I got to agree there is a `natural appeal' to it despite the valid arguments against that argument; once set besides each other you get to the comparison between cathedral and bazaar (when comparing windows to GNU/BSD type unixes), and the bazaar by its very open nature is more appealing.
But add to that also the `coolness factor' of GNU/BSD type OS vs MicroSoft. It is well documented that Linux rules the campus computer mentality if not the actual desktops. Once you are studying programming at college or university levels pretty much everywhere on this planet the peer pressure heavily favors unix. And these higher education facilities often are the grassroots of open source development.
So all in all I think MicroSoft is fighting a losing war vs open source / GNU / BSD.
I guess the real difference is in that ms type programming courses on intermediate levels are very practical in nature and are very application specific, while unix-type courses are still much more academical in nature although that is rapidly changing.
Whats your OS audience / community / tribe
on
Sniping at OpenBSD
·
· Score: 2
Those who require the tight security OpenBSD provides are also those who will have subscribed to the relevant OpenBSD announcement lists so they always have the opportunity to fix any problem that might lead to an exploit.
If you require tight security and yet you run an OS without the latest security patches youre asking for trouble no matter what OS you're using.
<I'm getting tired of this mode on>
At times its discouraging to see so much pointless bickering and the "My CPU/OS/GUI/Car/Race/Planet/Dogma is better than yours" and all the "neer neer neer" having to do with that attitude. And it makes me shake my head to in some cases to see some media pick up on it and actually present some of this dreary immature factionalism fit for the stone age as if it represents the viewpoint of any sizeable group or even project.
To say that OpenBSD "was hiding the truth" by not flooding BugTraq (while posting everything you ever wanted to know on their website and in their lists) is just that type of time wasting drivel. You wouldn't rely on the new york times to tell you about whats going on in Kansas city; no you rely on sources of information relevant to you and scaled to your domain.
<getting tired of this mode off>
Sorry about that, im actually still capable of getting worked up over this:)
It does work that way - it establishes a secure session by exchanging encryption keys, so the connection is secure whether or not the cert has been signed by a CA or not.
I guess this whole thing was created just to go through the motions of making it seem as if things are "Certified" by an "Authority". In the real world this doesn't mean much - anyone with a DBA can get a cert from a trusted CA. Anyone with $10 can set up a DBA (in some states of the states). And how would thawte or verisign know how to verify whether a business in Timbuktu or Kaliningrad is genuine...
An alternative would be to toss the CA concept and pull the domain name owners out of a whois database, and ask for any certificate whether we trust it or not by its own merits...
You're right, very few people are going to put a credit card into a site where MSIE warned them that quote "There is a problem with the site's security certificate". Netscape provides an identical warning. They would sooner punch in their number over a connection that doesnt have any SSL than punch it in after getting such a warning. And that is the funny part..
At thawte.com you can get 3rd level domain certs for $125 - they have excellent support too - even telling you how to get a cert out of an NT box and putting it into openssl.
Arrrr you know I have a TIMEX/Sinclair 1000 I think it is - I guess thats when the ZX81 was built by timex so I don't have a genuine ZX81. Had this great game called merchant of venus (or venice) where you had to steer a cargo vessel over Venus and dock at ports and make money. Really nice graphics and difficult steering to boot.
I have a 16k ram module so if anyone deperately needs to upgrade their $100 ZX81 let me know, it might still work:)
Re:Sense of security good but...
on
IRC Improvements
·
· Score: 1
not necessarily,
If you receive public keys from all users in a channel then its simply point to point encryption whenever you receive a message. Since the server probably will only forward instead of participate its not going to decrypt the info. I am thinking that keys are only exchanged between channel participants. In a busy channel that could be interesting as far as processor time on al the crypts is concerned.
In such a situation only a human or bot participant could log the conversation.
I would think that with the unification the very notion that Hong Kong now was again a part of China would change to a degree the mindset of the Chinese and accelerate their change into a consumer society.
And I guess that basically would define the difference between typically capitalist societies such as the USA, Hong Kong, Western Europe and some other places, and non-capitalist societies such as China's interior and large acres of the world. Capitalist societies are defined by being highly consumer product oriented and fitting into a global culture dominated by advertising & marketing (and recently internet). As long as China isn't blanketed by marketing & advertising like most of us are they probably won't feel a great need to `become consumers'.
But I guess traditionalists don't stand a chance, once people start wanting they'll start wanting it more and the consumer mind can flood China's interior quickly.
100mbps is fast relative to todays "consumer" broadband standards, but before the whole thing is layed out and the backbones are ready to support it, 100mbps wont be as fast as it seems now.
Its like putting a new road in some large urban area, by the moment its finally there, there are more than enough cars to fill it up.
I don't believe companies like ID software and Adobe will be quickly affected, eventually perhaps, but the perceived value of what they make and the lack of serious open-source competition will give them the run of the mill for quite a few more years.
But I do think eventually there will be extended toolkits available in the open source model that will allow anyone to develop games & special applications that can compete with top commercial alternatives.
What remains is custom programming for websites and specific implementations of programs such as mysql.
I'll never be a hardware person, i'm a lost cause. But someone tell me if I buy a 4x agp card is there any chance it won't work in my agp bus? The motherboard doesn't say anything about 1x 2x 4x never mind 8x agp.
A site with some links for hardware morons would be really nice:)
Did you try these tools out? I'm curious what your or anyones experience is. Too bad these threads run out so fast.
I've played with comparable tools but I find myself going back to writing code because I have to tell the computer explicitly about so much of what I want done.
I also think a lot of it has to do with the fact that i;ve been working in C since 1985 and there's a lot of calcificated resistance within the old pathways to try a new approach... Also I have to watch the size of my binaries and a higher level language always seems to bloat these up. Perhaps with you its even worse since coding in assembly gets you right down to the smallest possible footprint for your applications.
So what actually still is the difference between UNIX and GNU/Linux anyway? All the BSD's are unixes and most of them are opensource. You can run KDE on OpenBSD. You can compile most anything without a lot of tweaking on any *NIX.
Linux is a sapling of the Unix tree, Unix is alive, Linux proves that much. Whatever differences remain I think are going to be "converge", whatever differences there really are are historical and commercial.
if these guys are about defending anything and are in the military or security business then they have to be able to rely on an OS to be as secure as possible. Better than GNU/Linux in my mind would then be OpenBSD.
Opensource is great because it allows them to totally review whatever goes on in the OS and to tweak it to no end.
I use windows for two good reasons. One is to play games, two is to play with Adobe goodies.
I use GNU/Linux & OpenBSD for a great variety of other reasons - unfortunately not for gaming nor for working in Adobe.
I don't think the issue is to have them "break away from MS," if you value their opinion they need a system that does what they want it to do in the fashion they want it done. And then there are a great deal of choices, MS, Apple, GNU/Linux, BSD/UNIX, etc.
For the work that I do C and Perl work very nicely. I guess it depends on what you want to achieve.
I believe the very next great improvement in programming is not going to be some great development environment allowing us to glue together components - you're always stuck with learning the component and making the component do what you want it to do and often it doesn't allow you to do exactly what you need (ssh/scp instead of telnet/rcp).
No I think it's in the interface we use to program. My source codes are basically one dimensional lines of text expressing a logic that has a lot of variables interacting. The operational structure is in my head and the keyboard is a poor tool to translate the mind/logic to the practical/computer. I wouldn't know what type of input device would bring an improvement, I certainly don't think voice recognition will help programming, but I do believe that current languages are limited by the input devices we use to translate what is in our mind. Once such a device becomes available programming languages will start to reflect it.
I wont be surprised that when you go behind the scenes at IBM to look at the people who build linux into a watch and stash 20.000 linux instance into the large servers you'll find gear heads wearing black death metal shirts saying "hey thats cool dude" and "lets build a mobile beowulf cluster out of these watches".
Maybe not to those extremes but if you want to keep the creative programming and computer talent indoors nowadays you have to give them a lot of leeway, allow them their style, allow them their quirks. And I guess in case of IBM allow them to put their weird ideas to practise, give them a budget and silently wonder what in fact they are really doing. Give a gold watch and a suit to your sales people who can sell the gadgets the gear heads will eventually develop.
If you look at how things are developing in Linux where the shells and tools available in it are continuing to evolve I am not sure the MS stance on making shell a thing of the past is still a thing to endorse. They had or still have the notion that an OS needs to be totally graphical to have the greatest appeal, and yet all power users are used to having to append to the command line, set up scripting or type in a shell.
Someone else suggested they should start using bash - and why not expand the capabilities of the dos shell they have and make it a much more integrated part of windows instead of an ugly child that should be there for whatever reasons.
It's assuming that "small" also means "small screen" - but with a wearable PC you have a small full capability computer without a screen but one that projects the image onto your retina.
Perhaps for the next decade a late model PC will be large and hefty - with siginificant power consumption and heat generation. But techniques are getting more and more refined and maybe by the time processor speed has tripled, they will be more compact because componens will be so small they have to be frictionless. Eventually the photon will supersede the electron also within the CPU.
But that's quite a few years away, so until then yeah we'll walk around with gadgets and the real power is something we have to sit behind:)
Doom: I guess it will be impossible to give the same shock of immersion most of us had when we first fired up doom, heard the music, and the grunts of the sergeants at the armor.
It's totally fascinating! When I read those articles about tiny components showing incredible wear and tear under a microscope after just a few motions I thougth we'd be decades away from these kinds of development. And I never thought buckyballs could be used to do anything with anytime soon. But they got a 'nanotube' moving within another one! Already! These guys are doing some amazing things.
Looks like it that at these levels of size you find normal mechanical properties and semi-quantum properties such as the van der waals force combine and actually improve the function of these tubes, a van der waals bearing instead of a ball bearing.
Slashdot Mirror
But add to that also the `coolness factor' of GNU/BSD type OS vs MicroSoft. It is well documented that Linux rules the campus computer mentality if not the actual desktops. Once you are studying programming at college or university levels pretty much everywhere on this planet the peer pressure heavily favors unix. And these higher education facilities often are the grassroots of open source development.
So all in all I think MicroSoft is fighting a losing war vs open source / GNU / BSD.
I guess the real difference is in that ms type programming courses on intermediate levels are very practical in nature and are very application specific, while unix-type courses are still much more academical in nature although that is rapidly changing.
If you require tight security and yet you run an OS without the latest security patches youre asking for trouble no matter what OS you're using.
<I'm getting tired of this mode on>
At times its discouraging to see so much pointless bickering and the "My CPU/OS/GUI/Car/Race/Planet/Dogma is better than yours" and all the "neer neer neer" having to do with that attitude. And it makes me shake my head to in some cases to see some media pick up on it and actually present some of this dreary immature factionalism fit for the stone age as if it represents the viewpoint of any sizeable group or even project.
To say that OpenBSD "was hiding the truth" by not flooding BugTraq (while posting everything you ever wanted to know on their website and in their lists) is just that type of time wasting drivel. You wouldn't rely on the new york times to tell you about whats going on in Kansas city; no you rely on sources of information relevant to you and scaled to your domain.
<getting tired of this mode off>
Sorry about that, im actually still capable of getting worked up over this :)
thanks for the RPM's and the fast mirror bero - you're a cool frood :)
I guess this whole thing was created just to go through the motions of making it seem as if things are "Certified" by an "Authority". In the real world this doesn't mean much - anyone with a DBA can get a cert from a trusted CA. Anyone with $10 can set up a DBA (in some states of the states). And how would thawte or verisign know how to verify whether a business in Timbuktu or Kaliningrad is genuine...
An alternative would be to toss the CA concept and pull the domain name owners out of a whois database, and ask for any certificate whether we trust it or not by its own merits...
At thawte.com you can get 3rd level domain certs for $125 - they have excellent support too - even telling you how to get a cert out of an NT box and putting it into openssl.
Son: "Dad, how come the batteries are dead?"
Dad: "Errrrrr..."
actually if i remember correctly the zx81 had more like a 40x20 screen without colors at 8 bit a character that would be 800 bytes.
I have a 16k ram module so if anyone deperately needs to upgrade their $100 ZX81 let me know, it might still work :)
If you receive public keys from all users in a channel then its simply point to point encryption whenever you receive a message. Since the server probably will only forward instead of participate its not going to decrypt the info. I am thinking that keys are only exchanged between channel participants. In a busy channel that could be interesting as far as processor time on al the crypts is concerned.
In such a situation only a human or bot participant could log the conversation.
And I guess that basically would define the difference between typically capitalist societies such as the USA, Hong Kong, Western Europe and some other places, and non-capitalist societies such as China's interior and large acres of the world. Capitalist societies are defined by being highly consumer product oriented and fitting into a global culture dominated by advertising & marketing (and recently internet). As long as China isn't blanketed by marketing & advertising like most of us are they probably won't feel a great need to `become consumers'.
But I guess traditionalists don't stand a chance, once people start wanting they'll start wanting it more and the consumer mind can flood China's interior quickly.
Is this a good thing? Resistance is futile.
Its like putting a new road in some large urban area, by the moment its finally there, there are more than enough cars to fill it up.
But I do think eventually there will be extended toolkits available in the open source model that will allow anyone to develop games & special applications that can compete with top commercial alternatives.
What remains is custom programming for websites and specific implementations of programs such as mysql.
You could use http://www.linuxnewbie.com/. http://www.linux.com/ seems to be very newbie oriented too.
What do you know...
I'll never be a hardware person, i'm a lost cause. But someone tell me if I buy a 4x agp card is there any chance it won't work in my agp bus? The motherboard doesn't say anything about 1x 2x 4x never mind 8x agp.
A site with some links for hardware morons would be really nice :)
Would it not be be cool if adobe would hop onto one of the X gui bandwagons! Good font support is crucial.
I've played with comparable tools but I find myself going back to writing code because I have to tell the computer explicitly about so much of what I want done.
I also think a lot of it has to do with the fact that i;ve been working in C since 1985 and there's a lot of calcificated resistance within the old pathways to try a new approach... Also I have to watch the size of my binaries and a higher level language always seems to bloat these up. Perhaps with you its even worse since coding in assembly gets you right down to the smallest possible footprint for your applications.
Linux is a sapling of the Unix tree, Unix is alive, Linux proves that much. Whatever differences remain I think are going to be "converge", whatever differences there really are are historical and commercial.
if these guys are about defending anything and are in the military or security business then they have to be able to rely on an OS to be as secure as possible. Better than GNU/Linux in my mind would then be OpenBSD.
Opensource is great because it allows them to totally review whatever goes on in the OS and to tweak it to no end.
I use windows for two good reasons. One is to play games, two is to play with Adobe goodies.
I use GNU/Linux & OpenBSD for a great variety of other reasons - unfortunately not for gaming nor for working in Adobe.
I don't think the issue is to have them "break away from MS," if you value their opinion they need a system that does what they want it to do in the fashion they want it done. And then there are a great deal of choices, MS, Apple, GNU/Linux, BSD/UNIX, etc.
I believe the very next great improvement in programming is not going to be some great development environment allowing us to glue together components - you're always stuck with learning the component and making the component do what you want it to do and often it doesn't allow you to do exactly what you need (ssh/scp instead of telnet/rcp).
No I think it's in the interface we use to program. My source codes are basically one dimensional lines of text expressing a logic that has a lot of variables interacting. The operational structure is in my head and the keyboard is a poor tool to translate the mind/logic to the practical/computer. I wouldn't know what type of input device would bring an improvement, I certainly don't think voice recognition will help programming, but I do believe that current languages are limited by the input devices we use to translate what is in our mind. Once such a device becomes available programming languages will start to reflect it.
Maybe not to those extremes but if you want to keep the creative programming and computer talent indoors nowadays you have to give them a lot of leeway, allow them their style, allow them their quirks. And I guess in case of IBM allow them to put their weird ideas to practise, give them a budget and silently wonder what in fact they are really doing. Give a gold watch and a suit to your sales people who can sell the gadgets the gear heads will eventually develop.
Someone else suggested they should start using bash - and why not expand the capabilities of the dos shell they have and make it a much more integrated part of windows instead of an ugly child that should be there for whatever reasons.
Perhaps for the next decade a late model PC will be large and hefty - with siginificant power consumption and heat generation. But techniques are getting more and more refined and maybe by the time processor speed has tripled, they will be more compact because componens will be so small they have to be frictionless. Eventually the photon will supersede the electron also within the CPU.
But that's quite a few years away, so until then yeah we'll walk around with gadgets and the real power is something we have to sit behind :)
The review at Gamespot seems to indicate its ok.
Doom: I guess it will be impossible to give the same shock of immersion most of us had when we first fired up doom, heard the music, and the grunts of the sergeants at the armor.
Looks like it that at these levels of size you find normal mechanical properties and semi-quantum properties such as the van der waals force combine and actually improve the function of these tubes, a van der waals bearing instead of a ball bearing.