If you use a Jabber server, you have to use a Jabber client (I believe). If your Jabber server has the right transports it can handle Yahoo, AIM/ICQ and MSN.
However you're right, this only solves -your- end of it, your friend on the Yahoo server can't have non-Yahoo buddies (you just appear as a Yahoo buddy to them using your Yahoo account through the Jabber transport), but it will solve the problems on your end.
Jabber does at least the first 2 items you mention (trans-system buddies in the client, server can route between systems). If I read it correctly it also does the third. In fact, those things are exactly what Jabber is meant for and also does presence notification.
Yes, it means you have 4 different accounts for each of the 4 systems, so it is not exactly what you want, but it is a reasonable approximation and could be used in a scenario where a company didn't want to pay MS for their middleware. The biggest problem you have is when one of those systems changes their protocol.
I also am waiting for that time when I can use a generic client without a middleware server (Jabber or MS) to send messages to a multi-system address space. Unfortunately for now that system is email.
Still, the Moderator can not arbitrarily ban someone at another's request.
And if a comment is so poorly received that it can be modded down so many times as to do an auto-ban, perhaps that should be a signal to the user that they are in the wrong place.
While I think perhaps auto-bans should expire after a given time (perhaps they do), I do not disagree with the admins' choice to not interfere.
What I might want to see is auto-ban meta moderation, so that meta moderators could view a thread and judge whether the poster's ban is proper. Say 10 votes allowed and a 70% in-favor vote required to lift the ban.
If it uses middleware to translate between them, then it most certainly does sound like Jabber. GAIM, no, Jabber yes.
However even though this uses MS middleware, it could still be a good thing as it might make MSN/Yahoo/AIM less likely to break their protocols just to stymie the open source clients. Maybe not, maybe they will just tell MS to update their middleware, but no way to tell just yet.
After seeing the mediocre results of our wedding photos (some were great, others looked like cheesy glamor shots) I am convinced that unless you pay over $5000 you are probably just as well off hiring someone who needs you more than you need them.
I know of many photography students who have shown better work than this guy (they didn't -suck- or we'd have told him to piss off) and will almost certainly bite at the chance to do so for 1/2 the cost or well less (including surrenduring the copyright).
I have a friend who did this, then his siblings arranged the photos and had them professionally mounted. Total cost was far less than what it would have cost to have a photo pro do it all (and often the photo pro doesn't do the layout/mounting, they subcontract it).
If you have a school in your area, see if there is a bulletin board around the photography area. If not, see if there are any amateur groups in your area. Ask to see a portrait portfolio. You should have enough bites to find one that will work well.
I would pay more money for a new chapter of Fallout, with the same graphics as before, than I would for Doom 3.
I think the stuff going into Half-Life 2 is awesome, but I -still- would have wanted the game if it looked the same as before (ok, some higher resolution textures would be good but the engine worked well). Most of my gripes with 3D games have been on the mechanics side of things, not the whizbang graphics side.
I wouldn't mind seeing a 3D treatment of my all-time favorite Squarez! but it would be QUITE well handled with 5 year-old graphics technology.
Games should focus on being -games- first... enjoyable, fun, repeatable OR with tons of content (if not repeatable). The benefit of having the most up to date graphics engine will quickly wear off if the game itself is not up to par.
I am not saying that people who want to tweak an engine to use every possible CPU cycle should be fired, merely:
a) That should not be the focus of the game (in other words, don't expect me to want to play just because it looks pretty)
b) That a game should never be SO far out on the bleeding edge that only a small percentage of rigs can run it. Doom 3 seems to be close to this bleeding edge but probably not quite too far based on specs I've read... but beware that any more hardware limit will severely limit your market as well.
As I replied to another on this thread, no Moderator can do that. It requires higher permissions to ban someone. And generally speaking asking for someone who has those higher permissions (as in a/. administrator) by posting something like "Mods, ban this guy" is kind of like walking up to a random table in the cafeteria and saying something to a manager, hoping he'll be close enough to hear what you say.
If someone does something offensive enough to need admin attention, they only way of being sure it gets that attention is to send a note to the/. admins directly. They do respond to email (at least they did both times I sent in a note). "Mods" can't do anything other than moderate a message up or down.
a) Are you sure it didn't just get modded to -1 oblivion (if it was your post then I'll buy it since you can track that alot easier)?
b) If that happened it wasn't a Mod... a Moderator is just a/. user with 5 mod points on a random day who moderates your post. To be deleted it has to be done by an Admin... you know, one of those few folks who actually run/. There is a big distinction between the two.
And again I point out that that is exactly what was supposed to happen with MAC addresses. See previous posts. Less likely with RFID, yes, but still not impossible.
Not a civil right, but very EASILY (-especially- following 9/11) could be argued that they are now a Public Utility. Being a public utility is one of the primary reasons that land-based phones, electricity and television/radio outages and are tracked and published. Not by the same agencies perhaps, but to the same effect.
And what effect does it have? It makes it so that the involved companies feel the pressure to make sure that the guy across the street doesn't suffer a bunch more outages than you due to the equipment on his side being inferior (I point this out because it is a serious issue here in the Denver metro area for Xcel energy customers). By having a 3rd party track such things, the companies can't ignore it.
Given how small changes in location can drastically affect cell service (for instance, when travelling to California I usually get 3 times as many dropped calls or cell towers at capacity in San Francisco than just 50 miles south of there and I rarely lose calls in other locations). Obviously the cell companies would support a policy that didn't call such hotspots of bad service to public attention.
The end result of such a policy of public attention would force improvements, which would in turn strengthen the infrastructure against attack. So whether or not such reports might be wise in the short term, I feel they would have the reverse effect long-term.
Sure, and I saw that episode, but perhaps this isn't the proper place to put it when so many of the readers did -not- watch it and have no frame of referrence to know that you thought you were being funny.
Mods can't ban, they can only lower this one post's score.
If poster's scores are lowered enough times, they will begin to automatically post at score:0 but they will still be able to post.
Personally, I wouldn't mind a slight overhaul of the ratings system but even if banned, there are so many ways around that it often makes just as much sense to de-karmatize them to oblivion so that they can post from the same account and just be ignored.
And don't be so surprised about finding that here... while there are lots of intelligent folks here, there are alot of immature dipsticks, too. It will get modded down.
Ok, so I'm curious, what is the benefit to the provider to give free access to shell accounts.
All the shell accounts I've had in the past (I'm in the camp that just runs their own server over broadband now) were in some way attached to a paying account and/or were provided by a school or employer.
I can see a low-cost account, say $5/month for no compiler and $10/month for compiler (or just limit the account to x% CPU), but free doesn't make sense to me.
Not saying I think they should go away if they exist, just wondering what the incentive to give someone command-line access to your box would be?
This gives a very big incentive for terrorist groups (and others) to steal or clone the reading mechanism. Heck, imagine a world in the future where it were common for leaders to do something like this and the U.S. government decided to take them out... like we tried and failed so many times with Saddam Hussein and others. We would simply need to hack into the database and see who authenticated via their chip where, and all of a sudden a surgical strike is QUITE possible.
Maybe this needs to happen a few times for said leaders to understand the privacy issues behind such systems, no way to tell.
I do find it pretty amazing though. At the least I hope there is technology to allow the embedee to say, slap a small piece of tinfoil (ok, so it would probably need to be something else, just giving a nod to some folks;) over the area to keep it inert.
Is this an active chip or a passive one like an RFID chip? I wonder if it is safe for the human body to take a dose of radiation large enough to fry such a device (if passive, even if it had a destruct sequence, it would need extra radiation to perform such a sequence).
Anyway, off to find the Reynolds... oh wait, that's ALUMINUM?
I'm going off memory here, so hopefully I'm not too far off.
I believe MAC addresses are 48bit, the current RFID is 64bit and the new RFID spec that is becoming adopter is 96bit.
Not sure though... and you're right, as long as they are done diligently, you probably won't see collisions as frequently as MAC addresses.
However, in the case of a Wal-Mart warehouse you're talking -millions- of addresses and when you talk to a person who had a MAC collision you're usually talking in the high dozens to low thousands of addresses. So there is at least an order of magnitude of difference in scale between the two.
Then again, will the inventory clerks care all that much about whether a bic pen showed up as a tool chest because of a collision? Probably not as that would be a percentage of a percentage of their inventory and inventory is expected. So perhaps it is pretty much moot unless someone REALLY screws up their tags.
And yet I've known at least 2 people who claim to have had MAC address collisions (without doing things like changing the MAC via ifconfig). So even a manufacturer-doled-out system isn't going to be foolproof.
What might make sense is to reserve a pool that expire every X number of years. Use that for perishables or disposables. Probably would need interim periods between expiration and re-activation.
BTW the cost of putting RFID on mail, at least in the forseeable future, is prohibitive. Not for UPS style packages, but for the standard first class letter the RFID tag manufacturing costs are more than twice the selling price of a stamp. Enough people today have stopped sending postal letters because of the regular increase in the price of stamps, tripling cost (which would be the cost of the stamp today plus the RFID) would hobble the post office.
I use WEP at home and I'm fine with it since you have to be in my yard to get a decent signal (or target me with a serious antenna from a distance, and I don't broadcast SSID like at least 20 other people in my town -do-, I'm not so worried about that).
If I were less lazy, I would turn WEP off and setup a VPN subnet. Only IPs from the VPN subnet would pass from the wireless gateway to the rest of your network and vice versa. Then simply use the VPN from any PC connected to your wireless.
A bit more of a pain, but quite secure. I don't bother since 99% of my network traffic goes to the Internet and my 'net connection is unencrypted 802.11b to my ISP, so even if I locked down my local signal everything but local traffic is still be beamed 2 miles away. Luckily it's a tight beam and pointed over the tops of all the trees and houses, so it is fairly hard to intercept but not impossible.
Note that RADIUS is a way of replacing WEP authentication (shared key) but not a way to replace WEP encryption.
No kidding... my problem isn't junk that doesn't work... it's things like Cobalt boxes or a Zaurus or an old multifunction laser printer with no Linux drivers. All perfectly good and working, but I never have gotten off my bum to inventory and put on Ebay (Ebay always seems a bit of a hassle, I swear I'd be willing to pay 10%-30% depending on value for someone to sell and ship my items for me:)
You should have expected at least 1 response like that.
A) This is/....
B) It is a -test1 release... it breaks EVERYTHING...
C) This is/.... if it had been the other way around (will XP SP2 break my Fedora install?) you'd still have had an equally brattish response.
Don't let it disappoint you... just move on and read the better comments.
My personal feeling... if you are at all worried about breaking something, you should wait until it is final, not in any form of test release. Otherwise, you're just asking for problems.
Actually it would seem to me that using one of today's distributions for a complete newbie would be the ideal tradeoff.
The learning curve shouldn't be any greater than with Windows, there is a community out there willing to help, and you don't have any preconceived notions about "that goes where and does things how?". Clean slate.
Linspire is specifically trying to be very Windows-like and includes things that a 1st time user might not -need-. Xandros as well. Sun's Java Desktop System does this but to a lesser extent.
The biggest problem you would have would be "my friend wants me to (play X|use Y|do Z)" and having X,Y or Z be a windows-only program. But you'll have that problem with all distros to some level.
There is definite advantage to hiding what packets are going where.
Extreme Example: I may check mail from a corporate mail server. My mail session is encrypted via SSL but you can still tell which server I am communicating with. Let us say someone knew that an employee of my company lives in my town, and they wanted to find out which house that employee (me) lived in so that they could start monitoring their physical mailbox for some important letter.
If they came to my town, which uses 802.11b WISPs which 1/2 of don't use encryption because WEP is so breakable (I wish they'd turn it on to protect from casual tapping, but oh well, at least my email is sent over SSL), they could drive around for a few minutes sniffing until they triangulated the signal that was sending packets to that corporate mail server.
Am I worried about this happening? Not so much, because I have a P.O. box:) and because I rarely get postal mail, but it is possible.
Additionally, many people don't have the ability to tunnel their unencrypted data (like port 80 web traffic) to obtain ubiqitous encryption over wireless. I personally think that is the next evolution of wireless routers (including easy but secure VPN services on the router itself which can be used in conjuction or in place of lower level encryption). But until it becomes easy for the masses having a strong, common low level encryption technology is key.
Just to be clear, SFU is available today for Win2K, XP and I think 2003 as a free add-on. They're working on SFU for 64bit Windows right now. The only difference with Longhorn and SFU is that it will be part of the default install media and not a separate download.
And Apache is a bad example since it runs on Windows without the need of SFU.
Also, SFU is not meant so much to sideline Solaris as it does not have the reliability features that Solaris has. SFU is most definitely -targetted- at Linux server admins. Not saying what you state about it actually wrong, only that it is not the intent.
Why oh why did I sell off my first run of Darknight and Fish Police so many years ago? Can't you just let me forget my pain? Sure, I had to eat and was broke, but oh please stop reminding me of it!
1) probably, but in re-reading that post I certainly didn't say anything that was inflammatory to anyone but those who are ridiculously defensive about someone else's products. Smacks of an inferiority complex to me. Do you come to/. purely to defend Microsoft against the Open Source hordes? If so, you're tackling the wrong Joe since as much as I may prefer one business model to the other I don't go about bashing people.
2) Quite true... a newbie will not know how to change that setting. I never said they can't learn though, only that I don't expect the majority to ever know there is an option. And for support, my parents and grandparents both complained when migrating from 2K to XP that they didn't like the changed menus but they're not going to call me up to say that (bless them), they wait until a few weeks pass and I'm in town and I ask how they like their new OS. When they're told they can change it back they ask why that option isn't clearly presented (perhaps in installation and/or new user setup)?
3) I don't like the usability of the system, but it is not MY system, so I refuse to change it to fit my needs. Why should I?
And I never went past my feedback. YOU are the one who jumped up and started complaining about what I said.
I don't believe I assumed what I want -should- be the default. I gave my reaction to the current situation as feedback from one person. I didn't say "everything must be designed the way I like it" or that it must be changed back. It is that kind of feedback that allows a designer to further enhance their product. Do I expect Microsoft to see this thread? Probably not, but others will and they can remember about stuff like this.
I would make a similar set of feedback about how GNOME2 has "dumbed-down" preferences compared to KDE or GNOME1 and how I wish that as a power-user I had a simple and useful way (editing a registry, gconf, or about:config is not "simple and useful", useful yes, simple no, especially without only help for various options) to change those normally hidden prefs. Heck, a couple of days ago I made this argument about Firefox on a different article.
Do you assume that because one person gives feedback that they are whining or saying something sucks or that they feel everything should be done there way?
If so, I sincerely hope you're not a software designer because you are missing out on the value of such feedback.
Sit back, take a pill, re-read what I said and realize it was not inflammatory. Reply with all the gusto you want because this thread has hereby died from my side. What a waste of my time and your energy.
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If you use a Jabber server, you have to use a Jabber client (I believe). If your Jabber server has the right transports it can handle Yahoo, AIM/ICQ and MSN.
However you're right, this only solves -your- end of it, your friend on the Yahoo server can't have non-Yahoo buddies (you just appear as a Yahoo buddy to them using your Yahoo account through the Jabber transport), but it will solve the problems on your end.
Jabber does at least the first 2 items you mention (trans-system buddies in the client, server can route between systems). If I read it correctly it also does the third. In fact, those things are exactly what Jabber is meant for and also does presence notification.
Yes, it means you have 4 different accounts for each of the 4 systems, so it is not exactly what you want, but it is a reasonable approximation and could be used in a scenario where a company didn't want to pay MS for their middleware. The biggest problem you have is when one of those systems changes their protocol.
I also am waiting for that time when I can use a generic client without a middleware server (Jabber or MS) to send messages to a multi-system address space. Unfortunately for now that system is email.
Still, the Moderator can not arbitrarily ban someone at another's request.
And if a comment is so poorly received that it can be modded down so many times as to do an auto-ban, perhaps that should be a signal to the user that they are in the wrong place.
While I think perhaps auto-bans should expire after a given time (perhaps they do), I do not disagree with the admins' choice to not interfere.
What I might want to see is auto-ban meta moderation, so that meta moderators could view a thread and judge whether the poster's ban is proper. Say 10 votes allowed and a 70% in-favor vote required to lift the ban.
If it uses middleware to translate between them, then it most certainly does sound like Jabber. GAIM, no, Jabber yes.
However even though this uses MS middleware, it could still be a good thing as it might make MSN/Yahoo/AIM less likely to break their protocols just to stymie the open source clients. Maybe not, maybe they will just tell MS to update their middleware, but no way to tell just yet.
After seeing the mediocre results of our wedding photos (some were great, others looked like cheesy glamor shots) I am convinced that unless you pay over $5000 you are probably just as well off hiring someone who needs you more than you need them.
I know of many photography students who have shown better work than this guy (they didn't -suck- or we'd have told him to piss off) and will almost certainly bite at the chance to do so for 1/2 the cost or well less (including surrenduring the copyright).
I have a friend who did this, then his siblings arranged the photos and had them professionally mounted. Total cost was far less than what it would have cost to have a photo pro do it all (and often the photo pro doesn't do the layout/mounting, they subcontract it).
If you have a school in your area, see if there is a bulletin board around the photography area. If not, see if there are any amateur groups in your area. Ask to see a portrait portfolio. You should have enough bites to find one that will work well.
I would pay more money for a new chapter of Fallout, with the same graphics as before, than I would for Doom 3.
... enjoyable, fun, repeatable OR with tons of content (if not repeatable). The benefit of having the most up to date graphics engine will quickly wear off if the game itself is not up to par.
... but beware that any more hardware limit will severely limit your market as well.
I think the stuff going into Half-Life 2 is awesome, but I -still- would have wanted the game if it looked the same as before (ok, some higher resolution textures would be good but the engine worked well). Most of my gripes with 3D games have been on the mechanics side of things, not the whizbang graphics side.
I wouldn't mind seeing a 3D treatment of my all-time favorite Squarez! but it would be QUITE well handled with 5 year-old graphics technology.
Games should focus on being -games- first
I am not saying that people who want to tweak an engine to use every possible CPU cycle should be fired, merely:
a) That should not be the focus of the game (in other words, don't expect me to want to play just because it looks pretty)
b) That a game should never be SO far out on the bleeding edge that only a small percentage of rigs can run it. Doom 3 seems to be close to this bleeding edge but probably not quite too far based on specs I've read
As I replied to another on this thread, no Moderator can do that. It requires higher permissions to ban someone. And generally speaking asking for someone who has those higher permissions (as in a /. administrator) by posting something like "Mods, ban this guy" is kind of like walking up to a random table in the cafeteria and saying something to a manager, hoping he'll be close enough to hear what you say.
/. admins directly. They do respond to email (at least they did both times I sent in a note). "Mods" can't do anything other than moderate a message up or down.
If someone does something offensive enough to need admin attention, they only way of being sure it gets that attention is to send a note to the
a) Are you sure it didn't just get modded to -1 oblivion (if it was your post then I'll buy it since you can track that alot easier)?
... a Moderator is just a /. user with 5 mod points on a random day who moderates your post. To be deleted it has to be done by an Admin ... you know, one of those few folks who actually run /. There is a big distinction between the two.
b) If that happened it wasn't a Mod
And again I point out that that is exactly what was supposed to happen with MAC addresses. See previous posts. Less likely with RFID, yes, but still not impossible.
Not a civil right, but very EASILY (-especially- following 9/11) could be argued that they are now a Public Utility. Being a public utility is one of the primary reasons that land-based phones, electricity and television/radio outages and are tracked and published. Not by the same agencies perhaps, but to the same effect.
And what effect does it have? It makes it so that the involved companies feel the pressure to make sure that the guy across the street doesn't suffer a bunch more outages than you due to the equipment on his side being inferior (I point this out because it is a serious issue here in the Denver metro area for Xcel energy customers). By having a 3rd party track such things, the companies can't ignore it.
Given how small changes in location can drastically affect cell service (for instance, when travelling to California I usually get 3 times as many dropped calls or cell towers at capacity in San Francisco than just 50 miles south of there and I rarely lose calls in other locations). Obviously the cell companies would support a policy that didn't call such hotspots of bad service to public attention.
The end result of such a policy of public attention would force improvements, which would in turn strengthen the infrastructure against attack. So whether or not such reports might be wise in the short term, I feel they would have the reverse effect long-term.
Sure, and I saw that episode, but perhaps this isn't the proper place to put it when so many of the readers did -not- watch it and have no frame of referrence to know that you thought you were being funny.
Mods can't ban, they can only lower this one post's score.
... while there are lots of intelligent folks here, there are alot of immature dipsticks, too. It will get modded down.
If poster's scores are lowered enough times, they will begin to automatically post at score:0 but they will still be able to post.
Personally, I wouldn't mind a slight overhaul of the ratings system but even if banned, there are so many ways around that it often makes just as much sense to de-karmatize them to oblivion so that they can post from the same account and just be ignored.
And don't be so surprised about finding that here
Ok, so I'm curious, what is the benefit to the provider to give free access to shell accounts.
All the shell accounts I've had in the past (I'm in the camp that just runs their own server over broadband now) were in some way attached to a paying account and/or were provided by a school or employer.
I can see a low-cost account, say $5/month for no compiler and $10/month for compiler (or just limit the account to x% CPU), but free doesn't make sense to me.
Not saying I think they should go away if they exist, just wondering what the incentive to give someone command-line access to your box would be?
This gives a very big incentive for terrorist groups (and others) to steal or clone the reading mechanism. Heck, imagine a world in the future where it were common for leaders to do something like this and the U.S. government decided to take them out ... like we tried and failed so many times with Saddam Hussein and others. We would simply need to hack into the database and see who authenticated via their chip where, and all of a sudden a surgical strike is QUITE possible.
;) over the area to keep it inert.
... oh wait, that's ALUMINUM?
Maybe this needs to happen a few times for said leaders to understand the privacy issues behind such systems, no way to tell.
I do find it pretty amazing though. At the least I hope there is technology to allow the embedee to say, slap a small piece of tinfoil (ok, so it would probably need to be something else, just giving a nod to some folks
Is this an active chip or a passive one like an RFID chip? I wonder if it is safe for the human body to take a dose of radiation large enough to fry such a device (if passive, even if it had a destruct sequence, it would need extra radiation to perform such a sequence).
Anyway, off to find the Reynolds
I'm going off memory here, so hopefully I'm not too far off.
... and you're right, as long as they are done diligently, you probably won't see collisions as frequently as MAC addresses.
I believe MAC addresses are 48bit, the current RFID is 64bit and the new RFID spec that is becoming adopter is 96bit.
Not sure though
However, in the case of a Wal-Mart warehouse you're talking -millions- of addresses and when you talk to a person who had a MAC collision you're usually talking in the high dozens to low thousands of addresses. So there is at least an order of magnitude of difference in scale between the two.
Then again, will the inventory clerks care all that much about whether a bic pen showed up as a tool chest because of a collision? Probably not as that would be a percentage of a percentage of their inventory and inventory is expected. So perhaps it is pretty much moot unless someone REALLY screws up their tags.
And yet I've known at least 2 people who claim to have had MAC address collisions (without doing things like changing the MAC via ifconfig). So even a manufacturer-doled-out system isn't going to be foolproof.
What might make sense is to reserve a pool that expire every X number of years. Use that for perishables or disposables. Probably would need interim periods between expiration and re-activation.
BTW the cost of putting RFID on mail, at least in the forseeable future, is prohibitive. Not for UPS style packages, but for the standard first class letter the RFID tag manufacturing costs are more than twice the selling price of a stamp. Enough people today have stopped sending postal letters because of the regular increase in the price of stamps, tripling cost (which would be the cost of the stamp today plus the RFID) would hobble the post office.
I use WEP at home and I'm fine with it since you have to be in my yard to get a decent signal (or target me with a serious antenna from a distance, and I don't broadcast SSID like at least 20 other people in my town -do-, I'm not so worried about that).
If I were less lazy, I would turn WEP off and setup a VPN subnet. Only IPs from the VPN subnet would pass from the wireless gateway to the rest of your network and vice versa. Then simply use the VPN from any PC connected to your wireless.
A bit more of a pain, but quite secure. I don't bother since 99% of my network traffic goes to the Internet and my 'net connection is unencrypted 802.11b to my ISP, so even if I locked down my local signal everything but local traffic is still be beamed 2 miles away. Luckily it's a tight beam and pointed over the tops of all the trees and houses, so it is fairly hard to intercept but not impossible.
Note that RADIUS is a way of replacing WEP authentication (shared key) but not a way to replace WEP encryption.
10 minutes after posting and there are 14 replies ... none of which have a score over 0 :)
No kidding ... my problem isn't junk that doesn't work ... it's things like Cobalt boxes or a Zaurus or an old multifunction laser printer with no Linux drivers. All perfectly good and working, but I never have gotten off my bum to inventory and put on Ebay (Ebay always seems a bit of a hassle, I swear I'd be willing to pay 10%-30% depending on value for someone to sell and ship my items for me :)
You should have expected at least 1 response like that.
/. ...
... it breaks EVERYTHING ...
/. ... if it had been the other way around (will XP SP2 break my Fedora install?) you'd still have had an equally brattish response.
... just move on and read the better comments.
... if you are at all worried about breaking something, you should wait until it is final, not in any form of test release. Otherwise, you're just asking for problems.
A) This is
B) It is a -test1 release
C) This is
Don't let it disappoint you
My personal feeling
Actually it would seem to me that using one of today's distributions for a complete newbie would be the ideal tradeoff.
The learning curve shouldn't be any greater than with Windows, there is a community out there willing to help, and you don't have any preconceived notions about "that goes where and does things how?". Clean slate.
Linspire is specifically trying to be very Windows-like and includes things that a 1st time user might not -need-. Xandros as well. Sun's Java Desktop System does this but to a lesser extent.
The biggest problem you would have would be "my friend wants me to (play X|use Y|do Z)" and having X,Y or Z be a windows-only program. But you'll have that problem with all distros to some level.
There is definite advantage to hiding what packets are going where.
:) and because I rarely get postal mail, but it is possible.
Extreme Example: I may check mail from a corporate mail server. My mail session is encrypted via SSL but you can still tell which server I am communicating with. Let us say someone knew that an employee of my company lives in my town, and they wanted to find out which house that employee (me) lived in so that they could start monitoring their physical mailbox for some important letter.
If they came to my town, which uses 802.11b WISPs which 1/2 of don't use encryption because WEP is so breakable (I wish they'd turn it on to protect from casual tapping, but oh well, at least my email is sent over SSL), they could drive around for a few minutes sniffing until they triangulated the signal that was sending packets to that corporate mail server.
Am I worried about this happening? Not so much, because I have a P.O. box
Additionally, many people don't have the ability to tunnel their unencrypted data (like port 80 web traffic) to obtain ubiqitous encryption over wireless. I personally think that is the next evolution of wireless routers (including easy but secure VPN services on the router itself which can be used in conjuction or in place of lower level encryption). But until it becomes easy for the masses having a strong, common low level encryption technology is key.
Just to be clear, SFU is available today for Win2K, XP and I think 2003 as a free add-on. They're working on SFU for 64bit Windows right now. The only difference with Longhorn and SFU is that it will be part of the default install media and not a separate download.
And Apache is a bad example since it runs on Windows without the need of SFU.
Also, SFU is not meant so much to sideline Solaris as it does not have the reliability features that Solaris has. SFU is most definitely -targetted- at Linux server admins. Not saying what you state about it actually wrong, only that it is not the intent.
I'm just waiting for a barcode long enough tranlastion of IPv9 addresses. THEN we are ripe for confusion. IM to China via barcode? Cool.
Why oh why did I sell off my first run of Darknight and Fish Police so many years ago? Can't you just let me forget my pain? Sure, I had to eat and was broke, but oh please stop reminding me of it!
1) probably, but in re-reading that post I certainly didn't say anything that was inflammatory to anyone but those who are ridiculously defensive about someone else's products. Smacks of an inferiority complex to me. Do you come to /. purely to defend Microsoft against the Open Source hordes? If so, you're tackling the wrong Joe since as much as I may prefer one business model to the other I don't go about bashing people.
... a newbie will not know how to change that setting. I never said they can't learn though, only that I don't expect the majority to ever know there is an option. And for support, my parents and grandparents both complained when migrating from 2K to XP that they didn't like the changed menus but they're not going to call me up to say that (bless them), they wait until a few weeks pass and I'm in town and I ask how they like their new OS. When they're told they can change it back they ask why that option isn't clearly presented (perhaps in installation and/or new user setup)?
2) Quite true
3) I don't like the usability of the system, but it is not MY system, so I refuse to change it to fit my needs. Why should I?
And I never went past my feedback. YOU are the one who jumped up and started complaining about what I said.
I don't believe I assumed what I want -should- be the default. I gave my reaction to the current situation as feedback from one person. I didn't say "everything must be designed the way I like it" or that it must be changed back. It is that kind of feedback that allows a designer to further enhance their product. Do I expect Microsoft to see this thread? Probably not, but others will and they can remember about stuff like this.
I would make a similar set of feedback about how GNOME2 has "dumbed-down" preferences compared to KDE or GNOME1 and how I wish that as a power-user I had a simple and useful way (editing a registry, gconf, or about:config is not "simple and useful", useful yes, simple no, especially without only help for various options) to change those normally hidden prefs. Heck, a couple of days ago I made this argument about Firefox on a different article.
Do you assume that because one person gives feedback that they are whining or saying something sucks or that they feel everything should be done there way?
If so, I sincerely hope you're not a software designer because you are missing out on the value of such feedback.
Sit back, take a pill, re-read what I said and realize it was not inflammatory. Reply with all the gusto you want because this thread has hereby died from my side. What a waste of my time and your energy.