Of course, when I make a significant change in Linux, I have to recompile the FSCK'ing kernel.
Whereas to make a significent change in Windows you have to ask Microsoft and cross your fingers. Assuming they'll even bother to listen to you unless you have lots of money...
Why can't they use something like RSA to encrypt the photos so that only the Ritz people can read them?
A couple of reasons. First it would make the device more complicated. Second it probably wouldn't be long before the decryption key leaked. Either every camera would need the same key or the key would be stored somewhere in the camera...
I migrated from a Windows & Mac OS 7.5/8/9 programming background to OS X and with this migration UNIX. All of the custom handling required for file vs. networking vs. simple console I/O is a sick joke. Being able to re-use the same program for all of the above I/O methods with a minimal amount of specializing (in many cases none) is great for simplicity, STABILITY, overall function.
Stability is most likely a consequence of simplicity. The simpler something is, the less chance it has to go wrong. If it does go wrong the more chance you have of finding the bug too.
"Luna Lovegood" , a strange witch, who likes to keep her wand behind her ear. Nicknamed "Loony". If the question was actually "What's Luna?" then more likely they mean the Windows XP default theme. (Which often goes by other names on Slashdot.)
You install Winblows TTF fonts and it will look excactly like what they sent...
It may or it may not. Even if both sender and receiver are running MS Word (sometimes even if they both have the same version of MS Word.) The usual problem importing.DOC files into OpenOffice is formatting. Since Word used Pica for measuring, OpenOffice uses mm.
There simply is no way Microsoft can expose its proprietary code to the inspections open source benefits from. The result is horribly broken, insecure and crash-prone Microsoft code vs. a base of increasingly stable open source.
However keeping the source code secret dosn't do much to make things difficult for the "black hats", since they can still work out attacks against the binaries.
Things that Microsoft does not intend to fix or is taking too long to fix cannot be taken care of by an individual.
A proprietary software company can always argue "it's a feature, not a bug". If you want something changed it's what you want which matters. If you are paying someone to alter a program they'd be a fool to turn down the work offered.
In order to get a particular feature into a commercial closed-source program, you need to convince the software company that the feature is worth adding. That typically requires getting lots and lots of customers to ask for it repeatedly until the message gets pounded through their many layers of management.
Even if it actually does get added there is no guarentee that by the time the people who actually write the code hear about it the multiple levels of managment and marketing having mutated it into something else.
With OSS, you just write it yourself and submit the patch to the maintainer.
Or you pay someone to make the modifications. Depends how important it is to you or your business. But it's still perfectly possible if you are the only person/corporation/etc on the planet with that requirement.
Imagine my disdain when they proposed switching our international carrier's DNS servers to NT DNS (from BIND, along with our mediation software, etc.). Wonder if anyone can help Microsoft understand what a root nameserver is...
Few years back you could have asked if anyone at Microsoft knew what any kind of namesever was. When quite a few of their domain names didn't resolve, because they didn't understand the basic concept of putting nameservers in different places. The other irony is that NT DNS is actually a hacked about version of BIND 4.
Cars do make quite a good analogy. There are plenty of firms, at least in the UK, which will sell you kits to let you build your own 1950s Porsche Spyder, Jaguar E Type and other vehicles.
Technically more "look alikes" than actual replicas. Since the engine, gearbox, drive train, stearing system is likely to be from a much newer "doner" car. If having built your car you want to take it on the public roads it needs to be up to 21st century standards to "street legal". Even if that means fitting parts which would not be present on an actual half century old car.
The point being that open source projects can - and often do - outperform their closed competitors in most every way. You're right that out-of-the-box, they are not as user friendly - yet.
For anything other than the simplist of systems there is no such thing as "out-of-the-box" in the first place. The term "user friendly" has been so abused it dosn't really have much meaning left.
Mind you, the same goes for furniture: you can buy the wood yourself, put it together and make furniture. But it won't be as user friendly as a furniture building packet that you can buy at Ikea's.
Actually mass produced furniture is somewhere in the middle. If you are a good carpenter the furniture you make yourself is likely to be better than anything you could buy from Ikea. Mass produced furniture has to be something lots of people would want. Custom made furniture only needs to satisfy a few people at the very most.
People who don't want to bother with all this can just buy the same Ikea furniture already put together. And you'll have people who just want nice furniture, no matter what the cost or the supplier and they'll go to the nearest retail shop.
Even if you buy mass produced furniture nothing stops you modifying it, adding custom parts, putting different pieces together, etc. You can even use literal "hacking tools" to do so.
That's what happens to commodities: easy to get, lots of choice.
Here you can see a job for open source: people want choice. But of course Microsoft doesn't want software to become a commodity, it'll destroy their market monopoly.
If Microsoft made furniture it would come with an EULA which disallowed you to paint it or bring any powertool within 20 feet of it. Probably combined with lobbying/paying for laws to make table saws, drill/drivers and routers require more paperwork to own than firearms:)
How can you possibly say that M$ Orifice is better when I can save as PDF and even Flash from OpenOffice. Functionality wise I would call them even (with the exception of the missing virusexecution in OOo)
The issue is only likely to arise if people insit on sending.DOC/.XLS files to you and expect what you see to be exactly what they sent. The fact that most of the time what people really want to send is what the document would look like when it is printed, thus PDF is actually a better option, simply goes over the heads of many Windows users. (That's even before cases of Word files being sent when plain text would do the job equally well.)
You also have to make it painless to do things like install/remove software and install/remove drivers.
The subject is enterprise desktops. Here if the user needs to be messing around installing/uninstalling anything then it's broken.
Although I definitely agree with the root/user separation, its a pain in the a$$ to keep getting assaulted with a root password prompt when I want to change a system setting (flame away)
This is because you are trying to wear two different hats...
the interface needs to be more polished for the average user who doesn't want to understand the technical aspects of what a link is or what HDA1 is...
How is that different from expecting them to know what a "shortcut" or "C:" is?
Yes, there's a popup that asks if you want to view the attachment in another program. But that popup doesn't know the difference between "view this Word document" and "run this macro inside this Word document". The 'without user intervention' refers to the fact that the user cannot tell if the attachment is really a "passive" one or not - he doesn't know if he's "viewing" or "running" it.
This is part of a more general issue of bluring the distinction between "code" and "data". There is also the problem that Windows can look at the filename to work out if something should be executable. Then actually look at the file to work out how to "execute" it. Thus tricks like renaming an executable as a media file can fool people into running them.
For instance it is often helpful to have one place and only one place where credentials are verified. Likewise, there needs to be one place and only one place where external data is verfied or data is truncated to fit in a buffer. We have seen some evidence that MS still has basic functionlity spread over a much too large area. These issues have nothing to do with external user experience.
This does make it much harder for some third party to easily replace some section of Windows though.
The ugly truth about computer security is that it's a pain in the ass. It gets in the way of making programs be easy and intuitive. Microsoft consistently chooses to place the glitter and showoff factor at a higher priority than security.
Thing is that "bells and whistles" don't really do much to aid ease of use anyway. Even to the point of there being Windows "features" which are almost exclusivly used by malware.
Even parts of Win32 itself aren't consistent with other parts... everything seems to be developed in a fairly isolated environment and crammed together at a higher level into a final product.
Which dosn't stop the MS marketing department from going on and on about "integration" though...
Apparently, there's a legal doctrine that permits a judge to remove an owner's legitimate property rights in cases where following the letter of the law would violate the owner's intent and a better, fairer results can be obtained by altering the terms. IIRC this doctrine is mainly used in situations where a property owner has made a donation to a charitable foundation.
Actually when a property owner has willed something to a charity. The difference being is that the original owner isn't around to clarify their intentions.
So last month they installed 4 Blade servers with 14 1U servers each with dual 2Ghz Xeon's and 2GB of ram each. Consolidated a 1600 Sq. ft room of Alpha servers to 2 Racks (well they could have put them all in 1, but they decided not to for some reason).
Heat is the obvious problem. Are the racks actually half empty or half full of air conditioning plant?
Just cut out large chunks and process them in the most efficient way possible.
Once you have worked out a way to get machines capable of processing large chunks of rock...
If that means tons of chemicals that would normally be dangerous to humans,
Unless you have autonymous robots to do the job (and fix each other) then there are still likely to be humans around these dangerous chemicals. Whatever the final product is it most likely needs to be safe.
or giant nuclear reactors to melt the minerals, then you can do it.
Where are you going to get the fuel for such reactors?
Another thing to consider is mineral density. I'm no geologist, but I'm willing to bet that lack of an Eco-System to move minerals around, greatly increases mineral density.
Depends on the mineral. Quite a few mineral deposits are created by living organisms.
But to be useful, manned space missions also need to be big. And big ain't cheap. A next-gen moon mission needs to be capable of putting a team of eight to ten people on the moon for perhaps up to a month, to do anything constructive that hasn't been done and can't be done by unmanned missions.
It's also to be a few missions before much constructive can be done. You first need to figure out what effects long term exposure to the environment has on people's bodies and minds, what works and what dosn't work, etc.
Re:Minor factual error: no "darkside" of the moon
on
The Case for the Moon
·
· Score: 1
Just build whatever collectors you want near enough to the north or south pole of the moon that you can place one set of collectors on one side and another set on the other, or a "ring" of collectors. That way you'll always have some sun hitting some of the collectors all the time. And distance won't be much of an issue, transmission lines should be a piece of cake on the moon since there's 1/10'th the gravity and no atmospheric stress.
This would still be a major piece of construction. Together with the plants you'd need to produce the relevent materials to build such a power grid. The gravity is 1/6thG (1.6 Newtons/Kg). No-one has experience of working for any period of time in this gravity.
However, you do have a near-vacuum, so any lines carrying high voltage will leak to a convenient ground....
The lack of an atmosphere (and oceans), which on Earth even out the temperature difference between day and night, means that any structure needs to be capable of handling being repeatedly cycled between extremes of temperature. (e.g. wet concrete experiencing sunrise may well explode.)
i doubt you'll be running massive HV though, collectors are inherently low voltage devices.
Power grids are inherently high voltage though. The higher the voltage the less power is lost due to cable resistance.
Re:Minor factual error: no "darkside" of the moon
on
The Case for the Moon
·
· Score: 1
The moon has a 29.5 day cycle meaning that places on the moon experience about 15 days of daylight and about 15 days of night. The far side of the moon gets just as much (and just as little) sunlight as the near side. Only radio telescopes would see a big advantage on the farside by using the moon to block the Earth's noisy radio chatter.
The sun isn't that big a problem. Since there is no atmosphere to scatter the light. So it should be possible to carry out observations even in the lunar day. The Earth is a bigger problem since it takes up a large area of the nearside sky. Even objects in Earth orbit are a potential problem.
Many people do not want windows, and simply have it because they dont see any other choice, or they require it to interoperate with others. Theres a big difference between actually wanting something.
It's rather questionable to claim that people want anything which they get by default.
Many people who use their computers just for simple web browsing and email, maybe typing the occasional letter, would have been much happier with beos than windows, but these people never got the chance.
The problem is that Microsoft is able to have exclusive deals with OEM's for cheap Windows licences conditional on only supplying Windows with machines. Under these deals they can't offer alternative operating systems, multiple operating systems on one machine or even no OS. Both of the Microsoft trials were ment to address this, but it just hasn't happened.
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Of course, when I make a significant change in Linux, I have to recompile the FSCK'ing kernel.
Whereas to make a significent change in Windows you have to ask Microsoft and cross your fingers. Assuming they'll even bother to listen to you unless you have lots of money...
Why can't they use something like RSA to encrypt the photos so that only the Ritz people can read them?
A couple of reasons. First it would make the device more complicated. Second it probably wouldn't be long before the decryption key leaked. Either every camera would need the same key or the key would be stored somewhere in the camera...
I migrated from a Windows & Mac OS 7.5/8/9 programming background to OS X and with this migration UNIX. All of the custom handling required for file vs. networking vs. simple console I/O is a sick joke. Being able to re-use the same program for all of the above I/O methods with a minimal amount of specializing (in many cases none) is great for simplicity, STABILITY, overall function.
Stability is most likely a consequence of simplicity. The simpler something is, the less chance it has to go wrong. If it does go wrong the more chance you have of finding the bug too.
I like your point, but... Who's Luna?
"Luna Lovegood" , a strange witch, who likes to keep her wand behind her ear. Nicknamed "Loony".
If the question was actually "What's Luna?" then more likely they mean the Windows XP default theme. (Which often goes by other names on Slashdot.)
You install Winblows TTF fonts and it will look excactly like what they sent...
.DOC files into OpenOffice is formatting. Since Word used Pica for measuring, OpenOffice uses mm.
It may or it may not. Even if both sender and receiver are running MS Word (sometimes even if they both have the same version of MS Word.) The usual problem importing
There simply is no way Microsoft can expose its proprietary code to the inspections open source benefits from. The result is horribly broken, insecure and crash-prone Microsoft code vs. a base of increasingly stable open source.
However keeping the source code secret dosn't do much to make things difficult for the "black hats", since they can still work out attacks against the binaries.
Things that Microsoft does not intend to fix or is taking too long to fix cannot be taken care of by an individual.
A proprietary software company can always argue "it's a feature, not a bug". If you want something changed it's what you want which matters. If you are paying someone to alter a program they'd be a fool to turn down the work offered.
In order to get a particular feature into a commercial closed-source program, you need to convince the software company that the feature is worth adding. That typically requires getting lots and lots of customers to ask for it repeatedly until the message gets pounded through their many layers of management.
Even if it actually does get added there is no guarentee that by the time the people who actually write the code hear about it the multiple levels of managment and marketing having mutated it into something else.
With OSS, you just write it yourself and submit the patch to the maintainer.
Or you pay someone to make the modifications. Depends how important it is to you or your business. But it's still perfectly possible if you are the only person/corporation/etc on the planet with that requirement.
Imagine my disdain when they proposed switching our international carrier's DNS servers to NT DNS (from BIND, along with our mediation software, etc.). Wonder if anyone can help Microsoft understand what a root nameserver is...
Few years back you could have asked if anyone at Microsoft knew what any kind of namesever was. When quite a few of their domain names didn't resolve, because they didn't understand the basic concept of putting nameservers in different places.
The other irony is that NT DNS is actually a hacked about version of BIND 4.
Cars do make quite a good analogy. There are plenty of firms, at least in the UK, which will sell you kits to let you build your own 1950s Porsche Spyder, Jaguar E Type and other vehicles.
Technically more "look alikes" than actual replicas. Since the engine, gearbox, drive train, stearing system is likely to be from a much newer "doner" car. If having built your car you want to take it on the public roads it needs to be up to 21st century standards to "street legal". Even if that means fitting parts which would not be present on an actual half century old car.
The point being that open source projects can - and often do - outperform their closed competitors in most every way. You're right that out-of-the-box, they are not as user friendly - yet.
:)
For anything other than the simplist of systems there is no such thing as "out-of-the-box" in the first place.
The term "user friendly" has been so abused it dosn't really have much meaning left.
Mind you, the same goes for furniture: you can buy the wood yourself, put it together and make furniture. But it won't be as user friendly as a furniture building packet that you can buy at Ikea's.
Actually mass produced furniture is somewhere in the middle. If you are a good carpenter the furniture you make yourself is likely to be better than anything you could buy from Ikea. Mass produced furniture has to be something lots of people would want. Custom made furniture only needs to satisfy a few people at the very most.
People who don't want to bother with all this can just buy the same Ikea furniture already put together. And you'll have people who just want nice furniture, no matter what the cost or the supplier and they'll go to the nearest retail shop.
Even if you buy mass produced furniture nothing stops you modifying it, adding custom parts, putting different pieces together, etc. You can even use literal "hacking tools" to do so.
That's what happens to commodities: easy to get, lots of choice.
Here you can see a job for open source: people want choice. But of course Microsoft doesn't want software to become a commodity, it'll destroy their market monopoly.
If Microsoft made furniture it would come with an EULA which disallowed you to paint it or bring any powertool within 20 feet of it. Probably combined with lobbying/paying for laws to make table saws, drill/drivers and routers require more paperwork to own than firearms
How can you possibly say that M$ Orifice is better when I can save as PDF and even Flash from OpenOffice. Functionality wise I would call them even (with the exception of the missing virusexecution in OOo)
.DOC/.XLS files to you and expect what you see to be exactly what they sent.
The issue is only likely to arise if people insit on sending
The fact that most of the time what people really want to send is what the document would look like when it is printed, thus PDF is actually a better option, simply goes over the heads of many Windows users. (That's even before cases of Word files being sent when plain text would do the job equally well.)
You also have to make it painless to do things like install/remove software and install/remove drivers.
The subject is enterprise desktops. Here if the user needs to be messing around installing/uninstalling anything then it's broken.
Although I definitely agree with the root/user separation, its a pain in the a$$ to keep getting assaulted with a root password prompt when I want to change a system setting (flame away)
This is because you are trying to wear two different hats...
the interface needs to be more polished for the average user who doesn't want to understand the technical aspects of what a link is or what HDA1 is...
How is that different from expecting them to know what a "shortcut" or "C:" is?
Yes, there's a popup that asks if you want to view the attachment in another program. But that popup doesn't know the difference between "view this Word document" and "run this macro inside this Word document". The 'without user intervention' refers to the fact that the user cannot tell if the attachment is really a "passive" one or not - he doesn't know if he's "viewing" or "running" it.
This is part of a more general issue of bluring the distinction between "code" and "data". There is also the problem that Windows can look at the filename to work out if something should be executable. Then actually look at the file to work out how to "execute" it. Thus tricks like renaming an executable as a media file can fool people into running them.
For instance it is often helpful to have one place and only one place where credentials are verified. Likewise, there needs to be one place and only one place where external data is verfied or data is truncated to fit in a buffer. We have seen some evidence that MS still has basic functionlity spread over a much too large area. These issues have nothing to do with external user experience.
This does make it much harder for some third party to easily replace some section of Windows though.
The ugly truth about computer security is that it's a pain in the ass. It gets in the way of making programs be easy and intuitive. Microsoft consistently chooses to place the glitter and showoff factor at a higher priority than security.
Thing is that "bells and whistles" don't really do much to aid ease of use anyway.
Even to the point of there being Windows "features" which are almost exclusivly used by malware.
Even parts of Win32 itself aren't consistent with other parts... everything seems to be developed in a fairly isolated environment and crammed together at a higher level into a final product.
Which dosn't stop the MS marketing department from going on and on about "integration" though...
Apparently, there's a legal doctrine that permits a judge to remove an owner's legitimate property rights in cases where following the letter of the law would violate the owner's intent and a better, fairer results can be obtained by altering the terms. IIRC this doctrine is mainly used in situations where a property owner has made a donation to a charitable foundation.
Actually when a property owner has willed something to a charity. The difference being is that the original owner isn't around to clarify their intentions.
So last month they installed 4 Blade servers with 14 1U servers each with dual 2Ghz Xeon's and 2GB of ram each. Consolidated a 1600 Sq. ft room of Alpha servers to 2 Racks (well they could have put them all in 1, but they decided not to for some reason).
Heat is the obvious problem. Are the racks actually half empty or half full of air conditioning plant?
I'm having trouble coming up with appropriate people to play the SCO legal team
Isn't that section being subcontracted to Mutant Enemy? Due to their experience of creating an entire evil law firm...
Just cut out large chunks and process them in the most efficient way possible.
Once you have worked out a way to get machines capable of processing large chunks of rock...
If that means tons of chemicals that would normally be dangerous to humans,
Unless you have autonymous robots to do the job (and fix each other) then there are still likely to be humans around these dangerous chemicals. Whatever the final product is it most likely needs to be safe.
or giant nuclear reactors to melt the minerals, then you can do it.
Where are you going to get the fuel for such reactors?
Another thing to consider is mineral density. I'm no geologist, but I'm willing to bet that lack of an Eco-System to move minerals around, greatly increases mineral density.
Depends on the mineral. Quite a few mineral deposits are created by living organisms.
But to be useful, manned space missions also need to be big. And big ain't cheap. A next-gen moon mission needs to be capable of putting a team of eight to ten people on the moon for perhaps up to a month, to do anything constructive that hasn't been done and can't be done by unmanned missions.
It's also to be a few missions before much constructive can be done. You first need to figure out what effects long term exposure to the environment has on people's bodies and minds, what works and what dosn't work, etc.
Just build whatever collectors you want near enough to the north or south pole of the moon that you can place one set of collectors on one side and another set on the other, or a "ring" of collectors. That way you'll always have some sun hitting some of the collectors all the time. And distance won't be much of an issue, transmission lines should be a piece of cake on the moon since there's 1/10'th the gravity and no atmospheric stress.
This would still be a major piece of construction. Together with the plants you'd need to produce the relevent materials to build such a power grid. The gravity is 1/6thG (1.6 Newtons/Kg). No-one has experience of working for any period of time in this gravity.
However, you do have a near-vacuum, so any lines carrying high voltage will leak to a convenient ground....
The lack of an atmosphere (and oceans), which on Earth even out the temperature difference between day and night, means that any structure needs to be capable of handling being repeatedly cycled between extremes of temperature. (e.g. wet concrete experiencing sunrise may well explode.)
i doubt you'll be running massive HV though, collectors are inherently low voltage devices.
Power grids are inherently high voltage though. The higher the voltage the less power is lost due to cable resistance.
The moon has a 29.5 day cycle meaning that places on the moon experience about 15 days of daylight and about 15 days of night. The far side of the moon gets just as much (and just as little) sunlight as the near side. Only radio telescopes would see a big advantage on the farside by using the moon to block the Earth's noisy radio chatter.
The sun isn't that big a problem. Since there is no atmosphere to scatter the light. So it should be possible to carry out observations even in the lunar day. The Earth is a bigger problem since it takes up a large area of the nearside sky. Even objects in Earth orbit are a potential problem.
Many people do not want windows, and simply have it because they dont see any other choice, or they require it to interoperate with others. Theres a big difference between actually wanting something.
It's rather questionable to claim that people want anything which they get by default.
Many people who use their computers just for simple web browsing and email, maybe typing the occasional letter, would have been much happier with beos than windows, but these people never got the chance.
The problem is that Microsoft is able to have exclusive deals with OEM's for cheap Windows licences conditional on only supplying Windows with machines. Under these deals they can't offer alternative operating systems, multiple operating systems on one machine or even no OS. Both of the Microsoft trials were ment to address this, but it just hasn't happened.