Let's just say that I'm a relative newbie and I want to a good, simple distro for my older laptop. I dislike Mandrake because I can't stand eight million applications installed by default. I want Gnome 2.8 (KDE is not my cup of tea), a good perl and c++ programming environment, and a decent office suite (and Firefox and Thunderbird). I also want an easy update method. Fedora and Ubuntu both seem to fit this bill. I'm leaning toward Ubuntu because it comes on just one cd, versus four for Fedora. Can anyone weigh in on the relative merits of each distro? Which would you recommend over the other, and why?
In my experiences with traffic court (lets not get into that), lawyers are especially helpful in the smaller courts. A lawyer on your side is helpful for two reasons I can think of right off. One, you don't do the speaking so you don't accidentally stick your foot in your mouth, and therefore lose the case. Two, when you have a lawyer on your side, no one screws with you. They don't play legal 'tricks' you don't know about, and you're sure to get a much more favorable ruling. If you can afford one (and better yet, if you have a lawyer friend even if it's not their specialty) get the lawyer before entering a courtroom.
I just read that there are two cases where a CAL is not required for access to Win2k Server: One, when the client makes http requests (ie the server is acting as a web server); Two, the client makes ftp requests.
Certificate Services is, I believe, used to create authentication certificates for use on smartcards and similar access devices, not secure web transactions. But I could be wrong about that.
And I thought that Win2k support for smartcards was especially for remote authentication, say on a laptop. I'm not sure what you mean by physical access, perhaps local access?
This is slightly off topic, but I'm curious as to why you went with 3rd party solutions for encryption and smartcard support instead of using Windows Server, which has those capabilities built in. Mostly I'm curious about the limitations of Windows Server products (this is not a troll, and I'm not interested in flames about M$).
I always thought of PGP as a personal resource, not something capable of effectively encrypting entire network environments. Why do you choose not to use the EFS capabilities of Windows, which, to my knowledge, are very secure and transparent to the user (provided (s)he has permission to decrypt).
The same question applies to Smartcard technology. Windows supports the PKINIT protocol, RSA and CryptoAPI etc. You can install Certificate Authority software as part of your install. Why specifically go with cryptoflex?
And specifically regarding your SSH question, it's not SSH but Windows Server supports Remote Access services via which you could set up a VPN and have a secure connection to the company servers.
The functionality apparently provided by BEEP sounds similar to one aspect of the functionality that.NET is trying to accomplish - namely ease of network connectivity and data exchange. I wonder if.NET goals played any part in the design of BEEP.
Let's take a look at one small paragraph to get an idea where this guy is coming from:
"...you can trash the default operating system, replace it with Linux, and have the full power and reach of your computer, finally, in your hands. No more error messages, no more advertisements, no more sending your personal information to 'register' your machine with some giant corporation, no more lost work, lost time, lost minds. Once you make the switch, you'll wonder how you ever got this far driving behind the wheel of that old clunker."
I speak from experience when I say, "no more error messages," WRONG! Obviously mom needs a gui, KDE is arguably the best/standard/representative-of-what's-available and it's a dog and it crashes. But's it's pretty.
What do you mean by, "no more advertisements?" True there aren't tens of crap programs installed on the desktop for programs you won't ever use -- that's because they're under the new "start" menu. There a huge number of programs installed by default with typical distros, and most of them aren't even named or organized in a discriptive manner.
And for that matter, most advertisements the user experiences come while browsing the web. Obviously Linux has nothing to do with the viewing of banner ads. You have to use an ad-blocker program to get such functionality, and such programs are freely available on all major operating systems.
No more registration? Yep, you don't have to register. And you don't have to get any help when KDE crashes and burns repeatedly either. In fact, if anything goes wrong (and Linux has it's own special version of dll-hell when drivers aren't working correctly), you're pretty much up shit creek without a paddle. Unless, by grace, you're the mother of a linux geek.
No more lost work? Bah, what happens when a co-worker sends you an MS Office document and your distro came with KOffice or some such crap which can't import the file? That's a lot of lost work right there. And incidentally, that's going to contribute to a lost mind.
This essay completely fails to explain why anyone should even try using Linux, especially my mom who's been using Windows for years, didn't pay for it (in her mind) because it came with her computer, didn't pay for the upgrade to Win2k (which is a good OS incidentally) either, and is finally comfortable with just checking her email. This whole essay annoyed me, obviously, because it's just another Linux-is-best jerkoff session. It's practically propoganda.
Judging by the grammar of the original poster, I'd venture he's not a Mac user. But of course he is, witness his website, so I must conclude that the post is a mere ego-stroke.
I'm curious what other book genres typical "geeks" enjoy reading. I used to read a great deal of scifi but I moved away from it during college, not having much time for extraneous books. Now I find myself attracted to pseudo-history books like Dumas' The Three Musketeers and Scott's Ivanhoe. In some ways, these books are related to scifi playing what-if games. What genres do you guys like to read besides scifi (and manuals)?
You people are ridiculous. Everything is touched up in photoshop. It's not a conspiracy anymore; it's just the way it is. Did I miss the competition to be the first person to claim every photo is a photoshop fake?
And such as it is, I spend a lot of time photoshopping and those corners don't look "too sharp" to me. If anything, I'd say the glare along the right edge of the graffiti portion seems abnormally sharp, but it's in keeping with the quality of the photo.
It appears that this effort on Microsoft's part is also an attempt ot recoup the losses of UltimateTV. MS blames the cable companies and vice versa for the failure, but either way billions of dollars went down the drain. Now they're going to try to make the XBox into the box they always wanted. The problem is that they still don't have the support of the cablie companies. The solution to this appears to be mimic Tivo, and expand on the idea. So MS is spending a few billion more to build several "data centers" around the world that will be used for gaming as well Tivo like features.
I peg their changes of success to the inverse of their greediness. Unfortunately thse past few years have revealed a trend toward greater greediness, locking out competitors, etc, and locking consumers into a closed system.
I'm just glad that the European Union is much more an advocate of privacy and open standards than the US government has proven to be. The EU is much stricter about these kinds of practices, and their actions will effect us Americans in a good way. Case in point: the EU is investigating Creative for the spyware their PlayCenter software installs. I can't tell you how pissed off I was to discover those programs tracking my browsing habits, and they were tacked on to a buggy program that hardly works but to which I have no alternatives, just to use my Nomad Jukebox.
Tell me more about the mod chip! I haven't heard about it. Where is there more information? What functionality does it allow? Does it just bypass the usual boot sequence, or can you also boot to a command line? There must be a some sort of console built into the box for development purposes. Perhaps now's a good time actually pick up one of these XBox's.
LaTex isn't very difficult once you know a few basic commands, outputs to text, dvi, and pdf, and basically meets all the criteria for which you are looking - namely it does everything in ascii text. Think about Tex like emacs or vi - it's a great tool once you get used to it. It IS your solution.
Fuel Cell tech, I know, uses a different system than Millennium Cell's. Air and a regular fuel source like natural gas (or even unnatural gas from a waste treatmant plant in one instance) is combined in a stack of fuel cells to create electricity. The effecience is roughly 50%, which they claim to be really good even compared to fossil fuels. It's worth noting, however, that all these fuel cell technologies still rely upon a traditional form of fuel from which to derive the chemicals.
Millennium Cell is a good company trying to bring a viable, cheap (relatively), alternative fuel source to the consumer market, but they aren't the only company doing so. A few others are
Fuel Cell Energy Inc.
http://www.ercc.com/
Plug Power
http://www.plugpower.com/
Manhatten Scientifics
http://www.mhtx.com/
Anyway, I thought someone might be interested in doing a little deeper research into fuel cell technologies. It seems like the we're right on the edge of a power revolution, but most people haven't even heard of it!
The grand financial failure that was the Sega Dreamcast was probably, primarily, because the system was so simply hacked by everyone with a friend with a broadband connection. Heck, my friend just got one yesterday because they're only $50 and 500 games are all free, what a steal. No, Sega didn't go out of business, but that arm of their corporation did.
My friend has one of these ipaq devices, and he fitted it with a 20 gig laptop hard drive. That makes it rather expensive toy I guess, but it's really cool running linux. Think about one of these babies in your living room, streaming music to the stereo, checking email on the couch, maybe even controlling the tv with the right ir port. It'd be very cool.
The downside though - that hard drive makes a fair bit of heat meaning my friend can't run his ipaq for many more than twenty minutes at a time. A fan is definitely in order, but he lost interest in the project.
Well lets, why don't I tick off a few comments here:
I can easily run Netscape, a burner and winamp together without windows crashing. Honestly, I do it all the time, and on a laptop too!
I don't know what you mean by making a frisbee on linux, but I assume it means crashing the system. I can say that I have had linux crash on me, admittedly only once, but I can't say Win2k has crashed on me any more times than that. I consider myself at least proficient in Linux having used it regularly for classes and minor web dev, proficient enough that I can compile my own kernel, set up samba, and program in c++, but there's no denying that setting up anything in linux is a whole lot more difficult than doing the equivalent in Windows (except piping). Granted it's cheaper in Linux, but still harder.
Consider the argument that if there's a piece of GPL'd software that's not working right for you, you can always grab the source code and modify it. Let me tell you, I'm not a pro but I know a hell of a lot more about programming than most people in the world, and that's a daunting task. It's also one that I'm simply not going to do and neither is the rest of the world.
Here in college I think I can say that the only uses for linux are as servers, cs thesis machines, and tinkering. Of those people (all but one that I can think of) who have linux installed on their box, they dual-boot into Windows to do any real school work.
You're line about Linux doing in 10 years what Microsoft couldn't do in 20 is just wrong. Linux isn't nearly so user-friendly, useful, or supported by a long shot compared to Windows and Office (which usually go together). And for that matter you mentioned Netscape. I'm sorry to break it to you, but Netscape is inferior to Internet Explorer. It simply is better; I don't even want to get into this argument though.
Bitch bitch bitch about Microsoft, but the company is the single most successful company in history, so explain that one smart guy. I don't think you even know what you're talking about when you claim their software shoddy and insecure, you're clearly not in a position to evaluate it objectively, and you have no proof for this big brother bs.
It really gets me that people are so incredibly harsh on Microsoft. Yes, they're bastards and so you share some political differences, but on the other hand the produce GOOD CODE. No they don't you say, but what is the last enormous project you took on, and developed over many years. I'm using Windows 2000 right now, and gosh darn it, I LIKE IT. In fact, I like it a lot more than GNOME and KDE (I like gnome more than kde for the record, at least with the Mandrake 8.1 install). For all the evil practices of Microsoft, their developers are probably the best in the world, hands down, no question. They can throw a lot of cash at undergrads looking for a valuable work experience. I think my post has gone a little off topic, but give Microsoft a little credit. They do deserve a little.
Thank you for your response. My request is indeed legit, I am trying to study how one can compress floating-point numbers and one major aspect to investigate is how to take advantage of the data structure. For example, your typical compression algorithm (Ziv-Lempel and Arithmetic coding) is largely dependent upon the data being broken up along byte boundaries, but that's not how fp numbers are stored in memory (11 bit exponent for example). One simple way I've seen this was by taking a fairly small file of floating point numbers (about three megs in binary form) and compressing the file with WinZip (which I think uses Ziv-Lempel). That compression resulted in a file sized 2.5 megabytes. Then I took the original binary file of fp numbers, produced an equivalent list of numbers in ASCII (thereby enlarging the size of the information considerably), and compressing that ASCII file with WinZip. The resulting file of that operation was sized only 2 megabytes. The conclusion to draw from that is that the added structure of ASCII text allows WinZip to perform better. My approach now is to investigate various ways in which fp data can be manipulated to be better compressed. Noise-like data, so long as it's not truly random, is excellent data on which to test various compression strategies. Again, thank you for your suggestions to find data.
I'm writing my thesis on the compressibility of floating-point numbers (an understudied aspect of computer science), and I need more Real-World data to study. Astronomy being a field requiring vast storage capacity this is the perfect data to use (and physics too if I could find it). Anyway, I need data to statistically analyze. Is the data for this project open, and where can more data be found? I'm primarily looking for LOOONG streams of floating-point numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's just say that I'm a relative newbie and I want to a good, simple distro for my older laptop. I dislike Mandrake because I can't stand eight million applications installed by default. I want Gnome 2.8 (KDE is not my cup of tea), a good perl and c++ programming environment, and a decent office suite (and Firefox and Thunderbird). I also want an easy update method. Fedora and Ubuntu both seem to fit this bill. I'm leaning toward Ubuntu because it comes on just one cd, versus four for Fedora. Can anyone weigh in on the relative merits of each distro? Which would you recommend over the other, and why?
In my experiences with traffic court (lets not get into that), lawyers are especially helpful in the smaller courts. A lawyer on your side is helpful for two reasons I can think of right off. One, you don't do the speaking so you don't accidentally stick your foot in your mouth, and therefore lose the case. Two, when you have a lawyer on your side, no one screws with you. They don't play legal 'tricks' you don't know about, and you're sure to get a much more favorable ruling. If you can afford one (and better yet, if you have a lawyer friend even if it's not their specialty) get the lawyer before entering a courtroom.
My friend, Windows 2000 default tunneling procedure utilizes L2TP for tunneling and IPSec for encryption.
What's the difference between MS IPSec and OpenBSD IPSec? Is not IPSec a standard?
Certificate Services is, I believe, used to create authentication certificates for use on smartcards and similar access devices, not secure web transactions. But I could be wrong about that.
And I thought that Win2k support for smartcards was especially for remote authentication, say on a laptop. I'm not sure what you mean by physical access, perhaps local access?
This is slightly off topic, but I'm curious as to why you went with 3rd party solutions for encryption and smartcard support instead of using Windows Server, which has those capabilities built in. Mostly I'm curious about the limitations of Windows Server products (this is not a troll, and I'm not interested in flames about M$).
I always thought of PGP as a personal resource, not something capable of effectively encrypting entire network environments. Why do you choose not to use the EFS capabilities of Windows, which, to my knowledge, are very secure and transparent to the user (provided (s)he has permission to decrypt).
The same question applies to Smartcard technology. Windows supports the PKINIT protocol, RSA and CryptoAPI etc. You can install Certificate Authority software as part of your install. Why specifically go with cryptoflex?
And specifically regarding your SSH question, it's not SSH but Windows Server supports Remote Access services via which you could set up a VPN and have a secure connection to the company servers.
Please share your knowledge.
The functionality apparently provided by BEEP sounds similar to one aspect of the functionality that .NET is trying to accomplish - namely ease of network connectivity and data exchange. I wonder if .NET goals played any part in the design of BEEP.
"...you can trash the default operating system, replace it with Linux, and have the full power and reach of your computer, finally, in your hands. No more error messages, no more advertisements, no more sending your personal information to 'register' your machine with some giant corporation, no more lost work, lost time, lost minds. Once you make the switch, you'll wonder how you ever got this far driving behind the wheel of that old clunker."
I speak from experience when I say, "no more error messages," WRONG! Obviously mom needs a gui, KDE is arguably the best/standard/representative-of-what's-available and it's a dog and it crashes. But's it's pretty.
What do you mean by, "no more advertisements?" True there aren't tens of crap programs installed on the desktop for programs you won't ever use -- that's because they're under the new "start" menu. There a huge number of programs installed by default with typical distros, and most of them aren't even named or organized in a discriptive manner.
And for that matter, most advertisements the user experiences come while browsing the web. Obviously Linux has nothing to do with the viewing of banner ads. You have to use an ad-blocker program to get such functionality, and such programs are freely available on all major operating systems.
No more registration? Yep, you don't have to register. And you don't have to get any help when KDE crashes and burns repeatedly either. In fact, if anything goes wrong (and Linux has it's own special version of dll-hell when drivers aren't working correctly), you're pretty much up shit creek without a paddle. Unless, by grace, you're the mother of a linux geek.
No more lost work? Bah, what happens when a co-worker sends you an MS Office document and your distro came with KOffice or some such crap which can't import the file? That's a lot of lost work right there. And incidentally, that's going to contribute to a lost mind.
This essay completely fails to explain why anyone should even try using Linux, especially my mom who's been using Windows for years, didn't pay for it (in her mind) because it came with her computer, didn't pay for the upgrade to Win2k (which is a good OS incidentally) either, and is finally comfortable with just checking her email. This whole essay annoyed me, obviously, because it's just another Linux-is-best jerkoff session. It's practically propoganda.
Judging by the grammar of the original poster, I'd venture he's not a Mac user. But of course he is, witness his website, so I must conclude that the post is a mere ego-stroke.
I'm curious what other book genres typical "geeks" enjoy reading. I used to read a great deal of scifi but I moved away from it during college, not having much time for extraneous books. Now I find myself attracted to pseudo-history books like Dumas' The Three Musketeers and Scott's Ivanhoe. In some ways, these books are related to scifi playing what-if games. What genres do you guys like to read besides scifi (and manuals)?
And such as it is, I spend a lot of time photoshopping and those corners don't look "too sharp" to me. If anything, I'd say the glare along the right edge of the graffiti portion seems abnormally sharp, but it's in keeping with the quality of the photo.
Yeah, I guess you're right. I was thinking of the MicrosoftTV initiative.
I peg their changes of success to the inverse of their greediness. Unfortunately thse past few years have revealed a trend toward greater greediness, locking out competitors, etc, and locking consumers into a closed system.
I'm just glad that the European Union is much more an advocate of privacy and open standards than the US government has proven to be. The EU is much stricter about these kinds of practices, and their actions will effect us Americans in a good way. Case in point: the EU is investigating Creative for the spyware their PlayCenter software installs. I can't tell you how pissed off I was to discover those programs tracking my browsing habits, and they were tacked on to a buggy program that hardly works but to which I have no alternatives, just to use my Nomad Jukebox.
That's probably enough ranting for now.
Tell me more about the mod chip! I haven't heard about it. Where is there more information? What functionality does it allow? Does it just bypass the usual boot sequence, or can you also boot to a command line? There must be a some sort of console built into the box for development purposes. Perhaps now's a good time actually pick up one of these XBox's.
LaTex isn't very difficult once you know a few basic commands, outputs to text, dvi, and pdf, and basically meets all the criteria for which you are looking - namely it does everything in ascii text. Think about Tex like emacs or vi - it's a great tool once you get used to it. It IS your solution.
Rumor has it that Steve is going to pull out the big switcheroo. We'll see tomorrow I guess, but the rumor is that Apple is moving to Intel chips!
Fuel Cell tech, I know, uses a different system than Millennium Cell's. Air and a regular fuel source like natural gas (or even unnatural gas from a waste treatmant plant in one instance) is combined in a stack of fuel cells to create electricity. The effecience is roughly 50%, which they claim to be really good even compared to fossil fuels. It's worth noting, however, that all these fuel cell technologies still rely upon a traditional form of fuel from which to derive the chemicals.
Millennium Cell is a good company trying to bring a viable, cheap (relatively), alternative fuel source to the consumer market, but they aren't the only company doing so. A few others are
Fuel Cell Energy Inc.
http://www.ercc.com/
Plug Power
http://www.plugpower.com/
Manhatten Scientifics
http://www.mhtx.com/
Anyway, I thought someone might be interested in doing a little deeper research into fuel cell technologies. It seems like the we're right on the edge of a power revolution, but most people haven't even heard of it!
The grand financial failure that was the Sega Dreamcast was probably, primarily, because the system was so simply hacked by everyone with a friend with a broadband connection. Heck, my friend just got one yesterday because they're only $50 and 500 games are all free, what a steal. No, Sega didn't go out of business, but that arm of their corporation did.
Well, if you have a $1000 to spend on a laptop, sure, go for it. But $100 sounds a lot better to me.
My friend has one of these ipaq devices, and he fitted it with a 20 gig laptop hard drive. That makes it rather expensive toy I guess, but it's really cool running linux. Think about one of these babies in your living room, streaming music to the stereo, checking email on the couch, maybe even controlling the tv with the right ir port. It'd be very cool.
The downside though - that hard drive makes a fair bit of heat meaning my friend can't run his ipaq for many more than twenty minutes at a time. A fan is definitely in order, but he lost interest in the project.
Indeed Hydrogen does and will further boost the development of zero-emission vehicles.
If you're interested in reading about a few small companies that are researching this area check out:
Manhatten Scientifics (mhtx.com)
MillenniumCell (millenniumcell.com)
Fuel Cell Tech (?)
One even has a hydrogen powered bicycle, but I forget which.
Well lets, why don't I tick off a few comments here:
I can easily run Netscape, a burner and winamp together without windows crashing. Honestly, I do it all the time, and on a laptop too!
I don't know what you mean by making a frisbee on linux, but I assume it means crashing the system. I can say that I have had linux crash on me, admittedly only once, but I can't say Win2k has crashed on me any more times than that. I consider myself at least proficient in Linux having used it regularly for classes and minor web dev, proficient enough that I can compile my own kernel, set up samba, and program in c++, but there's no denying that setting up anything in linux is a whole lot more difficult than doing the equivalent in Windows (except piping). Granted it's cheaper in Linux, but still harder.
Consider the argument that if there's a piece of GPL'd software that's not working right for you, you can always grab the source code and modify it. Let me tell you, I'm not a pro but I know a hell of a lot more about programming than most people in the world, and that's a daunting task. It's also one that I'm simply not going to do and neither is the rest of the world.
Here in college I think I can say that the only uses for linux are as servers, cs thesis machines, and tinkering. Of those people (all but one that I can think of) who have linux installed on their box, they dual-boot into Windows to do any real school work.
You're line about Linux doing in 10 years what Microsoft couldn't do in 20 is just wrong. Linux isn't nearly so user-friendly, useful, or supported by a long shot compared to Windows and Office (which usually go together). And for that matter you mentioned Netscape. I'm sorry to break it to you, but Netscape is inferior to Internet Explorer. It simply is better; I don't even want to get into this argument though.
Bitch bitch bitch about Microsoft, but the company is the single most successful company in history, so explain that one smart guy. I don't think you even know what you're talking about when you claim their software shoddy and insecure, you're clearly not in a position to evaluate it objectively, and you have no proof for this big brother bs.
It really gets me that people are so incredibly harsh on Microsoft. Yes, they're bastards and so you share some political differences, but on the other hand the produce GOOD CODE. No they don't you say, but what is the last enormous project you took on, and developed over many years. I'm using Windows 2000 right now, and gosh darn it, I LIKE IT. In fact, I like it a lot more than GNOME and KDE (I like gnome more than kde for the record, at least with the Mandrake 8.1 install). For all the evil practices of Microsoft, their developers are probably the best in the world, hands down, no question. They can throw a lot of cash at undergrads looking for a valuable work experience. I think my post has gone a little off topic, but give Microsoft a little credit. They do deserve a little.
Thank you for your response. My request is indeed legit, I am trying to study how one can compress floating-point numbers and one major aspect to investigate is how to take advantage of the data structure. For example, your typical compression algorithm (Ziv-Lempel and Arithmetic coding) is largely dependent upon the data being broken up along byte boundaries, but that's not how fp numbers are stored in memory (11 bit exponent for example). One simple way I've seen this was by taking a fairly small file of floating point numbers (about three megs in binary form) and compressing the file with WinZip (which I think uses Ziv-Lempel). That compression resulted in a file sized 2.5 megabytes. Then I took the original binary file of fp numbers, produced an equivalent list of numbers in ASCII (thereby enlarging the size of the information considerably), and compressing that ASCII file with WinZip. The resulting file of that operation was sized only 2 megabytes. The conclusion to draw from that is that the added structure of ASCII text allows WinZip to perform better. My approach now is to investigate various ways in which fp data can be manipulated to be better compressed. Noise-like data, so long as it's not truly random, is excellent data on which to test various compression strategies. Again, thank you for your suggestions to find data.
George
I'm writing my thesis on the compressibility of floating-point numbers (an understudied aspect of computer science), and I need more Real-World data to study. Astronomy being a field requiring vast storage capacity this is the perfect data to use (and physics too if I could find it). Anyway, I need data to statistically analyze. Is the data for this project open, and where can more data be found? I'm primarily looking for LOOONG streams of floating-point numbers.
Thanks for any help you can give me.
My email is gcshaw@amherst.edu