No, it's the other way: There was no point in creating VB.NET
The only point of VB.NET was to be able to lie to VB6 developers and promise them that VB would be in.NET as well. Of course what VB.NET turned out to be is completely useless to a VB6 developer, as nothing is compatible. VB.NET is simply the.NET library, with a VB6-ish syntax on top.
This in the grand scheme of things was completely pointless. Great, I can take my 70K lines of VB6 code, and... wait, no, it's not compatible, so even if I switch to VB.NET I'll have to rewrite the whole thing from scratch anyway. This is definitely not what was on anybody's mind when VB in.NET was promised.
Since VB.NET is completely useless migration-wise, and C# was going to get done anyway, VB.NET is just a rotten bone tossed to the VB6 developers to get them to shut up. But I guess we deserve it, that's the reward you get for becoming dependent on a single vendor.
The Californian way of doing it leaves the possibility of somebody coming up with something just as inefficient as an incandescent bulb, but that just doesn't qualify as incandescent. It allows to follow the letter the law, but not its spirit.
Meanwhile the Australian way of doing it legislates the wanted outcome: a reduction in power usage by eliminating inefficiency. It also allows for the possibility of a more efficient incandescent bulb, should such a thing be technically possible.
Now this is how laws should be made. Legislate the desired result, not a specific method of achieving it.
Actually, waste of resources is precisely what's considered to be attractive.
Consider for example various competitions between animals: Who has the largest horns, who has the biggest and prettiest tail, etc. There's some breed of bird where the male creates a display of various pretty things to attract a female. Pretty much all that can be reduced to "If I could find the time and energy to haul all that stuff around, then obviously I'm a good mate, and you want my genes"
In human society, expensive clothes are appreciated. When being fat meant that you had enough resources to waste, being fat was attractive. Now that effort is required to be slim instead (to the point of it costing more than being fat) being slim is attractive.
Which is just fine, if you want Windows you know where to find it.
You seem to miss an important point somewhat however: Normal users don't choose to run Windows as much as they go with the default, or use whatever the friendly geek installs on their box.
In my case, I simply refuse to do any Windows support at all. There are no Office installs in my home, and if somebody wanted Office, I'd tell them "Sure, go and buy XP and Office", and then figure out how to set it up, because I'm just not going to touch it. So all documents still get written in KWord.
Suddenly, once I'm not offering any assistance for Windows, using Linux becomes a lot easier.
Then use offline IMAP. It's the best thing of both worlds: Mail's on disk, so it's quick to access, but it's also on the server so you have all your mail anywhere.
So what's new about that? RMS has always been saying that. Cuba has very little to do with it, as RMS has always been anti-copyright. The GPL basically turns copyright against itself.
I don't think there's a better way to do it either. Release Linux under the BSD license and it'll immediately get "embraced and extended". The GPL and the political ideology you dislike so much is what made Linux gain such traction in the first place.
Well, this is what we've been arguing about all along, isn't it? That Linux is cheaper than licensing and maintaining MS software?
So, why exactly should Cuba NOT use it, instead of wasting the precious little money it has on making MS richer? Are you proposing a course of action where OSS is only good for "friendly" rich countries, and kept away from places like Cuba that could hugely benefit from it, just to avoid silly associations with communism that should have got old a long time ago?
This seems to me again the same faulty logic that says that X is evil because thought X was good.
If we get another "spokesman" I sure hope it's not of the sort you seem to want.
People play it for different reasons, but you could put it this way:
"Who actually *reads* slashdot?" Well, the people who find that sort of thing interesting of course. SL at its base is graphical IRC with scripts. Many people use SL for the same reason people come here: because they found a place they like and where they can talk to interesting people.
Where all the hype is coming from I'm not sure, but it's certainly not a bad place. If you're a geek, then there's a lot to tinker with, if you're a social kind of person then there are all kinds of people to meet and talk to.
If the restaurant is so incompetent that undercharging is frequent enough to put it out of business, then probably that is what should happen. Capitalism being what it is you simply can't expect people to do your job for you.
There's also a difference of scope: For a restaurant this is quite obvious. Especially for a small one I'd also be compelled to be nice. On the other hand, large companies like Amazon and Dell are a lot more complicated in this respect: You simply can't know every promotion they have, and you can be quite sure that the front lines are manned by drones for who would almost certainly not return the favour.
Besides, how do you do that for Amazon? There's no waiter to tell "Hey, I think you forgot to charge me for the wine". At Amazon all you can do is to decide whether to continue or not with the order. I'm definitely not going to wait half an hour on hold just to let somebody at Amazon know I think they might have made a mistake with a discount.
(typing from memory, so I might get details wrong) Economist goes into SL, tries to earn cash from their internal currency which is *controlled by Linden Lab*, fails, and declares SL a scam.
There's one important detail he missed here: LL controls the currency, and buys and sells as required to maintain a stable value. That means that after the percentage LL takes for buying/selling, the amount you can earn from simple buying/selling of currency is very little, if anything at all. No surpsise that he failed. But then, since when "making money in SL" was supposed to be done like in a stock market?
SL has a services based economy. You make/do something for me, I pay you for it. The concept of a ponzi scheme simply doesn't apply in that situation, because a Ponzi scheme is an investment scam, and nobody sane earns money in SL by investing it. What there is is a straightforward system of supply and demand.
A bit pedantic here: Kalashnikov is the guy who came up with it, but "Avtomat" isn't part of his name, it means "machinegun" in this instance. So the name would stand for "Kalashnikov's machinegun"
At least in Spain, I can return hardware for any reason within a week. After that, I can only get a warranty replacement. Warranty is mandated to be a minimum of 2 years.
For instance, I've returned normal RAM and got ECC RAM instead, no questions asked.
Hint: The law overrides whatever the EULA says. If the law says a return MUST be possible with no exceptions, then whatever the EULA has to say on it is completely irrelevant. And this is the EU we're walking about, not America (where consumer protection laws are apparently backwards)
Sure a digital download can be faulty. It can be a recording of a really bad quality, a corrupted file, several minutes of silence, the wrong song altogether, or have DRM attached that prevents you from playing it. There are probably other modes of failure that didn't come to my mind.
But in that case, your speed is limited by the speed of the splitting by whitespace. And if you've got lots of CPUs, chances are they're quite slow on their own.
Then there's that you can hardly split by whitespace with a complex syntax. You certainly won't be able to parse C like that.
There are briefcase-sized portable systems that allow easy eavesdropping on GSM communications. IIRC, the encryption is weak, and the tower can be actually told to turn it off anyway.
I just had to su change the permissions on a config file so I could change the settings on vegastrike to steer with the mouse.
Just how does that work? A setting like that should be stored somewhere in ~/.vegastrike, that is, in the user's home directory, owned by the owner and modifiable by the owner without any permissions changes.
There's no reason why an application should require chmod'ing anything for something like that.
If you want something better than what Windows has, use SELinux. Of course, it's quite headache inducing, but it's definitely far more advanced than ACLs.
If that's too complicated, use ACLs, that's in the kernel as well.
And there are always the standard UNIX permissions to fall back on, which aren't all that bad, by the way. Yes, the ACL model is more complete, but the old UNIX permissions are more straightforward. The nice thing of RWX is that you can condense the permissions in a few characters (or digits).
AFAIK, on Windows there's no way to do something like "ls -l" and see all the permissions info on every file in the directory at once, as the ACLs can be arbitrarily long. ACLs are great in their functionality, but a pain in that you can't easily know your security settings.
For example, is it possible, in a standard Windows installation, with nothing extra added, to find out whether all the files in one directory have the same permissions and find few ones that have the wrong ones? In Linux, it's ridiculously easy, "ls -l | sort". In Windows I have no clue how to do that without getting RSI.
1. Upgrade your Ram to whatever kind it is at that second in time
That's only needed if a board upgrade is needed for some reason. The main reasons here are: CPU too slow, and new bus (PCI Express) needed. Bus doesn't change all that often, and CPU upgrades can be avoided if you only want gaming performance.
2. Probably have to upgrade your motherboard as well
See above
3. Your hard drive will probably be on the fritz, or something more juicy will be out
If you have hard disks die that often on you, then you need a case with better cooling. There are plenty cases where the drives can be mounted behind the intake fan, which keeps them cool and working properly for a long time.
4. If you're playing video games, you probably have to upgrade your (MS) OS also
What the heck for? I play video games, and I still use Win2K. I haven't even really used XP yet, and have no plans at all to upgrade until it stops being supported. There's absolutely no need to hurry with OS upgrades.
That said, my main OS is Linux and upgrades are free there.
So all in all, your $250.00 graphics card costs you close to $800.00 dollars. But then again, you knew that didn't you? This isn't the first computer you've upgraded? Is it?
A computer is cheaper than a computer + PS3 + games you must pay for. On a PC you can quite easily get quite a lot of free entretaintment.
That too, but it's a much less fine-grained approach.
grsecurity allows defining a group that can bypass this requirement (say, the normal user account for the admin) or the reverse (making only the users belonging to the group be limited). It's also a lot more fine-grained. For instance, making/var noexec would break CGIs, while with grsecurity you can make sure that CGIs still run, but anything not approved by the admin (by being placed inside a root owned directory only writable by root) doesn't. Since no sane distribution runs Apache as root, this breaks a whole range of exploits.
Which is this mythical "support" people talk about?
I've NEVER heard of anybody calling MS support for say, routine Windows issues. At best, people would call the ISP when the connection went down. This is because most of those normal users don't have a clue of what a computer is, how it works, and whose fault it is when something doesn't work. They understand that their ISP provides their internet connection, so they call them, but they have no clue who to call when their computer breaks.
So they assume that something broke, or that they broke it, and just haul the box to the local PC shop, where they check it for spyware, etc. In fact, when I still did that sort of thing routinely, 90% of things people needed help with was due to various crap that got into the system (which doesn't even exist in Linux).
For the rest of issues, which would be the "Why does this page not work?" when the page insists on IE6 and only IE5 is installed and they don't know how to update it, they call their local friendly geek. These people, btw, are getting increasinly sick of Windows and switching to Linux. My life became a lot more relaxing since I started answering that I haven't even used XP, so I don't know how to fix it.
To have an application directly access the hard disk you'd need to go back to DOS. It's not possible for an application to try to write beyond the bounds the hard disk because applications don't access the hard disk on that level. Only the OS does, and even there what you say isn't possible as current disks are pretty smart and just read/write the sector the OS says, and figure out themselves where is that physically on the platter.
Same goes for your video card nonsense -- you can't break it like that, if you try to use something that's not there the application will just crash.
You seem to have a VERY bizarre view of how things work. Please watch less bad movies and learn a bit more before spouting nonsense.
Make sure you also turn on the flag that checks for collissions with other package's files (wonder why it's optional), as well as the flag to drop privileges during building.
With this, Gentoo should be able to install any random junk you find on the net, and not let it root your box. Try on a test account just in case, though.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's the other way: There was no point in creating VB.NET
.NET as well. Of course what VB.NET turned out to be is completely useless to a VB6 developer, as nothing is compatible. VB.NET is simply the .NET library, with a VB6-ish syntax on top.
.NET was promised.
The only point of VB.NET was to be able to lie to VB6 developers and promise them that VB would be in
This in the grand scheme of things was completely pointless. Great, I can take my 70K lines of VB6 code, and... wait, no, it's not compatible, so even if I switch to VB.NET I'll have to rewrite the whole thing from scratch anyway. This is definitely not what was on anybody's mind when VB in
Since VB.NET is completely useless migration-wise, and C# was going to get done anyway, VB.NET is just a rotten bone tossed to the VB6 developers to get them to shut up. But I guess we deserve it, that's the reward you get for becoming dependent on a single vendor.
Well, the Australians sure thought it better.
The Californian way of doing it leaves the possibility of somebody coming up with something just as inefficient as an incandescent bulb, but that just doesn't qualify as incandescent. It allows to follow the letter the law, but not its spirit.
Meanwhile the Australian way of doing it legislates the wanted outcome: a reduction in power usage by eliminating inefficiency. It also allows for the possibility of a more efficient incandescent bulb, should such a thing be technically possible.
Now this is how laws should be made. Legislate the desired result, not a specific method of achieving it.
Actually, waste of resources is precisely what's considered to be attractive.
Consider for example various competitions between animals: Who has the largest horns, who has the biggest and prettiest tail, etc. There's some breed of bird where the male creates a display of various pretty things to attract a female. Pretty much all that can be reduced to "If I could find the time and energy to haul all that stuff around, then obviously I'm a good mate, and you want my genes"
In human society, expensive clothes are appreciated. When being fat meant that you had enough resources to waste, being fat was attractive. Now that effort is required to be slim instead (to the point of it costing more than being fat) being slim is attractive.
Which is just fine, if you want Windows you know where to find it.
You seem to miss an important point somewhat however: Normal users don't choose to run Windows as much as they go with the default, or use whatever the friendly geek installs on their box.
In my case, I simply refuse to do any Windows support at all. There are no Office installs in my home, and if somebody wanted Office, I'd tell them "Sure, go and buy XP and Office", and then figure out how to set it up, because I'm just not going to touch it. So all documents still get written in KWord.
Suddenly, once I'm not offering any assistance for Windows, using Linux becomes a lot easier.
Then use offline IMAP. It's the best thing of both worlds: Mail's on disk, so it's quick to access, but it's also on the server so you have all your mail anywhere.
So what's new about that? RMS has always been saying that. Cuba has very little to do with it, as RMS has always been anti-copyright. The GPL basically turns copyright against itself.
I don't think there's a better way to do it either. Release Linux under the BSD license and it'll immediately get "embraced and extended". The GPL and the political ideology you dislike so much is what made Linux gain such traction in the first place.
Well, this is what we've been arguing about all along, isn't it? That Linux is cheaper than licensing and maintaining MS software?
So, why exactly should Cuba NOT use it, instead of wasting the precious little money it has on making MS richer? Are you proposing a course of action where OSS is only good for "friendly" rich countries, and kept away from places like Cuba that could hugely benefit from it, just to avoid silly associations with communism that should have got old a long time ago?
This seems to me again the same faulty logic that says that X is evil because thought X was good.
If we get another "spokesman" I sure hope it's not of the sort you seem to want.
Why do your programs use the local timezone, anyway?
Programs should handle and store dates in UTC, and convert to the local timezone only for display.
People play it for different reasons, but you could put it this way:
"Who actually *reads* slashdot?" Well, the people who find that sort of thing interesting of course. SL at its base is graphical IRC with scripts. Many people use SL for the same reason people come here: because they found a place they like and where they can talk to interesting people.
Where all the hype is coming from I'm not sure, but it's certainly not a bad place. If you're a geek, then there's a lot to tinker with, if you're a social kind of person then there are all kinds of people to meet and talk to.
If the restaurant is so incompetent that undercharging is frequent enough to put it out of business, then probably that is what should happen. Capitalism being what it is you simply can't expect people to do your job for you.
There's also a difference of scope: For a restaurant this is quite obvious. Especially for a small one I'd also be compelled to be nice. On the other hand, large companies like Amazon and Dell are a lot more complicated in this respect: You simply can't know every promotion they have, and you can be quite sure that the front lines are manned by drones for who would almost certainly not return the favour.
Besides, how do you do that for Amazon? There's no waiter to tell "Hey, I think you forgot to charge me for the wine". At Amazon all you can do is to decide whether to continue or not with the order. I'm definitely not going to wait half an hour on hold just to let somebody at Amazon know I think they might have made a mistake with a discount.
That article made no sense at all.
(typing from memory, so I might get details wrong) Economist goes into SL, tries to earn cash from their internal currency which is *controlled by Linden Lab*, fails, and declares SL a scam.
There's one important detail he missed here: LL controls the currency, and buys and sells as required to maintain a stable value. That means that after the percentage LL takes for buying/selling, the amount you can earn from simple buying/selling of currency is very little, if anything at all. No surpsise that he failed. But then, since when "making money in SL" was supposed to be done like in a stock market?
SL has a services based economy. You make/do something for me, I pay you for it. The concept of a ponzi scheme simply doesn't apply in that situation, because a Ponzi scheme is an investment scam, and nobody sane earns money in SL by investing it. What there is is a straightforward system of supply and demand.
A bit pedantic here:
Kalashnikov is the guy who came up with it, but "Avtomat" isn't part of his name, it means "machinegun" in this instance. So the name would stand for "Kalashnikov's machinegun"
At least in Spain, I can return hardware for any reason within a week. After that, I can only get a warranty replacement. Warranty is mandated to be a minimum of 2 years.
For instance, I've returned normal RAM and got ECC RAM instead, no questions asked.
Hint: The law overrides whatever the EULA says. If the law says a return MUST be possible with no exceptions, then whatever the EULA has to say on it is completely irrelevant. And this is the EU we're walking about, not America (where consumer protection laws are apparently backwards)
Sure a digital download can be faulty. It can be a recording of a really bad quality, a corrupted file, several minutes of silence, the wrong song altogether, or have DRM attached that prevents you from playing it. There are probably other modes of failure that didn't come to my mind.
But in that case, your speed is limited by the speed of the splitting by whitespace. And if you've got lots of CPUs, chances are they're quite slow on their own.
Then there's that you can hardly split by whitespace with a complex syntax. You certainly won't be able to parse C like that.
There are briefcase-sized portable systems that allow easy eavesdropping on GSM communications. IIRC, the encryption is weak, and the tower can be actually told to turn it off anyway.
Count me as anti-DRM.
You put DRM in your stuff, I don't buy it, that simple. There's no such thing as good DRM.
There's no reason why an application should require chmod'ing anything for something like that.
So I don't understand, what's the problem?
If you want something better than what Windows has, use SELinux. Of course, it's quite headache inducing, but it's definitely far more advanced than ACLs.
If that's too complicated, use ACLs, that's in the kernel as well.
And there are always the standard UNIX permissions to fall back on, which aren't all that bad, by the way. Yes, the ACL model is more complete, but the old UNIX permissions are more straightforward. The nice thing of RWX is that you can condense the permissions in a few characters (or digits).
AFAIK, on Windows there's no way to do something like "ls -l" and see all the permissions info on every file in the directory at once, as the ACLs can be arbitrarily long. ACLs are great in their functionality, but a pain in that you can't easily know your security settings.
For example, is it possible, in a standard Windows installation, with nothing extra added, to find out whether all the files in one directory have the same permissions and find few ones that have the wrong ones? In Linux, it's ridiculously easy, "ls -l | sort". In Windows I have no clue how to do that without getting RSI.
That said, my main OS is Linux and upgrades are free there. A computer is cheaper than a computer + PS3 + games you must pay for. On a PC you can quite easily get quite a lot of free entretaintment.
Or are you typing this post on your console?
That too, but it's a much less fine-grained approach.
/var noexec would break CGIs, while with grsecurity you can make sure that CGIs still run, but anything not approved by the admin (by being placed inside a root owned directory only writable by root) doesn't. Since no sane distribution runs Apache as root, this breaks a whole range of exploits.
grsecurity allows defining a group that can bypass this requirement (say, the normal user account for the admin) or the reverse (making only the users belonging to the group be limited). It's also a lot more fine-grained. For instance, making
Which is this mythical "support" people talk about?
I've NEVER heard of anybody calling MS support for say, routine Windows issues. At best, people would call the ISP when the connection went down. This is because most of those normal users don't have a clue of what a computer is, how it works, and whose fault it is when something doesn't work. They understand that their ISP provides their internet connection, so they call them, but they have no clue who to call when their computer breaks.
So they assume that something broke, or that they broke it, and just haul the box to the local PC shop, where they check it for spyware, etc. In fact, when I still did that sort of thing routinely, 90% of things people needed help with was due to various crap that got into the system (which doesn't even exist in Linux).
For the rest of issues, which would be the "Why does this page not work?" when the page insists on IE6 and only IE5 is installed and they don't know how to update it, they call their local friendly geek. These people, btw, are getting increasinly sick of Windows and switching to Linux. My life became a lot more relaxing since I started answering that I haven't even used XP, so I don't know how to fix it.
What bullshit is that?
To have an application directly access the hard disk you'd need to go back to DOS. It's not possible for an application to try to write beyond the bounds the hard disk because applications don't access the hard disk on that level. Only the OS does, and even there what you say isn't possible as current disks are pretty smart and just read/write the sector the OS says, and figure out themselves where is that physically on the platter.
Same goes for your video card nonsense -- you can't break it like that, if you try to use something that's not there the application will just crash.
You seem to have a VERY bizarre view of how things work. Please watch less bad movies and learn a bit more before spouting nonsense.
Make sure you also turn on the flag that checks for collissions with other package's files (wonder why it's optional), as well as the flag to drop privileges during building.
With this, Gentoo should be able to install any random junk you find on the net, and not let it root your box. Try on a test account just in case, though.