outside of slashdot, people often enough call bloat "features." If developers add features to an application that lots of people want, that's a good thing. In that sense, there is no software that is getting less bloated i.e. removing features from every version.
What I would like to see changed about firefox is a smaller memory footprint, faster loading times, and a removal of that freeze up that happens when a download starts. In my mind, these things are the real bloat, and they can't be solved by just removing the anti fishing system or whatever. The mozilla guys need to do some serious profiling on firefox and figure out why they are using so much fricken time and space.
They should probably also consider rewriting firefox so that it doesn't use *javascript*, and thus require the javascript runtime to be constantly running, for all of its GUI components. XUL, xpcom and whatnot seem to be pet projects of the mozilla team. They need to take a hard look at those features and ask (1) whether anyone outside of mozilla will ever use them (certainly no one is now, and they've been around for a while) and (2) are they creating a lot of overhead in firefox.
Firefox was originally designed to be a faster lighter mozilla, but they still have a long way to go on that front. My concern is that the mozilla team has gotten complacent with the performance improvements that they have so far. Many people on windows are sticking with IE 6 with all of its problems just because they don't have to wait for it to load on windows (granted, that's because they are cheating by preloading it, but to the user that's still relatively better).
Javascript is not inherently insecure any more than java is, or flash is.
If the operations that javascript can perform are properly restricted (which they pretty much already are) and the implementation is properly sandboxed (which apparently it isn't right now on firefox) then you can ran an arbitrary javascript program without consequences.
Javascript is important to many companies business models, and if you haven't noticed already, the web has moved to using *more* javascript lately not less. People use javascript to deploy fairly thick clients, to assyncronously update a page without postbacks. Some web toolkits don't even render most html on the server, but send data to the client, and let the client handle display.
The bottom line is that businesses now widely use the web to distribute *applications* in a way that they used thin clients to distribute applications in the past. For them, the web is the new x forwarding. Using browsers sans javascript is not an option for them, so it is not going to happen.
What really needs to happen is better sandboxing. Also, sandboxing has to go further than it has in the past. One problem that javascript has is that it can use up a lot of processor time, and effectively bring the system to a halt, or at least cause usability problems in other applications. Browsers needs to regulate cpu and memory resources that javascript can use better to insure that this doesn't happen.
>Aqua is quite memory intensive. A moderate size window is likely to require about a 3MB buffer. Assuming it's double buffered, >guess 4MB (we'll allow for some smaller windows in the average). Now multiply that by the number of windows you have. You're >looking at a lot of memory just for this. I don't know how much of it is VRAM, but on my system it amounts to more than my total >VRAM so it can't be all unless they use some form of lossless texture compression.
They do use compression. The original version of osx had huge memory requirements for the window server (and a lot of other problems), but each version has gotten more effecient and pushed more processing onto the graphics card. At some point (I forget which version, probably 10.2 or 10.3) they started compressing every window in memory.
OSX is far from optimal in terms of performance, but every version has gotten closer by leaps and bounds, so I suspect they will get there before too long. Right now the window server seems very effecient on supported hardware, but the kernel could use a little work before things like threading get as fast as they are on linux.
If the difference in angle is such that each eye could receive a different image, than this technology could be used to implement a simple 3D display. I've heard that there are already some simple 3d displays. Does anyone know if this technology would be better or worse than that that already exists.
contextual menus are nice but...
on
GUIs Get a Makeover
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I think that by convention every function available in an application should be accessible either directly or indirectly from the main menu.
This used to be more or less a design standard (I think apple published it in their human interface guidelines?). For the most part, people use keyboard combos, toolbar buttons, or context menus; however, the main menu serves as a kind of index of all of the functionality that is available in the application. On macintosh it is also a place to quickly look up the the keyboard shortcut binding for a function.
Unfortunately, some developers have gotten lazy recently and made functionality available through only one source, instead of the usual triplet of main menu, context menu, and keyboard bindings. This is annoying when someone makes functionality that is only accessible by context menu, but it is crippling when functionality is only accessible from a keystroke. Worse, sometimes there is no documentation as to what keystroke is needed, and the functionality becomes less of a feature and more of an easter egg for whoever stumbles upon it.
Sadly, Linux software is the main offender here. Unfortunately many developers are totally unaware of the importance and difficulty of good UI design, and writing a GUI becomes an afterthought. In large companies this is rectified because people who specialize in UI design are hired, and on macintosh and windows, apple and microsoft publish UI standards that all applications should meet, but no one seems to be providing this service for Linux.
One other deadly sin of software design is writing software that is only configurable through a text file. Having a human readable text file to configure the application is a feature, but *not* having a preferences GUI in you application that wraps all supported features in the config file is just downright lazy.
Worse are applications that use a scripting language to configure themselves instead of a regular record format (i.e. xml properties files like apple uses, or.ini files like on windows, or the registry, etc). Using a scripting language to configure the application makes the file more difficult to edit for novice users, makes syntax errors more likely because the syntax is necessarily more complex, and makes parsing by third party applications more difficult because, again, the syntax is necessarily more complex. Additionally, a scripting language is just stupid overkill for a configuration file that needs to turn on and off options and specify a path. By definition, a configuration file shouldn't be doing anything *conditionally*. If something like that is in a.conf file, than you put it in the wrong place. Sadly, many linux daemans are guilty of this (especially apache, which is otherwise a nice and powerful web server).
Kevin Poulsen is a notorious ex hacker and phone freak, who's feats were much more impressive than most of the better known hackers. This guy is something of a legend.
From wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Poulsen "His best-appreciated hack was a takeover of all of the telephone lines for Los Angeles radio station KIIS-FM, guaranteeing that he would be the 102nd caller, and netting him a Porsche 944 S2"
According to the book about him he also 1. Broke into numerous Ma Bell facilities. 2. Hijacked and sold unused numbers to a prostitution ring. 3. Located and listened in on various government taps on foreign embasies. 4. Succesfully snuck into the office of the officer assigned to his case to figure out if they were close to catching him.
However these details are from the book that according to the wikipedia entry, poulsen himself "decries." I don't know what "decries" means in terms of poulsen's view of the books *accuracy*, but maybe some knowledgeable slashdotter could clear things up?
p.s. blog.wired.com isn't loading for me, so I unfortunately didn't RTFA
If you can't appreciate the pure joy that was hackers, you fail as a human being.
Hackers is great *because* it is nonsense. It is great *because* it is a total departure from reality. It expresses not how things are, but how we *want* them to be. It's called fiction.
Let's be honest. The only reason that gentoo still requires this kind of configuration is that it makes users feel "leet" to do something so arcane. Many people start using gentoo and various other linux distributions not because they derive any material benefit from it's design but because they want to feel smart and special. They want to be one of the underdogs, a member of a special revolutionary force bringing free software to the world, always shadowed by their evil nemesis, bill gates.
Users like this don't want everyone to start using linux, because then it wouldn't be hip anymore. As long as linux seems arcane and uninviting, then the people who use it seem cool and mysterious.
Some might despise this kind of linux user. Me, I'm just glad they didn't turn into goths or *shudder* emos.
Seriously, they get a bad review from someone, so they personally attack the reviewer on their web page? That's incredibly childish.
Furthermore, while I haven't read his article about mplayer, criticism was warranted to that project. I haven't used it in a while, simply because there are other, better, players available now such as VLC, but I remember the install being pointlessly combersome. I also recall a lack of binary packages. Their player wasn't up to snuff, and the reviewer was doing a service to the community by letting them know not to waste their time with it.
The virtues of 'free as in freedom' and the value of open source to the desktop users
what virtues? He expects the article to touch upon these points, but to many people they have not been sufficiently justified.
I've been using open source software for years, and have heard many people talk as if there was some moral imperative to release software under the GPL, or other oss license. Catch phrases like "free as in freedom," and "information wants to be free" are bandied about, and it is generally implied that commercial software developers are evil in some unspecified manner. However, these attitudes have never been justified to me with anything more than rhetoric and metaphor.
Slashdotters, maybe I am a fool. It might be that the moral imperative behind open source is only so obvious that no one can be bothered to write it down. However, I beg your patience and ask that someone take the time to explain it to me.
Now, to be clear I am not asking how open source helps to develop high quality software. I am already convinced on this point. I am asking for a justification of the commonly observed attitude on slashdot that open source developers are "good" and closed source developers are "bad" in the moral sense. I am asking for a justification of Richard Stallman's position that, as I understand it, there is a moral imperative to develop software under the GPL (or similar license).
Furthermore, as some suspect that I am already clearly quite daft, let's avoid using metaphorical terms or similes in the argument, as they might confuse me. Instead let us use only actual terms. By this I mean that I ask that responders do not derive some moral truth about computer software design by comparing it to plumbing, or cars, or politics (all of which are popular patterns of argument on slashdot). In these forms of arguments we are expected to accept some truth about an unrelated subject as a premise (i.e. you shouldn't send someone to jail for speeding) and from this premise come to accept some truth about computer software that holds a somewhat similar form (i.e. you shouldn't send someone to jail for hacking into their computer). In my ignorance, I often fail to see how the one proposition follows from the other. Often I even imagine that I see semantic distinctions that render the similitude meaningless with respect to the subject at hand. To avoid wandering into these failings in my comprehension, I ask that responders simply tell me why something is directly, without comparison to other truths.
with challenging microsoft desktop apps? Specifically office? Trying to build a better office suite than microsoft is kind of a futile effort... One more crappy word processor that reads.doc format isn't going to unseat the whole office suite. Microsoft has saturated the market *fully*. Office is microsoft's single most successful product, even more successful than windows since most mac users use office, and some linux users use office through wine.
If developers really want to get people to use open source software, or any kind of software that they write, they should focus on writing software that people need, but *don't* already have access to, instead of making the Nth substandard clone of some software that everyone already has.
best RTS: starcraft best japanese style RPG: chrono trigger (by FAR) best americdan style RPG: fallout best arcade: tetris best FPS: half life 2 best game where you roll shit up in a ball: katamari damacy best game where you kill a walking mountain with a porch built into it: shadow of the collosus best game where you are a cowboy: dust
many people seem to think that software development should be some kind of democracy, and that whatever side has the most posts should win. This is clearly not the case as the majority of people in any community are not competent to make most kinds of technical decisions. In a smaller comunity, people who are experts in a field are pretty easy to identify, and decisions are generally made by having a short discussion with that person. In larger communities, such people aren't so easily identifiable, and their input will likely be ignored.
The solution generally employed is to identify certain people responsible for a project, and then to build a trust network rooted at those project leads. The leads are responsible for inviting knowledgable parties to any discussion, for moderating any discussion, and for making decisions in places where concensus can't be achieved. Practically speaking, it's usually more important that a decision is made and that people follow that decision, than that the right decision is made. In the worst case, the work can just be done again if a decision turns out to be so bad that it leads to unsurmountable technical obstacles.
As a simple example, if some piece of software must be written by a number of developers, a language must be chosen. One can debate endlessly the merits of various programming languages, and often people do. However, what one cannot do is choose more than one (in *most* cases). For most software projects, choosing multiple languages would make the code unreadable and create a number of technical hurdles (especially on linux where COM is non-existent and CORBA is... CORBA).
The best path to success is to reduce the conversation to just those who are competent to understand all the relevent factors,which is usually vanishingly few. This reduces time to make decisions, which increases time spent working, and it reduces the chances of crappy decisions being made.
The fact is that older people lose their mental facilities. This practice is just as legitimate as the practice of not allowing persons under 18 to vote or enter into legally binding contracts. If a person is not rational they cannot be said to have the capacity to give their consent to anything. In most legal systems, many people (those under 18, those mentally incapacitated, etc.) are identified as not being rational enough to give consent.
Now, some phone company has no legal right to determine whether someone is fit to give consent. Since the state clearly still identified this person of being in control of their faculties, some random phone salesman has no legal right to question his fitness of judgement. However, while he had no right to do what he did, I can see why he did it. In our day to day lives, we run into many people who, for various reasons. are clearly not rational yet whom we are legally required to treat as if they were. It's clear to me that the state needs a better mechanism to, on a case by case basis, clearly identify people who can be treated as rational agents, and receive the rights and respect that a rational agent deserves.
The flipside of that is that people who clearly lack the capacity for critical thought should have diminished rights, i.e. no right to enter into contracts, no right to vote, probably a few others I can't think of. I suspect that is a bit more controversial thing to say.
deductive logic. The alternative to deductive logic is called inductive logic (basically reasoning with uncertainty), and that is what physics and literally everything that is not math uses. Unfortunately, although inductive logic (I think it's also sometimes called practical reasoning?) is much more useful than deductive logic, it is also much more difficult to do, and not nearly as well understood.
>Without the DRM provisions in the GPLv3 that Linus is complaining about, >we could eventually face a situation where it is literally impossible to >develop FOSS for the latest generation of computers.
How does that follow? Think clearly. If OSS doesn't work with DRM, it's not like that forces anyone to not use DRM. It just causes people to choose software under a different licence. Realistically, if someone wants to only run signed software, they can always go with proprietary software.
In general, my impression of the FSF is that they are idealists and are either unconcerned or unable to deal with the practical realities of the software business. Thankfully, we have people like Linus Tolvalds who *are* concerned with making OSS that people in the real world will be able to use.
>leaving out artists, playwrights, authors, musicians, statesmen and the like. Yes, let's only discuss smart people.
I suspect Newton vs Leibniz is a battle that only Newton and Leibniz would really care about. However, my vote goes to Leibniz because he contributed more to philosophy, and because he's GERMAN.
In terms of ethical theory, Nietzche vs Mill would be a very interesting argument. I would tend to side with Nietzche because he's GERMAN and because although Mill's ideas about morality are very appealing in their simplicity, they lead to some strong contradictions.
Additionally Mill never understood Kant, so he loses some big points with me. BTW, neither did Jesus or Buddha. The categorical imperative has some surface similarities to the golden rule, but isn't really about the same thing. Basically, the golden rule is about making people happy in a consequentalist sense, whereas the categorical imperative is about making them act from reason (I think Kant actually mentions the golden rule in contrast at some point?). If anything, I would argue that the categorical imperative forbids the golden rule as a maxim on the grounds of the second formulation of the categorical imperative.
It's about time the linux community got it's head out of it's collective ass, and started catering to proprietary software developers, or any kind of developer for that matter.
Right now, linux isn't really a coherrent operating system, but a large collection of different products that various distros coble together in different ways. There isn't even a single coherent API to code against that is equivalent to win32. Differing package management systems make it more difficult to install software packaged for redhat/debian.
To keep linux stocked with the latest and greatest software, a single coherrent standard must be made available to code against. Also, some unnecessary duplicate libraries *cough* QT *cough* need to be deprecated and a single API settled on for things like GUI, sound, etc.
Also, it's really time to start evaluating integrating some of the technologies microsoft has developed, primarily COM. It seems like a lot of good ideas that have come out of microsoft have been ignored out of some stupid sense of competition. Linux particularly suffers from a lack of a language independent way to call into libraries. As a consequence, virtually all libraries in linux are written in C, and export simple C functions and no objects.
Finally, it's time to ditch all of the.blahrc files and most of the contents of/etc in favor of either xml config files in regular locations, or a registry equivalent. It's cumbersome to have dozens of different configurations files, all with their own made up syntax that are difficult to parse programmatically. Apache, I'm looking at you.
Linux has come a long way, but it's pretty obvious that the community lacks any kind of strategy for success, and that it is overly disorganized. Frankly, I'm seriously worried about the future relevence of linux. As the competition has removed most of it's major flaws and linux has not, it's become increasingly hard to say that linux is the better operating system. At this point the best argument I can come up with against windows is that it is made by microsoft, and you have to pay for it, which frankly isn't a very good argument as to which operating system is objectively "best".
historically, a lot of smart people have come from germany. Off the top of my head:
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (one of two inventors of calculus, philosopher, etc) Arthur Schopenhauer (philosopher) Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (probably most well known atheist philosopher) Immanuel Kant (came up with the categorical imperative) Sigmund Freud
and then there's the 20th century physicists and rocket scientists most people are already aware of.
Who's the most impressive of the crowd though really? I'm tempted to say either Liebniz or Kant. Do any of the modern guys put them to shame?
>A complex software project doesn't compare well to a bridge. It's more like a city. Nobody goes and says >"Let's build a city!", lays out plans, prototypes and discusses what business go where.
Yes, actually, they do. If they didn't, cities would be unliviable shitholes, where it would be impossible to get from point A to point B, or to hook up power and water, etc. Sometimes people even tear down large sections of a city, once they've gotten out of control and don't fit into a coherent design.
What you are describing sounds more like a refugee camp than a city.
Now, it doesn't make sense to document and plan around things you don't know, but all kinds of engineers from software developers to civic engineers must plan around the knowns and create a framework that the unknowns can be made to fit within.
If your software will need to be expanded in the future in ways you can't predict, that's not an excuse for writing throwaway software now. If possible, you must design your software so that it is flexible enough to be reused in new contexts. You must take care to keep the parts loosely coupled, so that if some parts may be redesigned, the remaining parts can be left the same and reused.
to allow your peer to peer software to be blocked.
Really, I don't understand why more companies offering peer to peer software haven't made their traffic use common ports and do NAT piercing. I'm sure this will be a trend in the future.
The fact is that the current model of blocking all traffic until it is commonly used enough that it has to be let through causes some serious problems for uses and businesses marketing networked software. If administers must allow ranges of ports before software can be used, then it makes it difficult to bring software to market. Users are often prevented from using new software that administrators are unaware of.
Additionally, although blocking all incoming ports has obvious security benefits, blocking all outgoing ports except well known ports is pretty iffy. It's not like there aren't plenty of security vulnerabilities in client applications running on port 80... There's nothing about forcing users to keep all their traffic on port 80 that stops them from using an outdated version of internet explorer. Obviously if you think can force someone to use a recent version of some browser or another and no other, you are locking down their boxes entirely and blocking off peer to peer traffic etc, is a non issue.
Making it easy to rate limit certain kinds of traffic is an obvious reason for having traffic on seperate ports, but frankly I see no real benefit on rate limiting specific kinds of traffic over simply rate each ip address on the network.
Some network admins seem to think they can derive what software is critical for someone to use a priori. It may be the case that on some networks http is the only critical software used, but it is my impression that admins seem to assume that this is every network, when the reality is that most schools, workplaces, and public facilities have users who will need to access something like CVS, ftp, skype, aim on the spur of the moment, and their network will utterly fail them because their admins either didn't anticipate the need, or decided that it wasn't a "legitimate" use of the network (as if they could tell ahead of the time what purpose some protocol was going to be used for).
of reasons why visual studios is a better IDE than eclipse.
>That said, I find two big advantages to VS2005: its learning curve is a lot less steep >(remember the first time you actually tried to run your program in Eclipse?), and its GUI (WinForms) >editor is very simple+powerful (as long as you don't want to dig too much inside the >code it generates).
but here's the main reason visual studios outclasses eclipse. Visual studios provides uniformly good support for whatever programming needs you have over an entire operating system. Visual studios supports C++, all the.NET languages, embedded development for pocket pc and windows CE. You can even use it to debug the javascripts running in freaking internet explorer. There's also a ton of other development tools that can plug into it.
Visual Studios is an IDE in the sense that it integrates *all* of your development environments. Eclipse has excelent java support, and plugins for other languages that *may* *someday* evolve to the point where people will jump ship. However, right now they just aren't in the same class as visual studios.
In short, Eclipse is a wellcrafted program for you java development needs, but VS is a titanic beast of an IDE for everything else.
Slashdot Mirror
for most of us, these are not local weather conditions.
outside of slashdot, people often enough call bloat "features." If developers add features to an application that lots of people want, that's a good thing. In that sense, there is no software that is getting less bloated i.e. removing features from every version.
What I would like to see changed about firefox is a smaller memory footprint, faster loading times, and a removal of that freeze up that happens when a download starts. In my mind, these things are the real bloat, and they can't be solved by just removing the anti fishing system or whatever. The mozilla guys need to do some serious profiling on firefox and figure out why they are using so much fricken time and space.
They should probably also consider rewriting firefox so that it doesn't use *javascript*, and thus require the javascript runtime to be constantly running, for all of its GUI components. XUL, xpcom and whatnot seem to be pet projects of the mozilla team. They need to take a hard look at those features and ask (1) whether anyone outside of mozilla will ever use them (certainly no one is now, and they've been around for a while) and (2) are they creating a lot of overhead in firefox.
Firefox was originally designed to be a faster lighter mozilla, but they still have a long way to go on that front. My concern is that the mozilla team has gotten complacent with the performance improvements that they have so far. Many people on windows are sticking with IE 6 with all of its problems just because they don't have to wait for it to load on windows (granted, that's because they are cheating by preloading it, but to the user that's still relatively better).
Javascript is not inherently insecure any more than java is, or flash is.
If the operations that javascript can perform are properly restricted (which they pretty much already are) and the implementation is properly sandboxed (which apparently it isn't right now on firefox) then you can ran an arbitrary javascript program without consequences.
Javascript is important to many companies business models, and if you haven't noticed already, the web has moved to using *more* javascript lately not less. People use javascript to deploy fairly thick clients, to assyncronously update a page without postbacks. Some web toolkits don't even render most html on the server, but send data to the client, and let the client handle display.
The bottom line is that businesses now widely use the web to distribute *applications* in a way that they used thin clients to distribute applications in the past. For them, the web is the new x forwarding. Using browsers sans javascript is not an option for them, so it is not going to happen.
What really needs to happen is better sandboxing. Also, sandboxing has to go further than it has in the past. One problem that javascript has is that it can use up a lot of processor time, and effectively bring the system to a halt, or at least cause usability problems in other applications. Browsers needs to regulate cpu and memory resources that javascript can use better to insure that this doesn't happen.
>Aqua is quite memory intensive. A moderate size window is likely to require about a 3MB buffer. Assuming it's double buffered,
>guess 4MB (we'll allow for some smaller windows in the average). Now multiply that by the number of windows you have. You're
>looking at a lot of memory just for this. I don't know how much of it is VRAM, but on my system it amounts to more than my total
>VRAM so it can't be all unless they use some form of lossless texture compression.
They do use compression. The original version of osx had huge memory requirements for the window server (and a lot of other problems), but each version has gotten more effecient and pushed more processing onto the graphics card. At some point (I forget which version, probably 10.2 or 10.3) they started compressing every window in memory.
OSX is far from optimal in terms of performance, but every version has gotten closer by leaps and bounds, so I suspect they will get there before too long. Right now the window server seems very effecient on supported hardware, but the kernel could use a little work before things like threading get as fast as they are on linux.
If the difference in angle is such that each eye could receive a different image, than this technology could be used to implement a simple 3D display. I've heard that there are already some simple 3d displays. Does anyone know if this technology would be better or worse than that that already exists.
I think that by convention every function available in an application should be accessible either directly or indirectly from the main menu.
.ini files like on windows, or the registry, etc). Using a scripting language to configure the application makes the file more difficult to edit for novice users, makes syntax errors more likely because the syntax is necessarily more complex, and makes parsing by third party applications more difficult because, again, the syntax is necessarily more complex. Additionally, a scripting language is just stupid overkill for a configuration file that needs to turn on and off options and specify a path. By definition, a configuration file shouldn't be doing anything *conditionally*. If something like that is in a .conf file, than you put it in the wrong place. Sadly, many linux daemans are guilty of this (especially apache, which is otherwise a nice and powerful web server).
This used to be more or less a design standard (I think apple published it in their human interface guidelines?). For the most part, people use keyboard combos, toolbar buttons, or context menus; however, the main menu serves as a kind of index of all of the functionality that is available in the application. On macintosh it is also a place to quickly look up the the keyboard shortcut binding for a function.
Unfortunately, some developers have gotten lazy recently and made functionality available through only one source, instead of the usual triplet of main menu, context menu, and keyboard bindings. This is annoying when someone makes functionality that is only accessible by context menu, but it is crippling when functionality is only accessible from a keystroke. Worse, sometimes there is no documentation as to what keystroke is needed, and the functionality becomes less of a feature and more of an easter egg for whoever stumbles upon it.
Sadly, Linux software is the main offender here. Unfortunately many developers are totally unaware of the importance and difficulty of good UI design, and writing a GUI becomes an afterthought. In large companies this is rectified because people who specialize in UI design are hired, and on macintosh and windows, apple and microsoft publish UI standards that all applications should meet, but no one seems to be providing this service for Linux.
One other deadly sin of software design is writing software that is only configurable through a text file. Having a human readable text file to configure the application is a feature, but *not* having a preferences GUI in you application that wraps all supported features in the config file is just downright lazy.
Worse are applications that use a scripting language to configure themselves instead of a regular record format (i.e. xml properties files like apple uses, or
Kevin Poulsen is a notorious ex hacker and phone freak, who's feats were much more impressive than most of the better known hackers. This guy is something of a legend.
From wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Poulsen
"His best-appreciated hack was a takeover of all of the telephone lines for Los Angeles radio station KIIS-FM, guaranteeing that he would be the 102nd caller, and netting him a Porsche 944 S2"
According to the book about him he also
1. Broke into numerous Ma Bell facilities.
2. Hijacked and sold unused numbers to a prostitution ring.
3. Located and listened in on various government taps on foreign embasies.
4. Succesfully snuck into the office of the officer assigned to his case to figure out if they were close to catching him.
However these details are from the book that according to the wikipedia entry, poulsen himself "decries." I don't know what "decries" means in terms of poulsen's view of the books *accuracy*, but maybe some knowledgeable slashdotter could clear things up?
p.s. blog.wired.com isn't loading for me, so I unfortunately didn't RTFA
If you can't appreciate the pure joy that was hackers, you fail as a human being.
Hackers is great *because* it is nonsense. It is great *because* it is a total departure from reality. It expresses not how things are, but how we *want* them to be. It's called fiction.
Let's be honest. The only reason that gentoo still requires this kind of configuration is that it makes users feel "leet" to do something so arcane. Many people start using gentoo and various other linux distributions not because they derive any material benefit from it's design but because they want to feel smart and special. They want to be one of the underdogs, a member of a special revolutionary force bringing free software to the world, always shadowed by their evil nemesis, bill gates.
Users like this don't want everyone to start using linux, because then it wouldn't be hip anymore. As long as linux seems arcane and uninviting, then the people who use it seem cool and mysterious.
Some might despise this kind of linux user. Me, I'm just glad they didn't turn into goths or *shudder* emos.
Seriously, they get a bad review from someone, so they personally attack the reviewer on their web page? That's incredibly childish.
Furthermore, while I haven't read his article about mplayer, criticism was warranted to that project. I haven't used it in a while, simply because there are other, better, players available now such as VLC, but I remember the install being pointlessly combersome. I also recall a lack of binary packages. Their player wasn't up to snuff, and the reviewer was doing a service to the community by letting them know not to waste their time with it.
The virtues of 'free as in freedom' and the value of open source to the desktop users
what virtues? He expects the article to touch upon these points, but to many people they have not been sufficiently justified.
I've been using open source software for years, and have heard many people talk as if there was some moral imperative to release software under the GPL, or other oss license. Catch phrases like "free as in freedom," and "information wants to be free" are bandied about, and it is generally implied that commercial software developers are evil in some unspecified manner. However, these attitudes have never been justified to me with anything more than rhetoric and metaphor.
Slashdotters, maybe I am a fool. It might be that the moral imperative behind open source is only so obvious that no one can be bothered to write it down. However, I beg your patience and ask that someone take the time to explain it to me.
Now, to be clear I am not asking how open source helps to develop high quality software. I am already convinced on this point. I am asking for a justification of the commonly observed attitude on slashdot that open source developers are "good" and closed source developers are "bad" in the moral sense. I am asking for a justification of Richard Stallman's position that, as I understand it, there is a moral imperative to develop software under the GPL (or similar license).
Furthermore, as some suspect that I am already clearly quite daft, let's avoid using metaphorical terms or similes in the argument, as they might confuse me. Instead let us use only actual terms. By this I mean that I ask that responders do not derive some moral truth about computer software design by comparing it to plumbing, or cars, or politics (all of which are popular patterns of argument on slashdot). In these forms of arguments we are expected to accept some truth about an unrelated subject as a premise (i.e. you shouldn't send someone to jail for speeding) and from this premise come to accept some truth about computer software that holds a somewhat similar form (i.e. you shouldn't send someone to jail for hacking into their computer). In my ignorance, I often fail to see how the one proposition follows from the other. Often I even imagine that I see semantic distinctions that render the similitude meaningless with respect to the subject at hand. To avoid wandering into these failings in my comprehension, I ask that responders simply tell me why something is directly, without comparison to other truths.
Have at it.
with challenging microsoft desktop apps? Specifically office? Trying to build a better office suite than microsoft is kind of a futile effort... One more crappy word processor that reads .doc format isn't going to unseat the whole office suite. Microsoft has saturated the market *fully*. Office is microsoft's single most successful product, even more successful than windows since most mac users use office, and some linux users use office through wine.
If developers really want to get people to use open source software, or any kind of software that they write, they should focus on writing software that people need, but *don't* already have access to, instead of making the Nth substandard clone of some software that everyone already has.
My own list by category:
best RTS: starcraft
best japanese style RPG: chrono trigger (by FAR)
best americdan style RPG: fallout
best arcade: tetris
best FPS: half life 2
best game where you roll shit up in a ball: katamari damacy
best game where you kill a walking mountain with a porch built into it: shadow of the collosus
best game where you are a cowboy: dust
many people seem to think that software development should be some kind of democracy, and that whatever side has the most posts should win. This is clearly not the case as the majority of people in any community are not competent to make most kinds of technical decisions. In a smaller comunity, people who are experts in a field are pretty easy to identify, and decisions are generally made by having a short discussion with that person. In larger communities, such people aren't so easily identifiable, and their input will likely be ignored.
The solution generally employed is to identify certain people responsible for a project, and then to build a trust network rooted at those project leads. The leads are responsible for inviting knowledgable parties to any discussion, for moderating any discussion, and for making decisions in places where concensus can't be achieved. Practically speaking, it's usually more important that a decision is made and that people follow that decision, than that the right decision is made. In the worst case, the work can just be done again if a decision turns out to be so bad that it leads to unsurmountable technical obstacles.
As a simple example, if some piece of software must be written by a number of developers, a language must be chosen. One can debate endlessly the merits of various programming languages, and often people do. However, what one cannot do is choose more than one (in *most* cases). For most software projects, choosing multiple languages would make the code unreadable and create a number of technical hurdles (especially on linux where COM is non-existent and CORBA is... CORBA).
The best path to success is to reduce the conversation to just those who are competent to understand all the relevent factors,which is usually vanishingly few. This reduces time to make decisions, which increases time spent working, and it reduces the chances of crappy decisions being made.
The fact is that older people lose their mental facilities. This practice is just as legitimate as the practice of not allowing persons under 18 to vote or enter into legally binding contracts. If a person is not rational they cannot be said to have the capacity to give their consent to anything. In most legal systems, many people (those under 18, those mentally incapacitated, etc.) are identified as not being rational enough to give consent.
Now, some phone company has no legal right to determine whether someone is fit to give consent. Since the state clearly still identified this person of being in control of their faculties, some random phone salesman has no legal right to question his fitness of judgement. However, while he had no right to do what he did, I can see why he did it. In our day to day lives, we run into many people who, for various reasons. are clearly not rational yet whom we are legally required to treat as if they were. It's clear to me that the state needs a better mechanism to, on a case by case basis, clearly identify people who can be treated as rational agents, and receive the rights and respect that a rational agent deserves.
The flipside of that is that people who clearly lack the capacity for critical thought should have diminished rights, i.e. no right to enter into contracts, no right to vote, probably a few others I can't think of. I suspect that is a bit more controversial thing to say.
I tried SLED 10. It's buggy as get out.
deductive logic. The alternative to deductive logic is called inductive logic (basically reasoning with uncertainty), and that is what physics and literally everything that is not math uses. Unfortunately, although inductive logic (I think it's also sometimes called practical reasoning?) is much more useful than deductive logic, it is also much more difficult to do, and not nearly as well understood.
how much the linux install can be customized. Can I get arbitrary packages working? Put together a pretty nice website?
>Without the DRM provisions in the GPLv3 that Linus is complaining about,
>we could eventually face a situation where it is literally impossible to
>develop FOSS for the latest generation of computers.
How does that follow? Think clearly. If OSS doesn't work with DRM, it's not like that forces anyone to not use DRM. It just causes people to choose software under a different licence. Realistically, if someone wants to only run signed software, they can always go with proprietary software.
In general, my impression of the FSF is that they are idealists and are either unconcerned or unable to deal with the practical realities of the software business. Thankfully, we have people like Linus Tolvalds who *are* concerned with making OSS that people in the real world will be able to use.
>leaving out artists, playwrights, authors, musicians, statesmen and the like.
Yes, let's only discuss smart people.
I suspect Newton vs Leibniz is a battle that only Newton and Leibniz would really care about. However, my vote goes to Leibniz because he contributed more to philosophy, and because he's GERMAN.
In terms of ethical theory, Nietzche vs Mill would be a very interesting argument. I would tend to side with Nietzche because he's GERMAN and because although Mill's ideas about morality are very appealing in their simplicity, they lead to some strong contradictions.
Additionally Mill never understood Kant, so he loses some big points with me. BTW, neither did Jesus or Buddha. The categorical imperative has some surface similarities to the golden rule, but isn't really about the same thing. Basically, the golden rule is about making people happy in a consequentalist sense, whereas the categorical imperative is about making them act from reason (I think Kant actually mentions the golden rule in contrast at some point?). If anything, I would argue that the categorical imperative forbids the golden rule as a maxim on the grounds of the second formulation of the categorical imperative.
It's about time the linux community got it's head out of it's collective ass, and started catering to proprietary software developers, or any kind of developer for that matter.
.blahrc files and most of the contents of /etc in favor of either xml config files in regular locations, or a registry equivalent. It's cumbersome to have dozens of different configurations files, all with their own made up syntax that are difficult to parse programmatically. Apache, I'm looking at you.
Right now, linux isn't really a coherrent operating system, but a large collection of different products that various distros coble together in different ways. There isn't even a single coherent API to code against that is equivalent to win32. Differing package management systems make it more difficult to install software packaged for redhat/debian.
To keep linux stocked with the latest and greatest software, a single coherrent standard must be made available to code against. Also, some unnecessary duplicate libraries *cough* QT *cough* need to be deprecated and a single API settled on for things like GUI, sound, etc.
Also, it's really time to start evaluating integrating some of the technologies microsoft has developed, primarily COM. It seems like a lot of good ideas that have come out of microsoft have been ignored out of some stupid sense of competition. Linux particularly suffers from a lack of a language independent way to call into libraries. As a consequence, virtually all libraries in linux are written in C, and export simple C functions and no objects.
Finally, it's time to ditch all of the
Linux has come a long way, but it's pretty obvious that the community lacks any kind of strategy for success, and that it is overly disorganized. Frankly, I'm seriously worried about the future relevence of linux. As the competition has removed most of it's major flaws and linux has not, it's become increasingly hard to say that linux is the better operating system. At this point the best argument I can come up with against windows is that it is made by microsoft, and you have to pay for it, which frankly isn't a very good argument as to which operating system is objectively "best".
historically, a lot of smart people have come from germany. Off the top of my head:
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (one of two inventors of calculus, philosopher, etc)
Arthur Schopenhauer (philosopher)
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (probably most well known atheist philosopher)
Immanuel Kant (came up with the categorical imperative)
Sigmund Freud
and then there's the 20th century physicists and rocket scientists most people are already aware of.
Who's the most impressive of the crowd though really? I'm tempted to say either Liebniz or Kant. Do any of the modern guys put them to shame?
>A complex software project doesn't compare well to a bridge. It's more like a city. Nobody goes and says
>"Let's build a city!", lays out plans, prototypes and discusses what business go where.
Yes, actually, they do. If they didn't, cities would be unliviable shitholes, where it would be impossible to get from point A to point B, or to hook up power and water, etc. Sometimes people even tear down large sections of a city, once they've gotten out of control and don't fit into a coherent design.
What you are describing sounds more like a refugee camp than a city.
Now, it doesn't make sense to document and plan around things you don't know, but all kinds of engineers from software developers to civic engineers must plan around the knowns and create a framework that the unknowns can be made to fit within.
If your software will need to be expanded in the future in ways you can't predict, that's not an excuse for writing throwaway software now. If possible, you must design your software so that it is flexible enough to be reused in new contexts. You must take care to keep the parts loosely coupled, so that if some parts may be redesigned, the remaining parts can be left the same and reused.
to allow your peer to peer software to be blocked.
Really, I don't understand why more companies offering peer to peer software haven't made their traffic use common ports and do NAT piercing. I'm sure this will be a trend in the future.
The fact is that the current model of blocking all traffic until it is commonly used enough that it has to be let through causes some serious problems for uses and businesses marketing networked software. If administers must allow ranges of ports before software can be used, then it makes it difficult to bring software to market. Users are often prevented from using new software that administrators are unaware of.
Additionally, although blocking all incoming ports has obvious security benefits, blocking all outgoing ports except well known ports is pretty iffy. It's not like there aren't plenty of security vulnerabilities in client applications running on port 80... There's nothing about forcing users to keep all their traffic on port 80 that stops them from using an outdated version of internet explorer. Obviously if you think can force someone to use a recent version of some browser or another and no other, you are locking down their boxes entirely and blocking off peer to peer traffic etc, is a non issue.
Making it easy to rate limit certain kinds of traffic is an obvious reason for having traffic on seperate ports, but frankly I see no real benefit on rate limiting specific kinds of traffic over simply rate each ip address on the network.
Some network admins seem to think they can derive what software is critical for someone to use a priori. It may be the case that on some networks http is the only critical software used, but it is my impression that admins seem to assume that this is every network, when the reality is that most schools, workplaces, and public facilities have users who will need to access something like CVS, ftp, skype, aim on the spur of the moment, and their network will utterly fail them because their admins either didn't anticipate the need, or decided that it wasn't a "legitimate" use of the network (as if they could tell ahead of the time what purpose some protocol was going to be used for).
of reasons why visual studios is a better IDE than eclipse.
.NET languages, embedded development for pocket pc and windows CE. You can even use it to debug the javascripts running in freaking internet explorer. There's also a ton of other development tools that can plug into it.
>That said, I find two big advantages to VS2005: its learning curve is a lot less steep
>(remember the first time you actually tried to run your program in Eclipse?), and its GUI (WinForms)
>editor is very simple+powerful (as long as you don't want to dig too much inside the
>code it generates).
but here's the main reason visual studios outclasses eclipse. Visual studios provides uniformly good support for whatever programming needs you have over an entire operating system. Visual studios supports C++, all the
Visual Studios is an IDE in the sense that it integrates *all* of your development environments. Eclipse has excelent java support, and plugins for other languages that *may* *someday* evolve to the point where people will jump ship. However, right now they just aren't in the same class as visual studios.
In short, Eclipse is a wellcrafted program for you java development needs, but VS is a titanic beast of an IDE for everything else.