What evidence do you have that emacs is easy to use? I assert that if you asked users who had never seen emacs to use it to create, save, and reopen a file, the vast majority would not be able to do that.
You can assert whatever you like. However, I have introduced emacs to several users over the years, and many of them had never used anything other than MS Word. In almost all the cases, emacs became the primary editor of choice. If you look at the posts in gnu.emacs.help, you will see that most of them are from novice users and not geeks. In case you haven't used it, emacs under windows has the same file open dialog as any other application.
If the application I use -- open source or proprietary -- doesn't do what I want, I will use another application.
Your wants must be really narrow.
Even for a skilled developer, writing code is the least efficient way to accomplish a task. The F/OSS community needs to understand that the ability to review and revise source code is utterly unimportant to the overwhelming majority of software users.
Have you even used emacs? The way it works is like this--you write some function to do a particular task, and load it without leaving the editor. If you don't feel up to writing code, post in gnu.emacs.help using the built in gnus news reader, and someone will write it for you. People don't simply sit around doing edit compile cycles.
Yes, emacs has been widely ported. That fact alone testifies to a lack of innovation. Rather than coming up with something better, developers on those other platforms simply ported existing code.
Um... what would that be? Since your post shows that you know almost nothing about emacs, that would be a rhetorical question. However, just to refute your claim, the reason emacs is ported so widely is because it has features no other program has, and because there is a huge demand for it.
But it managed to squeeze the little extra on the performance graphs comparing the "best" AMD vs Intel processors, cost and other things be damned.
But it was still beaten by many of the AMD chips, so even the desperate move didn't pay off. Remember the 1 GHz PIII? They put out an overclocked chip to beat AMD and it blew up in their face.
Intel fumbled once with the Athlon being the fastest thing around, they're not making the same mistake twice. If they showed signs of weakness, it could cost them vastly more in "mainstream" P4 sales than keeping a EE line to put on charts.
It was much more than a stumble. For the first time, Intel is behind AMD in technology, and everything they have thrown at the problem has failed (the Itanic, Rambus). And now their CEO is expressing his frustration in public about product delays and failures. Looks like everything is going AMD's way.
If emacs and mutt are so good, why isn't everyone already using them?
Why not evaluate each one program on its merits rather than comparing them to what other people are doing?
That's where emacs, mutt and similar applications fall down: a lot of functionality combined with a very steep learning curve.
Emacs is in fact, very easy to learn. And what will you do if your proprietary application of choice doesn't have a feature you want? Write to the author/company?
Worse, once learned, that knowledge is essentially not transferrable elsewhere, which increases the demands on the user without providing an equivalent payoff.
This is certainly not true of Emacs, as it has been ported to virtually every platform in existence. What about your proprietary app? How will you make it work in a new environment?
No server based AV solution I know of will stop the latest wave of random password zip viruses. That is because the AV program cannot scan inside the zip file.
The password is in the text of the email. How difficult would it be to try all the different words in the mail as passwords? The mails have less than 50 words, so it should run pretty fast.
A lot of folks *use* password-encrypted zip files as the only way to securely exchange information in a world where not everyone uses PGP.
And how do you send the passwords for the zip files? Do they meet earlier and agree on the password (poor man's PKI)? If the password is in the mail itself, how is it more secure?
The loss of privacy in closed systems is very real. Most printers can be uniquely identified by certain features (invisible to the naked eye) that are created on the printouts. And I am not talking about the currency counterfeiting options. We can be sure that if email was implemented using appliances, every mail message would have a unique ID. Microsoft Office embedded a unique ID in every document it produced and that feature was only disabled due to a huge outcry by their customers. Has everyone forgotten the original P4 ID, and how it was to be used for tracking (called "authentication")? The only way to guarantee privacy is to have open systems which will ensure that a universal tracking system cannot be successfully implemented.
This thing is really the prototypical Emacs-based application, ugly, hard to learn, but amazingly powerful, flexible and easy to use. Not to mention the huge community of hackers that will implement all features found in other mailers in a small elisp snippet anyway:-)
The problem with Gnus is that the defaults are not very good, so there is no easy way to get started with it. I have had much better luck with VM, it behaves more like your typical email client, but has the additional power of lisp too.
Mozilla mail seems to be a good default choice for modern email clients. The integrated spam filter catches most of the spam. Another great thing compared to other Free applications is the way it can handle non standard ports and logins for mail accounts. I have found that many programs don't support authentication for outgoing email, for instance. Couple of issues that I have found pretty annoying though.
It doesn't support sorting messages into threads properly--instead of using message Ids, it uses subject headings!!
No real way to contribute due to the monolithic nature of the program. Even with the current efforts to create a standalone client, you will get nowhere unless you install the multi-GB build system with all the C++ code.
I paid 70 for a stick of 512mb in 2002. That may be expensive compared to now,
The present price for that much RAM is about $100. More importantly, RAM prices (/MB) haven't fallen in the past couple of years. Compare that with components like hard drives (price/GB).
Intel and AMD have, and have had for many years, full cross licensing agreements.
No this is not true. The relationship is asymmetric, as Intel can implement anything AMD comes up but not vice versa. In fact, of late, the latest Intel technologies are not licensed to AMD (probably due to change in regulatory conditions). This is a great change from the 486 days where AMD could produce almost identical chips. AMD was in big trouble before Athlon and AMD64 as Intel finally ingtended to shut them out of the compatibles market. Fortunately, AMD was able to stave that off.
The next step will be cryptographically signing the firmware, so the cellphone refuses to accept unofficial firmwares. The question is how difficult it will be to convince the phone to not do the check, or if/how it will be possible to desolder the Flash right from the phone board and reprogram it in a standalone programmer.
This is not particularly difficult to implement. Already many computer controlled hardware devices employ a challenge response system. See the this car story for example.
Also, it's possible not all manufacturers will do the signed-firmware thing, as unsigned firmware may be a big market advantage under such conditions; especially smaller Asian manufacturers could benefit from this.
Small Asian manufacturers are easy to sue to oblivion (eg. Lik Sang). What use is the unsigned firmware if you are unable to sell them?
Perhaps you can think of ways that cell phones are restrictive, but here's a headline from the front page of Today's EETimes.
The article talks about having a single OS ala MS. To see what the cell phone companies are actually doing, see this article. As you can see, they want to impose even more DRM on the consumers. And once the DRM has been implemented in the single chip phones, there is virtually nothing you can do about it. One factor is that due to the closed nature of these systems, the cell companies can get into the action (selling ring tones etc.). As it stands, they have even more of an incentive to lock down the systems.
The fear of DRM is little more than superstition. People will always try it, and it will always work to a degree but it will never work as long as there is a profit to be made in circumventing it by making products with open standards.
Well, the big question is, who will fight against DRM? In you take DVD players, you will need to choose some obscure player in order to skip ads and other annoying "features". The mainstream ones do not provide such backdoors, and cannot be flashed like, say, the Apex player.
Who is making software to protect your fair use rights? Small companies which get shut down by courts, bought and paid for. The tech companies are willing to bend over backwards for the content cartels, because the cartels are the movers. The content cartels form public opinion, and unless the public is willing to take a stand, the default will be DRM everywhere.
eventually just in terms of raw resolution camera equipped cell phones will be functional full-color scanners.
This is very likely in view of the rapid advances in phone tech. However, cell phones are an incredibly restrictive environment and DRM efforts are well under way. People are already used to paying for stuff life cell phones. Remember the do not copy symbols in ads which prevent photoshopping? Expect the same kind of thing to show up everywhere. And there are no open source phones.
I can't find my searches doing anything like that.
You probably don't run many searches. Upon further research, it seems that they have announced that they will track users who do more than a certain number of queries, but the count is kept using cookies, so if you refuse cookies you should be OK.
Anyone else notice that google now tracks all the links from the main page? Google now knows which links you go to. It has the format http://www.google.com/url?&URL&e=tracking.
The market for Solaris is very different from Linux, it's datacentre-land, not home user.
It could be useful to the home user too. When I first started using Linux, I ran for (;;) fork(); to see what would happen (Hint: load avg of 100). No problems on the Solaris box though. And filesharing within the same machine was so easy with ACLs.
Intel can do what they want. They are the owners of their hardware designs and the drivers to make that hardware function.
Intel can do what they want. However, you should realize that this is not "supporting Linux". Others have pointed out all the pitfalls of this approach. Do yourself a favor and buy from the guys who support Linux wireless as Theo said.
I say that this is Linus's fault because it's well-documented that the moving-target API's are his clear decision.
He says so repeatedly in his posts, so it's not like it is a secret.
And it's a bad decision.
No you are wrong here. As a practical matter binary drivers lead to buggy unstable kernels. The people writing these drivers have no contact with or support from experienced kernel developers due to the closed nature of the process, and code quality suffers. And people posting about binary drivers waste everyone's time, including their own.
Until the driver API is stabilized, Linux is going to have a hard time finding users outside the hacker set.
Linux has a lot of users outside the "hacker set". Did you miss the part about Linux overtaking MacOS and it's current share of the server market?
And Security. Dropping someones' closed drivers in your kernel means you cannot do an effective audit. You can *never* be certain you've not bee backdoored.
A lot of hardware comes backdoored by default. The Belkin routers have some firmware that will hijack random HTTP requests. Phoenix is launching a BIOS with networking capability to launch ads at bootup, among other things. But if the backdoor is in software it gives the company plausible deniability (a virus did it! etc).
I thought rmmmod support was removed or at least deprecated in the latest kernel? Any kernel hackers care to clear this up?
but beginners think "cool, a new stable kernel", try it and are disappointed, giving a bad name to an otherwise great kernel.
Why would beginners be installing a new kernel? The distros would have the latest features patched into their supported kernels. In any case, if you are installing kernels, you should at least read kernel traffic.
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You can assert whatever you like. However, I have introduced emacs to several users over the years, and many of them had never used anything other than MS Word. In almost all the cases, emacs became the primary editor of choice. If you look at the posts in gnu.emacs.help, you will see that most of them are from novice users and not geeks. In case you haven't used it, emacs under windows has the same file open dialog as any other application.
Your wants must be really narrow.
Have you even used emacs? The way it works is like this--you write some function to do a particular task, and load it without leaving the editor. If you don't feel up to writing code, post in gnu.emacs.help using the built in gnus news reader, and someone will write it for you. People don't simply sit around doing edit compile cycles.
Um ... what would that be? Since your post shows that you know almost nothing about emacs, that would be a rhetorical question. However, just to refute your claim, the reason emacs is ported so widely is because it has features no other program has, and because there is a huge demand for it.
But it was still beaten by many of the AMD chips, so even the desperate move didn't pay off. Remember the 1 GHz PIII? They put out an overclocked chip to beat AMD and it blew up in their face.
It was much more than a stumble. For the first time, Intel is behind AMD in technology, and everything they have thrown at the problem has failed (the Itanic, Rambus). And now their CEO is expressing his frustration in public about product delays and failures. Looks like everything is going AMD's way.
Why not evaluate each one program on its merits rather than comparing them to what other people are doing?
Emacs is in fact, very easy to learn. And what will you do if your proprietary application of choice doesn't have a feature you want? Write to the author/company?
This is certainly not true of Emacs, as it has been ported to virtually every platform in existence. What about your proprietary app? How will you make it work in a new environment?
The password is in the text of the email. How difficult would it be to try all the different words in the mail as passwords? The mails have less than 50 words, so it should run pretty fast.
And how do you send the passwords for the zip files? Do they meet earlier and agree on the password (poor man's PKI)? If the password is in the mail itself, how is it more secure?
The loss of privacy in closed systems is very real. Most printers can be uniquely identified by certain features (invisible to the naked eye) that are created on the printouts. And I am not talking about the currency counterfeiting options. We can be sure that if email was implemented using appliances, every mail message would have a unique ID. Microsoft Office embedded a unique ID in every document it produced and that feature was only disabled due to a huge outcry by their customers. Has everyone forgotten the original P4 ID, and how it was to be used for tracking (called "authentication")? The only way to guarantee privacy is to have open systems which will ensure that a universal tracking system cannot be successfully implemented.
The problem with Gnus is that the defaults are not very good, so there is no easy way to get started with it. I have had much better luck with VM, it behaves more like your typical email client, but has the additional power of lisp too.
Mozilla mail seems to be a good default choice for modern email clients. The integrated spam filter catches most of the spam. Another great thing compared to other Free applications is the way it can handle non standard ports and logins for mail accounts. I have found that many programs don't support authentication for outgoing email, for instance. Couple of issues that I have found pretty annoying though.
The present price for that much RAM is about $100. More importantly, RAM prices (/MB) haven't fallen in the past couple of years. Compare that with components like hard drives (price /GB).
No this is not true. The relationship is asymmetric, as Intel can implement anything AMD comes up but not vice versa. In fact, of late, the latest Intel technologies are not licensed to AMD (probably due to change in regulatory conditions). This is a great change from the 486 days where AMD could produce almost identical chips. AMD was in big trouble before Athlon and AMD64 as Intel finally ingtended to shut them out of the compatibles market. Fortunately, AMD was able to stave that off.
This is what the public should do. However, it remains to be seen if most people are willing to go through with this.
Never underestimate the power of the traditional media. Whenever I meet someone who claims I otherwise I like to point them here.
This is not particularly difficult to implement. Already many computer controlled hardware devices employ a challenge response system. See the this car story for example.
Small Asian manufacturers are easy to sue to oblivion (eg. Lik Sang). What use is the unsigned firmware if you are unable to sell them?
You won't have to wait long.
The article talks about having a single OS ala MS. To see what the cell phone companies are actually doing, see this article. As you can see, they want to impose even more DRM on the consumers. And once the DRM has been implemented in the single chip phones, there is virtually nothing you can do about it. One factor is that due to the closed nature of these systems, the cell companies can get into the action (selling ring tones etc.). As it stands, they have even more of an incentive to lock down the systems.
Well, the big question is, who will fight against DRM? In you take DVD players, you will need to choose some obscure player in order to skip ads and other annoying "features". The mainstream ones do not provide such backdoors, and cannot be flashed like, say, the Apex player.
Who is making software to protect your fair use rights? Small companies which get shut down by courts, bought and paid for. The tech companies are willing to bend over backwards for the content cartels, because the cartels are the movers. The content cartels form public opinion, and unless the public is willing to take a stand, the default will be DRM everywhere.
This is very likely in view of the rapid advances in phone tech. However, cell phones are an incredibly restrictive environment and DRM efforts are well under way. People are already used to paying for stuff life cell phones. Remember the do not copy symbols in ads which prevent photoshopping? Expect the same kind of thing to show up everywhere. And there are no open source phones.
You probably don't run many searches. Upon further research, it seems that they have announced that they will track users who do more than a certain number of queries, but the count is kept using cookies, so if you refuse cookies you should be OK.
Anyone else notice that google now tracks all the links from the main page? Google now knows which links you go to. It has the format http://www.google.com/url?&URL&e=tracking.
That page is only simple compared to the Yahoo portal. It took about 10 seconds to load, and has 6 images. Speed is everything for searches.
It could be useful to the home user too. When I first started using Linux, I ran for (;;) fork(); to see what would happen (Hint: load avg of 100). No problems on the Solaris box though. And filesharing within the same machine was so easy with ACLs.
I think the support came with Solaris 2.7. The "-h" option for ls was a big plus. Hopefully this is not just for the xpg4 stuff.
Intel can do what they want. However, you should realize that this is not "supporting Linux". Others have pointed out all the pitfalls of this approach. Do yourself a favor and buy from the guys who support Linux wireless as Theo said.
He says so repeatedly in his posts, so it's not like it is a secret.
No you are wrong here. As a practical matter binary drivers lead to buggy unstable kernels. The people writing these drivers have no contact with or support from experienced kernel developers due to the closed nature of the process, and code quality suffers. And people posting about binary drivers waste everyone's time, including their own.
Linux has a lot of users outside the "hacker set". Did you miss the part about Linux overtaking MacOS and it's current share of the server market?
A lot of hardware comes backdoored by default. The Belkin routers have some firmware that will hijack random HTTP requests. Phoenix is launching a BIOS with networking capability to launch ads at bootup, among other things. But if the backdoor is in software it gives the company plausible deniability (a virus did it! etc).
According to Andy Grove, only the paranoid survive
I thought rmmmod support was removed or at least deprecated in the latest kernel? Any kernel hackers care to clear this up?
Why would beginners be installing a new kernel? The distros would have the latest features patched into their supported kernels. In any case, if you are installing kernels, you should at least read kernel traffic.