Right now you can install and uninstall binary software on Linux (pretty much any Linux) with no significant problems if that software has been packaged with the Loki Installer.
Somewhere around here I have Loki's Myth II for Linux CD from some time last century, and I'd bet that if I tried to install that now it would work fine, and if it didn't work it would be because I don't have the 5 year old C library compatibility package installed. Note that I'm not the least bit worried about what distro I'm running - even though I'm not running Red Hat, or even an RPM based distro.
RealPlayer 10 is another example of packaged binary Linux software that Just Works(tm).
In conclusion, as long as the software was packaged for the current version of libc, it should work fine, libc has only changed twice since I started using Linux back with Kernel 2.0, and most if not all major distros have compatibility packages to solve even that issue.
If you want to complain about the Libc issue, try running the following programs under Windows XP SP 2: Warcraft I Star Wars: Dark Forces Adobe Live Motion 1
In the last couple computers I've set up, I haven't even hooked up that cable. Most CD playing software will actually read the data and play it as opposed to sending a hardware play command.
If a "normal user" decides to rip a CD using Windows Media Player and fails due to copy protection, one or more of the following will happen: 1.) They'll be pissed off at the record company for the copy protection scheme. 2.) They'll be pissed off at Microsoft for their software not working. 3.) They'll try to work around the problem by searching for and finding software than can bypass the copy protection. 4.) They'll try to work around the problem by downloading the already-ripped music. 5.) They'll try to work around the problem by asking a tech savvy friend for help, and they'll actually listen to the help because they have a reason to care.
None of those results is bad. In fact, they're all good. As long as A.) DRM techniques don't work against clueful opposition and B.) It's legal/possible to make TCP or UDP connections to arbitrary IP addresses then I don't see a problem here.
I've never had a single package weighing under 10 pounds stopped at the border for a significant length of time - nor have I ever seen any signs of a package being opened and repacked.
I highly doubt that they'd be able to stop / interested in stopping the shipment of small electronics.
Bulk mailing of an unsolicited message is unquestionably spam.
Counterexample: If you have a list of 7 friends/relitives and you CC them all a "Merry Christmas" message, that's not spam due to a pre-existing relationship.
The real question there may be what number makes up "bulk", but sending 7 viagra ads to spidered addresses is definately spam.
Going back to the realtor example, I'm sure the following wouldn't be spam, as long as the recipients are aquainted with the sender by name.
To: "Jack", "Liz", "Bob" From: "Sal" Subject: Price Sheets
Dear Jack, Liz, and Bob:
I'm going to be emailing out price sheets every couple weeks. You interested in getting them?
People shouldn't be added to mailing lists unless they request it.
Her sending personal emails to the people inviting them to be on her mailing list wouldn't be a problem.
Bulk mailing the invitation is quesitonable. If she could send messages to the "board of realtors mailing list", that would be an appropriate place for the message. If not, it would require a judgement call to decide if the existing business relationship is close enough to send the invitation.
When she started this, she had a short list of people she wanted to send the messages to, right?
The appropriate protocal would have been to individually mail the people on the list with "Would you like me to send out my listing sheets to you?"
Everyone who responded "yes" should have been added to the "mailing list", everyone else should have been left to ask to join themselves.
If at some point in the future there was a new person who would be appropriate to send the messages to who had not been asked before, a single email asking if they wanted to be added to the list is appropriate.
The key is: Personal messages are fine, but people shouldn't get onto mailing lists without explicitly asking to be on them.
The post I replied to was implying that Macs had more usable client software for multimedia than Linux's "Science Fiction Interfaces". I was merely stating that QuickTime's interface is as bad as anything for Linux.
In conclusion, QuickTime is worse because I can't figure out how to get it to play full screen.
Given the money that is saved on these, I'd expect that a low end one will add $40 to $50 to your new Dell. The up side is that you've ensured that you have a PCI-Express port - so you can move to a 6750GT (or whatever) when you need to.
This is assuming that "you" are a newb who'd buy a Dell for 3D gaming, but that comes up quite a bit.
That's not PCI-E, that's your mid-range ATI card. AGP 8x has no problem with UT2004 at 1600x1200. I'd you could do it with AGP 4x too, but I don't think anyone ever made a 4x card fast (processor/ram wise) enough.
For 1 city, you're already done. For 2 cities, you start in one and go to the other. For three cities, you find the two cities furthest from eachother, travel from one of them to the middle city and then to the far city.
Obviously it's no more complex for (any-value-of-N) cities.
You understand perfectly. In the world today, there are two legal systems. There is the American legal system (which may be vaguely based on some brittish system, but they're not important) and in every other country they use a third world system where they torture the accused until they confess.
On OSX you need to type in the root password to install stuff... so people just do it. It's the same with Linux, if you don't have computer literate users.
The only clean way to deal with this sort of thing is to have package repositories and convince users to only install official packages from the repository. Combined with (stuff like) browser java applets, it would be possible to set up a system that was relitively secure even with incompetant users - given 1 of: very minimal user training or a "you can't do stuff" security model.
It's possible to write bad code in any language, no competent perl programmer has seriously suggested writing any major software in Perl without use strict since the feature was implemented. I might as well complain that Python is horrible because it allows global variables.
We're not talking about some archaic version of Perl versus the current version of Python.
If properties of any version were open for complaints, I'd get to complain about things like Python (1.x) not having "+=" operators or "there's memory leaks in classes with a __getattr__ method" (fixed in 1.5).
You came up with an especially python-favored example. Direct access of list data members does end up looking a little weird in perl.
One thing that keeps annoying me about python is the scoping rules. There's three scopes: Global, A Whole Class, and A Whole Function. Even C has block scoped variables.
Another thing that annoys me is the lack of compile time checking. Take two code snippets:
use warnings FATAL => 'all'; use strict;
my $variable = get_some_data_with_side_effects(); $varaible = process($variable);
When you run that perl code, it doesn't even compile. Perl sees the bug, and won't run the program.
When you run the python code, it seems to work. There's no sign that something's wrong, and you could randomly clobber an arbitrary amount of data with a bug like that.
If the program was a little different, say the misspelling was to the right of the = sign, then python would catch it at runtime and puke... after it had already called get_some_data_with_side_effects() - still not good behaviour.
The theory is that if you can introduce executable code, you can make the protection system use a slightly different method each time, making it so that a given crack will only work on a given printrun of disks.
The reason this won't work for this sort of thing is that the hardware is staying constant, so all you need to do to get a general case break is to build an emulator.
Slashdot Mirror
Right now you can install and uninstall binary software on Linux (pretty much any Linux) with no significant problems if that software has been packaged with the Loki Installer.
Somewhere around here I have Loki's Myth II for Linux CD from some time last century, and I'd bet that if I tried to install that now it would work fine, and if it didn't work it would be because I don't have the 5 year old C library compatibility package installed. Note that I'm not the least bit worried about what distro I'm running - even though I'm not running Red Hat, or even an RPM based distro.
RealPlayer 10 is another example of packaged binary Linux software that Just Works(tm).
In conclusion, as long as the software was packaged for the current version of libc, it should work fine, libc has only changed twice since I started using Linux back with Kernel 2.0, and most if not all major distros have compatibility packages to solve even that issue.
If you want to complain about the Libc issue, try running the following programs under Windows XP SP 2:
Warcraft I
Star Wars: Dark Forces
Adobe Live Motion 1
In the last couple computers I've set up, I haven't even hooked up that cable. Most CD playing software will actually read the data and play it as opposed to sending a hardware play command.
Your comments are true, but that's fine.
If a "normal user" decides to rip a CD using Windows Media Player and fails due to copy protection, one or more of the following will happen:
1.) They'll be pissed off at the record company for the copy protection scheme.
2.) They'll be pissed off at Microsoft for their software not working.
3.) They'll try to work around the problem by searching for and finding software than can bypass the copy protection.
4.) They'll try to work around the problem by downloading the already-ripped music.
5.) They'll try to work around the problem by asking a tech savvy friend for help, and they'll actually listen to the help because they have a reason to care.
None of those results is bad. In fact, they're all good. As long as A.) DRM techniques don't work against clueful opposition and B.) It's legal/possible to make TCP or UDP connections to arbitrary IP addresses then I don't see a problem here.
I've never had a single package weighing under 10 pounds stopped at the border for a significant length of time - nor have I ever seen any signs of a package being opened and repacked.
I highly doubt that they'd be able to stop / interested in stopping the shipment of small electronics.
Russia? China? Korea? Mexico? Sweeden? Anywhere?
Counterexample:
If you have a list of 7 friends/relitives and you CC them all a "Merry Christmas" message, that's not spam due to a pre-existing relationship.
The real question there may be what number makes up "bulk", but sending 7 viagra ads to spidered addresses is definately spam.
Going back to the realtor example, I'm sure the following wouldn't be spam, as long as the recipients are aquainted with the sender by name.
People shouldn't be added to mailing lists unless they request it.
Her sending personal emails to the people inviting them to be on her mailing list wouldn't be a problem.
Bulk mailing the invitation is quesitonable. If she could send messages to the "board of realtors mailing list", that would be an appropriate place for the message. If not, it would require a judgement call to decide if the existing business relationship is close enough to send the invitation.
When she started this, she had a short list of people she wanted to send the messages to, right?
The appropriate protocal would have been to individually mail the people on the list with "Would you like me to send out my listing sheets to you?"
Everyone who responded "yes" should have been added to the "mailing list", everyone else should have been left to ask to join themselves.
If at some point in the future there was a new person who would be appropriate to send the messages to who had not been asked before, a single email asking if they wanted to be added to the list is appropriate.
The key is:
Personal messages are fine, but people shouldn't get onto mailing lists without explicitly asking to be on them.
The post I replied to was implying that Macs had more usable client software for multimedia than Linux's "Science Fiction Interfaces". I was merely stating that QuickTime's interface is as bad as anything for Linux.
In conclusion, QuickTime is worse because I can't figure out how to get it to play full screen.
I really don't care what the definition of Commercial Bulk Email is in the context of Spam.
Someone is abusing the email network if:
They are intentionally sending email messages to a bunch of people who didn't ask for them.
Counterexample?
What's wrong with Xine exactly?
It does have a bitmapped interface, but it doesn't look any less professional than, say, Apple's QuckTime player.
There is also a Gnome frontend to Xine which uses native widgets... I don't know how you can get less complaint-worthy than that.
It's more a political question. "Should ICANN be able to use its power to raise that much money? Money for what?"
They would have needed a bigger ad.
Given the money that is saved on these, I'd expect that a low end one will add $40 to $50 to your new Dell. The up side is that you've ensured that you have a PCI-Express port - so you can move to a 6750GT (or whatever) when you need to.
This is assuming that "you" are a newb who'd buy a Dell for 3D gaming, but that comes up quite a bit.
That's not PCI-E, that's your mid-range ATI card. AGP 8x has no problem with UT2004 at 1600x1200. I'd you could do it with AGP 4x too, but I don't think anyone ever made a 4x card fast (processor/ram wise) enough.
In the general case, yes. In the N = 3 case, not so much.
The traveling salesman problem is easy.
For 1 city, you're already done.
For 2 cities, you start in one and go to the other.
For three cities, you find the two cities furthest from eachother, travel from one of them to the middle city and then to the far city.
Obviously it's no more complex for (any-value-of-N) cities.
Ha!
That's way unlikely, a perl script that compact wouldn't make it through slashdot's junk filter.
You understand perfectly. In the world today, there are two legal systems. There is the American legal system (which may be vaguely based on some brittish system, but they're not important) and in every other country they use a third world system where they torture the accused until they confess.
Yup. Totally.
On OSX you need to type in the root password to install stuff... so people just do it. It's the same with Linux, if you don't have computer literate users.
The only clean way to deal with this sort of thing is to have package repositories and convince users to only install official packages from the repository. Combined with (stuff like) browser java applets, it would be possible to set up a system that was relitively secure even with incompetant users - given 1 of: very minimal user training or a "you can't do stuff" security model.
No - that's not an option, it's a feature.
It's possible to write bad code in any language, no competent perl programmer has seriously suggested writing any major software in Perl without use strict since the feature was implemented. I might as well complain that Python is horrible because it allows global variables.
We're not talking about some archaic version of Perl versus the current version of Python.
If properties of any version were open for complaints, I'd get to complain about things like Python (1.x) not having "+=" operators or "there's memory leaks in classes with a __getattr__ method" (fixed in 1.5).
One thing that keeps annoying me about python is the scoping rules. There's three scopes: Global, A Whole Class, and A Whole Function. Even C has block scoped variables.
Another thing that annoys me is the lack of compile time checking. Take two code snippets:versus the closest you can get in python.When you run that perl code, it doesn't even compile. Perl sees the bug, and won't run the program.
When you run the python code, it seems to work. There's no sign that something's wrong, and you could randomly clobber an arbitrary amount of data with a bug like that.
If the program was a little different, say the misspelling was to the right of the = sign, then python would catch it at runtime and puke... after it had already called get_some_data_with_side_effects() - still not good behaviour.
"The site you are viewing uses insecure extensions. Would you like to go into insecure mode?
Yes | No"
The theory is that if you can introduce executable code, you can make the protection system use a slightly different method each time, making it so that a given crack will only work on a given printrun of disks.
The reason this won't work for this sort of thing is that the hardware is staying constant, so all you need to do to get a general case break is to build an emulator.