Before we learn to walk again, we should learn to cycle again. Faster, more efficient, can carry heavy loads and relatively cheap to produce and maintain. It would solve a lot of health issues as well.
While you're doing that charge up an electric car from solar/wind/whatever for longer journeys or large loads.
A European research and development firm has announced a two hundred gramme, wrist-worn wearable computer with a 72 x 55-millimetre colour touchscreen. Eurotech's WWPC (wrist-worn PC) runs Linux or Windows, offers a wealth of standard PC interfaces (WLAN, Bluetooth, IrDA, USB, SD-card, etc), and has patented technology that puts the device to sleep when the user drops their arm. It can detect motionless user states, and serve as a location-transmitting beacon, thanks to a built-in GPS receiver and 'dead reckoning' technology. The company also claims six hours of battery life under 'fully operational' conditions.
For users, running as 'root' makes no difference to the usability of the system. What drives me crazy as a unix user currently having to work on Windows for data entry (involving lots of data movement between windows) is the way the desktop works.
Simple customisation like how windows focus, whether to raise on focus or not, 'keep on top', multiple desktops to reduce clutter and etc are simply not available (except by maybe 3rd party apps which I wouldn't be allowed to add).
At home I set my computer to work how I want it to. At work I have to use it one way, and one way only; the MS Way. Which would be fine if it wasn't completely different to My Way. This is on W2K. XP may be different, but if it isn't, then it's still the biggest gripe I have about *using* Windows.
I think what he meant is that GIMP only handles 8bit per channel images (ie 24bit colour, 3 RGB x 8bits each), such as you would get from a camera saving JPEGs. RAW files from cameras can contain 12bit (and up to 14bit) per channel out of a maximum of 16, giving 48bit colour space. This increases the lattitude of digital images, giving more scope to play around with exposure and contrast without losing detail.
Here's some info about the difference between RAW and JPEG files at Luminous Landscape.
This is one big thing Photoshop has over GIMP at the moment for professional photography, although even Photoshop doesn't handle them as well as 8bit images yet. If I get a camera soon that has RAW output this could seriously change my views on what OS I use for my photography (100% Linux and WINE at the moment).
And don't forget the whole thing about being the first to move their product base to 32bit RISC (where they were beaten to it by quite a few years by Acorn and their ARM-based RISC OS range).
The more you look at things the more you realise it's all been done before by someone else years ago.
So if the terrorist attack on the WTC had only killed 4 people would it have caused global outrage? Small numbers of people are killed by acts of terrorism on a daily basis but we hear little or nothing about them.
9/11 killed a lot of people. Thus it is very significant. The earthquake killed far more. That one group of people were, to all intents and purposes, murdered, and the others killed by a natural event does not change the fact that those people died. It does not change the grief experienced by the suddenly bereaved loved ones.
The fact that certain groups are willing to kill others because of their beliefs is of great importance. This is not, however (and this is the big point), intimately linked to the deaths of those people on 9/11. I do not see why I should mourn more the death of someone before their time when it was by 'murder' than if the exact same person had been run over by a bus.
I am concerned about terrorism but I am not going to grade grief by political measures. If I do anything special today it will be to observe a minute of thought about the evil that men do to each other. I will not observe a minute of silence or whatever for the people who died in 9/11 any more than I would for anyone else that had died. Especially as those deaths had no personal connection to me whatsoever.
There is a media hysteria arround these things nowdays (cf Diana dying and crazy amounts of public grief going on there) and I am quite frankly fed up of this modern passtime of public grief for people you've never met or known in any way at all.
From the first viewing of the pilot episode where the explicit and gratuitous 'Rubbing gel all over the bodies of a well-stacked bird and some buffed up fella' scene happened I have had little interest in Star Trek Enterprise.
The theme song is cringeworthy. They're blatantly using T'Pol to keep the sex-starved geekboys interested (To boldy pout where no large-breasted tramp has pouted before). There's (as is usual these days) an extreme overabundance of Americans (I mean, yeah, it's a big country, but you get the feeling any other country on Earth is slipped in only for plot development these days).
And the Vulcans! Logical, suppresed emotions? My arse, the actors like to think that Arrogant, Condescending, Irritable and Sarcastic are things that a highly intelligent being with supressed emotions and a fixation on Logic would be doing, it's all been downhill since Spock if you ask me! What's more, as well as being some much-need T&A to keep the boys awake T'Pol is also continuing the theme of inhuman outsider who really really wants to be Human (or if you prefer and are a little cynical like me, really really want to be American). cf Data, Odo, 7of9 (note the theme of Tits In Tight Clothing coupled with Struggling to understand Humanity/The American Way they learned there and are making good use of now).
It's all stuff we've seen before. They're all plots we've seen in one way or another before. The Aliens are still Just Humans(with all their mannerisms and emotions) With Funny Faces, they still use the Teleporters to get them out of sticky situations and I just know the Holodeck will make an appearance at some point so they can get down to some serious Holo-cobblers a la TNG and Voyager. All in all this in no way, for me, feels like a prequel to TOS, it feels just like one of a million other Americanised SciFi shows and after the horror story of Voyager (I won't even start to list how that narked me off) I hold little hope for Star Trek, it's all one big Franchise now and will never be allowed to die like it should have after DS9 (or before, according to taste).
They did. Years ago. The mindless worker drones didn't have the nouse or inclination to do anything about it. Many IT departments didn't have the nouse, inclination or sheer balls to do anything about it. Managers everywhere didn't have the nouse, inclination, balls or forsight to do anything about it. All the gamer freakz and AOLers and etc certainly didn't have the nouse, inclination or balls to do anything about it ("I can't play these cool games on anything else, whine whine whine!"). The US government in its usual fawning, apologist mode when it comes to someone with a few bucks just rolled over and let them off even when found guilty (guilty of really quite trivial things too, even when anyone out here with half an ounce of clue knows just how much they're screwing over *everyone* in many more ways than just providing a free browser; that's just the top of the iceberg. Mr Judge, so how about we all stop pissing about and actually *punish* a *criminal* company for a change, eh? Dream on...).
So, MS just carried on. In fact, they've come back even worse as far as I'm concerned and now all the spineless cretins are going down, drowning in all the odious filth that MS passes off as 'Security' and 'Stopping nasty pirates' and so on, many believing every downright stupid and blatantly untruthful word and paying out hand over fist for the privilige.
OK, screw em, that's their decision, but the one massive flaw in the old 'Live and let live' philosophy is that by letting MS get away it and with everyone and their dog just jumping on the wagon to join the ride is that the whole sinking ship is taking *me* with it if all this crap passes through and becomes law where I live meaning that I can't just sit down and sodding use the system and software *I* want to use in the way that *I* want to use it without harming so much as the tiniest hair on the teeniest fly, and making my life as a unix admin orders of magnitude more hassle than it has any right to be as MS constantly flip protocols and file formats and god knows what else around every five minutes for no other apparent reason than to make the lives of people like me difficult (as if we're just gonna give up or something; they can think again).
So to all you MS apologists and users (when you have any form of choice in the matter) here's a big FUCK YOU for pissing on everyone's parade including your own. Thanks.
Not that extreme. I've had that experience. Some Windows weenie had just installed a personal firewall and was using the same dialup as one of my users. The ISP got a line crossed somewhere and some packets destined for my user ended up going to Windows weenie (they were an email connection).
Weenie gets notified by Firewall. Weenie starts sending snotty threatening emails to me. I explain very calmly and correctly what had happened, what the output of his Firewall actually meant and how it was all a mistake and even if it wasn't there was nothing at all to be concerned about.
Weenie continues slinging accusations around and threatening all sorts. I lose my rag and tell him to (in a slightly less polite way) sod the hell off unless he had some real evidence (as it was his 'evidence' would mean that not only had our systems been owned or that I was trying to crack his computer but so were a number of the University's email systems and if so the whole uni admin staff would be quite anxious to know about it, thankyou very much, yer useless, jumped up f***wit...etc). Weenie finally shuts up.
We don't need this hassle for sure and if he'd known *anything* about networking or if his firewall hadn't been so bloody minded and overzealous it wouldn't have happened. The thing is, especially with dialup, you get loads of connections flying around that are pure mistakes (using the IP of someone that's logged off and someone else has dialled in and got it, an ip quad with one digit out, spelling mistake etc), harmless probes or plain malicious but won't harm your machine (eg Code Red if you don't run IIS). You'll probably get far more attempted connections at a firewall than you can possibly deal with and it's only really worth going for the really persistent ones. Thing is if it's showing up on your firewall then you're generally not being hurt by it.
The connections that really hurt are the ones that aren't in your firewall logs.
That's odd, we don't have any problem running our hardware control machines across VNC. Ok, on a modem it isn't fun fun fun but on anything better than that it's perfectly acceptable.
And running X-ray diffractometers and SQUID magnetometers isn't exactly simple text-based stuff either (a proper unix program would be but you know what Windows programmers are like: let's make it all buttons and clicking contrary to the fact that most people just want a freaking cli interface that works and doesn't require you to pick out high resolution objects with the mouse instead of just typing in the exact angles for example).
Although we have PC-Anywhere on there as well (which may be better, I dunno) it means we can connect up to those machines from practically any type of modern platform, ie we don't have to piss about rebooting into Windows just to control a couple of windows on another box. Added to that the fact that you can sling VNC quite happily onto anything else for serving and you're set: the users don't have to learn anything new they still use the same old clients.
You can compare the bandwidth requirements and cpu requirements and blah blah blah but the fact that VNC is here, has been for years and works on any system we use (Unix, Windows, Macs, even RISC OS) makes it a sure fire winner.
Anyway, at least nobody here has been sucker enough to get XP in the first place which must be a goddamn record for this dept (I'm ignoring the pirating scum and the ripped-off copies they had within days, naturally).
Anything else is X, and I don't need to point out the sheer Joy of its network transparency now do I? (Seeing as I'm often doing graphical analysis/editing and sometimes using OpenOffice to look at people's PowerPoint presentations at home via our cable connection without using anything other than my default desktop).
Anyone know yet whether Doom III will be a crossplatform release?
Then again even if it is all the NOT(Windows) platforms will probably get it a few weeks after the initial release and Carmack will once again wonder why nobody bought it for them.
I'd really like to buy this game when it comes out (which is pretty rare for me) and I would really like it to be on Linux (cos I don't run Windows!) and I urge those who want Linux ports to show a smidge of patience and buy the full port.
Excellent. Your post vividly depicts the true stupidity of top-posting in any medium.
How useful it is to read the final conclusion of your email adventure before even finding out how it started. Top posters really are "Read the book backwards" sorta people, aren't they?
And as long as I'm using a shell in an xterm I damn well hope we stay there. I like being able to see what the hell my files are from a simple text listing and collections of files like:
thesis.tex
thesis.dvi
thesis.ps
thesis.aux
thesis.pdf
and so on become impossible or have to be done with tedious hacks afaict. Look, here we are in a textual medium and I don't have to tell you what those files are, as the extension covers that (assuming you know LaTeX files, which a non-extenstion-based system is hardly going to help you with anyway).
Extensions aren't ideal but they're useful in a number of ways, particularly at the shell level, metadata can often be as arbitrarily assigned as a filename extension (I like a system that allows *me* to assign the types of my files if I wish, particularly in the realm of text files). IMO anyway.
Sitting at the desk next to me is someone that I am training up to take over my position as the group sys admin. Although he's a bright chap he still has much to learn and thinks (quite wrongly) that I'm some sort of guru or genius with all the 'complicated' unix stuff I know. He's a Windows convert and still thinks Linux is a bit clunky and difficult, which is fair enough. But he does do a lot of Fortran programming, far more than I do.
Whilst rooting about in some books a while back I came across an old, lone, pink punchcard being used as a bookmark. To put things into perspective for my colleague I simply wrote on this card "Count your blessings" and placed it next to his keyboard.
It was quickly taped to his monitor (after I explained what it was) and there it remains to this day.
PS - I read some of your other stuff and seems really interseting and you have some good points but dont you dare throw off at my skills whilst working in the protected world of academia and universities - in the real world its very very different - i admire your knowledge and skills but i pose this point - have you EVER used a MS Operating System - im assuming you have a CS degree and that would have been pretty much nothing but UNIX and then you went to Linux so if you havent used MS Product then how can you comment. Im not being a smart arse im just sick of the/. mentality of attacking ANY disssenting opionion with a personal insult regarding someones skills - it pisses me off and i respond in kind.
Yes, I have used Windows since 3.0 and have had experience of 3.0, 3.1, 95, 98, ME, NT4 and 2000 (and various DOSes inbetween) [This is both as a user and installer and through my own undergrad days and in my teaching IT courses I've seen the problematic nature of Windows in large scale networks, although it is getting much better since 2000]; a little experience with Mac OS 9, and a working knowledge of Solaris. I use 98 on a daily basis on hardware control machines.
I don't have a single IT qualification, I am all self-taught (through reading up on systems, discussion with professional admins, a couple of years of experience running our group's systems and now training up a replacement for when I leave; teaching is a great way of learning yourself;0).
I hadn't used unix at all until 4 years ago and had had far more experience of RISC OS, a very 'user friendly' environment, far more so than Windows when I was using it but there's a difference between easiness and capability. If you've ever used RISC OS you'll know the stark difference between a RISC OS and Linux desktop but at the end of day you can still click on a button, write your letter/memo/presentation, draw a diagram, scan a picture and print it out about as well on one system as on another, especially in an office environment as it's people like me that make sure you can.
I don't find Linux hard to use. When people here have been taught how to use it they don't find it overly hard (stuff like KDE2 really helps though). There's nothing I want to do that Linux can't do for me, but I happily admit this is not true for many people. But in a corporate environment? The machines I role out as well as being workstations have to handle the more corporate things such as WP, email, web browsing, CAD, address books, scanning, printing etc and with X terminals it's a piece of piss to 'roll it out' (we've since moved to local installs with networked applications but again we only have to update one machine to update the whole network immediately). Moving from Windows to Linux will obviously be a big outlay, but so would the reverse, possibly why Linux uptake is more in currently unix-based networks rather than out-and-out replacement of MS technology, possibly depends on the timescale the management is looking at; a shortterm outlay for longterm benefits or shortterm savings and hope for the best (the age-old quandry).
Hardware I have bought has worked out of the box, even a few years ago. I've had problems on other systems that had no influence over, I've also had problems getting Windows working on systems that Linux runs fine on and vice versa. The scale of difference between Windows and Linux is getting less all the time and if you don't like it, fair enough, but for many people it can and does work. From my experience of teaching undergraduates Windows is not a guarantee that you will be able to use a computer effectively, more often what people have used before is a biggest factor (here Windows tends to win hands down but I've had good success with DOS users moving to Linux).
Still, I know some people that love Linux but now use OS X instead. It's not as nice a 'unix' environment, but the integration of desktop tools makes up for it for them. I don't personally recommend Linux for everyone, I appreciate its current limitations, but if I feel someone can make use of it I will recommend it and help them with installing it if necessary.
Some of these people now use it because it's a good alternative to Windows which they have grown tired of (for 'religious' or technological reasons). Some use it because it offers something Windows doesn't (varies, all the free tools at hand on a CD tend to be a good reason, powerful networking is another) and one because Linux works on his PC but Windows is quite unstable (it plays his TV card, plays HOMIII, browses the web etc and that's enough for him). The group area dual-boots 2000 and SuSE and apart from PowerPoint and SigmaPlot (plotting package with no unix port) they stay pretty much in unix all the time and despite this being academia this does not guarantee computer literacy, believe me.
It all depends on what you want to do and whether you're prepared to work at learning a more complex but more capable system or stick with what you know.
I apologise if I offended you but you too seemed to be emitting 'X is crap, Y is brilliant' trollery;0).
PS yeah yeah im gonna get modded down - damn it i dont really know if i care or not - i have given up on free software in most ways - all my home equipment has gone back to MS software and ive stopped recommeding it to people - the fact is theres not one distro. out there that works properly out of the box - dont believe me think like a newbie and bung in Mandrake or Redhat and install it without any idea of what it means - then play an MPEG or AVI movie (NO changing compilers or libraries and NO console) You cant do it can you.
Yes, you can, if you use a modern up-to-date distro and don't have weird hardware.
If Linux is too hard for you Mr IT Manager then I fear for your company.
Linux is very easy to roll out for a corporate desktop. Install it on one machine, tune it up to what your company wants. Ghost the install. Or use terminal servers. (I do for my group). This isn't rocket science.
And the day MS software works 'out the box' on all machines will be a great one I assure you.
Well, my firewall and http servers have had countless tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of Nimda/CodeRed attempts over the past few months (they're apache machines so no bother there).
As for acquiring email viruses/worms, the vast majority of the people I email and recieve email from use unix so that's a start. The university I work in implements a policy of not using Outlook Express and advises people not to use it. It also harbours deep mistrust (IME of admin's responses to my notifications of infected machines) of MS server technology. Windows may still reign on the desktop but for email/http/dns etc they wouldn't touch it with someone else's bargepole.
I know of only one person that actually uses Outlook Express through preference and they are of enough general intelligence to not fall prey of such worms if they received them themselves.
So, yes, I haven't seen any myself but that's both a combination of who I am and the fact that my workplace has pretty security concious admins that block them at the main email servers so I wouldn't know if I'd been sent a virus anyway. The same level of mistrust of MS server technology also means the uni had maybe a dozen or two of CodeRed/Nimda infections (generally from self-installed machines by not particularly well-informed users).
Even so I notify my users of all major Windows holes and latest email viruses/worms even through I run a Linux network as an educated user is a good user (many have Windows machines at home).
My situation quite effectively isolates me from email security holes but the size of my firewall logs quite happily keep me in touch with the really quite alarming and depressing level of insecure Windows machines out there, and that are still out there now from exploits that made news months ago.
ELF executables would need to be (as per the usual retort of such idiotic comments) first marked as executable and then run by the user as an executable not run either by mistake as the user thought they were a text/image file or simply by the email client running them without any user intervention. I know of no unix client that does this and even the relative lack of HTML email is in itself a good thing in a security sense.
There tends to be a much wider range of email clients in use on unix machines: pine, kmail, mutt, xfmail to name a few. To make a worm that attacked all of these would be very hard, and only targetting one would greatly limit the impact.
I can manage millions of shell accounts and it wouldn't matter if I (through some miraculous event) was infected by an email worm as I wouldn't be reading my mail as root normally, and root would be reading mail through a known robust mail client, probably on a remote machine. Impact of a normal user on such a system will also be quite limited as it isn't often that easy to find out all the users on a machine and even if you do the 'worm' is still only on that one system and is easily prevented spreading onwards.
Homogeneity makes Windows a nicer 'user experience' but it also provides a very fertile ground for viruses and worms. There is far too much variety in the types of Unix, and the distributions of Unix and the number of clients for the sort of world-crushing effects that Windows security flaws produce. There are only 3 systems I can think of that would produce this: sendmail, apache and bind. Apache has a very good track record, bind and sendmail not so good but even though they are highly dominant they don't seem to produce such continual levels of exploitation and more importantly learn from their mistakes.
In fact it is often Unix that reduces the impact of Windows email viruses and worms due to sendmail/procmail filtering rejecting known infected mails.
All I hope is that the unix developers out there are looking long and hard at Microsoft's mistakes and learning from them. Unix viri and worms aren't impossible (there have been a handful over the years) but they are certainly a lot less prevalent and mostly a lot less destructive both through intention and as a side benefit of general unix design and unix variety. Variety is good, look at the world about you.
That the cost of your computer includes the cost of an OS is irrelevant for that calculation. Of course, since you and I build our own boxes, we're saving hundreds of dollars/pounds by using Linux.
If they want to save money they can build from parts. If they wan't to save a little less money they can buy from companies that do pass on the savings of no Windows installs.
The point is that the cost of the computer should not include the price of the OS unless you've actually asked for it. Not all companies do this and those that do should be kicked rudely up the arse for doing so (and MS should be wiped off the face of the earth for making it hard for them not to) and whoever complains "but it costs the same even without Windows" should maybe think about buying from someone else or would that require more thought than a Linux install?;0)
And the author doesn't seem to understand what Linux being free really means, and is wrong when he corrects his students about the cost of Windows. (If a PC costs the same with and without Windows, it is effectively free (beer) for you, even if someone ultimately pays for it.)
Well, you pay for it. Microsoft doesn't give Windows away on PCs.
PC Manufacturers don't put Windows on PCs for free out of the goodness of their own hearts.
The price is the same with or without Windows on it because MS have seen to it that all PCs from such companies have to have Windows on them. If you buy a PC without Windows on it for the same price as one that does then you have just paid for software you don't have not that if you buy it with Windows you got it for free.
Subtle difference but a very, very important one.
I bought my laptop without Windows. It was 80ukp cheaper. I bought my desktop in parts, without Windows. It was 'full price of Windows2000 cheaper'. We bought our home server in parts, same saving again. Using Linux has saved me a lot of money (and piracy, the level of which in my dept on MS systems I find quite sickening) not only for just the OS but all the software I use on it.
And the only thing I find odd about the 'too hard to install' anecdote is that a bunch of 3rd year CS students can't install an OS that I know at least moderately intelligent non-CS people can install without hardly any problems at all (the only things I can think that would have caused hassle would be winmodems and not using a modern distro, most of which are now easily on a par with Windows for installing; a further point, were these weenies installing their own Windows systems?). I think it is rather more of a 'the dog ate my homework' excuse or that MS spoonfed types were finding it hard having to think rather than watch pretty pictures float by during the install.
Slashdot Mirror
While you're doing that charge up an electric car from solar/wind/whatever for longer journeys or large loads.
[thinking to himself "Don't say doing your wife. Don't say doing your wife."] Doing your, uh, son...
A European research and development firm has announced a two hundred gramme, wrist-worn wearable computer with a 72 x 55-millimetre colour touchscreen. Eurotech's WWPC (wrist-worn PC) runs Linux or Windows, offers a wealth of standard PC interfaces (WLAN, Bluetooth, IrDA, USB, SD-card, etc), and has patented technology that puts the device to sleep when the user drops their arm. It can detect motionless user states, and serve as a location-transmitting beacon, thanks to a built-in GPS receiver and 'dead reckoning' technology. The company also claims six hours of battery life under 'fully operational' conditions.
For users, running as 'root' makes no difference to the usability of the system. What drives me crazy as a unix user currently having to work on Windows for data entry (involving lots of data movement between windows) is the way the desktop works.
Simple customisation like how windows focus, whether to raise on focus or not, 'keep on top', multiple desktops to reduce clutter and etc are simply not available (except by maybe 3rd party apps which I wouldn't be allowed to add).
At home I set my computer to work how I want it to. At work I have to use it one way, and one way only; the MS Way. Which would be fine if it wasn't completely different to My Way. This is on W2K. XP may be different, but if it isn't, then it's still the biggest gripe I have about *using* Windows.
Homage?! You're all drunk. It's disgusting. Out! The lot of you, out!
Here's some info about the difference between RAW and JPEG files at Luminous Landscape.
This is one big thing Photoshop has over GIMP at the moment for professional photography, although even Photoshop doesn't handle them as well as 8bit images yet. If I get a camera soon that has RAW output this could seriously change my views on what OS I use for my photography (100% Linux and WINE at the moment).
And don't forget the whole thing about being the first to move their product base to 32bit RISC (where they were beaten to it by quite a few years by Acorn and their ARM-based RISC OS range).
The more you look at things the more you realise it's all been done before by someone else years ago.
9/11 killed a lot of people. Thus it is very significant. The earthquake killed far more. That one group of people were, to all intents and purposes, murdered, and the others killed by a natural event does not change the fact that those people died. It does not change the grief experienced by the suddenly bereaved loved ones.
The fact that certain groups are willing to kill others because of their beliefs is of great importance. This is not, however (and this is the big point), intimately linked to the deaths of those people on 9/11. I do not see why I should mourn more the death of someone before their time when it was by 'murder' than if the exact same person had been run over by a bus.
I am concerned about terrorism but I am not going to grade grief by political measures. If I do anything special today it will be to observe a minute of thought about the evil that men do to each other. I will not observe a minute of silence or whatever for the people who died in 9/11 any more than I would for anyone else that had died. Especially as those deaths had no personal connection to me whatsoever.
There is a media hysteria arround these things nowdays (cf Diana dying and crazy amounts of public grief going on there) and I am quite frankly fed up of this modern passtime of public grief for people you've never met or known in any way at all.
From the first viewing of the pilot episode where the explicit and gratuitous 'Rubbing gel all over the bodies of a well-stacked bird and some buffed up fella' scene happened I have had little interest in Star Trek Enterprise.
The theme song is cringeworthy. They're blatantly using T'Pol to keep the sex-starved geekboys interested (To boldy pout where no large-breasted tramp has pouted before). There's (as is usual these days) an extreme overabundance of Americans (I mean, yeah, it's a big country, but you get the feeling any other country on Earth is slipped in only for plot development these days).
And the Vulcans! Logical, suppresed emotions? My arse, the actors like to think that Arrogant, Condescending, Irritable and Sarcastic are things that a highly intelligent being with supressed emotions and a fixation on Logic would be doing, it's all been downhill since Spock if you ask me! What's more, as well as being some much-need T&A to keep the boys awake T'Pol is also continuing the theme of inhuman outsider who really really wants to be Human (or if you prefer and are a little cynical like me, really really want to be American). cf Data, Odo, 7of9 (note the theme of Tits In Tight Clothing coupled with Struggling to understand Humanity/The American Way they learned there and are making good use of now).
It's all stuff we've seen before. They're all plots we've seen in one way or another before. The Aliens are still Just Humans(with all their mannerisms and emotions) With Funny Faces, they still use the Teleporters to get them out of sticky situations and I just know the Holodeck will make an appearance at some point so they can get down to some serious Holo-cobblers a la TNG and Voyager. All in all this in no way, for me, feels like a prequel to TOS, it feels just like one of a million other Americanised SciFi shows and after the horror story of Voyager (I won't even start to list how that narked me off) I hold little hope for Star Trek, it's all one big Franchise now and will never be allowed to die like it should have after DS9 (or before, according to taste).
Maybe I'm just jaded ;0).
FrinkThey did. Years ago. The mindless worker drones didn't have the nouse or inclination to do anything about it. Many IT departments didn't have the nouse, inclination or sheer balls to do anything about it. Managers everywhere didn't have the nouse, inclination, balls or forsight to do anything about it. All the gamer freakz and AOLers and etc certainly didn't have the nouse, inclination or balls to do anything about it ("I can't play these cool games on anything else, whine whine whine!"). The US government in its usual fawning, apologist mode when it comes to someone with a few bucks just rolled over and let them off even when found guilty (guilty of really quite trivial things too, even when anyone out here with half an ounce of clue knows just how much they're screwing over *everyone* in many more ways than just providing a free browser; that's just the top of the iceberg. Mr Judge, so how about we all stop pissing about and actually *punish* a *criminal* company for a change, eh? Dream on...).
So, MS just carried on. In fact, they've come back even worse as far as I'm concerned and now all the spineless cretins are going down, drowning in all the odious filth that MS passes off as 'Security' and 'Stopping nasty pirates' and so on, many believing every downright stupid and blatantly untruthful word and paying out hand over fist for the privilige.
OK, screw em, that's their decision, but the one massive flaw in the old 'Live and let live' philosophy is that by letting MS get away it and with everyone and their dog just jumping on the wagon to join the ride is that the whole sinking ship is taking *me* with it if all this crap passes through and becomes law where I live meaning that I can't just sit down and sodding use the system and software *I* want to use in the way that *I* want to use it without harming so much as the tiniest hair on the teeniest fly, and making my life as a unix admin orders of magnitude more hassle than it has any right to be as MS constantly flip protocols and file formats and god knows what else around every five minutes for no other apparent reason than to make the lives of people like me difficult (as if we're just gonna give up or something; they can think again).
So to all you MS apologists and users (when you have any form of choice in the matter) here's a big FUCK YOU for pissing on everyone's parade including your own. Thanks.
Frink
Weenie gets notified by Firewall. Weenie starts sending snotty threatening emails to me. I explain very calmly and correctly what had happened, what the output of his Firewall actually meant and how it was all a mistake and even if it wasn't there was nothing at all to be concerned about.
Weenie continues slinging accusations around and threatening all sorts. I lose my rag and tell him to (in a slightly less polite way) sod the hell off unless he had some real evidence (as it was his 'evidence' would mean that not only had our systems been owned or that I was trying to crack his computer but so were a number of the University's email systems and if so the whole uni admin staff would be quite anxious to know about it, thankyou very much, yer useless, jumped up f***wit...etc). Weenie finally shuts up.
We don't need this hassle for sure and if he'd known *anything* about networking or if his firewall hadn't been so bloody minded and overzealous it wouldn't have happened. The thing is, especially with dialup, you get loads of connections flying around that are pure mistakes (using the IP of someone that's logged off and someone else has dialled in and got it, an ip quad with one digit out, spelling mistake etc), harmless probes or plain malicious but won't harm your machine (eg Code Red if you don't run IIS). You'll probably get far more attempted connections at a firewall than you can possibly deal with and it's only really worth going for the really persistent ones. Thing is if it's showing up on your firewall then you're generally not being hurt by it.
The connections that really hurt are the ones that aren't in your firewall logs.
Frink
And running X-ray diffractometers and SQUID magnetometers isn't exactly simple text-based stuff either (a proper unix program would be but you know what Windows programmers are like: let's make it all buttons and clicking contrary to the fact that most people just want a freaking cli interface that works and doesn't require you to pick out high resolution objects with the mouse instead of just typing in the exact angles for example).
Although we have PC-Anywhere on there as well (which may be better, I dunno) it means we can connect up to those machines from practically any type of modern platform, ie we don't have to piss about rebooting into Windows just to control a couple of windows on another box. Added to that the fact that you can sling VNC quite happily onto anything else for serving and you're set: the users don't have to learn anything new they still use the same old clients.
You can compare the bandwidth requirements and cpu requirements and blah blah blah but the fact that VNC is here, has been for years and works on any system we use (Unix, Windows, Macs, even RISC OS) makes it a sure fire winner.
Anyway, at least nobody here has been sucker enough to get XP in the first place which must be a goddamn record for this dept (I'm ignoring the pirating scum and the ripped-off copies they had within days, naturally).
Anything else is X, and I don't need to point out the sheer Joy of its network transparency now do I? (Seeing as I'm often doing graphical analysis/editing and sometimes using OpenOffice to look at people's PowerPoint presentations at home via our cable connection without using anything other than my default desktop).
Then again even if it is all the NOT(Windows) platforms will probably get it a few weeks after the initial release and Carmack will once again wonder why nobody bought it for them.
I'd really like to buy this game when it comes out (which is pretty rare for me) and I would really like it to be on Linux (cos I don't run Windows!) and I urge those who want Linux ports to show a smidge of patience and buy the full port.
Ye gods, it's not very often I come away from /. knowing more than when I started ;0).
Damn right. Princess Garnet in FF IX has the cutest arse I've ever seen!
How useful it is to read the final conclusion of your email adventure before even finding out how it started. Top posters really are "Read the book backwards" sorta people, aren't they?
Extensions aren't ideal but they're useful in a number of ways, particularly at the shell level, metadata can often be as arbitrarily assigned as a filename extension (I like a system that allows *me* to assign the types of my files if I wish, particularly in the realm of text files). IMO anyway.
Really? I dread to think what you had to do to find this out.
Frink
Whilst rooting about in some books a while back I came across an old, lone, pink punchcard being used as a bookmark. To put things into perspective for my colleague I simply wrote on this card "Count your blessings" and placed it next to his keyboard.
It was quickly taped to his monitor (after I explained what it was) and there it remains to this day.
Yes, I have used Windows since 3.0 and have had experience of 3.0, 3.1, 95, 98, ME, NT4 and 2000 (and various DOSes inbetween) [This is both as a user and installer and through my own undergrad days and in my teaching IT courses I've seen the problematic nature of Windows in large scale networks, although it is getting much better since 2000]; a little experience with Mac OS 9, and a working knowledge of Solaris. I use 98 on a daily basis on hardware control machines.
I don't have a single IT qualification, I am all self-taught (through reading up on systems, discussion with professional admins, a couple of years of experience running our group's systems and now training up a replacement for when I leave; teaching is a great way of learning yourself ;0).
I hadn't used unix at all until 4 years ago and had had far more experience of RISC OS, a very 'user friendly' environment, far more so than Windows when I was using it but there's a difference between easiness and capability. If you've ever used RISC OS you'll know the stark difference between a RISC OS and Linux desktop but at the end of day you can still click on a button, write your letter/memo/presentation, draw a diagram, scan a picture and print it out about as well on one system as on another, especially in an office environment as it's people like me that make sure you can.
I don't find Linux hard to use. When people here have been taught how to use it they don't find it overly hard (stuff like KDE2 really helps though). There's nothing I want to do that Linux can't do for me, but I happily admit this is not true for many people. But in a corporate environment? The machines I role out as well as being workstations have to handle the more corporate things such as WP, email, web browsing, CAD, address books, scanning, printing etc and with X terminals it's a piece of piss to 'roll it out' (we've since moved to local installs with networked applications but again we only have to update one machine to update the whole network immediately). Moving from Windows to Linux will obviously be a big outlay, but so would the reverse, possibly why Linux uptake is more in currently unix-based networks rather than out-and-out replacement of MS technology, possibly depends on the timescale the management is looking at; a shortterm outlay for longterm benefits or shortterm savings and hope for the best (the age-old quandry).
Hardware I have bought has worked out of the box, even a few years ago. I've had problems on other systems that had no influence over, I've also had problems getting Windows working on systems that Linux runs fine on and vice versa. The scale of difference between Windows and Linux is getting less all the time and if you don't like it, fair enough, but for many people it can and does work. From my experience of teaching undergraduates Windows is not a guarantee that you will be able to use a computer effectively, more often what people have used before is a biggest factor (here Windows tends to win hands down but I've had good success with DOS users moving to Linux).
Still, I know some people that love Linux but now use OS X instead. It's not as nice a 'unix' environment, but the integration of desktop tools makes up for it for them. I don't personally recommend Linux for everyone, I appreciate its current limitations, but if I feel someone can make use of it I will recommend it and help them with installing it if necessary.
Some of these people now use it because it's a good alternative to Windows which they have grown tired of (for 'religious' or technological reasons). Some use it because it offers something Windows doesn't (varies, all the free tools at hand on a CD tend to be a good reason, powerful networking is another) and one because Linux works on his PC but Windows is quite unstable (it plays his TV card, plays HOMIII, browses the web etc and that's enough for him). The group area dual-boots 2000 and SuSE and apart from PowerPoint and SigmaPlot (plotting package with no unix port) they stay pretty much in unix all the time and despite this being academia this does not guarantee computer literacy, believe me.
It all depends on what you want to do and whether you're prepared to work at learning a more complex but more capable system or stick with what you know.
I apologise if I offended you but you too seemed to be emitting 'X is crap, Y is brilliant' trollery ;0).
Yes, you can, if you use a modern up-to-date distro and don't have weird hardware.
If Linux is too hard for you Mr IT Manager then I fear for your company.
Linux is very easy to roll out for a corporate desktop. Install it on one machine, tune it up to what your company wants. Ghost the install. Or use terminal servers. (I do for my group). This isn't rocket science.
And the day MS software works 'out the box' on all machines will be a great one I assure you.
As for acquiring email viruses/worms, the vast majority of the people I email and recieve email from use unix so that's a start. The university I work in implements a policy of not using Outlook Express and advises people not to use it. It also harbours deep mistrust (IME of admin's responses to my notifications of infected machines) of MS server technology. Windows may still reign on the desktop but for email/http/dns etc they wouldn't touch it with someone else's bargepole.
I know of only one person that actually uses Outlook Express through preference and they are of enough general intelligence to not fall prey of such worms if they received them themselves.
So, yes, I haven't seen any myself but that's both a combination of who I am and the fact that my workplace has pretty security concious admins that block them at the main email servers so I wouldn't know if I'd been sent a virus anyway. The same level of mistrust of MS server technology also means the uni had maybe a dozen or two of CodeRed/Nimda infections (generally from self-installed machines by not particularly well-informed users).
Even so I notify my users of all major Windows holes and latest email viruses/worms even through I run a Linux network as an educated user is a good user (many have Windows machines at home).
My situation quite effectively isolates me from email security holes but the size of my firewall logs quite happily keep me in touch with the really quite alarming and depressing level of insecure Windows machines out there, and that are still out there now from exploits that made news months ago.
- ELF executables would need to be (as per the usual retort of such idiotic comments) first marked as executable and then run by the user as an executable not run either by mistake as the user thought they were a text/image file or simply by the email client running them without any user intervention. I know of no unix client that does this and even the relative lack of HTML email is in itself a good thing in a security sense.
- There tends to be a much wider range of email clients in use on unix machines: pine, kmail, mutt, xfmail to name a few. To make a worm that attacked all of these would be very hard, and only targetting one would greatly limit the impact.
- I can manage millions of shell accounts and it wouldn't matter if I (through some miraculous event) was infected by an email worm as I wouldn't be reading my mail as root normally, and root would be reading mail through a known robust mail client, probably on a remote machine. Impact of a normal user on such a system will also be quite limited as it isn't often that easy to find out all the users on a machine and even if you do the 'worm' is still only on that one system and is easily prevented spreading onwards.
- Homogeneity makes Windows a nicer 'user experience' but it also provides a very fertile ground for viruses and worms. There is far too much variety in the types of Unix, and the distributions of Unix and the number of clients for the sort of world-crushing effects that Windows security flaws produce. There are only 3 systems I can think of that would produce this: sendmail, apache and bind. Apache has a very good track record, bind and sendmail not so good but even though they are highly dominant they don't seem to produce such continual levels of exploitation and more importantly learn from their mistakes.
In fact it is often Unix that reduces the impact of Windows email viruses and worms due to sendmail/procmail filtering rejecting known infected mails.All I hope is that the unix developers out there are looking long and hard at Microsoft's mistakes and learning from them. Unix viri and worms aren't impossible (there have been a handful over the years) but they are certainly a lot less prevalent and mostly a lot less destructive both through intention and as a side benefit of general unix design and unix variety. Variety is good, look at the world about you.
If they want to save money they can build from parts. If they wan't to save a little less money they can buy from companies that do pass on the savings of no Windows installs.
The point is that the cost of the computer should not include the price of the OS unless you've actually asked for it. Not all companies do this and those that do should be kicked rudely up the arse for doing so (and MS should be wiped off the face of the earth for making it hard for them not to) and whoever complains "but it costs the same even without Windows" should maybe think about buying from someone else or would that require more thought than a Linux install? ;0)
Well, you pay for it. Microsoft doesn't give Windows away on PCs.
PC Manufacturers don't put Windows on PCs for free out of the goodness of their own hearts.
The price is the same with or without Windows on it because MS have seen to it that all PCs from such companies have to have Windows on them. If you buy a PC without Windows on it for the same price as one that does then you have just paid for software you don't have not that if you buy it with Windows you got it for free.
Subtle difference but a very, very important one.
I bought my laptop without Windows. It was 80ukp cheaper. I bought my desktop in parts, without Windows. It was 'full price of Windows2000 cheaper'. We bought our home server in parts, same saving again. Using Linux has saved me a lot of money (and piracy, the level of which in my dept on MS systems I find quite sickening) not only for just the OS but all the software I use on it.
And the only thing I find odd about the 'too hard to install' anecdote is that a bunch of 3rd year CS students can't install an OS that I know at least moderately intelligent non-CS people can install without hardly any problems at all (the only things I can think that would have caused hassle would be winmodems and not using a modern distro, most of which are now easily on a par with Windows for installing; a further point, were these weenies installing their own Windows systems?). I think it is rather more of a 'the dog ate my homework' excuse or that MS spoonfed types were finding it hard having to think rather than watch pretty pictures float by during the install.
Sad, very sad indeed.