Carr's main point is that modern PCs are ridiculously overpowered for the needs of the typical home or office user. I couldn't agree more, and Bill's predictable road-ahead fluff piece didn't address that point at all. Yeah Bill, we know computers and software are going to keep evolving and all sorts of cool things are going to happen. But does the average desk jockey need a 3GHz processor, 160Gb hard drive and 19-inch LCD monitor to send email, run Excel and Word, and surf the web? No.
Do people need an H1 or any SUV for that matter to go back and forth to work, fetch groceries, and tote the kids back and forth to soccer practice?
Yes!
Or is it no?
In fact, most people drive smaller more task oriented vehicles for doing these things, and the same is for computers. I'm probably more of a power user than most people, but my humble 1.25GHz PowerBook with an 80 Gig hd is fine for me. At times I do wish I had a little more horsepower in the CPU department, but I would not sacrifice battery life for it.
Now, if a 3GHz 160Gb drive computer with a 19-inch LCD screen were $500. Why not use it? The only downside would be the power usage of the CPU. Actually, a 19inch LCD would probably pay for itself vs a 17 or possibly 15inch CRT in a year's time of usage by power alone.
My point, is that in a capitalist driven society, you can basically get whatever anyone is willing to pay for. Actual need is irrelevant. Perception of need and price are what is important. Somebody, somewhere is making these PC purchases (probably a slashdotter:). Like I said, if something is an overkill in every department besides price, it will sell. Actually, I see PCs getting like cars. All cars are OK for driving, but its up to the purchaser to figure out what is important to them in making a decision on a purchase.
the contractors are claiming that for all intents-and-purposes, they functioned more like actual employeed than a contractor.
Not a slam on your post, but on these guys that are suing.
"All intents-and-purposes" was probably not in their contract that they signed when they started working there. In fact, I would imagine that the benefits and everything else were more than "all intents-and-purposes" clearly laid out when they signed the paper and said "Yes!" I'll work here.
I mean, why aren't they claiming that they were getting paid too little too, and suing for back owed wages?
I am not in any way arguing that HP is "right" or has not tried to do something sleazy, but if the people agreed to the terms of their employment, I hold them entirely to blame and not HP or the potatoes in Idaho.
Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago
on
A History of Icons
·
· Score: 1
Hmm, I've always considered icons those funny little pictures that I had no clue what they did until I learned their relative position in the application from their mouseover text.
I obviously could not read the article, but the Slashdot blurbette did not mention the Xerox star which started the whole WIMP (Windows Icons Menus & Pointers). In my opinion, the whole WIMP paradigm has not significantly changed since its inception in 1980 or so. The most different OS that I can tell is OS X, but even that is subtly different from Microsoft's offerings and the "Desktop Environments" for the *NIXes.
is the law and the fines that will be applied internationally and enforced (collected) by the local authorities on the SOURCE.
Ah, the make it really illegal, and it will stop.
Has worked wonders for the "War on drugs".
The only way to stop spam is for people to stop being stupid and replying to the spam. I seriously think that people will spontaneously stop being stupid any time in the foreseeable future.
I mean, when I get pounded by these cheesy obviously fake mails from a bank promising me great interest rates on a mortgage that was "sent specially to me, and why haven't you responded yet?" and CCed to a couple of people I don't know, where the "bank" is in Korea or something, says its FDIC insured, the registrar is from France or whatever. But as lame as these mails are, I'm betting they are collecting a great number of SSNs or whatever info they are trying to get.
Starbucks doesn't bother to ask for a PIN or signature under $20
Neither does Wendy's and some other fast food places I've been.
Its excellent. Especially since the signatures are bs in the first place.
Now, if they could only update the CC machines that ask you incessantly if you "Really, really want to spend $XX.YY for what you just bought". In my area, Wawa is the only store that has figured out how to do credit cards correctly. Now if only they would adopt the < $20 no signature required thing. That would kick ass.
For my own anecdotal account, when I first started getting into computers when I was in college, my GPA plummeted. I was not a CS major or anything, but as soon as I learned about pipes on the command line, I was hooked. I have heard from professors that the quality of research by students has gone down because of computers. Students think that the first couple of hits on a google search is the same as real library research.
I can attribute students doing worse with the advent of computers because it basically makes people lazy because they can. Its the whole instant gratification thing. Especially since humans are all born defective now and have ADD or ADHD now, I can see how computers can foster those problems (yes that was sarcasm about the defective birth thing).
The only real advantage I see computers having for people are 1) record keeping 2) number crunching and 3) mindless entertainment like games and 4) torrent downloads. I'm an avid music collector, and the ability for me to get large amounts of quality live music downloads vs the "old school" way of trading tapes or CDs via snail mail is vastly superior in terms of the quality available and the speed of acquiring music.
For me, I find it interesting that my favorite computers are not very computerlike. For example, my DVR. Its basically a computer. Its not a Tivo, so I'm not sure what is behind the scenes, but its got an 800 MHz RISC processor, has a specialized input via the remote, and does pretty much what I want it to do. Another good example is my Linksys wireless router. Its a specialized computer that runs Linux, again with a very limited interface that pretty much does what I want. The same can be said for console games.
In summary, I can see how computers are a detriment to students. Even if the results are only 70% as good as doing other forms of research and studying, its so easy to get that 70% that going further takes an exponential amount of extra effort. Hmm, what is a 70% in school?
No, its a followup story. The one here has the headline "CSS Support Could Be IE7's Weakest Link", and they added the.0 too.
The slashdot "editors" are more on the ball than you think!
Actually, as often as this happens, I think its almost a joke by these guys. Either that, or they are completely ignorant about the content of their own site and can't even do a 10 second search on google like I did to find the previous story.
7. You helped perpetuate the spamming, pyramid scheme insanity.
I mean, even the "freecreditreports.com" is a scam that is not free. Duh, why would they pay for an ad on TV for free stuff?
FWIW, I foe everyone that has free crap in their sigs on slashdot. This is simply something that is driven by greed, for what? A toy that any working person could buy. They are only what, $400. For the six months and bothering some unknown pyramid amount of people you could have simply saved $67 a month and just bought the thing. Poor people suck. Go ask Kenny.
There is some degree of merit for working to obtain what one wants in life. Then there is apparently some kind of merit for those that feel the need to exert annoyance on people and exploit people to get what they want in life.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. There is no such thing as a free iPod. For the $400 they paid you, think about how many of your beloved greedy referrers and their referrers and their referrers were somehow affected by this scheme. Lets be conservative and say it was 128 people total from you that participated, and odds are none of them got iPods. Thats as whopping $3 to "market" to each of them (with results!). Its cheaper, and I imagine more effective than any other form of "marketing".
The good side, is that it will not last. People will be over the scam in 6 months to a year.
There are lots of times people are searching Google and really do want product results.
That is what froogle is for. Google is for searching, froogle is for searching for something to buy.
I do not mind having google provide searches for products. Its very handy, but it has gotten difficult to get good search results lately because of all of the people trying to sell me crap.
I would also like to see google integrate accurate customer feedback on stores on the web like many other sites do. That would be an icing on the cake.
All *NIX boxes can limit the number of processes and/or threads by UID. I cannot think of a "reasonable" default because of the variability in the hardware available and the variability of the type of users.
Actually, in the case of something like your fork bomb program, one simple command would be sufficient.
userdel
Its one thing to do something out of ignorance or by mistake, but to intentionally do something on a machine that you have been given an account on, I would imagine that if thats the best you can do with the usage of the box, I don't see why you need an account. If someone over me said a user like you needed an account, your account would be very, very limited in its functionality. Limited perhaps, by accident, to the point that you would just go to another machine for day to day computing.
Also, if there are no limits on users they can DOS the box by taking all available memory and/or disk space. Hell, I don't even know how to eliminate a user from filling up/var/log by pumping a bunch of crap into the 'logger' command. I believe that the same can be done with file descriptors, but I could be wrong.
So, what we have learned is that Linux being a multiuser OS can have one of its users with the default configuration consume all or enough resources on a box. Well, actually the default is a good thing. It would be annoying to be in the middle of doing something important and stuff stop working because you've forked too many processes. Also, an installation cannot predict the resources available to the system, therefore no generic limits would be reasonable.
In summary, nothing to see here. Please move along.
It would be really nice if Stable were updated at least yearly.
Which part of stable is confusing?
You know when I update my server software? When it is so old its not really supported any more, and when I get new hardware, and then it depends.
I like the longer lifespan and dependability of any operating system. If it ain't broke, why change a thing? It was different in the 1.2 and 2.0 days of Linux, when the kernel was not very mature and lacked very important features or had hard coded limitations in it, but those days are gone. The last limitation that has been overcome is large block device support (if you consider 1Tb large). I remember having to use beta kernels, 2.1.125 if I remember correctly because it supported more than 256 file descriptors for a single process, and the production kernels did not without a patch. There was a time when software RAID was not offered in the kernel. Or there were less than 5 or 6 filesystems offered. But now the kernel comes with everything besides a kitchen sink.
Also, the beauty of *NIX systems is the/usr/local (or/opt, I prefer/usr/local) directory to put updated or additional packages that did not come with the installation. For example, on my solaris boxes and even my OSX box, I put things like the latest GNU fileutils and other things like GNU grep, because they are simply more robust featurewise than standard implementations or even older ones. I also tend to roll my own core software on a system depending on its purpose (httpd for a web server, squid for a proxy server, DB server, etc). That way I am free of the distributions mucking with my core services, and often I want additional extensions or whatever that I would just rather do myself. Things like mail and bind, I leave to them to take care of for updates or whatever, I trust them more than myself, maybe that is a bad assumption, but...
Now, these things are different for an end user's desktop machine. But the reason for that is because the GUI world of Linux is more in the growth stage like the kernel was in the mid to late 90s. It is worthy to have updates every six months or less, and it is OK to have the downtime of having your video drivers bomb out on you or monkey around for a while to get the box back up and running. Its not worth the downtime on a server to do this.
The first time I saw Social Engineering on the big screen was when Matthew Broderick got himself sent to the principals office just so he could get the weekly password. That movie came out in 83 and the idea wasn't new then.
Yeah, but obviously we have come a long way in access control since then.
I mean, yes, in 83 they already adopted the draconian measure of changing passwords frequently. (Excellent!) But they were not "strong" passwords. If I remember correctly, "pencil" was the password.
Now, if they used the same authentication principles we do today with stringent password policies to change their passwords frequently and use a strong password like "P3nC1l!69@", then the likelihood of the password being written down in an obvious place, or simply given away would never happen.
</sarcasm>
In my not so humble and strong opinion, password policies that require certain number of nonsense characters and changed every so often so that I cannot remember the password, is simply ignorant. The only thing that changing a password frequently will do is eliminate the time of exposure for someone who has given up their password to someone, which is already bad and a sign of a breech, so the changing of the password would only limit the time that a breech would happen. The impossible to remember character sequence is simply ignorant. If I were to explicitly tell you that my password was a weak one like a family member or a pet and you had 3 guesses before the account was locked. Even then the likelihood of compromising the account would be extremely low. And again, this is even telling someone a limited subset of words to guess. Yes, automatic lockouts after X number of failed login attempts should be a requirement for a secure setting. Not pestering me to change it to something I don't even want to care to remember all the time.
So all of you CIO people out there. Keep doing what your doing. If I ever want access to your machines, I'll just ask for a username and password.
Honestly, I never use the right-mouse button because the menus it brings up are always available at the top menu, anyway.
Yeah, I would guess that _most_ of the things are available in the top menu, however that is not where my pointer is located. Plus over 90% of the junk in the top menu does not apply to what I'm currently doing with the mouse, to include greyed out things that I cannot do. 100% of the things that are available for me to do when I right or control click on something are available for immediate action.
Some things that are not available via the top menu that are available via control-click or right click in Safari alone are when clicking on a link I can 1) Copy the URL 2) bookmark the URL 3) open the url in a new window 4) open the url in a new tab (middle click does this too!) or 5) download the content in the link (in the new Safari it doesn't even ask you for the filename, finally!) I do not believe that any of those 5 options are available via the top menu when navigating a link. Possibly with other keyboard modifiers to the point that my hand hurts, maybe, but thats it.
The right click is so convenient that I use the Google search bar in Safari and right click on a word all the time to check its spelling. Its OK that you don't want or perceive the need for more mice buttons, but I find it invaluable for my computing experience. Especially for things like using remote X11 apps on my Mac. Sure you can alt-option-Apple click on junk, but its mechanically easier and quicker and more natural just to use the extra buttons on my mouse. Also, I'm right handed. I would find the modifier clicks completely awkward if I were left handed.
Seriously if I had a dime for everytime someone predicted the demise of the desktop, I'd have a couple of bucks.
The funny thing, is that if the desktop would demise, then maybe Linux would finally be "on the desktop", by being the server farm behind the desktop.
To be honest, if networks keep getting more reliable and faster, why would there still be a desktop? Right now, a vast majority of my computing, and my user's computing is done remotely on machines that are much more powerful in terms of CPU capacity and storage and they are maintained by a professional that does backups and whatnot on a regular basis.
Do "normal" desktop users do this? Do they have availability to dozens to hundreds of processors at a time on their desktop? How about disk space? How about backups? How useful is their computer if you cut the ethernet cable?
I think that the desktop has pretty much stalled. Noone cares too much about processor speed anymore for a desktop machine. For niche users like graphics designers that need really high graphical, disk, and memory bandwidth, sure get them a nice dual G5 or whatever, but these people are a minority.
I have my user's workstations set up so that they are pretty much dumb terminals, but they don't know it. I've got/usr/local mounted from a central server. Its much easier to maintain that way. Some users even use KDE on solaris which have their binaries located on the/usr/local partition. It works fine.
I would argue that the desktop is almost dead already. Again, pull the ethernet cable and see what I mean. Back in the late 80s or early 90s this was not always true, but today it is.
I never keep emails, or archive IMs or any other form of communication. Once a email is read, it is deleted. Same goes for normal old-skool mail, I read it and then trash it. The only exceptions are of letters/email of some importance such as information I need to keep handy, or if it has some kind of sentimental value (letters from deceased relatives for example.)
Oh, come on. I keep all of my email archived right beside my taped phone conversations and all of my postal mail right beside my gun in a drawer right beside my bed.
But seriously. I've heard of people keeping copies of their mail from x number of years back and toting it around with them and saving it here and there, but I have never heard of anyone that actually ever looked at it, and none of these people keep their postal mail nor do they tape their phone conversations or other conversations. I guess email is just that much more important than every other form of communication.
I do keep all of my email for work saved in directories for each year. This has come in handy for a lawsuit that I'm involved with, and for saying to people "but on this date you said XYZ". Its much less than a gig or two for a few years of emails. If I lost it, I wouldn't be that upset.
That is technically not RAID. Its kinda of a hack using RAID software. I do the same thing with a script that I call 'raid1.pl', but its not a RAID system at all. I simply use rsync to sync up two drives at night.
The difference between this and real RAID1 is that with RAID1 you do 'rm -rf/something/important' and its gone from both disks (or an overwrite, or anything). In my experience, if a backup is done nightly, even if a whole day's work is lost, it is preferable to having potentially YEARS of data lost, and it is easy to do with a typo in a script or something. Its great to have something like:
rm -rf/$SOME_DIRECTORY
and $SOME_DIRECTORY is not defined. Granted I would never do this, but some inexperienced scripters do.
Slashdot Mirror
Carr's main point is that modern PCs are ridiculously overpowered for the needs of the typical home or office user. I couldn't agree more, and Bill's predictable road-ahead fluff piece didn't address that point at all. Yeah Bill, we know computers and software are going to keep evolving and all sorts of cool things are going to happen. But does the average desk jockey need a 3GHz processor, 160Gb hard drive and 19-inch LCD monitor to send email, run Excel and Word, and surf the web? No.
Do people need an H1 or any SUV for that matter to go back and forth to work, fetch groceries, and tote the kids back and forth to soccer practice?
Yes!
Or is it no?
In fact, most people drive smaller more task oriented vehicles for doing these things, and the same is for computers. I'm probably more of a power user than most people, but my humble 1.25GHz PowerBook with an 80 Gig hd is fine for me. At times I do wish I had a little more horsepower in the CPU department, but I would not sacrifice battery life for it.
Now, if a 3GHz 160Gb drive computer with a 19-inch LCD screen were $500. Why not use it? The only downside would be the power usage of the CPU. Actually, a 19inch LCD would probably pay for itself vs a 17 or possibly 15inch CRT in a year's time of usage by power alone.
My point, is that in a capitalist driven society, you can basically get whatever anyone is willing to pay for. Actual need is irrelevant. Perception of need and price are what is important. Somebody, somewhere is making these PC purchases (probably a slashdotter:). Like I said, if something is an overkill in every department besides price, it will sell. Actually, I see PCs getting like cars. All cars are OK for driving, but its up to the purchaser to figure out what is important to them in making a decision on a purchase.
Is it any surprise that the companies are responding to economic pressure from the government NOT to hire regular full-time workers?
At least they are still trying to hire Americans...
You work for Manpower and should be arguing with THEM for better pay and benefits more in line with your current working conditions.
Silly rabbit, HP has deeper pockets.
Civil lawsuits have little to nothing about what is right or wrong, its a power and cash thing.
the contractors are claiming that for all intents-and-purposes, they functioned more like actual employeed than a contractor.
Not a slam on your post, but on these guys that are suing.
"All intents-and-purposes" was probably not in their contract that they signed when they started working there. In fact, I would imagine that the benefits and everything else were more than "all intents-and-purposes" clearly laid out when they signed the paper and said "Yes!" I'll work here.
I mean, why aren't they claiming that they were getting paid too little too, and suing for back owed wages?
I am not in any way arguing that HP is "right" or has not tried to do something sleazy, but if the people agreed to the terms of their employment, I hold them entirely to blame and not HP or the potatoes in Idaho.
Hmm, I've always considered icons those funny little pictures that I had no clue what they did until I learned their relative position in the application from their mouseover text.
I obviously could not read the article, but the Slashdot blurbette did not mention the Xerox star which started the whole WIMP (Windows Icons Menus & Pointers). In my opinion, the whole WIMP paradigm has not significantly changed since its inception in 1980 or so. The most different OS that I can tell is OS X, but even that is subtly different from Microsoft's offerings and the "Desktop Environments" for the *NIXes.
is the law and the fines that will be applied internationally and enforced (collected) by the local authorities on the SOURCE.
Ah, the make it really illegal, and it will stop.
Has worked wonders for the "War on drugs".
The only way to stop spam is for people to stop being stupid and replying to the spam. I seriously think that people will spontaneously stop being stupid any time in the foreseeable future.
I mean, when I get pounded by these cheesy obviously fake mails from a bank promising me great interest rates on a mortgage that was "sent specially to me, and why haven't you responded yet?" and CCed to a couple of people I don't know, where the "bank" is in Korea or something, says its FDIC insured, the registrar is from France or whatever. But as lame as these mails are, I'm betting they are collecting a great number of SSNs or whatever info they are trying to get.
I hate to admit it, but spam is here to stay.
Read the fine print in your credit card contract; I did. That's what the signature is there for. That's ALL it's there for.
So, according to the credit card's policies. I did not sign the contract on a card with just shy of $10,000 on it.
Can I just go to them and say that I did not accept their contract?
Starbucks doesn't bother to ask for a PIN or signature under $20
Neither does Wendy's and some other fast food places I've been.
Its excellent. Especially since the signatures are bs in the first place.
Now, if they could only update the CC machines that ask you incessantly if you "Really, really want to spend $XX.YY for what you just bought". In my area, Wawa is the only store that has figured out how to do credit cards correctly. Now if only they would adopt the < $20 no signature required thing. That would kick ass.
A credit card is not valid until signed
I put "SEE ID" on my CCs. I've got a new CC with a balance of almost 10,000 on it and it is not signed.
So, if the card is not valid, do I have to pay the balance?
For my own anecdotal account, when I first started getting into computers when I was in college, my GPA plummeted. I was not a CS major or anything, but as soon as I learned about pipes on the command line, I was hooked. I have heard from professors that the quality of research by students has gone down because of computers. Students think that the first couple of hits on a google search is the same as real library research.
I can attribute students doing worse with the advent of computers because it basically makes people lazy because they can. Its the whole instant gratification thing. Especially since humans are all born defective now and have ADD or ADHD now, I can see how computers can foster those problems (yes that was sarcasm about the defective birth thing).
The only real advantage I see computers having for people are 1) record keeping 2) number crunching and 3) mindless entertainment like games and 4) torrent downloads. I'm an avid music collector, and the ability for me to get large amounts of quality live music downloads vs the "old school" way of trading tapes or CDs via snail mail is vastly superior in terms of the quality available and the speed of acquiring music.
For me, I find it interesting that my favorite computers are not very computerlike. For example, my DVR. Its basically a computer. Its not a Tivo, so I'm not sure what is behind the scenes, but its got an 800 MHz RISC processor, has a specialized input via the remote, and does pretty much what I want it to do. Another good example is my Linksys wireless router. Its a specialized computer that runs Linux, again with a very limited interface that pretty much does what I want. The same can be said for console games.
In summary, I can see how computers are a detriment to students. Even if the results are only 70% as good as doing other forms of research and studying, its so easy to get that 70% that going further takes an exponential amount of extra effort. Hmm, what is a 70% in school?
SHOUT A WHOLE LOT. It makes you easier to understand.
No. The typical way an American speaks to a non-English speaking person and they don't get understood the first time is to:
S P E A KL O U D L Y A N DS L O W L Y
That often make up for a lack of vocabulary every time!
Really ever use ask jeeves? I mean, I used it once or twice several years ago, but is it really that popular to be bought for 2 billion?
Good question. So I asked Jeeves the question, and didn't get much of an answer either -- What is the value of the ask jeeves website?
Interesting enough, google had better results on the question than Jeeves did.
No, its a followup story. The one here has the headline "CSS Support Could Be IE7's Weakest Link", and they added the .0 too.
The slashdot "editors" are more on the ball than you think!
Actually, as often as this happens, I think its almost a joke by these guys. Either that, or they are completely ignorant about the content of their own site and can't even do a 10 second search on google like I did to find the previous story.
7. You helped perpetuate the spamming, pyramid scheme insanity.
I mean, even the "freecreditreports.com" is a scam that is not free. Duh, why would they pay for an ad on TV for free stuff?
FWIW, I foe everyone that has free crap in their sigs on slashdot. This is simply something that is driven by greed, for what? A toy that any working person could buy. They are only what, $400. For the six months and bothering some unknown pyramid amount of people you could have simply saved $67 a month and just bought the thing. Poor people suck. Go ask Kenny.
There is some degree of merit for working to obtain what one wants in life. Then there is apparently some kind of merit for those that feel the need to exert annoyance on people and exploit people to get what they want in life.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. There is no such thing as a free iPod. For the $400 they paid you, think about how many of your beloved greedy referrers and their referrers and their referrers were somehow affected by this scheme. Lets be conservative and say it was 128 people total from you that participated, and odds are none of them got iPods. Thats as whopping $3 to "market" to each of them (with results!). Its cheaper, and I imagine more effective than any other form of "marketing".
The good side, is that it will not last. People will be over the scam in 6 months to a year.
There are lots of times people are searching Google and really do want product results.
That is what froogle is for. Google is for searching, froogle is for searching for something to buy.
I do not mind having google provide searches for products. Its very handy, but it has gotten difficult to get good search results lately because of all of the people trying to sell me crap.
I would also like to see google integrate accurate customer feedback on stores on the web like many other sites do. That would be an icing on the cake.
but no choice in cable providers.
Personally, I would prefer the latter to the former.
All *NIX boxes can limit the number of processes and/or threads by UID. I cannot think of a "reasonable" default because of the variability in the hardware available and the variability of the type of users.
Actually, in the case of something like your fork bomb program, one simple command would be sufficient.
userdel
Its one thing to do something out of ignorance or by mistake, but to intentionally do something on a machine that you have been given an account on, I would imagine that if thats the best you can do with the usage of the box, I don't see why you need an account. If someone over me said a user like you needed an account, your account would be very, very limited in its functionality. Limited perhaps, by accident, to the point that you would just go to another machine for day to day computing.
Also, if there are no limits on users they can DOS the box by taking all available memory and/or disk space. Hell, I don't even know how to eliminate a user from filling up /var/log by pumping a bunch of crap into the 'logger' command. I believe that the same can be done with file descriptors, but I could be wrong.
So, what we have learned is that Linux being a multiuser OS can have one of its users with the default configuration consume all or enough resources on a box. Well, actually the default is a good thing. It would be annoying to be in the middle of doing something important and stuff stop working because you've forked too many processes. Also, an installation cannot predict the resources available to the system, therefore no generic limits would be reasonable.
In summary, nothing to see here. Please move along.
Personally, I like to update when there is a security hole, so I don't get rooted. Granted debian is fairly good about security patches...
Duh. I meant upgrade, not update.
It would be really nice if Stable were updated at least yearly.
/usr/local (or /opt, I prefer /usr/local) directory to put updated or additional packages that did not come with the installation. For example, on my solaris boxes and even my OSX box, I put things like the latest GNU fileutils and other things like GNU grep, because they are simply more robust featurewise than standard implementations or even older ones. I also tend to roll my own core software on a system depending on its purpose (httpd for a web server, squid for a proxy server, DB server, etc). That way I am free of the distributions mucking with my core services, and often I want additional extensions or whatever that I would just rather do myself. Things like mail and bind, I leave to them to take care of for updates or whatever, I trust them more than myself, maybe that is a bad assumption, but...
Which part of stable is confusing?
You know when I update my server software? When it is so old its not really supported any more, and when I get new hardware, and then it depends.
I like the longer lifespan and dependability of any operating system. If it ain't broke, why change a thing? It was different in the 1.2 and 2.0 days of Linux, when the kernel was not very mature and lacked very important features or had hard coded limitations in it, but those days are gone. The last limitation that has been overcome is large block device support (if you consider 1Tb large). I remember having to use beta kernels, 2.1.125 if I remember correctly because it supported more than 256 file descriptors for a single process, and the production kernels did not without a patch. There was a time when software RAID was not offered in the kernel. Or there were less than 5 or 6 filesystems offered. But now the kernel comes with everything besides a kitchen sink.
Also, the beauty of *NIX systems is the
Now, these things are different for an end user's desktop machine. But the reason for that is because the GUI world of Linux is more in the growth stage like the kernel was in the mid to late 90s. It is worthy to have updates every six months or less, and it is OK to have the downtime of having your video drivers bomb out on you or monkey around for a while to get the box back up and running. Its not worth the downtime on a server to do this.
Just my 2 cents.
The first time I saw Social Engineering on the big screen was when Matthew Broderick got himself sent to the principals office just so he could get the weekly password. That movie came out in 83 and the idea wasn't new then.
Yeah, but obviously we have come a long way in access control since then.
I mean, yes, in 83 they already adopted the draconian measure of changing passwords frequently. (Excellent!) But they were not "strong" passwords. If I remember correctly, "pencil" was the password.
Now, if they used the same authentication principles we do today with stringent password policies to change their passwords frequently and use a strong password like "P3nC1l!69@", then the likelihood of the password being written down in an obvious place, or simply given away would never happen.
</sarcasm>
In my not so humble and strong opinion, password policies that require certain number of nonsense characters and changed every so often so that I cannot remember the password, is simply ignorant. The only thing that changing a password frequently will do is eliminate the time of exposure for someone who has given up their password to someone, which is already bad and a sign of a breech, so the changing of the password would only limit the time that a breech would happen. The impossible to remember character sequence is simply ignorant. If I were to explicitly tell you that my password was a weak one like a family member or a pet and you had 3 guesses before the account was locked. Even then the likelihood of compromising the account would be extremely low. And again, this is even telling someone a limited subset of words to guess. Yes, automatic lockouts after X number of failed login attempts should be a requirement for a secure setting. Not pestering me to change it to something I don't even want to care to remember all the time.
So all of you CIO people out there. Keep doing what your doing. If I ever want access to your machines, I'll just ask for a username and password.
Honestly, I never use the right-mouse button because the menus it brings up are always available at the top menu, anyway.
Yeah, I would guess that _most_ of the things are available in the top menu, however that is not where my pointer is located. Plus over 90% of the junk in the top menu does not apply to what I'm currently doing with the mouse, to include greyed out things that I cannot do. 100% of the things that are available for me to do when I right or control click on something are available for immediate action.
Some things that are not available via the top menu that are available via control-click or right click in Safari alone are when clicking on a link I can 1) Copy the URL 2) bookmark the URL 3) open the url in a new window 4) open the url in a new tab (middle click does this too!) or 5) download the content in the link (in the new Safari it doesn't even ask you for the filename, finally!) I do not believe that any of those 5 options are available via the top menu when navigating a link. Possibly with other keyboard modifiers to the point that my hand hurts, maybe, but thats it.
The right click is so convenient that I use the Google search bar in Safari and right click on a word all the time to check its spelling. Its OK that you don't want or perceive the need for more mice buttons, but I find it invaluable for my computing experience. Especially for things like using remote X11 apps on my Mac. Sure you can alt-option-Apple click on junk, but its mechanically easier and quicker and more natural just to use the extra buttons on my mouse. Also, I'm right handed. I would find the modifier clicks completely awkward if I were left handed.
Seriously if I had a dime for everytime someone predicted the demise of the desktop, I'd have a couple of bucks.
/usr/local mounted from a central server. Its much easier to maintain that way. Some users even use KDE on solaris which have their binaries located on the /usr/local partition. It works fine.
The funny thing, is that if the desktop would demise, then maybe Linux would finally be "on the desktop", by being the server farm behind the desktop.
To be honest, if networks keep getting more reliable and faster, why would there still be a desktop? Right now, a vast majority of my computing, and my user's computing is done remotely on machines that are much more powerful in terms of CPU capacity and storage and they are maintained by a professional that does backups and whatnot on a regular basis.
Do "normal" desktop users do this? Do they have availability to dozens to hundreds of processors at a time on their desktop? How about disk space? How about backups? How useful is their computer if you cut the ethernet cable?
I think that the desktop has pretty much stalled. Noone cares too much about processor speed anymore for a desktop machine. For niche users like graphics designers that need really high graphical, disk, and memory bandwidth, sure get them a nice dual G5 or whatever, but these people are a minority.
I have my user's workstations set up so that they are pretty much dumb terminals, but they don't know it. I've got
I would argue that the desktop is almost dead already. Again, pull the ethernet cable and see what I mean. Back in the late 80s or early 90s this was not always true, but today it is.
I never keep emails, or archive IMs or any other form of communication. Once a email is read, it is deleted. Same goes for normal old-skool mail, I read it and then trash it. The only exceptions are of letters/email of some importance such as information I need to keep handy, or if it has some kind of sentimental value (letters from deceased relatives for example.)
Oh, come on. I keep all of my email archived right beside my taped phone conversations and all of my postal mail right beside my gun in a drawer right beside my bed.
But seriously. I've heard of people keeping copies of their mail from x number of years back and toting it around with them and saving it here and there, but I have never heard of anyone that actually ever looked at it, and none of these people keep their postal mail nor do they tape their phone conversations or other conversations. I guess email is just that much more important than every other form of communication.
I do keep all of my email for work saved in directories for each year. This has come in handy for a lawsuit that I'm involved with, and for saying to people "but on this date you said XYZ". Its much less than a gig or two for a few years of emails. If I lost it, I wouldn't be that upset.
That is technically not RAID. Its kinda of a hack using RAID software. I do the same thing with a script that I call 'raid1.pl', but its not a RAID system at all. I simply use rsync to sync up two drives at night.
/something/important' and its gone from both disks (or an overwrite, or anything). In my experience, if a backup is done nightly, even if a whole day's work is lost, it is preferable to having potentially YEARS of data lost, and it is easy to do with a typo in a script or something. Its great to have something like:
/$SOME_DIRECTORY
The difference between this and real RAID1 is that with RAID1 you do 'rm -rf
rm -rf
and $SOME_DIRECTORY is not defined. Granted I would never do this, but some inexperienced scripters do.