Seriously - I used to spend a fortune on games but the last game I paid full-price for was Half-life 2 and that was only to get Counter-Strike:Source really, which I was massively disappointed with and haven't played since.
I've got a load of machines but I ain't got anything above a 1GHz or a Playstation One so there's no point even LOOKING at games any more. Plus, the average price for a full-price game is fast approaching £50 which, I'm sorry, is an awful lot of money for someone who still remembers 99p full price games (zx spectrum era). By the time I bought a decent PC or modern console, say I bought five decent new games, you're into easily £700 for, what, a few weeks of decent gaming? That's a serious amount of money for some on-screen entertainment.
Bloody right an' all. For ages I've been cursing ad's for not showing what the game actually looks like. Even the use of in-game cutscenes is misleading to the uninitiated as they might believe that all the game was that pretty. What's to stop me producing a game that's text-only and then including a 20-minute MPEG cutscene halfway through it which was made by some major CGI studio? The cutscenes are NOT representative of the game as a whole and therefore should not be allowed to be used in a 30-second advert.
I actually noticed the initial adverts for Call of Duty 2 and had this exact concern. I don't buy games any more (nothing worth buying, nothing decent enough to play them on, no way I'm paying that amount just for a game) but it was obvious to me that there was no way the game could be anything like the adverts showed, even though they looked like they *could* be to the average parent/new gamer.
I'm glad this has been upheld and hopefully this will make companies spend more time making the entire game look and play better rather than just spending the money on pre-rendered cutscenes.
Didn't we have enough problems with dead pixels on things like the handheld consoles and LCD screens? Why would you want to run 101 (or however many) seperate screens, all of which could fail or degrade at any time just for an (extremely) expensive keyboard?
I thought we'd got rid of screensavers when CRT's became burn-in immune but apparently not only do we have to use them again for things like digital projectors but also for LCD screens and now even our keyboards!
I work in the IT field (obviously) but I work freelance. Basically, I choose who I work for, so I don't get stuck working under/alongside/above people that I don't personally like. I naturally veer away from meetings. Most meetings I've ever had were a waste of time and they were paying me a phenomenal amount of money to sit and talk, or sometimes even just sit. I don't doubt that meetings can be useful, quite often I've been keen to be involved in ones that affected me directly but been refused (yes, I've actually been politically blocked from attending a meeting with a supplier that would affect my work directly and drastically as I would be in charge of running and maintaining whatever they supplied!).
I've had three hour meetings where the only conclusion and main focus of the chat was what colour green to place on a website background (the website, incidentally, never got off the ground). And they paid me for that time. Now, I don't mind doing stuff that people are paying me for so long as it's something that I can do (I wouldn't say I could fix something if I couldn't), however I try to avoid all meetings now with those same people because it degenerates into a waste of five or more people's time, money and effort, distracts them from the real work and doesn't actually achieve anything we couldn't do with a poll on a webpage. I could make money from sitting in a room and gabbing nonsense but I consider it a real waste of my own time and talent.
One of the reasons that I won't work 9-5, mon-fri, for someone I don't like is that I can call things what they are if people ask. I've never sucked up to a boss in my life because I've never had one. I've had clients, whom I visit initially to determine their needs and then work for, but I avoid "meetings" at all costs.
Meetings are generally without any sort of focus, any conclusions, any change of opinions. They usually are either explaining things that people don't need to understand ("the network is broke, we're fixing it, it'll take a day and cost us X amount of money" is a perfectly good explanation for someone who's not technically minded), letting people spread responsibility for difficult decisions (or even just a comfort blanket for those same decision-makers) and attempts at micro-managing things that those people just don't understand.
If you have a group of colleagues who are all working on very intertwined things, they will form their own meeting either 1-1 or in small groups. They'll have to, and they'll do it a damn sight better than you organising a meeting for them all to check up with you. If you are managing people whose job you could not do yourself, stay out of their way. Maybe find them once a month or so, just to check that everything's working and that you're aware of any major problems. You hire people into a job to do that job, not to make them spend hours in a meeting explaining things they learned twenty years ago to you because you know nothing about that area.
I find that nonsensical meetings only come about through management. Managed-meetings are rarely productive. Having said that, there is a difference between a meeting and a chat. Chat to your staff, make sure they are okay, make sure things are on track, congratulate them on a job well done but bow to their expertise. If you invite someone to a meeting, it's because they absolutely HAVE to be there. If you are having a meeting with a IT vendor and you couldn't tell the difference between two products without the salesman's help, you need your IT guy there, to tell you and the vendor exactly what you want and don't want. But then, why are you there in the first place if you don't know what you're buying?
Meetings can be so useful in the right hands, but 99% of the really important decisions are made or can be made when those self-same people pass each other in the corridor, or pop into each other's office/cubicle/cupboard to chat. That way, there's also no problem with disturbing each other from important work (they won't chat
Oh, and just for the sake of completeness, the UK driving test practical test lasts around 40 minutes on ordinary roads (you can even download the possible routes that could be taken from each driving centre from the Driving Standards Agency website).
Off the subject a bit, I know someone who failed their driving test because they hit a traffic warden on a zebra crossing while speeding!
Can't speak for the requirements in the USA but here in the UK:
Have to be over 17 years old For motorcycles, you have to pass a basic competency test before you can even get on the bike on a public road Have to pass a multiple-choice theory test before you can take a practical Have to pass a video-and-button "hazard perception" test before you can take a practical Have to pass a quick vision test at the start of your test before you can start the practical Have to pass a practical test which usually involves at least some (if not most or all) of the following:
Emergency stop, parallel park, reverse around corner, three-point-turn, reverse parking, demonstrating how to check oil, water etc. and that you can locate the necessary components.
The practical test lets you make up to 15 "minor" driving faults and still pass the test (16 or more results in failure). However, if you commit one serious or dangerous fault you will fail the test.
Usually, it takes at least six months of driving lessons (one or two a week) for someone who doesn't know how a car works to get to the standard necessary for passing the practical test. Most people only pass on their second attempt at the practical test and the theory test has something like a 50% pass rate at any time.
I know for a fact that almost every country in the world treats a UK driving licence like it was a revered religious artifact when hiring cars etc.
Would someone from the US care to state the minimum requirements to obtain a full car driving license in their states?
Yes, I've had CD's that have failed (I've even got a CD lying around with a piece of paper sellotaped to it that details which byte is incorrect on the disk - I noticed a one-byte descripency on the burned disk to the original data about a month after writing it. To this day, hexediting that particular byte makes the CD pass an MD5 check!) but in general my disks just keep going.
Personally, I've not got much that requires long-term storage (photos, websites, some code, graphical works, financial records etc.) but I reckon the critical stuff (that which I would be very upset to lose) adds up to about a GB and is mirrored everywhere, even to the point where every month I swap backup CD's with my brother who lives 20 miles away and we store them at each other's houses (he has something like 9Gb of critical data).
I've also got several hard drives (200Gb+ in total) full of data that would be a pain to lose but that I probably wouldn't pay to have recovered. To date, losses have been minor to say the least.
In all the time that I've been using PC's, my primary storage medium has always been hard disks and CD/DVD-R's (and before that floppies but that doesn't count any more). In 15 years, over about 20-odd hard drives including two 75GXP that are still going strong, I've had *one* critical failure of a 20Mb hard drive (that just shows how long ago that was!) and everything but the OS itself was already backed up on floppy!
I think the key to backups is not what media, but the magic word of redundancy - don't rely on one medium to always work as advertised. Don't rely on your hard drive to keep it all. Don't think that tape will still work in 10 years time. Don't believe that the filesystem will even be supported in that timeframe! Back up to everything you've got, scratch that, back up to TWO of everything you've got, if not more.
I always have two copies of things on my hard disk - normally I have two drives in any PC I build for exactly this purpose. It's not worth backing up Windows etc., things like Ghost Images are extremely useful in the event of a crash but there's little point keeping them for years. I have several backups spread over the hard drives that are usually on different filing systems, ones I can almost guarantee to be able to read in 10 years time, corruption or not (Ext3 / FAT). I even include the tools to read them each time (they may get outdated, but at least there is some way to read them in the future, even if it means booting a FreeDOS disk image from a USB key!)
I regularly copy the important stuff to other locations - my girlfriend's PC, my brother's linux router (which is specially equipped with RAID and SSH for me to do so), my own router (similarly set up for him), my USB keys, my laptop, every one of my FTP spaces (several) and for small files every one of my email addresses.
All this is just automated scripting of backups - I don't need to lift a finger for the above to occur. But I don't rely on those scripts to save my data. Although they are specially designed so that they NEVER overwrite previous backups (we manually delete older ones if it ever fills up, which is rare), I don't trust them not to do that. Hence, I burn the critical stuff to CDR and DVDR and distribute copies to people willing to store it for me (my brother, who also swaps his backups with a trusted computer-literate friend etc.)
Occasionally I will add error-recovery info as well (it's in the automated backups already), using tools such as RAR files with the right options or things like PAR. I always include a current copy of the relevant program with the backup too. This is mainly to guard against media deterioration, something no backup mechanism can really cope well with.
I used to use tape until I realised that a) it was getting ludicrously expensive b) the backups took forever and interfered with my usage of the computer, even when automated as much as I could get, and c) the *two* brand new tape drives (one for use, one put into storage fro
As someone who disables all Windows sounds, desktop themes, screensavers and other junk the second they get a new computer with Windows on, this is probably going to sound trash but:
I spent £200 on an operating system so they can waste the money spending god-knows-how-much to get some guitarist I've never heard of to create some Windows theme sounds? Granted, the current Windows sounds have reached a sort of notoriety in that I can tell the version of Windows from 50 feet by it's boot up and clicking sounds but I'd hardly call it a good thing.
All you need is some basic sound effects, not music or anything along those lines, to be able to know what's going on. The Windows start sound does nothing more than tell you that you've now just got to wait another 30 seconds for your taskbar icons to load up, same for the Windows exit sound.
I **KNOW** Windows is shutting down, I clicked the button! I don't need a little tune to play before it can shut down. I know Windows is starting, there's a bluey-green screen with a mouse cursor on it waiting for the damn thing to carry on loading, why do I need a jingle to tell me that?
I'd much rather someone spent £1,000,000 on making the interface more human friendly, or the startup 30 seconds faster than £10 on all this junk. At the very least, replacing all the boot/startup screens with ONE semi-accurate status bar which, when it goes, shows the desktop fully drawn, and fully operational, is something that needs work much more than a friendly jingle.
If I wanted rubbish like this, I'd buy the PLUS pack.:-)
I RTFA and don't see what the hell this has to do with Linux. The way the article reads is that the "old" and "new" dvd drives (otherwise known as RPC-1 and RPC-2) handle things so differently that it's impossible to support both. This is not actually the complete truth... in fact to handle either is just as easy and they are almost completely the same. The difference is mainly how the drive responds to requests for a CSS key.
Also, the article is very Windows-dependent and has nothing to do with similar hardware/software in other OS's. For example:
"It was impossible for third-parties to compile their own CDROM.SYS from the source code in the DDK because the region code enforcement code was not included in the DDK."
This means that the source code was not present to include complete support. This is a decision that MS has made because they don't want people re-doing the region protection. That's not a "generic" issue, that's an OS issue. OS code to handle any type of DVD drive is available and (because of the GPL) always will be.
"The region code enforcement code would sometimes mistake a new drive for an old one, resulting in customers unable to play DVDs. Even worse, the driver test team could not reproduce the problem reliably, and the problem went away entirely once a debugger was attached to the system."
Strange how the new code would mistake the drives when the code in every operating system currently available that supports DVD's has no such problems (previous versions of Windows included!). Also, is it really the DVD's fault that their debugger was stopping the code from executing in the same way when it was activated or not? This definitely smells of bovine excrement.
"The code to support the older drives is complex, and the drives that the optical storage team purchased prior to January 1, 2000 are dead or dying. Consequently, testing the code that provides support for old drives has become increasingly difficult, and when the last old drive finally gives up the ghost, testing will become impossible altogether."
Strange, then, that they haven't noticed that almost every new DVD drive has firmware available that'll run it as a RPC-1 (or as they like to coin it, "old") drive. Also, I'm pretty sure that the "more complex" claim would not stand up to scrutiny (check out any OS code that deals with DVD drives, whether in the kernel, libdvd* or other places and see if they differ that much for RPC-1 or RPC-2).
"What does this mean for you? Almost certainly, the answer is "absolutely nothing"." Followed by the quote: "Only if you have an old drive will you notice anything different, namely that encrypted/regionalized DVD movies will no longer play."
That's not "absolutely nothing", especially for the budget-conscious who may well upgrade their PC a bit at a time.
"And since the average drive lifetime is only three years, the number of such old drives that are still working is vanishingly small. Not even the optical drive test team can manage to keep their old drives alive that long."
Strange... sitting here with DVD drives that are much older than that and still working. All of them "original" RPC-1, all of them the cheapest crap I could afford, all of them still reading the disks perfectly. None have died and, whoops, if they did you could always get a new RPC-2 drive and firmware it. This is just an excuse... for this paragraph read "We couldn't be arsed to support it and you're not allowed to use it anyway because you'll just use it to do naughty stuff you're not allowed to do cos the DVD forum said you can't and this sounds like a decent excuse to convince the idiots who are going to buy Vista anyway".
"It is that software enforcement that is going away"
There's your answer - they've made a conscious decision to remove this feature. Why? Because if you believe the above quotes, their dev team is incompetent, can't get already working code to play nicely in Vista and can't find a single RPC-1 drive to test i
I am an avid fan of Opera and it's sucked the soul out of my other browsers and even my email/news/IRC/RSS clients to the point where I use nothing else.
However, I still have to have a seperate piece of software for IM (Trillian on Windows, GAIM on Linux). Any plans to extend the IRC support to support major IM protocols and put Trillian out of business?
Thinking forward, what happens when the US decides to do to their GPS what they're trying to do to the Internet, i.e. dictate all possible uses and laws, from music downloading to what you're allowed to say on Wikipedia? What if the US disapproves of a war that the EU takes part in (in the same way that some EU nations disapproved of the Iraq war)? Would the US demand that the war stop or else they'd turn off their GPS system?
Were the situation reversed, would the US pay the EU for such a contract? Not a chance in hell.
Secondly, if you're going to use GPS for it's primary purpose (military), you want redundancy, not a single point of failure for all allied nations. If you'd be willing to pay another country for it, you'd be better off putting that money into another identical system.
And yet again, why should EU companies that require GPS to perform their business be paying a GPS tax to America when they could be paying that tax to the EU instead?
Talking for myself I'm not one bit interested in HDTV. VHS-DVD made only a minor difference to me (easier to skip through, easier to store, etc.), the quality not really being an issue at all. I don't see how any sort of hi-res TV is going to make any difference to what I buy or what I watch.
On a similar note, however, if you want to sell HDTV then you have to SHOW a difference. Most of the LCD-panel TV's in my local electrical stores (even the largest retailers) only ever show a picture which seems to be from an amplified shared analog aerial, so the picture looks EXACTLY the same on a LCD as it does on a CRT TV, fuzziness, minor ghosting etc. so nobody actually sees any difference at all. If they do the same with their HDTV-capable TV's I can't imagine they'll sell a lot of them.
Also, what is this trend with widescreen rubbish? Why can I go to a shop and buy a 34" 4:3 TV and get a larger final picture (even when it letterboxes a DVD) than I would from a widescreen TV that costs the same price? And yet that widescreen TV is also only able to show 4:3 content in a size that's beaten by a portable TV I have upstairs in the loft!
For those that are asking, a darknet is used in this context as a closed P2P system (i.e. you, your mates, your mates' mates and others by invitation only sharing what you have with each other over the internet).
Reminds me of something me and my brother used to do. We wanted to play a game online over the Internet but didn't want to sign up to yet-another online gaming service (The Zone or something it was called). We both had legit copies of the game, we both had internet connections and we just wanted to play online against each other. We couldn't do a straight TCP/IP connection for some reason or another so the only options left in the software were LAN, Modem or this Zone thing.
So what we did was set up PPTP between our routers, assigned nearby IP addresses on both sides that routed across the connection and played a "LAN" game over the Internet. As far as I can see this was a type of darknet if you like.
If we'd had non-legit copies, many games of the era would let you plan LAN without the CD so long as one player had the CD but not across the Internet. Or, say we'd cracked or VirtualCD'd the CD so that neither of us had a legit copy but could still play online. Then this sort of "PPTP darknet" would be used to let groups of friends without the legit CD to play over the Internet without needing the authorisation or intervention of the person running the gaming servers.
A further thought, bringing it up to the modern day, would suggest that things like Steam could be played over this sort of "PPTP darknet" as a LAN game (connecting to PC's spread over the internet, all disconnected from the "real" internet and bypassing restrictions on who / what is allowed to play)?
It's a interesting idea, sort of like a hidden black market for the internet (which I'm assuming is where the name comes from). As companies crack down on people lending movies to their friends and similar other quite legitimate activities, things like this are going to appear, translated from the real world where this happens all the time to the Internet.
It seems to me that these sorts of things have existed for a while, though. I've heard that things like paedophile rings are already using such tactics? Detection is much, much harder than for a centrally administered P2P network. The only way to detect is to infiltrate the network itself, which is basically social engineering?
1) I now know what my computer does and when. I know when it loads a driver, I can exclude a driver (even one of the base OS drivers, such as filesystems), I know what drivers crash or don't mix and can easily exclude them. I can MAKE CERTAIN that when I boot from my hard drive, it doesn't write to the disk in any way... perfect for diagnostics and advanced troubleshooting. I also know that drivers can't be loaded into the kernel without my permission.
2) I can still boot 10-year-old versions of Linux (kernel, apps etc.) if necessary, without having to lose my current settings (using chroots, kernels, initrds). I can still run 10-year-old Linux apps and be pretty much assured that they will run (even if it does mean a recompile).
3) 99% of my hardware "just works" and the 1% I really don't care about. I've always bought hardware that was "real" hardware, not some fake winmodem rubbish, and therefore have not had any problems with the stuff that I've bought. So far, 1 non-supported parallel/USB scanner out of the four I have and 1 cheapy soundcard out of 6 that didn't give the performance I would like. I see it as the hardware manufacturer's fault if something does not work... they designed it, they should have stuck to standards, made the design simple enough to implement or, at worst, got off their backsides and maintained a driver for it. Why should ANYONE have to reverse-engineer their network/sound/video card to make it work?
4) When Windows decides to throw a wobbler, go into a reboot loop, give stop errors on boot, there's not much I can do to bring it back but restore from a ghost image (if I have one and if it's fairly recent). When (if) linux goes, I get USEFUL error messages, I can narrow it down to kernel or userspace. Kernel can be upgraded/downgraded, userspace can be changed. Userspace can be backed up to a tar file, not some fancy format, there's no registry to worry about and at worst reinstalling the problem app (be it bash or KDE) will fix the problem.
5) All my apps are self-contained in packages (be they slackware tgz's, RPM's, deb's). That means that so long as I back them,/home and/etc up, reinstalling the machine takes about two-three hours at worst compared to days of trying to get settings back to how they were. I don't need to worry about registries, programs storing their own preferences elsewhere. The packages are freely downloadable and therefore I can afford *not* to back them up if I ever needed to. It also means software management is so simple it's hardly worth mentioning. Upgrades can be trusted to happen automatically via things like swaret as you know that two commands gets you back to where you were.
6) I have all of my data in a format that can be read off my disks using a single floppy, I can read it in some of the most ancient of kernels, I can read it from a small Windows driver. I can even have a stab at trying to fix the filesystem manually because it's in a semi-sensible format.
7) I know that my computer is not spying on me, not "checking" that I have the right numbers typed in, not constantly accusing me of possibly being a pirate because I want to reinstall an OS.
8) Upgrades are a dream. I can, for example, go from a 2.4 kernel KDE 3.2 system to a 2.6 kernel KDE 3.4 without losing any functionality. (the equivalent of a 2K-XP upgrade or similar) Functionality losses (if any) are CLEARLY advertised in changelogs, readme's etc. and I can choose to just stay where I am if I want.
9) The damn computer finally does what I tell it to. Technically speaking it has always done what it was told to, but that was by a combination of me, MS and applications. It would do what you told it to even though that might be crash or break or format my disk, but now it FEELS like I have control. Sometimes I screw up and things get complicated but in the end I can see WHY things happened (I removed the library, upgraded the wrong file, d
First, I think you're missing the fact that, overall, Linux doesn't care that you can't put your binary-only drivers on it.
Linus has said publically many times that the reason that there is not ABI is because he doesn't want one. Binary drivers for *anything* end up screwing stuff up. When they do, there is NOTHING anyone but the original author can do. The code stagnates, users get shut out without any help and nobody is any the wiser as to how that hardware actually worked in the first place.
That's WHY there is stuff like the kernel module license tainting, so that the kernel developers look at a problem, see that you have the massive unknown of a in-kernel binary loaded and can instantly filter your report out. They don't care that your binary driver doesn't work. They can't help you.
Additionally, setting anything into a static position means that development of it ends and stagnates. You'll never get a static interface that you can use to extend the drivers when new features come along. You end up with all sorts of kludges and interface versioning to try to take account of new things.
Linux is developed as an independent operating system, not Windows 2006. No-one wants to make you use it if you don't want to. I doubt Linux was ever intended as anything other than a "pure", almost theoretical, system; that is, one that can be constantly redesigned from the ground up to the way it should have been, not kludged to make it fit your eight-year-old driver (which the author is no longer available to update) for a mouse that happens to still use the old interface.
"Frankly, linux desperatly needs both a kernel debugger, and an ABI to be a REAL alternative for many customers."
Whoa, magic word customers. Linux doesn't have customers. Your company may have customers. There's no obligation on Linux to help you get/keep your customers. People use Linux because they want to. How often does Linus appear on your telly begging you to buy into Linux? Never. Because he doesn't care if you do or not. However, I do imagine it feels pretty nice to him that you do want to use it.
"It also needs the ABI for driver developers so that we can write a single driver and expect it to work on the dozens of flavors of linux we are expected to support."
*You* are expected to support whatever you decide to make. Unfortunately, the linux kernel developers are expected to support YOU, your hardware and everyone else in the world. They don't because they cannot and have no reason to. Even if they had your complete source code, they cannot be expected to maintain your driver for you (which is what will happen when your company goes bust / gets bored with OS).
Sometimes the best-written drivers in the world are not taken into the kernel because they don't quite fit and the maintainance involved in keeping them in the kernel is too difficult. Your driver, if it is to have any support in the kernel, needs to be able to be updated on any kernel-coder's whim in order to make the whole a better system. You can't do that with binaries, you can't even do it with stable interfaces. You have to have the source.
The kernel coders have never promised that your stuff will always work (unless it is designed to run purely from userspace... several times Linus has says that userspace interfaces will not MUCH change over time.). They haven't because they cannot.
The nature of the system is changes to bring improvements, from the interrupt system to the IDE interfaces, from the schedulers to the userspace interfaces such as sysfs or procfs, Linux changes and evolves over time and they cannot guarantee that anything other than userspace syscalls and the like will not be broken, changed or improved between one kernel release and the next.
When the linux kernel people discover a new way to write drivers that sees enhancements across the board, chances are that they are going to break any of your "single driver" models. That's why they won't give you one. Them im
Do you know how many people get a new computer with Windows and spend an hour choosing their wallpaper, screensavers, IM avatars etc.? Loads. Look and feel and customisation is important even to the least tech-savvy person.
If Linux is to ever take off, it's got to out-choose Windows. This is where the big push is coming from... those people who choose not to run a crippled, expensive system but a cheaper more which might take a little more of a push. The people who choose to use an antivirus scanner that's free compared to one that's constantly bugging them to upgrade. The people who choose to run on an older PC than have to upgrade AGAIN.
Choosing between Gnome, KDE and every other window manager is a vital part of any linux desktop system. You like Gnome, I like KDE, the system I make to go on an old 486 might run much nicer with something else entirely. The fact that, at install time and later on, I can choose what I want to use based on what I like or what I want is a plus point. It HELPS newbies, not hinders them.
The only fly in the linux desktop ointment at the moment is the fact that there's very little to help a brand new user. Help files DO NOT GET READ. I work in six schools, I assist nigh-on 100 members of staff and hundreds of children and not once has anyone every clicked on, read, or bothered to consult a help file when something went wrong or they needed help. Stupid things in Windows like that little bouncing arrow that points to the startbar are HELPFUL to people, even if only for the first time the desktop is shown.
We need to get Gnome, KDE and all the others around to make silly tutorials, videos, help files, tooltips, and all the other gumph that users need to adjust. Remember the Windows 3.1 "how to use a mouse" tutorial? It showed click-and-drag and everything because it was NEW to the users. Linux is new to people. It's very similar to Windows in terms of usage (or can be very easily made to be) but it needs to show that that's the case. The simple fact that KDE loads up with five icons in the bottom left doesn't help a new user. They don't know that they have to press the K to find the programs. They could GUESS it but users don't like to guess. The newer the desktop, the more "fancy", the more modern, the more abstract, the harder it is for people to adjust.
How do they find their files? It has to be explained that the Home folder holds all their documents. How do they get on the web? It has to be explained that they can use lots of browsers but that IE isn't there.
When you have someone to demonstrate the fact, it takes two minutes to get them into a word processor and printing off their stuff. When they get to the stage where they are BUYING this stuff in PC World, they need to be able to have a go themselves with some confidence of what to expect. This doesn't mean make it like Windows, it doesn't mean that they should be stuck with "GnomeKDE" the new merged desktop, it means that every project that wants a piece of the desktop has to think of the users.
That's where linux desktop currently falls down. Yes, for me it's nice that I can configure my middle button to do any of twenty different things depending on context but that shouldn't get in the way of the user who's trying to work out why he can't reverse his mouse buttons for left-handed use. Once you have that in place, the Gnome/KDE/other issue becomes a user choosing his "theme".
"... no matter how good it is, KDE is simply is not going to happen as a mainstream commercial desktop as long as Qt is available only under the GPL and a commercial license."
Maybe not. But where does your reasoning come from? Companies can buy into it just like the software they are used to (if they want to be that stupid). People (like me) can freebie their way into it because they know it's not going to get taken away if QT disappears. Exactly where is the problem for anybody? Were it GPL-only, you'd have an argument. Were it commercial licenses only, you'd have an argument. But it's both. That solves pretty much everything you could want in a product.
"Gnome may be worse, but it isn't so much worse that it makes a difference to real-world users."
Gnome may not be any better or worse, I've compared both and personally I prefer KDE (it seems more modern but not too artsy, easier, sleeker, not so clunky. Gnome still reminds me of old DOS GUI's in places, or those Borland-written dialogs and menus you used to have on Windows. Nothing *wrong* with them, they just feel completely out of place).
However, from a technical side, there are many considerations. Gnome is still a pain in the arse to manage for a distro. That's the primary reason that Slackware has dropped it from the distro.
Quotes from the changelog: [[ gnome/*: Removed from -current, and turned over to community support and
distribution. I'm not going to rehash all the reasons behind this, but it's
been under consideration for more than four years.
Please do not incorrectly interpret any of this as a slight against GNOME
itself, which (although it does usually need to be fixed and polished beyond
the way it ships from upstream more so than, say, KDE or XFce) is a decent
desktop choice. So are a lot of others, but Slackware does not need to ship
every choice. GNOME is and always has been a moving target (even the
"stable" releases usually aren't quite ready yet) that really does demand a
team to keep up on all the changes (many of which are not always well
documented). I fully expect that this move will improve the quality of both
Slackware itself, and the quality (and quantity) of the GNOME options
available for it.
Folks, this is how open source is supposed to work. Enjoy.:-) ]]
I have to agree with the last sentence.
"I think it's a bad mistake for Ubuntu to support KDE on equal footing with Gnome; for the Linux desktop, the best thing is if people standardize on Gnome for now."
Nope. Not in an open-source world. The point is to take EVERYTHING on an equal footing, get the best out of both and ditch the cruft. It's like software evolution. Whoever wins out of KDE and GNOME will, by definition, be the better system. However, to do this you have to start them both off on an equal footing. Welcome to open source. The fact that I can run GNOME binaries on my KDE desktop and vice versa means that there's no reason to choose any one of them yet and no need for standardisation. It's just another set of libraries for now.
"The KDE developers should seriously think about developing the next generation Linux desktop, based on a an entirely new toolkit and new approach to doing things."
Maybe. But what to start from? Where to get those ideas? Where to find those approaches? How to determine which of the new approaches works and which was better off the old way? By putting them all together, fighting it out (by a vote of user popularity) and, as if by magic, a victor will appear. They can take bits of each other, they can "steal" each other's ideas but they shouldn't be written off just because you don't like them. Many, many people do.
Almost funny to hear them explain how they are using more than one supplier/manufacturer in order to increase competition and lower the prices for the end user.
If you have Windows and you really need to play the CD's (not that I suspect many casual users would even think of using the CD drive in the computer - most people I work with don't know you can even do it. I've even been asked if I can play a CD in a DVD drive and, incidentally, vice versa) ripping them to MP3 is suddenly safer, easier and, taking the users time into account, cheaper. Plus you don't need the disk in the drive. Good move, record companies the world over. You've just signed your own bankruptcy.
To those tech-savvy people who want to play their CD's in their computers, why have you got Autorun enabled, why do you treat the onboard media playing software as any different to any other software (virus risk etc.) and why would you allow someone to install ANYTHING, no matter how tiny, onto your hard disk just to play a CD on the computer?
CD's play in the computer as a by-product of the technology. Most of the time, data and audio CD's never mix so if it's been this difficult for the past few years to play a god-damn audio CD in your computer, who still bothers?
You want to play a CD on a computer, keep autorun turned off (it only saves two double-clicks at great security expense) or alternatively hold down Shift as you load the drive, rip it to MP3 and never use the "software" that comes with it. If you wanna play it on your CD players, make audio-disc copies (you just did it to MP3 so dragging those MP3's onto Nero takes about a minute and you have a completely DRM-free audio copy for the car, safe use on the computer and a backup should your CD ever stop working (breakages, can't play it in Windows Vista etc.). Most decent MP3 software completely bypasses this sort of thing so long as the disk doesn't get a chance to Autorun or be installed.
It probably never hits about 70% of the CD-playing public as they never put it in their computer. It shouldn't ever hit anybody clever enough not to install unchecked software. The middle ground (those who want to make a copy with some piece of rubbish written in Visual Basic or those who want to play it on their computer) are a small minority.
- ssh (file transfers, port forwarding, encryption and remote login in one tiny tool. I even use it in place of WEP or WPA) - pico (can't stand vi but pico is small and has enough of a help that I don't have to memorise keystrokes) - grep, sed (with grep and sed, you can pretty much manipulate any file/program output into whatever you want, strip IP's out of errors/logs, etc.) - x11vnc (like any other VNC program but supports Tight encoding and also lets me see what an EXISTING X session is doing. Combined with a script that seds/greps the auth code from the process list and you have automated remote desktop) - screen (if for no other reason than it lets you start a job at work (like a kernel compile) and watch it's progress throughout the day even if you have to log off in between. And when you get home, you can still check on it) - tinyproxy (wonderful small, easy to use web-proxy that I tunnel into from work to bypass the far-too-restrictive filters in the schools that I work in) - slocate (worth it's weight in gold when you have it auto-indexing overnight across all filesystems. Where's that file I used ten years ago that had Xen in the name? a simple command, 2 seconds wait and you get the full path). - dnsmasq (tiny util, bung it a massive list of public DNS servers and point your DNS requests to 127.0.0.1 and it will loop through them all until it gets a response. Failover to other servers, built-in full DHCP server, invaluable behind a NAT, simple config. Saved my life I-don't-know-how-many-times when my ISP DNS servers were feeling flaky. No one even noticed that half the time our ISP's weren't responding to DNS at all.) - lsusb, lspci,/proc/cpuinfo, free etc. (Invaluable for hardware discovery. Boot a knoppix CD, run those commands and instantly you know everything about the hardware that you need to know.) - dd, cat, more, sh, etc.(where would we be without them?)
I think that something that Wikipedia needs more urgently are -stable and -current version of the data. Have a working copy that anyone can edit, yes, and then on a completly seperate domain name, have the articles copied, checked for accuracy, cleaned up etc. and locked down. Thus, once an article reaches maturity, it's static so it's much easier to refer to it from websites and other citations, the quality is more reliable, it's kid-safe so schools etc. can use it as a reference, the accuracy can be checked and wikipedia doesn't keep it's reputation among academics which is usually expressed in terms of monkeys and typewriters.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in my day...
Seriously - I used to spend a fortune on games but the last game I paid full-price for was Half-life 2 and that was only to get Counter-Strike:Source really, which I was massively disappointed with and haven't played since.
I've got a load of machines but I ain't got anything above a 1GHz or a Playstation One so there's no point even LOOKING at games any more. Plus, the average price for a full-price game is fast approaching £50 which, I'm sorry, is an awful lot of money for someone who still remembers 99p full price games (zx spectrum era). By the time I bought a decent PC or modern console, say I bought five decent new games, you're into easily £700 for, what, a few weeks of decent gaming? That's a serious amount of money for some on-screen entertainment.
Bloody right an' all. For ages I've been cursing ad's for not showing what the game actually looks like. Even the use of in-game cutscenes is misleading to the uninitiated as they might believe that all the game was that pretty. What's to stop me producing a game that's text-only and then including a 20-minute MPEG cutscene halfway through it which was made by some major CGI studio? The cutscenes are NOT representative of the game as a whole and therefore should not be allowed to be used in a 30-second advert.
I actually noticed the initial adverts for Call of Duty 2 and had this exact concern. I don't buy games any more (nothing worth buying, nothing decent enough to play them on, no way I'm paying that amount just for a game) but it was obvious to me that there was no way the game could be anything like the adverts showed, even though they looked like they *could* be to the average parent/new gamer.
I'm glad this has been upheld and hopefully this will make companies spend more time making the entire game look and play better rather than just spending the money on pre-rendered cutscenes.
A good point, well made.
Didn't we have enough problems with dead pixels on things like the handheld consoles and LCD screens? Why would you want to run 101 (or however many) seperate screens, all of which could fail or degrade at any time just for an (extremely) expensive keyboard?
I thought we'd got rid of screensavers when CRT's became burn-in immune but apparently not only do we have to use them again for things like digital projectors but also for LCD screens and now even our keyboards!
I work in the IT field (obviously) but I work freelance. Basically, I choose who I work for, so I don't get stuck working under/alongside/above people that I don't personally like. I naturally veer away from meetings. Most meetings I've ever had were a waste of time and they were paying me a phenomenal amount of money to sit and talk, or sometimes even just sit. I don't doubt that meetings can be useful, quite often I've been keen to be involved in ones that affected me directly but been refused (yes, I've actually been politically blocked from attending a meeting with a supplier that would affect my work directly and drastically as I would be in charge of running and maintaining whatever they supplied!).
I've had three hour meetings where the only conclusion and main focus of the chat was what colour green to place on a website background (the website, incidentally, never got off the ground). And they paid me for that time. Now, I don't mind doing stuff that people are paying me for so long as it's something that I can do (I wouldn't say I could fix something if I couldn't), however I try to avoid all meetings now with those same people because it degenerates into a waste of five or more people's time, money and effort, distracts them from the real work and doesn't actually achieve anything we couldn't do with a poll on a webpage. I could make money from sitting in a room and gabbing nonsense but I consider it a real waste of my own time and talent.
One of the reasons that I won't work 9-5, mon-fri, for someone I don't like is that I can call things what they are if people ask. I've never sucked up to a boss in my life because I've never had one. I've had clients, whom I visit initially to determine their needs and then work for, but I avoid "meetings" at all costs.
Meetings are generally without any sort of focus, any conclusions, any change of opinions. They usually are either explaining things that people don't need to understand ("the network is broke, we're fixing it, it'll take a day and cost us X amount of money" is a perfectly good explanation for someone who's not technically minded), letting people spread responsibility for difficult decisions (or even just a comfort blanket for those same decision-makers) and attempts at micro-managing things that those people just don't understand.
If you have a group of colleagues who are all working on very intertwined things, they will form their own meeting either 1-1 or in small groups. They'll have to, and they'll do it a damn sight better than you organising a meeting for them all to check up with you. If you are managing people whose job you could not do yourself, stay out of their way. Maybe find them once a month or so, just to check that everything's working and that you're aware of any major problems. You hire people into a job to do that job, not to make them spend hours in a meeting explaining things they learned twenty years ago to you because you know nothing about that area.
I find that nonsensical meetings only come about through management. Managed-meetings are rarely productive. Having said that, there is a difference between a meeting and a chat. Chat to your staff, make sure they are okay, make sure things are on track, congratulate them on a job well done but bow to their expertise. If you invite someone to a meeting, it's because they absolutely HAVE to be there. If you are having a meeting with a IT vendor and you couldn't tell the difference between two products without the salesman's help, you need your IT guy there, to tell you and the vendor exactly what you want and don't want. But then, why are you there in the first place if you don't know what you're buying?
Meetings can be so useful in the right hands, but 99% of the really important decisions are made or can be made when those self-same people pass each other in the corridor, or pop into each other's office/cubicle/cupboard to chat. That way, there's also no problem with disturbing each other from important work (they won't chat
Oh, and just for the sake of completeness, the UK driving test practical test lasts around 40 minutes on ordinary roads (you can even download the possible routes that could be taken from each driving centre from the Driving Standards Agency website).
Off the subject a bit, I know someone who failed their driving test because they hit a traffic warden on a zebra crossing while speeding!
Can't speak for the requirements in the USA but here in the UK:
Have to be over 17 years old
For motorcycles, you have to pass a basic competency test before you can even get on the bike on a public road
Have to pass a multiple-choice theory test before you can take a practical
Have to pass a video-and-button "hazard perception" test before you can take a practical
Have to pass a quick vision test at the start of your test before you can start the practical
Have to pass a practical test which usually involves at least some (if not most or all) of the following:
Emergency stop, parallel park, reverse around corner, three-point-turn, reverse parking, demonstrating how to check oil, water etc. and that you can locate the necessary components.
The practical test lets you make up to 15 "minor" driving faults and still pass the test (16 or more results in failure). However, if you commit one serious or dangerous fault you will fail the test.
Usually, it takes at least six months of driving lessons (one or two a week) for someone who doesn't know how a car works to get to the standard necessary for passing the practical test. Most people only pass on their second attempt at the practical test and the theory test has something like a 50% pass rate at any time.
I know for a fact that almost every country in the world treats a UK driving licence like it was a revered religious artifact when hiring cars etc.
Would someone from the US care to state the minimum requirements to obtain a full car driving license in their states?
Yes, I've had CD's that have failed (I've even got a CD lying around with a piece of paper sellotaped to it that details which byte is incorrect on the disk - I noticed a one-byte descripency on the burned disk to the original data about a month after writing it. To this day, hexediting that particular byte makes the CD pass an MD5 check!) but in general my disks just keep going.
Personally, I've not got much that requires long-term storage (photos, websites, some code, graphical works, financial records etc.) but I reckon the critical stuff (that which I would be very upset to lose) adds up to about a GB and is mirrored everywhere, even to the point where every month I swap backup CD's with my brother who lives 20 miles away and we store them at each other's houses (he has something like 9Gb of critical data).
I've also got several hard drives (200Gb+ in total) full of data that would be a pain to lose but that I probably wouldn't pay to have recovered. To date, losses have been minor to say the least.
In all the time that I've been using PC's, my primary storage medium has always been hard disks and CD/DVD-R's (and before that floppies but that doesn't count any more). In 15 years, over about 20-odd hard drives including two 75GXP that are still going strong, I've had *one* critical failure of a 20Mb hard drive (that just shows how long ago that was!) and everything but the OS itself was already backed up on floppy!
I think the key to backups is not what media, but the magic word of redundancy - don't rely on one medium to always work as advertised. Don't rely on your hard drive to keep it all. Don't think that tape will still work in 10 years time. Don't believe that the filesystem will even be supported in that timeframe! Back up to everything you've got, scratch that, back up to TWO of everything you've got, if not more.
I always have two copies of things on my hard disk - normally I have two drives in any PC I build for exactly this purpose. It's not worth backing up Windows etc., things like Ghost Images are extremely useful in the event of a crash but there's little point keeping them for years. I have several backups spread over the hard drives that are usually on different filing systems, ones I can almost guarantee to be able to read in 10 years time, corruption or not (Ext3 / FAT). I even include the tools to read them each time (they may get outdated, but at least there is some way to read them in the future, even if it means booting a FreeDOS disk image from a USB key!)
I regularly copy the important stuff to other locations - my girlfriend's PC, my brother's linux router (which is specially equipped with RAID and SSH for me to do so), my own router (similarly set up for him), my USB keys, my laptop, every one of my FTP spaces (several) and for small files every one of my email addresses.
All this is just automated scripting of backups - I don't need to lift a finger for the above to occur. But I don't rely on those scripts to save my data. Although they are specially designed so that they NEVER overwrite previous backups (we manually delete older ones if it ever fills up, which is rare), I don't trust them not to do that. Hence, I burn the critical stuff to CDR and DVDR and distribute copies to people willing to store it for me (my brother, who also swaps his backups with a trusted computer-literate friend etc.)
Occasionally I will add error-recovery info as well (it's in the automated backups already), using tools such as RAR files with the right options or things like PAR. I always include a current copy of the relevant program with the backup too. This is mainly to guard against media deterioration, something no backup mechanism can really cope well with.
I used to use tape until I realised that a) it was getting ludicrously expensive b) the backups took forever and interfered with my usage of the computer, even when automated as much as I could get, and c) the *two* brand new tape drives (one for use, one put into storage fro
As someone who disables all Windows sounds, desktop themes, screensavers and other junk the second they get a new computer with Windows on, this is probably going to sound trash but:
:-)
I spent £200 on an operating system so they can waste the money spending god-knows-how-much to get some guitarist I've never heard of to create some Windows theme sounds? Granted, the current Windows sounds have reached a sort of notoriety in that I can tell the version of Windows from 50 feet by it's boot up and clicking sounds but I'd hardly call it a good thing.
All you need is some basic sound effects, not music or anything along those lines, to be able to know what's going on. The Windows start sound does nothing more than tell you that you've now just got to wait another 30 seconds for your taskbar icons to load up, same for the Windows exit sound.
I **KNOW** Windows is shutting down, I clicked the button! I don't need a little tune to play before it can shut down. I know Windows is starting, there's a bluey-green screen with a mouse cursor on it waiting for the damn thing to carry on loading, why do I need a jingle to tell me that?
I'd much rather someone spent £1,000,000 on making the interface more human friendly, or the startup 30 seconds faster than £10 on all this junk. At the very least, replacing all the boot/startup screens with ONE semi-accurate status bar which, when it goes, shows the desktop fully drawn, and fully operational, is something that needs work much more than a friendly jingle.
If I wanted rubbish like this, I'd buy the PLUS pack.
As the links seems dead now:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/portableoo/
I RTFA and don't see what the hell this has to do with Linux. The way the article reads is that the "old" and "new" dvd drives (otherwise known as RPC-1 and RPC-2) handle things so differently that it's impossible to support both. This is not actually the complete truth... in fact to handle either is just as easy and they are almost completely the same. The difference is mainly how the drive responds to requests for a CSS key.
Also, the article is very Windows-dependent and has nothing to do with similar hardware/software in other OS's. For example:
"It was impossible for third-parties to compile their own CDROM.SYS from the source code in the DDK because the region code enforcement code was not included in the DDK."
This means that the source code was not present to include complete support. This is a decision that MS has made because they don't want people re-doing the region protection. That's not a "generic" issue, that's an OS issue. OS code to handle any type of DVD drive is available and (because of the GPL) always will be.
"The region code enforcement code would sometimes mistake a new drive for an old one, resulting in customers unable to play DVDs. Even worse, the driver test team could not reproduce the problem reliably, and the problem went away entirely once a debugger was attached to the system."
Strange how the new code would mistake the drives when the code in every operating system currently available that supports DVD's has no such problems (previous versions of Windows included!). Also, is it really the DVD's fault that their debugger was stopping the code from executing in the same way when it was activated or not? This definitely smells of bovine excrement.
"The code to support the older drives is complex, and the drives that the optical storage team purchased prior to January 1, 2000 are dead or dying. Consequently, testing the code that provides support for old drives has become increasingly difficult, and when the last old drive finally gives up the ghost, testing will become impossible altogether."
Strange, then, that they haven't noticed that almost every new DVD drive has firmware available that'll run it as a RPC-1 (or as they like to coin it, "old") drive. Also, I'm pretty sure that the "more complex" claim would not stand up to scrutiny (check out any OS code that deals with DVD drives, whether in the kernel, libdvd* or other places and see if they differ that much for RPC-1 or RPC-2).
"What does this mean for you? Almost certainly, the answer is "absolutely nothing"." Followed by the quote: "Only if you have an old drive will you notice anything different, namely that encrypted/regionalized DVD movies will no longer play."
That's not "absolutely nothing", especially for the budget-conscious who may well upgrade their PC a bit at a time.
"And since the average drive lifetime is only three years, the number of such old drives that are still working is vanishingly small. Not even the optical drive test team can manage to keep their old drives alive that long."
Strange... sitting here with DVD drives that are much older than that and still working. All of them "original" RPC-1, all of them the cheapest crap I could afford, all of them still reading the disks perfectly. None have died and, whoops, if they did you could always get a new RPC-2 drive and firmware it. This is just an excuse... for this paragraph read "We couldn't be arsed to support it and you're not allowed to use it anyway because you'll just use it to do naughty stuff you're not allowed to do cos the DVD forum said you can't and this sounds like a decent excuse to convince the idiots who are going to buy Vista anyway".
"It is that software enforcement that is going away"
There's your answer - they've made a conscious decision to remove this feature. Why? Because if you believe the above quotes, their dev team is incompetent, can't get already working code to play nicely in Vista and can't find a single RPC-1 drive to test i
I am an avid fan of Opera and it's sucked the soul out of my other browsers and even my email/news/IRC/RSS clients to the point where I use nothing else.
However, I still have to have a seperate piece of software for IM (Trillian on Windows, GAIM on Linux). Any plans to extend the IRC support to support major IM protocols and put Trillian out of business?
Trust?
Thinking forward, what happens when the US decides to do to their GPS what they're trying to do to the Internet, i.e. dictate all possible uses and laws, from music downloading to what you're allowed to say on Wikipedia? What if the US disapproves of a war that the EU takes part in (in the same way that some EU nations disapproved of the Iraq war)? Would the US demand that the war stop or else they'd turn off their GPS system?
Were the situation reversed, would the US pay the EU for such a contract? Not a chance in hell.
Secondly, if you're going to use GPS for it's primary purpose (military), you want redundancy, not a single point of failure for all allied nations. If you'd be willing to pay another country for it, you'd be better off putting that money into another identical system.
And yet again, why should EU companies that require GPS to perform their business be paying a GPS tax to America when they could be paying that tax to the EU instead?
Not so much Linux as Unix in general.
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
--
HenrySpencer
Usenet signature, November 1987
Talking for myself I'm not one bit interested in HDTV. VHS-DVD made only a minor difference to me (easier to skip through, easier to store, etc.), the quality not really being an issue at all. I don't see how any sort of hi-res TV is going to make any difference to what I buy or what I watch.
On a similar note, however, if you want to sell HDTV then you have to SHOW a difference. Most of the LCD-panel TV's in my local electrical stores (even the largest retailers) only ever show a picture which seems to be from an amplified shared analog aerial, so the picture looks EXACTLY the same on a LCD as it does on a CRT TV, fuzziness, minor ghosting etc. so nobody actually sees any difference at all. If they do the same with their HDTV-capable TV's I can't imagine they'll sell a lot of them.
Also, what is this trend with widescreen rubbish? Why can I go to a shop and buy a 34" 4:3 TV and get a larger final picture (even when it letterboxes a DVD) than I would from a widescreen TV that costs the same price? And yet that widescreen TV is also only able to show 4:3 content in a size that's beaten by a portable TV I have upstairs in the loft!
Gotta be done...
African or European?
For those that are asking, a darknet is used in this context as a closed P2P system (i.e. you, your mates, your mates' mates and others by invitation only sharing what you have with each other over the internet).
Reminds me of something me and my brother used to do. We wanted to play a game online over the Internet but didn't want to sign up to yet-another online gaming service (The Zone or something it was called). We both had legit copies of the game, we both had internet connections and we just wanted to play online against each other. We couldn't do a straight TCP/IP connection for some reason or another so the only options left in the software were LAN, Modem or this Zone thing.
So what we did was set up PPTP between our routers, assigned nearby IP addresses on both sides that routed across the connection and played a "LAN" game over the Internet. As far as I can see this was a type of darknet if you like.
If we'd had non-legit copies, many games of the era would let you plan LAN without the CD so long as one player had the CD but not across the Internet. Or, say we'd cracked or VirtualCD'd the CD so that neither of us had a legit copy but could still play online. Then this sort of "PPTP darknet" would be used to let groups of friends without the legit CD to play over the Internet without needing the authorisation or intervention of the person running the gaming servers.
A further thought, bringing it up to the modern day, would suggest that things like Steam could be played over this sort of "PPTP darknet" as a LAN game (connecting to PC's spread over the internet, all disconnected from the "real" internet and bypassing restrictions on who / what is allowed to play)?
It's a interesting idea, sort of like a hidden black market for the internet (which I'm assuming is where the name comes from). As companies crack down on people lending movies to their friends and similar other quite legitimate activities, things like this are going to appear, translated from the real world where this happens all the time to the Internet.
It seems to me that these sorts of things have existed for a while, though. I've heard that things like paedophile rings are already using such tactics? Detection is much, much harder than for a centrally administered P2P network. The only way to detect is to infiltrate the network itself, which is basically social engineering?
The primary reasons for my Linux switch:
/home and /etc up, reinstalling the machine takes about two-three hours at worst compared to days of trying to get settings back to how they were. I don't need to worry about registries, programs storing their own preferences elsewhere. The packages are freely downloadable and therefore I can afford *not* to back them up if I ever needed to. It also means software management is so simple it's hardly worth mentioning. Upgrades can be trusted to happen automatically via things like swaret as you know that two commands gets you back to where you were.
1) I now know what my computer does and when. I know when it loads a driver, I can exclude a driver (even one of the base OS drivers, such as filesystems), I know what drivers crash or don't mix and can easily exclude them. I can MAKE CERTAIN that when I boot from my hard drive, it doesn't write to the disk in any way... perfect for diagnostics and advanced troubleshooting. I also know that drivers can't be loaded into the kernel without my permission.
2) I can still boot 10-year-old versions of Linux (kernel, apps etc.) if necessary, without having to lose my current settings (using chroots, kernels, initrds). I can still run 10-year-old Linux apps and be pretty much assured that they will run (even if it does mean a recompile).
3) 99% of my hardware "just works" and the 1% I really don't care about. I've always bought hardware that was "real" hardware, not some fake winmodem rubbish, and therefore have not had any problems with the stuff that I've bought. So far, 1 non-supported parallel/USB scanner out of the four I have and 1 cheapy soundcard out of 6 that didn't give the performance I would like. I see it as the hardware manufacturer's fault if something does not work... they designed it, they should have stuck to standards, made the design simple enough to implement or, at worst, got off their backsides and maintained a driver for it. Why should ANYONE have to reverse-engineer their network/sound/video card to make it work?
4) When Windows decides to throw a wobbler, go into a reboot loop, give stop errors on boot, there's not much I can do to bring it back but restore from a ghost image (if I have one and if it's fairly recent). When (if) linux goes, I get USEFUL error messages, I can narrow it down to kernel or userspace. Kernel can be upgraded/downgraded, userspace can be changed. Userspace can be backed up to a tar file, not some fancy format, there's no registry to worry about and at worst reinstalling the problem app (be it bash or KDE) will fix the problem.
5) All my apps are self-contained in packages (be they slackware tgz's, RPM's, deb's). That means that so long as I back them,
6) I have all of my data in a format that can be read off my disks using a single floppy, I can read it in some of the most ancient of kernels, I can read it from a small Windows driver. I can even have a stab at trying to fix the filesystem manually because it's in a semi-sensible format.
7) I know that my computer is not spying on me, not "checking" that I have the right numbers typed in, not constantly accusing me of possibly being a pirate because I want to reinstall an OS.
8) Upgrades are a dream. I can, for example, go from a 2.4 kernel KDE 3.2 system to a 2.6 kernel KDE 3.4 without losing any functionality. (the equivalent of a 2K-XP upgrade or similar) Functionality losses (if any) are CLEARLY advertised in changelogs, readme's etc. and I can choose to just stay where I am if I want.
9) The damn computer finally does what I tell it to. Technically speaking it has always done what it was told to, but that was by a combination of me, MS and applications. It would do what you told it to even though that might be crash or break or format my disk, but now it FEELS like I have control. Sometimes I screw up and things get complicated but in the end I can see WHY things happened (I removed the library, upgraded the wrong file, d
First, I think you're missing the fact that, overall, Linux doesn't care that you can't put your binary-only drivers on it.
Linus has said publically many times that the reason that there is not ABI is because he doesn't want one. Binary drivers for *anything* end up screwing stuff up. When they do, there is NOTHING anyone but the original author can do. The code stagnates, users get shut out without any help and nobody is any the wiser as to how that hardware actually worked in the first place.
That's WHY there is stuff like the kernel module license tainting, so that the kernel developers look at a problem, see that you have the massive unknown of a in-kernel binary loaded and can instantly filter your report out. They don't care that your binary driver doesn't work. They can't help you.
Additionally, setting anything into a static position means that development of it ends and stagnates. You'll never get a static interface that you can use to extend the drivers when new features come along. You end up with all sorts of kludges and interface versioning to try to take account of new things.
Linux is developed as an independent operating system, not Windows 2006. No-one wants to make you use it if you don't want to. I doubt Linux was ever intended as anything other than a "pure", almost theoretical, system; that is, one that can be constantly redesigned from the ground up to the way it should have been, not kludged to make it fit your eight-year-old driver (which the author is no longer available to update) for a mouse that happens to still use the old interface.
"Frankly, linux desperatly needs both a kernel debugger, and an ABI to be a REAL alternative for many customers."
Whoa, magic word customers. Linux doesn't have customers. Your company may have customers. There's no obligation on Linux to help you get/keep your customers. People use Linux because they want to. How often does Linus appear on your telly begging you to buy into Linux? Never. Because he doesn't care if you do or not. However, I do imagine it feels pretty nice to him that you do want to use it.
"It also needs the ABI for driver developers so that we can write a single driver and expect it to work on the dozens of flavors of linux we are expected to support."
*You* are expected to support whatever you decide to make. Unfortunately, the linux kernel developers are expected to support YOU, your hardware and everyone else in the world. They don't because they cannot and have no reason to. Even if they had your complete source code, they cannot be expected to maintain your driver for you (which is what will happen when your company goes bust / gets bored with OS).
Sometimes the best-written drivers in the world are not taken into the kernel because they don't quite fit and the maintainance involved in keeping them in the kernel is too difficult. Your driver, if it is to have any support in the kernel, needs to be able to be updated on any kernel-coder's whim in order to make the whole a better system. You can't do that with binaries, you can't even do it with stable interfaces. You have to have the source.
The kernel coders have never promised that your stuff will always work (unless it is designed to run purely from userspace... several times Linus has says that userspace interfaces will not MUCH change over time.). They haven't because they cannot.
The nature of the system is changes to bring improvements, from the interrupt system to the IDE interfaces, from the schedulers to the userspace interfaces such as sysfs or procfs, Linux changes and evolves over time and they cannot guarantee that anything other than userspace syscalls and the like will not be broken, changed or improved between one kernel release and the next.
When the linux kernel people discover a new way to write drivers that sees enhancements across the board, chances are that they are going to break any of your "single driver" models. That's why they won't give you one. Them im
Oh, and on the linux desktop thing...
Do you know how many people get a new computer with Windows and spend an hour choosing their wallpaper, screensavers, IM avatars etc.? Loads. Look and feel and customisation is important even to the least tech-savvy person.
If Linux is to ever take off, it's got to out-choose Windows. This is where the big push is coming from... those people who choose not to run a crippled, expensive system but a cheaper more which might take a little more of a push. The people who choose to use an antivirus scanner that's free compared to one that's constantly bugging them to upgrade. The people who choose to run on an older PC than have to upgrade AGAIN.
Choosing between Gnome, KDE and every other window manager is a vital part of any linux desktop system. You like Gnome, I like KDE, the system I make to go on an old 486 might run much nicer with something else entirely. The fact that, at install time and later on, I can choose what I want to use based on what I like or what I want is a plus point. It HELPS newbies, not hinders them.
The only fly in the linux desktop ointment at the moment is the fact that there's very little to help a brand new user. Help files DO NOT GET READ. I work in six schools, I assist nigh-on 100 members of staff and hundreds of children and not once has anyone every clicked on, read, or bothered to consult a help file when something went wrong or they needed help. Stupid things in Windows like that little bouncing arrow that points to the startbar are HELPFUL to people, even if only for the first time the desktop is shown.
We need to get Gnome, KDE and all the others around to make silly tutorials, videos, help files, tooltips, and all the other gumph that users need to adjust. Remember the Windows 3.1 "how to use a mouse" tutorial? It showed click-and-drag and everything because it was NEW to the users. Linux is new to people. It's very similar to Windows in terms of usage (or can be very easily made to be) but it needs to show that that's the case. The simple fact that KDE loads up with five icons in the bottom left doesn't help a new user. They don't know that they have to press the K to find the programs. They could GUESS it but users don't like to guess. The newer the desktop, the more "fancy", the more modern, the more abstract, the harder it is for people to adjust.
How do they find their files? It has to be explained that the Home folder holds all their documents. How do they get on the web? It has to be explained that they can use lots of browsers but that IE isn't there.
When you have someone to demonstrate the fact, it takes two minutes to get them into a word processor and printing off their stuff. When they get to the stage where they are BUYING this stuff in PC World, they need to be able to have a go themselves with some confidence of what to expect. This doesn't mean make it like Windows, it doesn't mean that they should be stuck with "GnomeKDE" the new merged desktop, it means that every project that wants a piece of the desktop has to think of the users.
That's where linux desktop currently falls down. Yes, for me it's nice that I can configure my middle button to do any of twenty different things depending on context but that shouldn't get in the way of the user who's trying to work out why he can't reverse his mouse buttons for left-handed use. Once you have that in place, the Gnome/KDE/other issue becomes a user choosing his "theme".
"... no matter how good it is, KDE is simply is not going to happen as a mainstream commercial desktop as long as Qt is available only under the GPL and a commercial license."
:-)
Maybe not. But where does your reasoning come from? Companies can buy into it just like the software they are used to (if they want to be that stupid). People (like me) can freebie their way into it because they know it's not going to get taken away if QT disappears. Exactly where is the problem for anybody? Were it GPL-only, you'd have an argument. Were it commercial licenses only, you'd have an argument. But it's both. That solves pretty much everything you could want in a product.
"Gnome may be worse, but it isn't so much worse that it makes a difference to real-world users."
Gnome may not be any better or worse, I've compared both and personally I prefer KDE (it seems more modern but not too artsy, easier, sleeker, not so clunky. Gnome still reminds me of old DOS GUI's in places, or those Borland-written dialogs and menus you used to have on Windows. Nothing *wrong* with them, they just feel completely out of place).
However, from a technical side, there are many considerations. Gnome is still a pain in the arse to manage for a distro. That's the primary reason that Slackware has dropped it from the distro.
Quotes from the changelog:
[[
gnome/*: Removed from -current, and turned over to community support and
distribution. I'm not going to rehash all the reasons behind this, but it's
been under consideration for more than four years.
Please do not incorrectly interpret any of this as a slight against GNOME
itself, which (although it does usually need to be fixed and polished beyond
the way it ships from upstream more so than, say, KDE or XFce) is a decent
desktop choice. So are a lot of others, but Slackware does not need to ship
every choice. GNOME is and always has been a moving target (even the
"stable" releases usually aren't quite ready yet) that really does demand a
team to keep up on all the changes (many of which are not always well
documented). I fully expect that this move will improve the quality of both
Slackware itself, and the quality (and quantity) of the GNOME options
available for it.
Folks, this is how open source is supposed to work. Enjoy.
]]
I have to agree with the last sentence.
"I think it's a bad mistake for Ubuntu to support KDE on equal footing with Gnome; for the Linux desktop, the best thing is if people standardize on Gnome for now."
Nope. Not in an open-source world. The point is to take EVERYTHING on an equal footing, get the best out of both and ditch the cruft. It's like software evolution. Whoever wins out of KDE and GNOME will, by definition, be the better system. However, to do this you have to start them both off on an equal footing. Welcome to open source. The fact that I can run GNOME binaries on my KDE desktop and vice versa means that there's no reason to choose any one of them yet and no need for standardisation. It's just another set of libraries for now.
"The KDE developers should seriously think about developing the next generation Linux desktop, based on a an entirely new toolkit and new approach to doing things."
Maybe. But what to start from? Where to get those ideas? Where to find those approaches? How to determine which of the new approaches works and which was better off the old way? By putting them all together, fighting it out (by a vote of user popularity) and, as if by magic, a victor will appear. They can take bits of each other, they can "steal" each other's ideas but they shouldn't be written off just because you don't like them. Many, many people do.
Almost funny to hear them explain how they are using more than one supplier/manufacturer in order to increase competition and lower the prices for the end user.
Hold on...
If you have Windows and you really need to play the CD's (not that I suspect many casual users would even think of using the CD drive in the computer - most people I work with don't know you can even do it. I've even been asked if I can play a CD in a DVD drive and, incidentally, vice versa) ripping them to MP3 is suddenly safer, easier and, taking the users time into account, cheaper. Plus you don't need the disk in the drive. Good move, record companies the world over. You've just signed your own bankruptcy.
To those tech-savvy people who want to play their CD's in their computers, why have you got Autorun enabled, why do you treat the onboard media playing software as any different to any other software (virus risk etc.) and why would you allow someone to install ANYTHING, no matter how tiny, onto your hard disk just to play a CD on the computer?
CD's play in the computer as a by-product of the technology. Most of the time, data and audio CD's never mix so if it's been this difficult for the past few years to play a god-damn audio CD in your computer, who still bothers?
You want to play a CD on a computer, keep autorun turned off (it only saves two double-clicks at great security expense) or alternatively hold down Shift as you load the drive, rip it to MP3 and never use the "software" that comes with it. If you wanna play it on your CD players, make audio-disc copies (you just did it to MP3 so dragging those MP3's onto Nero takes about a minute and you have a completely DRM-free audio copy for the car, safe use on the computer and a backup should your CD ever stop working (breakages, can't play it in Windows Vista etc.). Most decent MP3 software completely bypasses this sort of thing so long as the disk doesn't get a chance to Autorun or be installed.
It probably never hits about 70% of the CD-playing public as they never put it in their computer. It shouldn't ever hit anybody clever enough not to install unchecked software. The middle ground (those who want to make a copy with some piece of rubbish written in Visual Basic or those who want to play it on their computer) are a small minority.
- ssh (file transfers, port forwarding, encryption and remote login in one tiny tool. I even use it in place of WEP or WPA) /proc/cpuinfo, free etc. (Invaluable for hardware discovery. Boot a knoppix CD, run those commands and instantly you know everything about the hardware that you need to know.)
- pico (can't stand vi but pico is small and has enough of a help that I don't have to memorise keystrokes)
- grep, sed (with grep and sed, you can pretty much manipulate any file/program output into whatever you want, strip IP's out of errors/logs, etc.)
- x11vnc (like any other VNC program but supports Tight encoding and also lets me see what an EXISTING X session is doing. Combined with a script that seds/greps the auth code from the process list and you have automated remote desktop)
- screen (if for no other reason than it lets you start a job at work (like a kernel compile) and watch it's progress throughout the day even if you have to log off in between. And when you get home, you can still check on it)
- tinyproxy (wonderful small, easy to use web-proxy that I tunnel into from work to bypass the far-too-restrictive filters in the schools that I work in)
- slocate (worth it's weight in gold when you have it auto-indexing overnight across all filesystems. Where's that file I used ten years ago that had Xen in the name? a simple command, 2 seconds wait and you get the full path).
- dnsmasq (tiny util, bung it a massive list of public DNS servers and point your DNS requests to 127.0.0.1 and it will loop through them all until it gets a response. Failover to other servers, built-in full DHCP server, invaluable behind a NAT, simple config. Saved my life I-don't-know-how-many-times when my ISP DNS servers were feeling flaky. No one even noticed that half the time our ISP's weren't responding to DNS at all.)
- lsusb, lspci,
- dd, cat, more, sh, etc.(where would we be without them?)
I think that something that Wikipedia needs more urgently are -stable and -current version of the data. Have a working copy that anyone can edit, yes, and then on a completly seperate domain name, have the articles copied, checked for accuracy, cleaned up etc. and locked down. Thus, once an article reaches maturity, it's static so it's much easier to refer to it from websites and other citations, the quality is more reliable, it's kid-safe so schools etc. can use it as a reference, the accuracy can be checked and wikipedia doesn't keep it's reputation among academics which is usually expressed in terms of monkeys and typewriters.
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
-- Henry Spencer Usenet signature, November 1987