No, it should be your job to adapt the system to your needs. The system itself should be as flexible as possible to adapt to the needs of as many people as possible. It's not like typing an alias command is *that* difficut.
Don't you adapt whatever OS you use to your needs? For example, in Windows it's quite likely that you change the screen resolution and font size to make it more comfortable to you. You might create shortcuts on the desktop or the taskbar to make some programs more accessible. Most people install MS Word because they aren't satisfied with Wordpad. Some people even tweak things in the registry. There's no way of making an OS where the default settings satisfy everybody.
My problem with Windows is that everything seems to want to make decisions for me. When installing programs most of them will add things to the desktop or startup folder. The result is the typical Windows computer: so many icons on the desktop that they don't fit on it, and it takes 10 minutes to boot because it loads 13 programs on startup. What's more annoying is that sometimes I have to mess with the registry because somehow the Startup folder isn't used anymore.
That's the nice thing about Unix, if you don't like something you can fix it:
$ alias copy=cp $ alias move=mv
Problem solved. Don't like the default options? Add the ones you like to the alias. IIRC, the reason why the command names are so cryptic are to save typing, and to save time when working on a slow terminal. Try using a ssh session sometime to a server in another country with a modem connection, and you'll see that it'd be much more annoying if all the commands had long and verbose names.
Yuck. Wasn't it one of those annoying programs that take the whole screen and use weird custom controls for everything? I really hate that. Even more than the obsession with skinnable apps.
I mean, just try starting Trillian, Winamp, Sonique, MSN, Yahoo messenger and a few other skinnable apps toghether. They all look different, behave differently (in the short while I used Sonique I couldn't figure out how to close it without using the taskbar), and consume more resources than they should. I'm very happy here with noatun running on the taskbar, and mp3blaster.
But, this doesn't mean that I'm against look improvements. I just don't think that every program should have its own skin. Window managers offer plenty flexibility if you want stuff to look nice.
Normally it works like this: A person has a link on his/her main page, maybe something like "don't click here", that leads to a CGI that generates a lot of fake addresses and a link to itself. A program that tries to parse that will get thousands of fake addresses. You may not even see it because it could be hidden (white on white color, for example)
Note that I didn't say anything about having just one machine. What about risk assesment, I think the 30 minutes spent on installing shorewall are worth if they avoid a full reinstall of the OS. With Windows just getting it installed, then installing drivers, programs, updates and configuring can take about 6 hours. Things like retinal scanners wouldn't help since that'd be definitely more trouble than it's worth.
Anyway, what I meant is that a firewall can be an useful addition, especially when you have computers with a narrow function. This is pretty much the setup I have here, btw, firewall, DMZ, and 3 computers in the private network. The firewall protects things pretty well, and also does some bandwidth limiting.
There were exploits in SSH and SSL not very long ago. Who knows if some script kiddie nmap'ped your whole ISP and grepped his/her list for SSH servers to try to get into? Sometimes a bit of paranoia doesn't hurt.
A well configured firewall will protect you somewhat against the exploits that did work.
Say, you run a machine that you only use for web browsing. Block outbound access to everything except ports 21,25 and 80, deny all inbound connections. Now if somehow you get BackOrifice or something similar it will be much less likely that it will work, especially if the firewall is on another computer.
Of course, it doesn't protect you against everything, but it still can be really useful when well configured.
Yuck. Who uses gosub in VB these days? Goto is used as in "On Error Goto Somewhere" of course, but I can't think of anything that'd require using gosub.
The filter on my Lian Li PC-68 is fairly easy to access too. All you need to do is to remove the front, and open the air filter. No unscrewing required. It's a very nicely designed case too. Everything is easy to take apart, and stuff inside is very comfortable. It costs quite a lot though.
Currently, selling an overclocked CPU is easy, just insert the CPU, set jumpers/BIOS settings higher than they should be, and the only way of finding it's overclocked is removing the heatsink and looking at the label.
If the BIOS displayed a warning it'd be noticeably harder. You'd have to find a BIOS without this banner, which would get complicated pretty fast. AFAIK there are very few BIOS vendors, and I don't see why would they make an option to disable a banner that doesn't hurt anything. It'd be trivial to protect the BIOS a bit against hex-editing with a checksum or something similar.
If the shop goes as far as reverse-engineering the BIOS to remove that banner, I'd say you have more important things to worry about than an overclocked CPU. They could say, make the BIOS corrupt data randomly on boot so that you'd need tech support every few months. I'm pretty sure that there are many other nasty things a vendor could do to your hardware. Having a good protection against them probably would mean something like Palladium.
The article mentions that this would protect against a vendor who sells overclocked CPUs as if they were originally made to run at that speed. But I don't think this is the only reason. They surely want to stop people from overclocking so that they buy a faster CPU instead.
I think if the only point of this was preventing vendor overclock it could be done much easier: Make the CPU tell the motherboard what frequency it was supposed to run at. Then when you start the computer the BIOS would perform a simple check and show a message like "Intel Pentium 4 at 3.5 GHz (OVERCLOCKED! Should be 3 GHz)".
Nobody who intentionally overclocks his/her system would care much about having this banner, it's even a way of bragging about how much you overclocked your CPU. But it should be effective for avoiding vendor overclock.
Yeah, Perl's argument handling is a bit messy. But it's completely flexible as well. You can have named arguments even though there's no special support for them, for example. And it's easy to write generic code to say, log all the arguments passed to a function.
But I kind of liked what they did the other time. I think it was called "CJAN", Comprehensive Java Archive Network. It was great, I went there and suddenly found a lot of Java stuff on the front page. Took me a while to realize what was going on.
IANANE (I am not a networking expert), but what you want seems impossible, and not because of address space. It's routing.
Routing would be simplified by making IP addresses be dependent of geography. Say,/16 corresponds to a country, the ISP gets a/32, perhaps makes some internal division by areas, gives you a/48, which you can further organize into buildings, floors, rooms or whatever.
If you owned an IP range and could have the same range in US and Russia then routing would become a *huge* mess. Not to mention the problem of keeping track how to get to a particular IP. With your system, the whole internet would need to know that while yesterday you were in US today you're in Russia.
I don't see why you want your own IP either. That's what the DNS service is for, you get a domain name and when you move make it point to your new IP. What's the problem with that?
Re:Doesn't matter anyway...Ninnle Linux is far bet
on
Sun Drops Linux Distro
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for the advice, I'll see if I can get it to work:-)
My language choice is limited though. Given our project, I think an interpreted/VM language is best, because we need development speed, and application speed is not important. Perl is also the language I know best, and even if it's not ideal it's much less annoying than VB.
You don't get support for free, but you can buy it, from RedHat for example.
Wine and vmware might be useful in *some* situations.
And, it's not a silver bullet. For example, I considered rewriting a VB app in PerlQt and running it on Linux. Turns out it wouldn't work because we'd have to migrate from SQL Server as well. So what to do? Very simple.
Tell your manager that while Linux is not currently a viable alternative for your business it's growing fast, and that you can make changes slowly to make moving to it easier if you ever need it, since vendor lock-in might mean serious problems for the company in the future. For example you could try Postgres for a small non-critial DB. You could try to make a database that could be moved to Postres with little effort. You could get Cygwin and/or use Perl to automate tasks. You could try using Linux on your mail server, DNS server or web server.
Then, if some day MS takes a way you don't like it'll be much easier to switch to Linux.
Bad handling of lack of disk space is either an oversight or laziness of the programmer. That kind of behavior should never be considered correct. Especially in Mandrake, which is supposed to be user friendly.
Besides, removing unwanted packages is not so easy. Suppose the user had KMail and Mutt installed, and was using only mutt. S/he might have still left KMail there expecting that maybe the upgrade will add the features s/he needs.
Of course engineers prefer "GDRR2 SDRAM". It's much more informative. It includes the purpose (Graphics), transmission type (DDR), memory type (Synchronous) and access type (Random). Would you prefer buying "UltraFast MAX RAM" instead of DDR 333? I definitely want to know how fast is the RAM I'm buying and if it has ECC or not.
This is what I've been wondering for a while. Say I write a program, and in X years it becomes public domain. But what happens with things like the Linux kernel? Will it ever become public domain, or copyright will last until people stop updating it for X years?
A bit OT, but this reminds me something I saw in an issue of "what if". It's a magazine where you could suggest something along the lines of "What if Dr. Octupus killed Spiderman" and they might make it. They also had a list of the suggestions they received. One was:
Slashdot Mirror
No, it should be your job to adapt the system to your needs. The system itself should be as flexible as possible to adapt to the needs of as many people as possible. It's not like typing an alias command is *that* difficut.
Don't you adapt whatever OS you use to your needs? For example, in Windows it's quite likely that you change the screen resolution and font size to make it more comfortable to you. You might create shortcuts on the desktop or the taskbar to make some programs more accessible. Most people install MS Word because they aren't satisfied with Wordpad. Some people even tweak things in the registry. There's no way of making an OS where the default settings satisfy everybody.
My problem with Windows is that everything seems to want to make decisions for me. When installing programs most of them will add things to the desktop or startup folder. The result is the typical Windows computer: so many icons on the desktop that they don't fit on it, and it takes 10 minutes to boot because it loads 13 programs on startup. What's more annoying is that sometimes I have to mess with the registry because somehow the Startup folder isn't used anymore.
Yuck. Wasn't it one of those annoying programs that take the whole screen and use weird custom controls for everything? I really hate that. Even more than the obsession with skinnable apps.
I mean, just try starting Trillian, Winamp, Sonique, MSN, Yahoo messenger and a few other skinnable apps toghether. They all look different, behave differently (in the short while I used Sonique I couldn't figure out how to close it without using the taskbar), and consume more resources than they should. I'm very happy here with noatun running on the taskbar, and mp3blaster.
But, this doesn't mean that I'm against look improvements. I just don't think that every program should have its own skin. Window managers offer plenty flexibility if you want stuff to look nice.
There are.
Normally it works like this: A person has a link on his/her main page, maybe something like "don't click here", that leads to a CGI that generates a lot of fake addresses and a link to itself. A program that tries to parse that will get thousands of fake addresses. You may not even see it because it could be hidden (white on white color, for example)
Note that I didn't say anything about having just one machine. What about risk assesment, I think the 30 minutes spent on installing shorewall are worth if they avoid a full reinstall of the OS. With Windows just getting it installed, then installing drivers, programs, updates and configuring can take about 6 hours. Things like retinal scanners wouldn't help since that'd be definitely more trouble than it's worth.
Anyway, what I meant is that a firewall can be an useful addition, especially when you have computers with a narrow function. This is pretty much the setup I have here, btw, firewall, DMZ, and 3 computers in the private network. The firewall protects things pretty well, and also does some bandwidth limiting.
There were exploits in SSH and SSL not very long ago. Who knows if some script kiddie nmap'ped your whole ISP and grepped his/her list for SSH servers to try to get into? Sometimes a bit of paranoia doesn't hurt.
A well configured firewall will protect you somewhat against the exploits that did work.
Say, you run a machine that you only use for web browsing. Block outbound access to everything except ports 21,25 and 80, deny all inbound connections. Now if somehow you get BackOrifice or something similar it will be much less likely that it will work, especially if the firewall is on another computer.
Of course, it doesn't protect you against everything, but it still can be really useful when well configured.
Yuck. Who uses gosub in VB these days? Goto is used as in "On Error Goto Somewhere" of course, but I can't think of anything that'd require using gosub.
The filter on my Lian Li PC-68 is fairly easy to access too. All you need to do is to remove the front, and open the air filter. No unscrewing required. It's a very nicely designed case too. Everything is easy to take apart, and stuff inside is very comfortable. It costs quite a lot though.
True, but it would make things noticeably harder.
Currently, selling an overclocked CPU is easy, just insert the CPU, set jumpers/BIOS settings higher than they should be, and the only way of finding it's overclocked is removing the heatsink and looking at the label.
If the BIOS displayed a warning it'd be noticeably harder. You'd have to find a BIOS without this banner, which would get complicated pretty fast. AFAIK there are very few BIOS vendors, and I don't see why would they make an option to disable a banner that doesn't hurt anything. It'd be trivial to protect the BIOS a bit against hex-editing with a checksum or something similar.
If the shop goes as far as reverse-engineering the BIOS to remove that banner, I'd say you have more important things to worry about than an overclocked CPU. They could say, make the BIOS corrupt data randomly on boot so that you'd need tech support every few months. I'm pretty sure that there are many other nasty things a vendor could do to your hardware. Having a good protection against them probably would mean something like Palladium.
The article mentions that this would protect against a vendor who sells overclocked CPUs as if they were originally made to run at that speed. But I don't think this is the only reason. They surely want to stop people from overclocking so that they buy a faster CPU instead.
I think if the only point of this was preventing vendor overclock it could be done much easier: Make the CPU tell the motherboard what frequency it was supposed to run at. Then when you start the computer the BIOS would perform a simple check and show a message like "Intel Pentium 4 at 3.5 GHz (OVERCLOCKED! Should be 3 GHz)".
Nobody who intentionally overclocks his/her system would care much about having this banner, it's even a way of bragging about how much you overclocked your CPU. But it should be effective for avoiding vendor overclock.
Yuck, I hope they get replaced with something nicer. Like Lian Li cases for example :-)
The next computer I buy is definitely going to look a bit nicer than the boring standard stuff.
Yeah, Perl's argument handling is a bit messy. But it's completely flexible as well. You can have named arguments even though there's no special support for them, for example. And it's easy to write generic code to say, log all the arguments passed to a function.
Hehe!
But I kind of liked what they did the other time. I think it was called "CJAN", Comprehensive Java Archive Network. It was great, I went there and suddenly found a lot of Java stuff on the front page. Took me a while to realize what was going on.
Eh? How is that going to be illegal?
What, you've never heard of USB drives? Guess what, it's a memory card with an USB connector.
IANANE (I am not a networking expert), but what you want seems impossible, and not because of address space. It's routing.
/16 corresponds to a country, the ISP gets a /32, perhaps makes some internal division by areas, gives you a /48, which you can further organize into buildings, floors, rooms or whatever.
Routing would be simplified by making IP addresses be dependent of geography. Say,
If you owned an IP range and could have the same range in US and Russia then routing would become a *huge* mess. Not to mention the problem of keeping track how to get to a particular IP. With your system, the whole internet would need to know that while yesterday you were in US today you're in Russia.
I don't see why you want your own IP either. That's what the DNS service is for, you get a domain name and when you move make it point to your new IP. What's the problem with that?
MicroSoft, is that a brand of toilet paper?
WinCVS last time I tried it was annoying. Try TortoiseCVS.
Thanks for the advice, I'll see if I can get it to work :-)
My language choice is limited though. Given our project, I think an interpreted/VM language is best, because we need development speed, and application speed is not important. Perl is also the language I know best, and even if it's not ideal it's much less annoying than VB.
Then you didn't tell well.
It's free, but you can pay for it.
You don't get support for free, but you can buy it, from RedHat for example.
Wine and vmware might be useful in *some* situations.
And, it's not a silver bullet. For example, I considered rewriting a VB app in PerlQt and running it on Linux. Turns out it wouldn't work because we'd have to migrate from SQL Server as well. So what to do? Very simple.
Tell your manager that while Linux is not currently a viable alternative for your business it's growing fast, and that you can make changes slowly to make moving to it easier if you ever need it, since vendor lock-in might mean serious problems for the company in the future. For example you could try Postgres for a small non-critial DB. You could try to make a database that could be moved to Postres with little effort. You could get Cygwin and/or use Perl to automate tasks. You could try using Linux on your mail server, DNS server or web server.
Then, if some day MS takes a way you don't like it'll be much easier to switch to Linux.
No, that was an idiotic reply.
Bad handling of lack of disk space is either an oversight or laziness of the programmer. That kind of behavior should never be considered correct. Especially in Mandrake, which is supposed to be user friendly.
Besides, removing unwanted packages is not so easy. Suppose the user had KMail and Mutt installed, and was using only mutt. S/he might have still left KMail there expecting that maybe the upgrade will add the features s/he needs.
Of course engineers prefer "GDRR2 SDRAM". It's much more informative. It includes the purpose (Graphics), transmission type (DDR), memory type (Synchronous) and access type (Random). Would you prefer buying "UltraFast MAX RAM" instead of DDR 333? I definitely want to know how fast is the RAM I'm buying and if it has ECC or not.
If you have any suggestions or want to ask something about it, you can send a mail to vadim@(server name in that link)
This is what I've been wondering for a while. Say I write a program, and in X years it becomes public domain. But what happens with things like the Linux kernel? Will it ever become public domain, or copyright will last until people stop updating it for X years?
A bit OT, but this reminds me something I saw in an issue of "what if". It's a magazine where you could suggest something along the lines of "What if Dr. Octupus killed Spiderman" and they might make it. They also had a list of the suggestions they received. One was:
What if the Punisher killed my maths teacher?