Diet Coke also is the most carbonated soda that I know of, so that probably makes it a "few percent better" than anything else (and thus its popularity). Plus, it doesn't taste very good, so you don't feel like you wasted anything. (This is why we don't have Guinness fountains; only Diet Coke:)
Maker, not designer. Some no name company makes Apple's laptops too, but it's the Apple design that makes them good. Same for IBM -- good design is why people bought thinkpads.
I just got a new laptop, and I really wanted to buy a Thinkpad... but they're so much more expensive than Dells and have lower specs. After reading the Lenovo doesn't care about Linux, I'm glad I went for the Dell.
> As soon as you have to manage keys, the difficulty of encrypting data goes way up. For these applications, a six letter password isn't going to cut it.
So keep your private key on a smart card (I use an OpenPGP card from Kernel Concepts). All the encryption/decryption takes place on the card, which requires a passphrase to use. If you type the passphrase wrong a certain number of times, the card melts itself, destroying the key.
This gives you all the convenience of a short password, with all the security of a 1024-bit+ RSA key. (You can use a short password since the data is destroyed after three wrong guesses. Brute force attacks just can't happen.)
Evidentally Dapper Drake uses some other installer, since the Debian one isn't eye-candy-ish enough. Personally I prefer 15 years of testing and development to eye candy, but that's why I use Debian instead of Ubuntu:)
> At a certain point, you just have to trust something.
So why not make that "something" peer reviewed open source software, rather than some black piece of plastic inside your machine? Sure, the CPU could be specifically looking for your sooper seekret data, but that's not really likely (because it's too hard).
Crypto is all about mitigating risk, and using software that you can trust is helpful for acheiving that goal.
That could be good. Let's say they're investigating you for drug trafficing, but really you're planning to overthrow the government and all the plans are on your hard drive. OK, so they assume "the worst" and that you're a big drug dealer, and they throw you in prison for 15 years or something. Meanwhile, your rebel co-conspirators weren't revealed, and they successfully overthrew the government. Obviously you are freed from jail, and everyone is happy. (I should write movies:)
And anyway, crypto isn't always about protecting yourself -- it helps keep honest people honest, too. Do you really want your bored UNIX admin reading your mails from your girlfriend about how much she likes your hair (or whatever)? No; so encrypt it.
(As for disk encryption, do you really want your relatives going through your e-mail and IM conversations [or pr0n stash] if you suddenly die or something? No; so encrypt it.)
> if you don't encrypt your swap, then you will leak cleartext onto your hard drive
Not if you're using GPG, which tells the operating system to lock pages into memory (i.e. never swap them to disk). Ironically, this is also how iTunes keeps you from getting at decrypted DRM music.
Completely untrue. Take the controller board off an identical (but not locked) drive, put it on the "locked" drive, and bang!, you have the data. Alternatives include sending the drive to a data recovery shop to have them read the data off the platters with an electron microscope.
If your data's not encrypted on the platters, it's easily readable.
This was modded insightful, so I have to ask -- is that true? If so, why is everything so expensive over here? If someone can live for two months on $40, why not have Wal-Mart buy what someone lives on for two months, ship it over here, and sell it for $80? That's a lot less than what people are paying now.
> Does the average user buying an HP, Gateway or Dell really have a legitimate use for a DVD burner ?
Probably. A lot of non-techincal people that I know use DVD burners to burn home movies and send them to their relatives. Not to mention that they SHOULD be backing up their data onto a DVD-RW every now and again.
DVD burners aren't tools for piracy. I've pirated tons of stuff and have never burned a DVD -- get with the '00s... it's called BitTorrent:)
> If the iPod didn't do about 99% of what I want it to do
Why are you willing to live without that 1%? Why is 99% the end-all-and-be-all?
> And I'm not talking about cases and crap like that. I mean external speakers/boomboxes and car interfaces.
Ever hear of a '1/8" plug'? They're very useful for connecting portable audio device to one another. Annoyingly, they're completely standardized, so you can use any speaker with any mp3 player. Damn those evil standards cutting into market share!
(I like how it's bad when M$ does this with IE, but good when Apple does it with the iPod and iTMS. Slashdot has really hit rock bottom.)
> You seem to be complaining that they're not throwing away their trade secrets just for your benefit.
I'm not complaining at all. I have no interest in using their crippled hardware.
You, however, are complaining that Ubuntu doesn't ship the nVidia driver. This is due to nVidia's licensing problems, not because Ubuntu hates nVidia or something. So to make things easy for the end user, nVidia needs to do something, because nobody else has the legal authority over the issue.
And why exactly does nVidia's driver contain "trade secrets", but Intel's doesn't? (And why should I care about nVidia's trade secrets. If that's their excuse, the end result is the same - I'm not going to buy their hardware.)
> For example, I noticed that, in that default installation, there is a boot option for "Recovery Console," which simply gives anyone who starts it root access to the computer without a password.
Are you sure about that? On Debian, upon which Ubuntu is based, you get this message when you boot to single user mode:
Give root password for maintenance (or type Control-D to continue):
If you don't know the root password, you're not going to get a root shell; it's that simple.
Do people even use mp3 anymore? My music collection is all Ogg/FLAC and most people I know (that have Macs) use mp4. mp3 has no technical advantages, and it's not even legal to use freely, so why all the fuss on slashdot about using it?
> I just want the installer to do its job and install the bloody thing.
Then bitch to nVidia about their driver (which violates the GPL to distribute). The Ubuntu people have no control over nVidia's poor choice of licensing. If you want everything to be easy, get a video card that has OSS drivers. I have a 945GM from Intel, and it works fine, no binary blobs required.
I don't think those graphs show anything. First of all, if you look at the 4 week graph, you'll see that activity is usually highest on Monday, and then it decays to a low level during the weekend. This week's pattern is no different. Next, if you look at the yearly graph, this week is one of the highest in the last year. So all in all, I don't know what your conclusion is? Traffic in Sweeden went down because of TPB closing? I don't see that.
And anyway, 99% of TPB-generated traffic is on BitTorrent, which is decentralized. If an ISP released numbers on how much BitTorrent traffic they saw this week, I bet you would noticed a signficant dip there.
> 4G, 60GB color iPod. Click on Music. Then click on 'artists' or 'genres' or about seven or eight other things.
So what if I have a big playlist ("My Top Rated 3+"), and I sort that by song name on my computer. Then on my iPod, I want that playlist to play by shuffling albums? Can't do it.
The iPod also ignores iTunes' "shuffle by grouping", so if I have a classical song that's split into three sections, they won't be in order if I'm shuffling the other tracks.
All in all, plenty of room for improvement over Apple. Slashdot is excessively pro-Apple these days -- you (we?) should look at iPod competitors as potential ways to make portable music more enjoyable than it already is. Instead, it seems people look at it like, "OMG there's no way anything could be better. iWant to be cool!". In that case, Sandisk's iSheep epithet is exactly right!
(RANT: Speaking of which, this Sandisk thing doesn't look that cool. The screen, for one thing, looks useless. Unfortunately, I can't view their site, since iDon't have Flash. How hard is making an XHTML page with some PNG pictures? I want to want to buy their product, but they're not letting me! Great way to build up a market...)
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA
Seems pretty airtight to me. "WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY" or "FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE".
Regulating software is mornoic anyway. If dumb people buy bad software, that's their own damn problem. Sue the vendor, or something. That's why lawsuits exist, after all!
As for the, "but buggy software causes SPAM!!!!!!!!111" argument, I have a simple solution: if the user's poor choice sends too much junk traffic to the Internet, turn off their connection. Problem solved, and without any new laws!
Slashdot Mirror
Diet Coke also is the most carbonated soda that I know of, so that probably makes it a "few percent better" than anything else (and thus its popularity). Plus, it doesn't taste very good, so you don't feel like you wasted anything. (This is why we don't have Guinness fountains; only Diet Coke :)
Maker, not designer. Some no name company makes Apple's laptops too, but it's the Apple design that makes them good. Same for IBM -- good design is why people bought thinkpads.
I just got a new laptop, and I really wanted to buy a Thinkpad... but they're so much more expensive than Dells and have lower specs. After reading the Lenovo doesn't care about Linux, I'm glad I went for the Dell.
> As soon as you have to manage keys, the difficulty of encrypting data goes way up. For these applications, a six letter password isn't going to cut it.
So keep your private key on a smart card (I use an OpenPGP card from Kernel Concepts). All the encryption/decryption takes place on the card, which requires a passphrase to use. If you type the passphrase wrong a certain number of times, the card melts itself, destroying the key.
This gives you all the convenience of a short password, with all the security of a 1024-bit+ RSA key. (You can use a short password since the data is destroyed after three wrong guesses. Brute force attacks just can't happen.)
Evidentally Dapper Drake uses some other installer, since the Debian one isn't eye-candy-ish enough. Personally I prefer 15 years of testing and development to eye candy, but that's why I use Debian instead of Ubuntu :)
> At a certain point, you just have to trust something.
So why not make that "something" peer reviewed open source software, rather than some black piece of plastic inside your machine? Sure, the CPU could be specifically looking for your sooper seekret data, but that's not really likely (because it's too hard).
Crypto is all about mitigating risk, and using software that you can trust is helpful for acheiving that goal.
> throw you in jail for contempt
:)
That could be good. Let's say they're investigating you for drug trafficing, but really you're planning to overthrow the government and all the plans are on your hard drive. OK, so they assume "the worst" and that you're a big drug dealer, and they throw you in prison for 15 years or something. Meanwhile, your rebel co-conspirators weren't revealed, and they successfully overthrew the government. Obviously you are freed from jail, and everyone is happy. (I should write movies
And anyway, crypto isn't always about protecting yourself -- it helps keep honest people honest, too. Do you really want your bored UNIX admin reading your mails from your girlfriend about how much she likes your hair (or whatever)? No; so encrypt it.
(As for disk encryption, do you really want your relatives going through your e-mail and IM conversations [or pr0n stash] if you suddenly die or something? No; so encrypt it.)
> if you don't encrypt your swap, then you will leak cleartext onto your hard drive
Not if you're using GPG, which tells the operating system to lock pages into memory (i.e. never swap them to disk). Ironically, this is also how iTunes keeps you from getting at decrypted DRM music.
See mlock(2).
> There's no known backdoor.
Completely untrue. Take the controller board off an identical (but not locked) drive, put it on the "locked" drive, and bang!, you have the data. Alternatives include sending the drive to a data recovery shop to have them read the data off the platters with an electron microscope.
If your data's not encrypted on the platters, it's easily readable.
> video and pictures to *prove* that UFOs are responsible for 9/11
9 0224991194
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-20233208
> Maybe you'd like to take your eyes off the road to fiddle with an mp3 player
I don't have a driver's license, so I don't really care one way or another.
This was modded insightful, so I have to ask -- is that true? If so, why is everything so expensive over here? If someone can live for two months on $40, why not have Wal-Mart buy what someone lives on for two months, ship it over here, and sell it for $80? That's a lot less than what people are paying now.
> Does the average user buying an HP, Gateway or Dell really have a legitimate use for a DVD burner ?
:)
Probably. A lot of non-techincal people that I know use DVD burners to burn home movies and send them to their relatives. Not to mention that they SHOULD be backing up their data onto a DVD-RW every now and again.
DVD burners aren't tools for piracy. I've pirated tons of stuff and have never burned a DVD -- get with the '00s... it's called BitTorrent
Then pay someone to fix them. Complaining solves nothing.
> If the iPod didn't do about 99% of what I want it to do
Why are you willing to live without that 1%? Why is 99% the end-all-and-be-all?
> And I'm not talking about cases and crap like that. I mean external speakers/boomboxes and car interfaces.
Ever hear of a '1/8" plug'? They're very useful for connecting portable audio device to one another. Annoyingly, they're completely standardized, so you can use any speaker with any mp3 player. Damn those evil standards cutting into market share!
(I like how it's bad when M$ does this with IE, but good when Apple does it with the iPod and iTMS. Slashdot has really hit rock bottom.)
> So, I'd say that a good lawyer has always been necessary.
You're saying that since the system is already fucked up, we should make it even worse? You should run for office!
> You seem to be complaining that they're not throwing away their trade secrets just for your benefit.
I'm not complaining at all. I have no interest in using their crippled hardware.
You, however, are complaining that Ubuntu doesn't ship the nVidia driver. This is due to nVidia's licensing problems, not because Ubuntu hates nVidia or something. So to make things easy for the end user, nVidia needs to do something, because nobody else has the legal authority over the issue.
And why exactly does nVidia's driver contain "trade secrets", but Intel's doesn't? (And why should I care about nVidia's trade secrets. If that's their excuse, the end result is the same - I'm not going to buy their hardware.)
> Not that I do not epect any bugs at all, but their number is so great.
So quit whining and start fixing them.
Are you sure about that? On Debian, upon which Ubuntu is based, you get this message when you boot to single user mode:
If you don't know the root password, you're not going to get a root shell; it's that simple.
Do people even use mp3 anymore? My music collection is all Ogg/FLAC and most people I know (that have Macs) use mp4. mp3 has no technical advantages, and it's not even legal to use freely, so why all the fuss on slashdot about using it?
> I just want the installer to do its job and install the bloody thing.
Then bitch to nVidia about their driver (which violates the GPL to distribute). The Ubuntu people have no control over nVidia's poor choice of licensing. If you want everything to be easy, get a video card that has OSS drivers. I have a 945GM from Intel, and it works fine, no binary blobs required.
http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#39
Note the picture of Tux caught in an oil spill. That's what demanding binary blobs does to Linux.
> Oh yeah, and you're still really fucking lame.
Says someone whose name is "poopdeville".
> check out wednesday night on the weekly graph
I don't think those graphs show anything. First of all, if you look at the 4 week graph, you'll see that activity is usually highest on Monday, and then it decays to a low level during the weekend. This week's pattern is no different. Next, if you look at the yearly graph, this week is one of the highest in the last year. So all in all, I don't know what your conclusion is? Traffic in Sweeden went down because of TPB closing? I don't see that.
And anyway, 99% of TPB-generated traffic is on BitTorrent, which is decentralized. If an ISP released numbers on how much BitTorrent traffic they saw this week, I bet you would noticed a signficant dip there.
> What could be better than this for programming in Whitespace!! [?]
;))
Why, Acme::Bleach of course.
(And, even cooler, is Acme::Greek
> 4G, 60GB color iPod. Click on Music. Then click on 'artists' or 'genres' or about seven or eight other things.
So what if I have a big playlist ("My Top Rated 3+"), and I sort that by song name on my computer. Then on my iPod, I want that playlist to play by shuffling albums? Can't do it.
The iPod also ignores iTunes' "shuffle by grouping", so if I have a classical song that's split into three sections, they won't be in order if I'm shuffling the other tracks.
All in all, plenty of room for improvement over Apple. Slashdot is excessively pro-Apple these days -- you (we?) should look at iPod competitors as potential ways to make portable music more enjoyable than it already is. Instead, it seems people look at it like, "OMG there's no way anything could be better. iWant to be cool!". In that case, Sandisk's iSheep epithet is exactly right!
(RANT: Speaking of which, this Sandisk thing doesn't look that cool. The screen, for one thing, looks useless. Unfortunately, I can't view their site, since iDon't have Flash. How hard is making an XHTML page with some PNG pictures? I want to want to buy their product, but they're not letting me! Great way to build up a market...)
And remember:
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA
Seems pretty airtight to me. "WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY" or "FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE".
Regulating software is mornoic anyway. If dumb people buy bad software, that's their own damn problem. Sue the vendor, or something. That's why lawsuits exist, after all!
As for the, "but buggy software causes SPAM!!!!!!!!111" argument, I have a simple solution: if the user's poor choice sends too much junk traffic to the Internet, turn off their connection. Problem solved, and without any new laws!