IMHO it sound good in theory, but it's just going to be another set of numbers to confuse people. Maybe a L8 video card would make a system into an L4. But if you look on the box for the card, the card was rated at L8 months ago - now it's actually an L5. The other option is that you just incrament numbers. That's going to be pretty annoying since different components advance at a different rate. Processors will advance levels extremely fast, Mainboards very slow. Hard drives may have an 'L' rating, but then do I want a bigger 'L' or do I want more space? How come the one with more space is slower?
So I don't think it's going to help the situation. In the end it's still going to come down to two questions to the sales person. "How much do you want to spend?" "What are you going to use it for?"
Actually I think a price scale is exactly what happens right now for the average person. A computer guru has too many variables to really price a system anyway. Maybe I can reuse a power suppy, I only need a $15 case, I decide I want a serial ATA mirror, with a good 3ware card... It's just too easy to skew any pricing structure when you know what you're doing. By contrast Joe Average has no clue what in the hell he should get. He sees vague numbers about RAM and processor speed that don't mean anything to him. So what else do you base it on? The more expensive one is better.
The difference is that the guru's scale is different from Joe's scale. Just like used cars. You go to a car auction and it's sort of sick how much cars are sold for only to end up on car lots with a couple thousand dollars mark up.
Reading this I got this image in my head of some sort of Appocoliptic Mad Max sort of movie - where people are attracted to shiny things and use them for ornaments while oblivious to their real use.
And where I work, that's not too far of the mark some times..
The hard part about patching this one is that a lot of third party software may overwrite the Windows JPEG GDI library with its own older version:-/
And thats one of the things that pissed me off so much about Windows - software that fucks with the system libraries and messes everything up. You keep your system up to date, only to install some software that overwrites a dll with a version from the dark ages, and breaks everything else.
Now MS is talking about allowing different version s of the same library, but really that's just a bandaid fix to something that shouldn't be allowed in the first place.
On some machines I work with I can take FreeBSD completely down and up (not just up) in about 23 seconds, and that's with 2 seconds for you to escape in the boot loader. But that of course depends on your hardware. Running the same system on a Dell server could take like 3 or more minutes simply because of all the initalization crap for hardware. In any case the boot time required would be 0.26 not 26. Allowing for a reboot a year to obtain 5 nines would be about a 3 second boot cycle.
If it was really that important to reboot the system they could just install back orifice , then script another host to reboot any win9x host. Windows 2000 you could just schedule a reboot every month with the task scheduler. Win98 and ME have a scheduler also, but I've found that to be rather... unreliable.
What kind of machine are we talking here? In my experience I really don't experience much of any slowdown what-so-ever using anything around a P3. It seems to me if you are using cron, then you should probably schedule cvsup when there is no activity. I find it sort of hard to believe the scheduler would make more of an impression if you set the jobs to 'nice 19'.
Do we really need political experience? We've had good and bad presidents with and without experience. People seem to have this bizzare belief that the president makes every decision himself and understands every fascet of the entire nation. Realisticly it only requires that you have some common sense to hire good advisors who really understand what the hell is going on. Probably the thing that helps a president most is foreign experience which helps dealing with other nations - but again with a collected head you can do just as well.
It's hard to say that any of the two party candidates have much leadership ability since they're basically puppets of their respective parties anyway. And when you elect a politian that isn't just a bullshit generator, cut the ties with the two parties, that's basically all you have left - someone you voted for because you actually believe in the person and their views.
Must just be Unix then where it's broken. Or possibly just what I built on Gentoo, since I've noticed all sorts of other problems. - Most notably I'm getting popups sometimes on a javascript page unload event.
Well it's not going to kill me, and I use type ahead (which is a killer feature I must say) more now anyway.
I think MS really screwed up with this one. It seems like there is issue after issue if you install it. I'm also getting the impression that installing it isn't mandatory (like previous service packs)? What Microsoft SHOULD have done is just secure some things in XP, then released something like "second edition". Now we have a situation where some people are probably going to refuse installing XP so some will have XPsp1 and some with XPsp2 - thus two different versions of the same OS floating around.
MS moving towards more security is a good thing, I just think that SP2 is a bit too ambitous to stuff into a SERVICE PACK.
I was thinking a Shuttle PC would be fine, but I don't have much experience with them. Have you thought about just buying a used laptop? Power usage is pretty low, the profile is small, and people seem to junk perfectly good machines. Probably the only problem there would be support for the network card and if FreeBSD supports it. I've actually turned some busted up Laptops into Kiosks and it works pretty well.
OpenBSD is secure by default because it doesn't start any services by default. Samba is just as insecure on OpenBSD as it is on any other machine (for the most part). So while the OS itself might be "secure", as soon as you install other Open Source software on top of it, you're pretty much in the same ballpark as everyone else.
I haven't read the article, but this doesn't seem to address what can be better secured. With superior firewalling, setting partitions to noexec, and BSD Jails (among many other things) an admin can make a system fairly secure even with software that has security problems, it just means that you need to know what you're doing.
You base that off of the assumption that people want to work on another distro when it many not meet their needs or goals. Some people work on a Linux distro because it's THEIRS, or they signifcantly contribute towards that distro's direction. You just aren't going to get that level of control or experimentation in Gentoo or Fedora. Probably 90% of Linux is concentrated in the top 10 distros (offical made up statistc!) anyway. Why stop at a handful? Why not go towards ONE distro for all?
Linux will come down to a handful of distros when everyone is actually happy with those distros. Those who try their hand at a new distro aren't just sitting on a mailing list bitching, they're actually working at making their own improvments their own way. And that's not such a bad thing either.
Actually, you bring up a good point. Why doesn't someone write a program called "help"? I know this is one of the first things I tried at the command line when I was new to computers, and I've seen many other people try the same thing. 'man' only helps you if you know what command you should be typing, and lets face it; most Linux commands are NOT intuitivly named.
It seems to me that it wouldn't kill someone to make a bunch of tutorials that speak to average people, and explain things like rm, and ls... AND GIVE EXAMPLES. Organize it like a book, and write it like a book. Possibly make it modular so you can add other help modules for stuff like rsync, etc. which may not be a part of linux by default.
It's actually a lot like the olympics. The United States consitently fields a huge ammount of great athletes and manages to win a bigger portion of metals than any other nation. Yet the average American is fat (and often lazy). The best and the brightest in the US have managed to drag the rest of us to the top of the pile, but in the end even that can't turn the tide forever. Especially when the people at the top gut the infastructure to support such a system, for their own gains.
It's the generational gap on a grand scale (and slower). The first generation busts their ass making a living and providing for their child so that they can have a better life. The next generation goest to school and does quite well, and respecting what their parents did for them. The third generation sits on their ass and always had it good, and isn't particularly interested in working hard or going to school.
Is this book mainly code, or is it mainly theory? I'd like to get a book that explains the guts, but I really don't want to spend days looking at page after page of code on paper.
I decided to go third party long ago (reform for me). So I'll forward my own personal agenda here. We have two guys who have had a silver spoon shoved in their mouths all of their live bickering over issues of "the common man", and I'm surprized anyone even believes them.
Maybe some people at slashdot would be interested in the Libertarian candidate who actually WORKED for a living as a programmer. You'd think Slashdot would be all over a candidate who can actually write code, but I suppose it's the two party system that's so entrenched that it's even prevelent here.
You can get pretty close to this already in KDE 3.2 by default. Set kicker to the center, set the width to 0% (to scale with icons). Set the grab handles and other stuff to hide or remove them. Then set the panel transparency to whatever makes you happy. After that it's just a matter of icons.
To me drop shadows add a bit more depth and make it slightly easier to determine the active window by giving a perception of which window is 'on top' of the other. It seems to make it a bit more intuitive then just changing the titlebar color.
My thoughts as well. MS doesn't need China for money, it needs it in order to maintain control. In a country that manufacters the majority of computers, with a gigantic portion of the Earths population, would you want them starting to all collaborate on a compeditors product, like say... Linux? Linux and open source are hard enough for MS to battle, even though it's done by people in their free time, and a handful of corperations. You put the weight of the Chinese people behind it and MS will simply not be able to stop it.
So in the end it's better for MS to make stuff for China, and then slap some wrists and tell them they shouldn't pirate, while really not caring. Basically do anything to keep the Chinese people away from Linux.
Not just the illiterate, but all of us. Our legal sysem the way it is today, itself is starting to become a problem. Simply put, legal jargin and wording is beyond most of us to easily comprehend, and add on top of that the rules and red tape and you've essentially excluded the population from even understanding how to defend themselves in a court of law. And it's why lawyers have become far too powerful. Law is supposed to be the lowest form of civility, but more and more it's being abused, like weilding a club and beating the person simply by who has more funding to find more things buried within the law.
The law is working less and less for us, and more and more against us. And basically what it comes down to (aside from the indifference of the people) is that most of us cannot easily obtain or understand our own laws.
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO it sound good in theory, but it's just going to be another set of numbers to confuse people. Maybe a L8 video card would make a system into an L4. But if you look on the box for the card, the card was rated at L8 months ago - now it's actually an L5. The other option is that you just incrament numbers. That's going to be pretty annoying since different components advance at a different rate. Processors will advance levels extremely fast, Mainboards very slow. Hard drives may have an 'L' rating, but then do I want a bigger 'L' or do I want more space? How come the one with more space is slower?
So I don't think it's going to help the situation. In the end it's still going to come down to two questions to the sales person.
"How much do you want to spend?"
"What are you going to use it for?"
Actually I think a price scale is exactly what happens right now for the average person. A computer guru has too many variables to really price a system anyway. Maybe I can reuse a power suppy, I only need a $15 case, I decide I want a serial ATA mirror, with a good 3ware card... It's just too easy to skew any pricing structure when you know what you're doing. By contrast Joe Average has no clue what in the hell he should get. He sees vague numbers about RAM and processor speed that don't mean anything to him. So what else do you base it on? The more expensive one is better.
The difference is that the guru's scale is different from Joe's scale. Just like used cars. You go to a car auction and it's sort of sick how much cars are sold for only to end up on car lots with a couple thousand dollars mark up.
Do I get a bonus for having an Athlon?
Reading this I got this image in my head of some sort of Appocoliptic Mad Max sort of movie - where people are attracted to shiny things and use them for ornaments while oblivious to their real use.
And where I work, that's not too far of the mark some times..
The hard part about patching this one is that a lot of third party software may overwrite the Windows JPEG GDI library with its own older version :-/
And thats one of the things that pissed me off so much about Windows - software that fucks with the system libraries and messes everything up. You keep your system up to date, only to install some software that overwrites a dll with a version from the dark ages, and breaks everything else.
Now MS is talking about allowing different version s of the same library, but really that's just a bandaid fix to something that shouldn't be allowed in the first place.
On some machines I work with I can take FreeBSD completely down and up (not just up) in about 23 seconds, and that's with 2 seconds for you to escape in the boot loader. But that of course depends on your hardware. Running the same system on a Dell server could take like 3 or more minutes simply because of all the initalization crap for hardware. In any case the boot time required would be 0.26 not 26. Allowing for a reboot a year to obtain 5 nines would be about a 3 second boot cycle.
If it was really that important to reboot the system they could just install back orifice , then script another host to reboot any win9x host. Windows 2000 you could just schedule a reboot every month with the task scheduler. Win98 and ME have a scheduler also, but I've found that to be rather... unreliable.
Probably the only big downside is " This has been partly by using an external power supply". So that means another massive electrical plug.
What kind of machine are we talking here? In my experience I really don't experience much of any slowdown what-so-ever using anything around a P3. It seems to me if you are using cron, then you should probably schedule cvsup when there is no activity. I find it sort of hard to believe the scheduler would make more of an impression if you set the jobs to 'nice 19'.
Do we really need political experience? We've had good and bad presidents with and without experience. People seem to have this bizzare belief that the president makes every decision himself and understands every fascet of the entire nation. Realisticly it only requires that you have some common sense to hire good advisors who really understand what the hell is going on. Probably the thing that helps a president most is foreign experience which helps dealing with other nations - but again with a collected head you can do just as well.
It's hard to say that any of the two party candidates have much leadership ability since they're basically puppets of their respective parties anyway. And when you elect a politian that isn't just a bullshit generator, cut the ties with the two parties, that's basically all you have left - someone you voted for because you actually believe in the person and their views.
how man fpy (frames per year) do you get?
Must just be Unix then where it's broken. Or possibly just what I built on Gentoo, since I've noticed all sorts of other problems. - Most notably I'm getting popups sometimes on a javascript page unload event.
Well it's not going to kill me, and I use type ahead (which is a killer feature I must say) more now anyway.
Unfortunatly it doesn't appear to have a keyboard shortcut to make it go away.
I think MS really screwed up with this one. It seems like there is issue after issue if you install it. I'm also getting the impression that installing it isn't mandatory (like previous service packs)? What Microsoft SHOULD have done is just secure some things in XP, then released something like "second edition". Now we have a situation where some people are probably going to refuse installing XP so some will have XPsp1 and some with XPsp2 - thus two different versions of the same OS floating around.
MS moving towards more security is a good thing, I just think that SP2 is a bit too ambitous to stuff into a SERVICE PACK.
I was thinking a Shuttle PC would be fine, but I don't have much experience with them. Have you thought about just buying a used laptop? Power usage is pretty low, the profile is small, and people seem to junk perfectly good machines. Probably the only problem there would be support for the network card and if FreeBSD supports it. I've actually turned some busted up Laptops into Kiosks and it works pretty well.
OpenBSD is secure by default because it doesn't start any services by default. Samba is just as insecure on OpenBSD as it is on any other machine (for the most part). So while the OS itself might be "secure", as soon as you install other Open Source software on top of it, you're pretty much in the same ballpark as everyone else.
I haven't read the article, but this doesn't seem to address what can be better secured. With superior firewalling, setting partitions to noexec, and BSD Jails (among many other things) an admin can make a system fairly secure even with software that has security problems, it just means that you need to know what you're doing.
You base that off of the assumption that people want to work on another distro when it many not meet their needs or goals. Some people work on a Linux distro because it's THEIRS, or they signifcantly contribute towards that distro's direction. You just aren't going to get that level of control or experimentation in Gentoo or Fedora. Probably 90% of Linux is concentrated in the top 10 distros (offical made up statistc!) anyway. Why stop at a handful? Why not go towards ONE distro for all?
Linux will come down to a handful of distros when everyone is actually happy with those distros. Those who try their hand at a new distro aren't just sitting on a mailing list bitching, they're actually working at making their own improvments their own way. And that's not such a bad thing either.
Actually, you bring up a good point. Why doesn't someone write a program called "help"? I know this is one of the first things I tried at the command line when I was new to computers, and I've seen many other people try the same thing. 'man' only helps you if you know what command you should be typing, and lets face it; most Linux commands are NOT intuitivly named.
... AND GIVE EXAMPLES. Organize it like a book, and write it like a book. Possibly make it modular so you can add other help modules for stuff like rsync, etc. which may not be a part of linux by default.
It seems to me that it wouldn't kill someone to make a bunch of tutorials that speak to average people, and explain things like rm, and ls
It's actually a lot like the olympics. The United States consitently fields a huge ammount of great athletes and manages to win a bigger portion of metals than any other nation. Yet the average American is fat (and often lazy). The best and the brightest in the US have managed to drag the rest of us to the top of the pile, but in the end even that can't turn the tide forever. Especially when the people at the top gut the infastructure to support such a system, for their own gains.
It's the generational gap on a grand scale (and slower). The first generation busts their ass making a living and providing for their child so that they can have a better life. The next generation goest to school and does quite well, and respecting what their parents did for them. The third generation sits on their ass and always had it good, and isn't particularly interested in working hard or going to school.
Is this book mainly code, or is it mainly theory? I'd like to get a book that explains the guts, but I really don't want to spend days looking at page after page of code on paper.
I decided to go third party long ago (reform for me). So I'll forward my own personal agenda here. We have two guys who have had a silver spoon shoved in their mouths all of their live bickering over issues of "the common man", and I'm surprized anyone even believes them.
Maybe some people at slashdot would be interested in the Libertarian candidate who actually WORKED for a living as a programmer. You'd think Slashdot would be all over a candidate who can actually write code, but I suppose it's the two party system that's so entrenched that it's even prevelent here.
You can get pretty close to this already in KDE 3.2 by default. Set kicker to the center, set the width to 0% (to scale with icons). Set the grab handles and other stuff to hide or remove them. Then set the panel transparency to whatever makes you happy. After that it's just a matter of icons.
To me drop shadows add a bit more depth and make it slightly easier to determine the active window by giving a perception of which window is 'on top' of the other. It seems to make it a bit more intuitive then just changing the titlebar color.
My thoughts as well. MS doesn't need China for money, it needs it in order to maintain control. In a country that manufacters the majority of computers, with a gigantic portion of the Earths population, would you want them starting to all collaborate on a compeditors product, like say... Linux? Linux and open source are hard enough for MS to battle, even though it's done by people in their free time, and a handful of corperations. You put the weight of the Chinese people behind it and MS will simply not be able to stop it.
So in the end it's better for MS to make stuff for China, and then slap some wrists and tell them they shouldn't pirate, while really not caring. Basically do anything to keep the Chinese people away from Linux.
Not just the illiterate, but all of us. Our legal sysem the way it is today, itself is starting to become a problem. Simply put, legal jargin and wording is beyond most of us to easily comprehend, and add on top of that the rules and red tape and you've essentially excluded the population from even understanding how to defend themselves in a court of law. And it's why lawyers have become far too powerful. Law is supposed to be the lowest form of civility, but more and more it's being abused, like weilding a club and beating the person simply by who has more funding to find more things buried within the law.
The law is working less and less for us, and more and more against us. And basically what it comes down to (aside from the indifference of the people) is that most of us cannot easily obtain or understand our own laws.