Re:Most of you are missing the point.
on
OS X
·
· Score: 3
I have to disagree. Truth is that I've been a rabid Linux and UNIX user for years, spending many of them programming Motif under CDE...
As a user who's been through many unices and been heartbroken by all the UIs it's been through, I could really see OS X being my final home. I enjoy the antialiased graphics in all my applications. I enjoy the built in UI. I enjoy the general low pain-in-the-ass factor that I have with either UNIX or Windows when it comes to software installation, hardware installation, or any other maintanence task.
Apache is pre-installed. I installed PHP and mysql within ten minutes, and am fully up & running. GCC 2.95.2 comes on the development CD, and project builder's got a fairly nice editor. I installed bash 2 and vim 5.7, and I can't say I've ever been this comfortable on any other computer in my life.
Sure, customizing the windowmanager of the week (and I've been through it all when it was actually like that back when fvwm95 was the rage) is fun for a while, but I have SHIT TO DO. The biggest attribute I must give many people who need to customize X to the very limits, who need to install 400 themes, or any other truly useless overtweaking activity is TOO MUCH TIME ON THEIR HANDS.
Armed with a shell prompt and the easiest to use GUI I've ever known on UNIX (because Mac OS X is a UNIX, remember that!), I've never been happier.
And, the fact that I don't have to put up with the PC architecture's completely fucked up hardware is wonderful. A 64bit cpu that does up to 4 GFLOPS is wonderful in my mind. I enjoy not using an interrupt controller dated to 1979 (yes, I know all about the APICs, but how many devices use the little fuckers?).
Also remember that macs have a longer lifetime than PC hardware. A pentium is barely usable, while a normal powermac is fine under OS 9. Sure alot of macs will be obsoleted by OS X, but many still run OS 8 or 7.x with glee. All that an old linux box really says is "router."
So, before everyone goes off into their non-linux tirade, ask yourself, what are you in it for? A quick reaction to show your 3733+3ness, or a genuine love for a good every day use & programming environment?
One of the biggest plusses now is that your grandmother (no, not the one that sends patches to Alan Cox, the other one) will probably most likely use UNIX with you:-)
Rich Boucher is my representative. Actually, he's been listed as one of the most influential people on the internet, right up there with Tim Berners Lee. I've sent him a few emails about several slashdot topics and he's always had a real reason for fighting things like the DMCA -- for the benefit of his constituents. Hell even the republicans down here vote for him.
This is obviously an attempt at a Linux killer. The UNIX workstation market is getting creamed by linux on PC hardware, so they're lowering the inflation rate on their own hardware in an effort to bring people back to solaris from Linux.
Simple. Corporations have the ability to control who gets elected. They have the power to provide one representative the funding necessary to run a campaign. This leverage is very powerful and effective.
So, the rich have the power to control who gets elected. They can buy their representatives of choice a seat in the congress. So, what does this mean?
Government control is a freely traded commodity.
As for positive rights, its a hack. Its a way of helping those people who the system has screwed over from day 1. Dont believe that since your 711 has a help wanted sign that everyone without a job is a deadbeat. How do they get to work? Where do they sleep? How many employers hire homeless people? Oh, and lets not forget that the majority of the people Americans enslaved by law during its beginning are still enslaved by the economy. God forbid we try to help them out.
Hmm, when did slashdot start taking over for freshmeat? I though they were the ones listing new software releases. Perhaps part of a hostile
takeover within the andover ranks?
Not to mention that a large part of the cold war
mission of the intelligence community is to prevent foreign industrial espionage, in which case a (more) secure operating system is directly
in line with their goals.
What userland protection helps is stability ; less code that can deref a bad pointer, etc. What it can't help is the quality of the code. At the end of the day, an attempted attack will try to make the code make the wrong decision; i.e. allow something to happen that shouldn't have, or do something that is shouldn't have. That has nothing to do with whether or not it causes a segfault somewhere else.
Although some attacks could make monolithic kernel code do something to other code segments somewhere else, it really isn't all that likely or often used. Attacks tend to be against making code call the wrong routine, set a variable the wrong way, etc. That stuff can't be helped with microkernels.
Sorry, all microkernels are really good for are (1) loadable features (no recompiling), (2) crash protection. But, they do the traditional tradeoff of speed for it (multiple context switches for a single system call, etc.).
But, anyone else get the feeling that a good portion of the questions Theo did respond to were all asking the same thing: what common errors do you end up fixing? Not a horrible question to answer by far. Sure you could say 'bad code,' but a list of good examples of security-critical mistakes are far more helpful.
My first reaction was to the ideas of the invisible ruler (i'm not quoting here); where he rules without force. That to me sounds very libertarian.
But, they're not trying to be true anarchists either, sticking with property and the like. Libertarians are one of the least of the evils in the list of available presidential choices...
Hmm, sounds like he's trying to get it off our ass to me...
I think the basic point of his statement is that people live better with less government interference. The Tao Te Ching describes the ideas pretty well.
I must agree that register.com is much more useful. I've got 4 domains I manage with them, and I can have them set up within minutes and everthing's up & running by their cache update every 24 hours.
NSI needs a smack or fifty across the face. Perhaps with a large blunt metal object, like a fire extinguisher...
I've had one name registered with them for nearly a year now and have yet to get it up and running. I have no problems with anyone suing NSI.
Fools must have decided to protect all their root nameservers by sequentially shoving them up their ass.
I'm not a big perl weenie, but it takes alot for people to try to buy you out of your employer. Anyone have any pointers to show what this dude has done?
Btw, is use Perl using the slashdot code directly or is it a damn good copy?
Yeap, MicroSoft dishes out bugs.. RedHat dishes out bugs... This must be a conspiracy!!!!!!!!
Grow up.
People make mistakes. They're fixing this one BEFORE it can hit people: RH7 released 2 weeks ago, bug hits in 3 weeks.. 1 week to apply the fix.
The only complaint I have about RH7 is putting a beta compiler into a production environment, but that's just one decision, best described by a brain fart. Other than that, they've been doing a decent job.
Obviously someone's hand got sore so they have to find other ways to vent their various frustrations...
well my rude friend, you forget the culture-shock.
People in the U.S. (well some people in the U.S.) fight the system with lawyers. It's an accepted and expected way for people to fight for themselves.
In other countries, such as India, the government is corrupt and static; there is no way to change what's being done to you without paying someone off. As there's no way to pay off someone in the U.S. directly (except for campaign financing, illegal here!), there's really no choice left for people coming from that culture.
Say it with me: PEOPLE FROM DIFFERENT PLACES LIVE DIFFERENTLY. Like why we don't show nudity on TV here, yet the rest of the world could care less. It really doesn't hurt anybody, but this is a big issue in the states. Somehow here the natural state of the human being is polluting to the child's mind.
Umm, unless you want to rewrite at least glib, gtk, and qt, and probably a good portion of most applications, you really can't just port everything away from X.
Yeah, if we could just get C# working on linux, we can get rid of libc!!
Sheesh dude. ALL of our kde & gnome software is based on Xlib calls. DEAR GOD MAN. Unless all the underlying abstractions are INSANELY similar, rewriting those libs for displayPDF will be truly painful.
Besides, I LIKE X. It's pretty good at what it does, honestly. Of course, I liked Motif and CDE, but that's just me. I was one of the few who paid for a GUI back in the day (RedHat 4, slackware, back when fvwm95 was the big thing) and it ran fine for me. I might still run it if my copy wasn't all libc5:-)
But, there are things to be learned from CDE. It was designed to be very managable from central administration. It really did use the power of X; at least in design.. the implementation had some real problems. But that's politics of the era which makes sense.
Oh, and Motif programming isn't really that bad!! Sheesh, I still code GUIs in motif. Sorry, but I haven't found equal documentation for either QT or GTK.
Please people, let's give the Open Group A LITTLE BIT OF CREDIT. They're not another microsoft. They are just people from all the big UNIX vendors trying to get something made through all the chaos.. they didn't have the unified Linux platform (it's pretty damn unified in contrast folks... distro wars aren't really that bad) that we have now. And they didn't work for the home user first; these were industrial strength professional systems; "prettyness" wasn't too high on the agenda. Motif is damn usable. Complain all you want about dtwm, but it was pretty damn good for its time.
CDE even included hyperlinked multimedia (this means text+graphics) help before HTML really took off.
In essence, CDE shouldn't be hated or forgotten, but be made a great case study; it has a few features (like ease of administration) which could be made better in gnome & kde. Anyways, lemme get off my soapbox.
Somehow people assume that every clock is 100% accurate and that radio waves travel straight through that large layer of charged particles called the ionosphere.. Try 20 meters.
If you want better than that, go differential.
But, back to the story of the GPS guiding airplanes, I feel inclined to bring out the fact that the airplanes still must use the existing altimeter as GPS is absolutely horrible at altitude. Considering that GPS assumes that the planet is one perfect ellipsoid, one can understand the range of error.
As for europe not wanting to base its airplanes on GPS, that makes perfect sense to me. The reason SA was turned off was because the DoD was able to demonstrate the ability of turning GPS on & off in specific regions. I would rather not like another country having control of whether or not my airplanes can tell where they are.
Nah, one of the really bigass linux news sites linked to it. Hence the large percentage. Honestly, I'd more likely believe that a random user pumped up the win32 platform than msnbc, they've been pretty good about being fair.
But, we do remember the old "grassroots" movement for Win16 against OS/2 on the OS/2 BBSs. I'm sorry but one must also remember that MS really isn't above this childish bullshit.
I have.. "friends".. that are loyal customers of such retailers. They work the same way MS does for its software. They make the entrance easy (cheap upgrades, easy file import, etc) but make leaving extremely hard (incompatibility with standards, shitty file export, etc.)
The first hit is free, after that, the price jacks up. What they do with quantity or more likely cutting the stuff is probably as constant as the price hike. First high-quality free hit to get you hooked, perhaps a few more good quality ones at a given price $n, and then quality-- and n++.
But at some point quality and n become constant as they've hit market values. Drug dealers don't have a monopoly over you, just usually the drug.
Don't you love capitalism? It even keeps the drug dealers honest!!:-)
Problem with solar panels is that they tend to suck.
They're extremely expensive and don't generate much power.
Charging in the parking lot would probably double the price of your car and give you 20 minutes of more drivable range tops. (These numbers are bullshit, but give a good feel for the truth).
The industry is moving towards fuel cell vehicles. LOTS of research in this area. The basic idea is along these lines:
H2 + O2 -> Fuel Cell -> Electric Power -> Electric Motors
The hydrogen's safer than most other fuels because in case of a leak, it dissipates in the atmosphere VERY quickly (molecular weight of 2 and all:-) ). Remember the Hindenburg blew up because the paint on the skin was made of kerosene...
One possible variation of these vehicles includes something called a reformer, which lets the vehicle 'cook' gasoline to extract hydrogen. All the infrastructure of gasoline, all the energy density/range of gasoline, but none of the emissions and much better efficiency.
I've worked on alternative fuels for two years.
Alot of these ideas have some of the same problems:
Infrastructure: You'll have to build massive
refueling stations across the country, build a
whole new industry, and unemploy millions.
Energy density: alot of other, cleaner-burning fuels take much more volume to hold the same amount of energy.
Storage: storing some chemicals can be
hazardous, error-prone, and very volatile in
crashes, etc.
Storing N2 in liquid state in, say, the hot arizona desert at 108 degress is a challenge. Having a system that does all this while still
being crash-safe, low-maintainence, and reliable is fucking hard.
So far, alot of the industry is looking towards
hydrogen fuel cells, hopefully with reformers. Reformers extract the hydrogen out of normal gasoline cleanly, and the fuel cells add ambient oxygen to it to make water: a very acceptable byproduct. Gasoline storage is easy, safe, maintainable, and reliable. The exhaust is pure water. The systems cost is feasable to be near that of cars (+/- $1000).
Slashdot Mirror
As a user who's been through many unices and been heartbroken by all the UIs it's been through, I could really see OS X being my final home. I enjoy the antialiased graphics in all my applications. I enjoy the built in UI. I enjoy the general low pain-in-the-ass factor that I have with either UNIX or Windows when it comes to software installation, hardware installation, or any other maintanence task.
Apache is pre-installed. I installed PHP and mysql within ten minutes, and am fully up & running. GCC 2.95.2 comes on the development CD, and project builder's got a fairly nice editor. I installed bash 2 and vim 5.7, and I can't say I've ever been this comfortable on any other computer in my life.
Sure, customizing the windowmanager of the week (and I've been through it all when it was actually like that back when fvwm95 was the rage) is fun for a while, but I have SHIT TO DO. The biggest attribute I must give many people who need to customize X to the very limits, who need to install 400 themes, or any other truly useless overtweaking activity is TOO MUCH TIME ON THEIR HANDS.
Armed with a shell prompt and the easiest to use GUI I've ever known on UNIX (because Mac OS X is a UNIX, remember that!), I've never been happier.
And, the fact that I don't have to put up with the PC architecture's completely fucked up hardware is wonderful. A 64bit cpu that does up to 4 GFLOPS is wonderful in my mind. I enjoy not using an interrupt controller dated to 1979 (yes, I know all about the APICs, but how many devices use the little fuckers?).
Also remember that macs have a longer lifetime than PC hardware. A pentium is barely usable, while a normal powermac is fine under OS 9. Sure alot of macs will be obsoleted by OS X, but many still run OS 8 or 7.x with glee. All that an old linux box really says is "router."
So, before everyone goes off into their non-linux tirade, ask yourself, what are you in it for? A quick reaction to show your 3733+3ness, or a genuine love for a good every day use & programming environment?
One of the biggest plusses now is that your grandmother (no, not the one that sends patches to Alan Cox, the other one) will probably most likely use UNIX with you :-)
--
--
IMHO, too little, too late.
--
So, the rich have the power to control who gets elected. They can buy their representatives of choice a seat in the congress. So, what does this mean?
Government control is a freely traded commodity.
As for positive rights, its a hack. Its a way of helping those people who the system has screwed over from day 1. Dont believe that since your 711 has a help wanted sign that everyone without a job is a deadbeat. How do they get to work? Where do they sleep? How many employers hire homeless people? Oh, and lets not forget that the majority of the people Americans enslaved by law during its beginning are still enslaved by the economy. God forbid we try to help them out.
--
--
--
--
What userland protection helps is stability ; less code that can deref a bad pointer, etc. What it can't help is the quality of the code. At the end of the day, an attempted attack will try to make the code make the wrong decision; i.e. allow something to happen that shouldn't have, or do something that is shouldn't have. That has nothing to do with whether or not it causes a segfault somewhere else.
Although some attacks could make monolithic kernel code do something to other code segments somewhere else, it really isn't all that likely or often used. Attacks tend to be against making code call the wrong routine, set a variable the wrong way, etc. That stuff can't be helped with microkernels.
Sorry, all microkernels are really good for are (1) loadable features (no recompiling), (2) crash protection. But, they do the traditional tradeoff of speed for it (multiple context switches for a single system call, etc.).
But, anyone else get the feeling that a good portion of the questions Theo did respond to were all asking the same thing: what common errors do you end up fixing? Not a horrible question to answer by far. Sure you could say 'bad code,' but a list of good examples of security-critical mistakes are far more helpful.
--
--
But, they're not trying to be true anarchists either, sticking with property and the like. Libertarians are one of the least of the evils in the list of available presidential choices...
--
I think the basic point of his statement is that people live better with less government interference. The Tao Te Ching describes the ideas pretty well.
--
My only criteria are (1) bandwidth (2) food quality/availability and (3) climate. I hear Brazil is nice...
--
NSI needs a smack or fifty across the face. Perhaps with a large blunt metal object, like a fire extinguisher...
I've had one name registered with them for nearly a year now and have yet to get it up and running. I have no problems with anyone suing NSI.
Fools must have decided to protect all their root nameservers by sequentially shoving them up their ass.
--
Btw, is use Perl using the slashdot code directly or is it a damn good copy?
--
--
Yeap, MicroSoft dishes out bugs.. RedHat dishes out bugs... This must be a conspiracy!!!!!!!!
Grow up.
People make mistakes. They're fixing this one BEFORE it can hit people: RH7 released 2 weeks ago, bug hits in 3 weeks.. 1 week to apply the fix.
The only complaint I have about RH7 is putting a beta compiler into a production environment, but that's just one decision, best described by a brain fart. Other than that, they've been doing a decent job.
Obviously someone's hand got sore so they have to find other ways to vent their various frustrations...
--
People in the U.S. (well some people in the U.S.) fight the system with lawyers. It's an accepted and expected way for people to fight for themselves.
In other countries, such as India, the government is corrupt and static; there is no way to change what's being done to you without paying someone off. As there's no way to pay off someone in the U.S. directly (except for campaign financing, illegal here!), there's really no choice left for people coming from that culture.
Say it with me: PEOPLE FROM DIFFERENT PLACES LIVE DIFFERENTLY. Like why we don't show nudity on TV here, yet the rest of the world could care less. It really doesn't hurt anybody, but this is a big issue in the states. Somehow here the natural state of the human being is polluting to the child's mind.
--
Yeah, if we could just get C# working on linux, we can get rid of libc!!
Sheesh dude. ALL of our kde & gnome software is based on Xlib calls. DEAR GOD MAN. Unless all the underlying abstractions are INSANELY similar, rewriting those libs for displayPDF will be truly painful.
Besides, I LIKE X. It's pretty good at what it does, honestly. Of course, I liked Motif and CDE, but that's just me. I was one of the few who paid for a GUI back in the day (RedHat 4, slackware, back when fvwm95 was the big thing) and it ran fine for me. I might still run it if my copy wasn't all libc5 :-)
But, there are things to be learned from CDE. It was designed to be very managable from central administration. It really did use the power of X; at least in design.. the implementation had some real problems. But that's politics of the era which makes sense.
Oh, and Motif programming isn't really that bad!! Sheesh, I still code GUIs in motif. Sorry, but I haven't found equal documentation for either QT or GTK.
Please people, let's give the Open Group A LITTLE BIT OF CREDIT. They're not another microsoft. They are just people from all the big UNIX vendors trying to get something made through all the chaos.. they didn't have the unified Linux platform (it's pretty damn unified in contrast folks... distro wars aren't really that bad) that we have now. And they didn't work for the home user first; these were industrial strength professional systems; "prettyness" wasn't too high on the agenda. Motif is damn usable. Complain all you want about dtwm, but it was pretty damn good for its time.
CDE even included hyperlinked multimedia (this means text+graphics) help before HTML really took off.
In essence, CDE shouldn't be hated or forgotten, but be made a great case study; it has a few features (like ease of administration) which could be made better in gnome & kde. Anyways, lemme get off my soapbox.
--
Somehow people assume that every clock is 100% accurate and that radio waves travel straight through that large layer of charged particles called the ionosphere.. Try 20 meters.
If you want better than that, go differential.
But, back to the story of the GPS guiding airplanes, I feel inclined to bring out the fact that the airplanes still must use the existing altimeter as GPS is absolutely horrible at altitude. Considering that GPS assumes that the planet is one perfect ellipsoid, one can understand the range of error.
As for europe not wanting to base its airplanes on GPS, that makes perfect sense to me. The reason SA was turned off was because the DoD was able to demonstrate the ability of turning GPS on & off in specific regions. I would rather not like another country having control of whether or not my airplanes can tell where they are.
--
These people were swindled. Congress is screwing over not only the immigrants by the high-tech sector of the US.
--
But, we do remember the old "grassroots" movement for Win16 against OS/2 on the OS/2 BBSs. I'm sorry but one must also remember that MS really isn't above this childish bullshit.
--
The first hit is free, after that, the price jacks up. What they do with quantity or more likely cutting the stuff is probably as constant as the price hike. First high-quality free hit to get you hooked, perhaps a few more good quality ones at a given price $n, and then quality-- and n++.
But at some point quality and n become constant as they've hit market values. Drug dealers don't have a monopoly over you, just usually the drug.
Don't you love capitalism? It even keeps the drug dealers honest!! :-)
--
They're extremely expensive and don't generate much power.
Charging in the parking lot would probably double the price of your car and give you 20 minutes of more drivable range tops. (These numbers are bullshit, but give a good feel for the truth).
--
H2 + O2 -> Fuel Cell -> Electric Power -> Electric Motors
The hydrogen's safer than most other fuels because in case of a leak, it dissipates in the atmosphere VERY quickly (molecular weight of 2 and all :-) ). Remember the Hindenburg blew up because the paint on the skin was made of kerosene...
One possible variation of these vehicles includes something called a reformer, which lets the vehicle 'cook' gasoline to extract hydrogen. All the infrastructure of gasoline, all the energy density/range of gasoline, but none of the emissions and much better efficiency.
--
I've worked on alternative fuels for two years. Alot of these ideas have some of the same problems:
Storing N2 in liquid state in, say, the hot arizona desert at 108 degress is a challenge. Having a system that does all this while still being crash-safe, low-maintainence, and reliable is fucking hard.
So far, alot of the industry is looking towards hydrogen fuel cells, hopefully with reformers. Reformers extract the hydrogen out of normal gasoline cleanly, and the fuel cells add ambient oxygen to it to make water: a very acceptable byproduct. Gasoline storage is easy, safe, maintainable, and reliable. The exhaust is pure water. The systems cost is feasable to be near that of cars (+/- $1000).
Nitrogen is pretty funny :-)
--