Time to doubly-encrypt things, I think. Then the real message underneath... is also meaningless! Seriously, the threats to e-commerce in the UK are extremely high; if I can't trust someone's web server because the government will require them to decrypt stuff, it's just as bad as everything having a hidden backdoor key in it too. Everyone in the UK should sign up with Stand and send a letter to their MP immediately, IMNSHO.
You should hang out on more newsgroups. I'm a regular on one Christian newsgroup and inter-discussion between denominations, atheists and even a Muslim is valued here.
Faith *is* the acceptance that "I might be wrong", amongst other things (namely, "I don't think I am";)
If nothing else, some of the furore over, e.g. women priests should prove that Christianity is anything *but* "True By Decree".
What I don't understand is the comment at the start of the story about "no longer just for techies". Traditionally, "we techies" have been unable to write coherently let alone presentably, and yet... look who's come up with SGML and the <a href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a>!
(Compare and contrast the way that on Usenet, it's "us die-hard hackers" who are "insistent" on compliance with Usenet formatting (plaintext or die, roughly) and yet the non-geeks who persist in posting in HTML and MIME and everything.)
Me, I think web sites should be designed with accessibility in *all* browsers in mind - not just <a href="http://lynx.browser.org/">lynx</a> and <a href="http://ei5nazha.yz.yamagata-u.ac.jp/~aito/w3 m/eng/">w3m</a>, of course, but anything the future will throw at us in the way of browsers for the blind / otherwise-impaired, as well. That means ALT modifiers in your IMG tags, or else, amongst other things, and probably stopping the reliance on graphical fuzz. I wonder what'd happen if we had linguists designing websites instead of "graphic artists"...
That's One Big If, and I'm one of those for whom "wants it to be popular" is not a particularly good description.
No, there should *not* be "one GUI". There has to be choice like there is today between QT & GTK+ and all that - your machine should run both happily at the same time, of course, like me currently running X, sawmill, kfm and gnome-panel all together even right now; however this is desirable flexibility, not a downer at all.
"Automatic system configuration"? That's for weenies, plain and simple. If you don't know what numbers to specify where for your new sound card, don't install it, as you certainly don't deserve to be using it. Whether you know *everything* about "what is an IRQ" is not quite the point, but some working knowlege or ability and willingness to experiment are essential.
It might be "too obtuse" but why is "for most computer users" something we should tailor it for? Give me quality (cluefulness) instead of quantity (hordes of lusers) any day.
I think I agree entirely - especially about the 'marketroids should attract me' view, not the other way round.
Someone needs to sit down and look at the available graphics, audio, streaming and video formats (DVD, anyone?;) and write a decent killer app, I think. I mean, I've got some large mpegs flying around that I occasionally like to view, and I really hated having to boot windoze to watch them properly. "xanim" really doesn't kick it. In fact, MpegTV doesn't really kick it unless you renice a few processes up & down, too.
Maybe the problem lies in that while linux is definitely great for being a server, it is also hitting the desktop; and while I don't want an influx of luser newbies wanting it to *be* a desktop OS per-se, I also (a) don't want to run windoze (b) do want to watch my video sources full-screen with decent performance.
So some companies need to open-source their products or at least open the protocols used (I disagree utterly with the "buy it under NDA and do all the linux porting work for Apple quicktime" approach, btw), so we can get on with using them...
But please note, I didn't say everyone has to be an expert at everything. People having an attitude of "don't want to learn" (particularly, expressed arrogantly) - or of "I don't need to know now make it all simple" are still morons, though. And actually that'd apply to the visitor to the doctor, not to the doc him/herself...
"Easy to use" is not the same as "good". It certainly does *not* follow that one implies the other for all cases. After all, if I went for the easy option all the time, I'd be running MacOS X or '95 on a notebook in BED.
Approach it wondering what it is; if you don't like it, so be it. Don't approach it with an agenda that "it's not easy, I don't understand therefore it's ITS fault not mine". This kind of thing gets right up my snout.
I knew there was a reason I persist in using Debian - I can cope with the breaks of living at the cutting edge of 'unstable' all the time, for the benefits I get. "If you don't get the benefits, or you don't want to put in the effort, go away and don't moan."
>Saying "once they learn how to use bash properly" doesn't cut it - If an average non-power user has to get that far they'll give up. Period. They don't want to learn,
This much is true, and not a problem. Just don't expect those of us who know our shells from our eggwhisks to pander to the sheer pathetic attitude of "don't want to learn".
> nor should they have to. For Linux to succeed as a desktop OS,
Disagree from here on, though. People *should* both have to, and want to, learn how to use something for what it's worth in the first place, otherwise get lost by all means. Open-Source hasn't got where it is today by getting a committee-load of morons together saying "we can't help, won't help, make it pretty pictures for us".
I suggest you also have a strange idea of linux either "succeeding" or (in general) "winning". It doesn't win by having more (l)users; it wins by being *better* than the alternatives (not "the competition"), and having a user-base giving out a *quality* signal, not a quantity one.
How can "power and flexibility of linux be the fatal flaw"? They're right up amongst its major strengths, apart from stability and all that.
There is indeed an art - if not a Zen - and a science to knowing when to optimize stuff, and I think it boils down to 'use the hottest algorithm around' (especially if you start in C), *followed* by 'hack the ASM by hand'.
Something I finally got round to doing just this past weekend, that I'd been meaning to do for a while, is it compare the speed of execution of loops that simply count between 0 and a big number, but using different comparison methods, and different compiler optimization levels in gcc, with Perl for the hell of it as well.
The full source I used follows:
#include #include #include
#define INNER 5000000 #define OUTER 200
void up(void), down(void), xor(void);
int main (void) { int c; time_t t0, t1, t2, t3;
t0 = time (NULL);
for (c = 0; c Mosix cluster, which was "interesting", to say the least...;)
As for perl, well that behaved the way I expected. The whole thing was way slower than C, but it did at least do an xor when I asked for it - that was almost invariably faster than counting up with "".
Well, those be the results... compile the source yourselves with all the various gcc options and compare the assembler, folks:)
Sounds simple to me. Claim to agree with the "demands" of this michael morrison creep, and then do nothing - after all, you'll have removed your "lies"...
And no it does not constitute written demand at all either. Anyone can impersonate hotmail, and we *know* their security is non-existent anyway.
Personally, I wouldn't have even bothered with the retraction type email; I don't see the point in sounding contrite over something of which I'm not guilty.
I shall await LinuxOne's "lawyer"'s threats against me for this comment, with interest...
Out of interest, does that mean such people should not be using linux? Or at least until they've had you/me/someone else clueful, giving them a good training course? (I'm tempted to add 'with a cattle prod' but shall refrain... erm, oops:)
Tosh. Linux is no less a unix than any other flavour that's gone its own sweet (and in some cases, commercial) way. It is also no less "unix" because you often get only one person using it; in case you'd not heard, there are one or two machines in existence that run multi-user stuff as well as poxy desktops. Cobalt Cube, and all that. In some cases, RDBMS servers. And so on.
Of course, if you have a linux box as your only OS in your room, and clone yourself across the entire USA, then I'd see why there might be a problem - you've got the same OS throughout, and any/exploits/ that folks might find will walk over all your infrastructure wholesale. However, if you keep yourself uptodate with security patches, as you should, then you'll keep the enemy at bay for far longer.
The separation between "user space" and OS-space in terms of ACLs is essential here; am I the only one that doesn't want clueless lusers sullying thing good name of Linux by their demands for bad practice?
Yup. I'd hope it'd be able to memorise *how* I like my lasagne anyway - that it wouldn't be many trips to Sainsbury before it cottoned on, so I'd be able to tailor my own "frozen -> cremated" range for myself.
Of course, your problem of variability of temperature throughout the lasagne is a sign of not having evolved the art far enough: you should douse it with a bit of water (so the base gets evenly hot all over) and regularly break it up into chunks distributed around the perimeter of the plate - e.g. after 2 mins from frozen, hack it up & redistribute, etc.
my reply is always the same: i should not have to "learn to install software" or "learn a package manager" -- in my opinion, these are things that should be essentially transparent to the enduser.
ITYM "end-luser". Well said those colleagues of yours! Plain and simple: if you are unwilling to learn how to use something, and properly at that, there's nothing we can (or should) do for you, so don't waste our time and go back to pestering M$loth Support.
Seriously, there's nothing that gets to me more than unwillingness. Inability, need a helping hand, those are FINE by me, and will get all due sympathy. Unfortunately, unwillingness also gets due sympathy too - nil!
Well that's unfortunate. A very quick trip straight to the Web Consortium shows their pages on XML straight up, complete with links to the XML FAQ and of course, just what you always wanted, the XML 1.0 Spec. If that's not an adequate definition, read the source for your favourite parser!
Just one other thing that occurs to me: it depends entirely what you think your company is worth and what you do with the options. If you happen to have landed with a beaurocracy that doesn't let you vest until after you leave, they are worthless - not just because you won't get anything, but because you see them as pathetic.
In short: money is what you make of it, neither how much you make of it, or how much someone else thinks you're worth, within reason.
Give me happiness and a new mouse in preference to £10 any day.
Well not only that, but if you read the FAQ then it explains in section 11 about "what about the legitimate users being cut off?". Section 8 also deals with those who 'hijack open servers'.
Basically, I see the UDP as saying "this site's users are toss-pots and the site admins aren't doing anything about it, block site, solve problem" and the existence legitimate users either forces the ISP to clean up its act, or they all go elsewhere - who'd want to subscribe to a lame ISP?
All in all, sounds like a good thing to me. Surprisingly enough, Deja notwithstanding, there are those of us who use news clients, subscribe to individual news groups, and read them as 'regulars'. We don't want no stinkin' @Home twerps on my newsgroups, for starters!
You're absolutely right, especially about the flea market thing. Taking a list of the 'software titles' available, it looks like nothing more than the crap-ware you'd expect at a local fair.
Not to mention, http://www.poso.com/gui-page.htm is no way to tune a guitar. You don't want a piano, the timbre's all wrong. You certainly *don't* want to start with open 6th string, as any inaccuracy there sucks. You don't want to do each string separately either - the best is harmonics off 5th and 7th frets, starting with 6th and working up. Misinformation. Grrr!
Slashdot Mirror
Time to doubly-encrypt things, I think. Then the real message underneath... is also meaningless! Seriously, the threats to e-commerce in the UK are extremely high; if I can't trust someone's web server because the government will require them to decrypt stuff, it's just as bad as everything having a hidden backdoor key in it too. Everyone in the UK should sign up with Stand and send a letter to their MP immediately, IMNSHO.
You should hang out on more newsgroups. I'm a regular on one Christian newsgroup and inter-discussion between denominations, atheists and even a Muslim is valued here.
;)
Faith *is* the acceptance that "I might be wrong", amongst other things (namely, "I don't think I am"
If nothing else, some of the furore over, e.g. women priests should prove that Christianity is anything *but* "True By Decree".
You're right about that. I checked out the license for YaST2 over the weekend (totally on the spur of the moment) and was relatively disgusted that it was a custom roll-your-own license that restricts distribution, therefore fails the
Pity, as with it the way it is no-one would want to hack it and make it work better, even if the rest of the distro is tolerable.
Insofar as 'Net-newbies don't know how to configure their client newsreaders to post politely (PLAIN TEXT OR DIE!!), you're probably right.
Insofar as there are some who have things to contribute and are willing to learn then there's a little more leeway, of course.
What I don't understand is the comment at the start of the story about "no longer just for techies". Traditionally, "we techies" have been unable to write coherently let alone presentably, and yet ... look who's come up with SGML and the <a href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a>!
3 m/eng/">w3m</a>, of course, but anything the future will throw at us in the way of browsers for the blind / otherwise-impaired, as well. That means ALT modifiers in your IMG tags, or else, amongst other things, and probably stopping the reliance on graphical fuzz.
(Compare and contrast the way that on Usenet, it's "us die-hard hackers" who are "insistent" on compliance with Usenet formatting (plaintext or die, roughly) and yet the non-geeks who persist in posting in HTML and MIME and everything.)
Me, I think web sites should be designed with accessibility in *all* browsers in mind - not just <a href="http://lynx.browser.org/">lynx</a> and <a href="http://ei5nazha.yz.yamagata-u.ac.jp/~aito/w
I wonder what'd happen if we had linguists designing websites instead of "graphic artists"...
That's a good thing. It gives you legitimate reason to complain to their parent ISP and wipe them off the face of the net :8)
That's One Big If, and I'm one of those for whom "wants it to be popular" is not a particularly good description.
No, there should *not* be "one GUI". There has to be choice like there is today between QT & GTK+ and all that - your machine should run both happily at the same time, of course, like me currently running X, sawmill, kfm and gnome-panel all together even right now; however this is desirable flexibility, not a downer at all.
"Automatic system configuration"? That's for weenies, plain and simple. If you don't know what numbers to specify where for your new sound card, don't install it, as you certainly don't deserve to be using it. Whether you know *everything* about "what is an IRQ" is not quite the point, but some working knowlege or ability and willingness to experiment are essential.
It might be "too obtuse" but why is "for most computer users" something we should tailor it for?
Give me quality (cluefulness) instead of quantity (hordes of lusers) any day.
This is pants.
(a) there is no '1' in today's date, as far as I've noticed
(b) 0 is even. So is -18.
I think I agree entirely - especially about the 'marketroids should attract me' view, not the other way round.
;) and write a decent killer app, I think. I mean, I've got some large mpegs flying around that I occasionally like to view, and I really hated having to boot windoze to watch them properly. "xanim" really doesn't kick it.
Someone needs to sit down and look at the available graphics, audio, streaming and video formats (DVD, anyone?
In fact, MpegTV doesn't really kick it unless you renice a few processes up & down, too.
Maybe the problem lies in that while linux is definitely great for being a server, it is also hitting the desktop; and while I don't want an influx of luser newbies wanting it to *be* a desktop OS per-se, I also (a) don't want to run windoze (b) do want to watch my video sources full-screen with decent performance.
So some companies need to open-source their products or at least open the protocols used (I disagree utterly with the "buy it under NDA and do all the linux porting work for Apple quicktime" approach, btw), so we can get on with using them...
Interesting examples.
But please note, I didn't say everyone has to be an expert at everything. People having an attitude of "don't want to learn" (particularly, expressed arrogantly) - or of "I don't need to know now make it all simple" are still morons, though. And actually that'd apply to the visitor to the doctor, not to the doc him/herself...
Hear hear. Up the geeks! :)
"Easy to use" is not the same as "good". It certainly does *not* follow that one implies the other for all cases. After all, if I went for the easy option all the time, I'd be running MacOS X or '95 on a notebook in BED.
Approach it wondering what it is; if you don't like it, so be it. Don't approach it with an agenda that "it's not easy, I don't understand therefore it's ITS fault not mine". This kind of thing gets right up my snout.
I knew there was a reason I persist in using Debian - I can cope with the breaks of living at the cutting edge of 'unstable' all the time, for the benefits I get. "If you don't get the benefits, or you don't want to put in the effort, go away and don't moan."
>Saying "once they learn how to use bash properly" doesn't cut it - If an average non-power user has to get that far they'll give up. Period. They don't want to learn,
This much is true, and not a problem. Just don't expect those of us who know our shells from our eggwhisks to pander to the sheer pathetic attitude of "don't want to learn".
> nor should they have to. For Linux to succeed as a desktop OS,
Disagree from here on, though. People *should* both have to, and want to, learn how to use something for what it's worth in the first place, otherwise get lost by all means. Open-Source hasn't got where it is today by getting a committee-load of morons together saying "we can't help, won't help, make it pretty pictures for us".
I suggest you also have a strange idea of linux either "succeeding" or (in general) "winning". It doesn't win by having more (l)users; it wins by being *better* than the alternatives (not "the competition"), and having a user-base giving out a *quality* signal, not a quantity one.
How can "power and flexibility of linux be the fatal flaw"? They're right up amongst its major strengths, apart from stability and all that.
Aaaargh!
CmdrTaco, your preview mode is broken. That worked for me before.
In any case, the source is available here.
I think I agree... :)
;)
:)
There is indeed an art - if not a Zen - and a science to knowing when to optimize stuff, and I think it boils down to 'use the hottest algorithm around' (especially if you start in C), *followed* by 'hack the ASM by hand'.
Something I finally got round to doing just this past weekend, that I'd been meaning to do for a while, is it compare the speed of execution of loops that simply count between 0 and a big number, but using different comparison methods, and different compiler optimization levels in gcc, with Perl for the hell of it as well.
The full source I used follows:
#include
#include
#include
#define INNER 5000000
#define OUTER 200
void up(void), down(void), xor(void);
int
main (void)
{
int c;
time_t t0, t1, t2, t3;
t0 = time (NULL);
for (c = 0; c Mosix cluster, which was "interesting", to say the least...
As for perl, well that behaved the way I expected. The whole thing was way slower than C, but it did at least do an xor when I asked for it - that was almost invariably faster than counting up with "".
Well, those be the results... compile the source yourselves with all the various gcc options and compare the assembler, folks
Indeedie.
Sounds simple to me.
Claim to agree with the "demands" of this michael morrison creep, and then do nothing - after all, you'll have removed your "lies"...
And no it does not constitute written demand at all either. Anyone can impersonate hotmail, and we *know* their security is non-existent anyway.
Personally, I wouldn't have even bothered with the retraction type email; I don't see the point in sounding contrite over something of which I'm not guilty.
I shall await LinuxOne's "lawyer"'s threats against me for this comment, with interest...
Fair enough!
:)
Out of interest, does that mean such people should not be using linux?
Or at least until they've had you/me/someone else clueful, giving them a good training course? (I'm tempted to add 'with a cattle prod' but shall refrain... erm, oops
> "Linux is not Unix"
/exploits/ that folks might find will walk over all your infrastructure wholesale.
Tosh. Linux is no less a unix than any other flavour that's gone its own sweet (and in some cases, commercial) way.
It is also no less "unix" because you often get only one person using it; in case you'd not heard, there are one or two machines in existence that run multi-user stuff as well as poxy desktops. Cobalt Cube, and all that. In some cases, RDBMS servers. And so on.
Of course, if you have a linux box as your only OS in your room, and clone yourself across the entire USA, then I'd see why there might be a problem - you've got the same OS throughout, and any
However, if you keep yourself uptodate with security patches, as you should, then you'll keep the enemy at bay for far longer.
The separation between "user space" and OS-space in terms of ACLs is essential here; am I the only one that doesn't want clueless lusers sullying thing good name of Linux by their demands for bad practice?
Yup. I'd hope it'd be able to memorise *how* I like my lasagne anyway - that it wouldn't be many trips to Sainsbury before it cottoned on, so I'd be able to tailor my own "frozen -> cremated" range for myself.
;)
Of course, your problem of variability of temperature throughout the lasagne is a sign of not having evolved the art far enough: you should douse it with a bit of water (so the base gets evenly hot all over) and regularly break it up into chunks distributed around the perimeter of the plate - e.g. after 2 mins from frozen, hack it up & redistribute, etc.
Share and enjoy
It's a government censorship conspiracy: you must have a PC in your microwave so that when you start looking at dodgy sites, you get burnt :)
my reply is always the same: i should not have to "learn to install software" or "learn a package manager" -- in my opinion, these are things that should be essentially transparent to the enduser.
ITYM "end-luser".
Well said those colleagues of yours! Plain and simple: if you are unwilling to learn how to use something, and properly at that, there's nothing we can (or should) do for you, so don't waste our time and go back to pestering M$loth Support.
Seriously, there's nothing that gets to me more than unwillingness. Inability, need a helping hand, those are FINE by me, and will get all due sympathy. Unfortunately, unwillingness also gets due sympathy too - nil!
Well that's unfortunate. A very quick trip straight to the Web Consortium shows their pages on XML straight up, complete with links to the XML FAQ and of course, just what you always wanted, the XML 1.0 Spec. If that's not an adequate definition, read the source for your favourite parser!
No it's not! It's called a "plough"!
:)
D'oh...
Just one other thing that occurs to me: it depends entirely what you think your company is worth and what you do with the options. If you happen to have landed with a beaurocracy that doesn't let you vest until after you leave, they are worthless - not just because you won't get anything, but because you see them as pathetic.
In short: money is what you make of it, neither how much you make of it, or how much someone else thinks you're worth, within reason.
Give me happiness and a new mouse in preference to £10 any day.
Well not only that, but if you read the FAQ then it explains in section 11 about "what about the legitimate users being cut off?". Section 8 also deals with those who 'hijack open servers'.
Basically, I see the UDP as saying "this site's users are toss-pots and the site admins aren't doing anything about it, block site, solve problem" and the existence legitimate users either forces the ISP to clean up its act, or they all go elsewhere - who'd want to subscribe to a lame ISP?
All in all, sounds like a good thing to me. Surprisingly enough, Deja notwithstanding, there are those of us who use news clients, subscribe to individual news groups, and read them as 'regulars'. We don't want no stinkin' @Home twerps on my newsgroups, for starters!
You're absolutely right, especially about the flea market thing. Taking a list of the 'software titles' available, it looks like nothing more than the crap-ware you'd expect at a local fair.
Not to mention, http://www.poso.com/gui-page.htm is no way to tune a guitar. You don't want a piano, the timbre's all wrong. You certainly *don't* want to start with open 6th string, as any inaccuracy there sucks. You don't want to do each string separately either - the best is harmonics off 5th and 7th frets, starting with 6th and working up. Misinformation. Grrr!