You missed my point [usual for an AC]. The point is Bruce is 99% mouthpiece. People quote him because he knows how to use webmail [I've seen him use it personally, it was fascinating], has long hair and says things like "it's the ramifications of the draconian backbone we are all founded on."
Seriously though... in person he's puts on a good show, has a sense of humour and more importantly knows when to turn off the media filter.
That's a step backwards I think. At least in windows you can both develop/work and play games.
I think a step forward will be to get some form of standard for graphics/sound/input ala DirectX style. sure opengl, oss, sdl are all good libs but they follow the unix philosophy. That is, do one thing and do it well.
There should be a unified development tool/library that includes them all. E.g. I can install "blah" and boom I got 3d graphics, sound support, joystick/keyboard support, timers/interrupt/callback etc...
Of course that doesn't stop people from just picking their fav collection of tools [e.g. ut2k4 which runs perfectly on my Gentoo box].
"We wouldn't have to spend so much time, money and effort on network security if we didn't have such bad software security."
Is to smart as
"We wouldn't have some many crumbling roads if heavy vehicles didn't drive on them"
Is to insightful. I still say the best way to experience Bruce's mind in action is in person. In his books he's trying to pander to the market [of let's face it less than apt people] and in person he's talking with fairly brilliant people [e.g. me;-)]
That's the cool thing about lawsuits with these types of corporations. They can afford to cast useless fly-fishing lawsuits cuz afterall, the next titney speers album will just cost 29.95$ instead of the low low 22.95$ it costs now.;-)
You can use guns to target practice and *also* kill.
You can use "vulgar" language to promote free speech and *also* lower the quality of life of others.
You can use p2p to promote sharing and *also* to promote piracy.
The point is murder is illegal, hate crimes are illegal and piracy is illegal. No need to make special laws because new technology lets you do it easier. Sure prosecute P2P people who violate copyrights. Why make P2P illegal though?
As for the idea of a "tax" I find it leaves man people out. Here in Canada I pay a levy for CD-Rs despite the fact I only use them to backup *my* software. In fact, CDRs are used to pirate software probably more than audio. So when do I get my levy money?
That was all convincing until I remembered that I used to build my own 386/486/socket7 systems when I was a kid....;-)
"hard to build"... my ass. Ya it was "harder" than a MAC but it wasn't life altering trauma here... open the manual [shocker!] put the jumpers in the right places and plug it in a freely available ISA slot. Whoa hard...
The crux of the reason why MACs are less popular [though not at schools which are often MAC whores for no reason.... ya need it for photoshop!] is because they're more expensive, have crappy mice, were hard to expand on your own, etc....
That and Windows really caters to the lower end IQ users. I don't recall seeing a taskbar the last time I used MAC OS X... Personally I need at least a tasklist/pager to use a desktop. My bet [based on the popularity] is that many others do too;-)
Legal scrutiny of the emulators is part of the problem don't ya think?
I mean an emulator is in no way a copyright violation yet that's what most megacorps aim at when they try to shut them down. And who is Nintendo to tell me I can't write my own programs for *my* gameboy?
Most likely this patent was filed for their NES emulator [that uses the trading cards] so they could cover their ass. Chances are right now they're just taking advantage of it now to screw the "underground" developer/gaming community.
that DDOS attacks are asymmetric? [e.g. many to one] So what? Customers of this company will have hordes of zombie computers at their control?
I don't quite get it.
Though you can tell this is an american idea. the concept of collateral damage [e.g. people with the same ISP or host being tossed offline] isn't relatively important to them...
Why not make a tool that can find who started the DDOS and then accidentally send them to 20 years in a pound-me-in-the-ass prison? That would be worth money.
Well most sysops I know [like for my ISP] require you to send the full header details so they can check it themselves.
I mean there is of course potential for people to be ignorant/lazy. That's when you switch providers or sue or BWABFCB.
I'd personally have no problem with ISPs doing this. When @home moved to rogers.com my account went down for 3 weeks. I got that month for free and a few other months for 1/2 price as their little "re-payment". It worked. I've been with the very same ISP ever since and their service has otherwise been very very good [e.g. I can't recall the last time it went down].
So the moral I guess I'm getting at here is in the end things will work themselves out. ISPs with clueless sysops will fold or lose business and ISPs with clued in sysops will fare better.
Um only if you're a moron sysop [oh wait... yeah ok I can see your point;-)]
The top line of the received headers will be the last hop where the email came from. You can't forge that [unless your smtp server has been exploited]. So you just pick on the dude at the top [which is most likely the infected user].
Yes, but when I want to work with others on say my LibTom libraries I hardly can ask them to fire up Windiff or Source Safe [though admitedly I don't use CVS, you get the point though]. Let's use cabpack to archive a release! That'll win me users....
grep does more than the IDE search function. You can pipe any data through it which is useful for finding lines in files [e.g. output of cat] and other programs.
As part of the "OS" my point was bloatware.
After you install windows XP + msvc + msdn you're looking at 3-4GB of space used. After installing a stage3 gentoo + X + icewm + mozilla you're looking at around 1GB [or less]. Not only is the "oss" approach smaller but it includes more [you get all the typical userland tools like tar, zip, bzip2, gzip, diff, patch, grep, perl, man, bash, etc....] not to mention you get the OSS benefits [e.g. shorter release cycles, more accessible, um, it's free!]
After install windows+msdn you get an explorer shell, a browser, a mail client, a crappy shell, a decent C compiler [that doesn't optimize for AMD nor will it ever]. You still don't have proper archive tools or anything leaning towards ISO C compliance [at least GCC is starting to swing that way]
I'd rather the "non-bloat free" approach over the closed source, expensive, bloatware microsoft approach. Specially considering non-OEM copies of both can ring you around 600$ [400$ for WinXP and 200$ for MSVC student versions].
Heck most of my computer an be bought for 600$ [100$ mobo, 150$ ram, 50$ case, 60$ speakers, 120$ powersupply, 100$ hard disk ~ 600$].
The point is many oss tools are competent, complete, professional and competitive. To have people just outright judge it because it's not "point and click" is just plain stupid. A developer ought to know how to use a shell, how to write build scripts, how to navigate directories in a shell, etc...
But some stupid devry grad who thinks they're shit disses Linux distros because it's not shiny like Windows somehow has some validity? The only things I want point and clicky are Mozilla, Gaim and XMMS. The rest is a matter for a bash shell to sort out.
Sure this particular article was about "is it for the average joe". Admitedly I don't really think Linux distros are for the average joe. You have to know how to work with the distros to some degree. However, that being said the article author is still on crack. I can play media files of various sorts [mpg, divx, qt, rm, wmv, DVD....], I can burn CD-Rs easily [with cdrecord], I can browse the web easily with Mozilla, I can write quick documents with OpenOffice which is more than enough for quick 2 page documents. If I want real document power I'll use TeTex, etc, etc, etc.
Maybe Lindows is just a crappy distro? Does this really have to say something about Linux distros in general? Maybe it says something about the administrator? [e.g. Linux distros might not be something newbies should try to install?] etc etc etc.
This article really doesn't address these issues and is all about fueling the MSFT FUD machine.
How dare you. For us non-rich folk it's a good way to turn your PC which has a monitor anyways into a TV. And the WinTV PCI cards are very keen indeed. Good quality, relatively cheap.
Ok great. Whatever. Still doesn't address the lack of a shell, archive tools, various text tools [sed, perl, grep, etc], source tools [diff, patch, cvs] etc...
So yeah sure if all you do is use the IDE I guess MSVC is cool but quite frankly in my hobby coding I use more than an IDE so I imagine people who code more seriously wouldn't get by with only an IDE.
Um userland GNU tools [which includes way more than you get with either windows and MSVC combined] + gcc + manpages is still way smaller than an optimum [cuz who wants to use a CD/DVD when you are looking up functions] MSVC install.
Linux distros are hard to install as ice fishing is hard for warm climate southerners. Wrong market.
That and the average computer user could just be better served with a typewriter and a vic-20 or something;-)
What gets me about articles like this are the summary judgements that will be based off it... E.g. well some magazine jerk said Linux is hard to use. Must be true. Ok school, let's renew your assraping windows licenses!
I mean seriously.... specially at vocational schools where people are training to be professionals why not use professional tools and not he "user enabled" ms ones?
For example, writing a manuscript? Great, use TeX not Word. Developing a program? Great use a free multi-platform C compiler [e.g. GCC] not some single platform Intel friendly MSVC [which is just huge bloatware... 6 CDs?], etc, etc, etc.
There are tonnes of quality free software out there that professionals of different fields can use. They're just too lazy to put up with development. Sure gimp isn't photoshop but I'm sure if Gimp had more active feedback [and say donations] the authors would be really motivated to get 2.0 out the door. At the end of the day Gimp is free and the professionals [say artists or whatever] are rewarded with a tool they don't have to re-license with every computer/new year, etc..
Of course all of this requires a bit of long-term thinking and not the usual standard issue 9 second knee-jerk reaction americans come standard with.
All I care is that icewm is small, quick loading and doesn't bloat like KDE or Gnome. I never said "icewm is the bestest in the whole wide world". I said it was decent.
Well to be specific icewm on my box takes ~7.5MB of ram [four processes of 3.3, 1.2, 1.5 and 1.5 MB each].
Note thate compared to fvwm2 [which I have only used in cygwin] icewm supports multiple desktops, has a clock, start menu and tray. icewm also has nice window decorations..
don't get me wrong for what CF is used for now it's certainly suitable [btw the re-write quota on most CFs is about 100,000 cycles so you haven't even hit the half-way mark on any sectors most likely].
My point though was....um I forgot.... whatever the entire market is a scam right now. Personally I'll just sit on the sideline and wait for things to sort themselves out;-)
Well you might trying to be sarcastic but um yeah.
Sorry hate to break it to ya but 8MB of ram is shit for a compiler [that is meant to handle a program of any respectable size]. 80MB of disk space is little space to hold source+builds, etc...
The trick [which most miss] is an acceptable rate of growth.
I imagine 100 years from now a PDA will have a baseline of 1TB of memory [anything less will just be inhuman]. The point is right now that would be insane.
Similarly sure 20 years ago 8MB of ram was godly [cuz quite frankly the average program was of limited appeal and functionality]. You can pick up a 512MB of ram for relatively cheap [~110$ CDN for PC2700].
So it isn't unreasonable to assume a desktop user would have 512MB or even 1GB of ram [it's much I agree but not overly excessive]. If windows required 512MB of ram 10 years ago they would have gone out of business. Right now though it's not asking too much.
That being said I agree with the sentiment against bloat. I run icewm for the sole reason that it takes 10MB of ram. Combined with X my entire "desktop" takes less than 30MB of ram. It would be nice if the next version of windows didn't take 200MB of ram when idle but alas it wouldn't be cool enough if you didn't have a million little things going on all at once.
On a stable platform you can re-write a micro-drive more than you can CF [though yeah with sector re-mapping the damage is little, hit to capacity though...]
Still doesn't answer the question "is this NEW?" I mean why is this being posted on slashdot? Obviously the kernel teams know about the flaw and have already fixed it.
Oh oh, I found a bug in Win 3.11... oh wait... that's an old release? Dang... Nobody will want to hear about that...
Slashdot Mirror
You missed my point [usual for an AC]. The point is Bruce is 99% mouthpiece. People quote him because he knows how to use webmail [I've seen him use it personally, it was fascinating], has long hair and says things like "it's the ramifications of the draconian backbone we are all founded on."
Seriously though... in person he's puts on a good show, has a sense of humour and more importantly knows when to turn off the media filter.
Tom
That's a step backwards I think. At least in windows you can both develop/work and play games.
I think a step forward will be to get some form of standard for graphics/sound/input ala DirectX style. sure opengl, oss, sdl are all good libs but they follow the unix philosophy. That is, do one thing and do it well.
There should be a unified development tool/library that includes them all. E.g. I can install "blah" and boom I got 3d graphics, sound support, joystick/keyboard support, timers/interrupt/callback etc...
Of course that doesn't stop people from just picking their fav collection of tools [e.g. ut2k4 which runs perfectly on my Gentoo box].
Tom
Why I love Bruce...
;-)]
"We wouldn't have to spend so much time, money and effort on network security if we didn't have such bad software security."
Is to smart as
"We wouldn't have some many crumbling roads if heavy vehicles didn't drive on them"
Is to insightful. I still say the best way to experience Bruce's mind in action is in person. In his books he's trying to pander to the market [of let's face it less than apt people] and in person he's talking with fairly brilliant people [e.g. me
Tom
That's the cool thing about lawsuits with these types of corporations. They can afford to cast useless fly-fishing lawsuits cuz afterall, the next titney speers album will just cost 29.95$ instead of the low low 22.95$ it costs now. ;-)
Tom
This is a case of the "also" clause being abused.
You can use guns to target practice and *also* kill.
You can use "vulgar" language to promote free speech and *also* lower the quality of life of others.
You can use p2p to promote sharing and *also* to promote piracy.
The point is murder is illegal, hate crimes are illegal and piracy is illegal. No need to make special laws because new technology lets you do it easier. Sure prosecute P2P people who violate copyrights. Why make P2P illegal though?
As for the idea of a "tax" I find it leaves man people out. Here in Canada I pay a levy for CD-Rs despite the fact I only use them to backup *my* software. In fact, CDRs are used to pirate software probably more than audio. So when do I get my levy money?
Tom
That was all convincing until I remembered that I used to build my own 386/486/socket7 systems when I was a kid.... ;-)
;-)
"hard to build"... my ass. Ya it was "harder" than a MAC but it wasn't life altering trauma here... open the manual [shocker!] put the jumpers in the right places and plug it in a freely available ISA slot. Whoa hard...
The crux of the reason why MACs are less popular [though not at schools which are often MAC whores for no reason.... ya need it for photoshop!] is because they're more expensive, have crappy mice, were hard to expand on your own, etc....
That and Windows really caters to the lower end IQ users. I don't recall seeing a taskbar the last time I used MAC OS X... Personally I need at least a tasklist/pager to use a desktop. My bet [based on the popularity] is that many others do too
Tom
How am I wrong? I said the patent was probably for their NES emulator.
I never said it was a valid patent.
Geez... knee-jerk reaction or what?
Tom
Legal scrutiny of the emulators is part of the problem don't ya think?
I mean an emulator is in no way a copyright violation yet that's what most megacorps aim at when they try to shut them down. And who is Nintendo to tell me I can't write my own programs for *my* gameboy?
Most likely this patent was filed for their NES emulator [that uses the trading cards] so they could cover their ass. Chances are right now they're just taking advantage of it now to screw the "underground" developer/gaming community.
Tom
that DDOS attacks are asymmetric? [e.g. many to one] So what? Customers of this company will have hordes of zombie computers at their control?
I don't quite get it.
Though you can tell this is an american idea. the concept of collateral damage [e.g. people with the same ISP or host being tossed offline] isn't relatively important to them...
Why not make a tool that can find who started the DDOS and then accidentally send them to 20 years in a pound-me-in-the-ass prison? That would be worth money.
Tom
Well most sysops I know [like for my ISP] require you to send the full header details so they can check it themselves.
I mean there is of course potential for people to be ignorant/lazy. That's when you switch providers or sue or BWABFCB.
I'd personally have no problem with ISPs doing this. When @home moved to rogers.com my account went down for 3 weeks. I got that month for free and a few other months for 1/2 price as their little "re-payment". It worked. I've been with the very same ISP ever since and their service has otherwise been very very good [e.g. I can't recall the last time it went down].
So the moral I guess I'm getting at here is in the end things will work themselves out. ISPs with clueless sysops will fold or lose business and ISPs with clued in sysops will fare better.
Tom
Um only if you're a moron sysop [oh wait... yeah ok I can see your point ;-)]
The top line of the received headers will be the last hop where the email came from. You can't forge that [unless your smtp server has been exploited]. So you just pick on the dude at the top [which is most likely the infected user].
Tom
Yes, but when I want to work with others on say my LibTom libraries I hardly can ask them to fire up Windiff or Source Safe [though admitedly I don't use CVS, you get the point though]. Let's use cabpack to archive a release! That'll win me users....
grep does more than the IDE search function. You can pipe any data through it which is useful for finding lines in files [e.g. output of cat] and other programs.
As part of the "OS" my point was bloatware.
After you install windows XP + msvc + msdn you're looking at 3-4GB of space used. After installing a stage3 gentoo + X + icewm + mozilla you're looking at around 1GB [or less]. Not only is the "oss" approach smaller but it includes more [you get all the typical userland tools like tar, zip, bzip2, gzip, diff, patch, grep, perl, man, bash, etc....] not to mention you get the OSS benefits [e.g. shorter release cycles, more accessible, um, it's free!]
After install windows+msdn you get an explorer shell, a browser, a mail client, a crappy shell, a decent C compiler [that doesn't optimize for AMD nor will it ever]. You still don't have proper archive tools or anything leaning towards ISO C compliance [at least GCC is starting to swing that way]
I'd rather the "non-bloat free" approach over the closed source, expensive, bloatware microsoft approach. Specially considering non-OEM copies of both can ring you around 600$ [400$ for WinXP and 200$ for MSVC student versions].
Heck most of my computer an be bought for 600$ [100$ mobo, 150$ ram, 50$ case, 60$ speakers, 120$ powersupply, 100$ hard disk ~ 600$].
The point is many oss tools are competent, complete, professional and competitive. To have people just outright judge it because it's not "point and click" is just plain stupid. A developer ought to know how to use a shell, how to write build scripts, how to navigate directories in a shell, etc...
But some stupid devry grad who thinks they're shit disses Linux distros because it's not shiny like Windows somehow has some validity? The only things I want point and clicky are Mozilla, Gaim and XMMS. The rest is a matter for a bash shell to sort out.
Sure this particular article was about "is it for the average joe". Admitedly I don't really think Linux distros are for the average joe. You have to know how to work with the distros to some degree. However, that being said the article author is still on crack. I can play media files of various sorts [mpg, divx, qt, rm, wmv, DVD....], I can burn CD-Rs easily [with cdrecord], I can browse the web easily with Mozilla, I can write quick documents with OpenOffice which is more than enough for quick 2 page documents. If I want real document power I'll use TeTex, etc, etc, etc.
Maybe Lindows is just a crappy distro? Does this really have to say something about Linux distros in general? Maybe it says something about the administrator? [e.g. Linux distros might not be something newbies should try to install?] etc etc etc.
This article really doesn't address these issues and is all about fueling the MSFT FUD machine.
Tom
TV-Tuner functionality questionable?
How dare you. For us non-rich folk it's a good way to turn your PC which has a monitor anyways into a TV. And the WinTV PCI cards are very keen indeed. Good quality, relatively cheap.
Tom
Ok great. Whatever. Still doesn't address the lack of a shell, archive tools, various text tools [sed, perl, grep, etc], source tools [diff, patch, cvs] etc...
So yeah sure if all you do is use the IDE I guess MSVC is cool but quite frankly in my hobby coding I use more than an IDE so I imagine people who code more seriously wouldn't get by with only an IDE.
Tom
Um userland GNU tools [which includes way more than you get with either windows and MSVC combined] + gcc + manpages is still way smaller than an optimum [cuz who wants to use a CD/DVD when you are looking up functions] MSVC install.
Um you got it right basically.
;-)
... 6 CDs?], etc, etc, etc.
Linux distros are hard to install as ice fishing is hard for warm climate southerners. Wrong market.
That and the average computer user could just be better served with a typewriter and a vic-20 or something
What gets me about articles like this are the summary judgements that will be based off it... E.g. well some magazine jerk said Linux is hard to use. Must be true. Ok school, let's renew your assraping windows licenses!
I mean seriously.... specially at vocational schools where people are training to be professionals why not use professional tools and not he "user enabled" ms ones?
For example, writing a manuscript? Great, use TeX not Word. Developing a program? Great use a free multi-platform C compiler [e.g. GCC] not some single platform Intel friendly MSVC [which is just huge bloatware
There are tonnes of quality free software out there that professionals of different fields can use. They're just too lazy to put up with development. Sure gimp isn't photoshop but I'm sure if Gimp had more active feedback [and say donations] the authors would be really motivated to get 2.0 out the door. At the end of the day Gimp is free and the professionals [say artists or whatever] are rewarded with a tool they don't have to re-license with every computer/new year, etc..
Of course all of this requires a bit of long-term thinking and not the usual standard issue 9 second knee-jerk reaction americans come standard with.
Tom
Shhh. Let's not point that out already. Windows is the 1.0 normalizer. Linux is like 0.1 in the authors mind I guess...
Tom
Do you have udma for your drives turned on? I know burning at 16x without dma used to be a nightmare [thank ya hdparm!]
;-)
Right now burnign a cd takes next to no cpu time as it's all done off chip
Tom
Laugh all ya want. I bet 30 years ago PDAs with 128MB of ram seemed like a really "far fetched and mystical idea".
Tom
To each their own.
All I care is that icewm is small, quick loading and doesn't bloat like KDE or Gnome. I never said "icewm is the bestest in the whole wide world". I said it was decent.
Tom
Well to be specific icewm on my box takes ~7.5MB of ram [four processes of 3.3, 1.2, 1.5 and 1.5 MB each].
Note thate compared to fvwm2 [which I have only used in cygwin] icewm supports multiple desktops, has a clock, start menu and tray. icewm also has nice window decorations..
So sure fvwm is smaller but it also does less.
Tom
don't get me wrong for what CF is used for now it's certainly suitable [btw the re-write quota on most CFs is about 100,000 cycles so you haven't even hit the half-way mark on any sectors most likely].
....um I forgot.... whatever the entire market is a scam right now. Personally I'll just sit on the sideline and wait for things to sort themselves out ;-)
My point though was
Tom
Well you might trying to be sarcastic but um yeah.
Sorry hate to break it to ya but 8MB of ram is shit for a compiler [that is meant to handle a program of any respectable size]. 80MB of disk space is little space to hold source+builds, etc...
The trick [which most miss] is an acceptable rate of growth.
I imagine 100 years from now a PDA will have a baseline of 1TB of memory [anything less will just be inhuman]. The point is right now that would be insane.
Similarly sure 20 years ago 8MB of ram was godly [cuz quite frankly the average program was of limited appeal and functionality]. You can pick up a 512MB of ram for relatively cheap [~110$ CDN for PC2700].
So it isn't unreasonable to assume a desktop user would have 512MB or even 1GB of ram [it's much I agree but not overly excessive]. If windows required 512MB of ram 10 years ago they would have gone out of business. Right now though it's not asking too much.
That being said I agree with the sentiment against bloat. I run icewm for the sole reason that it takes 10MB of ram. Combined with X my entire "desktop" takes less than 30MB of ram. It would be nice if the next version of windows didn't take 200MB of ram when idle but alas it wouldn't be cool enough if you didn't have a million little things going on all at once.
Tom
But that's a trade off really.
On a stable platform you can re-write a micro-drive more than you can CF [though yeah with sector re-mapping the damage is little, hit to capacity though...]
Tom
Still doesn't answer the question "is this NEW?" I mean why is this being posted on slashdot? Obviously the kernel teams know about the flaw and have already fixed it.
Oh oh, I found a bug in Win 3.11... oh wait... that's an old release? Dang... Nobody will want to hear about that...
Tom