For this reason, building instructions are usally provided, e.g. in the form of a Makefile. Furthermore, almost every distribution provides you with all dependencies and the full packaging script which was used to create the distribution's binary in the first place. Source-based distributions such as Gentoo even go as far as to do the actual creation of the binary on your local machine. On Windows, however, this is admittedly a problem, since _everybody_ simply downloads an exe file from somewhere, without even checking the md5 hash that is usually provided (however, in most cases, in vain because the website is not even SSL secured). Most software probably can't even be compiled on Windows.
As far as I understood, publishers would select games they found supportworthy, and provide funding, thus making the game possible at all, or at least take a huge amount of risk away from the devs. Unfortunately for them, this is nowdays done by kickstarter.
0. The windows command-line is a bad joke. It is, in fat, so bad that I think they in fact made it this bad deliberately to make people afraid of command lines and thus UNIX. I do most of my work and computer usage on the command line, because I find stuff involving any kind of GUIs just incredibly inconvenient, just in the way of doing what I want, exactly the way I want.
1. I've not found a tiling window manager for windows that is as powerful as i3. In fact, I have not found a single window manager for Windows, probably due to the lack of an API.
2. Installing software is just so much harder on Windows. You have to google for some shiny, advertisement-filled homepage and download some binary, for which you have no guarantee at all that it might not contain a virus. On Linux I just have a repository, from which I can install anything I need, having to trust only the distributor, and it just works. There was a short glimmer of hope when Microsoft announced the Windows 8 appstore, but oh well...
3. I find that the whole spirit of the software on Windows is poisoned; this is not Microsoft's fault (at least not directly). There is expensive professional software, which is usually pirated (at least for private use); the software creators try (fruitlessly) to fight this piracy with evil DRM schemes which just burden the people who actually bought the stuff. Then there is a shitload of shareware crap (example: WinRAR), which likes to annoy the user with message boxes, overly colorful graphics themes, websites opening out of nothing and such. And then, there is the even bigger amount of completely useless crap, which somehow ends up on most computers anyway - even with 'trusted' software such as the Java Updater: Scareware, Antivirus software, Toolbars, 'Motherboard driver and overclocking GUIs'. A combination of all this results in an incredibly slow, unreliable and insecure system which spams the user with a dozen error messages at boot time. This trans the user to simply press 'OK', 'Cancel' or whatever they found out will make the message go away. This again will cause them to ignore real warning messages... no thanks. Luckily, Open Source has at least partially begun to replace the shareware stuff on Windows.
4. All the windows-only applications I need (mostly games anyway) have by now been ported to Linux in the current Steam-for-Linux/Humble Indie Bundle efforts, or work way better in wine than they did on Windows (Age of Empires 2, Crysis,...)
5. I like to understand my system and be fully in control of it. This is quite hard to achieve with closed-source stuff.
6. Finally, there is also the whole ideological stuff: Microsoft is evil, Closed source is evil, blah blah. While certainly not the main argument, this point should not be completely neglected.
Yeah, but the whole article is about crackers stealing the password hash database. There is no way you could crack even a (random) 9-digit password (even if it only consisted of literal digits) over the internet. I guess the maximum you'll get is 1000 tries per second before the server will get unresponsive under the DOS load.
There seems to be a thing about entropy you do not understand. The information on the password structure is part of the entropy as well as the actual contents that you fill the structure with. There is a function f that assigns to each possible password p a probability f(p) that a user would choose that password. The function is obviously unknown, and undecidable/uncalculatable, since it depends on the user, who is, in approximation, turing-equivalent. A perfect password bruteforce tool would try the passwords strictly in the order defined by f. However, since f can not be calculated, all password bruteforce tools can only use an approximation. One approximation would be 'a' 'b' 'c' 'd'... 'z' 'aa'..., but that approximation is obviously pretty bad. An other approximation would be a wordlist, followed by combining words, putting special characters in words, etc. An other approximation would be iterating over all words, but 'decompressing' with an algorithm as I have stated in my post above. That way, you would catch d0G..... pretty fast (at the same place where you would place a 9-character-password with the brute-force approach, or something like that). While crackers are certainly still far away from a good approximation of f, I can assure you that they are getting better and better. Using a low-entropy password such as d0G.... will only work until the cracker's approximation of f gets good enough (e.G. by self-learning AI, or simply the decompression algorithm I proposed). Hence, d0G.... might give you a feeling of false security, since its entropy is extremely low, but you hope the cracker does not know that passwords of such structure exist yet (now that you have posted the structure on slashdot... well... he certainly does. but even if you hadn't, if he uses the decompression approach, he can already crack it easily).
That would be security through obscurity. Your password has very little entropy, it can for example be compressed to 1'd0G'18'.', which has 11 characters (and I tell you, the actual entropy is a lot lower). You are assuming that crackers would bever get the idea to test for passwords in this style. A cracker which tests passwords strictly ordered by the amount of entropy they contain, i.e. an optimal cracker, would crack this password pretty easily. I'm pretty sure you are underestimating the amount of intelligence in password crackers.
They are not cheaper because of Windows. Microsoft is not that desperate yet - first, they would make pirating easier again. They are cheaper because of all the other crapware that runs on top of the Windows. Basically with each Windows PC you buy, money flows from Symantec to Microsoft.
no, it won't phase out.
It's not like Microsoft would want to commit suicide in the entertainment sector - DirectX is the only huge barrier that prevents porting games to Linux/OSX/Playstation.
A jailbreak is some sort of privilege escalation from inside a locked-down system, using bugs in the system.
This "hack" just consists of attaching a debugger to the running system, which is perfectly allowed, and modifying the live memory. That might be hard, since debug symbols are probably not released by Microsoft and source code is not available, but it is by no means anything security-relevant.
Your personal life will not improve directly, since humans are stubborn and hate the new stuff, trying to avoid it whereever possible - hell, here in germany, the use of 'horse power' for car power has been banned by the government for decades, and people still don't talk kilowatts.
However, the unification will make everything a lot easier, especially for trade and international engineering projects (mars probe, anybody?). On the long run, products will get cheaper, less mistakes will be made, etc.
Also, your kids will be thankful when they learn the metric system instead of the imperial system in school.
But you, you will have to suffer.
Actually, NK developed their own GNU/Linux distributions. http://rt.com/news/north-korea-cyber-weapon/?fullstory
Please don't be irritated by the sensational title - that's a real problem with news sites these days, even here on slashdot. For example, see this article.
I do not see anything that would make this satellite different from the thousands of other defunct satellites - there is far worse stuff up there, such as satellites containing nuclear reactors (!) or plutonium RTGs.
Furthermore, TFA, especially the Gizmo article, contains statements or implications which are simply wrong. The/. summary picks them up, as well as most of the commenters. And they should be technically adept people...
However, a failure (or complete lack?) of attitude control does in no way mean the satellite's orbit is 'unstable', 'unpredictable' or 'changing'. The satellite is and stays where it was placed by its rocket, and if it was placed in LEO, declines (as every other object in LEO, such as the ISS) within a fairly predictable timeframe until it disintegrates in the atmosphere.
(Hopefully) nobody would be as stupid to give their satellite active propulsion and program it to 'fire its engines randomly when tumbling out of control'. Anyway, I highly doubt the satellite has any attitude control or even propulsion built-in at all - just take a look at the Sputnik and Explorer missions, which did not even have an energy source; they just started 'tumbling out of control by design', and transmitted data until their batteries ran out.
However, of course the statement that the satellite was thought for earth monitoring, which is basically confirmed by the fact it was launched into (and will stay in) sun-synchronous orbit would imply it has some sort of attitude control, since it would require some sort of CCD chip to be earth-faced.
The thing is, when a nuclear plant is shut down regularily because the transmission lines are down, or when it is shut down because of a malfunction, it won't simply stay off. You need an external energy source to run the cooling pumps, or everything will blow up. And that external energy source is not the grid because the grid is down. That's exactly what happened at Fukushima.
Slashdot Mirror
For this reason, building instructions are usally provided, e.g. in the form of a Makefile.
Furthermore, almost every distribution provides you with all dependencies and the full packaging script which was used to create the distribution's binary in the first place.
Source-based distributions such as Gentoo even go as far as to do the actual creation of the binary on your local machine.
On Windows, however, this is admittedly a problem, since _everybody_ simply downloads an exe file from somewhere, without even checking the md5 hash that is usually provided (however, in most cases, in vain because the website is not even SSL secured). Most software probably can't even be compiled on Windows.
I still refuse to believe that piracy makes as much as a dent in sales.
As far as I understood, publishers would select games they found supportworthy, and provide funding, thus making the game possible at all, or at least take a huge amount of risk away from the devs. Unfortunately for them, this is nowdays done by kickstarter.
0.
The windows command-line is a bad joke. It is, in fat, so bad that I think they in fact made it this bad deliberately to make people afraid of command lines and thus UNIX.
I do most of my work and computer usage on the command line, because I find stuff involving any kind of GUIs just incredibly inconvenient, just in the way of doing what I want, exactly the way I want.
1.
I've not found a tiling window manager for windows that is as powerful as i3. In fact, I have not found a single window manager for Windows, probably due to the lack of an API.
2.
Installing software is just so much harder on Windows. You have to google for some shiny, advertisement-filled homepage and download some binary, for which you have no guarantee at all that it might not contain a virus. On Linux I just have a repository, from which I can install anything I need, having to trust only the distributor, and it just works. There was a short glimmer of hope when Microsoft announced the Windows 8 appstore, but oh well...
3.
I find that the whole spirit of the software on Windows is poisoned; this is not Microsoft's fault (at least not directly).
There is expensive professional software, which is usually pirated (at least for private use); the software creators try (fruitlessly) to fight this piracy with evil DRM schemes which just burden the people who actually bought the stuff. Then there is a shitload of shareware crap (example: WinRAR), which likes to annoy the user with message boxes, overly colorful graphics themes, websites opening out of nothing and such. And then, there is the even bigger amount of completely useless crap, which somehow ends up on most computers anyway - even with 'trusted' software such as the Java Updater: Scareware, Antivirus software, Toolbars, 'Motherboard driver and overclocking GUIs'. A combination of all this results in an incredibly slow, unreliable and insecure system which spams the user with a dozen error messages at boot time. This trans the user to simply press 'OK', 'Cancel' or whatever they found out will make the message go away. This again will cause them to ignore real warning messages... no thanks. Luckily, Open Source has at least partially begun to replace the shareware stuff on Windows.
4. ...)
All the windows-only applications I need (mostly games anyway) have by now been ported to Linux in the current Steam-for-Linux/Humble Indie Bundle efforts, or work way better in wine than they did on Windows (Age of Empires 2, Crysis,
5.
I like to understand my system and be fully in control of it. This is quite hard to achieve with closed-source stuff.
6.
Finally, there is also the whole ideological stuff: Microsoft is evil, Closed source is evil, blah blah. While certainly not the main argument, this point should not be completely neglected.
simple substitution chiffre
Given that Linux is running by Linus, you can bet that will never happen. Just look at how he utterly rejects the idea of using even C++, even for userspace tools: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/57918
Yeah, but the whole article is about crackers stealing the password hash database. There is no way you could crack even a (random) 9-digit password (even if it only consisted of literal digits) over the internet. I guess the maximum you'll get is 1000 tries per second before the server will get unresponsive under the DOS load.
There seems to be a thing about entropy you do not understand. The information on the password structure is part of the entropy as well as the actual contents that you fill the structure with. There is a function f that assigns to each possible password p a probability f(p) that a user would choose that password. The function is obviously unknown, and undecidable/uncalculatable, since it depends on the user, who is, in approximation, turing-equivalent. A perfect password bruteforce tool would try the passwords strictly in the order defined by f. However, since f can not be calculated, all password bruteforce tools can only use an approximation. One approximation would be 'a' 'b' 'c' 'd' ... 'z' 'aa' ..., but that approximation is obviously pretty bad. An other approximation would be a wordlist, followed by combining words, putting special characters in words, etc. An other approximation would be iterating over all words, but 'decompressing' with an algorithm as I have stated in my post above. That way, you would catch d0G..... pretty fast (at the same place where you would place a 9-character-password with the brute-force approach, or something like that). While crackers are certainly still far away from a good approximation of f, I can assure you that they are getting better and better. Using a low-entropy password such as d0G.... will only work until the cracker's approximation of f gets good enough (e.G. by self-learning AI, or simply the decompression algorithm I proposed). Hence, d0G.... might give you a feeling of false security, since its entropy is extremely low, but you hope the cracker does not know that passwords of such structure exist yet (now that you have posted the structure on slashdot... well... he certainly does. but even if you hadn't, if he uses the decompression approach, he can already crack it easily).
I, for one, care about who my money goes to, but the thing is - I do not want any of those two companies to get it.
That would be security through obscurity. Your password has very little entropy, it can for example be compressed to 1'd0G'18'.', which has 11 characters (and I tell you, the actual entropy is a lot lower). You are assuming that crackers would bever get the idea to test for passwords in this style. A cracker which tests passwords strictly ordered by the amount of entropy they contain, i.e. an optimal cracker, would crack this password pretty easily. I'm pretty sure you are underestimating the amount of intelligence in password crackers.
And... even the Remote works!!
They are not cheaper because of Windows. Microsoft is not that desperate yet - first, they would make pirating easier again. They are cheaper because of all the other crapware that runs on top of the Windows. Basically with each Windows PC you buy, money flows from Symantec to Microsoft.
It's funny how C# and Java fanboys constantly fight each other while their languages are really the same crap.
no, it won't phase out. It's not like Microsoft would want to commit suicide in the entertainment sector - DirectX is the only huge barrier that prevents porting games to Linux/OSX/Playstation.
Anyway, it's great marketing for Microsoft - this is the first time I actually hear about the Surface on the news in a 'positive' way.
A jailbreak is some sort of privilege escalation from inside a locked-down system, using bugs in the system. This "hack" just consists of attaching a debugger to the running system, which is perfectly allowed, and modifying the live memory. That might be hard, since debug symbols are probably not released by Microsoft and source code is not available, but it is by no means anything security-relevant.
One seconed thought, I see one direct benefit: Your penis size sounds longer.
Your personal life will not improve directly, since humans are stubborn and hate the new stuff, trying to avoid it whereever possible - hell, here in germany, the use of 'horse power' for car power has been banned by the government for decades, and people still don't talk kilowatts. However, the unification will make everything a lot easier, especially for trade and international engineering projects (mars probe, anybody?). On the long run, products will get cheaper, less mistakes will be made, etc. Also, your kids will be thankful when they learn the metric system instead of the imperial system in school. But you, you will have to suffer.
Simple rule: If company X does policy changes, don't trust lawyers paid by company X to explain those changes to you.
Actually, NK developed their own GNU/Linux distributions. http://rt.com/news/north-korea-cyber-weapon/?fullstory Please don't be irritated by the sensational title - that's a real problem with news sites these days, even here on slashdot. For example, see this article.
I do not see anything that would make this satellite different from the thousands of other defunct satellites - there is far worse stuff up there, such as satellites containing nuclear reactors (!) or plutonium RTGs. Furthermore, TFA, especially the Gizmo article, contains statements or implications which are simply wrong. The /. summary picks them up, as well as most of the commenters. And they should be technically adept people...
However, a failure (or complete lack?) of attitude control does in no way mean the satellite's orbit is 'unstable', 'unpredictable' or 'changing'. The satellite is and stays where it was placed by its rocket, and if it was placed in LEO, declines (as every other object in LEO, such as the ISS) within a fairly predictable timeframe until it disintegrates in the atmosphere.
(Hopefully) nobody would be as stupid to give their satellite active propulsion and program it to 'fire its engines randomly when tumbling out of control'. Anyway, I highly doubt the satellite has any attitude control or even propulsion built-in at all - just take a look at the Sputnik and Explorer missions, which did not even have an energy source; they just started 'tumbling out of control by design', and transmitted data until their batteries ran out.
However, of course the statement that the satellite was thought for earth monitoring, which is basically confirmed by the fact it was launched into (and will stay in) sun-synchronous orbit would imply it has some sort of attitude control, since it would require some sort of CCD chip to be earth-faced.
GPS is in medium earth orbit; there is no way debris from a LEO collision could reach that.
The thing is, when a nuclear plant is shut down regularily because the transmission lines are down, or when it is shut down because of a malfunction, it won't simply stay off. You need an external energy source to run the cooling pumps, or everything will blow up. And that external energy source is not the grid because the grid is down. That's exactly what happened at Fukushima.
You could transfer about one football field of library of congress area in the time it takes to watch one sitcom.
I see one quite simple way of getting it fixed - making Windows free of charge alltogether. That might save Microsofts monopoly and thus asses.