But "Debian" really just refers to the package management system, and the mirrors on which those packages are hosted. I find it supremely annoying when package systems like Debian and Gentoo plaster their logos and names all over my system... the fact that I used apt/dpkg to install a program does not mean I should see the Debian logo every time that program starts. I put up with it because of the supremely nice job the Debian people do of making sure everything works nicely together, even in unstable, but it's still annoying.
My system would probably be best described with a name like Openoffice.org/Mozilla/KDE/XFree/Debian/GNU/Linux. However, most of the above names refer to optional features which are not always in use. Linux and GNU libc are in use whenever the system is functioning, so there is some argument for just calling it GNU/Linux. Personally, though, I think this is counterproductive. The FSF has better things to worry about than names, it should be lobbying software companies to open their code, and finishing Hurd, and that sort of thing.
The fact that the largest available consumer 3.5" drive capacity just when up from 320GB to 400GB without any corresponding increase in physical size indicates, at least in theory, that technology has allowed the areal density of disk platters to increase by 25%. This advance should be just as applicable to 2.5" drives as it is to 3.5" ones, and as the current maximum laptop drive capacity is 80GB, we should (according to your post) see 100GB drives as soon as the technology trickles down.
However, we must also take into account that the first 80GB laptop drive became available in January 2003. At the time, the largest commercially available desktop drives were 200GB. Therefore, areal density in desktop drives has doubled during this time. This technology should trickle down and allow 160GB laptop drives. Where are they?
Also, gigabit ether in practice maxes out around 400Mbps, i.e. 50 MB/sec. Thats substantially less than even an ATA/66 7200rpm drive.
Of course, gigabit switches are basically unheard of outside of very large networks, so unless you're using crossover cable you're still limited to 100Mbps, which practice gives you about 10MB/s (due to overhead). And many of us are on wireless networks, which will give you even less throughput.
Networking technology still has a ways to go before the disk will really be the bottleneck in such scenarios.
You'll have trouble getting a self-powered firewire drive bigger than around 40GB, anything larger than that has to be plugged in, which utterly defies the point of a laptop. Even if the drive is self powered, it combined with an internal drive sucks a lot more power than a single internal drive would.
Now if I can only figure out why the OSS modules are being autoloaded for my built-in VIA 82something-or-ther rather than the ALSA ones, I'll be all set.
Yes, but you have to increment the nesting level in make menuconfig when you're building it, i.e. you need a UML specially compiled to run on other UMLs, or a UML compiled to run on other UMLs that run on other UMLs, etc.
Yes, in the short run, but in the long run greedy, power-hungry individuals find their way to the top again.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." -- Thomas Jefferson
Most Western countries keep the tyranny problem from getting out of hand by having little mini-revolutions every few decades. The most recent one in most countries was 1968-9, and one hopes we're due another any day now.
Lawsuits are fundamentally against the concept of free-market capitalism, and (if you really believe in capitalism) should only be used when the system breaks severely. In a capitalist economy, SCO would be unable to sue people with no case the way it has, and any money Microsoft spent backing them would be wasted.
Its not so much that the 5200go sucks, its that nvidia also produces 5600go and 5700go chips, which are faster, better, eat more battery, and have higher version numbers. The market for this laptop is the sort of gamers who want to be able to brag that they have a 3EGHz laptop at a LAN party. A graphics chip that is any less that the absolute biggest number available detracts substantially from said bragging rights. Thats all.
The ironic thing is that the author of the letter realizes this, as he talks about the program he wrote exclusively for use in his father's business. Open-sourcing that would have had very little effect on his total revenue, as he would be payed just for developing the program in the first place. His mistake (or one of them) is that he somehow thinks that everything businesses need already exists today. In fact, there are quite a few in-house applications that businesses need, and allowing external sources to contribute to and use their code will increase the benefit to the businesses and the original programmer, rather than decreasing it.
It's just a bunch of kernel patches. They can't do anything to the compiler, and since SE kernel would be compiled on a non SE-system with a non-SE compiler, any backdoor would have to be right there in the code.
In fact, IIRC, an earlier version of the SElinux patch set is already in Linux 2.6. The NSA is bound by the GPL like everybody else, so the patches were GPL'd. They were good and useful, so they were included.
IMHO they simply add to the pressures of life, and are a bad thing generally, especially in the hands of children or teenagers.
What exactly is wrong with teenagers in particular having cell phones? It allows them to easily contact adults in case of emergency, to communicate their friends without any of the unpleasant face-to-face contact that most slashdotters so abhor, and seems to me to be a Good Thing overall.
I agree that the way in which some businesses use employee cell phones is a bit extreme, but if you're not being paid enough to make getting all those calls worth it, you have just as much right to quit as someone who isn't being paid for all the hours he works.
The way they are sold in some countries is partly to blame, you get a phone for nearly nothing, which deceives many into thinking they are getting a bargain. I only know of UK practice, it may not be the same everywhere, but if it was made illegal to subsidise the phone from line rental and call charges, a lot of people would think again, if they had to pay the actual cost.
Here in Tanzania, you pay full handset price for an unlocked sim-free phone, and then purchase your own sim card and prepaid cards. This gives customers a lot more freedom with what they do with their phone, rather than limiting them to a given provider or plan, but it does tend to drive up the price of phones. Higher phone prices is generally a Bad Thing, because there are no landline phones here, so mobile phones are the only way to contact emergency services etc. is via mobile phones. Everybody, even minimum wage ($50US/month) workers, needs a mobile phone. Subsidy of phones, by corporations or by government, would improve the standard of living for everybody.
Nothing actually wrong with taxes, assuming we can keep the government using them sensibly (i.e. not on wars for oil). Of course, its nicer when we can have people with too much money anyway carrying the majority of the tax burden, but this doesn't make particularly good PR because 19% of americans believe they are in the richest 1%.
Anyway, back ontopic: Taxing VoIP connections would be like taxing Gnutella or KaZaA connections. If it could be done, the RIAA would have already gotten a law passed to do it.
6) VoIP comapanies move their operations abroad, so that congress can't tax them 7) Tax revenues plummet.
Seriously, why does the FCC's opinion on this even matter? Forgive me if theres something about the VoIP system I'm not understanding here, but Free World Dialup is a service something like DNS, so the servers can easily be located outside the US. Taxing the actual peer-to-peer VoIP connections between individual computers is just impossible. Congress is better off letting VoIP providers continue to run their systems from within the states, so that they at least provide some taxpaying jobs.
remembering how Gigabytes compare to Mebibytes (...) to kilobits.
If you're going to say "mebibytes", you also have to use "gibibytes" and "kibibits". Consistency within your own post is at least as important as consistency between international units.
Aside from USB booting being available in every modern BIOS, as a plethora of other posts have stated...
The next step is to move all device driver software from the operating system to a dedicated flash ROM embeded on the motherboard.
There are so many problems with this that it's silly. Most operating system kernels (including Linux and Windows) require drivers to be recompiled whenever the kernel is updated. Thus, you would have to make sure that the kernel on your USB drive is the same as the one that installed its drivers into the flashROM. Even if you could get around that problem, this sort of solution is just asking for DRM. Once drivers are no longer under the control of the operating system, one loses a LOT of the freedom that Linux and other such systems provide.
Much better solutions would be: A) Standardize hardware interfaces. This is already done with IDE, as well as OHCI/UHCI USB and others. One IDE driver will work with all existing IDE hardware. Theres no reason we coudn't apply the same thing to network cards, sound cards, or whatever else you might need. In fact, hardware is already so standardized that most Linux distributions can ship a single disk with drivers supporting every piece of hardware found in most systems. B) Get bigger USB keydrives, and put more drivers on them. Such drives are already available with 1GB capacity, which is far more than you would need to store every single available Linux kernel module.
No. In bandwidth measurements, "Mbps" with a small "b" refers to megabits per second. So the rover has a roughly 1 Mbps (0.119 MB/s) line to mars, and the article therefore implies that the average house has a 10 Mbps (1.25 MB/s) connection, which is quite untrue. 1 Mbps is quite acceptable for warez (roughly 10 minutes for an average ISO) and could probably handle a minor slashdotting as well (assuming the page was low on images).
How do they get that much bandwidth over a satellite link? My satellite connection maxes out at 320kbps, and I usually have to share it with at least 20 other people. It's a bit sad that the mars rovers have more bandwidth than the total bandwidth of the fastest ISP here in Tanzania. *sigh* The drawbacks of life in less economically developed countries. At least we don't have a DMCA, though.
Keep It Simple Stupid. Computers are tools. We don't "need" them to be fully featured with a full OS. Today we have network holes in a few applications. What's next tomorrow on MSFT Longhorn? Hackers turning in using your modem to call 0900 numbers? People hacking your e-wallet? When it comes to commodity devices we should make sure they do reliably and securely work. I don't expect anything less. --- Dman luddites. Just because you would rather have a device that gives up freedom for security does not mean all of us do. There is a market for "KISS" phones, just as there is a market for locked-down xbox or "internet appliance" computers. Your post, however, implies that companies shouldn't produce more complicated phones. Personally, my phone's main source of usefullness is as a general-purpose, hackable device, and I don't expect anything less.
Adding security doesn't mean we have to remove features. Linux is a prime example of this. Substantially more secure than most alternatives, not because it removes features, but because people actually paid attention to security when they wrote it.
"7. Type: sudo./install" would probably be necessary, if it wanted to install a backdoor or run automatically at boot or anything. Still, most users are stupid enough to type their password into any program asking for it. And, of course, the install process for a legitimate screensaver would be identical.
Slashdot Mirror
But "Debian" really just refers to the package management system, and the mirrors on which those packages are hosted. I find it supremely annoying when package systems like Debian and Gentoo plaster their logos and names all over my system... the fact that I used apt/dpkg to install a program does not mean I should see the Debian logo every time that program starts. I put up with it because of the supremely nice job the Debian people do of making sure everything works nicely together, even in unstable, but it's still annoying.
. However, most of the above names refer to optional features which are not always in use. Linux and GNU libc are in use whenever the system is functioning, so there is some argument for just calling it GNU/Linux. Personally, though, I think this is counterproductive. The FSF has better things to worry about than names, it should be lobbying software companies to open their code, and finishing Hurd, and that sort of thing.
My system would probably be best described with a name like Openoffice.org/Mozilla/KDE/XFree/Debian/GNU/Linux
Quoth the great-grandparent:
"Ten years later... well, it's basically the same thing, but it's been ported to every damn computer out there!"
He was therefore claiming that it was and still is a toy, which the grandparent intelligently refuted.
The fact that the largest available consumer 3.5" drive capacity just when up from 320GB to 400GB without any corresponding increase in physical size indicates, at least in theory, that technology has allowed the areal density of disk platters to increase by 25%. This advance should be just as applicable to 2.5" drives as it is to 3.5" ones, and as the current maximum laptop drive capacity is 80GB, we should (according to your post) see 100GB drives as soon as the technology trickles down.
However, we must also take into account that the first 80GB laptop drive became available in January 2003. At the time, the largest commercially available desktop drives were 200GB. Therefore, areal density in desktop drives has doubled during this time. This technology should trickle down and allow 160GB laptop drives. Where are they?
Also, gigabit ether in practice maxes out around 400Mbps, i.e. 50 MB/sec. Thats substantially less than even an ATA/66 7200rpm drive.
Of course, gigabit switches are basically unheard of outside of very large networks, so unless you're using crossover cable you're still limited to 100Mbps, which practice gives you about 10MB/s (due to overhead). And many of us are on wireless networks, which will give you even less throughput.
Networking technology still has a ways to go before the disk will really be the bottleneck in such scenarios.
You'll have trouble getting a self-powered firewire drive bigger than around 40GB, anything larger than that has to be plugged in, which utterly defies the point of a laptop. Even if the drive is self powered, it combined with an internal drive sucks a lot more power than a single internal drive would.
Now if I can only figure out why the OSS modules are being autoloaded for my built-in VIA 82something-or-ther rather than the ALSA ones, I'll be all set.
/etc/modules?
Can you fix it manually by editing
Yes, but you have to increment the nesting level in make menuconfig when you're building it, i.e. you need a UML specially compiled to run on other UMLs, or a UML compiled to run on other UMLs that run on other UMLs, etc.
Yes, that works, but stating an address other than your own on a credit card application is (IIRC) illegal, so it doesn't really address the problem.
Mozilla/Firefox user agent switcher link: http://www.chrispederick.com/work/firefox/useragen tswitcher/
Yes, in the short run, but in the long run greedy, power-hungry individuals find their way to the top again.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from
time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." -- Thomas Jefferson
Most Western countries keep the tyranny problem from getting out of hand by having little mini-revolutions every few decades. The most recent one in most countries was 1968-9, and one hopes we're due another any day now.
Lawsuits are fundamentally against the concept of free-market capitalism, and (if you really believe in capitalism) should only be used when the system breaks severely. In a capitalist economy, SCO would be unable to sue people with no case the way it has, and any money Microsoft spent backing them would be wasted.
Its not so much that the 5200go sucks, its that nvidia also produces 5600go and 5700go chips, which are faster, better, eat more battery, and have higher version numbers. The market for this laptop is the sort of gamers who want to be able to brag that they have a 3EGHz laptop at a LAN party. A graphics chip that is any less that the absolute biggest number available detracts substantially from said bragging rights. Thats all.
What good are food and shelter when you lack a ideal to live for?
The ironic thing is that the author of the letter realizes this, as he talks about the program he wrote exclusively for use in his father's business. Open-sourcing that would have had very little effect on his total revenue, as he would be payed just for developing the program in the first place. His mistake (or one of them) is that he somehow thinks that everything businesses need already exists today. In fact, there are quite a few in-house applications that businesses need, and allowing external sources to contribute to and use their code will increase the benefit to the businesses and the original programmer, rather than decreasing it.
It's just a bunch of kernel patches. They can't do anything to the compiler, and since SE kernel would be compiled on a non SE-system with a non-SE compiler, any backdoor would have to be right there in the code.
In fact, IIRC, an earlier version of the SElinux patch set is already in Linux 2.6. The NSA is bound by the GPL like everybody else, so the patches were GPL'd. They were good and useful, so they were included.
blame the person who signed the law.
And the people who voted for it, including every sitting senator at the time (the vast majority of which are still in office).
random code-swap where a bunch of us get together and hand eachother a blank disc with the source code to something nifty on it to play with.
Brilliant idea. It's called the internet.
Yet another slashdot luddite post, how sad...
IMHO they simply add to the pressures of life, and are a bad thing generally, especially in the hands of children or teenagers.
What exactly is wrong with teenagers in particular having cell phones? It allows them to easily contact adults in case of emergency, to communicate their friends without any of the unpleasant face-to-face contact that most slashdotters so abhor, and seems to me to be a Good Thing overall.
I agree that the way in which some businesses use employee cell phones is a bit extreme, but if you're not being paid enough to make getting all those calls worth it, you have just as much right to quit as someone who isn't being paid for all the hours he works.
The way they are sold in some countries is partly to blame, you get a phone for nearly nothing, which deceives many into thinking they are getting a bargain. I only know of UK practice, it may not be the same everywhere, but if it was made illegal to subsidise the phone from line rental and call charges, a lot of people would think again, if they had to pay the actual cost.
Here in Tanzania, you pay full handset price for an unlocked sim-free phone, and then purchase your own sim card and prepaid cards. This gives customers a lot more freedom with what they do with their phone, rather than limiting them to a given provider or plan, but it does tend to drive up the price of phones. Higher phone prices is generally a Bad Thing, because there are no landline phones here, so mobile phones are the only way to contact emergency services etc. is via mobile phones. Everybody, even minimum wage ($50US/month) workers, needs a mobile phone. Subsidy of phones, by corporations or by government, would improve the standard of living for everybody.
Nothing actually wrong with taxes, assuming we can keep the government using them sensibly (i.e. not on wars for oil). Of course, its nicer when we can have people with too much money anyway carrying the majority of the tax burden, but this doesn't make particularly good PR because 19% of americans believe they are in the richest 1%.
Anyway, back ontopic: Taxing VoIP connections would be like taxing Gnutella or KaZaA connections. If it could be done, the RIAA would have already gotten a law passed to do it.
6) VoIP comapanies move their operations abroad, so that congress can't tax them
7) Tax revenues plummet.
Seriously, why does the FCC's opinion on this even matter? Forgive me if theres something about the VoIP system I'm not understanding here, but Free World Dialup is a service something like DNS, so the servers can easily be located outside the US. Taxing the actual peer-to-peer VoIP connections between individual computers is just impossible. Congress is better off letting VoIP providers continue to run their systems from within the states, so that they at least provide some taxpaying jobs.
remembering how Gigabytes compare to Mebibytes (...) to kilobits.
If you're going to say "mebibytes", you also have to use "gibibytes" and "kibibits". Consistency within your own post is at least as important as consistency between international units.
Aside from USB booting being available in every modern BIOS, as a plethora of other posts have stated...
The next step is to move all device driver software from the operating system to a dedicated flash ROM embeded on the motherboard.
There are so many problems with this that it's silly. Most operating system kernels (including Linux and Windows) require drivers to be recompiled whenever the kernel is updated. Thus, you would have to make sure that the kernel on your USB drive is the same as the one that installed its drivers into the flashROM. Even if you could get around that problem, this sort of solution is just asking for DRM. Once drivers are no longer under the control of the operating system, one loses a LOT of the freedom that Linux and other such systems provide.
Much better solutions would be:
A) Standardize hardware interfaces. This is already done with IDE, as well as OHCI/UHCI USB and others. One IDE driver will work with all existing IDE hardware. Theres no reason we coudn't apply the same thing to network cards, sound cards, or whatever else you might need. In fact, hardware is already so standardized that most Linux distributions can ship a single disk with drivers supporting every piece of hardware found in most systems.
B) Get bigger USB keydrives, and put more drivers on them. Such drives are already available with 1GB capacity, which is far more than you would need to store every single available Linux kernel module.
No. In bandwidth measurements, "Mbps" with a small "b" refers to megabits per second. So the rover has a roughly 1 Mbps (0.119 MB/s) line to mars, and the article therefore implies that the average house has a 10 Mbps (1.25 MB/s) connection, which is quite untrue. 1 Mbps is quite acceptable for warez (roughly 10 minutes for an average ISO) and could probably handle a minor slashdotting as well (assuming the page was low on images).
How do they get that much bandwidth over a satellite link? My satellite connection maxes out at 320kbps, and I usually have to share it with at least 20 other people. It's a bit sad that the mars rovers have more bandwidth than the total bandwidth of the fastest ISP here in Tanzania. *sigh* The drawbacks of life in less economically developed countries. At least we don't have a DMCA, though.
Keep It Simple Stupid. Computers are tools. We don't "need" them to be fully featured with a full OS. Today we have network holes in a few applications. What's next tomorrow on MSFT Longhorn? Hackers turning in using your modem to call 0900 numbers? People hacking your e-wallet? When it comes to commodity devices we should make sure they do reliably and securely work. I don't expect anything less.
---
Dman luddites. Just because you would rather have a device that gives up freedom for security does not mean all of us do. There is a market for "KISS" phones, just as there is a market for locked-down xbox or "internet appliance" computers. Your post, however, implies that companies shouldn't produce more complicated phones. Personally, my phone's main source of usefullness is as a general-purpose, hackable device, and I don't expect anything less.
Adding security doesn't mean we have to remove features. Linux is a prime example of this. Substantially more secure than most alternatives, not because it removes features, but because people actually paid attention to security when they wrote it.
"7. Type: sudo ./install" would probably be necessary, if it wanted to install a backdoor or run automatically at boot or anything. Still, most users are stupid enough to type their password into any program asking for it. And, of course, the install process for a legitimate screensaver would be identical.