I noticed a lot of bugs initially in FC3 - enough to make me switch to another distro. But I reinstalled it last weekend and there have been a lot of updates that fixed many of the problems I had (mainly USB related). Updates have been daily for the past two weeks according to fedoranews.org. I have SuSe 9.2 on my laptop, but I am going to stick with FC3 on my desktop machine for now.
You mean there were Macs prior to MacOSX? I had no idea;)
I guess I did phrase my question a bit badly. Basically I meant is the eMac performance going to annoy a developer (doing debugging etc.) enough that the PowerMac is a worthwhile investment.
Developers also had different performance expectations in the past: a P3-600 must have seemed pretty fast when new, but the one in my laptop is slow enough to be annoying now.
I might end up needing a Mac soon (software for work only Mac/Windows and I'm not working in Windows). I've played around with eMacs, which this looks to be similar in performance to, but never worked seriously on one.
Anybody out there used an eMac for development work? Upgraded to 512mb, are they usable for general C/C++ development or is the Powermac the only way to go for anything beyond email and word processing?
There is an entire research area dedicated to this kind of thing - Operations Research. All your points probably could be encoded in some sort of mathematical programming model without too much trouble. Just add your additional points as factors affecting the objective function value.
From what I understand, MAC filtering is virtually no help at all against anyone trying to use your connection. Mac spoofing is easy, and getting a valid MAC from network traffic is simple as well.
local exploits are still serious, especially in combination with other remote flaws (in apache etc). If somebody can get you to open a trojaned file, an exploit like this can be used to get root and own your machine.
Isn't this just more evidence that most people are a bit daft when it comes to money? If they're not actually paying for it there and then with cash, most people find it hard to think of it as real money.
It's just like those idiots who get the cheap introductory offers from companies like 3 and think "ooh, I'm getting a good deal" , but don't look up how much the normal monthly tariff is. It often doubles from £15 to £30 after three months or something, with a one year minimum.
I think I've been jaded by my experiences with Ubuntu, which I had thought would be the kind of distro for people like my parents, but was in fact far too buggy to use. Problems like Nautilus crashing if you actually try to move large numbers of files around or Impress not handling bullet points correctly are not going to be acceptable. Maybe Hoary will be better, but given their policy on bug fix releases, I doubt it.
I've switched them to Firefox on WinXP, but I couldn't replace outlook express as the free alternatives lacked the filter options they use in OE.
The problem is that in order to switch, the alternative has to be *much* better and I've yet to find a free-as-in-beer distro that is that much better for normal users. They have WinXP SP2 and Firefox, so I get no calls about virus problems any more.
Their needs are basically as you descibe it: web and email, word processing, mp3 ripping. Vidalinux looks pretty good, although it appears to be at least partly pay-software. As they both work freelance from home, lost productivity to bugs or time spent fiddling is expensive, and their current computers work fine (I haven't had a tech support call from them in a year). I get the feeling that, hypothetically, if I switched them to Linux overnight I'd be dealing with complaints like "Why is Office so slow now?", "Why can't I view this Word document properly?", "Why does it take so long to boot?" and "Why did my music player die when I changed the system font?" all day.
I'm using Fedora Core 3 myself (now the updates have fixed the worst of the bugs) and find it a hundred times better the windows *for me*: I'm a Free software developer, however.
I agree with you basic idea, but I think you're a bit over the top with your praise for the Free alternatives.
Nautilus, for example, crashes about as often (maybe more often) as Windows explorer does. Go search bugzilla.gnome.org for "Nautilus crash" for the evidence. Using famd with it so that it matches explorer's functionality and you get all sorts of problems with runaway processes.
Evolution is quite nice, but the Palm sync is buggy as hell. Gedit (more accurately, gtktextview) had some pretty obvious bugs that should be caught by automated tests before release.
I use F/OSS all day, every day for work, but it's not really at the level where I could suggest replacing (for example) my parent's WinXP with a Linux distro and not expect to have to handle a bunch of phone calls about bugs.
(#include "IMHO,YMMV, only tested free-as-in-beer distros,no offence meant")
How do you suggest I log onto the cluster downstairs , compile and run my simulations without shell access? There are many thousands of servers out there which require ssh access to unprivileged users out there.
Proponents of IE would be very stupid to point people to Secunia. After all, Secunia currently says:
"Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 with all vendor patches installed and all vendor workarounds applied, is currently affected by one or more Secunia advisories rated Extremely critical"
...and has 21 (out of 75) unpatched vulnerabilities, compared to Firefox's 4 low threat vulnerabilities.
Apart from the first issue, of course, which reads:
"The vulnerability has been confirmed in Mozilla 1.7.3 for Linux, Mozilla 1.7.5 for Windows, and Mozilla Firefox 1.0. Other versions may also be affected."
So it's actually just one spoofing vulnerability. It's probably a result of fixing the bug in 0.9.something where an overly long (>4kb, IIRC) URL in the address bar could cause firefox to lock up the x-server.
It's basically to do with manipulating 32 bit integers. In the example they give of an average ((t1+t2)/2), the compiler generates code that adds t1 and t2, both 32 bit integers, and then stores that result in a temporary 32 bit integer before doing the division by two. So, although the final result won't exceed the 32 bit limit, the temporary can.
The queen doesn't select honours any more, the Government does it for her and she OKs it, in the same way that she 'gives Royal Assent' to acts of parliament to make them law but actually has no power. It's not a particurlarly good system, but it's not quite as terrible as it is sometimes made out to be.
Must be something seriously wrong with your Palm. The only time mine (Tungsten E) has ever crashed is running crappy freeware apps, or test versions of my own software.
The SDIO wireless would be good: I think the official one will burn out a tungsten E.
"Every bit as stable as fedora", "Every bit as unsinkable as the titanic"
Fedora Core 3 was one of the buggiest distros I've used. If Debian Unstable is still like that (which it was when I used it a year or so ago), I wouldn't use it for anything beyond a test system.
On Fedora: gnome-volume-manager died all the time on unmounting memory cards, syncing to my Palm wouldn't work (kernel patch problem), xemacs wouldn't maximise, up2date would say "Updates available" in the notification area and then refuse to find any updates, NFS mounts wouldn't mount on boot unless I put the server address in/etc/hosts.
This does seem quite common in the UK. Non-specialist shops that sell games (Virgin,HMV etc) very often have shelves of X-Box and PS-2 and no Gamecube games at all, or maybe a few of the bigger games. Gamecube--only games are released months or years later here with virtually no advertising (I think I saw one TV advert for Double Dash and a few for Mario sunshine, but that's it).
Dixons group stores (PC World, Dixons etc), the main high street electrical goods retailers, stopped stocking GC completely a while back.
I guess the slightly kooky gamecube ("it's for kids, innit?") doesn't fit in too well in image-obsessed Britain. A shame really, as there are so many great games on it.
I think many people just find blockbuster movies dull. Most of them are basically the same movie, with a storyline that can be summed up in a thirty second pitch to a producer. There's nothing wrong with that, and it has its place. It's nice to be able to switch your brain off and watch the good guys win because the evil robot forgot it could run at 100mph.
But it's also nice to have films that are different and interesting. It depends how you're defining art-house, really. Fargo, Pulp Fiction, Hero, Supersize me, Sexy Beast, Lost in Translation, Before Sunset, to name a few, are not standard Spiderman-style blockbusters but were all very successful.
It's not a translation issue - the UK is always miles behind too. Mario Tennis is out in a couple of months, Animal Crossing was about a year behind the US. Unless it takes six months to change a game to PAL?
Slashdot Mirror
Hence the temperature increase in the US during the period when all commercial flights were grounded after september 11 2001.
I noticed a lot of bugs initially in FC3 - enough to make me switch to another distro. But I reinstalled it last weekend and there have been a lot of updates that fixed many of the problems I had (mainly USB related). Updates have been daily for the past two weeks according to fedoranews.org.
I have SuSe 9.2 on my laptop, but I am going to stick with FC3 on my desktop machine for now.
You mean there were Macs prior to MacOSX? I had no idea ;)
I guess I did phrase my question a bit badly. Basically I meant is the eMac performance going to annoy a developer (doing debugging etc.) enough that the PowerMac is a worthwhile investment.
Developers also had different performance expectations in the past: a P3-600 must have seemed pretty fast when new, but the one in my laptop is slow enough to be annoying now.
I might end up needing a Mac soon (software for work only Mac/Windows and I'm not working in Windows). I've played around with eMacs, which this looks to be similar in performance to, but never worked seriously on one.
Anybody out there used an eMac for development work? Upgraded to 512mb, are they usable for general C/C++ development or is the Powermac the only way to go for anything beyond email and word processing?
There is an entire research area dedicated to this kind of thing - Operations Research.
All your points probably could be encoded in some sort of mathematical programming model without too much trouble. Just add your additional points as factors affecting the objective function value.
The next post on Bill Palmer's blog might be quite an amusing read.
We seem to have slashdotted the apple store, too.
From what I understand, MAC filtering is virtually no help at all against anyone trying to use your connection. Mac spoofing is easy, and getting a valid MAC from network traffic is simple as well.
It's been explained a hundred times already, but:
local!=physical
local exploits are still serious, especially in combination with other remote flaws (in apache etc). If somebody can get you to open a trojaned file, an exploit like this can be used to get root and own your machine.
Isn't this just more evidence that most people are a bit daft when it comes to money? If they're not actually paying for it there and then with cash, most people find it hard to think of it as real money.
It's just like those idiots who get the cheap introductory offers from companies like 3 and think "ooh, I'm getting a good deal" , but don't look up how much the normal monthly tariff is. It often doubles from £15 to £30 after three months or something, with a one year minimum.
Are you saying the exploit doesn't work? Certainly seems to for many posters here.
I think I've been jaded by my experiences with Ubuntu, which I had thought would be the kind of distro for people like my parents, but was in fact far too buggy to use. Problems like Nautilus crashing if you actually try to move large numbers of files around or Impress not handling bullet points correctly are not going to be acceptable. Maybe Hoary will be better, but given their policy on bug fix releases, I doubt it.
I've switched them to Firefox on WinXP, but I couldn't replace outlook express as the free alternatives lacked the filter options they use in OE.
The problem is that in order to switch, the alternative has to be *much* better and I've yet to find a free-as-in-beer distro that is that much better for normal users. They have WinXP SP2 and Firefox, so I get no calls about virus problems any more.
Their needs are basically as you descibe it: web and email, word processing, mp3 ripping. Vidalinux looks pretty good, although it appears to be at least partly pay-software. As they both work freelance from home, lost productivity to bugs or time spent fiddling is expensive, and their current computers work fine (I haven't had a tech support call from them in a year). I get the feeling that, hypothetically, if I switched them to Linux overnight I'd be dealing with complaints like "Why is Office so slow now?", "Why can't I view this Word document properly?", "Why does it take so long to boot?" and "Why did my music player die when I changed the system font?" all day.
I'm using Fedora Core 3 myself (now the updates have fixed the worst of the bugs) and find it a hundred times better the windows *for me*: I'm a Free software developer, however.
I agree with you basic idea, but I think you're a bit over the top with your praise for the Free alternatives.
Nautilus, for example, crashes about as often (maybe more often) as Windows explorer does. Go search bugzilla.gnome.org for "Nautilus crash" for the evidence. Using famd with it so that it matches explorer's functionality and you get all sorts of problems with runaway processes.
Evolution is quite nice, but the Palm sync is buggy as hell. Gedit (more accurately, gtktextview) had some pretty obvious bugs that should be caught by automated tests before release.
I use F/OSS all day, every day for work, but it's not really at the level where I could suggest replacing (for example) my parent's WinXP with a Linux distro and not expect to have to handle a bunch of phone calls about bugs.
(#include "IMHO,YMMV, only tested free-as-in-beer distros,no offence meant")
How do you suggest I log onto the cluster downstairs , compile and run my simulations without shell access? There are many thousands of servers out there which require ssh access to unprivileged users out there.
Proponents of IE would be very stupid to point people to Secunia. After all, Secunia currently says:
"Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 with all vendor patches installed and all vendor workarounds applied, is currently affected by one or more Secunia advisories rated Extremely critical"
...and has 21 (out of 75) unpatched vulnerabilities, compared to Firefox's 4 low threat vulnerabilities.
Apart from the first issue, of course, which reads:
"The vulnerability has been confirmed in Mozilla 1.7.3 for Linux, Mozilla 1.7.5 for Windows, and Mozilla Firefox 1.0. Other versions may also be affected."
So it's actually just one spoofing vulnerability. It's probably a result of fixing the bug in 0.9.something where an overly long (>4kb, IIRC) URL in the address bar could cause firefox to lock up the x-server.
It's basically to do with manipulating 32 bit integers. In the example they give of an average ((t1+t2)/2), the compiler generates code that adds t1 and t2, both 32 bit integers, and then stores that result in a temporary 32 bit integer before doing the division by two. So, although the final result won't exceed the 32 bit limit, the temporary can.
The queen doesn't select honours any more, the Government does it for her and she OKs it, in the same way that she 'gives Royal Assent' to acts of parliament to make them law but actually has no power. It's not a particurlarly good system, but it's not quite as terrible as it is sometimes made out to be.
BBC articleYes, Doc to Go is crappy. What happens to the Palm that requires a reset during syncing though? Does it just freeze?
Personally, I'd just return the thing under warranty to wherever I bought it - that isn't normal Palm behaviour.
Must be something seriously wrong with your Palm. The only time mine (Tungsten E) has ever crashed is running crappy freeware apps, or test versions of my own software.
The SDIO wireless would be good: I think the official one will burn out a tungsten E.
"Every bit as stable as fedora", "Every bit as unsinkable as the titanic"
/etc/hosts.
Fedora Core 3 was one of the buggiest distros I've used. If Debian Unstable is still like that (which it was when I used it a year or so ago), I wouldn't use it for anything beyond a test system.
On Fedora: gnome-volume-manager died all the time on unmounting memory cards, syncing to my Palm wouldn't work (kernel patch problem), xemacs wouldn't maximise, up2date would say "Updates available" in the notification area and then refuse to find any updates, NFS mounts wouldn't mount on boot unless I put the server address in
This does seem quite common in the UK. Non-specialist shops that sell games (Virgin,HMV etc) very often have shelves of X-Box and PS-2 and no Gamecube games at all, or maybe a few of the bigger games. Gamecube--only games are released months or years later here with virtually no advertising (I think I saw one TV advert for Double Dash and a few for Mario sunshine, but that's it).
Dixons group stores (PC World, Dixons etc), the main high street electrical goods retailers, stopped stocking GC completely a while back.
I guess the slightly kooky gamecube ("it's for kids, innit?") doesn't fit in too well in image-obsessed Britain. A shame really, as there are so many great games on it.
No, if you nmap a default ubuntu install there are no open ports on any external interfaces. Postfix is running, but only listens on 127.0.0.1.
Of course Nintendo is going for the wrong market. That's why they're losing so much money and revenues are plummeting. Oh wait...
I can't help but feed the trolls today.
I think many people just find blockbuster movies dull. Most of them are basically the same movie, with a storyline that can be summed up in a thirty second pitch to a producer. There's nothing wrong with that, and it has its place. It's nice to be able to switch your brain off and watch the good guys win because the evil robot forgot it could run at 100mph.
But it's also nice to have films that are different and interesting. It depends how you're defining art-house, really. Fargo, Pulp Fiction, Hero, Supersize me, Sexy Beast, Lost in Translation, Before Sunset, to name a few, are not standard Spiderman-style blockbusters but were all very successful.
It's not a translation issue - the UK is always miles behind too. Mario Tennis is out in a couple of months, Animal Crossing was about a year behind the US.
Unless it takes six months to change a game to PAL?