I'm a long time fan of the series and I've been saying the same here. The C2 look was *wonderful*. I'd love a game using the DS/C3 engine (although I'd prefer the C2 interface), and perhaps a bit of the charm of C1, and it'd be perfect for me.
Unfortunately, I doubt they'll make that, so I'm working on making my own:-)
Well, this is basically a guess, but it looks pretty simple to me.
For microrganisms the best reproduction type is asexual, since there's no much point in genetic diversity anyway. If something like a pH change happens, that will kill every bacteria that can't stand it, the rest will reproduce, and problem solved. There's no point in wasting energy in breeding, since there won't be much diversity to begin with, and the insanely quick reproduction rate will restore the population really fast.
In plants both are present, since for the most part they breed with the plants around them. Sure the pollen can travel quite far, but that's a quite unlikely ocurrence for some species.
Now, for big animals, sexual reproduction makes a lot of sense. It allows combining the genes of animals that live really far from each other. For example, birds, fish, elephants, etc, migrate pretty far. And if the conditions turn unfavourable, many species can move quite long distances.
Morrowind had a system that let you design spells. Kind of.
Choose duration, power, touch or ranged. The problem is that they didn't go far enough. There was no point in making a spell that burned, because making a spell that did 30 points in one blast, cost the same as one that did 15 per second during 2 seconds.
There was the lack of effects too, I'd like to have been able to choose the effect to be used.
I actually thought about how this should work. Came up with the following:
Casting should begin with a powerup stage, where you gather the required power. The more powerful, the more time it takes. Big spells would involve long incantations, with a proper request for help from the appropiate deity. If it sounds like it's from Slayers, it's because it's pretty much from there.
The second stage would be optionally modifying the original effect, like for example choosing to compress a fireball to make higher damage in a more localized area. Or add the possibility of controlling the direction during flight.
The third stage would be adopting the proper position for casting the spell, depending on where you wanted it to go.
Finally, release it, maintaining concentration during the required time.
With a decent implementation, it should be possible to make a quite cool system, where different effects can be combined, power/speed/damage/radius can be adjusted.
It does depend on the case though. For example, I got a really huge speed improvement by simply moving a VB function for calculating an article's price into a SQL Server stored procedure.
After simply writing the stored proc, and tweaking a bit the code that calls it, I managed a speed improvement of *25* times.
It seems the main problem was that network latency to transfer small bits of data was taking up a quite noticeable amount of time. And on top of that, ADO has its own overhead of course, which can be noticeable for a function that gets called very often.
Of course, YMMV, but there are indeed cases where everything should go in the database. And it has other benefits, like making porting the client easier, and finer grained security controls.
I think I've seen something that sounds a lot like this a very long time ago (15 years ago maybe) on TV. I can't remember if it was a movie or a cartoon though because I was very young at the time
I can install Debian, or Gentoo, or whatever else is popular this week, on a machine with a direct internet connection, without worrying about crap getting into it.
However, if I try to do that with a Windows box, it gets broken into in minutes! And I know because I tried, several times to install Win2K on a friend's computer and get the patches before the virus got to me. I failed. It was infected each time, between 1 to 5 minutes from booting. That's completely unacceptable.
Finally, we ended bringing his box to my home, and set it up behind my Linux firewall.
It's got the great advantage of being able to boot any kernel you have, as long as it can access the partition. Screwed up configuration, kernel with a bad filename, etc, all don't matter when you can load any kernel you want from grub's command line.
It's a bit strange in some things, like that it counts disks starting at 0 and not 1, but overall it's quite nice when you get used to it, and it's definitely a lot better than LILO when something unexpected happens.
You say it as if every OSS product was as awkward as mplayer (works great, but the manpage would scare pretty much any beginner), and every commercial one was a marvel of UI engineering. Guess what, lots of commercial stuff sucks too, badly. Google for "Interface Hall of Shame".
For instance, I had the opportunity to try Oracle 8 here. Granted, it's not the newest version. But the UI is *bad*. The SQL client is something that looks like it's from prehistoric times. Decent command line interfaces were hammered out ages ago, but this one is even worse than DOS, mostly because in DOS you rarely typed very long commands.
More examples: Kai's power tools, which is an image editing program. Oh sure it was pretty, but it was also crap.
Enterprise Manager (from MS SQL Server 2000). For some reason, selecting rows from a table, or creating a view is done with a MDI window, while to make a stored procedure it uses a modal dialog. It also does that for the permissions window, which can't be resized! It's annoying as heck when you have hundreds of tables, views and stored procedures. It can lock up with itself, and will pop up windows while you're typing to ask if you'd like to free server resources by closing unused windows. No, I wouldn't like to, I've got a development box all for myself!
Then there are wonderful OSS applications. KDE is mostly great. Juk is nice. Sits in the taskbar, displays the current song with a tooltip, lets me change song with Ctrl+Alt+Left and Ctrl+Alt+Right, can be scripted on the command line. Konqueror has an insanely useful file size view. KNotes comes handy sometimes. The WM allows me to make any window be permanently on top, unlike Win2K.
A 5400 RPM disk from today is still a LOT faster than a 5400 RPM disk from 1998. More RPM translates into less rotational latency, and a higher transfer rate. However, you can get a better rate by increasing the density, and your 1998 disk is certainly a lot smaller than any current one.
Besides, 7200 RPM disks are quite common these days. And 10K RPM is just tricky, 7200 ones already get pretty hot. I'm thinking that manufacturers would actually love to sell 10K RPM drives to everybody, if they didn't have to deal with the risk of people using them in underventilated cases.
Had that happen to my cell phone once when I forgot it in a car. It went black indeed, and the display was unreadable. It did go back to normal when it cooled down (took a few minutes) though.
It only happened to me once though, so maybe the damage accumulates, or it'd have got permanently damaged if I left it there long enough
Well, maybe they do create manifestos. I don't know any, so I don't really know, but programmers aren't the only people who have long, deep discussions about their subject that sound like arcane magic to everybody else.
Musicians discuss who and how makes instruments, and I'm sure machinists get into their own technical arguments comparable to the ones that happen here. So why wouldn't they also create manifestos?
You make it sound as if programmers were the only people discussing this stuff, and the rest of the world just shuts up and works, as I suppose you think they should.
Well, I'd hope that this kind of setup would work like PGP.
The admin's box is the only one that has the private key used for signing. The servers have the public key. When you sign an executable, you only need to do it once, any of the 100 boxes can verify it, and the attacker can't generate a signature without getting the private key.
Of course, this scenario doesn't need hardware at all. It's all doable in software, and in fact I've heard one of the BSDs (forgot which) has either a feature or a patch that does something similar.
The chip's almost certainly for the big business, since I don't see how it's needed for any scenario where the owner remains in full control. Note that I say the owner, since there are perfectly legitimate reasons for locking down a machine so that the user can't mess with it. Public terminals and such come to mind.
But for those cases I think it's quite safe to assume that the owner took measures to close any obvious holes, such as booting from floopy/CD and passing arguments to the kernel. About the only reason I can come up with is a computer with very sensitive data, where it's vital that data can't be recovered if it's stolen. But that doesn't seem like such a common scenario.
I don't think there's any fundamental problem that makes it impossible to make a VM or emulator that's impossible to break through. If the attacker entered by ssh guessing a password or whatever, and assuming the kernel doesn't have any defects that make bypassing the protection possible, it should work just as well.
The scenario I presented in the grandparent should work just fine with software, IMHO. Now, the chip is certainly useful if you want to take away control from the owner of the machine.
Well, it could be useful for a seriously locked down server.
Imagine that you're an admin at some big company, with a hundred Linux boxes. You have this stuff on every of those boxes, and a computer for administration somewhere safe. When you install software you first check it, then sign it, then push updates to your servers.
If somebody gets in, they'll have things quite difficult. Anything unsigned simply won't run at all. Rootkit modules, exploits, etc, will all simply not be able to run at all. This would take out a quite big part of the exploits an attacker could use. Remote ones would hopefully avoided by NX.
This wouldn't protect against things like races, but it certainly could help quite a lot.
The situation above is something I wouldn't have any problems with. If an admin wants to have an uber-locked down system where anything not signed by his key that's only present in a computer with no network connection in a secure room with an armored door doesn't run at all, then sure, why not. I'm fairly sure this can mostly be accomplished without hardware support at all, though.
Now, it's when software publishers want to make it impossible for me to control my computer when I have problems with it. But if the user has full control of it, I think it could come quite handy in some cases.
Hehe, now curious. Never imagined somebody would remember how my posts are moderated. But anyway.
As an user of Unix systems you should know that a decent OS has the ability of limiting the damage a normal user can do. On Unix that mostly means limiting the damage you can do to your own account. While not perfect, it certainly helps.
Yeah, Windows has accounts, and privileges. The system is even nicer than the Unix one. However, I've never seen them actually working well. Windows is incredibly uncomfortable for normal people if they use a normal user account, so pretty much everybody I know logs in as Administrator, another username with Administrator privileges, or Power User.
People select Power User because it gives you the ability to install programs. And also, to screw up the whole system by messing up the registry. I actually broke a Win2K system once, accidentally importing a dump of HKLM from Windows 98. The problem in Windows is not that it lacks features. It's that lots of programs expect to run as Administrator even if they could do without it, and that there are lots of things that are horribly implemented without paying any attention to security.
Linux, on the other hand, makes it impossible to harm anything besides your account, unless you run as root, and makes it possible to install software as a normal user. There are also nice patches to it like SELinux which can restrict even what root can do. Linux is also a lot easier to use securely.
But it's still not that hard to fall for it. I mean, I don't check every link on each site I visit, and I'm sure that neither do you. Finding that page, and clicking the download link without looking at anything else is a very simple mistake to make even for somebody with great knowledge. And they could perfectly choose to be more subtle, too.
I'd say I'm far from stupid - not a genius of course, but I do enough knowledge to administrate Unix and Windows systems, and write software. Yet I can't keep a Windows box spyware and virus free, unless that's specifically my objective.
I mean, it's certainly possible, if what you aim for is a spyware free box. Yes, I can use vmware, every virus and spyware scanner, try to make sure everything I install is 100% safe, and perhaps get a clean and hopefully useful box out of it. But no normal user does that, myself included. I'm certainly fairly paranoid and won't install random crap from the net, but nice looking useful tools can have spyware too.
If you want a real example, here's one. Go to this Azureus page. Well, actually that's not the Azureus page. It's a page that some jerks set up where you download spyware. The real page is on SourceForge.
The cost of forgetting to look with a critical eye at the fake page is to have your system infected with all kinds of crap that will then pretty hard to remove. And it's pretty hard, mind you. I could fairly easily have fallen for it, if I hadn't seen the official one before and wondered why they changed their design so much. Normal users don't run strings(1) on suspicious executables and google for information, though.
Now, you could argue that this kind of thing applies to Linux as well. True. However, there's a critical difference: On any sane Linux distribution, the official release of Azureus will be a package. And if the user downloads the software on their own, it'd be installed in their home directory. At least, while running under your account such crap is limited in what it can do, and has it much harder to wedge into your system as to make it hard to remove.
Yeah, Konqueror is conceptually very similar to IE. And just like the MSHTML engine, KHTML is a component that can be embedded in applications.
However, KDE is completely open, and there's nothing that stops you from replacing KHTML with something else. In fact, there's a Gecko KPart that lets you have the Mozilla engine inside Konqueror. Haven't seen that in IE yet.
Hey, nobody said they'd have to accept your contributions.
You're perfectly free to patch your own copy, start a fork if you wish, or distribute your patch separately. I'm not aware of any OSS project that states that they'll merge each and every patch they get.
Ahh, my apologies then. Probably should have looked more closely.
MS indeed doesn't charge for service packs, but lately I'm getting a bit annoyed with their way of fixing things. Yeah, they do fix bugs once in a while, but I get the impression that the only things they consider "bugs" is straight crashes and other kinds of evident malfunction.
Linux is of course not free of things like that either. For example, in KDE if Konqueror pops up a message box, it's not forced on top. Which means that I can bring the Konqueror window on top, covering the message box. The konqueror window will not redraw because it's waiting for the message box to close, and I bet lots of people think it locked up.
Nothing wrong with bug fixes. I just hate paying for them.
When an OSS project fixes a bug 99% of the time I can just get a patch and be done with it, instead of paying for the new version, which usually includes the bug fix, 20 new features I didn't need, and more bugs in different places.
I just love how after 4 service packs of SQL Server 2000, the Enterprise Manager still manages to lock up with itself, and how while editing a table is done with a MDI child window, a stored procedure for some reason uses a modal one. Of course I'm sure all of that is fixed in SQL Server 2010, which will also have Clippy help you write JOIN queries.
About my website, that used to be a page dedicated to the Creatures games by CyberLife/CreatureLabs, and wouldn't help you that much. I did make a few tools for the game though, all of which were free.
I don't need anything like that (plenty alternatives available, plus I could code my own), but most importantly, I'd never buy anything that lists "Lots of bug fixes" as a feature. There's hardly anything I hate more about commercial software than that. And I say that as a software developer.
It should be able to add something to an already labelled disk. Perhaps by printing a marker and reading it.
Here I have a set of shell scripts that make a list of files, do the backups, open the CD tray, pop up a dialog window, and burn the CD when I click "okay". All that would be needed to make it even better is to print a mark on it.
I'm thinking of something like burning a calendar on the CD, then being able to burn over it to indicate the day the backup was made.
In philosophy and physics: A rule of being, operation, or
change, so certain and constant that it is conceived of as
imposed by the will of God or by some controlling
authority; as, the law of gravitation; the laws of motion;
the law heredity; the laws of thought; the laws of cause
and effect; law of self-preservation.
And from Wikipedia: "Moore's law is an empirical observation stating, in effect, that at our rate of technological development and advances in the semiconductor industry, the complexity of integrated circuits doubles every 18 months"
Hence, it can't be a law. The law of gravitation isn't going anywhere any time soon. Meanwhile, nothing prevents AMD and Intel from stopping the improvement of their processors. Besides, it doesn't even say anything about computing power, but the number of transistors.
Parallel processing or not, the fact remains that it is possible to make a key long enough so that while a computer will be able to use it easily, the power of the entire universe, with each atom operating at 100 GHz for longer than its current age won't be enough to search the whole keyspace. DES, at its 56 bits might be breakable, but 256 bit AES is perfectly available right now.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed!
:-)
I'm a long time fan of the series and I've been saying the same here. The C2 look was *wonderful*. I'd love a game using the DS/C3 engine (although I'd prefer the C2 interface), and perhaps a bit of the charm of C1, and it'd be perfect for me.
Unfortunately, I doubt they'll make that, so I'm working on making my own
Well, this is basically a guess, but it looks pretty simple to me.
For microrganisms the best reproduction type is asexual, since there's no much point in genetic diversity anyway. If something like a pH change happens, that will kill every bacteria that can't stand it, the rest will reproduce, and problem solved. There's no point in wasting energy in breeding, since there won't be much diversity to begin with, and the insanely quick reproduction rate will restore the population really fast.
In plants both are present, since for the most part they breed with the plants around them. Sure the pollen can travel quite far, but that's a quite unlikely ocurrence for some species.
Now, for big animals, sexual reproduction makes a lot of sense. It allows combining the genes of animals that live really far from each other. For example, birds, fish, elephants, etc, migrate pretty far. And if the conditions turn unfavourable, many species can move quite long distances.
Morrowind had a system that let you design spells. Kind of.
Choose duration, power, touch or ranged. The problem is that they didn't go far enough. There was no point in making a spell that burned, because making a spell that did 30 points in one blast, cost the same as one that did 15 per second during 2 seconds.
There was the lack of effects too, I'd like to have been able to choose the effect to be used.
I actually thought about how this should work. Came up with the following:
Casting should begin with a powerup stage, where you gather the required power. The more powerful, the more time it takes. Big spells would involve long incantations, with a proper request for help from the appropiate deity. If it sounds like it's from Slayers, it's because it's pretty much from there.
The second stage would be optionally modifying the original effect, like for example choosing to compress a fireball to make higher damage in a more localized area. Or add the possibility of controlling the direction during flight.
The third stage would be adopting the proper position for casting the spell, depending on where you wanted it to go.
Finally, release it, maintaining concentration during the required time.
With a decent implementation, it should be possible to make a quite cool system, where different effects can be combined, power/speed/damage/radius can be adjusted.
Often all logic indeed should be in the database.
It does depend on the case though. For example, I got a really huge speed improvement by simply moving a VB function for calculating an article's price into a SQL Server stored procedure.
After simply writing the stored proc, and tweaking a bit the code that calls it, I managed a speed improvement of *25* times.
It seems the main problem was that network latency to transfer small bits of data was taking up a quite noticeable amount of time. And on top of that, ADO has its own overhead of course, which can be noticeable for a function that gets called very often.
Of course, YMMV, but there are indeed cases where everything should go in the database. And it has other benefits, like making porting the client easier, and finer grained security controls.
Nah, doesn't need to be that complex.
Take water for instance. H2O, made of hydrogen and oxygen, which are both quite different from what results when they combine.
I think I've seen something that sounds a lot like this a very long time ago (15 years ago maybe) on TV. I can't remember if it was a movie or a cartoon though because I was very young at the time
Let me politely diagree here: bullshit.
I can install Debian, or Gentoo, or whatever else is popular this week, on a machine with a direct internet connection, without worrying about crap getting into it.
However, if I try to do that with a Windows box, it gets broken into in minutes! And I know because I tried, several times to install Win2K on a friend's computer and get the patches before the virus got to me. I failed. It was infected each time, between 1 to 5 minutes from booting. That's completely unacceptable.
Finally, we ended bringing his box to my home, and set it up behind my Linux firewall.
Switch to grub.
It's got the great advantage of being able to boot any kernel you have, as long as it can access the partition. Screwed up configuration, kernel with a bad filename, etc, all don't matter when you can load any kernel you want from grub's command line.
It's a bit strange in some things, like that it counts disks starting at 0 and not 1, but overall it's quite nice when you get used to it, and it's definitely a lot better than LILO when something unexpected happens.
You say it as if every OSS product was as awkward as mplayer (works great, but the manpage would scare pretty much any beginner), and every commercial one was a marvel of UI engineering. Guess what, lots of commercial stuff sucks too, badly. Google for "Interface Hall of Shame".
For instance, I had the opportunity to try Oracle 8 here. Granted, it's not the newest version. But the UI is *bad*. The SQL client is something that looks like it's from prehistoric times. Decent command line interfaces were hammered out ages ago, but this one is even worse than DOS, mostly because in DOS you rarely typed very long commands.
More examples: Kai's power tools, which is an image editing program. Oh sure it was pretty, but it was also crap.
Enterprise Manager (from MS SQL Server 2000). For some reason, selecting rows from a table, or creating a view is done with a MDI window, while to make a stored procedure it uses a modal dialog. It also does that for the permissions window, which can't be resized! It's annoying as heck when you have hundreds of tables, views and stored procedures. It can lock up with itself, and will pop up windows while you're typing to ask if you'd like to free server resources by closing unused windows. No, I wouldn't like to, I've got a development box all for myself!
Then there are wonderful OSS applications. KDE is mostly great. Juk is nice. Sits in the taskbar, displays the current song with a tooltip, lets me change song with Ctrl+Alt+Left and Ctrl+Alt+Right, can be scripted on the command line. Konqueror has an insanely useful file size view. KNotes comes handy sometimes. The WM allows me to make any window be permanently on top, unlike Win2K.
A 5400 RPM disk from today is still a LOT faster than a 5400 RPM disk from 1998. More RPM translates into less rotational latency, and a higher transfer rate. However, you can get a better rate by increasing the density, and your 1998 disk is certainly a lot smaller than any current one.
Besides, 7200 RPM disks are quite common these days. And 10K RPM is just tricky, 7200 ones already get pretty hot. I'm thinking that manufacturers would actually love to sell 10K RPM drives to everybody, if they didn't have to deal with the risk of people using them in underventilated cases.
Had that happen to my cell phone once when I forgot it in a car. It went black indeed, and the display was unreadable. It did go back to normal when it cooled down (took a few minutes) though.
It only happened to me once though, so maybe the damage accumulates, or it'd have got permanently damaged if I left it there long enough
Well, maybe they do create manifestos. I don't know any, so I don't really know, but programmers aren't the only people who have long, deep discussions about their subject that sound like arcane magic to everybody else.
Musicians discuss who and how makes instruments, and I'm sure machinists get into their own technical arguments comparable to the ones that happen here. So why wouldn't they also create manifestos?
You make it sound as if programmers were the only people discussing this stuff, and the rest of the world just shuts up and works, as I suppose you think they should.
Well, I'd hope that this kind of setup would work like PGP.
The admin's box is the only one that has the private key used for signing. The servers have the public key. When you sign an executable, you only need to do it once, any of the 100 boxes can verify it, and the attacker can't generate a signature without getting the private key.
Of course, this scenario doesn't need hardware at all. It's all doable in software, and in fact I've heard one of the BSDs (forgot which) has either a feature or a patch that does something similar.
The chip's almost certainly for the big business, since I don't see how it's needed for any scenario where the owner remains in full control. Note that I say the owner, since there are perfectly legitimate reasons for locking down a machine so that the user can't mess with it. Public terminals and such come to mind.
But for those cases I think it's quite safe to assume that the owner took measures to close any obvious holes, such as booting from floopy/CD and passing arguments to the kernel. About the only reason I can come up with is a computer with very sensitive data, where it's vital that data can't be recovered if it's stolen. But that doesn't seem like such a common scenario.
Why?
I don't think there's any fundamental problem that makes it impossible to make a VM or emulator that's impossible to break through. If the attacker entered by ssh guessing a password or whatever, and assuming the kernel doesn't have any defects that make bypassing the protection possible, it should work just as well.
The scenario I presented in the grandparent should work just fine with software, IMHO. Now, the chip is certainly useful if you want to take away control from the owner of the machine.
Well, it could be useful for a seriously locked down server.
Imagine that you're an admin at some big company, with a hundred Linux boxes. You have this stuff on every of those boxes, and a computer for administration somewhere safe. When you install software you first check it, then sign it, then push updates to your servers.
If somebody gets in, they'll have things quite difficult. Anything unsigned simply won't run at all. Rootkit modules, exploits, etc, will all simply not be able to run at all. This would take out a quite big part of the exploits an attacker could use. Remote ones would hopefully avoided by NX.
This wouldn't protect against things like races, but it certainly could help quite a lot.
The situation above is something I wouldn't have any problems with. If an admin wants to have an uber-locked down system where anything not signed by his key that's only present in a computer with no network connection in a secure room with an armored door doesn't run at all, then sure, why not. I'm fairly sure this can mostly be accomplished without hardware support at all, though.
Now, it's when software publishers want to make it impossible for me to control my computer when I have problems with it. But if the user has full control of it, I think it could come quite handy in some cases.
Hehe, now curious. Never imagined somebody would remember how my posts are moderated. But anyway.
As an user of Unix systems you should know that a decent OS has the ability of limiting the damage a normal user can do. On Unix that mostly means limiting the damage you can do to your own account. While not perfect, it certainly helps.
Yeah, Windows has accounts, and privileges. The system is even nicer than the Unix one. However, I've never seen them actually working well. Windows is incredibly uncomfortable for normal people if they use a normal user account, so pretty much everybody I know logs in as Administrator, another username with Administrator privileges, or Power User.
People select Power User because it gives you the ability to install programs. And also, to screw up the whole system by messing up the registry. I actually broke a Win2K system once, accidentally importing a dump of HKLM from Windows 98. The problem in Windows is not that it lacks features. It's that lots of programs expect to run as Administrator even if they could do without it, and that there are lots of things that are horribly implemented without paying any attention to security.
Linux, on the other hand, makes it impossible to harm anything besides your account, unless you run as root, and makes it possible to install software as a normal user. There are also nice patches to it like SELinux which can restrict even what root can do. Linux is also a lot easier to use securely.
On, indeed, this one is quite evident.
But it's still not that hard to fall for it. I mean, I don't check every link on each site I visit, and I'm sure that neither do you. Finding that page, and clicking the download link without looking at anything else is a very simple mistake to make even for somebody with great knowledge. And they could perfectly choose to be more subtle, too.
Ha.
I'd say I'm far from stupid - not a genius of course, but I do enough knowledge to administrate Unix and Windows systems, and write software. Yet I can't keep a Windows box spyware and virus free, unless that's specifically my objective.
I mean, it's certainly possible, if what you aim for is a spyware free box. Yes, I can use vmware, every virus and spyware scanner, try to make sure everything I install is 100% safe, and perhaps get a clean and hopefully useful box out of it. But no normal user does that, myself included. I'm certainly fairly paranoid and won't install random crap from the net, but nice looking useful tools can have spyware too.
If you want a real example, here's one. Go to this Azureus page. Well, actually that's not the Azureus page. It's a page that some jerks set up where you download spyware. The real page is on SourceForge.
The cost of forgetting to look with a critical eye at the fake page is to have your system infected with all kinds of crap that will then pretty hard to remove. And it's pretty hard, mind you. I could fairly easily have fallen for it, if I hadn't seen the official one before and wondered why they changed their design so much. Normal users don't run strings(1) on suspicious executables and google for information, though.
Now, you could argue that this kind of thing applies to Linux as well. True. However, there's a critical difference: On any sane Linux distribution, the official release of Azureus will be a package. And if the user downloads the software on their own, it'd be installed in their home directory. At least, while running under your account such crap is limited in what it can do, and has it much harder to wedge into your system as to make it hard to remove.
Yeah, Konqueror is conceptually very similar to IE. And just like the MSHTML engine, KHTML is a component that can be embedded in applications.
However, KDE is completely open, and there's nothing that stops you from replacing KHTML with something else. In fact, there's a Gecko KPart that lets you have the Mozilla engine inside Konqueror. Haven't seen that in IE yet.
Hey, nobody said they'd have to accept your contributions.
You're perfectly free to patch your own copy, start a fork if you wish, or distribute your patch separately. I'm not aware of any OSS project that states that they'll merge each and every patch they get.
Ahh, my apologies then. Probably should have looked more closely.
MS indeed doesn't charge for service packs, but lately I'm getting a bit annoyed with their way of fixing things. Yeah, they do fix bugs once in a while, but I get the impression that the only things they consider "bugs" is straight crashes and other kinds of evident malfunction.
Linux is of course not free of things like that either. For example, in KDE if Konqueror pops up a message box, it's not forced on top. Which means that I can bring the Konqueror window on top, covering the message box. The konqueror window will not redraw because it's waiting for the message box to close, and I bet lots of people think it locked up.
Nothing wrong with bug fixes. I just hate paying for them.
When an OSS project fixes a bug 99% of the time I can just get a patch and be done with it, instead of paying for the new version, which usually includes the bug fix, 20 new features I didn't need, and more bugs in different places.
I just love how after 4 service packs of SQL Server 2000, the Enterprise Manager still manages to lock up with itself, and how while editing a table is done with a MDI child window, a stored procedure for some reason uses a modal one. Of course I'm sure all of that is fixed in SQL Server 2010, which will also have Clippy help you write JOIN queries.
About my website, that used to be a page dedicated to the Creatures games by CyberLife/CreatureLabs, and wouldn't help you that much. I did make a few tools for the game though, all of which were free.
Just took a look at the page in your sig.
I don't need anything like that (plenty alternatives available, plus I could code my own), but most importantly, I'd never buy anything that lists "Lots of bug fixes" as a feature. There's hardly anything I hate more about commercial software than that. And I say that as a software developer.
It should be able to add something to an already labelled disk. Perhaps by printing a marker and reading it.
Here I have a set of shell scripts that make a list of files, do the backups, open the CD tray, pop up a dialog window, and burn the CD when I click "okay". All that would be needed to make it even better is to print a mark on it.
I'm thinking of something like burning a calendar on the CD, then being able to burn over it to indicate the day the backup was made.
To be pedantic, it's still not a law:
In philosophy and physics: A rule of being, operation, or
change, so certain and constant that it is conceived of as
imposed by the will of God or by some controlling
authority; as, the law of gravitation; the laws of motion;
the law heredity; the laws of thought; the laws of cause
and effect; law of self-preservation.
And from Wikipedia:
"Moore's law is an empirical observation stating, in effect, that at our rate of technological development and advances in the semiconductor industry, the complexity of integrated circuits doubles every 18 months"
Hence, it can't be a law. The law of gravitation isn't going anywhere any time soon. Meanwhile, nothing prevents AMD and Intel from stopping the improvement of their processors. Besides, it doesn't even say anything about computing power, but the number of transistors.
Parallel processing or not, the fact remains that it is possible to make a key long enough so that while a computer will be able to use it easily, the power of the entire universe, with each atom operating at 100 GHz for longer than its current age won't be enough to search the whole keyspace. DES, at its 56 bits might be breakable, but 256 bit AES is perfectly available right now.