This is exactly the kind of thing I do... I dual boot Gentoo and Windows XP Pro, and my XP system has only one user account with full privileges. Sure I could screw up the system really easily (although knowing Windows it'll screw up itself quite happily without any help from me), but I don't bother setting up a proper seperate user account for day-to-day use simply because I don't trust Windows to do it properly. I'll admit I've never tried it, but I very much doubt games and so forth would work properly (I know I couldn't install them, but would they run as a non-privileged user? I know for a fact that some won't, it says in their instruction manuals).
And games are the only reason I have Windows at all, (or rather, they will be when gPhoto2's PTP support works properly with my camera).
But I don't use Outlook, so at least I'm safe from most of those nasty e-mail virus things.
Re:Great 'article' about how to get a nice console
on
DRI Comes to DirectFB
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· Score: 1
It does, but it's something else to do with the framebuffer device...
Well in some ways, getting your site featured on Slashdot is VERY good advertising... you usually get lots of hits if nothing else, so at least people get the chance to find out you exist.
I don't know if Delia gets anything back for promoting these products, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happens from time to time - although she is on the BBC, and I'm not entirely sure how their rules about interaction with commercial entities would apply for that.
Britain's well-known celebrity chef Delia Smith is famous for causing 'offline' Slashdot effects by recommending each time she starts a TV series a select group of cooking hardware (pans, utensils etc.) and ingredients (a particular brand of sea salt, for example). These have a tendency to immediately start vanishing from shops (via the checkouts) at an astounding rate, which breeds newspaper stories about how fast they're selling which makes even more people want to buy them...
Gas is cheap? When did that happen? Electric cars may not have the range required for cross-country driving in the USA where gas costs less than water (seemingly), but over here in the UK we don't have as far to go and our gas is insanely expensive. I'd really rather like an electric car, and not just for the cleanliness and quiet.
Wow! That sounds fantastic! User access systems are one of the bits of web applications which always cause me lots of grief - especially when you have users with differing levels of access to various parts of the system/features/whatever. Debugging things like that is a nightmare, and while this is the point one of my lecturers would start to tell me about the advantages of designing the program correctly in the first place, when I'm working with a system I designed before I took his program design courses things get kind of hairy...
I've never put in a back door for any purpose - on every system I've written so far, I have a standard administrator account (if such a feature exists in the system, that is), and most of the time I also have direct access to the database and web server, either through FTP and phpMyAdmin or via SSH (which is preferable), so hard-coded ways in aren't necessary.
This post was very boring, go and have a drink or something to reward yourself for making it to the end.
If this happens... well, it's really, really not going to help anyone, and will seriously p!ss off lots and lots and lots of people who aren't getting rich from the advertising fees.
Thank Fate for the BBC.
To make it small and have a workable screen...
on
The Dream Handheld
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· Score: 1
Replace the LEP screen with a holographic projector. Just project your screen in mid-air (and of course it includes some whizzy bits that let you stab it with a finger and/or stylus to write and press buttons and things, otherwise it'd be pretty useless). The hologram would of course feel solid, so you'd know when you'd hit it. Buttons could even be made to 'feel' different to the finger when you press them depending on what they do, so a kind of squishy feel for launching applications, and a slightly spikey feel for pressing the button that formats the hard drive.
Okay, so that's impossible right now, but in the future, who knows?
Speaking of hard drives, if money's no object, fill the thing with flash RAM. Solid-state holographic storage would be better though, and more plausible than a holographic screen, too.
A final plus point would be the ability to suck power out of nearby power lines. Never get a flat battery ever again, just stay near a power line! And these days, you'll only get away from one if you go out in the country on a nice long walk, in which case you'll appreciate the three-month battery life and waterproof casing.
That would be my dream handheld.
Oh yeah, the OS would be even more full of eye candy than Mac OS X and Windows XP put together.
Phew! I was getting worried for a bit until I read that. Shouldn't article submitters read the article they're submitting before they make comment on it? And anyway, who's going to be using Itanium-based systems when AMD's 64bit chip comes out?
That would, I agree, be awful. Why can't they leave us and our functional text-based installers alone?
And why does nobody ever say good things about Slackware?
And could someone put up the 1.0 sources for those of us not running RedHat or Debian?
Re:A community site deserves the BBC.
on
Hope For H2G2
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· Score: 1
Yeah, they were getting pretty annoying. And not long to go now until we find out if we're right or they are... see you there!
MaW (U55669)
Re:A community site deserves the BBC.
on
Hope For H2G2
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· Score: 1
Now if only the members of the h2g2 community I'm still in touch with all agreed with you... I do, but for some reason they seem to be suffering from paranoia. Oh well, we'll soon see how it all pans out.
I for one am looking forward to it enormously.
Yrd / MaW
Guru, Minister for Evil, Muse of Evilness & Dancing Ducks @ h2g2 (well, I was before the takeover, who knows what I am now?)
One claim in particular comes to mind. Near the end of the article, he claims that Microsoft can build a better product than Linux. So if they can, why haven't they? And why does it take them so long to do it? The "American Way" may be very good for lining Microsoft's pockets, but it's not the only way to get new, innovative software out into the world. Speaking of which, have Microsoft shown all that much in the way of innovation lately? Apart from in the courtroom, that is.
I'm in the process of joining the police in the UK, so I'm probably biased (yes, I am biased), and although I can understand the objections being raised, I believe the benefits can outweigh the disadvantages. Too many people get away with their crimes - either through lack of capture or on legal wrangling. DNA evidence could give us the edge we need to make some kind of impact. Obviously such a database must be carefully controlled, but at the moment I see no problems - of course, when the government changes later this year things might be different.
And as for CCTV, I'd much rather have that than arm every police officer and live my life as a cop in fear of being shot every time I talk to someone on the streets.
Errm... nothing that I can see. Microsoft are reportedly betting their future on it. Well good for them. Maybe they'll go at least partially down the tubes. I'm using Windows at the moment, and don't like it. Why am I using it? Because of the state of Linux ICQ clients I can't get through my local firewall without ICQ2000b... without Windows, ICQ might run properly on Linux. Who knows?
Slashdot Mirror
This is exactly the kind of thing I do... I dual boot Gentoo and Windows XP Pro, and my XP system has only one user account with full privileges. Sure I could screw up the system really easily (although knowing Windows it'll screw up itself quite happily without any help from me), but I don't bother setting up a proper seperate user account for day-to-day use simply because I don't trust Windows to do it properly. I'll admit I've never tried it, but I very much doubt games and so forth would work properly (I know I couldn't install them, but would they run as a non-privileged user? I know for a fact that some won't, it says in their instruction manuals).
And games are the only reason I have Windows at all, (or rather, they will be when gPhoto2's PTP support works properly with my camera).
But I don't use Outlook, so at least I'm safe from most of those nasty e-mail virus things.
It does, but it's something else to do with the framebuffer device...
Well in some ways, getting your site featured on Slashdot is VERY good advertising... you usually get lots of hits if nothing else, so at least people get the chance to find out you exist.
I don't know if Delia gets anything back for promoting these products, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happens from time to time - although she is on the BBC, and I'm not entirely sure how their rules about interaction with commercial entities would apply for that.
Britain's well-known celebrity chef Delia Smith is famous for causing 'offline' Slashdot effects by recommending each time she starts a TV series a select group of cooking hardware (pans, utensils etc.) and ingredients (a particular brand of sea salt, for example). These have a tendency to immediately start vanishing from shops (via the checkouts) at an astounding rate, which breeds newspaper stories about how fast they're selling which makes even more people want to buy them...
Gas is cheap? When did that happen? Electric cars may not have the range required for cross-country driving in the USA where gas costs less than water (seemingly), but over here in the UK we don't have as far to go and our gas is insanely expensive. I'd really rather like an electric car, and not just for the cleanliness and quiet.
I should make a note of these things for the next system I have to design... could save a lot of time and effort.
Wow! That sounds fantastic! User access systems are one of the bits of web applications which always cause me lots of grief - especially when you have users with differing levels of access to various parts of the system/features/whatever. Debugging things like that is a nightmare, and while this is the point one of my lecturers would start to tell me about the advantages of designing the program correctly in the first place, when I'm working with a system I designed before I took his program design courses things get kind of hairy...
I've never put in a back door for any purpose - on every system I've written so far, I have a standard administrator account (if such a feature exists in the system, that is), and most of the time I also have direct access to the database and web server, either through FTP and phpMyAdmin or via SSH (which is preferable), so hard-coded ways in aren't necessary.
This post was very boring, go and have a drink or something to reward yourself for making it to the end.
Another wonder method with a price... gotta hate the world.
If this happens... well, it's really, really not going to help anyone, and will seriously p!ss off lots and lots and lots of people who aren't getting rich from the advertising fees.
Thank Fate for the BBC.
Replace the LEP screen with a holographic projector. Just project your screen in mid-air (and of course it includes some whizzy bits that let you stab it with a finger and/or stylus to write and press buttons and things, otherwise it'd be pretty useless). The hologram would of course feel solid, so you'd know when you'd hit it. Buttons could even be made to 'feel' different to the finger when you press them depending on what they do, so a kind of squishy feel for launching applications, and a slightly spikey feel for pressing the button that formats the hard drive.
Okay, so that's impossible right now, but in the future, who knows?
Speaking of hard drives, if money's no object, fill the thing with flash RAM. Solid-state holographic storage would be better though, and more plausible than a holographic screen, too.
A final plus point would be the ability to suck power out of nearby power lines. Never get a flat battery ever again, just stay near a power line! And these days, you'll only get away from one if you go out in the country on a nice long walk, in which case you'll appreciate the three-month battery life and waterproof casing.
That would be my dream handheld.
Oh yeah, the OS would be even more full of eye candy than Mac OS X and Windows XP put together.
Phew! I was getting worried for a bit until I read that. Shouldn't article submitters read the article they're submitting before they make comment on it? And anyway, who's going to be using Itanium-based systems when AMD's 64bit chip comes out?
That would, I agree, be awful. Why can't they leave us and our functional text-based installers alone? And why does nobody ever say good things about Slackware?
And could someone put up the 1.0 sources for those of us not running RedHat or Debian?
MaW (U55669)
Now if only the members of the h2g2 community I'm still in touch with all agreed with you... I do, but for some reason they seem to be suffering from paranoia. Oh well, we'll soon see how it all pans out.
I for one am looking forward to it enormously.
Yrd / MaW
Guru, Minister for Evil, Muse of Evilness & Dancing Ducks @ h2g2 (well, I was before the takeover, who knows what I am now?)
This post is going to score sooooo low...
I'm in the process of joining the police in the UK, so I'm probably biased (yes, I am biased), and although I can understand the objections being raised, I believe the benefits can outweigh the disadvantages. Too many people get away with their crimes - either through lack of capture or on legal wrangling. DNA evidence could give us the edge we need to make some kind of impact. Obviously such a database must be carefully controlled, but at the moment I see no problems - of course, when the government changes later this year things might be different.
And as for CCTV, I'd much rather have that than arm every police officer and live my life as a cop in fear of being shot every time I talk to someone on the streets.
Errm... nothing that I can see. Microsoft are reportedly betting their future on it. Well good for them. Maybe they'll go at least partially down the tubes. I'm using Windows at the moment, and don't like it. Why am I using it? Because of the state of Linux ICQ clients I can't get through my local firewall without ICQ2000b... without Windows, ICQ might run properly on Linux. Who knows?