Any government interested in keeping its data and secrets safe but runs Windows is likely populated by imbeciles.
But an OS designed to serve Putin's interests is a better alternative? The geek mind at work is a fascinating thing to watch.
wtf? Uh, yeah! Putin, being the head of the Russian government, would indeed be strongly interested in a home-rolled OS to avoid Microsoft funneling state secrets to the USA. How thick do you have to be to not see this?
Oxygen constitutes 80% of everything in the atmosphere right now, and is the basis for most common exothermic reactions. But, to be clear, it's not really necessary. There are other oxidizers, and other compounds which many things could be converted over to use. Some applications simply wouldn't be able to run anymore. Like mammals. But that's really just a reason to create new, better organisms from scratch. We know how they work, so it should be pretty easy. Right?
Oxygen is dangerous, even toxic, stuff, and I can absolutely agree that something better is a good idea.
You go first.
You're an imbecile. Plenty of governments, large corporations and other institutions have been able to dump Windows (or never run Windows to begin with) and are doing quite fine.
While our competing companies in Russia or spending their cycles mounting the CD drive from the command line and rebuilding the kernel to fix GPU failures, we'll be adding the innovation customers in a free market would choose to buy.
I haven't ever had to mount a CD from the terminal or rebuild my kernel, but it's nice that those options are available in case I need to.
Guess how fucked you are if your CD or GPU are malfunctioning in Windows?
Minor correction. North Korea's internal Linux distro is called "Red Star OS". China's Linux distro was once called "Red Flag Linux", but they have since switched to Ubuntu Kylin.
Some tariffs exist purely as a source of revenue. I think a tax on foreign OSs would moreso be to foster adoption of a home-grown OS with economic incentives.
Any government interested in keeping its data and secrets safe but runs Windows is likely populated by imbeciles.
Hopefully Russian computer scientists will focus on either making ReactOS a usable replacement (better for us in the West trying to dump Windows), or making their own Linux distro (I suggest they call it... Kremlinux), which will likely be better for them in the long run.
You can uninstall Unity and replace it with whatever DE you want. But speak for yourself. Unity is not a terribly great desktop DE, but it's fantastic for mobile, and lots of people are excited for it.
Can't comment because I'm not an Arch user and don't know much about it, but Greg Kroah-Hartman endorses it. I assume the world's second foremost kernel hacker knows enough about its security to do such a thing.
Chrome and Chromium don't just have "lots of cross-pollination", they're the exact same browser, using the exact same UI and rendering engine. The only differences are that Chrome comes with proprietary media codecs, Flash, and an auto-updater.
I advise people stick to the big ones (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS, Arch, Gentoo, SUSE, Tails) since they're thoroughly audited by security professionals
Haha, no! Perhaps a few core libraries are, if you are lucky.
whereas those tiny little forks that do nothing but alter the UI probably aren't.
Most distros are repackaging from the larger distros (Debian, Red Hat, Arch, Gentoo, SUSE), and security-related changes go upstream and downstream (well, sooner or later). So you there is no major difference in security between UI-altering ones such as Mint and Debian.
Mint's probably not bad since it's such a large project now. But I would never use something like elementaryOS or Parsix, since I have no idea about the competence of their security teams.
Americans don't know much about the Comodo Browser. One of the antitrust rulings against Microsoft in Europe was that they had to provide alternative web browsers for their customers; they avoided Firefox and Chrome and instead opted to display the knockoffs like Comodo Icedragon or whatever. So this story impacts Europeans a lot more than Americans.
There's a lot of Chromium and Firefox clones/forks by small teams that have certain targeted goals (better UI, different default settings, etc.), but I tend to avoid them; I figure that Google and Mozilla have world-class security experts working for them, whereas these little forks, even if competently done, do not and might introduce security holes by accident.
The same is also true for Linux distros--I advise people stick to the big ones (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS, Arch, Gentoo, SUSE, Tails) since they're thoroughly audited by security professionals, whereas those tiny little forks that do nothing but alter the UI probably aren't.
So what's everybody's favorite alternative, since SwiftKey is owned by a company that is nowadays renowned for its spyware and keylogging?
My favourite is my new BlackBerry Classic that actually has a keyboard. Please enjoy the incoming BlackBerry hate below.
I have nothing against physical keyboards. But do you have any reason to believe that BlackBerry Ltd isn't keylogging you (after all, they proudly backdoor their products to cooperate with governments)?
This seems irrational:
"Systemd developers have rejected mounting the EFI variables as read-only, since there are valid use-cases for writing to them. Mounting them read-only can also break other applications, so for now there is no good solution to avoid potentially bricking your system, "
Can't you just mount read only anyway? Fuck the broken apps. Does every system have them? It should be my choice but systemd devs are arrogant assholes. Are these "valid use cases" universal?
If Gentoo is ever systemd only I'll be done with Linux.
wtf is wrong with you? systemd should break a fair number of programs to prevent idiots from bricking their system by running self-destructive commands? I bet if it was the other way around, you would complain that systemd breaks programs by loading UEFI variables as ROM.
all I can tell you is that was the only thing I uninstalled, rebooted and im at a command prompt
Show me your syslog and I can tell you what happened. But your anecdote, as reported, is inaccurate: uninstalling sudoku had nothing to do with your DE getting fudged.
> No, he's not an idiot. He's a normal person. Normal people click uninstall and expect their game to be uninstalled, not their OS's GUI
No he's not an idiot, a fucking liar is what he is. There is no way that in any package management system XFCE would have a dependency on a Sudoku app, if anything the dependency would be the other way around. So no, removing Sudoku would never result in XFCE being deleted. Not even Ubuntu would be that stupid.
You and a bunch of other people in this thread are continually missing the point, which is certainly not that you could somehow accidentally type rm -rf/. Nobody gives a fuck about that. The point is that you shouldn't be able to brick your hardware from user space, just as the GP has laid out.
There was a time not too long ago when malware could be dealt with by "simply" reinstalling the OS. Now malware can infect your PC's firmware, your USB sticks' and hard drives' firmware, make your graphics card go up in flames, and brick your motherboard.
Rootkits are nothing new. They existed in BIOS as well.
On at least Windows 7, you can get rid of the shell and it will still boot. You can open task manager with CTRL+ALT+DEL and launch programs. When you minimize a program, it goes down in the corner as a little bar just like it did in Windows 3.1
As late as XP, you could set progman.exe as your shell...which was weird.
I didn't say crash explorer and dwm, I said uninstall it.
Slashdot Mirror
Any government interested in keeping its data and secrets safe but runs Windows is likely populated by imbeciles.
But an OS designed to serve Putin's interests is a better alternative? The geek mind at work is a fascinating thing to watch.
wtf? Uh, yeah! Putin, being the head of the Russian government, would indeed be strongly interested in a home-rolled OS to avoid Microsoft funneling state secrets to the USA. How thick do you have to be to not see this?
ReactOS is a horrible Windows XP clone, what's the point of that operating system in the 21st century?
Proprietary legacy applications with no *nix support. There's billions of dollars invested in it.
Oxygen constitutes 80% of everything in the atmosphere right now, and is the basis for most common exothermic reactions. But, to be clear, it's not really necessary. There are other oxidizers, and other compounds which many things could be converted over to use. Some applications simply wouldn't be able to run anymore. Like mammals. But that's really just a reason to create new, better organisms from scratch. We know how they work, so it should be pretty easy. Right?
Oxygen is dangerous, even toxic, stuff, and I can absolutely agree that something better is a good idea.
You go first.
You're an imbecile. Plenty of governments, large corporations and other institutions have been able to dump Windows (or never run Windows to begin with) and are doing quite fine.
While our competing companies in Russia or spending their cycles mounting the CD drive from the command line and rebuilding the kernel to fix GPU failures, we'll be adding the innovation customers in a free market would choose to buy.
I haven't ever had to mount a CD from the terminal or rebuild my kernel, but it's nice that those options are available in case I need to.
Guess how fucked you are if your CD or GPU are malfunctioning in Windows?
Minor correction. North Korea's internal Linux distro is called "Red Star OS". China's Linux distro was once called "Red Flag Linux", but they have since switched to Ubuntu Kylin.
Some tariffs exist purely as a source of revenue. I think a tax on foreign OSs would moreso be to foster adoption of a home-grown OS with economic incentives.
Any government interested in keeping its data and secrets safe but runs Windows is likely populated by imbeciles.
Hopefully Russian computer scientists will focus on either making ReactOS a usable replacement (better for us in the West trying to dump Windows), or making their own Linux distro (I suggest they call it... Kremlinux), which will likely be better for them in the long run.
Do you foresee that one day Canonical will be up there with Google, Apple, and Microsoft in terms of being perceived as a software tech giant?
The fact that they're not in the Google Play Store shouldn't stop you.
I think it's fairly good.
You can uninstall Unity and replace it with whatever DE you want. But speak for yourself. Unity is not a terribly great desktop DE, but it's fantastic for mobile, and lots of people are excited for it.
Can't comment because I'm not an Arch user and don't know much about it, but Greg Kroah-Hartman endorses it. I assume the world's second foremost kernel hacker knows enough about its security to do such a thing.
Chrome and Chromium don't just have "lots of cross-pollination", they're the exact same browser, using the exact same UI and rendering engine. The only differences are that Chrome comes with proprietary media codecs, Flash, and an auto-updater.
Haha, no! Perhaps a few core libraries are, if you are lucky.
whereas those tiny little forks that do nothing but alter the UI probably aren't.
Most distros are repackaging from the larger distros (Debian, Red Hat, Arch, Gentoo, SUSE), and security-related changes go upstream and downstream (well, sooner or later). So you there is no major difference in security between UI-altering ones such as Mint and Debian.
Mint's probably not bad since it's such a large project now. But I would never use something like elementaryOS or Parsix, since I have no idea about the competence of their security teams.
Again, who has ever heard of this company?
Americans don't know much about the Comodo Browser. One of the antitrust rulings against Microsoft in Europe was that they had to provide alternative web browsers for their customers; they avoided Firefox and Chrome and instead opted to display the knockoffs like Comodo Icedragon or whatever. So this story impacts Europeans a lot more than Americans.
There's a lot of Chromium and Firefox clones/forks by small teams that have certain targeted goals (better UI, different default settings, etc.), but I tend to avoid them; I figure that Google and Mozilla have world-class security experts working for them, whereas these little forks, even if competently done, do not and might introduce security holes by accident.
The same is also true for Linux distros--I advise people stick to the big ones (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS, Arch, Gentoo, SUSE, Tails) since they're thoroughly audited by security professionals, whereas those tiny little forks that do nothing but alter the UI probably aren't.
So what's everybody's favorite alternative, since SwiftKey is owned by a company that is nowadays renowned for its spyware and keylogging?
My favourite is my new BlackBerry Classic that actually has a keyboard. Please enjoy the incoming BlackBerry hate below.
I have nothing against physical keyboards. But do you have any reason to believe that BlackBerry Ltd isn't keylogging you (after all, they proudly backdoor their products to cooperate with governments)?
So what's everybody's favorite alternative, since SwiftKey is owned by a company that is nowadays renowned for its spyware and keylogging?
This seems irrational: "Systemd developers have rejected mounting the EFI variables as read-only, since there are valid use-cases for writing to them. Mounting them read-only can also break other applications, so for now there is no good solution to avoid potentially bricking your system, "
Can't you just mount read only anyway? Fuck the broken apps. Does every system have them? It should be my choice but systemd devs are arrogant assholes. Are these "valid use cases" universal?
If Gentoo is ever systemd only I'll be done with Linux.
wtf is wrong with you? systemd should break a fair number of programs to prevent idiots from bricking their system by running self-destructive commands? I bet if it was the other way around, you would complain that systemd breaks programs by loading UEFI variables as ROM.
all I can tell you is that was the only thing I uninstalled, rebooted and im at a command prompt
Show me your syslog and I can tell you what happened. But your anecdote, as reported, is inaccurate: uninstalling sudoku had nothing to do with your DE getting fudged.
If you're using sudo and not logged in as the root user, then it won't automatically execute without the admin password.
> No, he's not an idiot. He's a normal person. Normal people click uninstall and expect their game to be uninstalled, not their OS's GUI
No he's not an idiot, a fucking liar is what he is. There is no way that in any package management system XFCE would have a dependency on a Sudoku app, if anything the dependency would be the other way around. So no, removing Sudoku would never result in XFCE being deleted. Not even Ubuntu would be that stupid.
I can confirm this is the case: http://s23.postimg.org/yxo666n...
You and a bunch of other people in this thread are continually missing the point, which is certainly not that you could somehow accidentally type rm -rf /. Nobody gives a fuck about that. The point is that you shouldn't be able to brick your hardware from user space, just as the GP has laid out.
There was a time not too long ago when malware could be dealt with by "simply" reinstalling the OS. Now malware can infect your PC's firmware, your USB sticks' and hard drives' firmware, make your graphics card go up in flames, and brick your motherboard.
Rootkits are nothing new. They existed in BIOS as well.
On at least Windows 7, you can get rid of the shell and it will still boot. You can open task manager with CTRL+ALT+DEL and launch programs. When you minimize a program, it goes down in the corner as a little bar just like it did in Windows 3.1
As late as XP, you could set progman.exe as your shell...which was weird.
I didn't say crash explorer and dwm, I said uninstall it.
Xubuntu 14.04.3 LTS
OK, now I know you're full of shit. There's no dependencies on sudoku in Xubuntu 14.04.
Tried it in the software center, too. There's no dependencies.