TextMate on OS X has spell checking functionality that is semi-useful, but it's not really "aggressive" enough, and there doesn't seem to be a way to make it such with prefs/configuration.
You can right-click on any "word" (variable name, subroutine name, whatever, just generally a whitespace-delimited group of characters) and it will check the spelling and present alternatives in the context menu. It also recognizes things like perl's sigils so correcting '$teh' turns into '$the', not 'the'.
It _won't_ automatically check spelling except in strings (so e.g. if I have '$teh = "This is a tset.";', 'tset' will be underlined, '$teh' won't). It doesn't include comments in its automatic checking either, which is probably the most annoying part about it.
Overall I typically just don't bother with it, but someone _has_ thought along these lines, at least.
XP requires drivers for SATA drives, but XP was released years before SATA drives were available. You can't really fault an OS for not supporting hardware that didn't exist when it was written.
So, you're saying Windows XP is out-of-date, and was in that state for at least three years before Vista was released. And now you have to pay to update to Vista, which has all sorts of things you might not want, just to be able to install the OS without a separate driver disk.
How exactly is this an improvement over the condition stated in the original complaint?
Apps are not what attracted me to a Mac (though I'll admit I'm an atypical user in many ways). In fact, now that I'm using a Mac, there aren't many "Mac" apps I really use:
I use Mail.app for my personal mail through an accident of history (and it doesn't matter much, as everything's stored on my IMAP server these days), but Thunderbird for work. One of these days I'll transition my personal mail back to Thunderbird, too.
I use Adium for IM, but primarily because gaim doesn't have a native Cocoa port. Really, Adium is just gaim for OS X. Even uses gaim's IM library in the backend.
My primary browser is Firefox. I jump to Safari only on the rare occasion something doesn't seem to like Firefox. Were I on a more typical Unix box, I'd try Konqueror or maybe Opera in such cases.
I use iTunes, but I'm not all that attached to it. Makes dealing with my iPod easier, but I had the Mac before I had the iPod.
For the limited graphics work I do, The GIMP.
"Office" work is all OpenOffice.
The only truly "Mac" app I'm really attached to is TextMate, which I've come to love. In the end, though, it's far from indispensable. I used vi(m) for everything before finding it.
There's also Preview, Image Capture, and DVD Player, but to me it's just "oh, it's nice having those built in, ready to go, and polished" versus having to go out and find them or muck with their configuration.
The other apps I commonly use day-to-day on my PowerBook are, I kid you not, Terminal, bash, bc, perl, vim, ssh, and grep. In no particular order. Plus the perforce command-line client for checking code in and out at work.
No, while it's nice sometimes having a more widely-supported system (don't need WINE for Blizzard games, for instance), the draw for me was about having a system that didn't get in my way and just worked. Fewer gotchas and rough edges than any Linux distribution, greater stability and less outright lunacy than Windows. And while one can make many legitimate arguments (some of which I'll agree with) about why the closed-ness of the Mac is a bad thing, as a practical matter it's been a plus for me that Apple controls both the OS and the major hardware components.
I got a Mac so I could concentrate on getting things done, not to get access to new gee-whiz apps. In fact, before I got my PowerBook, I double-checked with some fellow Unix geek friends who had PowerBooks that a couple things important to me ran without any issues.
I have a question. If you actually _need_ a standard Unix system as your primary desktop, why the hell would you buy a Mac in the first place? What possible attraction could there be? You pay a premium for the hardware and get a system that, though it actually _is_ really Unix, despite what you seem to think, differs in some very important ways from most Unix systems.
You seem to be ragging on OS X and its users just because it doesn't do what _you_ want it to. If it doesn't meet your needs, that's fine, but it's no reason to be an ass.
Personally, I'm a unix geek, and I've been a happy PowerBook owner since late 2005. It works great as a desktop that "just works" + a unix command line environment, which is precisely what many of us are after. If you need to do heavy lifting that really _needs_ a typical *nix environment, OS X helpfully provides OpenSSH right in the default install. Login to your Linux box and go nuts.
And if you just don't like Macs, that's fine, too. But your reasons for insulting OS X and its users are specious at best.
Define "developer". Our developers do amazingly cool shit with embedded Linux boxes, but most of them couldn't admin their way out of a paper bag.
"How do I add a user?" "How do I restart Apache?" "Is there a flag for tar to...?" "How does RAID work?" "Can you put DDR RAM in a box that takes DDR2?"
And of course they never seem to know what "ATA" is, but they all know what "SATA" is. Don't ask me how that works. Then there's the networking questions my mother could answer.
The problem with the right/left view of politics is that it doesn't really mean anything. Free software users often have a strong libertarian streak. It doesn't always manifest in the same way (some are _real_ libertarians, some are economic libertarians, some are social libertarians (which has an applicable double meaning) like me) but depending on time, place, and context, they could all end up being seen as "right-wing", "left-wing", or "moderate".
If the site were in-country with in-country bank accounts, the authorities would just search those records directly. This gets them the exact same information. No more, no less. The parameters are narrowly-defined, reasonable, and the activity in question clearly illegal. The risk to innocents is at least as low as going at it from the other direction (looking at the records on the receiving end).
How about the increased understanding of and accurate diagnosis of autism and autism-related disorders around that time?
How about the repetitive nature of television programming, especially kids shows, appealing to autistics as a source of consistency and comfort?
How about the fact that the places getting cable were also the places getting elevated concentrations of geeks, who seem to have genetic quirks that have this tendancy to result in autism-like disorders? Could that POSSIBLY have ANYTHING to do with a rise in autism in Washington, _Oregon_, and *CALIFORNIA*?
What you're missing in your rush to find something wrong with the plan is that the version flagging is NOT being applied site-wide -- it is being used as a less-restrictive alternative to full- and semi-protection currently applied to SOME pages, the result being that users previously unable to edit those pages AT ALL will be able to edit them, but the changes won't be displayed by default to random non-logged-in ("anonymous") users until their edits have been flagged as not-vandalism (though they'll still available to everyone).
> for avg users hard drives seem to be at risk of 'crashing' or 'dying' suddenly...
And you think they aren't??
In a small company with ~160 hot drives (all good quality, and the systems are well-maintained), we lose one every three weeks or so. That's in the neighborhood of 10% per year. I'm sure the failure rate is lower for cold drives, but when it comes down to it, most drive failures I see don't seem to be gross mechanical failures, they're the platters saying "oops! I suck, send me back".
Hell, just today I stuck a dormant drive in a duplicator and the damn thing started spitting bad sector errors at me. The disk, straight from the factory, had been written to _exactly_ once, about two months ago, powered up and read from start to finish 2 or 3 times since, and had otherwise been sitting in an anti-static bag in a padded drawer.
If the LTO cartridges and DVD-Rs we do backups to had that kind of failure rate, we'd be out of business.
If they're not a sysadmin, they don't need the root password. They probably don't need sudo, either. If they have the former, your internal policies are broken. If they have the latter, you better be damn sure of why. sudo is far from foolproof. It's almost exactly like making select binaries suid root and available only to a specific group, except that it's more convenient (good), and introduces an extra suid root binary that could have a security bug (bad).
If they are a sysadmin, and we're talking production servers, they're either qualified to decide what's best for their particular situation, in which case you really don't need to be questioning them (if their judgement isn't trustworthy, what the HELL are they doing in a sysadmin position?) and you're just wasting everyone's time, or they're just generally incompetent, in which case either the IT department will eventually be taken over by someone competent and the house will be cleaned, or the company will die a slow and painful death. Either way, it's all pretty moot.
The enigma-client installation instructions explicitly tell users to replace "nominal" with a strong random password and provide precise instructions on how to do so. If you're too stupid to follow such simple instructions, you deserve to have your system compromised.
I think you're gonna find just a low concentration of minorities in tech, period. A sad number of blacks and hispanics still don't get a decent education, and live in environments that aren't suited to independent development of the necessary skills. On top of which, many of those that _do_ develop the skills are going to be more concerned with putting food on the table than doing FOSS work that usually results in little or no actual pay. When you start subtracting the percentages from the percentages, you end up with pretty low estimates in general.
That said, for Americans, it can be hard to reliably tell much about someone's ethnicity by their name, especially for African-Americans, whose names are often just plain ol' Western names if their families weren't post-slavery immigrants. So just because a person's name doesn't sound "ethnic" doesn't mean they're white. On the 'net, there's no way to know what colour someone's skin is.
I dunno if the product you're looking at can handle this, but in principle, just because three points of reference theoretically allows a perfect calculation doesn't mean you can't add more to provide greater resolution in an error-prone environment.
I don't know where you people keep pulling this crap from. There's so many problems with it.
1) Jimbo is more libertarian than anything else, that's not right-wing, that's "get the hell off my back".
2) I'm about as left-wing as it gets without being classified as insane, and I find Wikipedia to have a greater problem with left-wing bias than anything else.
Where is all this supposed right-wing bias? Point us to it, it'll get fixed. Stop just spouting nonesense.
Wikipedia has no restrictions on linking to articles whatsoever. It would be completely counter to the very foundation and culture. If google just wanted to link directly to Wikipedia articles, they could just go ahead and do it.
The Wikimedia Foundation would send google packing if they demanded any such exclusive deal. None of the directors would stand for it, much less the many other participants in the various Wikimedia projects.
Unfortunately, it's virtually impossible, as every multiplayer game has painfully discovered at some point. You can't have the client doing ANY meaningful processing and maintain the integrity of the game, because the client WILL be hacked to death by people looking for an advantage. EVERYTHING has to be verified server-side, and you can't send ANY information to the client without assuming that the player is going to see it.
Peer-to-peer networking games like Starcraft, Diablo (1), Warcraft II (are we sensing a Blizzard theme here?:P) have long suffered from these issues, and these same issues have created problems for client-server games from Quake to EverQuest. Ask an Ultima Online player to tell you about the importance of server-side collision detection sometime.
All the encryption/obfuscation and client version checking in the world won't help you do client-side processing securely. Somehow the code has to be executable, and if it's executable, it's crackable.
You just can't let the client do anything important, because somebody will figure out how to exploit it.
You don't sound trollish, you just sound ignorant.
1) I did not say Unix cannot have privilege escalation vulnerabilities. Like any multi-user operating system that implements actual privileges, it can. I said that Windows and Windows software is "riddled" with such vulnerabilities, as in it has a ridiculous number of them.
2) I'm not talking about buffer overflows, I'm talking about privilege escalation. While the former can lead to the latter, the latter does not require the former. Buffer overflows are not the only attack vector.
3) MacOS was not a multi-user operating system, and as such the concept of privilege escalation simply did not exist in it.
4) VMS is not "written in Modula" (http://h71000.www7.hp.com/wizard/faq/vmsfaq_001.h tml#vms8), nor is it a Unix in any normal sense (simple ability to run Unix applications does not make an OS a Unix).
Windows and Windows software (especially, sadly, security software) is riddled with privilege escalation vulnerabilities. If you have full control over a "normal" user account on a Windows system, you've got a better than 50/50 shot at aquiring full administrator/"root" access.
Traditional HDDs make great workhorses, and they'll be around for a long time to come, but I doubt if we'll ever see any huge improvements over the current top-end drives. Their basis is fifty-year-old technology, and conceptually they do very little. There comes a point when you're pretty much tapped out of revolutionary improvements.
Prices will continue to improve, and I'm sure we'll see gradual space and speed improvements for a while, but the future lies elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
TextMate on OS X has spell checking functionality that is semi-useful, but it's not really "aggressive" enough, and there doesn't seem to be a way to make it such with prefs/configuration.
You can right-click on any "word" (variable name, subroutine name, whatever, just generally a whitespace-delimited group of characters) and it will check the spelling and present alternatives in the context menu. It also recognizes things like perl's sigils so correcting '$teh' turns into '$the', not 'the'.
It _won't_ automatically check spelling except in strings (so e.g. if I have '$teh = "This is a tset.";', 'tset' will be underlined, '$teh' won't). It doesn't include comments in its automatic checking either, which is probably the most annoying part about it.
Overall I typically just don't bother with it, but someone _has_ thought along these lines, at least.
XP requires drivers for SATA drives, but XP was released years before SATA drives were available. You can't really fault an OS for not supporting hardware that didn't exist when it was written.
So, you're saying Windows XP is out-of-date, and was in that state for at least three years before Vista was released. And now you have to pay to update to Vista, which has all sorts of things you might not want, just to be able to install the OS without a separate driver disk.
How exactly is this an improvement over the condition stated in the original complaint?
Apps are not what attracted me to a Mac (though I'll admit I'm an atypical user in many ways). In fact, now that I'm using a Mac, there aren't many "Mac" apps I really use:
I use Mail.app for my personal mail through an accident of history (and it doesn't matter much, as everything's stored on my IMAP server these days), but Thunderbird for work. One of these days I'll transition my personal mail back to Thunderbird, too.
I use Adium for IM, but primarily because gaim doesn't have a native Cocoa port. Really, Adium is just gaim for OS X. Even uses gaim's IM library in the backend.
My primary browser is Firefox. I jump to Safari only on the rare occasion something doesn't seem to like Firefox. Were I on a more typical Unix box, I'd try Konqueror or maybe Opera in such cases.
I use iTunes, but I'm not all that attached to it. Makes dealing with my iPod easier, but I had the Mac before I had the iPod.
For the limited graphics work I do, The GIMP.
"Office" work is all OpenOffice.
The only truly "Mac" app I'm really attached to is TextMate, which I've come to love. In the end, though, it's far from indispensable. I used vi(m) for everything before finding it.
There's also Preview, Image Capture, and DVD Player, but to me it's just "oh, it's nice having those built in, ready to go, and polished" versus having to go out and find them or muck with their configuration.
The other apps I commonly use day-to-day on my PowerBook are, I kid you not, Terminal, bash, bc, perl, vim, ssh, and grep. In no particular order. Plus the perforce command-line client for checking code in and out at work.
No, while it's nice sometimes having a more widely-supported system (don't need WINE for Blizzard games, for instance), the draw for me was about having a system that didn't get in my way and just worked. Fewer gotchas and rough edges than any Linux distribution, greater stability and less outright lunacy than Windows. And while one can make many legitimate arguments (some of which I'll agree with) about why the closed-ness of the Mac is a bad thing, as a practical matter it's been a plus for me that Apple controls both the OS and the major hardware components.
I got a Mac so I could concentrate on getting things done, not to get access to new gee-whiz apps. In fact, before I got my PowerBook, I double-checked with some fellow Unix geek friends who had PowerBooks that a couple things important to me ran without any issues.
I have a question. If you actually _need_ a standard Unix system as your primary desktop, why the hell would you buy a Mac in the first place? What possible attraction could there be? You pay a premium for the hardware and get a system that, though it actually _is_ really Unix, despite what you seem to think, differs in some very important ways from most Unix systems.
You seem to be ragging on OS X and its users just because it doesn't do what _you_ want it to. If it doesn't meet your needs, that's fine, but it's no reason to be an ass.
Personally, I'm a unix geek, and I've been a happy PowerBook owner since late 2005. It works great as a desktop that "just works" + a unix command line environment, which is precisely what many of us are after. If you need to do heavy lifting that really _needs_ a typical *nix environment, OS X helpfully provides OpenSSH right in the default install. Login to your Linux box and go nuts.
And if you just don't like Macs, that's fine, too. But your reasons for insulting OS X and its users are specious at best.
Define "developer". Our developers do amazingly cool shit with embedded Linux boxes, but most of them couldn't admin their way out of a paper bag.
"How do I add a user?" "How do I restart Apache?" "Is there a flag for tar to...?" "How does RAID work?" "Can you put DDR RAM in a box that takes DDR2?"
And of course they never seem to know what "ATA" is, but they all know what "SATA" is. Don't ask me how that works. Then there's the networking questions my mother could answer.
Maybe you should have a slightly better idea of who it is you're responding to before you start being snotty:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Perens
The problem with the right/left view of politics is that it doesn't really mean anything. Free software users often have a strong libertarian streak. It doesn't always manifest in the same way (some are _real_ libertarians, some are economic libertarians, some are social libertarians (which has an applicable double meaning) like me) but depending on time, place, and context, they could all end up being seen as "right-wing", "left-wing", or "moderate".
If the site were in-country with in-country bank accounts, the authorities would just search those records directly. This gets them the exact same information. No more, no less. The parameters are narrowly-defined, reasonable, and the activity in question clearly illegal. The risk to innocents is at least as low as going at it from the other direction (looking at the records on the receiving end).
Could there POSSIBLY be other factors at work?
How about the increased understanding of and accurate diagnosis of autism and autism-related disorders around that time?
How about the repetitive nature of television programming, especially kids shows, appealing to autistics as a source of consistency and comfort?
How about the fact that the places getting cable were also the places getting elevated concentrations of geeks, who seem to have genetic quirks that have this tendancy to result in autism-like disorders? Could that POSSIBLY have ANYTHING to do with a rise in autism in Washington, _Oregon_, and *CALIFORNIA*?
What you're missing in your rush to find something wrong with the plan is that the version flagging is NOT being applied site-wide -- it is being used as a less-restrictive alternative to full- and semi-protection currently applied to SOME pages, the result being that users previously unable to edit those pages AT ALL will be able to edit them, but the changes won't be displayed by default to random non-logged-in ("anonymous") users until their edits have been flagged as not-vandalism (though they'll still available to everyone).
> for avg users hard drives seem to be at risk of 'crashing' or 'dying' suddenly...
And you think they aren't??
In a small company with ~160 hot drives (all good quality, and the systems are well-maintained), we lose one every three weeks or so. That's in the neighborhood of 10% per year. I'm sure the failure rate is lower for cold drives, but when it comes down to it, most drive failures I see don't seem to be gross mechanical failures, they're the platters saying "oops! I suck, send me back".
Hell, just today I stuck a dormant drive in a duplicator and the damn thing started spitting bad sector errors at me. The disk, straight from the factory, had been written to _exactly_ once, about two months ago, powered up and read from start to finish 2 or 3 times since, and had otherwise been sitting in an anti-static bag in a padded drawer.
If the LTO cartridges and DVD-Rs we do backups to had that kind of failure rate, we'd be out of business.
If they're not a sysadmin, they don't need the root password. They probably don't need sudo, either. If they have the former, your internal policies are broken. If they have the latter, you better be damn sure of why. sudo is far from foolproof. It's almost exactly like making select binaries suid root and available only to a specific group, except that it's more convenient (good), and introduces an extra suid root binary that could have a security bug (bad).
If they are a sysadmin, and we're talking production servers, they're either qualified to decide what's best for their particular situation, in which case you really don't need to be questioning them (if their judgement isn't trustworthy, what the HELL are they doing in a sysadmin position?) and you're just wasting everyone's time, or they're just generally incompetent, in which case either the IT department will eventually be taken over by someone competent and the house will be cleaned, or the company will die a slow and painful death. Either way, it's all pretty moot.
Make sure your resume is up-to-date.
The enigma-client installation instructions explicitly tell users to replace "nominal" with a strong random password and provide precise instructions on how to do so. If you're too stupid to follow such simple instructions, you deserve to have your system compromised.
l ient-winXP-Pro-install.html
http://www.bytereef.org/howto/m4-project/enigma-c
I think you're gonna find just a low concentration of minorities in tech, period. A sad number of blacks and hispanics still don't get a decent education, and live in environments that aren't suited to independent development of the necessary skills. On top of which, many of those that _do_ develop the skills are going to be more concerned with putting food on the table than doing FOSS work that usually results in little or no actual pay. When you start subtracting the percentages from the percentages, you end up with pretty low estimates in general.
That said, for Americans, it can be hard to reliably tell much about someone's ethnicity by their name, especially for African-Americans, whose names are often just plain ol' Western names if their families weren't post-slavery immigrants. So just because a person's name doesn't sound "ethnic" doesn't mean they're white. On the 'net, there's no way to know what colour someone's skin is.
Like all Ars Technica articles, the full article is viewable on the website for free, and paid members can download it in a PDF form.
I dunno if the product you're looking at can handle this, but in principle, just because three points of reference theoretically allows a perfect calculation doesn't mean you can't add more to provide greater resolution in an error-prone environment.
I don't know where you people keep pulling this crap from. There's so many problems with it.
1) Jimbo is more libertarian than anything else, that's not right-wing, that's "get the hell off my back".
2) I'm about as left-wing as it gets without being classified as insane, and I find Wikipedia to have a greater problem with left-wing bias than anything else.
Where is all this supposed right-wing bias? Point us to it, it'll get fixed. Stop just spouting nonesense.
Wikipedia has no restrictions on linking to articles whatsoever. It would be completely counter to the very foundation and culture. If google just wanted to link directly to Wikipedia articles, they could just go ahead and do it.
We'll adapt. It's not as if we've been unable to survive this long. Google is going to make it *easier*, it's not our only hope.
The Wikimedia Foundation would send google packing if they demanded any such exclusive deal. None of the directors would stand for it, much less the many other participants in the various Wikimedia projects.
Not so much, no, not if you're in the US and in range of your telco CO.
One word: Speakeasy.
http://www.speakeasy.net/
Unfortunately, it's virtually impossible, as every multiplayer game has painfully discovered at some point. You can't have the client doing ANY meaningful processing and maintain the integrity of the game, because the client WILL be hacked to death by people looking for an advantage. EVERYTHING has to be verified server-side, and you can't send ANY information to the client without assuming that the player is going to see it.
:P) have long suffered from these issues, and these same issues have created problems for client-server games from Quake to EverQuest. Ask an Ultima Online player to tell you about the importance of server-side collision detection sometime.
Peer-to-peer networking games like Starcraft, Diablo (1), Warcraft II (are we sensing a Blizzard theme here?
All the encryption/obfuscation and client version checking in the world won't help you do client-side processing securely. Somehow the code has to be executable, and if it's executable, it's crackable.
You just can't let the client do anything important, because somebody will figure out how to exploit it.
You don't sound trollish, you just sound ignorant.
h tml#vms8), nor is it a Unix in any normal sense (simple ability to run Unix applications does not make an OS a Unix).
1) I did not say Unix cannot have privilege escalation vulnerabilities. Like any multi-user operating system that implements actual privileges, it can. I said that Windows and Windows software is "riddled" with such vulnerabilities, as in it has a ridiculous number of them.
2) I'm not talking about buffer overflows, I'm talking about privilege escalation. While the former can lead to the latter, the latter does not require the former. Buffer overflows are not the only attack vector.
3) MacOS was not a multi-user operating system, and as such the concept of privilege escalation simply did not exist in it.
4) VMS is not "written in Modula" (http://h71000.www7.hp.com/wizard/faq/vmsfaq_001.
Windows and Windows software (especially, sadly, security software) is riddled with privilege escalation vulnerabilities. If you have full control over a "normal" user account on a Windows system, you've got a better than 50/50 shot at aquiring full administrator/"root" access.
Traditional HDDs make great workhorses, and they'll be around for a long time to come, but I doubt if we'll ever see any huge improvements over the current top-end drives. Their basis is fifty-year-old technology, and conceptually they do very little. There comes a point when you're pretty much tapped out of revolutionary improvements.
Prices will continue to improve, and I'm sure we'll see gradual space and speed improvements for a while, but the future lies elsewhere.