Although Slashdot is obviously a pro-Linux site, for the first few months of Vista's release, there were plenty of people who would say "It works fine for me" or "It will catch on when more drivers are released" or "It will work fine with Service Pack 1", or the like. But there doesn't seem to be many defenders left. Is the Verdict in that Vista did, indeed, tank? The people who said "it works fine for me" are still happily using Vista without issue, and have lost interest in defending it from whiners. The people who said "it will catch on when more drivers are released" have either gotten their new drivers and are now happy, or have reluctantly replaced their hardware. The people who said "it will work fine with Service Pack 1" are still waiting for Service Pack 1, which is now in beta.
Maybe because the certified for Windows Vista logo is Microsoft's responsibility? Good call. See here for information about "Works with Vista" logo licensing. If you've got an app that displays the logo, but doesn't work (and the developers confirm it doesn't work), then either 1) Microsoft screwed up and approved the license when they shouldn't have, or 2) the application developer is using Microsoft's trademark illegally. Either way, Microsoft needs to take care of that.
Why do we ignore that reason? Because it's complete FUD. Vista doesn't add DRM to anything that isn't already protected by the content owner.
Vista added support for content that already has DRM, which isn't nearly as "invasive" as your trolling/ignorance. That's almost entirely right... but the reason I can't play DVDs in Windows Media Player is apparently because of buggy anti-piracy measures. Third party apps like PowerDVD or VLC work fine. I'm using a FireWire DVD drive.
In the long run (over the next two or three years), I'm sure Vista will pick up the slack, but what has got to be filling guys like Ballmer with fear (and ought to be concerning Wallstreet) is what happens in four or five years, when the next Windows comes out. One of the most brilliant things Microsoft ever did was call the successor to Windows NT 4.0 "Windows 2000". The name made home users who had been running Windows 98 think that Windows 2000 was an upgrade for them, so they started buying and/or pirating it in droves... but then they quickly discovered that nothing worked. Everything was broken. Half their apps didn't work right, and all their games crashed. So they yelled at Microsoft, but Microsoft said "it's not our fault, Windows 2000 is designed for corporate use only, not for home use; you're using our product in an unsupported way, so we can't help you." So the users turned to application developers and manufacturers, and demanded that they fix their apps and drivers to work with the new OS. After a year or so of this, everything worked, and since the operating system itself was such a huge improvement over Windows 98SE, people quickly forgot about the initial problems. A significant number of Slashdotters still swear by Windows 2000 today.
So when Microsoft took Windows 2000, prettied it up and dumbed it down, and sold it to the masses as Windows XP, most of the major problems and incompatibilities had already been fixed, and things went fairly smoothly. Geeks grumbled about the Fisher-Price UI and scary DRM, but everyone else thought it was great, and it quickly became the standard that everyone uses, just as Windows 98 had been.
Windows Vista is going through exactly the kind of incompatibility issues that Windows 2000 went through, but this time, Microsoft doesn't have the deniability they had with Win2k. This time, OEMs are shipping it pre-installed to millions of home users. Most of the problems have been worked out already, but there are more that will take another year or so, and users hate the idea that they'll have to upgrade their applications (which in many cases costs a lot of money) and buy new peripherals (because Vista-compatible drivers for the old ones aren't available). But like you said, in 2-3 years, everything will settle down. Microsoft will release a couple of service packs to fix their bugs, application developers will have updated their apps, hardware manufacturers will have updated their drivers, users will have bought new software and thrown out their old peripherals, and 2GB RAM will be the absolute minimum that low-end cheap PCs ship with. What we're going through now will be forgotten, and Vista will develop a loyal fan base, just as Win2k did.
And a couple years after that, Microsoft will release a new version of Windows. But guess what? It'll be just like the Win2k to WinXP transition: most of the improvements will be things that don't significantly affect compatibility. All the major problems will already have been fixed, and on top of that, developers will have cleaned up some of their code so that future changes won't be so painful. The new OS will have new features and an overhauled UI, and they'll provide a compatibility layer to cover up any serious changes to the OS, so in general everything that works in Vista will work in its successor.
IMHO, FTP should be upgraded in order to be secure and encrypted (at least in authentication), FTP is a horrible protocol and needs to die.
or someone should write a good daemon to run a SFTP server that allows jailed SFTP sessions, even if it needs to be totally separated from the SSH daemon. This would neatly solve the problem... except that the security parts of SSH are pretty complex, and it would probably be difficult to write a stand-alone SFTP server that wasn't buggy. This is the best solution, but it would be difficult to do well. I would suggest starting with OpenSSH, hacking it to behave the way you want, then stripping out the parts you don't need until you've got something reasonable, and packaging it up to make it easy to administer.
Or, as a third option, someone could write something entirely new that would allow easy CLI-based file transfers in a secure method. Bad idea. SFTP is already widely supported on the client end, and is perfectly appropriate for servers where users have full shell access (in fact, it's great for those environments because the system administrator has to do absolutely nothing - SFTP just works by default).
someone suggested to me that I should be looking at webdav instead. You'll have similar issues with WebDAV. I'm not aware of a stand-alone WebDAV server; most people run Apache configured with mod_dav. It works fine for a single-user environment, where all files are owned by the user Apache runs as, and user logins are handled with an htpasswd file. In a multi-user environment where each user owns their own stuff, mod_dav won't work. Other server options are listed here. Writing an HTTP server designed to run as root, accept a connection, spawn a child process, parse a request, authenticate against/etc/passwd and friends, setuid to that user, then handle the request (or whatever other order things would need to be done in) without huge gaping security holes is non-trivial. It could be done, but not by me.
There's no good reason to use AOL, but AIM is an entirely different service, which continues to work just fine. Of course, many of us connect to it using a third-party client, but the official AIM client is the most reliable when it comes to things like file transfers and extra features, so some people use that, because it works.
There are only three major IM networks that are used by a large enough number of normal people to make them worth bothering with: AIM, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger. A handful of geeks use Jabber. Everyone else has moved to web-based services like MySpace and Facebook to communicate (which only sounds painful to those of us who know the difference between e-mail and webmail).
Wrong; that exploit is only available because you chose to set up an insecure system by allowing a user into the wheel group. What the hell are you talking about?
Here's the answer to your question: http://www.minstrel.org.uk/papers/sftp/
You'll need to compile your own version of OpenSSH. I'm running two instances of sshd, the default one that I can log into for administration and a hacked one for users (not on the same interface/port, obviously). I mostly followed the instructions from that page, but with this setup I don't need to use his crazy hack that uses/./ in the user's home directory (which could interfere with other things), so I applied this patch to minstrel's sftp-server.c:
--- sftp-server.c.minstrel 2007-09-04 23:54:06.000000000 -0700 +++ sftp-server.c 2007-09-25 14:41:59.000000000 -0700 @@ -1230,22 +1230,12 @@ if (!user_dir) fatal("HOME isn't in environment");
- new_root = user_dir + 1; + /* Begin phroggy's hack */ + if (chroot(user_dir) != 0) + fatal("Couldn't chroot to user directory %s: %s", user_dir, strerror(errno)); + setenv("HOME", "/", 1); + /* End phroggy's hack */
If you choose to run two sshds, you'll need to make sure they're not both trying to listen to the same interface/port, they use different PID files, etc. etc.
Disclaimer: if any of this turns out to be horribly insecure and your server gets hacked, it's not my fault.
How about everyone who justs flips the screen closed on their laptop when they're done with it? Mac users always do this, but PC users usually don't, because either the software or the hardware isn't reliable enough to make it work properly, so they've learned not to. Either it fails to go to sleep and overheats, or it fails to wake up and you have to reboot it anyway (losing anything you had open). If it works perfectly only 90% of the time, most people aren't going to chance it.
You mean your browser doesn't have any kind of password management, with a master key?
Unfortunately Apple's Keychain won't let me conveniently access my saved passwords if I'm logged in via SSH (it can be done from the command line, but it pops up a GUI confirmation dialog, unless you do that once and then click "Always Allow" for each password you'll want to access later), and there doesn't appear to be a search feature like there is in the GUI (although it shouldn't be hard to write one). But other than that, it sounds like exactly what you're looking for. You can set it to require your master password after you haven't used it for a few minutes, and every time the computer wakes from sleep. I think KDE has something similar that works with Konqueror. Firefox's password manager isn't bad either, and works on all platforms Firefox runs on (although it's not shared with other applications, unfortunately - bug 386533). Opera calls theirs the Wand.
I'm surprised you would trust your bank to manage your passwords, but I guess if you've had your head buried in the sand long enough not to know about browser password management, you probably haven't heard about all the financial institutions getting hacked and their members' account information leaking all over the Internet. Banks have centuries of experience with physical security and decades of experience with internal network security, but Internet security is still relatively new to them.
I remember while (I was a Canadian) living in Berkeley, one of the residents told me of the time they first got an American credit card (he was a foreigner too). Everything was all well and good with the world, except when he took a trip to the East Coast. The credit card was declined can cut up. Why? Because the CC company had only authorized it to be used in the area in which he lived. Why? Because Americans just don't travel enough to make it common enough that such things shouldn't be considered theft right off the hop. And we're not talking about limiting to a local area, we're talking about the USA! Lest anyone get the wrong impression about American credit cards, I should mention that I've never had any trouble using my cards around the country or elsewhere.
And btw, it's not that you can't use the iPhone internationally. It's that you'll be charged roaming fees while doing it (yes, there/is/ an international plan - see below). But, I highly doubt that this would be different with any other company. You've misunderstood the issue. We're not talking about just being able to use a phone in another country. We're talking about being able to use the phone on another network, in another country. For example, if I were to move to Spain for a year, I might want to cancel my US cell phone plan and sign up with Telefónica, getting a local Spanish number so I could make local calls in Spain at reasonable rates. Of course, anyone from the US trying to call me would have to dial 011-34 in front of my new number, and they'd be billed for an international call, so if I was just visiting on vacation for a couple weeks, I wouldn't want to do this. But if it was something longer-term, I might. In fact, I might want to keep both cell phone plans active, and swap my SIM card depending on who I'm calling and who I'm expecting to call me (I might use the Telefónica SIM card when I want to make calls to people or companies in Spain, then swap it for the AT&T SIM card the rest of the time so friends and family can reach me at my old US number).
So the issue isn't whether you can take an iPhone to another country and use it with your existing AT&T plan, with roaming charges. That works fine. The issue is whether you can take an iPhone to another country, sign up with Telefónica or whatever other local carrier, get a SIM card from them, pop it into your iPhone, and make local calls on your new phone number without roaming. All other GSM phones can do this (it's why SIM cards exist).
...with a list of some of the features of my current phone, a Motorola v551. It's not a complete piece of crap, but it's certainly not high end or anything. The interface is terrible; Motorola's UI designers are apparently completely incompetent. Slashdotters complain about EDGE, but this phone doesn't even support EDGE; I get 32kbps down and 16kbps up on GPRS. So right there, there's two things the iPhone would do better.
But here's some of the things my crappy old phone can do, that the iPhone can't:
tethering via BlueTooth
syncing via BlueTooth
voice dialing
MP3 ring tones, alarms, etc.
record videos, and send them to others via MMS or e-mail, or transfer them (or photos, or ring tones) to my computer via BlueTooth
AIM client
Install and play third-party games
Swap batteries when I'm away from a power source for awhile
I shouldn't have to give up these features. Tethering (the ability to connect to the Internet from my laptop through the phone) is the dealbreaker; I use that all the time. I can understand the battery issue, and I should be able to work around it by connecting an external battery pack (I've seen these for other phones; I don't know if one is available for the iPhone yet, but it's not exactly complicated).
Beyond that? I'm sure 3G is coming. GPS would be nice, so I don't have to enter my current location when using Google Maps, especially after I've made a wrong turn and I don't really know where I am. Copy and paste would be helpful. And I really desperately want an SSH client.
The consumerist approach to environmentalism is like trying to fight WWII by asking individual members of the population to buy guns and go out and shoot a few Germans in their spare time. Interesting analogy. That sounds exactly like what's happening in the Middle East, and they've been kicking our ass.
anything supernatural cannot be tested scientifically
That's just silly - people have tested prayer, ESP, remote viewing, dowsing, and thousands of types of magic healing.
If God chooses to reveal Himself in a way that can be directly observed, then you'll have your proof
Exactly! If something supernatural can affect anything we can objectively test, then we can test it scientifically. On the other hand, if you suggest that something much more powerful than us wants to hide from us, natural super-smart aliens or supernatural divine angels, that's possible, but it isn't the supernatural part that keeps them from mere human knowledge. The issue is that God is a living, intelligent Being, with a will of His own, and not just a phenomenon that responds to stimuli. So, while God can affect something we can objectively test, if God chooses not to do so, then we cannot test it scientifically - and this does not in any way disprove God's existence. As you point out, studies have been done on the effectiveness of intercessory prayer, but these studies are flawed because the idea they try to test for is the false idea that prayer causes e.g. patients to have better results when undergoing heart bypass surgery. Prayer does not cause that. Prayer is a form of communication between us and God, and God can influence the surgery results or not, depending on God's will, not ours.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that. When booted from the CD, expect everything to take a long time. Make sure everything works, but don't look for speed. When you install onto your hard drive, the speed should be fine.
Most likely the problem has to do with different incompatible versions of ID3 tags. I'm not intimately familiar with the specs of the file format or anything, so I can't give you a clear answer as to what happened and why, but for future reference, there is a way to fix it:
In iTunes, select all your MP3s, go to the Advanced menu, select "Convert ID3 Tags..." and check the box for "ID3 tag version". Select the highest version number (currently v2.4), and click OK. Depending on how big your music library is, this may take awhile. Now, all your MP3s will have the same version of ID3 tags. Try opening one in another program - select a track and press Cmd-R (Mac) or Ctrl-R (Windows) to reveal the file, then drag it to WinAmp or whatever. See if the ID3 information looks right. If it doesn't, go back to iTunes, select everything, and convert the ID3 tags to the next lowest version. Try again. Repeat these steps until you get to a version your other MP3 player is happy with.
Can anyone shed some light on how ID3 tag versions work?
Call Cisco's TAC, give them your serial number, and tell them you've found a security flaw. Record the conversation, editing out any confidential bits. If they won't listen to you, post the MP3 of the call online. See if that gets any attention.
The existence of God is outside the realm of empirical science. God is supernatural, and anything supernatural cannot be tested scientifically, because science can only test the natural, not the supernatural. If God chooses to reveal Himself in a way that can be directly observed, then you'll have your proof, but there's no way to coerce God into doing that, because God does not bend His will to ours.
Of course, God did reveal Himself to us. He gave us His Word, which you regard as fiction, and sent His Son to live among us, but that happened long enough ago that you don't consider any of the eyewitness accounts to be trustworthy sources. Oh well.
Creation Science is actually scientific, in that it begins with a hypothesis (the universe and everything in it was created in six literal days by a supernatural God around 4,000 BC or so, and a worldwide catastrophic event happened about 2,000 years later that wiped out just about everything except one guy's family and a bunch of animals that survived on a big boat), then seeks to find evidence that supports the hypothesis. It's a bit more complicated than that - there are different theories about exactly how the global Flood occurred, for example, and newly discovered evidence may support some of these theories while disproving others - but regardless of how much you may dislike the hypothesis, that doesn't invalidate the science. If you think you have evidence that DOES invalidate the science, well, either there's a perfectly good explanation for your evidence that still supports the Creation model, or somehow your evidence is faulty (e.g. you've made conclusions from your observations that rely on assumptions that aren't necessarily true, and while your conclusions conflict with Creation and your observations are legitimate, your conclusions may be wrong).
Intelligent Design began as an attempt to strip the Creator out of Creation Science, so that what's left can be taught in public schools. Unfortunately, if you're going to strip out God, then you also have to strip out the Bible, and the Biblical account of Creation in Genesis, and then you're left with no particular reason why you should be starting with a hypothesis that says the earth is 6,000 years old or there was a global flood 4,000 years ago, so you have to throw that out too... and what you're left with is the completely unscientific notion that Evolution is wrong just because it doesn't feel right, and therefore a supernatural being (or beings, or force, or dish of pasta, or whatever) must have done it.
I can't switch to Linux for several reasons. While my knowledge of Windows kernel is very little (actual code knowledge that is, I know nothing), I know even less about Linux. So while modern day Linux distros are all very GUI friendly and look similar to Windows, what if something went drastically wrong with it? I don't know nearly enough about Linux's command line system or anything. While I know a decent bit about DOS I've seen a small touch of Linux when I ran a Half Life 1 server on a Linux box for a mod. Using PuTTy into it was a pain cause all these strange Linux command line commands were no where near what I was used to. Linux has progressed a bit since then. Try Ubuntu 7.04; you can just boot from the CD and give it a try without touching your hard drive. For most things, you shouldn't have to touch a command line.
Now the real kicker reason why I can't switch; I have no guarantee for my PC being able to use it. Like I said, try the live CD. There's no risk.
While I'm sure I could find a distro that has decent drivers for my hardware, what am I to do about the PC games I play that do not have Linux ports? Now you've hit upon a potential issue.
I could use some Linux emulation software like Wine right? I mean that's the easiest solution. Emulate Windows to run those must-have Windows applications. Well my PC is rather old. You figure in running Linux, plus emulating Windows, plus running a Windows based MMORPG where I normally got 20 fps on a PC, I doubt I'd get anywhere a playable state. While I'm sure some Linux distros themselves run faster, use less memory etc than Windows XP, having to run that and emulate Windows + Game probably negates any resources I had freed up from running Linux itself, if not making the game run even worse. Ah, but you're forgetting: Wine Is Not an Emulator. It's a reverse-engineered clone of the Win32 APIs, running natively on Linux. When you run a Windows game on Wine, the game is actually running natively, on your hardware, using Win32 API calls, just like it runs on Windows... except it's not running on Windows. So, there should be no performance hit at all, and memory usage shouldn't be any higher.
(Disclaimer: I've never used Wine and have no idea what I'm talking about.)
For some people, upgrading or buying a new PC simply so they can use Linux instead of Windows isn't an option. If I was going to shell out that much money, I'd go get another copy of Windows XP that has the current SP2 streamlined into the install to greatly reduce install and patch time. If I didn't play PC games that needed Windows, I might consider running Linux cause pretty much everything else I use can be used on Linux (Firefox, IRC, mp3 player, VLC, etc). Actually, many people switch to Linux because they have older hardware, because Linux tends to run on older hardware better than Windows does. As for getting a copy of Windows XP with all the current patches slipstreamed in, you'll have to pirate that - as another poster complained, there are a ton of patches you have to install, even if you start with an SP2 CD. They're releasing SP3 next year, but who knows whether it will even be possible to buy an XP SP3 CD anywhere; remember that they'd rather you switched to Vista.
Anyway, not trying to argue; Linux probably isn't a good option for you right now. But try the Ubuntu live CD, and the next time you reinstall XP, consider repartitioning and setting up a Windows/Linux dual-boot. That way you can use Windows to get your work done and play your games, and fiddle with Linux in your spare time to see if you can get your games to run there. You said your main problem is that you don't know much about Linux; this would be a good way to do something about that.
Price was no object. The main reason I went for a linux laptop was simple---pixel density. I work with very large images, and the more pixels I can see at a time, in better. Even back in 2001, you could buy a cheap 14" Dell with 1440x1050 resolution (128 pixels/linear inch). By contrast, in 2007 you cannot buy a 15.4" inch MacBook pro with similar pixel density. The best Apple can do is 1440x900, which comes to a crappy 110 pixels/linear inch. Simply put, the pixels on a MacBook/MacBook Pro are just way too big. You're right, but there is a reason Apple doesn't ship laptops with higher resolutions: the software isn't ready to support higher resolutions yet. Most people don't want everything on the screen to be super tiny, they want things to be readable and not look like crap. Apple has been working on this problem, but it will take application support to make it work. Here's what they're telling developers:
The old assumption that displays are 72dpi has been rendered obsolete by advances in display technology. Macs now ship with displays that sport native resolutions of 100dpi or better. Furthermore, the number of pixels per inch will continue to increase dramatically over the next few years. This will make displays crisper and smoother, but it also means that interfaces that are pixel-based will shrink to the point of being unusable. The solution is to remove the 72dpi assumption that has been the norm. In Leopard, the system, including the Carbon and Cocoa frameworks, will be able to draw user interface elements using a scale factor. This will let the user interface maintain the same physical size while gaining resolution and crispness from high dpi displays.
The introduction of resolution independence may mean that there is work that you'll need to do in order to make your application look as good as possible. For modern Cocoa and Carbon applications, most of the work will center around raster-based resources. For older applications that use QuickDraw, more work will be required to replace QuickDraw-based calls with Quartz ones.
Slashdot Mirror
Vista added support for content that already has DRM, which isn't nearly as "invasive" as your trolling/ignorance. That's almost entirely right... but the reason I can't play DVDs in Windows Media Player is apparently because of buggy anti-piracy measures. Third party apps like PowerDVD or VLC work fine. I'm using a FireWire DVD drive.
So when Microsoft took Windows 2000, prettied it up and dumbed it down, and sold it to the masses as Windows XP, most of the major problems and incompatibilities had already been fixed, and things went fairly smoothly. Geeks grumbled about the Fisher-Price UI and scary DRM, but everyone else thought it was great, and it quickly became the standard that everyone uses, just as Windows 98 had been.
Windows Vista is going through exactly the kind of incompatibility issues that Windows 2000 went through, but this time, Microsoft doesn't have the deniability they had with Win2k. This time, OEMs are shipping it pre-installed to millions of home users. Most of the problems have been worked out already, but there are more that will take another year or so, and users hate the idea that they'll have to upgrade their applications (which in many cases costs a lot of money) and buy new peripherals (because Vista-compatible drivers for the old ones aren't available). But like you said, in 2-3 years, everything will settle down. Microsoft will release a couple of service packs to fix their bugs, application developers will have updated their apps, hardware manufacturers will have updated their drivers, users will have bought new software and thrown out their old peripherals, and 2GB RAM will be the absolute minimum that low-end cheap PCs ship with. What we're going through now will be forgotten, and Vista will develop a loyal fan base, just as Win2k did.
And a couple years after that, Microsoft will release a new version of Windows. But guess what? It'll be just like the Win2k to WinXP transition: most of the improvements will be things that don't significantly affect compatibility. All the major problems will already have been fixed, and on top of that, developers will have cleaned up some of their code so that future changes won't be so painful. The new OS will have new features and an overhauled UI, and they'll provide a compatibility layer to cover up any serious changes to the OS, so in general everything that works in Vista will work in its successor.
There's no good reason to use AOL, but AIM is an entirely different service, which continues to work just fine. Of course, many of us connect to it using a third-party client, but the official AIM client is the most reliable when it comes to things like file transfers and extra features, so some people use that, because it works.
There are only three major IM networks that are used by a large enough number of normal people to make them worth bothering with: AIM, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger. A handful of geeks use Jabber. Everyone else has moved to web-based services like MySpace and Facebook to communicate (which only sounds painful to those of us who know the difference between e-mail and webmail).
Here's the answer to your question:
/./ in the user's home directory (which could interfere with other things), so I applied this patch to minstrel's sftp-server.c:
/* CHROOT */
http://www.minstrel.org.uk/papers/sftp/
You'll need to compile your own version of OpenSSH. I'm running two instances of sshd, the default one that I can log into for administration and a hacked one for users (not on the same interface/port, obviously). I mostly followed the instructions from that page, but with this setup I don't need to use his crazy hack that uses
--- sftp-server.c.minstrel 2007-09-04 23:54:06.000000000 -0700
+++ sftp-server.c 2007-09-25 14:41:59.000000000 -0700
@@ -1230,22 +1230,12 @@
if (!user_dir)
fatal("HOME isn't in environment");
- new_root = user_dir + 1;
+ /* Begin phroggy's hack */
+ if (chroot(user_dir) != 0)
+ fatal("Couldn't chroot to user directory %s: %s", user_dir, strerror(errno));
+ setenv("HOME", "/", 1);
+ /* End phroggy's hack */
- while ((new_root = strchr(new_root, '.')) != NULL) {
- new_root--;
- if (strncmp(new_root, "/./", 3) == 0) {
- *new_root = '\0';
- new_root += 2;
-
- if (chroot(user_dir) != 0)
- fatal("Couldn't chroot to user directory %s: %s", user_dir, strerror(errno));
-
- setenv("HOME", new_root, 1);
- break;
- }
- new_root += 2;
- }
}
#endif
If you choose to run two sshds, you'll need to make sure they're not both trying to listen to the same interface/port, they use different PID files, etc. etc.
Disclaimer: if any of this turns out to be horribly insecure and your server gets hacked, it's not my fault.
You mean your browser doesn't have any kind of password management, with a master key?
Unfortunately Apple's Keychain won't let me conveniently access my saved passwords if I'm logged in via SSH (it can be done from the command line, but it pops up a GUI confirmation dialog, unless you do that once and then click "Always Allow" for each password you'll want to access later), and there doesn't appear to be a search feature like there is in the GUI (although it shouldn't be hard to write one). But other than that, it sounds like exactly what you're looking for. You can set it to require your master password after you haven't used it for a few minutes, and every time the computer wakes from sleep. I think KDE has something similar that works with Konqueror. Firefox's password manager isn't bad either, and works on all platforms Firefox runs on (although it's not shared with other applications, unfortunately - bug 386533). Opera calls theirs the Wand.
I'm surprised you would trust your bank to manage your passwords, but I guess if you've had your head buried in the sand long enough not to know about browser password management, you probably haven't heard about all the financial institutions getting hacked and their members' account information leaking all over the Internet. Banks have centuries of experience with physical security and decades of experience with internal network security, but Internet security is still relatively new to them.
So the issue isn't whether you can take an iPhone to another country and use it with your existing AT&T plan, with roaming charges. That works fine. The issue is whether you can take an iPhone to another country, sign up with Telefónica or whatever other local carrier, get a SIM card from them, pop it into your iPhone, and make local calls on your new phone number without roaming. All other GSM phones can do this (it's why SIM cards exist).
But here's some of the things my crappy old phone can do, that the iPhone can't:
I shouldn't have to give up these features. Tethering (the ability to connect to the Internet from my laptop through the phone) is the dealbreaker; I use that all the time. I can understand the battery issue, and I should be able to work around it by connecting an external battery pack (I've seen these for other phones; I don't know if one is available for the iPhone yet, but it's not exactly complicated).
Beyond that? I'm sure 3G is coming. GPS would be nice, so I don't have to enter my current location when using Google Maps, especially after I've made a wrong turn and I don't really know where I am. Copy and paste would be helpful. And I really desperately want an SSH client.
I was hoping for Hungry Hippo.
"And now we play the waiting game. Aww, the waiting game sucks! Let's play Hungry Hungry Hippos!" - Homer Simpson
But yeah, you're exactly right.
That's just silly - people have tested prayer, ESP, remote viewing, dowsing, and thousands of types of magic healing.
If God chooses to reveal Himself in a way that can be directly observed, then you'll have your proof
Exactly! If something supernatural can affect anything we can objectively test, then we can test it scientifically. On the other hand, if you suggest that something much more powerful than us wants to hide from us, natural super-smart aliens or supernatural divine angels, that's possible, but it isn't the supernatural part that keeps them from mere human knowledge. The issue is that God is a living, intelligent Being, with a will of His own, and not just a phenomenon that responds to stimuli. So, while God can affect something we can objectively test, if God chooses not to do so, then we cannot test it scientifically - and this does not in any way disprove God's existence. As you point out, studies have been done on the effectiveness of intercessory prayer, but these studies are flawed because the idea they try to test for is the false idea that prayer causes e.g. patients to have better results when undergoing heart bypass surgery. Prayer does not cause that. Prayer is a form of communication between us and God, and God can influence the surgery results or not, depending on God's will, not ours.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that. When booted from the CD, expect everything to take a long time. Make sure everything works, but don't look for speed. When you install onto your hard drive, the speed should be fine.
Most likely the problem has to do with different incompatible versions of ID3 tags. I'm not intimately familiar with the specs of the file format or anything, so I can't give you a clear answer as to what happened and why, but for future reference, there is a way to fix it:
In iTunes, select all your MP3s, go to the Advanced menu, select "Convert ID3 Tags..." and check the box for "ID3 tag version". Select the highest version number (currently v2.4), and click OK. Depending on how big your music library is, this may take awhile. Now, all your MP3s will have the same version of ID3 tags. Try opening one in another program - select a track and press Cmd-R (Mac) or Ctrl-R (Windows) to reveal the file, then drag it to WinAmp or whatever. See if the ID3 information looks right. If it doesn't, go back to iTunes, select everything, and convert the ID3 tags to the next lowest version. Try again. Repeat these steps until you get to a version your other MP3 player is happy with.
Can anyone shed some light on how ID3 tag versions work?
Yeah, I don't buy that.
Call Cisco's TAC, give them your serial number, and tell them you've found a security flaw. Record the conversation, editing out any confidential bits. If they won't listen to you, post the MP3 of the call online. See if that gets any attention.
The existence of God is outside the realm of empirical science. God is supernatural, and anything supernatural cannot be tested scientifically, because science can only test the natural, not the supernatural. If God chooses to reveal Himself in a way that can be directly observed, then you'll have your proof, but there's no way to coerce God into doing that, because God does not bend His will to ours.
Of course, God did reveal Himself to us. He gave us His Word, which you regard as fiction, and sent His Son to live among us, but that happened long enough ago that you don't consider any of the eyewitness accounts to be trustworthy sources. Oh well.
Creation Science is actually scientific, in that it begins with a hypothesis (the universe and everything in it was created in six literal days by a supernatural God around 4,000 BC or so, and a worldwide catastrophic event happened about 2,000 years later that wiped out just about everything except one guy's family and a bunch of animals that survived on a big boat), then seeks to find evidence that supports the hypothesis. It's a bit more complicated than that - there are different theories about exactly how the global Flood occurred, for example, and newly discovered evidence may support some of these theories while disproving others - but regardless of how much you may dislike the hypothesis, that doesn't invalidate the science. If you think you have evidence that DOES invalidate the science, well, either there's a perfectly good explanation for your evidence that still supports the Creation model, or somehow your evidence is faulty (e.g. you've made conclusions from your observations that rely on assumptions that aren't necessarily true, and while your conclusions conflict with Creation and your observations are legitimate, your conclusions may be wrong).
Intelligent Design began as an attempt to strip the Creator out of Creation Science, so that what's left can be taught in public schools. Unfortunately, if you're going to strip out God, then you also have to strip out the Bible, and the Biblical account of Creation in Genesis, and then you're left with no particular reason why you should be starting with a hypothesis that says the earth is 6,000 years old or there was a global flood 4,000 years ago, so you have to throw that out too... and what you're left with is the completely unscientific notion that Evolution is wrong just because it doesn't feel right, and therefore a supernatural being (or beings, or force, or dish of pasta, or whatever) must have done it.
Hope this helps!
(Disclaimer: I've never used Wine and have no idea what I'm talking about.) For some people, upgrading or buying a new PC simply so they can use Linux instead of Windows isn't an option. If I was going to shell out that much money, I'd go get another copy of Windows XP that has the current SP2 streamlined into the install to greatly reduce install and patch time. If I didn't play PC games that needed Windows, I might consider running Linux cause pretty much everything else I use can be used on Linux (Firefox, IRC, mp3 player, VLC, etc). Actually, many people switch to Linux because they have older hardware, because Linux tends to run on older hardware better than Windows does. As for getting a copy of Windows XP with all the current patches slipstreamed in, you'll have to pirate that - as another poster complained, there are a ton of patches you have to install, even if you start with an SP2 CD. They're releasing SP3 next year, but who knows whether it will even be possible to buy an XP SP3 CD anywhere; remember that they'd rather you switched to Vista.
Anyway, not trying to argue; Linux probably isn't a good option for you right now. But try the Ubuntu live CD, and the next time you reinstall XP, consider repartitioning and setting up a Windows/Linux dual-boot. That way you can use Windows to get your work done and play your games, and fiddle with Linux in your spare time to see if you can get your games to run there. You said your main problem is that you don't know much about Linux; this would be a good way to do something about that.