"For those who haven't seen it, "Sunshine" is a movie about the effects of a possible, but as-of-yet non-existant technology on people/society. I didn't know it was sci-fi when my friend rented it, but I was pleasently surprised."
"Sunshine" has little to do with memory erasing technology. That's just a plot device to push the characters through the emotions of losing something special. The movie's theme is that you don't know what you have until you lose it. It could have worked just as well if they got into an argument and walked away from each other, only then realizing they needed each other.
That's what I meant by a drama with edgy technology. IMO, not every movie or book with futuristic technology is sci-fi. I think sci-fi has to have that technology as central to the plot. You couldn't make Star Trek without travelling the galaxy because in order to face their own humanity and prejudices the crew had to visit other worlds and meet other intelligent life. (Which is why Stargate and Star Trek share the same themes... they just changed the plot device used to travel with).
It's been ok lately, but then I don't update drivers when they come out anymore. I've been burned a few times upgrading to new ATI drivers that kept crashing my system or in one case lowered my Counter-Strike: Source frame rate by twenty. I still get more crashes with good ATI drivers that I never got with NVidia, but with my current ATI drivers it's rare enough that it doesn't bother me too much. Crashes only ever happened while in DX games.
"I wouldn't buy an ATI card even if they got their drivers on par with their windows Drivers"
Their Windows drivers suck, too. I can't wait until I my 9800 Pro needs to be replaced so I can get an Nvidia card. ATI wooed me with a great price, and they lost me with lousy drivers. Their Linux drivers are without a doubt horrible.
I believe they sell the chips along with reference boards and schematics so 3rd parties can make their own boards, but they (and Nvidia) would be crazy to let anybody else fab the chips. It's their name and brand on the line and they can't risk crappy chips being released. Besides, there are probably very few chip plants that have the capability to produce a modern GPU.
OSC says he likes Sci-Fi, but what he really likes is drama with some edgy technology. As much as he puts down makers of bubble-gum-space-ship sci-fi for not being true to the genre, his own favourites such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are no more true to the genre.
The problem with sci-fi movies may be the lack of real drama and relationships, but that doesn't make movies which excel on those two points any more sci-fi.
If she was to suggest a school experiment that involved drinking sulphuric acid, because she'd confused it with acetic, then she'd be in big trouble. Yet I can't do anything when a company produces software that exposes my online banking details to any script kiddie with time to spare
The real difference is that it's nearly impossible to write any kind of complex software and have it free from bugs. Finding these problems isn't as easy as proofreading because code can function in vastly different ways depending on the context it's run in (where's the input coming from? etc).
I think software writers should be held responsible if they don't correct major bugs in software which they claim they are maintaining. When MS doesn't fix a security bug for a year after knowing about it and it then causes someone data loss, maybe MS should be held accountable. Same with OSS... Red Hat promises security patches for several kernel versions and they should be expected to provide them in a reasonable amount of time.
The problem with that is it's very subjective. What's a reasonable amount of time? What bugs are serious vs. not serious (especially when a bug thought to be not serious is exploited in an unexpected way to become serious)? What if the fix causes major compatibility problems?
It's easy to say "make software developers accountable", but not so easy to find a fair way to do that. Newspapers post corrections when they find errors, but are they held accountable for an error in a paper they printed last year? What if they printed a correction, but not everyone bought the paper with the correction in it?
"These people need to just admit that all they're doing is freeloading stuff"
Fine, but that still doesn't mean they should be called shoplifters and cheaters. That still doesn't mean this study is anything other than garbage.
And for what it's worth, I often use P2P to obtain copies of songs I already own. I have an MP3 CD player in my car and I like being able to put several albums worth of songs on one CD to play. Am I a freeloader, too? You anti-P2P people need to realize that not everyone who downloads music is doing so because they want free music. You should realize that the reason people like me use P2P is because the recording industry won't let me play my purchased music where I want to play it. I believe I should have that right.
"One particularly interesting feature is the "I feel lucky" button on the navigation console, no specifics as to the exact function of this button was put forth by the Google spokesdrone."
It's simple: you just type your destination and click the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, then you end up there, or at least you end up somewhere.
If Red Hat isn't any good, then it's a bad decision, not a Linux problem, per se. I have never run into an instability problem with Debian, but I have with Red Hat. Choosing the right distro is just as important as choosing the right software to run on it. Many people choose Red Hat because of the support, but for Debian you would buy it from a 3rd party (http://www.debian.org/consultants/). For Open Source this isn't a problem, whereas on Windows you know there are some things only MS can help you with.
"It's just as possible to run a secure Windows machine as it is an insecure unix one."
If we avoid the lowest common denominator, it's possible to secure a Unix system far more than it's possible to secure a Windows system. Tools such as SELinux and chroot aren't available on Windows (unless some 3rd party has made them). Chroot especially is a standard tool for securing a public-facing service such as web or ftp. SELinux is still young, but does wonders to prevent an exploited app from doing any harm.
The problem comes from Windows users who don't understand how to read memory usage on Linux. For example, Evolution is reported as using about 200MB (vmSize), if I recall correctly. Right now Xorg is 416MB! I only have 512MB of RAM yet vmSize is reported as over 1.5GB! Better check my swap usage... hey, no swapping at all (let's see you get Windows to use zero swap no matter how much RAM you have, without disabling swap altogether).
Most people quote the app size in RAM including shared libraries, so most of my apps include KDE and QT libraries and a few include GTK2 and other Gnome stuff. Not to mention a whole host of other small libraries.
What you want to do is measure how often and how much your system swaps. If it doesn't swap, you don't have anything to worry about even if you constantly have 4MB free RAM.
"Poor documentation, poor standards across distros, and obscure undocumented dependencies."
That's not valid for SAP. SAP gives you exact distributions it supports and tells you exactly which packages to install. From there, it's all SAP's software configuration, which I hear is brutal.
"Anyone that says that Linux will beat out Windows in every situation is a fool."
True, of course, but in this case it looks like someone seriously screwed up the configuration. By default neither Linux nor Windows will crash every two weeks, so somebody came along and made it worse. I don't know much about SAP, but if it took two weeks to install and configure on Linux and only two days on Windows, then the people who did on Linux it are either incompetent or the software is not very good on Linux, which is an SAP problem.
Maybe it's fair to say that if you're running SAP you shouldn't do it on Linux. I think that's where most of the pros and cons come into play when choosing an OS. I wouldn't run Apache or a DNS server on Windows for the same reason, but I also wouldn't blame the problem on Windows, I'd blame it on, for instance, the Apache Group not properly supporting Windows. (I hear Apache is pretty good on Windows now, but that wasn't always the case).
For one, better user accounts and software that doesn't require root access to run (Windows is just getting there now). For another, better separation of executables making it very easy to lock out system binaries while still giving access to applications (sbin and bin). Let's not forget that with XP Home, Windows still defaults everyone to being an administrator. I think even Pro does that for the first user created.
"On the server-side - and particularly the non-Windows server side - the single biggest vulnerability and attack vector - the user(s) - have a substantially different profile."
Maybe, but we're not always talking about social engineering. There are plenty of real software vulnerabilities. Social engineering must be dealt with by proper training.
"This is before even getting to the simple fact that unix has had 20 years more to harden itself from attackers."
Are you conceding that Unix is more secure, but using this as an excuse? Even if it's a valid excuse, it still means Unix is more secure, which is all that's important.
"Targets are not only chosen because they're easy, but also because they're useful."
I'd say that huge databases of credit card numbers and other personal information is very useful. I reckon that Unix servers are probably the most useful to break into since they're run by banks and the government as well as large corporations. Some turd's desktop is ok at sending spam, but the big hackers would be after the big servers.
Every time any database is mentioned on Slashdot we get a load of comments about how MySQL is not a "real" database because it doesn't support {insert random feature here}.
"Congress would be forced to make changes to the laws that make the RIAA's witchhunt possible."
Yes, Congress will make it possible to sue the parents. What, did you really think Congress was on your side?
Re:40 - average workweek
on
Pay vs. Happiness
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If you need to remember any of those items, your job sucks. Personally, I don't mind coming in 30 minutes early and leaving 30 minutes late. My boss would never ask me to do that unless an extreme emergency happened, which it hasn't yet. My job is good, my boss is great and I enjoy it. I actually look forward to arriving at work in the morning so I can talk with my boss for a while about non-work and work stuff.
My last job wasn't quite as good, but I still got along with the people I worked with and had a ton of fun.
There is really only one problem people have with work: their boss. A bad boss can turn a decent job into a horrible one. I would suggest to everyone that you try to have a good friendship with your boss, even if he or she can be an ass sometimes. Does your boss have kids? Ask him or her about their kids. Find common ground. Hell, for years I was a programmer working for the Director of Marketing and if I managed to do it, so can you!
That doesn't mean it's a bad format. This is all about formats that will stick around, which JPG won't. Like the GP said, BMPs are practically human-readable if you know what you're doing.
I would love to switch to Konqueror, but there are serious issues with trying to configure it as both a good browser and a file manager. For instance:
1. As a file manager I can set the Home button to take me to my home directory. But I can't set the browser's Home button to Google at the same time. Either I get a file manager's Home or a browser's Home.
2. I love Konqueror's tabbed file manager interface. When I have one instance open and I open another directory, I get a new tab instead of a new window. Perfect. Unfortunately, if I have a Konqueror browser open, the new file manager tab will appear in my browser. Sure, I can detatch it after the fact, but that's not the way it should work. I know I can select to always open external links in a new window, but I like the tabs when using the file manager.
3. The window won't remember separate position and size attributes for the browser and file manager unless I mess around with KDE's window preferences, which doesn't work very well since it resizes dialogs and other things in the same app.
There are a couple more points I can nitpick, but I won't right now. Konqueror is just too good a file manager for me to give it up so I can use the browser properly. In fact, Konqueror is the best file manager I've ever used (tabs! yes!). Great software, but a poor separation between file manager and web browser. I've been on the lookout for a 3rd party lightweight KHTML browser. It'd be great to have a Firefox clone with extension support that ran KHTML.
Yes, artists get advances, which are paid back to the record companies at a later date. The record companies also put up the cash for the recording costs, then bill the artists for it.
It's kind of like buying a home. I don't have enough cash for a house, but when I borrow money from the bank it's still me who's paying for it, eventually.
Slashdot Mirror
"For those who haven't seen it, "Sunshine" is a movie about the effects of a possible, but as-of-yet non-existant technology on people/society. I didn't know it was sci-fi when my friend rented it, but I was pleasently surprised."
"Sunshine" has little to do with memory erasing technology. That's just a plot device to push the characters through the emotions of losing something special. The movie's theme is that you don't know what you have until you lose it. It could have worked just as well if they got into an argument and walked away from each other, only then realizing they needed each other.
That's what I meant by a drama with edgy technology. IMO, not every movie or book with futuristic technology is sci-fi. I think sci-fi has to have that technology as central to the plot. You couldn't make Star Trek without travelling the galaxy because in order to face their own humanity and prejudices the crew had to visit other worlds and meet other intelligent life. (Which is why Stargate and Star Trek share the same themes... they just changed the plot device used to travel with).
It's been ok lately, but then I don't update drivers when they come out anymore. I've been burned a few times upgrading to new ATI drivers that kept crashing my system or in one case lowered my Counter-Strike: Source frame rate by twenty. I still get more crashes with good ATI drivers that I never got with NVidia, but with my current ATI drivers it's rare enough that it doesn't bother me too much. Crashes only ever happened while in DX games.
That's retarded. The database shouldn't try to fix buggy code.
"I wouldn't buy an ATI card even if they got their drivers on par with their windows Drivers"
Their Windows drivers suck, too. I can't wait until I my 9800 Pro needs to be replaced so I can get an Nvidia card. ATI wooed me with a great price, and they lost me with lousy drivers. Their Linux drivers are without a doubt horrible.
I believe they sell the chips along with reference boards and schematics so 3rd parties can make their own boards, but they (and Nvidia) would be crazy to let anybody else fab the chips. It's their name and brand on the line and they can't risk crappy chips being released. Besides, there are probably very few chip plants that have the capability to produce a modern GPU.
"often those albums have a ton of extra tracks or remixes"
I have yet to hear a remix I would pay for. They're sort of like the bonus features on DVDs, but even less useful.
OSC says he likes Sci-Fi, but what he really likes is drama with some edgy technology. As much as he puts down makers of bubble-gum-space-ship sci-fi for not being true to the genre, his own favourites such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are no more true to the genre.
The problem with sci-fi movies may be the lack of real drama and relationships, but that doesn't make movies which excel on those two points any more sci-fi.
If she was to suggest a school experiment that involved drinking sulphuric acid, because she'd confused it with acetic, then she'd be in big trouble. Yet I can't do anything when a company produces software that exposes my online banking details to any script kiddie with time to spare
The real difference is that it's nearly impossible to write any kind of complex software and have it free from bugs. Finding these problems isn't as easy as proofreading because code can function in vastly different ways depending on the context it's run in (where's the input coming from? etc).
I think software writers should be held responsible if they don't correct major bugs in software which they claim they are maintaining. When MS doesn't fix a security bug for a year after knowing about it and it then causes someone data loss, maybe MS should be held accountable. Same with OSS... Red Hat promises security patches for several kernel versions and they should be expected to provide them in a reasonable amount of time.
The problem with that is it's very subjective. What's a reasonable amount of time? What bugs are serious vs. not serious (especially when a bug thought to be not serious is exploited in an unexpected way to become serious)? What if the fix causes major compatibility problems?
It's easy to say "make software developers accountable", but not so easy to find a fair way to do that. Newspapers post corrections when they find errors, but are they held accountable for an error in a paper they printed last year? What if they printed a correction, but not everyone bought the paper with the correction in it?
"These people need to just admit that all they're doing is freeloading stuff"
Fine, but that still doesn't mean they should be called shoplifters and cheaters. That still doesn't mean this study is anything other than garbage.
And for what it's worth, I often use P2P to obtain copies of songs I already own. I have an MP3 CD player in my car and I like being able to put several albums worth of songs on one CD to play. Am I a freeloader, too? You anti-P2P people need to realize that not everyone who downloads music is doing so because they want free music. You should realize that the reason people like me use P2P is because the recording industry won't let me play my purchased music where I want to play it. I believe I should have that right.
"One particularly interesting feature is the "I feel lucky" button on the navigation console, no specifics as to the exact function of this button was put forth by the Google spokesdrone."
It's simple: you just type your destination and click the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, then you end up there, or at least you end up somewhere.
If Red Hat isn't any good, then it's a bad decision, not a Linux problem, per se. I have never run into an instability problem with Debian, but I have with Red Hat. Choosing the right distro is just as important as choosing the right software to run on it. Many people choose Red Hat because of the support, but for Debian you would buy it from a 3rd party (http://www.debian.org/consultants/). For Open Source this isn't a problem, whereas on Windows you know there are some things only MS can help you with.
Most importantly...
"It's just as possible to run a secure Windows machine as it is an insecure unix one."
If we avoid the lowest common denominator, it's possible to secure a Unix system far more than it's possible to secure a Windows system. Tools such as SELinux and chroot aren't available on Windows (unless some 3rd party has made them). Chroot especially is a standard tool for securing a public-facing service such as web or ftp. SELinux is still young, but does wonders to prevent an exploited app from doing any harm.
The problem comes from Windows users who don't understand how to read memory usage on Linux. For example, Evolution is reported as using about 200MB (vmSize), if I recall correctly. Right now Xorg is 416MB! I only have 512MB of RAM yet vmSize is reported as over 1.5GB! Better check my swap usage... hey, no swapping at all (let's see you get Windows to use zero swap no matter how much RAM you have, without disabling swap altogether).
Most people quote the app size in RAM including shared libraries, so most of my apps include KDE and QT libraries and a few include GTK2 and other Gnome stuff. Not to mention a whole host of other small libraries.
What you want to do is measure how often and how much your system swaps. If it doesn't swap, you don't have anything to worry about even if you constantly have 4MB free RAM.
"Poor documentation, poor standards across distros, and obscure undocumented dependencies."
That's not valid for SAP. SAP gives you exact distributions it supports and tells you exactly which packages to install. From there, it's all SAP's software configuration, which I hear is brutal.
Simple As Pie
It's supposed to be ironic, I think.
"Anyone that says that Linux will beat out Windows in every situation is a fool."
True, of course, but in this case it looks like someone seriously screwed up the configuration. By default neither Linux nor Windows will crash every two weeks, so somebody came along and made it worse. I don't know much about SAP, but if it took two weeks to install and configure on Linux and only two days on Windows, then the people who did on Linux it are either incompetent or the software is not very good on Linux, which is an SAP problem.
Maybe it's fair to say that if you're running SAP you shouldn't do it on Linux. I think that's where most of the pros and cons come into play when choosing an OS. I wouldn't run Apache or a DNS server on Windows for the same reason, but I also wouldn't blame the problem on Windows, I'd blame it on, for instance, the Apache Group not properly supporting Windows. (I hear Apache is pretty good on Windows now, but that wasn't always the case).
"That design being ?"
For one, better user accounts and software that doesn't require root access to run (Windows is just getting there now). For another, better separation of executables making it very easy to lock out system binaries while still giving access to applications (sbin and bin). Let's not forget that with XP Home, Windows still defaults everyone to being an administrator. I think even Pro does that for the first user created.
"On the server-side - and particularly the non-Windows server side - the single biggest vulnerability and attack vector - the user(s) - have a substantially different profile."
Maybe, but we're not always talking about social engineering. There are plenty of real software vulnerabilities. Social engineering must be dealt with by proper training.
"This is before even getting to the simple fact that unix has had 20 years more to harden itself from attackers."
Are you conceding that Unix is more secure, but using this as an excuse? Even if it's a valid excuse, it still means Unix is more secure, which is all that's important.
"Targets are not only chosen because they're easy, but also because they're useful."
I'd say that huge databases of credit card numbers and other personal information is very useful. I reckon that Unix servers are probably the most useful to break into since they're run by banks and the government as well as large corporations. Some turd's desktop is ok at sending spam, but the big hackers would be after the big servers.
Every time any database is mentioned on Slashdot we get a load of comments about how MySQL is not a "real" database because it doesn't support {insert random feature here}.
Is it a real database yet?
"Congress would be forced to make changes to the laws that make the RIAA's witchhunt possible."
Yes, Congress will make it possible to sue the parents. What, did you really think Congress was on your side?
If you need to remember any of those items, your job sucks. Personally, I don't mind coming in 30 minutes early and leaving 30 minutes late. My boss would never ask me to do that unless an extreme emergency happened, which it hasn't yet. My job is good, my boss is great and I enjoy it. I actually look forward to arriving at work in the morning so I can talk with my boss for a while about non-work and work stuff.
My last job wasn't quite as good, but I still got along with the people I worked with and had a ton of fun.
There is really only one problem people have with work: their boss. A bad boss can turn a decent job into a horrible one. I would suggest to everyone that you try to have a good friendship with your boss, even if he or she can be an ass sometimes. Does your boss have kids? Ask him or her about their kids. Find common ground. Hell, for years I was a programmer working for the Director of Marketing and if I managed to do it, so can you!
That doesn't mean it's a bad format. This is all about formats that will stick around, which JPG won't. Like the GP said, BMPs are practically human-readable if you know what you're doing.
I have an old copy of Solaris I tried to sell at a garage sale. Am I officially now in the Unix business as well?
I would love to switch to Konqueror, but there are serious issues with trying to configure it as both a good browser and a file manager. For instance:
1. As a file manager I can set the Home button to take me to my home directory. But I can't set the browser's Home button to Google at the same time. Either I get a file manager's Home or a browser's Home.
2. I love Konqueror's tabbed file manager interface. When I have one instance open and I open another directory, I get a new tab instead of a new window. Perfect. Unfortunately, if I have a Konqueror browser open, the new file manager tab will appear in my browser. Sure, I can detatch it after the fact, but that's not the way it should work. I know I can select to always open external links in a new window, but I like the tabs when using the file manager.
3. The window won't remember separate position and size attributes for the browser and file manager unless I mess around with KDE's window preferences, which doesn't work very well since it resizes dialogs and other things in the same app.
There are a couple more points I can nitpick, but I won't right now. Konqueror is just too good a file manager for me to give it up so I can use the browser properly. In fact, Konqueror is the best file manager I've ever used (tabs! yes!). Great software, but a poor separation between file manager and web browser. I've been on the lookout for a 3rd party lightweight KHTML browser. It'd be great to have a Firefox clone with extension support that ran KHTML.
Not exactly. Record companies recoup their money from the artists' 11 cents per song, they don't take it out of their own portion of the money.
Yes, artists get advances, which are paid back to the record companies at a later date. The record companies also put up the cash for the recording costs, then bill the artists for it.
It's kind of like buying a home. I don't have enough cash for a house, but when I borrow money from the bank it's still me who's paying for it, eventually.