Is there an executable preventer on Linux? Nosiree, there's nothing preventing a user from affecting his own dataspace. What do you think is bad: Trashing the whole system, or trashing your ~ ? A system can be reinstalled, but most people dont back up their data.
Yes there is, it's called "grsecurity". There's a kernel patch, quite widely integrated in some distributions (gentoo hardened-sources package say). One of the options is disabling execution completely from non-root-owned directories. So it basically prevents a normal user from executing anything at all that they download.
Possibly the only workaround would be a Perl or a shell script, but the user would have to run it as "perl foo.pl", which is not the normal way of executing a shell script, so it's very unlikely that a GUI would be set up to do that automatically. That could be closed by patching Perl/bash/etc as well.
I have a firewall, but I don't remember having to open any ports for it. I think it only makes outbound connections, so it should work fine without changing anything.
Regarding your problems, haven't had anything like that happen here. Perhaps you have an ATI card? I heard of problems with them.
BTW, the Windows client ran flawlessly in Wine last time I checked, so if you want to try it, that could avoid having to do a Windows install.
People suggested it multiple times already, but it never gets done, probably because it's complicated.
For example, if you actually compile from source, this is undesirable. If you're compiling from source instead of using your distribution's kernel you probably have some specific reason for it, like wanting to apply a patch. Now what if this patch touches some kernel internals (say, the USB subsystem), and updates multiple drivers? Then applying the patch would fail.
Also, having the full source is a VERY good thing if you just replaced your network card, have no net access, and need to build a new kernel to get it. Then what if you didn't download any other network drivers? Bootstrapping problem there too: if you download drivers, how do you download the modem/network card driver? If you ship those, why not others since they're all in the kernel to start with? Making arbitrary distinctions is strange.
If you use binaries, you again have the same problems. If you have all the drivers installed that takes what, 20MB disk space? And in exchange if you swap the network card, a recent distribution will detect the new one and automatically load it, instead of making you mess with burning a driver CD on some other computer.
Then, Windows has exactly the same behavior! When you connect say, USB speakers (those with an integrated soundcard) they just work, because the driver for them was installed with the OS, even though it was unused at the time. It doesn't ask for the CD, or download anything.
Basically, making it download drivers is just more complication, extra things that can go wrong and less user friendliness in exchange for just a few MB of disk space, which doesn't amount to anything noticeable on a disk bought in the last 5 years anyway. Now if you're for some bizarre reason still booting Linux from a floppy, or work on something embedded that runs on 8MB of flash, then this makes sense, but that's a very uncommon situation.
1. It works. Everything but video works fine. Sure, it crashes once in a while, but so does the Windows one, so I don't think that's specific to the Linux version.
2. I have modified the source, and connected to the main grid using the compiled client.
Regarding whether they accept patches, not 100% sure there, but the latest version compiles on GCC 4.1 when the first releases didn't. It looks like they integrated fixes people made for that.
Unless you mean memory (where things don't look good ATM, as they seem to be expanding bandwidth but at the cost of adding latency), you might want to consider a flash drive.
Flash has the advantage of having no seek latency, so even though I think current flash drives are slower than a hard disk as far as raw read/write speed is concerned, the seek latency cripples performance so much that a flash drive should be a massive improvement for most tasks. Most people don't do things like continously reading or writing data to disk, so eliminating latency would be a huge improvement.
1. Antivirus hooks into the OS, and scans every program BEFORE it gets executed. In that case, the scanner's priority doesn't matter, it gets run before the program starts anyway.
2. You run the antivirus scanning every file on disk, as a normal process. This would be what the priority adjustments affect, but doing things this way you can't really detect a new virus in real time. You can just find it during the scan, and the priority only determines how fast it will proceed when something else wants CPU time.
I've heard that somebody did a study of whether chewing gum of different sorts produces a measurable effect on an EEG. The result was that no, it doesn't. That's what I think Feynman meant: they had a hypothesis, and very scientifically determined the experiment was a failure, but still should be published, if only to add to the information about what shows up on an EEG and what doesn't.
Now, in my understanding, peer review is to tell apart things that are well researched from things that aren't. The above should pass peer review and be published: Even though the result was negative it was still good research. On the other hand, I don't think Feynman was saying that any crap anybody makes up should be published as well. Research with a negative result has value, while plain nonsense adds nothing useful and is with all likehood damaging.
There's the "copybot", which can duplicate objects. But it can only duplicate what you see. This means that scripts, contents of objects, etc can't be duplicated automatically.
Simple objects (avatars, buildings) are vulnerable to this, but many others aren't. For example vehicles consist of a shape which you can duplicate, and a set of scripts that makes it move that you can't. So you could copy the vehicle's shape but that wouldn't work as a vehicle, so you'd have to script it. Depending on what the scripts do, it could be a lot easier to just buy it.
Duplication by hand is difficult. Some things you can buy in-world are complex, with thousands of lines of code tuned over a long time for a particular purpose.
Sure, IF you're a coder, and IF you have a lot of time, you could spend say, 2 weeks remaking something. But that thing sells for maybe $10. Is it worth your time as a programmer to spend 70 hours of work to avoid buying a $10 item?
The same way, in the real world I could grow my own potatoes. But most people don't, for the simple reason that often buying stuff from somebody else who dedicates to it on a large scale is much easier and cheaper than doing it yourself.
SL has scarcity of a kind. Boxes in SL are everywhere. Custom made things are scarce.
People in SL won't abandon the economy for a "FOSS approach", and I say that as an OSS advocate myself.
The thing is that no real cash would actually make SL a less impressive place. Let's suppose you want for whatever reason to look like your RL self. Right now you can hire an artist who will tell you what sort of photos they want of you, and will then create textures and clothes in the right shape. They get cash, and you get to look like yourself.
On the other hand, who will bother with that in a pure "FOSS" environment? It's tedious work. The same way, OSS does badly in areas like accounting packages. Working on the kernel is interesting. Writing code for dealing with some obscure tax regulation is boring. Making some random guy's nose look just right is boring.
Yes, people can and do release all sorts of things for free. Say, avatars. But who wants to be cybergoth #12342? All of them would look exactly the same. If you want to look unique there are only two things you can do: make it yourself (which is hard unless you're skilled), or get somebody else to make it. And so far we haven't come up with a better way to motivate people to make custom stuff than paying them for it.
It's very possible to make money in SL. But of course taking it as a stock market is stupid. What sells in SL is services.
SL is simply an environment capable of connecting buyer to seller. You provide a service: drawing a custom picture, making a custom script, building something, the buyer provides the cash. This way of doing things simply CAN'T be a pyramid scheme.
Banking in SL is stupid - that I can agree with. People in SL simply aren't patient enough to handle a sane interest rate. Most people work with amounts like $5 USD, which they consider significant. Only maybe 1% of all people in SL works with amounts of money where a 5% interest would amount to something. So SL banks offer really insane interests, possibly operating as a Ponzi scheme. I haven't used any SL banks, but my feeling is that they're very unreliable.
Calling all of the SL economy a pyramid scheme is bullshit though. If you act as a scripter/artist/builder for hire you can make some money without problems. Build something pretty, put it on sale, and if people buy it, you get cash.
Now, indeed, you won't get rich in SL very easily. Earning say, $10 or $20 in SL is easy. Earning something approaching a real income is very, very hard. It'll take dedication, an impressive quality (there's tons of competition), selling things much below what they'd cost in the real world (meaning, what you get per hour of scripting is probably noticeably below what you can get per hour of coding in your country). Through all of it, you'll have to be your own programmer, marketing department and businessman, because involving any more people makes it even less profitable. Through all of that you have to contend with that everything in SL is intangible. With no materials other than perhaps hosting costs for things that require external servers, anything you offer for cash, somebody else could offer for free.
Now, despite all this, I'll say that selling things in SL can be a very nice experience, despite the low income you get from it. At least for me personally having something I made byself get used by several hundred people and personally hearing feedback gives a much nicer feeling than being a faceless drone in a corporation, even though the corporation pays a lot better.
The idea of Sealand is that it's supposed to be its own country (which is not assured). If you buy an island that's definitely going to still belong to some other country.
The satellites you'd use to link it to the internet would be owned by somebody else and could be convinced to take the connection down.
Also, an island is geographically fixed, so once all the practical ways to connect to it are taken down (satellite, links from neighbouring places), it's pretty much over.
IMO, the advantage of having a satellite take care of it is that it can bypass the internet completely, letting people connect to it directly (ideally it would be compatible with dishes available to consumers used for some other purpose).
Also, shooting down a satellite is probably a lot more complicated than blowing up Sealand, and if say, China could be convinced to lanuch it, America trying to shoot it down would be an international incident.
With that price, couldn't they do something better with the money?
For that amount of cash they could probably launch a satellite. Now that's an idea -- how about trackers in the sky people can connect to by pointing an antenna to it? Since you'd have to aim at the satellite, it'd be very unlikely that somebody could snoop on the communication, and the precise location of the users could be unknown.
At least, unlike with Sealand, anybody with the right equipment could connect to it, without having to rely on other countries not cutting the connection to it.
Or perhaps IBM is doing it out of need, not because they consider it the ideal situation.
For example, you can at the same time spend a lot on home security and lobby the government to solve the crime problem. Security solves the problem now, but that doesn't mean you wouldn't prefer not to need it at all.
So perhaps they patent so much because in the current situation it's what makes the most sense, but would prefer not to have to.
For example, take Anshe Chung, who I'm fairly sure doesn't give a damn about the copybot. Heavily scripted objects aren't affected either. Copybot can only copy the shape , which is completely pointless for various tools that consist of an object or two, and then several thousands lines of code. Services are also unaffected - there are people who will make you a custom avatar, scripters and builders for hire, etc.
Copybot was really not much of a revelation. It about ranks there with the realization that selling.JPG files on a website everybody can see isn't going to be a viable business for long. Everybody can just come and duplicate your stuff when you do it like that. But they can't just come and get your server. So there's plenty viable businesses on the web based on selling a service -- subscriptions, server space/resources, etc.
I would argue that such a business was never reliable to begin with.
SL, IMO shows what a world where replication of physical objects would be like. Once duplication is effectively free, you need to switch to providing a service. Instead of making one thing then selling copies, content creators will probably have to adapt and sell customized solutions.
This isn't WoW, in SL the server takes care of pretty much everything, and the client is practically a 3D web browser. The client is already very unresticted as far as MMORPGs go, you can teleport anywhere you want for instance. Of course you can be banned or not allowed to some destination, but changing the client won't change that.
Even without it being open, the libsecondlife people had figured out enough to duplicate in-game objects. This means that very possibly creators of things that aren't scripted are going to get screwed. But this was always a possibility. It was completely obvious somebody would do it within a few days of trying SL, closed or not.
L$ handling is of course server-side, you can't create them out of nowhere. L$ are only created by LL and then exchanged between residents and bought and sold for USD.
SL has a number of problems. One of them is that the client is well, slow. Framerates of 5 FPS aren't entirely uncommon in some areas. Now instead of blindly speculating, we can look at it and actually tell whether it's just badly coded, or the nature of SL makes it work slowly. This will probably also spur some effort in trying to make it take advantage of multicore CPUs.
Another thing to try would be rewriting the UI. It would be a lot less painful to use if the UI and display weren't in sync, so that when things were slow you could still type at a normal speed.
My personal area of interest would be attempting to provide some sort of way to let SL objects provide a better interface. The sort of interface that can be scripted in SL is very primitive as of now. Being able to make an object with a full dialog with buttons, dropdown lists, a list view, etc would really improve the usability of complex objects.
This should also give a big push to the libsecondlife project, which is also a great thing. SL can be used as a platform for interesting things, such as A-Life experiments. That's another thing I plan to try eventually.
On the Linux side, I'd like to see the integration of something like DCOP, or at least a named pipe to communicate with the SL client. For coding it'd be wonderful to run 'make' and have all the modified scripts automatically sent to SL. Currently this requires an edit, copy, paste into SL cycle.
It's completely true about me, which is why I would consider criticizing other people for the same hypocritical. I consider SL and Slashdot to be on about the same level as far as the "filling boring lives" quality goes.
Slashdot Mirror
Possibly the only workaround would be a Perl or a shell script, but the user would have to run it as "perl foo.pl", which is not the normal way of executing a shell script, so it's very unlikely that a GUI would be set up to do that automatically. That could be closed by patching Perl/bash/etc as well.
We only need to send a bunch of weirdos into space and have them clean things up a bit, and problem solved!
I have a firewall, but I don't remember having to open any ports for it. I think it only makes outbound connections, so it should work fine without changing anything.
Regarding your problems, haven't had anything like that happen here. Perhaps you have an ATI card? I heard of problems with them.
BTW, the Windows client ran flawlessly in Wine last time I checked, so if you want to try it, that could avoid having to do a Windows install.
People suggested it multiple times already, but it never gets done, probably because it's complicated.
For example, if you actually compile from source, this is undesirable. If you're compiling from source instead of using your distribution's kernel you probably have some specific reason for it, like wanting to apply a patch. Now what if this patch touches some kernel internals (say, the USB subsystem), and updates multiple drivers? Then applying the patch would fail.
Also, having the full source is a VERY good thing if you just replaced your network card, have no net access, and need to build a new kernel to get it. Then what if you didn't download any other network drivers? Bootstrapping problem there too: if you download drivers, how do you download the modem/network card driver? If you ship those, why not others since they're all in the kernel to start with? Making arbitrary distinctions is strange.
If you use binaries, you again have the same problems. If you have all the drivers installed that takes what, 20MB disk space? And in exchange if you swap the network card, a recent distribution will detect the new one and automatically load it, instead of making you mess with burning a driver CD on some other computer.
Then, Windows has exactly the same behavior! When you connect say, USB speakers (those with an integrated soundcard) they just work, because the driver for them was installed with the OS, even though it was unused at the time. It doesn't ask for the CD, or download anything.
Basically, making it download drivers is just more complication, extra things that can go wrong and less user friendliness in exchange for just a few MB of disk space, which doesn't amount to anything noticeable on a disk bought in the last 5 years anyway. Now if you're for some bizarre reason still booting Linux from a floppy, or work on something embedded that runs on 8MB of flash, then this makes sense, but that's a very uncommon situation.
Bullshit.
1. It works. Everything but video works fine. Sure, it crashes once in a while, but so does the Windows one, so I don't think that's specific to the Linux version.
2. I have modified the source, and connected to the main grid using the compiled client.
Regarding whether they accept patches, not 100% sure there, but the latest version compiles on GCC 4.1 when the first releases didn't. It looks like they integrated fixes people made for that.
Which I do.
That would be the reason why I don't have any Apple hardware, but do have a MP3 player that works as a completely standard USB storage device.
It also has the amazing innovation of having screws I can remove to change the battery, should it be required.
In SL the map shows objects on the land. People used that to create pictures and ads visible on the map. For example:
8 /8 /
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Palomarian/128/128/12
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Omidyar/128/128/128/
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Clementina/128/128/12
These are usually made by using large colored blocks high in the air, so they can't be seen from the ground.
Unless you mean memory (where things don't look good ATM, as they seem to be expanding bandwidth but at the cost of adding latency), you might want to consider a flash drive.
Flash has the advantage of having no seek latency, so even though I think current flash drives are slower than a hard disk as far as raw read/write speed is concerned, the seek latency cripples performance so much that a flash drive should be a massive improvement for most tasks. Most people don't do things like continously reading or writing data to disk, so eliminating latency would be a huge improvement.
That's complete nonsense.
There are basically two options here:
1. Antivirus hooks into the OS, and scans every program BEFORE it gets executed. In that case, the scanner's priority doesn't matter, it gets run before the program starts anyway.
2. You run the antivirus scanning every file on disk, as a normal process. This would be what the priority adjustments affect, but doing things this way you can't really detect a new virus in real time. You can just find it during the scan, and the priority only determines how fast it will proceed when something else wants CPU time.
Did Feynman really mean that?
I've heard that somebody did a study of whether chewing gum of different sorts produces a measurable effect on an EEG. The result was that no, it doesn't. That's what I think Feynman meant: they had a hypothesis, and very scientifically determined the experiment was a failure, but still should be published, if only to add to the information about what shows up on an EEG and what doesn't.
Now, in my understanding, peer review is to tell apart things that are well researched from things that aren't. The above should pass peer review and be published: Even though the result was negative it was still good research. On the other hand, I don't think Feynman was saying that any crap anybody makes up should be published as well. Research with a negative result has value, while plain nonsense adds nothing useful and is with all likehood damaging.
There's the "copybot", which can duplicate objects. But it can only duplicate what you see. This means that scripts, contents of objects, etc can't be duplicated automatically.
Simple objects (avatars, buildings) are vulnerable to this, but many others aren't. For example vehicles consist of a shape which you can duplicate, and a set of scripts that makes it move that you can't. So you could copy the vehicle's shape but that wouldn't work as a vehicle, so you'd have to script it. Depending on what the scripts do, it could be a lot easier to just buy it.
Duplication by hand is difficult. Some things you can buy in-world are complex, with thousands of lines of code tuned over a long time for a particular purpose.
Sure, IF you're a coder, and IF you have a lot of time, you could spend say, 2 weeks remaking something. But that thing sells for maybe $10. Is it worth your time as a programmer to spend 70 hours of work to avoid buying a $10 item?
The same way, in the real world I could grow my own potatoes. But most people don't, for the simple reason that often buying stuff from somebody else who dedicates to it on a large scale is much easier and cheaper than doing it yourself.
SL has scarcity of a kind. Boxes in SL are everywhere. Custom made things are scarce.
People in SL won't abandon the economy for a "FOSS approach", and I say that as an OSS advocate myself.
The thing is that no real cash would actually make SL a less impressive place. Let's suppose you want for whatever reason to look like your RL self. Right now you can hire an artist who will tell you what sort of photos they want of you, and will then create textures and clothes in the right shape. They get cash, and you get to look like yourself.
On the other hand, who will bother with that in a pure "FOSS" environment? It's tedious work. The same way, OSS does badly in areas like accounting packages. Working on the kernel is interesting. Writing code for dealing with some obscure tax regulation is boring. Making some random guy's nose look just right is boring.
Yes, people can and do release all sorts of things for free. Say, avatars. But who wants to be cybergoth #12342? All of them would look exactly the same. If you want to look unique there are only two things you can do: make it yourself (which is hard unless you're skilled), or get somebody else to make it. And so far we haven't come up with a better way to motivate people to make custom stuff than paying them for it.
It's very possible to make money in SL. But of course taking it as a stock market is stupid. What sells in SL is services.
SL is simply an environment capable of connecting buyer to seller. You provide a service: drawing a custom picture, making a custom script, building something, the buyer provides the cash. This way of doing things simply CAN'T be a pyramid scheme.
Banking in SL is stupid - that I can agree with. People in SL simply aren't patient enough to handle a sane interest rate. Most people work with amounts like $5 USD, which they consider significant. Only maybe 1% of all people in SL works with amounts of money where a 5% interest would amount to something. So SL banks offer really insane interests, possibly operating as a Ponzi scheme. I haven't used any SL banks, but my feeling is that they're very unreliable.
Calling all of the SL economy a pyramid scheme is bullshit though. If you act as a scripter/artist/builder for hire you can make some money without problems. Build something pretty, put it on sale, and if people buy it, you get cash.
Now, indeed, you won't get rich in SL very easily. Earning say, $10 or $20 in SL is easy. Earning something approaching a real income is very, very hard. It'll take dedication, an impressive quality (there's tons of competition), selling things much below what they'd cost in the real world (meaning, what you get per hour of scripting is probably noticeably below what you can get per hour of coding in your country). Through all of it, you'll have to be your own programmer, marketing department and businessman, because involving any more people makes it even less profitable. Through all of that you have to contend with that everything in SL is intangible. With no materials other than perhaps hosting costs for things that require external servers, anything you offer for cash, somebody else could offer for free.
Now, despite all this, I'll say that selling things in SL can be a very nice experience, despite the low income you get from it. At least for me personally having something I made byself get used by several hundred people and personally hearing feedback gives a much nicer feeling than being a faceless drone in a corporation, even though the corporation pays a lot better.
It's backwards compatible to the OS.
Any OS that supported PCI supports PCI automatically supports PCI Express without any modifications.
The idea of Sealand is that it's supposed to be its own country (which is not assured). If you buy an island that's definitely going to still belong to some other country.
The satellites you'd use to link it to the internet would be owned by somebody else and could be convinced to take the connection down.
Also, an island is geographically fixed, so once all the practical ways to connect to it are taken down (satellite, links from neighbouring places), it's pretty much over.
IMO, the advantage of having a satellite take care of it is that it can bypass the internet completely, letting people connect to it directly (ideally it would be compatible with dishes available to consumers used for some other purpose).
Also, shooting down a satellite is probably a lot more complicated than blowing up Sealand, and if say, China could be convinced to lanuch it, America trying to shoot it down would be an international incident.
With that price, couldn't they do something better with the money?
For that amount of cash they could probably launch a satellite. Now that's an idea -- how about trackers in the sky people can connect to by pointing an antenna to it? Since you'd have to aim at the satellite, it'd be very unlikely that somebody could snoop on the communication, and the precise location of the users could be unknown.
At least, unlike with Sealand, anybody with the right equipment could connect to it, without having to rely on other countries not cutting the connection to it.
Or perhaps IBM is doing it out of need, not because they consider it the ideal situation.
For example, you can at the same time spend a lot on home security and lobby the government to solve the crime problem. Security solves the problem now, but that doesn't mean you wouldn't prefer not to need it at all.
So perhaps they patent so much because in the current situation it's what makes the most sense, but would prefer not to have to.
Exactly, so people went and did just that.
Changing the API was what the hacking consisted of. There's only so much you can improve while keeping everything looking the same.
Sure you can make money in SL.
.JPG files on a website everybody can see isn't going to be a viable business for long. Everybody can just come and duplicate your stuff when you do it like that. But they can't just come and get your server. So there's plenty viable businesses on the web based on selling a service -- subscriptions, server space/resources, etc.
For example, take Anshe Chung, who I'm fairly sure doesn't give a damn about the copybot.
Heavily scripted objects aren't affected either. Copybot can only copy the shape , which is completely pointless for various tools that consist of an object or two, and then several thousands lines of code.
Services are also unaffected - there are people who will make you a custom avatar, scripters and builders for hire, etc.
Copybot was really not much of a revelation. It about ranks there with the realization that selling
I would argue that such a business was never reliable to begin with.
SL, IMO shows what a world where replication of physical objects would be like. Once duplication is effectively free, you need to switch to providing a service. Instead of making one thing then selling copies, content creators will probably have to adapt and sell customized solutions.
What music? SL has no music of its own. If the area has that set, the client streams music from the configured shoutcast server.
SL client doesn't really need to be protected.
This isn't WoW, in SL the server takes care of pretty much everything, and the client is practically a 3D web browser. The client is already very unresticted as far as MMORPGs go, you can teleport anywhere you want for instance. Of course you can be banned or not allowed to some destination, but changing the client won't change that.
Even without it being open, the libsecondlife people had figured out enough to duplicate in-game objects. This means that very possibly creators of things that aren't scripted are going to get screwed. But this was always a possibility. It was completely obvious somebody would do it within a few days of trying SL, closed or not.
L$ handling is of course server-side, you can't create them out of nowhere. L$ are only created by LL and then exchanged between residents and bought and sold for USD.
SL has a number of problems. One of them is that the client is well, slow. Framerates of 5 FPS aren't entirely uncommon in some areas. Now instead of blindly speculating, we can look at it and actually tell whether it's just badly coded, or the nature of SL makes it work slowly. This will probably also spur some effort in trying to make it take advantage of multicore CPUs.
Another thing to try would be rewriting the UI. It would be a lot less painful to use if the UI and display weren't in sync, so that when things were slow you could still type at a normal speed.
My personal area of interest would be attempting to provide some sort of way to let SL objects provide a better interface. The sort of interface that can be scripted in SL is very primitive as of now. Being able to make an object with a full dialog with buttons, dropdown lists, a list view, etc would really improve the usability of complex objects.
This should also give a big push to the libsecondlife project, which is also a great thing. SL can be used as a platform for interesting things, such as A-Life experiments. That's another thing I plan to try eventually.
On the Linux side, I'd like to see the integration of something like DCOP, or at least a named pipe to communicate with the SL client. For coding it'd be wonderful to run 'make' and have all the modified scripts automatically sent to SL. Currently this requires an edit, copy, paste into SL cycle.
It's completely true about me, which is why I would consider criticizing other people for the same hypocritical. I consider SL and Slashdot to be on about the same level as far as the "filling boring lives" quality goes.