Nobody seems to be talking about the fact that for Microsoft to offer Wrath of Khan to male programmers, it must first determine that you are A) male, and B) a programmer. That could be done through questionaires, but this is Microsoft we're talking about. It seems much, much more likely that the OS would be watching what you do and reporting your activities back to the mothership.
Even if you trust Microsoft to have your best interests in mind, I'm sure the FBI will, shortly thereafter, be sending Microsoft those letters of theirs. And I'd really rather not have a knock on my door from reading the 'wrong' websites.
Of course, with their new powers, I'm not sure they'd actually knock.
The Squeezeboxes are about $200 each for the wired model 2, which is identical to the snazzier model 3 except for the appearance. $250 for the wireless version. (add $50 for Model 3s). Their hardware is extremely good, with top-quality DACs and very low-jitter digital outs. They'll outperform CD players that are much more expensive.
You'll need a computer to run the music server software. You can then easily sync up multiple rooms... and they all come with quite lovely displays and very useful remotes. This would be one of the cheaper ways to do this, and it has a nice side effect of being very, very high-quality.
But you still need amplification and speakers in every room, and that's going to add a buttload to the cost. You're essentially trying to buy six stereo systems on the cheap. I'd suggest repeated trips to pawn shops and Goodwill stores to get the sound gear... and then add your distributed music system from there.
The Squeezeboxes would make a really excellent backbone, but getting the signal to a room won't matter if you have nothing to play it back with.
I was alive in 1970, but young, only three. We were paying for the excesses of the 60s, but we had the money to pay for it. We were struggling with high oil prices, and a decline in our standard of living, but again.. average personal income peaked right around 1970 and it's never gotten to that level again. (how much house can you buy with your 2005 salary?) We didn't start running 'serious' deficits until the Carter years. It was a painful decade, but we'd fixed many of the stupidities by the end of it... and then Reagan took us off to astronomical levels of deficit spending. Borrowing money is like a drug... it feels great, but you'll pay for it. They started the whole cycle of borrow-and-spend, rather than tax and spend, which has been accelerating, and which Bush has taken to new heights.
The reason it felt bad was because the economy was relatively honest. It doesn't feel as bad now, but that is because we are (and this is JUST the government, not personal debt) EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS IN THE HOLE. As consumers, we are carrying absolutely unprecedented debt levels, trying desperately to hold onto the lifestyles that our parents could afford without any debt at all.
It felt bad, because we weren't high on debt. When we start to really try to repay the money (and there is NO WAY that the debt that America now carries can EVER be repaid, at least not in dollars of the same value) we'll feel a THOUSAND times worse. You'll long for the 1970s and its relatively simple problems.
That's an amazing piece of spin. Saying "Parents must be responsible" and then within ONE SENTENCE flipping that around to "Parents aren't responsible so we're going to ban the things we don't personally like." Even the current American administration would have a hard time topping that one.
Quality isn't something you can add later. It has to be there from the start.
Their internal development process is so bad they broke traceroute. Rik Van Riel has said that if only 1 stable kernel release in 3 is actually stable, that's fine with him. It doesn't look like much of anyone on the kernel dev team disagrees.
Linux used to be legendary for its reliability. That's what got it to the place it's in now. The code that is coming out of the kernel dev process now is crap and has to be fixed by squads of other people. They care so little that they're putting out crap that they explicitly say that other people have to actually make it work. They can't be bothered.
I, for one, need to have my servers work. I don't like reboots. The endless stream of bullshit security patches means I have to reboot a lot. If they'd slow down and let the stable kernel be STABLE for awhile, they'd let us make servers we can trust. In other words, stick with the development model that got them where they are. It worked. It got tens of thousands of people just like me jobs designing, installing, and administering these servers because they worked better than Microsoft servers did. That is no longer true. Microsoft's code quality these days is miles better than the crap that's coming out of the Linux dev team. They're willing to call any steaming pile of horse manure 'stable', and good luck figuring out which releases actually ARE.
Yes, I can pay a distro and have them desperately try to retrofit quality into a kernel that no longer has it. But that means I have to switch away from Debian. If I have to switch anyway, I might as well go to FreeBSD... or just pay Microsoft. Paying thousands to Microsoft doesn't look all that much worse than paying thousands to RedHat.
They broke traceroute in a STABLE KERNEL. And you tolerate this kind of bullshit? Free-as-in-speech (or beer for that matter) doesn't mean anything if the code doesn't fucking work.
Pick a broad liberal ideal; civil rights, health care quality/coverage, infant mortality/life expectancy, hunger, tolerance, wages / hours, whatever, it is better today then it was 50 years ago. We are even more well off if you look a 100 years back. Look 200 years back and the difference is so stark that it isn't even a meaningful comparison. The liberals are winning.
On most of those fronts, we are in poorer shape than we were in 1970. Tolerance is a little better now. Health 'coverage' is up, but in 1970, you could afford routine care on just your wages.
Literacy is down. Truth in government is down. Government spending has gone to the point of self destruction. The government asserts that it can lock you up forever without a trial and without even access to lawyers. The PATRIOT Act's effects still haven't been fully understood. Civil rights, in other words, have never been in worse shape in this country. Average wages and living standards in this country are WAY down.... a small segment of the population is doing very well, while most folks struggle harder and harder with each passing year. Infant mortality is way up. Hunger is way up.
This country is broke, way past broke, and it's only the largesse of strangers(foreigners buying dollars, mostly) that allows us to continue functioning at all.
I don't have the stats handy, but there have been a tremendous number of "oops!" patches to the, ahem, "stable version" of Linux in the last year. For instance, you may remember 2.6.14, the most recent release? That broke traceroute.
It looks like 2.4 had a patch released today, as well... 2.4.32 has today's date on the tarfile.
One of my all-time favorite games is The Longest Journey. It's a wonderful story/adventure game. I used a walkthrough to get past some of the nastier puzzles (there are some pretty obscure ones), and I still felt like I got 10x my money's worth out of it. Long, intricate plot, good graphics, super characters, top-notch conversations, great voicing. There are long conversations you can have with some of your neighbors that have no real bearing on the game whatsoever... they're just background. But even the background 'throwaway' stuff has incredible texture to it.
Not even Grim Fandango was quite as good as TLJ.
They're working on a sequel, Dreamfall. It'll be a preorder for sure.
I don't know if it's really underrated, but I hardly ever see anyone mention it. I'm not sure it sold all that well. It's really a shame... what a wonderful experience it was. A great, great ride from a master storyteller.
It didn't sell well? Holy cow. That was a great game!
From memory, I'd think it would still hold up almost perfectly... I think the graphics would be more than acceptable on a modern system. Those of you who haven't played it yet would most likely enjoy it. Worth finding.
If you have one person to support a hundred people, he's running his ass off, and probably doesn't KNOW what he does in a day. He's probably badly overworked.
Considering that you're being asked to do an RFP, they're probably not happy with the job he's doing... he's probably not wise enough to ask for the help he most likely needs.
Once you get to several employees, you can scale way past 1/100, if they're good. But early on, it doesn't work like that. That first person has to wear so many hats that there isn't much time to streamline and specialize.
If the current employee is competent, you'll almost certainly be better served adding a person than by outsourcing. And expect to add a third person around 200. After that, play it by ear.
I saw an interesting analysis by someone who purported to know what he was talking about.
The way he put it was this: viruses don't evolve suddenly. They evolve over time. It won't abruptly be the mega-super-lethal virus from hell. It has to get there in stages. First it has to get into humans. Then it has to learn to move from human to human. Then it has to learn to do that WELL.
It is, apparently, very unusual for a highly lethal virus to become widespread. This happened in WW1, but that was largely because of the trenches. The virus was able to communicate itself from a downed soldier, and that was the key to it being so intensely virulent. It was, very possibly, the only time in modern history that that many people have been together in conditions that poor.
In other words, dying soldiers could still transmit the virus, so killing the host wasn't a evolutionary dead end.
In our modern world, with our intense awareness of bird flu, if it stays highly lethal, it will never be widespread. We will bring enormous resources to bear on isolating any such patients. If the virulence drops to something approaching a normal flu, it could become widespread... we might not notice it until it was too late. But it would probably never kill very many people.
Remember, the reaction of humans to the virus is also a selection process, and we will select very, VERY strongly against highly lethal strains.
Smallpox is extremely lethal and contagious. Smallpox no longer exists in the wild. That should tell you something.
Civ4 is amazingly good, a real resurrection of what was great about the first one. It makes no sense for them to be selling out now, unless Civ4 isn't doing well... is it not selling well?
If PC gaming has bitten the dust to that degree, perhaps they're letting themselves be bought out just to survive?
A) Users will do ANYTHING if you promise them something fun in exchange. "Super cool screensaver! Just type your password to install!" B) Programs can install and run as the user without any passwords at all. It'd be perfectly possible to write a fully functioning virus/trojan that spread like crazy, and just ran in userspace. All the user's files can be infected by the virus. Without running as root, it can't HIDE itself, and it can't infect other users' files, but A) most Macs aren't multiuser, and B) few Mac users would even know how to find a virus in the first place. C) Once there's hostile code running on your system, it's only a matter of time before the zombie author finds a local root exploit to SERIOUSLY wedge your machine.
These conversations remind me SO SO much of the conversations we were having in 1998 about Windows and all the fundamental insecurities Microsoft was building in. Russ Nelson in particular was jumping up and down and screaming about how attachments in email were handled, and the blurring of the idea between code and data. An awful lot of people, including Microsoft, ignored Russ... and look where we are now.
The Mac isn't fundamentally as insecure as Windows is. Apple is making better choices than Microsoft did. But there's a lot of money in malware, and there are some very obvious holes. The Mac WILL eventually be exploited.
The largest problem in computing, which won't go away soon, is naive users. That's a hard problem to patch.
Oh it's definitely there, and has been for ages. It's quite easy to run as a user without administrative permissions, only putting on the Admin hat when you need to install software or change settings. There's actually an extremely rich permissions system in Windows... it's far, far more granular and descriptive than OSX's. You can specify with great precision exactly what users can and can't do on a particular system.
The big problem is, many games are completely brain-dead and require Admin privs just to run. This is usually from copy protection. So most people, by default, run with Admin privs. It's stupid, but that's how it is. This really isn't Windows' fault...all the functionality for limited user privileges is there, tons and tons of it, and has been since well before OSX even existed. Good software will handle limited privs gracefully. The Windows market is, sadly, full of crummy software that doesn't. A great feature goes largely unused because of it.
You could, in other words, do exactly the same thing on Windows that you're doing now, but some of their games might break.
And remember, nearly all Mac users are in the Admin group by default. They can't make system changes unless a utility gets their password and sudo's to root on their behalf... but users are used to typing in that password when they're installing software.
If promised some bit of screen glitz, many (most?) Mac users would happily type in that password and compromise their system. It's kind of disgusting, but it's the simple truth.
Oh, I don't think most Slashdot readers hate modern Macs. That'd be kind of dumb, after all.. most of us are pretty into Unix.
I do think a good chunk of us are worried that marketing is taking over their design, rather than technical excellence, but by and large, I think Apple has very good geek cred right now.
I wouldn't, however, get all stuffy about 'no viruses on the Mac'... an awful lot of their code is closed, so it's hard to know how good it is. They were still doing some pretty dumb security-related things when OSX first shipped (the last time I truly spent time digging into the system), and I'm not at all sure they're as paranoid as they should be.
If there were no malware authors, Windows would be easy as cake. Windows itself is extremely reliable, just as robust (if not more so) than the Mac. What makes it so unstable and trouble-prone is a world full of assholes.
Remember, most malware is installed with user permission. If a user thinks they're getting a cool screensaver, they'll say yes to ANYTHING.
Given user permission, it'll be easy, easy, EASY to mess up a Mac just as bad as a Windows box.
Microsoft probably wants there to be a big buzz about shortages, to get more people to pony up and purchase the first day.... the rumor thus becomes sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It would not shock me AT ALL if the source for this one is Microsoft itself. They want it to be special, scarce, and hard to find.
The way to combat the problem, as others here are mentioning, is just to ignore the console completely. There aren't going to be very many good games for it at first ANYWAY. The games aren't going anywhere. You'll still be able to play them if you wait until the consoles are easy to get. They're just graphical updates of existing games. They'll look fantabulous, but they're not going to play differently. It's just the same old shit with a facelift.
There's NO rush on this... the games will be just as much fun in February as they would be in two weeks, and they might be a little cheaper.
Distrowatch lists it at #2, behind only Ubuntu, and ahead of SUSE.
I don't know how closely their results reflect the real world, their list comes fairly close to matching my personal experience with Linux users and their distros of choice.
As long as I have a secure place to lock assets, I don't much care if I'm on a cardboard box in the middle of an amphitheater. It doesn't really matter if people can see over my shoulder, and I doubt most folks would care enough to bother. Watching scripts run isn't terribly entertaining.:)
Sure, an office would be nice, but given a lockable closet or something, there's no real need for one.
Most people don't use passphrases that are nearly as strong as the encryption itself. Most police departments are probably going to attack the encryption of the key, not the plaintext.
Re:Where are the differences?
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Debian GNU/Solaris
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· Score: 5, Informative
It's probably not the best choice for a notebook or a router. It might be a good choice for a server, depending on what you're doing with it.
I've done some Solaris administration, but I have never been even remotely expert. I did get an idea of just how much I don't know, however.
In many ways, Solaris makes Linux and the BSDs look like tinkertoys. There is a vast array of functionality inside. Solaris feels like it was designed 'down', by people who are used to working with mainframes; Linux and the BSDs are more designed 'up' by people inventing (and often re-inventing) things for the first time.
There's a fundamental expectation in Solaris that the server will stay up under virtually all circumstances. If the hardware you're running it on is expensive enough, it's apparently pretty easy to hotswap almost anything... even RAM and CPUs. I believe it supports multiple running instances of Solaris on the same hardware at the same time, even different versions. And I'm fairly sure that a recent feature will let you upgrade OSes 'on the fly', though I think there would have to be at least a brief interruption of service. Pay attention to replies, if any. My knowledge in this area is very sketchy.
It's highly optimized to scale to amazing degrees, given more CPUs to work with. But that means it's not very well optimized to work with only one, which was why it was called 'Slowlaris' in the early days of Linux. Running multiprocessor requires a lot of locking to make sure that different CPUs don't step on each others' toes. This locking takes time. So the first versions of Solaris/Intel were dogmeat slow in comparison to Linux. There was no chance of a conflict, because multi-CPU Intel boxes almost didn't exist, but Sun was and is more interested in having it run WELL than run FAST. Removing all that locking would have introduced bugs. So they left it slow. And most folks went with SPARC boxen or Linux instead, for better performance.
At the time, Linux screamed on the same hardware, because it didn't worry about any of that. Up through 2.2, Linux had just a Big Kernel Lock... only one CPU could be in kernel space at any given time, and the rest of the CPUs either ran user code or sat around idle. Most user code makes fairly frequent kernel calls, so the extra CPUs blocked a lot. Running on one CPU was very fast, but there wasn't much benefit to adding more. A second was a moderate plus, adding maybe 50% overall throughput. Adding further CPUs did very little for most workloads.
Solaris does exactly the opposite. It's slow on one CPU, though 'slow' is pretty relative on a multi-gigahertz processor, but as you add more, it scales almost linearly. 64-way Solaris boxes run very nicely. And they do it without crashing, too. That's an area where Linux, for instance, has had a huge amount of trouble... as they add in new locks and try to rearchitect to let more and more CPUs into kernel code at once, they introduce bugs, often at a furious rate. You don't see much of that in released versions of Solaris. A lot of what you're paying for with the expensive Sun equipment is their QA department, which must be just incredibly good. (if any of you are reading this, thanks!)
Basically, this is enterprise-grade software. It's designed to run things like banks and air traffic control and medical equipment...stuff that just can't ever break or go down. It's not actually USED for air traffic control, as far as I know, but I'm sure Sun would be happy to sell systems into that market. If your hardware is good, Solaris can take an unbelievable beating... you can have loads in the thousands and still be able to connect to the box with SSH (eventually) and rescue it. It'll be slow, but you'll get in. Linux, in contrast, will often still die from dumb stuff like fork bombs. Yes, ulimits can prevent that problem, but Solaris will survive without the extra help.
Basically, Solaris is the kind of OS that you can bet your job on, and remain employed. Linux remai
That's only illegal if you're already a monopoly. It's illegal for Microsoft to do that, but not for, say, Red Hat. They're not supposed to leverage their monopoly position in one market to dominate another.
As a rather off-topic aside, it strikes me that Sony and Microsoft selling their game consoles at a loss is doing exactly that. Sony makes some profit now on their game division, but Microsoft has lost billions.
From this armchair, that sure looks like classic monopoly abuse.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody seems to be talking about the fact that for Microsoft to offer Wrath of Khan to male programmers, it must first determine that you are A) male, and B) a programmer. That could be done through questionaires, but this is Microsoft we're talking about. It seems much, much more likely that the OS would be watching what you do and reporting your activities back to the mothership.
Even if you trust Microsoft to have your best interests in mind, I'm sure the FBI will, shortly thereafter, be sending Microsoft those letters of theirs. And I'd really rather not have a knock on my door from reading the 'wrong' websites.
Of course, with their new powers, I'm not sure they'd actually knock.
The Squeezeboxes are about $200 each for the wired model 2, which is identical to the snazzier model 3 except for the appearance. $250 for the wireless version. (add $50 for Model 3s). Their hardware is extremely good, with top-quality DACs and very low-jitter digital outs. They'll outperform CD players that are much more expensive.
You'll need a computer to run the music server software. You can then easily sync up multiple rooms... and they all come with quite lovely displays and very useful remotes. This would be one of the cheaper ways to do this, and it has a nice side effect of being very, very high-quality.
But you still need amplification and speakers in every room, and that's going to add a buttload to the cost. You're essentially trying to buy six stereo systems on the cheap. I'd suggest repeated trips to pawn shops and Goodwill stores to get the sound gear... and then add your distributed music system from there.
The Squeezeboxes would make a really excellent backbone, but getting the signal to a room won't matter if you have nothing to play it back with.
I was alive in 1970, but young, only three. We were paying for the excesses of the 60s, but we had the money to pay for it. We were struggling with high oil prices, and a decline in our standard of living, but again.. average personal income peaked right around 1970 and it's never gotten to that level again. (how much house can you buy with your 2005 salary?) We didn't start running 'serious' deficits until the Carter years. It was a painful decade, but we'd fixed many of the stupidities by the end of it... and then Reagan took us off to astronomical levels of deficit spending. Borrowing money is like a drug... it feels great, but you'll pay for it. They started the whole cycle of borrow-and-spend, rather than tax and spend, which has been accelerating, and which Bush has taken to new heights.
The reason it felt bad was because the economy was relatively honest. It doesn't feel as bad now, but that is because we are (and this is JUST the government, not personal debt) EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS IN THE HOLE. As consumers, we are carrying absolutely unprecedented debt levels, trying desperately to hold onto the lifestyles that our parents could afford without any debt at all.
It felt bad, because we weren't high on debt. When we start to really try to repay the money (and there is NO WAY that the debt that America now carries can EVER be repaid, at least not in dollars of the same value) we'll feel a THOUSAND times worse. You'll long for the 1970s and its relatively simple problems.
That's an amazing piece of spin. Saying "Parents must be responsible" and then within ONE SENTENCE flipping that around to "Parents aren't responsible so we're going to ban the things we don't personally like." Even the current American administration would have a hard time topping that one.
Quality isn't something you can add later. It has to be there from the start.
... or just pay Microsoft. Paying thousands to Microsoft doesn't look all that much worse than paying thousands to RedHat.
Their internal development process is so bad they broke traceroute. Rik Van Riel has said that if only 1 stable kernel release in 3 is actually stable, that's fine with him. It doesn't look like much of anyone on the kernel dev team disagrees.
Linux used to be legendary for its reliability. That's what got it to the place it's in now. The code that is coming out of the kernel dev process now is crap and has to be fixed by squads of other people. They care so little that they're putting out crap that they explicitly say that other people have to actually make it work. They can't be bothered.
I, for one, need to have my servers work. I don't like reboots. The endless stream of bullshit security patches means I have to reboot a lot. If they'd slow down and let the stable kernel be STABLE for awhile, they'd let us make servers we can trust. In other words, stick with the development model that got them where they are. It worked. It got tens of thousands of people just like me jobs designing, installing, and administering these servers because they worked better than Microsoft servers did. That is no longer true. Microsoft's code quality these days is miles better than the crap that's coming out of the Linux dev team. They're willing to call any steaming pile of horse manure 'stable', and good luck figuring out which releases actually ARE.
Yes, I can pay a distro and have them desperately try to retrofit quality into a kernel that no longer has it. But that means I have to switch away from Debian. If I have to switch anyway, I might as well go to FreeBSD
They broke traceroute in a STABLE KERNEL. And you tolerate this kind of bullshit? Free-as-in-speech (or beer for that matter) doesn't mean anything if the code doesn't fucking work.
On most of those fronts, we are in poorer shape than we were in 1970. Tolerance is a little better now. Health 'coverage' is up, but in 1970, you could afford routine care on just your wages.
Literacy is down. Truth in government is down. Government spending has gone to the point of self destruction. The government asserts that it can lock you up forever without a trial and without even access to lawyers. The PATRIOT Act's effects still haven't been fully understood. Civil rights, in other words, have never been in worse shape in this country. Average wages and living standards in this country are WAY down.... a small segment of the population is doing very well, while most folks struggle harder and harder with each passing year. Infant mortality is way up. Hunger is way up.
This country is broke, way past broke, and it's only the largesse of strangers(foreigners buying dollars, mostly) that allows us to continue functioning at all.
That's bullshit handwaving for not doing the job right in the first place. "Oh, the distros will fix all our problems and make life golden again."
Bullshit. They just don't want to be bothered with the nasty bugfixing part of writing code.
Thank god you're not using the 2.6 kernel, eh?
I don't have the stats handy, but there have been a tremendous number of "oops!" patches to the, ahem, "stable version" of Linux in the last year. For instance, you may remember 2.6.14, the most recent release? That broke traceroute.
It looks like 2.4 had a patch released today, as well... 2.4.32 has today's date on the tarfile.
One of my all-time favorite games is The Longest Journey. It's a wonderful story/adventure game. I used a walkthrough to get past some of the nastier puzzles (there are some pretty obscure ones), and I still felt like I got 10x my money's worth out of it. Long, intricate plot, good graphics, super characters, top-notch conversations, great voicing. There are long conversations you can have with some of your neighbors that have no real bearing on the game whatsoever... they're just background. But even the background 'throwaway' stuff has incredible texture to it.
Not even Grim Fandango was quite as good as TLJ.
They're working on a sequel, Dreamfall. It'll be a preorder for sure.
I don't know if it's really underrated, but I hardly ever see anyone mention it. I'm not sure it sold all that well. It's really a shame... what a wonderful experience it was. A great, great ride from a master storyteller.
It didn't sell well? Holy cow. That was a great game!
From memory, I'd think it would still hold up almost perfectly... I think the graphics would be more than acceptable on a modern system. Those of you who haven't played it yet would most likely enjoy it. Worth finding.
I can't believe it didn't sell. Wow.
If you have one person to support a hundred people, he's running his ass off, and probably doesn't KNOW what he does in a day. He's probably badly overworked.
Considering that you're being asked to do an RFP, they're probably not happy with the job he's doing... he's probably not wise enough to ask for the help he most likely needs.
Once you get to several employees, you can scale way past 1/100, if they're good. But early on, it doesn't work like that. That first person has to wear so many hats that there isn't much time to streamline and specialize.
If the current employee is competent, you'll almost certainly be better served adding a person than by outsourcing. And expect to add a third person around 200. After that, play it by ear.
I saw an interesting analysis by someone who purported to know what he was talking about.
The way he put it was this: viruses don't evolve suddenly. They evolve over time. It won't abruptly be the mega-super-lethal virus from hell. It has to get there in stages. First it has to get into humans. Then it has to learn to move from human to human. Then it has to learn to do that WELL.
It is, apparently, very unusual for a highly lethal virus to become widespread. This happened in WW1, but that was largely because of the trenches. The virus was able to communicate itself from a downed soldier, and that was the key to it being so intensely virulent. It was, very possibly, the only time in modern history that that many people have been together in conditions that poor.
In other words, dying soldiers could still transmit the virus, so killing the host wasn't a evolutionary dead end.
In our modern world, with our intense awareness of bird flu, if it stays highly lethal, it will never be widespread. We will bring enormous resources to bear on isolating any such patients. If the virulence drops to something approaching a normal flu, it could become widespread... we might not notice it until it was too late. But it would probably never kill very many people.
Remember, the reaction of humans to the virus is also a selection process, and we will select very, VERY strongly against highly lethal strains.
Smallpox is extremely lethal and contagious. Smallpox no longer exists in the wild. That should tell you something.
Civ4 is amazingly good, a real resurrection of what was great about the first one. It makes no sense for them to be selling out now, unless Civ4 isn't doing well... is it not selling well?
If PC gaming has bitten the dust to that degree, perhaps they're letting themselves be bought out just to survive?
A) Users will do ANYTHING if you promise them something fun in exchange. "Super cool screensaver! Just type your password to install!"
B) Programs can install and run as the user without any passwords at all. It'd be perfectly possible to write a fully functioning virus/trojan that spread like crazy, and just ran in userspace. All the user's files can be infected by the virus. Without running as root, it can't HIDE itself, and it can't infect other users' files, but A) most Macs aren't multiuser, and B) few Mac users would even know how to find a virus in the first place.
C) Once there's hostile code running on your system, it's only a matter of time before the zombie author finds a local root exploit to SERIOUSLY wedge your machine.
These conversations remind me SO SO much of the conversations we were having in 1998 about Windows and all the fundamental insecurities Microsoft was building in. Russ Nelson in particular was jumping up and down and screaming about how attachments in email were handled, and the blurring of the idea between code and data. An awful lot of people, including Microsoft, ignored Russ... and look where we are now.
The Mac isn't fundamentally as insecure as Windows is. Apple is making better choices than Microsoft did. But there's a lot of money in malware, and there are some very obvious holes. The Mac WILL eventually be exploited.
The largest problem in computing, which won't go away soon, is naive users. That's a hard problem to patch.
Oh it's definitely there, and has been for ages. It's quite easy to run as a user without administrative permissions, only putting on the Admin hat when you need to install software or change settings. There's actually an extremely rich permissions system in Windows... it's far, far more granular and descriptive than OSX's. You can specify with great precision exactly what users can and can't do on a particular system.
The big problem is, many games are completely brain-dead and require Admin privs just to run. This is usually from copy protection. So most people, by default, run with Admin privs. It's stupid, but that's how it is. This really isn't Windows' fault...all the functionality for limited user privileges is there, tons and tons of it, and has been since well before OSX even existed. Good software will handle limited privs gracefully. The Windows market is, sadly, full of crummy software that doesn't. A great feature goes largely unused because of it.
You could, in other words, do exactly the same thing on Windows that you're doing now, but some of their games might break.
And remember, nearly all Mac users are in the Admin group by default. They can't make system changes unless a utility gets their password and sudo's to root on their behalf... but users are used to typing in that password when they're installing software.
If promised some bit of screen glitz, many (most?) Mac users would happily type in that password and compromise their system. It's kind of disgusting, but it's the simple truth.
OpenBSD, as tight as it is, still can't protect against dumb users.
Most of the spyware in the world comes from dumb users installing it, not from security holes allowing remote installation.
They like their bouncey smiley faces when mail comes in.
Oh, I don't think most Slashdot readers hate modern Macs. That'd be kind of dumb, after all.. most of us are pretty into Unix.
I do think a good chunk of us are worried that marketing is taking over their design, rather than technical excellence, but by and large, I think Apple has very good geek cred right now.
I wouldn't, however, get all stuffy about 'no viruses on the Mac'... an awful lot of their code is closed, so it's hard to know how good it is. They were still doing some pretty dumb security-related things when OSX first shipped (the last time I truly spent time digging into the system), and I'm not at all sure they're as paranoid as they should be.
If there were no malware authors, Windows would be easy as cake. Windows itself is extremely reliable, just as robust (if not more so) than the Mac. What makes it so unstable and trouble-prone is a world full of assholes.
Remember, most malware is installed with user permission. If a user thinks they're getting a cool screensaver, they'll say yes to ANYTHING.
Given user permission, it'll be easy, easy, EASY to mess up a Mac just as bad as a Windows box.
Microsoft probably wants there to be a big buzz about shortages, to get more people to pony up and purchase the first day.... the rumor thus becomes sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It would not shock me AT ALL if the source for this one is Microsoft itself. They want it to be special, scarce, and hard to find.
The way to combat the problem, as others here are mentioning, is just to ignore the console completely. There aren't going to be very many good games for it at first ANYWAY. The games aren't going anywhere. You'll still be able to play them if you wait until the consoles are easy to get. They're just graphical updates of existing games. They'll look fantabulous, but they're not going to play differently. It's just the same old shit with a facelift.
There's NO rush on this... the games will be just as much fun in February as they would be in two weeks, and they might be a little cheaper.
Distrowatch lists it at #2, behind only Ubuntu, and ahead of SUSE.
I don't know how closely their results reflect the real world, their list comes fairly close to matching my personal experience with Linux users and their distros of choice.
As long as I have a secure place to lock assets, I don't much care if I'm on a cardboard box in the middle of an amphitheater. It doesn't really matter if people can see over my shoulder, and I doubt most folks would care enough to bother. Watching scripts run isn't terribly entertaining. :)
Sure, an office would be nice, but given a lockable closet or something, there's no real need for one.
Mandriva is popular and widely used, particularly in Europe.
Just because it's one you DON'T use doesn't make it irrelevant.
Most people don't use passphrases that are nearly as strong as the encryption itself. Most police departments are probably going to attack the encryption of the key, not the plaintext.
It's probably not the best choice for a notebook or a router. It might be a good choice for a server, depending on what you're doing with it.
I've done some Solaris administration, but I have never been even remotely expert. I did get an idea of just how much I don't know, however.
In many ways, Solaris makes Linux and the BSDs look like tinkertoys. There is a vast array of functionality inside. Solaris feels like it was designed 'down', by people who are used to working with mainframes; Linux and the BSDs are more designed 'up' by people inventing (and often re-inventing) things for the first time.
There's a fundamental expectation in Solaris that the server will stay up under virtually all circumstances. If the hardware you're running it on is expensive enough, it's apparently pretty easy to hotswap almost anything... even RAM and CPUs. I believe it supports multiple running instances of Solaris on the same hardware at the same time, even different versions. And I'm fairly sure that a recent feature will let you upgrade OSes 'on the fly', though I think there would have to be at least a brief interruption of service. Pay attention to replies, if any. My knowledge in this area is very sketchy.
It's highly optimized to scale to amazing degrees, given more CPUs to work with. But that means it's not very well optimized to work with only one, which was why it was called 'Slowlaris' in the early days of Linux. Running multiprocessor requires a lot of locking to make sure that different CPUs don't step on each others' toes. This locking takes time. So the first versions of Solaris/Intel were dogmeat slow in comparison to Linux. There was no chance of a conflict, because multi-CPU Intel boxes almost didn't exist, but Sun was and is more interested in having it run WELL than run FAST. Removing all that locking would have introduced bugs. So they left it slow. And most folks went with SPARC boxen or Linux instead, for better performance.
At the time, Linux screamed on the same hardware, because it didn't worry about any of that. Up through 2.2, Linux had just a Big Kernel Lock... only one CPU could be in kernel space at any given time, and the rest of the CPUs either ran user code or sat around idle. Most user code makes fairly frequent kernel calls, so the extra CPUs blocked a lot. Running on one CPU was very fast, but there wasn't much benefit to adding more. A second was a moderate plus, adding maybe 50% overall throughput. Adding further CPUs did very little for most workloads.
Solaris does exactly the opposite. It's slow on one CPU, though 'slow' is pretty relative on a multi-gigahertz processor, but as you add more, it scales almost linearly. 64-way Solaris boxes run very nicely. And they do it without crashing, too. That's an area where Linux, for instance, has had a huge amount of trouble... as they add in new locks and try to rearchitect to let more and more CPUs into kernel code at once, they introduce bugs, often at a furious rate. You don't see much of that in released versions of Solaris. A lot of what you're paying for with the expensive Sun equipment is their QA department, which must be just incredibly good. (if any of you are reading this, thanks!)
Basically, this is enterprise-grade software. It's designed to run things like banks and air traffic control and medical equipment...stuff that just can't ever break or go down. It's not actually USED for air traffic control, as far as I know, but I'm sure Sun would be happy to sell systems into that market. If your hardware is good, Solaris can take an unbelievable beating... you can have loads in the thousands and still be able to connect to the box with SSH (eventually) and rescue it. It'll be slow, but you'll get in. Linux, in contrast, will often still die from dumb stuff like fork bombs. Yes, ulimits can prevent that problem, but Solaris will survive without the extra help.
Basically, Solaris is the kind of OS that you can bet your job on, and remain employed. Linux remai
No such address. If you're going to tell me to send in a bug report, giving me a good address would be more useful.
... User unknown (in reply to RCPT TO
: host vger.rutgers.edu[128.6.225.194] said: 550
5.1.1
command)
That's only illegal if you're already a monopoly. It's illegal for Microsoft to do that, but not for, say, Red Hat. They're not supposed to leverage their monopoly position in one market to dominate another.
As a rather off-topic aside, it strikes me that Sony and Microsoft selling their game consoles at a loss is doing exactly that. Sony makes some profit now on their game division, but Microsoft has lost billions.
From this armchair, that sure looks like classic monopoly abuse.