcom I worked for went out of business, all the computers were auctioned off. I heard a few weeks after the auction that a bartender had been asking one of my former co-workers about the details of another co-worker's love life, details he picked up from reading the personal email which had been left on a computer sold at the auction.
mmh, the "CAUTION" passus is not included
in my man shred(1) from fileutils.
However, it is included in
the.info texinfo page.
I really hate it when important info is
hidden from the casual reader. (And the
standard info(1) reader sucks like hell -
pinfo(1) is one of the first things I install
on a fresh system.)
Regarding ext3: If you really need it and
you have root priviledges, remount as ext2,
shred, and remount as ext3.
If you wipe, remember to take your
device's physics into account.
Wipe it once when it is completely "cold"
(computer has been turned off for at least
several hours), then wipe it again after it
has been running for an hour or so, and wipe
it a third time after you've giving the disk
some serious thrashing (that is, disk activity
that moves the head around quite a bit).
The reason is temperature. Data is saved
on circles on a magnetic medium. The read/write
head has a certain amount of thickness, and
so have the tracks on the platter (the tracks
have to be a bit widther than the head is,
to take thermal expansion into account so
the head won't overwrite data on neighbour
tracks).
So, for some specialized data recovery
company, it may even be possible to recover
different data from the same track,
because after a while of use, a track can
look like this:
................ Free space to next track
---------------- Outer track end
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA Older data 1
BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB
BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB Actual data
BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB
CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC Older data 2
---------------- Inner track end ................ Free space to next track
So, your drive will always read the data
in 'B'. In 'C' there might still be data
your computer saved when the drive had just
spun up and was cold, while 'A' might still
hold a copy of data that was written on very
heavy disk activity when the drive was really
hot.
To overwrite all of this data, you need
to have the drive write in any of the temperature
states that it has been in within this life.
"Simple" writing might only destroy all 'B'
data and leave all 'A' and 'C' data intact on
the drive, where they can be recovered.
Slashdot Mirror
As much as I like to configure my Linux here and there, on every single edge to make it fit my needs, I really appreciate it to be able to install a fresh system from the newest RedHat or Debian or whatever if some bigger update is neccessary (2.2->2.4, glibc, GNOME1->2 etc.).
I really want to have everything configurable, even the desktop, be it GNOME or KDE.
But, IMHO, if for example the KDE people are going to implement a simplified interface for configuring the desktop and hide further options somewhere deeper, I fear that this will be the DEFAULT for distributions like RedHat; maybe they'll hide these options even deeper to "not confuse new users".
RedHat already did this with BlueCurve and trying to hide any differences between KDE and GNOME.
So, at least for me who wants to easily configure my system after a fresh install, it will in fact become harder to have the system behave as I like it because I will have to spend quite some time just to find out where all the options have gone.
Short: If KDE/GNOME offer less configuration options, even as an option, distributions will adapt. And in my very humble opinion, this is a bad move.
Ever tried to turn off Google Images' "You-really-don't-want-to-see-this" filter?
I mean.. You were searching for "pictures" of "mountains"... Big breasts, that is? ;-) Nah.
It's "&safe=off", and people outside the US might want to change the language to English before trying to use it (hint).
Funny thing here in Germany is: The filter is ALWAYS ON, and in the German preferences, there's no option to turn it off. After you change your language to English (URL), though, there suddenly appears an option for disabling the filter... Try talking about censorship (there are not even clear rules about what exactly they are filtering, and there's no explanation why you can't turn it off over here; even worse: They don't even tell you that there IS a filter and that it's always active).
I asked Google about this, but never got a response.
That was still before you joined the Phoenix Foundation, right?
From who I met over the last years, there really seem to be these two groups employed:
The biggest difference you often see if you look at how these two groups are actually working is that the 2nd are far more interested in looking things up and learn them if they encounter a problem which they're not currently able to solve.
The 1st group rather likes to make workarounds or look for documentation from someone on the 'net who had the same problem before and solved it, instead of learning the very matter themselves.
Personally, I'd rather trust somebody to solve a problem for which it's not an exception to look things up and learn about new techniques but for whom it's the standard thing to do if something is missing - read: it's embedded in the very way he works.
You usually find them in group 2, which is the same group that thinks that having some degree "on paper" is just a waste of time since you could've learned real stuff in the meantime.
It's a different kind of thinking. But, if you use it in reverse, you can judge how people'll work a bit by looking at how many diploma they show you..
This (all of it) is perhaps the most "Insightful" posting on the subject I've read for months. Thanks, I'm going to bookmark it.
Yes, indeed, I think you're missing something:
How does Microsoft measure its market percentage for browsers? Yes, they're checking (or let others check) UserAgent strings sent by browsers visiting popular sites (msn/hotmail may be quite popular, for example).
And how are these UserAgents set? Oops, you just changed your browser (Opera) to identify as MS Internet Explorer...
You don't need to replace Opera by Internet Explorer. It's enough for Microsoft if you just change your UserAgent to MSIE and surf on for them to be able to claim "we've just got another 10% of the browser market" and everybody just believes it, because not many people will fiddle with their UserAgent settings for no good reason, right?
So, one could say, MS just gives those that don't want to switch to IE a reason to change their UserAgents. That's all they need.
I won't use IE as I don't like it and I don't visit sites that look like crap in Mozilla. Meaning, I won't change my UserAgent for these marketing drones' benefits.
And you forgot to mention that the book reviewed is three and a half years old.
I mean: Review a 3.5 year-old book on C++ and criticize its view of the standard? In 2003?
I'm sure it's not what you wanted to hear, but it's indeed "implemention-dependent". :-) Trying
to figure out C++, you'll hear this term a lot.
On some systems, more is already less.
Let's say it did. Current GCC incarnations honor std namespace conventions way too much according to the always-changing standard, IMHO.
Let me explain and give you an example:
(I'm sorry I had to replace spaces at the beginning of lines by dots or Slashdot's <ecode> would simply eat them..)
This code won't compile. You're required to put an application-supplied utility function in namespace std (remove the comment markers above) or it just won't compile.
That's GCC 3.2 for you. :-( I'm not sure
whether it is to blame because of following strange
standard requirements, but IMHO you should not be
required to put custom functions
into namespace std just to output some data.
I mean: Polluting std namespace because of this?
Any ideas, btw?
Preprocessor? What preprocessor? Microsoft aren't using cfront in VC++, are they?
Authors: Michael Hyman and Phani Vaddadi
Publisher: APress
Copyright: 1999
ISBN: 1-893115-04-6
Pages: 300
Now read that "1999" bit again. How, exactly, did "standard" C++ look back about 3.5 years ago?!
What did you expect? Hell, many modern C++ features weren't even implemented by most available compilers in 1999.
Yes, it's off-topic. :) But what the hell..
It's not the same if you know that Willy was only really freed in the movie "Free Willy". After that, he/she (the actual animal) was still in some presumably too small water bassin. Only years, lot of protests and several tries later he was re-released into the wild, AFAIR (which was especially hard, since Willy just couln't cope with living on his/her own anymore).
btw, I stole this sentence from a .sig somebody
had on /. here a while ago. I like it and
it makes sense. Think freed code.
Ask "slaker", since it's him (or her) who wrote this.
I know quite some people with this attitude, and I'm afraid that most of them Just Don't Get It.
Most of the people writing Open Source software are doing it because they like to do it. That's all.
If somebody is doing something special just for the fun of it, you can't just kick him and say: "That's of no use for anybody, why don't you just do $THIS instead?"
Won't work at all if he's not interested in doing $THIS. Things just don't work this way. And this is a Good Thing[tm].
And, coming back to your question, no, the world wouldn't be a better place. :-) Definitely no.
[Footnote and rant: Maybe I should send good ol' George W. a mail asking him to do something different because that would make much more sense for everybody else than what he's doing at the moment. But I'm afraid this won't work either. He just likes what he's doing ATM too much, I'd guess.]
And remember that it's already hard to buy new NT4 licenses and it will become even harder when MS completely stops selling them (except from eBay, of course).
Yes, a free (as in bird, not as in Willy) replacement for NT4 could save quite a lot of companies that did "embedded NT4" and the like on their products until they had time to reimplement it for something less braindead.
You did read your EULA, didn't you?
Yeah... and put it in nicely colored pills and give you some VR helmet to use while you "eat" them.
Sometimes I really like marketing scientists (or is it scientist marketeers?).
Like: "Legacy" being the industrial term for "working"?
Shareholders are what brought at least one company I used to work for to bankruptcy. Once there were shares, they started to smell "big money", which started with telling all the employees on the very next full-company meeting that they can always be replaced, that the shareholders are now the uppermost important persons to please, customers came next, and then us.
Well, replacing year-long employees that know how the company was actually making money by Wallstreet junkies never seemed to be a good idea to me.
About one year later, there was nothing anymore to worry about.
You see, we're talking about a company that made real money before this IPO and shareholder shit. Sorry for being a bit angry, but shareholders are in no way more important than the people that work for a company, brought it up and have no choice but to see upper management start playing Bullshit Bingo.
I personally don't have any understanding about people buying shares of some company and not knowing (or not wanting to know but prefer to listen to quackers) about the risks. Shares are a game. Games are not where you should put your money if you REALLY need it. This only attracks all the sharks and destroys even more people's lifes that you never even heard about.
Chicks in metal bras are:
From the Autoclave website:
mmh, the "CAUTION" passus is not included in my man shred(1) from fileutils.
However, it is included in the .info texinfo page.
I really hate it when important info is hidden from the casual reader. (And the standard info(1) reader sucks like hell - pinfo(1) is one of the first things I install on a fresh system.)
Regarding ext3: If you really need it and you have root priviledges, remount as ext2, shred, and remount as ext3.
If you wipe, remember to take your device's physics into account.
Wipe it once when it is completely "cold" (computer has been turned off for at least several hours), then wipe it again after it has been running for an hour or so, and wipe it a third time after you've giving the disk some serious thrashing (that is, disk activity that moves the head around quite a bit).
The reason is temperature. Data is saved on circles on a magnetic medium. The read/write head has a certain amount of thickness, and so have the tracks on the platter (the tracks have to be a bit widther than the head is, to take thermal expansion into account so the head won't overwrite data on neighbour tracks).
So, for some specialized data recovery company, it may even be possible to recover different data from the same track, because after a while of use, a track can look like this:
---------------- Outer track end
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA Older data 1
BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB
BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB Actual data
BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB
CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC Older data 2
---------------- Inner track end
So, your drive will always read the data in 'B'. In 'C' there might still be data your computer saved when the drive had just spun up and was cold, while 'A' might still hold a copy of data that was written on very heavy disk activity when the drive was really hot.
To overwrite all of this data, you need to have the drive write in any of the temperature states that it has been in within this life.
"Simple" writing might only destroy all 'B' data and leave all 'A' and 'C' data intact on the drive, where they can be recovered.