Reading you loud and clear! I was generalising but what I mean is that it's not a desktop DISTRO. You have to work at it rather than it being point and click. I'm actually running a Slackware/KDE desktop as my main machine, have been for a while.
The stability of Slackware was my main choice (been using it for years for black-box servers). My reason for migrating to a Linux desktop was that I was sick of having to have a recent Ghost image of my system or spend hours of fiddling every time Windows (3.1, 95, 98, ME, XP) decided to blow itself up. Slackware was the perfect candidate as I've always loved it's simplicity (in the same way that FAT is much easier to recover files from than NTFS, Slackware's plain TAR package system was much easier to use than RPM, DEB's etc.), it's security, it's stability and the fact that I can tinker on the commandline to suit my needs.
Wasn't dissing Slackware, just people who diss it.:-)
Although I understand (and partially sympathise) with this, there is also a factor of ownership here. Play on a Counterstrike server and rename yourself to the most obnoxious name possible or the name of the admin, or even "Admin". How long before you're kicked/banned?
Although your name is fairly placid and not offensive, the servers and their admins determine what you can and cannot do. I don't know how often I've had to kick people from CS servers for doing stuff I don't want them to... not rushing, not defusing, not renaming, not shutting up even. I occasionally hear cries of "it's a free country" etc. but I don't heed them.
When **I'm** paying for the PC, the hosting, the bandwidth, the maintenance and the time, I want my server to be about playing the game, not insulting each other, not pissing about, not "trying out something", just players who know how to play, playing. You want a 1 on 1 knife-fight? Go play elsewhere. You wanna start talking about the drugs you were doing last night? I don't want you to be on my server. Go play elsewhere.
It's VERY "it's my ball and you're not playing" but when it's my server, built by me, paid for by me and run for my and my friends entertainment, I don't want people to do anything that ruins that.
Now, my personal server versus a MMORPG is a bit different. If you're a paying customer, they have some obligation to yourself to maintain your enjoyment of the system. They also have a responsibility to their other players, as well, so abuse of the system is dealt with harshly. Having said that, a non-offensive name is hardly abuse, but you have decided to use THEIR game, THEIR servers, THEIR world and thereby have to play by their rules, no matter how dumb they are.
The fact that support or appeal is non-existent is partly their fault, partly yours. Would you pay for a boxed game that offered absolutely no installation instructions, no support line, no patches? Possibly but then if it goes wrong, who's to blame? You for buying it.
This is my major problem with Steam, always has been. The fact that I could be accidentally (or purposefully) banned from playing on any Steam server ever, by the people who run Steam, is not something I like to think about. I will probably never give them any cause to ban me but they could and that I don't like.
Effectively, any centrally controlled online game has some form of DRM - they get to choose how, when, if and on what terms we play their game. Steam has appeal processes, real humans behind it to talk to. They have clear guidelines - don't cheat, don't type in stolen credit cards when purchasing, etc. but at the end of the day if Valve shuts it down like it did WON, or turfs me out, I'll have no way to get back in. I will have to find an alternate gaming venue (WON substitutes, most probably).
This is the price you pay for service-oriented software. My copy of Counterstrike will always work on my home machine (I have the original WON versions). If I want to play multiplayer, I have to abide by what Steam tells me or find ways to circumvent the Steam restrictions (I've actually played some multiplayer games quite happily over the internet by setting up small PPTP networks and letting it think it's playing over a local LAN).
My Microsoft Word 2000 isn't going to suddenly stop working, it's even under WINE so if MS decided to change their latest operating system to stop it working, they can't touch it. That's REAL software. It might have a horrible EULA but at least it's on my machine and stays there.
You've come across just one of many problems of software as a service.
And what isn't pointed out is that there is no "official" slackware 64-bit port. From the FAQ:
What is Slamd64?
Slamd64 is an *unofficial* port of Slackware to x86_64.
This is like saying that if someone's rip-off of Red Hat's code crashes on you then Red Hat is crap. There is NO port of Slackware to 64-bits. There doesn't need to be. Slackware 32 is blinding fast already and does what it's designed to do, run on any 32-bit of above computer, EVEN 64-bit X86 compatibles. Just cos it's not optimised for it, it doesn't mean it's slow or "wrong" to run the 32-bit version. In fact, even the early Pentiums and 486's are still supported by the base install. There's even still a way to install from floppy, for goodness sake.
Slackware is designed to be stable, secure, and predictable. That's why it's targeted at and used by servers, not desktops.
There are a lot of people moaning that IM's in Linux don't support voice, video etc. and I think that quite a few are missing the obvious.
Firstly, most Linux systems are behind an iptables firewall. This has to be poked and prodded or have iptables connection/NAT helper modules in order to let most video/audio into the computer. Text-based messaging works perfectly without any extra config. More and more systems are behind NAT's, because of the advent of broadband and broadband routers (especially popular now that they include wireless).
Being behind a NAT can stop quite a lot of this stuff working unless you want to start editing your settings (way beyond the average computer user). Programs like Skype etc. help in that they automatically traverse NAT without any sort of help but things like MSN Messenger can be a pain in the backside. Yes, some routers will support UPnP but let's not even start on the troubles that is likely to cause.
It then becomes a question, not of why doesn't the IM program do it but of why is it made so damn difficult for the program authors? If it wasn't for closed-source and sometimes closed-spec systems using all different protocols that change constantly, drastically and without warning, expecting connections over all different ports with IP embedded in all sorts of packets, not being able to navigate NAT without some security disaster like UPnP (which has little support in any system other than Microsoft's) and being used less and less in favour of protocols that "just work".
I've never used video over the internet. It's slow, clunky, bandwidth-hogging, a pain to configure, doesn't NAT very well if at all, needs extra hardware and has all the advantages of a videophone, i.e. none. This is why videophones haven't sold well either, despite being around for many years. Voice is a slightly different issue and can be quite useful and popular (a friend I know uses Skype to phone her dad who lives across the road and my girlfriend is interested in using it to talk to her dad in Kuwait.)
I mentioned to my girlfriend the possibility of over-the-net communication and she was very keen (currently 70p / minute to phone Kuwait from the UK) but has absolutely no interest whatsoever in video, neither has her computer-illiterate father who would have to set up all sorts of stuff (including getting broadband in a foreign country) in order to get video working, whereas a microphone and a volume setting is well within his knowledge.
I can't imagine that, as a percentage, many people at all use video. A few more probably use voice but I should imagine (at a complete guess), 95% or more (by connection, not by bandwidth) of IM is pure text. I work in schools and text works over the school networks, voice and video do not. The kids only ever use MSN as text because even at home they can't be bothered to get video working when text needs no configuration. One or two have played with voice but so many of their friends are text-only too that nobody uses it on a day-to-day basis (videophone syndrome again).
In fact, the only place most teenagers would use voice comms would be inside their games, counterstrike etc., where again it "just works". How many of them use those games on Linux? Zilch. How many people who use Linux would actually use video - only a few and them be geeks who know how to get stuff wokring anyway. How many would use voice? Maybe a few more. In the end, though, Linux isn't mainstream and Linux IM's are constantly playing catchup through no fault of their own.
There's no point having Linux voice/video IM (an awful lot of development work just to get the tiniest of results) until some standards are adopted by everyone and stablised, there are mechanisms in place to help the packets traverse properly, ordinary people actually start using Linux on the desktop and they start demanding it.
Sitting here, now at a 512Mb (actually 448Mb after the onboard graphics steals it's RAM) 1.2GHz machine with a PCI (PCI, for god's sake, there's no even an AGP slot on it) graphics card. Absolutely no swapping. Some apps take a little while to load but the only thing that actually MAKES my computer swap is if I run Word through Crossover Office.
This is the same computer that swaps like mad whenever I run XP on it, only other OS that doesn't swap too badly on it is 98.
I dunno what you are doing to make your machine swap but I'd point the finger at the machine or the config, not KDE. For reference, Slackware 10.2 plain install with KDE 3.4 (previously 10.1 with 3.3 and no problems then either), default settings except for the NVidia driver.
This is my primary desktop, runs Dreamweaver MX, Word etc. on top of Crossover plus all the OS-goodness I can find and still swapping doesn't get in my way. I have an extremely loud ATA66 hard drive that I could hear any swapping and a big red light for drive activity and yet most of the time, once a program is loaded, that's it. Maybe a small twitch when switching between tasks. Dunno what you're doing wrong but there's nothing there that's specifically KDE's fault.
1) Cut the hype. It might have 32-bit, 100FPS graphics but if we are lead to expect the entire game to be like that and it isn't, we won't like you. Tell us what you WANT the game to have, tell us what it's ACTUALLY got and ask us what we think. This also means get rid of cutscenes and DO NOT SHOW CUTSCENES in advertisements.
2) Testing. Demo disks of new games. Must be fully playable, must be a complete level. If we like it we will tell you. If we don't, we won't tell you unless you ask us. Put a BIG banner in the demo at the end that lets people win a prize if they come up with the best suggestion or whatever.
3) Feedback. After you release a game, go looking for those sites that list "I wish game X had Y" and IMPLEMENT IT in the sequel/next patch. READ THE OFFICIAL FORUMS FOR THE GAME and take people seriously rather than having your own agenda for what goes into the sequel/next game.
4) Movement. Keep changing the game, the stuff that's in it, don't take stuff out that works, ask for opinions, release smaller updates (with things like XBoxLive now, there's no excuse not to have regular, massive patches... think Steam... I buy Half Life 2 on console and when I've just completed it, bang! I get a free upgrade mod like CS:Source or something). Keep showing me what the game can do in new and interesting ways.
5) Modifications. Let me download mods - again with XBox live and similar systems there's nothing to stop "those in the know" from being able to download an SDK that you put out for the game, develop some sort of mod with it and then UPLOAD IT where anyone with the console and a suitable net connection can then DOWNLOAD IT and play it. Yes, you'll be cut completely out of the customer experience by this but they will love your game and you can buy up the best mods later (think Counterstrike). This extends to things like nude patches, new skins, new sounds etc. (don't worry... if you're not creating them yourself, you won't get sued like Rockstar did over the GTA mod)
6) Online play - players will create their own communities without you, but at least it's better than people just never talking about the game because they can't play it with their mates.
Those are just suggestions. Everything else is just minor details, like the technicalities of having a forum where people can rave about your game.
"but I don't know anyone who actually sends in bug reports when an application crashes in XP"
There are several reasons for this... you almost never get any sort of reply, most users are practically incapable of writing a useful bug report (what were you doing, what did you click, etc.) and from what I see the majority of the information in an XP error report such as this is just some processor states and a few technical details.
I fail to see how anyone but a machine code professional would decode the XP reports, or how they would know what state the machine was in or why it crashed. The open-source project, OpenTTD, had this same feature for a while until it was scrapped when they realised that no-one could interpret the results or, if they could, it was far too complex, far too time-consuming and far too vague to the programmers.
I'm not saying you COULDN'T make the debug reports much better but then you're basically building every executable in a debug state, i.e. massively bloated and not as good performing, even if you go the highly-manual route and go through the code putting in printf's for each procedure entrance.
Bug reports are invaluable to a programmer but they need to be the right type. Spending 7 hours to trace the machine code route through a hex dump to find that someone was running it on a machine with a corrupt DLL is a massive waste of resources.
Getting experienced beta- and alpha- testers to submit a detailed, reproducible, bug where you can actually ask them to try patches out for you is amillion times more useful
His reply may be immature but then, it's basically what I'd say in a similar situation (though I'm not nearly as popular that MS would want me) and what everyone else in the world is thinkign. The linked page states that there was in fact a very polite phone reply to the gentleman at MS.
Personally, I'd rather work with, buy stuff from and generally be around someone who not only speaks his mind but also has enough of a sense of humour to share it with people.
In the same way that Open Source is all nerdy hackers sitting in back bedrooms trying to persuade their mum to let them stay up to finish their latest bit of code, this reply represents Open Source. (Just to clarify, that means that it doesn't, in any way, shape or form.)
Anyone stupid enough to take this seriously would need a mental run up to tackle a crossword clue that read "A five letter word meaning a stupid person, beginning with I, meaning someone too stupid to know what a five letter word, meaning a stupid person, beginning with I is."
And then we look at the facts - MS, the largest, richest company in the world, ***is*** taking OS seriously because it's trying to recruit some of it's top people. Oh, and IBM and the rest of them. One person's reply does not a movement make and you only need a sense of humour to appreciate this.
So you're the git that means airline peanuts have to have warnings such as "May contain nuts". Not everything is fit for human consumption, so take that bottle of bleach out of your mouth.
You're going to sell a player that will report any modification of itself back to HQ via the Internet.
1) What happens if it's never allowed to contact the internet? (i.e. the house has no internet, or the householder just doesn't plug it into the internet, like the UK Sky Digital boxes that people just let the installer install and then, when he's gone, remove the phone cable from the wall)
2) How is it going to talk? Broadband? Better be a secure networking device then and come Ethernet-ready. How many people have Internet-connected Ethernet as a percentage of the people who have a DVD Player? Modem? Not another gadget randomly dialling out (see above Sky Digital comment). Wireless?
3) If the device can be disabled remotely, do you have replacement rights? Faulty goods, not fight for the purpose for which they were sold etc.? How do you intend to PROVE that people were tampering in a court of law?
4) It took just over a year after DVD went "mainstream" for almost every single DVD player in the world to support Region-Free codes/hacks/options. How long do you think Blu-Ray "security" will last in a similar climate? And if it doesn't, how many people will buy it?
Granted, the first really obnoxious technology that does this sort of thing, people MAY buy into. But after that, they will get wise. People wised up to DVD Region Encoding quickly. The first obnoxious tech MAY get popular but after that, the market will simply refuse to buy without reading the T's & C's first.
I was thinking this the other day... I read a story on CNN that said people in New Orleans were paying "as much as" $5/gallon. As if that was a major disaster. Now people are whinging about paying $3 / gallon?
Everyday UK price = Very near GBP 1 / litre = GBP 3.78/gallon = $6.96.
When is the US going to wake up to just how much oil COSTS, and top subsidising their country's SUV's?
Every country in the EU pays prices near the UK ones (maybe not quite as much). Nobody really moans (except a little if they go up even further), because that's what it always has cost. What does the EU know that America doesn't? Or, more likely, what is America choosing to ignore in case whoever changes prices gets lynched?
1) Laptop (obviously) with wireless built-in. 2) Backup Mouse (I miss the trackpoint of my old IBM but not enough to use my trackpad that insists on seeing a light tap as a mouse click) with PS/2, USB and even serial adaptors. 3) Two 2m patch cables with adaptors to join them together and join w/crossover. 4) Various (unused) international modem adaptors (including one that looks like some sort of medical device) 5) USB Flash drive (with my SSH Key) 6) 10 CD-R's for burning various CD's/backups 7) Knoppix CD & DVD, Ultimate Boot CD 8) A few floppies, just in case 9) 2.5" USB2-IDE adaptor + Hard drive 10) USB Laplink network cable (for when people don't have a network card) 11) Drivers CD's for everything I carry that's USB (in case of an old 98SE computer), usually those tiny single CD's. 12) 2.5" IDE to 3.5" IDE adaptors (to power up the hard drive in people's computers) 13) 12-25V variable voltage, high power car cigar lighter adaptor for charging laptop etc. while travelling 14) USB Phone Charger 15) TV-out cable + scart adaptors
Not in the bag, but I also usually have on me when "working" (i.e. at work, private jobs or going away from "civilisation"):
* 12V - 220VAC power adaptor (for powering peripherals from car) * USB amplified Speakers * Set of good noise-cancelling headphones * Phone numbers/Dial-up details of a few good nationwide ISP's
The laptop also has a repository of vital software, including stuff like Zonealarm, Rawrite etc., and floppy/ISO images of important stuff (e.g. Smart Boot Manager to make old computers boot off of CD and Knoppix ISO's to have something to boot).
A) Fine. So we'll distribute one binary version of the kernel. It won't work as fast. It'll be hundreds of megs in size. It will take ages to load as it checks for every single known piece of hardware. You've just lost all the speed/memory advantage of having a tailored kernel. Alternatively, it'll come with a hundred modules. It'll also never be x64 optimised or, for that matter, able to work on every machine (some options crash some machines, while the opposite options may crash others) and APM/ACPI will NEVER work on some machines.
B) Fine. You come up with a GUI that can allow me to find files modified on the second Tuesday of every month between May 1, 1946 and June 27, 1978, which contain the words 'secret' and 'report' within 26 characters of each other, sort them by date, and replace any occurence of the word 'anchovie' by 'dead bug'. Some things GUI's just cannot do, some things GUI's do that are just command line interfaces in a fancy coloured textbox, some things GUI's can do once in the time that someone who knows the command can do twenty times.
Secondly, how do you expect a GUI to be able to do stuff like modify computer internals safely? Windows answer to this is usually that settings won't take effect until the next reboot, which makes your computer *stop all it's work* until it's done. X can be restarted with a single keystroke to have the same effect. Maybe a couple of command line edits in between but meanwhile none of your users have been disconnected, no programs have stopped doing what they were supposed to be doing.
Command-lines are not for the faint-of-heart. Then again, last time I touched the command line on my own Linux desktop (not counting other machines that are cmd-line only via SSH) was to run LILO - not something that a "desktop doughnut" should be doing. You obviously have either different ideas of what you should be doing on a normal desktop machine or have not found out how to do them GUI-wise. By the same token, Windows should never expect me to recover in safe mode, or via recovery console, or by running any batch commands ever. Fine for the ordinary desktop user because it very rarely does. Not fine for a power user. An ordinary desktop user wouldn't even notice if you ran a Windows GUI on a Linux machine.
C) Man pages can be a pain in the arse (make it compulsory to include enough examples to demonstrate every option!). HOWTO's are not always up-to-date. Forums are, pretty much, for people who want to know how to install this Linux thing they downloaded. Then again... how much documentation do you get with Windows?
A small booklet showing you how to use a mouse to point at the various icons. An online help system that, even with it's wizard-style help for some items, is next to useless if you don't know the terms to look for (I work support for six schools... that's about 60-100 staff and a few thousand pupils. I have NEVER seen or heard of anyone even bother to try using Windows Help or Help inside ANY program because it's never been useful to them). Annoying dogs, wizards, paperclips that people want me to TURN OFF for them because they can't figure out how.
That's surely Linux 0-0 Windows in terms of help.
If you're an advanced user, you've got to be comfortable with the command-line. I carry a USB key full of cmd-line utils and use them almost every day on Windows and Linux. It's amazing how much quicker "Start, Run, Cmd, ipconfig" is than navigating that poxy GUI network settings. And while I'm there, doing "route print" is the ONLY way to discover Windows network routes.
Anyone who's not going to set up networks or advanced stuff (i.e. users), or home users shouldn't ever NEED to worry about the command line on either OS. And they don't. They pick a distro like Lindows and once the installation is complete, they never see it again. Or they have a decent desktop set up and then never see the command-line again. You, however, are on the border. You are trying to do stuff that NEEDS a command line, stuff that's beyond a GUI point-and-click.
Now can we please insert the standard anti-UK "I'm not paying for a license to watch TV" garb. The BBC are always doing stuff like this... they support Linux for their websites/broadcasts, they have been trailling Ogg Vorbis downloads for some of their media, and now CHOOSING to see piracy as a sign of demand rather than as an opportunity for a lawsuit.
So it's basically a conventional DDR SDRAM to SATA hardware RAMDISK, powered from PCI but not dependent on it and battery backed for a few hours.
At first it sounds so simple but what a brilliant idea. For years my university saved a fortune by running everything off a network boot system, using a large ramdisk as a root drive.
This sounds like the perfect hardware solution for them, that doesn't need special drivers or software configurations or even specialist hardware, just ordinary RAM chips, a cheap adaptor and a PCI slot (I reckon you could even bodge it a bit to not need any slot seeing as power is the only thing the PCI bus is used for).
Embedded stuff and home-cinema (MythTV etc.) boxes could power down their boot harddrives almost instantly and yet still keep working, storing everything on this iRAM. Then, at midnight, power up the disk to save to a more permanent storage. Or even better, constantly record to the iRAM and then re-encode at it's own pace back out to a real hard drive.
Silent, reliable as a RAM chip, the ability to replace the chips if they get faulty, the speed, the power consumption, the ease of use. This is a marvellous idea. It's obviously NOT a permanent storage device and I'd hate to have someone buying this thinking that it was, but this really deserves to take off.
I must admit that low-noise is, for me, much more of a consideration that what games it can run. A desktop PC for most people is usually sited in a main family room and having a constant background humming or churning is not nice to listen to.
I tend to stick with older machines for many reasons (cost, reliability, no need to worry about a fan stopping and the machine going bang, no need for excessive venting and can still do most things I need it to) and this helps me when it comes to keeping them quiet.
The old PII-233's (with that weird processor fitting system) can operate perfectly well with no fans (found by experiment, confirmed by over three years of fanless operation *after* having been used at a school in working order for about three years previously).
I find the sweet spot for myself to be around 1-2GHz in my machines (a 1GHz laptop or desktop is not going to make a lot of noise or need a lot of power and yet will get almost anything done in a reasonable time and not cost the earth to buy) Computers of those speeds can run easily off a 300W power supply.
I bought a 300W Etasis Fanless PSU as it was enough and quite cheap considering and it's worked like a charm. Noise is drastically cut through the system as a whole, temperatures are barely affected.
I also invested a few quid in a temperature monitor, it acts as a passthrough for the cpu and case fans and also contains a thin temperature sensor that you can place elsewhere in the case (in my case slid between the top of the PSU and the inside of the casing above it). This beeps reassuringly on every boot to let you know it's working and also throws an absolute wobbler should a fan fail or the PSU get too hot. I much prefer having an non-software/firmware warning as a backup for this sort of thing.
I also placed my computer in a small cupboard and that lets me hide the PC and also dampen the noise. The computer is approximately two feet from my ear if I sit on the sofa and watch a film and, therefore, I need it to be quiet.
My next "projects" is probably to vent out the back of the cupboard to direct the sound in the opposite direction to my sofa or to build a small door to go in front of the PC (though I don't like these because of the way they interfere with the operation of the CD drives).
"If the crackers get hold of an admin account," then you're stuffed anyway.
I can see your argument and tried to think of a few counter-arguments.
If someone can only get to root by coming in as a normal user and su-ing, then we should know which account they came from and hold that user responsible.
Not all SSH accounts are necessarily for admin users anyway (compile farms, cgi hosting, VPN's etc.), so blocking root on those connections doesn't hinder anyone and the users will not be able to get to root anyway, so why not block root logins?
Blocking a unnecessary login is one less login to attack? Especially if it is one that has power that is unnecessary, e.g. compile farms using SSH. Why *should* there be any facility to log in as root remotely?
If someone should find an exploit in SSH that executes with the privileges of the logged in user?
In the same way that you should never log in as root at the terminal anyway, just to make sure you think twice before you actually perform that rm command?
I've been seeing these sorts of "attacks" in number since I installed my Linux Desktop machine about 6 months ago. I'm only on plain ADSL that isn't published, not like I'm a likely target.
Every day I get two or three new attackers, most of whom try 50-60 times on common account names (fred, jeff, user, test etc.) and about one a week that goes full-bore for a particular username or a large spread of a few thousand attempts.
I took the appropriate measures... disallowed root login, use public-key authentication only and I also have a script that checks through my logs once every five minutes, permanantly blacklisting anyone who has more than five attempts within a 7-day period (except for known whitelist addresses).
Currently, it runs to 390 unique lines of IP's, some of which have come via
My mother, in her late fifties now, adores computer games. It has become so prevelant that most nights she and my dad can be found playing through some old Playstation/N64 title that they've completed previously.
I get strange looks in shops when they ask who the game is for and I say it's for my mother. They must think that I'm just someone who assumes that their parents are into the same things.
Mum has completed almost every known Mario, Crash Bandicoot or Spyro game and has steadily upgraded for many years from Gameboy up to Gamecube, through Game Gear, Playstation, CD-I, Palm and onwards.
She prefers platformers like Mario (original or 64) etc. but is also a big fun of puzzle games like Tetris, Columns, Puzzle Bobble/Bust-a-Move and the cheap ripoffs of such. She also likes the Mario-style racing titles, Mario Kart, Diddy Kong Racing etc. though she is a little throttle-heavy and thinks that brakes are for other people.
Her motions with the joypad as she gets carried away with the game are legendary, the leads usually end up in a right tangle once she's finished and on more than one occasion she's ended up sporting an indent of a capital A on her thumb from pressing the N64 controller too hard.
It comes to something when my mid-twenties girlfriend isn't anywhere near as interested in video games as my own mother. Even she, though, is prone to the odd flash game or a run through an old Megadrive game via an emulator. At the moment, she's hooked on the Sims which I bought for her birthday, a special deal which contains the original game and every official add-on.
Hopefully, that'll keep her quiet for as long as Catz and Dogz did.
"The researchers claim download times are between 20-30 per cent faster"
I would love to know how they can get 20-30 percent more information down my connection than an ordinary BitTorrent connection (which can, and almost always does, fully flood my connection) in the same time. This is some AMAZING compression or transmission technology there... I bet you can then compress it even more by compressing the compressed data.:-)
I'm assuming they mean that they can improve download speeds on low-usage "avalanches" (nice naming, by the way) because each peer doesn't need the full file necessarily. However this must mean that, at some point, extra information is added to each "chunk" of the file, to be able to replicate the information from other, missing chunks. Hence, people are just effectively sending out larger chunks of information into the void.
It might be a more efficient way of doing things, yes, and it might well save bandwidth for the initial peer but you're still going to run into the exact same problems as BitTorrent (no download without "enough" peers with "enough" info, for example), it won't become a standard without a massive end-user difference from BitTorrent and global uptake.
Almost any torrent I use is peered enough to download at top-whack for my broadband connection. What's in it for me to run ANOTHER protocol, with another set of servers, another non-standard standard when I can't download any faster at all?
Maybe servers would like this, but then for initial releases any popular torrent only need seed one, maybe two COMPLETE copies of a file to let the peers take over and finish the job off. With avalanche, surely the server would still have to send out roughly this same amount (or more) of information, the client would have to recieve roughly the same amount (or more) of information and might even end up sending out a lot more info?
Where's the advantage? Is it better if you are constantly seeding forever, is it better if you are seeding LOTS of different stuff? I don't see how the maths adds up for any non-trivial "avalanche".
"No one peer can become a bottle neck" "overall network traffic is lower" So this is advantageous only to the TCP/IP middlemen? Does that mean I have to change all my protocols and see next to no benefit for the sake of that transatlantic pipeline to the US? I don't see how anybody else really benefits.
When you delete a file, do you also redisplay the listing to make sure that it's actually gone?
No, but I do make sure that I have file delete confirmations turned on so that I can be sure I don't delete files I want. Plus, if I delete a file, I can always recover it. When it's my credit card on the line, I ALWAYS double-check. I also check my credit card statements at the end of each month. Does that make me stupid?
My brother once accidentally bid GBP999 for a item on eBay instead of GBP9.99 because he didn't double-check the cost. Luckily he spotted his error and retracted the bid. Had it been a book on Amazon whose price he had misread (or misclicked), it could already be winging it's way to him.
It's not a question of "is it useful?", more one of "is it sensible?"
Once I've used some tool enough to know that it works reliably, I stop feeling the need to double check it
Done an rm -rf * lately? I always check any command line/script that uses commands that can do permanent damage, usually by replacing the command with a harmless one first to check it's got the right parameters. I trust rm to do exactly what it's supposed to do. I don't trust me. I don't trust any website enough to be only one-click away from my credit card being charged.
Honestly, how many people USE Amazon's 1-click ordering anyway?
I order online nearly every day of my life and I double and triple check things to make sure they charge the right card, go to the right address, that it's what I want etc. and for this I insist on being able to get to a screen where I can double-check EVERYTHING and only then do I submit it.
How many people are seriously logged into secure websites so often that it is just one click and they've ordered something?
How this qualifies as an important piece of news, I don't know. I'm assuming it's a "comedy" piece because he said "Dear Slashdot: please don't post about this. Screw you guys." on one of the linked pages.
However, I myself have had problems with sound in linux, yes, but considering that (as someone who had only ever played about with TCP/IP in Linux and had never touched X or the Linux desktop until a few months ago) I have now switched from Windows to a Linux desktop and got sound working in all apps installed within a few days of switching. That was about four months ago and I still don't use Windows.
I had worked out everything he had worked out in less than two days of having a linux desktop. There are things that should be simpler (cups, sound, etc.) but none of them hindered me for very long and, once properly set up, work much better than my previous OS's incarnations. Yes, it's a pain having to "set things up", but it's hardly worth such a strop.
We all know arts, esd, etc. are a pain in the ass and, yes, we are all waiting for ALSA to "just work". Now that it's in the kernel, we finally have a standardised, working, maintained sound system that supports mixing on EVERY LINUX MACHINE. This should be the turning point.
If a program that plays sound doesn't have an ALSA-compatible option by now, it's not being maintained properly. If it does, it will just work with ALSA and any plugins you might use, e.g. dmix.
As soon as 2.6 distros become the standard, we can work on getting EVERY app to use the same damn sound systems.
I saw his entry on wikipedia and if he's such a great programmer who has made contributions to such important projects as, gosh, XScreensaver, it makes me wonder why the hell he:
a) didn't know this already (not a single XScreensaver that uses sound?).
b) can't work it out for himself.
c) throws a major strop because it's not point-and-click.
It occurs that he's just missed the point. You don't have a Linux desktop to say "I've got a Linux desktop". You don't have one to beat every other desktop into the ground with your technical superiority (real or percieved). You don't have one to complain that it's not like Windows. You don't have one to play iTunes (as he seems to value this as an important feature).
My desktop is Linux because it works, it's fast enough, it does what I want, it doesn't restrict me in any way, it's free, it's Free, it doesn't blue-screen, crash, corrupt and die every few months/years, I can leave it running overnight and not worry about if it'll crash before it finishes it's downloads, I can access it remotely (a good thing when you're working behind restrictive child-safe proxies all the time), and I can do things without wizards, dogs and paperclips jumping up to "help me find a file".
I can't help feeling that any decent programmer would have been able to overcome the same little roadhumps on the way without so much as a sigh. They might even have bothered to fix the troublesome programs themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Reading you loud and clear! I was generalising but what I mean is that it's not a desktop DISTRO. You have to work at it rather than it being point and click. I'm actually running a Slackware/KDE desktop as my main machine, have been for a while.
:-)
The stability of Slackware was my main choice (been using it for years for black-box servers). My reason for migrating to a Linux desktop was that I was sick of having to have a recent Ghost image of my system or spend hours of fiddling every time Windows (3.1, 95, 98, ME, XP) decided to blow itself up. Slackware was the perfect candidate as I've always loved it's simplicity (in the same way that FAT is much easier to recover files from than NTFS, Slackware's plain TAR package system was much easier to use than RPM, DEB's etc.), it's security, it's stability and the fact that I can tinker on the commandline to suit my needs.
Wasn't dissing Slackware, just people who diss it.
Although I understand (and partially sympathise) with this, there is also a factor of ownership here. Play on a Counterstrike server and rename yourself to the most obnoxious name possible or the name of the admin, or even "Admin". How long before you're kicked/banned?
Although your name is fairly placid and not offensive, the servers and their admins determine what you can and cannot do. I don't know how often I've had to kick people from CS servers for doing stuff I don't want them to... not rushing, not defusing, not renaming, not shutting up even. I occasionally hear cries of "it's a free country" etc. but I don't heed them.
When **I'm** paying for the PC, the hosting, the bandwidth, the maintenance and the time, I want my server to be about playing the game, not insulting each other, not pissing about, not "trying out something", just players who know how to play, playing. You want a 1 on 1 knife-fight? Go play elsewhere. You wanna start talking about the drugs you were doing last night? I don't want you to be on my server. Go play elsewhere.
It's VERY "it's my ball and you're not playing" but when it's my server, built by me, paid for by me and run for my and my friends entertainment, I don't want people to do anything that ruins that.
Now, my personal server versus a MMORPG is a bit different. If you're a paying customer, they have some obligation to yourself to maintain your enjoyment of the system. They also have a responsibility to their other players, as well, so abuse of the system is dealt with harshly. Having said that, a non-offensive name is hardly abuse, but you have decided to use THEIR game, THEIR servers, THEIR world and thereby have to play by their rules, no matter how dumb they are.
The fact that support or appeal is non-existent is partly their fault, partly yours. Would you pay for a boxed game that offered absolutely no installation instructions, no support line, no patches? Possibly but then if it goes wrong, who's to blame? You for buying it.
This is my major problem with Steam, always has been. The fact that I could be accidentally (or purposefully) banned from playing on any Steam server ever, by the people who run Steam, is not something I like to think about. I will probably never give them any cause to ban me but they could and that I don't like.
Effectively, any centrally controlled online game has some form of DRM - they get to choose how, when, if and on what terms we play their game. Steam has appeal processes, real humans behind it to talk to. They have clear guidelines - don't cheat, don't type in stolen credit cards when purchasing, etc. but at the end of the day if Valve shuts it down like it did WON, or turfs me out, I'll have no way to get back in. I will have to find an alternate gaming venue (WON substitutes, most probably).
This is the price you pay for service-oriented software. My copy of Counterstrike will always work on my home machine (I have the original WON versions). If I want to play multiplayer, I have to abide by what Steam tells me or find ways to circumvent the Steam restrictions (I've actually played some multiplayer games quite happily over the internet by setting up small PPTP networks and letting it think it's playing over a local LAN).
My Microsoft Word 2000 isn't going to suddenly stop working, it's even under WINE so if MS decided to change their latest operating system to stop it working, they can't touch it. That's REAL software. It might have a horrible EULA but at least it's on my machine and stays there.
You've come across just one of many problems of software as a service.
And what isn't pointed out is that there is no "official" slackware 64-bit port. From the FAQ:
What is Slamd64?
Slamd64 is an *unofficial* port of Slackware to x86_64.
This is like saying that if someone's rip-off of Red Hat's code crashes on you then Red Hat is crap. There is NO port of Slackware to 64-bits. There doesn't need to be. Slackware 32 is blinding fast already and does what it's designed to do, run on any 32-bit of above computer, EVEN 64-bit X86 compatibles. Just cos it's not optimised for it, it doesn't mean it's slow or "wrong" to run the 32-bit version. In fact, even the early Pentiums and 486's are still supported by the base install. There's even still a way to install from floppy, for goodness sake.
Slackware is designed to be stable, secure, and predictable. That's why it's targeted at and used by servers, not desktops.
There are a lot of people moaning that IM's in Linux don't support voice, video etc. and I think that quite a few are missing the obvious.
Firstly, most Linux systems are behind an iptables firewall. This has to be poked and prodded or have iptables connection/NAT helper modules in order to let most video/audio into the computer. Text-based messaging works perfectly without any extra config. More and more systems are behind NAT's, because of the advent of broadband and broadband routers (especially popular now that they include wireless).
Being behind a NAT can stop quite a lot of this stuff working unless you want to start editing your settings (way beyond the average computer user). Programs like Skype etc. help in that they automatically traverse NAT without any sort of help but things like MSN Messenger can be a pain in the backside. Yes, some routers will support UPnP but let's not even start on the troubles that is likely to cause.
It then becomes a question, not of why doesn't the IM program do it but of why is it made so damn difficult for the program authors? If it wasn't for closed-source and sometimes closed-spec systems using all different protocols that change constantly, drastically and without warning, expecting connections over all different ports with IP embedded in all sorts of packets, not being able to navigate NAT without some security disaster like UPnP (which has little support in any system other than Microsoft's) and being used less and less in favour of protocols that "just work".
I've never used video over the internet. It's slow, clunky, bandwidth-hogging, a pain to configure, doesn't NAT very well if at all, needs extra hardware and has all the advantages of a videophone, i.e. none. This is why videophones haven't sold well either, despite being around for many years. Voice is a slightly different issue and can be quite useful and popular (a friend I know uses Skype to phone her dad who lives across the road and my girlfriend is interested in using it to talk to her dad in Kuwait.)
I mentioned to my girlfriend the possibility of over-the-net communication and she was very keen (currently 70p / minute to phone Kuwait from the UK) but has absolutely no interest whatsoever in video, neither has her computer-illiterate father who would have to set up all sorts of stuff (including getting broadband in a foreign country) in order to get video working, whereas a microphone and a volume setting is well within his knowledge.
I can't imagine that, as a percentage, many people at all use video. A few more probably use voice but I should imagine (at a complete guess), 95% or more (by connection, not by bandwidth) of IM is pure text. I work in schools and text works over the school networks, voice and video do not. The kids only ever use MSN as text because even at home they can't be bothered to get video working when text needs no configuration. One or two have played with voice but so many of their friends are text-only too that nobody uses it on a day-to-day basis (videophone syndrome again).
In fact, the only place most teenagers would use voice comms would be inside their games, counterstrike etc., where again it "just works". How many of them use those games on Linux? Zilch. How many people who use Linux would actually use video - only a few and them be geeks who know how to get stuff wokring anyway. How many would use voice? Maybe a few more. In the end, though, Linux isn't mainstream and Linux IM's are constantly playing catchup through no fault of their own.
There's no point having Linux voice/video IM (an awful lot of development work just to get the tiniest of results) until some standards are adopted by everyone and stablised, there are mechanisms in place to help the packets traverse properly, ordinary people actually start using Linux on the desktop and they start demanding it.
Eh? WTF?
Sitting here, now at a 512Mb (actually 448Mb after the onboard graphics steals it's RAM) 1.2GHz machine with a PCI (PCI, for god's sake, there's no even an AGP slot on it) graphics card. Absolutely no swapping. Some apps take a little while to load but the only thing that actually MAKES my computer swap is if I run Word through Crossover Office.
This is the same computer that swaps like mad whenever I run XP on it, only other OS that doesn't swap too badly on it is 98.
I dunno what you are doing to make your machine swap but I'd point the finger at the machine or the config, not KDE. For reference, Slackware 10.2 plain install with KDE 3.4 (previously 10.1 with 3.3 and no problems then either), default settings except for the NVidia driver.
This is my primary desktop, runs Dreamweaver MX, Word etc. on top of Crossover plus all the OS-goodness I can find and still swapping doesn't get in my way. I have an extremely loud ATA66 hard drive that I could hear any swapping and a big red light for drive activity and yet most of the time, once a program is loaded, that's it. Maybe a small twitch when switching between tasks. Dunno what you're doing wrong but there's nothing there that's specifically KDE's fault.
1) Cut the hype. It might have 32-bit, 100FPS graphics but if we are lead to expect the entire game to be like that and it isn't, we won't like you. Tell us what you WANT the game to have, tell us what it's ACTUALLY got and ask us what we think. This also means get rid of cutscenes and DO NOT SHOW CUTSCENES in advertisements.
2) Testing. Demo disks of new games. Must be fully playable, must be a complete level. If we like it we will tell you. If we don't, we won't tell you unless you ask us. Put a BIG banner in the demo at the end that lets people win a prize if they come up with the best suggestion or whatever.
3) Feedback. After you release a game, go looking for those sites that list "I wish game X had Y" and IMPLEMENT IT in the sequel/next patch. READ THE OFFICIAL FORUMS FOR THE GAME and take people seriously rather than having your own agenda for what goes into the sequel/next game.
4) Movement. Keep changing the game, the stuff that's in it, don't take stuff out that works, ask for opinions, release smaller updates (with things like XBoxLive now, there's no excuse not to have regular, massive patches... think Steam... I buy Half Life 2 on console and when I've just completed it, bang! I get a free upgrade mod like CS:Source or something). Keep showing me what the game can do in new and interesting ways.
5) Modifications. Let me download mods - again with XBox live and similar systems there's nothing to stop "those in the know" from being able to download an SDK that you put out for the game, develop some sort of mod with it and then UPLOAD IT where anyone with the console and a suitable net connection can then DOWNLOAD IT and play it. Yes, you'll be cut completely out of the customer experience by this but they will love your game and you can buy up the best mods later (think Counterstrike). This extends to things like nude patches, new skins, new sounds etc. (don't worry... if you're not creating them yourself, you won't get sued like Rockstar did over the GTA mod)
6) Online play - players will create their own communities without you, but at least it's better than people just never talking about the game because they can't play it with their mates.
Those are just suggestions. Everything else is just minor details, like the technicalities of having a forum where people can rave about your game.
"but I don't know anyone who actually sends in bug reports when an application crashes in XP"
There are several reasons for this... you almost never get any sort of reply, most users are practically incapable of writing a useful bug report (what were you doing, what did you click, etc.) and from what I see the majority of the information in an XP error report such as this is just some processor states and a few technical details.
I fail to see how anyone but a machine code professional would decode the XP reports, or how they would know what state the machine was in or why it crashed. The open-source project, OpenTTD, had this same feature for a while until it was scrapped when they realised that no-one could interpret the results or, if they could, it was far too complex, far too time-consuming and far too vague to the programmers.
I'm not saying you COULDN'T make the debug reports much better but then you're basically building every executable in a debug state, i.e. massively bloated and not as good performing, even if you go the highly-manual route and go through the code putting in printf's for each procedure entrance.
Bug reports are invaluable to a programmer but they need to be the right type. Spending 7 hours to trace the machine code route through a hex dump to find that someone was running it on a machine with a corrupt DLL is a massive waste of resources.
Getting experienced beta- and alpha- testers to submit a detailed, reproducible, bug where you can actually ask them to try patches out for you is amillion times more useful
His reply may be immature but then, it's basically what I'd say in a similar situation (though I'm not nearly as popular that MS would want me) and what everyone else in the world is thinkign. The linked page states that there was in fact a very polite phone reply to the gentleman at MS.
Personally, I'd rather work with, buy stuff from and generally be around someone who not only speaks his mind but also has enough of a sense of humour to share it with people.
In the same way that Open Source is all nerdy hackers sitting in back bedrooms trying to persuade their mum to let them stay up to finish their latest bit of code, this reply represents Open Source. (Just to clarify, that means that it doesn't, in any way, shape or form.)
Anyone stupid enough to take this seriously would need a mental run up to tackle a crossword clue that read "A five letter word meaning a stupid person, beginning with I, meaning someone too stupid to know what a five letter word, meaning a stupid person, beginning with I is."
And then we look at the facts - MS, the largest, richest company in the world, ***is*** taking OS seriously because it's trying to recruit some of it's top people. Oh, and IBM and the rest of them. One person's reply does not a movement make and you only need a sense of humour to appreciate this.
So you're the git that means airline peanuts have to have warnings such as "May contain nuts". Not everything is fit for human consumption, so take that bottle of bleach out of your mouth.
You're going to sell a player that will report any modification of itself back to HQ via the Internet.
1) What happens if it's never allowed to contact the internet? (i.e. the house has no internet, or the householder just doesn't plug it into the internet, like the UK Sky Digital boxes that people just let the installer install and then, when he's gone, remove the phone cable from the wall)
2) How is it going to talk? Broadband? Better be a secure networking device then and come Ethernet-ready. How many people have Internet-connected Ethernet as a percentage of the people who have a DVD Player? Modem? Not another gadget randomly dialling out (see above Sky Digital comment). Wireless?
3) If the device can be disabled remotely, do you have replacement rights? Faulty goods, not fight for the purpose for which they were sold etc.? How do you intend to PROVE that people were tampering in a court of law?
4) It took just over a year after DVD went "mainstream" for almost every single DVD player in the world to support Region-Free codes/hacks/options. How long do you think Blu-Ray "security" will last in a similar climate? And if it doesn't, how many people will buy it?
Granted, the first really obnoxious technology that does this sort of thing, people MAY buy into. But after that, they will get wise. People wised up to DVD Region Encoding quickly. The first obnoxious tech MAY get popular but after that, the market will simply refuse to buy without reading the T's & C's first.
I was thinking this the other day... I read a story on CNN that said people in New Orleans were paying "as much as" $5/gallon. As if that was a major disaster. Now people are whinging about paying $3 / gallon?
/gallon = $6.96.
Everyday UK price = Very near GBP 1 / litre = GBP 3.78
When is the US going to wake up to just how much oil COSTS, and top subsidising their country's SUV's?
Every country in the EU pays prices near the UK ones (maybe not quite as much). Nobody really moans (except a little if they go up even further), because that's what it always has cost. What does the EU know that America doesn't? Or, more likely, what is America choosing to ignore in case whoever changes prices gets lynched?
1) Laptop (obviously) with wireless built-in.
/Dial-up details of a few good nationwide ISP's
2) Backup Mouse (I miss the trackpoint of my old IBM but not enough to use my trackpad that insists on seeing a light tap as a mouse click) with PS/2, USB and even serial adaptors.
3) Two 2m patch cables with adaptors to join them together and join w/crossover.
4) Various (unused) international modem adaptors (including one that looks like some sort of medical device)
5) USB Flash drive (with my SSH Key)
6) 10 CD-R's for burning various CD's/backups
7) Knoppix CD & DVD, Ultimate Boot CD
8) A few floppies, just in case
9) 2.5" USB2-IDE adaptor + Hard drive
10) USB Laplink network cable (for when people don't have a network card)
11) Drivers CD's for everything I carry that's USB (in case of an old 98SE computer), usually those tiny single CD's.
12) 2.5" IDE to 3.5" IDE adaptors (to power up the hard drive in people's computers)
13) 12-25V variable voltage, high power car cigar lighter adaptor for charging laptop etc. while travelling
14) USB Phone Charger
15) TV-out cable + scart adaptors
Not in the bag, but I also usually have on me when "working" (i.e. at work, private jobs or going away from "civilisation"):
* 12V - 220VAC power adaptor (for powering peripherals from car)
* USB amplified Speakers
* Set of good noise-cancelling headphones
* Phone numbers
The laptop also has a repository of vital software, including stuff like Zonealarm, Rawrite etc., and floppy/ISO images of important stuff (e.g. Smart Boot Manager to make old computers boot off of CD and Knoppix ISO's to have something to boot).
A) Fine. So we'll distribute one binary version of the kernel. It won't work as fast. It'll be hundreds of megs in size. It will take ages to load as it checks for every single known piece of hardware. You've just lost all the speed/memory advantage of having a tailored kernel. Alternatively, it'll come with a hundred modules. It'll also never be x64 optimised or, for that matter, able to work on every machine (some options crash some machines, while the opposite options may crash others) and APM/ACPI will NEVER work on some machines.
B) Fine. You come up with a GUI that can allow me to find files modified on the second Tuesday of every month between May 1, 1946 and June 27, 1978, which contain the words 'secret' and 'report' within 26 characters of each other, sort them by date, and replace any occurence of the word 'anchovie' by 'dead bug'. Some things GUI's just cannot do, some things GUI's do that are just command line interfaces in a fancy coloured textbox, some things GUI's can do once in the time that someone who knows the command can do twenty times.
Secondly, how do you expect a GUI to be able to do stuff like modify computer internals safely? Windows answer to this is usually that settings won't take effect until the next reboot, which makes your computer *stop all it's work* until it's done. X can be restarted with a single keystroke to have the same effect. Maybe a couple of command line edits in between but meanwhile none of your users have been disconnected, no programs have stopped doing what they were supposed to be doing.
Command-lines are not for the faint-of-heart. Then again, last time I touched the command line on my own Linux desktop (not counting other machines that are cmd-line only via SSH) was to run LILO - not something that a "desktop doughnut" should be doing. You obviously have either different ideas of what you should be doing on a normal desktop machine or have not found out how to do them GUI-wise. By the same token, Windows should never expect me to recover in safe mode, or via recovery console, or by running any batch commands ever. Fine for the ordinary desktop user because it very rarely does. Not fine for a power user. An ordinary desktop user wouldn't even notice if you ran a Windows GUI on a Linux machine.
C) Man pages can be a pain in the arse (make it compulsory to include enough examples to demonstrate every option!). HOWTO's are not always up-to-date. Forums are, pretty much, for people who want to know how to install this Linux thing they downloaded. Then again... how much documentation do you get with Windows?
A small booklet showing you how to use a mouse to point at the various icons. An online help system that, even with it's wizard-style help for some items, is next to useless if you don't know the terms to look for (I work support for six schools... that's about 60-100 staff and a few thousand pupils. I have NEVER seen or heard of anyone even bother to try using Windows Help or Help inside ANY program because it's never been useful to them). Annoying dogs, wizards, paperclips that people want me to TURN OFF for them because they can't figure out how.
That's surely Linux 0-0 Windows in terms of help.
If you're an advanced user, you've got to be comfortable with the command-line. I carry a USB key full of cmd-line utils and use them almost every day on Windows and Linux. It's amazing how much quicker "Start, Run, Cmd, ipconfig" is than navigating that poxy GUI network settings. And while I'm there, doing "route print" is the ONLY way to discover Windows network routes.
Anyone who's not going to set up networks or advanced stuff (i.e. users), or home users shouldn't ever NEED to worry about the command line on either OS. And they don't. They pick a distro like Lindows and once the installation is complete, they never see it again. Or they have a decent desktop set up and then never see the command-line again. You, however, are on the border. You are trying to do stuff that NEEDS a command line, stuff that's beyond a GUI point-and-click.
Now can we please insert the standard anti-UK "I'm not paying for a license to watch TV" garb. The BBC are always doing stuff like this... they support Linux for their websites/broadcasts, they have been trailling Ogg Vorbis downloads for some of their media, and now CHOOSING to see piracy as a sign of demand rather than as an opportunity for a lawsuit.
The BBC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bbc are a publically funded independent entity, not just a channel.
So it's basically a conventional DDR SDRAM to SATA hardware RAMDISK, powered from PCI but not dependent on it and battery backed for a few hours.
At first it sounds so simple but what a brilliant idea. For years my university saved a fortune by running everything off a network boot system, using a large ramdisk as a root drive.
This sounds like the perfect hardware solution for them, that doesn't need special drivers or software configurations or even specialist hardware, just ordinary RAM chips, a cheap adaptor and a PCI slot (I reckon you could even bodge it a bit to not need any slot seeing as power is the only thing the PCI bus is used for).
Embedded stuff and home-cinema (MythTV etc.) boxes could power down their boot harddrives almost instantly and yet still keep working, storing everything on this iRAM. Then, at midnight, power up the disk to save to a more permanent storage. Or even better, constantly record to the iRAM and then re-encode at it's own pace back out to a real hard drive.
Silent, reliable as a RAM chip, the ability to replace the chips if they get faulty, the speed, the power consumption, the ease of use. This is a marvellous idea. It's obviously NOT a permanent storage device and I'd hate to have someone buying this thinking that it was, but this really deserves to take off.
I must admit that low-noise is, for me, much more of a consideration that what games it can run. A desktop PC for most people is usually sited in a main family room and having a constant background humming or churning is not nice to listen to.
I tend to stick with older machines for many reasons (cost, reliability, no need to worry about a fan stopping and the machine going bang, no need for excessive venting and can still do most things I need it to) and this helps me when it comes to keeping them quiet.
The old PII-233's (with that weird processor fitting system) can operate perfectly well with no fans (found by experiment, confirmed by over three years of fanless operation *after* having been used at a school in working order for about three years previously).
I find the sweet spot for myself to be around 1-2GHz in my machines (a 1GHz laptop or desktop is not going to make a lot of noise or need a lot of power and yet will get almost anything done in a reasonable time and not cost the earth to buy) Computers of those speeds can run easily off a 300W power supply.
I bought a 300W Etasis Fanless PSU as it was enough and quite cheap considering and it's worked like a charm. Noise is drastically cut through the system as a whole, temperatures are barely affected.
I also invested a few quid in a temperature monitor, it acts as a passthrough for the cpu and case fans and also contains a thin temperature sensor that you can place elsewhere in the case (in my case slid between the top of the PSU and the inside of the casing above it). This beeps reassuringly on every boot to let you know it's working and also throws an absolute wobbler should a fan fail or the PSU get too hot. I much prefer having an non-software/firmware warning as a backup for this sort of thing.
I also placed my computer in a small cupboard and that lets me hide the PC and also dampen the noise. The computer is approximately two feet from my ear if I sit on the sofa and watch a film and, therefore, I need it to be quiet.
My next "projects" is probably to vent out the back of the cupboard to direct the sound in the opposite direction to my sofa or to build a small door to go in front of the PC (though I don't like these because of the way they interfere with the operation of the CD drives).
"If the crackers get hold of an admin account," then you're stuffed anyway.
I can see your argument and tried to think of a few counter-arguments.
If someone can only get to root by coming in as a normal user and su-ing, then we should know which account they came from and hold that user responsible.
Not all SSH accounts are necessarily for admin users anyway (compile farms, cgi hosting, VPN's etc.), so blocking root on those connections doesn't hinder anyone and the users will not be able to get to root anyway, so why not block root logins?
Blocking a unnecessary login is one less login to attack? Especially if it is one that has power that is unnecessary, e.g. compile farms using SSH. Why *should* there be any facility to log in as root remotely?
If someone should find an exploit in SSH that executes with the privileges of the logged in user?
In the same way that you should never log in as root at the terminal anyway, just to make sure you think twice before you actually perform that rm command?
I've been seeing these sorts of "attacks" in number since I installed my Linux Desktop machine about 6 months ago. I'm only on plain ADSL that isn't published, not like I'm a likely target.
Every day I get two or three new attackers, most of whom try 50-60 times on common account names (fred, jeff, user, test etc.) and about one a week that goes full-bore for a particular username or a large spread of a few thousand attempts.
I took the appropriate measures... disallowed root login, use public-key authentication only and I also have a script that checks through my logs once every five minutes, permanantly blacklisting anyone who has more than five attempts within a 7-day period (except for known whitelist addresses).
Currently, it runs to 390 unique lines of IP's, some of which have come via
http://www.cyber-defense.org/blacklist.txt
and at least 50% from my own blacklist. That site (http://www.cyber-defense.org/ incidentally, also notices the same phenemona.
My mother, in her late fifties now, adores computer games. It has become so prevelant that most nights she and my dad can be found playing through some old Playstation/N64 title that they've completed previously.
I get strange looks in shops when they ask who the game is for and I say it's for my mother. They must think that I'm just someone who assumes that their parents are into the same things.
Mum has completed almost every known Mario, Crash Bandicoot or Spyro game and has steadily upgraded for many years from Gameboy up to Gamecube, through Game Gear, Playstation, CD-I, Palm and onwards.
She prefers platformers like Mario (original or 64) etc. but is also a big fun of puzzle games like Tetris, Columns, Puzzle Bobble/Bust-a-Move and the cheap ripoffs of such. She also likes the Mario-style racing titles, Mario Kart, Diddy Kong Racing etc. though she is a little throttle-heavy and thinks that brakes are for other people.
Her motions with the joypad as she gets carried away with the game are legendary, the leads usually end up in a right tangle once she's finished and on more than one occasion she's ended up sporting an indent of a capital A on her thumb from pressing the N64 controller too hard.
It comes to something when my mid-twenties girlfriend isn't anywhere near as interested in video games as my own mother. Even she, though, is prone to the odd flash game or a run through an old Megadrive game via an emulator. At the moment, she's hooked on the Sims which I bought for her birthday, a special deal which contains the original game and every official add-on.
Hopefully, that'll keep her quiet for as long as Catz and Dogz did.
"The researchers claim download times are between 20-30 per cent faster"
:-)
I would love to know how they can get 20-30 percent more information down my connection than an ordinary BitTorrent connection (which can, and almost always does, fully flood my connection) in the same time. This is some AMAZING compression or transmission technology there... I bet you can then compress it even more by compressing the compressed data.
I'm assuming they mean that they can improve download speeds on low-usage "avalanches" (nice naming, by the way) because each peer doesn't need the full file necessarily. However this must mean that, at some point, extra information is added to each "chunk" of the file, to be able to replicate the information from other, missing chunks. Hence, people are just effectively sending out larger chunks of information into the void.
It might be a more efficient way of doing things, yes, and it might well save bandwidth for the initial peer but you're still going to run into the exact same problems as BitTorrent (no download without "enough" peers with "enough" info, for example), it won't become a standard without a massive end-user difference from BitTorrent and global uptake.
Almost any torrent I use is peered enough to download at top-whack for my broadband connection. What's in it for me to run ANOTHER protocol, with another set of servers, another non-standard standard when I can't download any faster at all?
Maybe servers would like this, but then for initial releases any popular torrent only need seed one, maybe two COMPLETE copies of a file to let the peers take over and finish the job off. With avalanche, surely the server would still have to send out roughly this same amount (or more) of information, the client would have to recieve roughly the same amount (or more) of information and might even end up sending out a lot more info?
Where's the advantage? Is it better if you are constantly seeding forever, is it better if you are seeding LOTS of different stuff? I don't see how the maths adds up for any non-trivial "avalanche".
"No one peer can become a bottle neck"
"overall network traffic is lower"
So this is advantageous only to the TCP/IP middlemen? Does that mean I have to change all my protocols and see next to no benefit for the sake of that transatlantic pipeline to the US? I don't see how anybody else really benefits.
When you delete a file, do you also redisplay the listing to make sure that it's actually gone?
No, but I do make sure that I have file delete confirmations turned on so that I can be sure I don't delete files I want. Plus, if I delete a file, I can always recover it. When it's my credit card on the line, I ALWAYS double-check. I also check my credit card statements at the end of each month. Does that make me stupid?
My brother once accidentally bid GBP999 for a item on eBay instead of GBP9.99 because he didn't double-check the cost. Luckily he spotted his error and retracted the bid. Had it been a book on Amazon whose price he had misread (or misclicked), it could already be winging it's way to him.
It's not a question of "is it useful?", more one of "is it sensible?"
Once I've used some tool enough to know that it works reliably, I stop feeling the need to double check it
Done an rm -rf * lately? I always check any command line/script that uses commands that can do permanent damage, usually by replacing the command with a harmless one first to check it's got the right parameters. I trust rm to do exactly what it's supposed to do. I don't trust me. I don't trust any website enough to be only one-click away from my credit card being charged.
Honestly, how many people USE Amazon's 1-click ordering anyway?
I order online nearly every day of my life and I double and triple check things to make sure they charge the right card, go to the right address, that it's what I want etc. and for this I insist on being able to get to a screen where I can double-check EVERYTHING and only then do I submit it.
How many people are seriously logged into secure websites so often that it is just one click and they've ordered something?
How this qualifies as an important piece of news, I don't know. I'm assuming it's a "comedy" piece because he said "Dear Slashdot: please don't post about this. Screw you guys." on one of the linked pages.
However, I myself have had problems with sound in linux, yes, but considering that (as someone who had only ever played about with TCP/IP in Linux and had never touched X or the Linux desktop until a few months ago) I have now switched from Windows to a Linux desktop and got sound working in all apps installed within a few days of switching. That was about four months ago and I still don't use Windows.
I had worked out everything he had worked out in less than two days of having a linux desktop. There are things that should be simpler (cups, sound, etc.) but none of them hindered me for very long and, once properly set up, work much better than my previous OS's incarnations. Yes, it's a pain having to "set things up", but it's hardly worth such a strop.
We all know arts, esd, etc. are a pain in the ass and, yes, we are all waiting for ALSA to "just work". Now that it's in the kernel, we finally have a standardised, working, maintained sound system that supports mixing on EVERY LINUX MACHINE. This should be the turning point.
If a program that plays sound doesn't have an ALSA-compatible option by now, it's not being maintained properly. If it does, it will just work with ALSA and any plugins you might use, e.g. dmix.
As soon as 2.6 distros become the standard, we can work on getting EVERY app to use the same damn sound systems.
I saw his entry on wikipedia and if he's such a great programmer who has made contributions to such important projects as, gosh, XScreensaver, it makes me wonder why the hell he:
a) didn't know this already (not a single XScreensaver that uses sound?).
b) can't work it out for himself.
c) throws a major strop because it's not point-and-click.
It occurs that he's just missed the point. You don't have a Linux desktop to say "I've got a Linux desktop". You don't have one to beat every other desktop into the ground with your technical superiority (real or percieved). You don't have one to complain that it's not like Windows. You don't have one to play iTunes (as he seems to value this as an important feature).
My desktop is Linux because it works, it's fast enough, it does what I want, it doesn't restrict me in any way, it's free, it's Free, it doesn't blue-screen, crash, corrupt and die every few months/years, I can leave it running overnight and not worry about if it'll crash before it finishes it's downloads, I can access it remotely (a good thing when you're working behind restrictive child-safe proxies all the time), and I can do things without wizards, dogs and paperclips jumping up to "help me find a file".
I can't help feeling that any decent programmer would have been able to overcome the same little roadhumps on the way without so much as a sigh. They might even have bothered to fix the troublesome programs themselves.
But why would you buy a DVD player if you didn't know whether the DVD's would be easily available?
http://www.geocities.com/dankoty/shades.html :-)