Funny, all those MS fixes that roll out the first Tuesday of every month must have all just been a product of my wild imagination.
They fixed UAC being obnoxious and playing MP3s while networking and glacial file copies and all the other design issues? You don't seem to be grasping the difference between architecture and implementation. People are complaining about Vista's overall design. Other people are complaining about bugs Apple wrote while executing a generally well-respected plan. There's a world of difference.
Obligatory car analogy: I'd rather drive a BMW with a broken tape player than a flawless Pinto. Well, I'd really rather drive the car equivalent of Linux than either of the other two, but that's a different conversation.
P.S. All of you "there has never been a trojan or virus in the wild for OS X" can all all shut up now.
And I don't like cranberries, as long as we're hitting unrelated subjects.
What I have a problem with is when it's Microsoft, everyone is up in arms about how M$ sucks, and when it's Apple everyone's like "it's okay. it's a 1.0 release. they'll fix it."
That's because there's a wide historical gap in what kind of bugs are there and how they're fixed. MS has long been criticized for basic design flaws that may or may not be fixed when a service pack rolls out a year or so later. Apple tends to have bugs along the lines of "Mail.app's spam filter gives false negatives in this corner case because we accidentally used an int instead of a float in this function", and most of them are usually fixed when a service pack rolls out a few weeks later.
If every application was well-behaved and stored that file in $appdir/etc/ it would be utterly clear to everyone that it was part of that specific application.
And the tradeoff is that you have to add/usr to your backups because 512KB on that 8GB partition is now local-created data and not easily recreated by a reinstall. Also forget mounting/usr read-only for security purposes.
The problem is that you can't say "gibibyte" without sounding like a fucking tool.:)
Amen! Did they get a committee together to come up with the absolutely stupidest sounding name possible? It almost seems like deliberate sabotage. If they'd given us something like "ninjabytes" or "megapirates", then "kilobytes" would be about as cool and current as "cyber" and not even the most dogged Slashdotter would be defending it.
SI units have been around a lot longer than computers have, and just because a few come-lately computer nerds have started abusing and misusing SI units, is no reason to drop their real meaning.
Or you could accept that RAM isn't measured in SI units. Why is that so important to you? Do you anticipated converting from liters to bits some day, or words per kilonewton?
Life is complicated, especially the technical parts. Unless you also propose to redefine data transmission rates like 100mbps ethernet and 150mbps SATA all your proposal does is rearrange the deck chairs.
On a Mac, i believe you can get the Quicktime engine to have all the codecs you'll ever need by installing the free open source package Perian and the free (closed source) Flip4Mac WMV, which covers the last few.
Thanks! Please excuse me while I go download these codecs.
Therefore, if you have to trust someone to provide you with binaries for the initial software load, are they suddenly not trustworthy enough to provide you with binaries for security updates?
My point exactly. Thank you for saying it so clearly.
You're seriously underestimating the work involved. An OpenBSD release covers around a dozen machine architectures: one donated Pentium won't cut it.
I mentioned earlier that it'd be for the most popular couple of architectures. We already do this at my company for our OpenBSD machines: maintain an old beater that does nothing but track changes to -stable and package them for other local machines. It'd just be nice if there were an official parallel.
before you even start on the non-trivial amounts of time (necessarily that of a trusted developer) to prepare and test things out.
Seriously, though, why would it take more testing than rolling out just the patches? If I have foo.c and its resulting foo, and you give me foo.patch, both of us should end up with bit-identical new copies of foo afterward. Why not just give me foo so that it only has to be built on one machine instead of a million?
Copy that tarball to the website for mass downloading.
It is also generally considered a stock response that an administrator should be doing the patches, so that they understand what's happening in their machine.
I don't know what's on the machine in the first place beyond what the OpenBSD folks said is there; I certainly haven't audited it myself. At any rate, the output of
# cd/; tar xvzf/tmp/binarypatch009.tar.gz
on the machine being patched is a lot more grokable for most people than the output of a long patch/compile/install session.
I'm not saying that my way is "right", but it just seems like an easy step that would be greatly appreciated by a huge amount of people who otherwise just ignore patches until the next release comes along.
With 'ls', at least, you can skip a step. Replace:
alias ls='gls --color=always'
with:
alias ls='ls -G'
What GNU extensions to you use to 'cp' and 'mv' so often to alias them? In a decade of using Linux and FreeBSD interchangeably, I've never noticed a significant difference in those very basic tools.
One thing I never really figured out with OpenBSD is why errata patches are handled the way they are. Why doesn't OpenBSD offer binary updates? For example, here are the instructions to fix errata entry 009 ("Fix possible heap overflow in file(1), aka CVE-2007-1536."):
Apply by doing: cd/usr/src patch -p0 < 009_file.patch
And then rebuild and install file: cd usr.bin/file make obj make cleandir make depend make make install
Given that I installed from binary packages as do most users, and I might not even have a compiler installed, the startup cost of following those steps is fairly substantial. It seems like it would be easier for someone at OpenBSD to run those commands, see which files changed, wrap them up into a tarball, and distribute those - at least for the most popular architecture or two.
Now, I'm not saying they should do this or that they owe it to us end users to do it. I just mean that it'd be amazingly convenient with a seemingly minimal amount of extra work. Am I wrong about what would be involved?
*OR*, I've got a better idea: STFU on speaking authoritatively on topics you know next to nothing about. It's not about USER ABILITY. It's about USER NEEDS with regards to their JOB FUNCTION with COSTS calculated in. That's the companys call. Not mine. Absolutely not yours.
I'm an IT advisor. Our company is growing by leaps and bounds and our employees are happy and productive. The company's call seems to be that I'm better at the job than you are.
BUT, try telling Bob the luddite he can't use thunderbird (something he may have never used, but likes the way it looks) when Lennie The Linux Master two desks down is running pine!
You tell Bob that Lennie was hired because he knows how to do these things and to mind his own business from now on. You tell Lennie that you officially support Outlook or whatever and that you can't and won't help him with anything else. Grow a spine and let Bob and Lennie know what's expected of them and leave it at that.
If you can't do that, then the problem is that you suck at management and compensate by inflicting a uniform mediocrity. If you read Harrison Bergeron as a kid, did you find it scary or exciting?
The problem is that deletionism is viewed as an acceptable way of doing things, which is intrinsically flawed due to capricious and arbitrary notability standards.
From the page of a guy who is trying to delete a page I'm interested in:
My Mission
The English Wikipedia has over 2,000,000 articles. That's absurd. Anyone who even glances at the notability policy will immediately realize that there are clearly not that many notable subjects in existence. There is so much crap on here that it makes my head spin. As such, my goal here is too remove all garbage from Wikipedia. I enjoy tagging articles and participating in AFDs and I am strongly against all forms of cruftery.
What a son of a bitch. "I am", says he, "more qualified than you to judge what belongs." Doctorfluffy, kiss my ass, you self-appointed keeper of the One True Way. Your opinion counts for no more than mine or anyone else. I know it's easier to destroy than to create, but I can't imagine bragging about it any more than I'd brag about torturing puppies.
I also teach them about expose, and after I give them some pointers about it they realize it's more than just flashy crap.
I'm asking sincerely: what's so great about Expose? How is it substantially better than alt-tab and alt-` switching? I've started using a Mac recently since I got a great deal on a used one, and I'm still adjusting to it. I can see how zoom-vs-maximize makes sense and I'm starting to like it. I just haven't "gotten" Expose yet. What do you, personally, like about it?
I think the nominator summed up his/her rationale for deletion quite well: "Unlikely reliable sources can be found to indicate notability. Fails WP:FICT."
But that one requirement basically removes all discussion of creative works. The "reliable source" is often the movie or TV show or book that an article is written about, and if that's removed as a citable source, then you might as well start deleting.
But, if you start going through the new pages created every day, you'll realize why "notability" is so important. People keep creating articles on all sorts of things -- the band they formed in school yesterday, their pet cat, the 10-minute flash movie they created today and uploaded to YouTube...
And this is bad because...? The Beatles were once a newly-formed band. Wouldn't it be historically interesting to read an article written about them during that first week?
Consider an analogy: you are a Reddit user who submits a story about Ron Paul. It doesn't make to the front page because several people mod it down
The word encyclopedia comes from the Classical Greek " " (pronounced "enkyklios paideia"), literally, a "[well-]rounded education," meaning "general knowledge."
Reddit and Digg are fairly narrow in scope. An encyclopedia should not be, particularly when there are no physical limitations saying that it doesn't need to be. The Encyclopædia_Britannica was formed in a time when it needed to be physically transportable. Wikipedia was formed in a time when storing and transmitting human-consumable text is almost trivially easy. The same standards need not apply to both of them.
I watched 28 Days Later a few days ago and then read its article on Wikipedia. I was intrigued by the virus in the movie and noticed that its article needed a little cleaning up, so I did so. Oh well. They decided that it's just fanfiction and now it's marked for deletion.
OK, so it's just an unimportant article about a fictional virus, but darn it, I found it interesting reading to the point that I wanted to add to it. I'm a Republican and not interested in the Democratic candidates next year; maybe I should delete their article. Baseball is just a game; delete. I'm not Catholic - gotta go. I like turtles all the way down, so dark matter can bite it.
My point is that everyone values and takes interest in different things. If it's not costing Wikipedia a lot to host minor pages on diverse subjects, then why not? Part of that huge diversity is what made Wikipedia popular. You'd think they'd heard of the network effect and the long tail.
At any rate, they can delete the article I like if they want, but if they're still going to ask for my money afterward, they can bite me. Incidentally, that last article is the plot summary of an episode of a non-mainstream TV show. Hope I didn't draw the attention of the delete-happy admins.
Now that we have DVRs that can record and store a hundred hours or more of programming, I simply set it to record the best shows and then watch them whenever I feel like watching TV.
Exactly. That old concept of putting a lame-but-expensive show behind a popular one in hopes that people will forget to turn the channel is D-E-A-D dead. I record "Psych" (from USA, I think), "My Name Is Earl" (maybe NBC?), "The Office" (no idea), "House" (Fox) and "Bones" (CBS?). I don't know what night they're on. I don't know what station they're on. I have no freakin' clue what time they're on. All I know is that when I turn on my TV, there's usually something recorded that I want to watch.
I don't have an magical ideas about how Zucker et al can profit off that, but I honestly don't care. I'm not going back.
This is why the UI encourages users to keep windows to whatever size they need, and maintains a very "multitasking" feel by removing a simple way to shove a window over all available pixels.
Mildly OT: is there a way to get this effect in KDE? I liked maximizing apps and using virtual desktops to switch among them until I got a 22" monitor, and now that's way too large to comfortably use most apps in fullscreen mode. For example, reading a web page that wide would tire my eyes in a matter of a few minutes.
HerbieHancock - automated music librarian that tags 99% of your music as "pop crap" and deletes it. Also detects audiophile owners and scrubs their drives (to give them "more danceable sound").
Slashdot Mirror
They fixed UAC being obnoxious and playing MP3s while networking and glacial file copies and all the other design issues? You don't seem to be grasping the difference between architecture and implementation. People are complaining about Vista's overall design. Other people are complaining about bugs Apple wrote while executing a generally well-respected plan. There's a world of difference.
Obligatory car analogy: I'd rather drive a BMW with a broken tape player than a flawless Pinto. Well, I'd really rather drive the car equivalent of Linux than either of the other two, but that's a different conversation.
P.S. All of you "there has never been a trojan or virus in the wild for OS X" can all all shut up now.And I don't like cranberries, as long as we're hitting unrelated subjects.
That's because there's a wide historical gap in what kind of bugs are there and how they're fixed. MS has long been criticized for basic design flaws that may or may not be fixed when a service pack rolls out a year or so later. Apple tends to have bugs along the lines of "Mail.app's spam filter gives false negatives in this corner case because we accidentally used an int instead of a float in this function", and most of them are usually fixed when a service pack rolls out a few weeks later.
And the tradeoff is that you have to add /usr to your backups because 512KB on that 8GB partition is now local-created data and not easily recreated by a reinstall. Also forget mounting /usr read-only for security purposes.
Amen! Did they get a committee together to come up with the absolutely stupidest sounding name possible? It almost seems like deliberate sabotage. If they'd given us something like "ninjabytes" or "megapirates", then "kilobytes" would be about as cool and current as "cyber" and not even the most dogged Slashdotter would be defending it.
Gibibyte. Wow.
Or you could accept that RAM isn't measured in SI units. Why is that so important to you? Do you anticipated converting from liters to bits some day, or words per kilonewton?
...says the guy with a 100millibit/s NIC.
Thanks! Please excuse me while I go download these codecs.
Oh, wait...
My point exactly. Thank you for saying it so clearly.
I mentioned earlier that it'd be for the most popular couple of architectures. We already do this at my company for our OpenBSD machines: maintain an old beater that does nothing but track changes to -stable and package them for other local machines. It'd just be nice if there were an official parallel.
before you even start on the non-trivial amounts of time (necessarily that of a trusted developer) to prepare and test things out.Seriously, though, why would it take more testing than rolling out just the patches? If I have foo.c and its resulting foo, and you give me foo.patch, both of us should end up with bit-identical new copies of foo afterward. Why not just give me foo so that it only has to be built on one machine instead of a million?
I don't really know if Theo is the one who compiled the ISO I just downloaded and installed, either. At some point there's a leap of trust.
Assuming FreeBSD's tools with a few options over OpenBSD's for simplicity:
- On release day, do a clean install onto a donated Pentium set aside for such a purpose.
- When a patch comes out, follow its instructions.
- Run:
- Copy that tarball to the website for mass downloading.
It is also generally considered a stock response that an administrator should be doing the patches, so that they understand what's happening in their machine.I don't know what's on the machine in the first place beyond what the OpenBSD folks said is there; I certainly haven't audited it myself. At any rate, the output of
on the machine being patched is a lot more grokable for most people than the output of a long patch/compile/install session.I'm not saying that my way is "right", but it just seems like an easy step that would be greatly appreciated by a huge amount of people who otherwise just ignore patches until the next release comes along.
With 'ls', at least, you can skip a step. Replace:
with:
What GNU extensions to you use to 'cp' and 'mv' so often to alias them? In a decade of using Linux and FreeBSD interchangeably, I've never noticed a significant difference in those very basic tools.
One thing I never really figured out with OpenBSD is why errata patches are handled the way they are. Why doesn't OpenBSD offer binary updates? For example, here are the instructions to fix errata entry 009 ("Fix possible heap overflow in file(1), aka CVE-2007-1536."):
Given that I installed from binary packages as do most users, and I might not even have a compiler installed, the startup cost of following those steps is fairly substantial. It seems like it would be easier for someone at OpenBSD to run those commands, see which files changed, wrap them up into a tarball, and distribute those - at least for the most popular architecture or two.
Now, I'm not saying they should do this or that they owe it to us end users to do it. I just mean that it'd be amazingly convenient with a seemingly minimal amount of extra work. Am I wrong about what would be involved?
I'm an IT advisor. Our company is growing by leaps and bounds and our employees are happy and productive. The company's call seems to be that I'm better at the job than you are.
You tell Bob that Lennie was hired because he knows how to do these things and to mind his own business from now on. You tell Lennie that you officially support Outlook or whatever and that you can't and won't help him with anything else. Grow a spine and let Bob and Lennie know what's expected of them and leave it at that.
If you can't do that, then the problem is that you suck at management and compensate by inflicting a uniform mediocrity. If you read Harrison Bergeron as a kid, did you find it scary or exciting?
From the page of a guy who is trying to delete a page I'm interested in:
What a son of a bitch. "I am", says he, "more qualified than you to judge what belongs." Doctorfluffy, kiss my ass, you self-appointed keeper of the One True Way. Your opinion counts for no more than mine or anyone else. I know it's easier to destroy than to create, but I can't imagine bragging about it any more than I'd brag about torturing puppies.
I'm asking sincerely: what's so great about Expose? How is it substantially better than alt-tab and alt-` switching? I've started using a Mac recently since I got a great deal on a used one, and I'm still adjusting to it. I can see how zoom-vs-maximize makes sense and I'm starting to like it. I just haven't "gotten" Expose yet. What do you, personally, like about it?
Correction: that's "Office Open XML", so named by it's owner, Microsoft, for the sole purpose of confusing people.
But that one requirement basically removes all discussion of creative works. The "reliable source" is often the movie or TV show or book that an article is written about, and if that's removed as a citable source, then you might as well start deleting.
But, if you start going through the new pages created every day, you'll realize why "notability" is so important. People keep creating articles on all sorts of things -- the band they formed in school yesterday, their pet cat, the 10-minute flash movie they created today and uploaded to YouTube...And this is bad because...? The Beatles were once a newly-formed band. Wouldn't it be historically interesting to read an article written about them during that first week?
Consider an analogy: you are a Reddit user who submits a story about Ron Paul. It doesn't make to the front page because several people mod it downReddit does not claim to be an encyclopedia. The definition in Wikipedia says:
Reddit and Digg are fairly narrow in scope. An encyclopedia should not be, particularly when there are no physical limitations saying that it doesn't need to be. The Encyclopædia_Britannica was formed in a time when it needed to be physically transportable. Wikipedia was formed in a time when storing and transmitting human-consumable text is almost trivially easy. The same standards need not apply to both of them.
I watched 28 Days Later a few days ago and then read its article on Wikipedia. I was intrigued by the virus in the movie and noticed that its article needed a little cleaning up, so I did so. Oh well. They decided that it's just fanfiction and now it's marked for deletion.
OK, so it's just an unimportant article about a fictional virus, but darn it, I found it interesting reading to the point that I wanted to add to it. I'm a Republican and not interested in the Democratic candidates next year; maybe I should delete their article. Baseball is just a game; delete. I'm not Catholic - gotta go. I like turtles all the way down, so dark matter can bite it.
My point is that everyone values and takes interest in different things. If it's not costing Wikipedia a lot to host minor pages on diverse subjects, then why not? Part of that huge diversity is what made Wikipedia popular. You'd think they'd heard of the network effect and the long tail.
At any rate, they can delete the article I like if they want, but if they're still going to ask for my money afterward, they can bite me. Incidentally, that last article is the plot summary of an episode of a non-mainstream TV show. Hope I didn't draw the attention of the delete-happy admins.
Exactly. That old concept of putting a lame-but-expensive show behind a popular one in hopes that people will forget to turn the channel is D-E-A-D dead. I record "Psych" (from USA, I think), "My Name Is Earl" (maybe NBC?), "The Office" (no idea), "House" (Fox) and "Bones" (CBS?). I don't know what night they're on. I don't know what station they're on. I have no freakin' clue what time they're on. All I know is that when I turn on my TV, there's usually something recorded that I want to watch.
I don't have an magical ideas about how Zucker et al can profit off that, but I honestly don't care. I'm not going back.
Mildly OT: is there a way to get this effect in KDE? I liked maximizing apps and using virtual desktops to switch among them until I got a 22" monitor, and now that's way too large to comfortably use most apps in fullscreen mode. For example, reading a web page that wide would tire my eyes in a matter of a few minutes.
Don't forget:
So I can swap bricks for hard drives.
Posted anonymously for obvious reasons.
...for certain values of "cut" that overlap with "increase, but not as much as requested".