I think you are overlooking the mentality of many windows users. They want to use a specific app (which I will call "X") to do something. They don't want something that is better than 'X' they wan't 'X'. If it's at all differen't than 'X', they'll complain. It doesn't matter if there's a billion other programs that do the same thing, they specifically want that ONE application - even if the next upgrade is so drastically different that they could just as well use something else anyway.
No offence, but if you lose interest in Linux because someone says it will "Free you from the BSOD" then you probably shouldn't use it anyway. If you don't want to use it out of spite because some annoying geek told you to, then that's okay by me. But you should really only be using Linux if you are interested in it. If you don't want something new, and are happy with what you have, then stick to windows - to use Linux you are probably going to need a little stronger resolve then just being swayed by what other people say. I have had frequent BSOD issues with Win2k machines, but that's not why I switched. I switched because I like to tinker and I want a computer to do things MY way.
If you don't like negative comments comming from Linux zealots, then it's best to ignore them. Believe me there are more than enough of them, and they aren't going to go away.
I think it's less of an issue of who is more like who, as opposed to who makes the right decisions and moves forward. Unix is not the end all pinnacle of operating systems. Posix compliance is a good thing, but Linux needs to move where the community wants it to, not where the Unix standards neccesarily is.
The interesting thing about port knocking is that it can protect a daemon that is vulerable. For instance, if sshd is unpatched and an exploit just needs to be able to connect, then portknocking will at least protect the server from people just checking your ports for sshd.
Personally I think the fingerprinting part is a bad idea, since I often don't know what kind of computer I'll need to connect from, or maybe I was booted into windows that day to have a sane sound recording enviornment.
KDE zealots who have no business doing so, since they don't use it anyway and shouldn't really care
As a KDE user who doesn't want anything to do with Gnome, I'd have to say I disagree. Competition is good, and I'm not sure KDE would be where it is today if it weren't for Gnome. Granted I can snicker at this ridiculous file browsing thing, but the bad ideas are as important in competition as the good ones. Who's to say if Gnome hadn't decided to do it, that the KDE people wouldn't have tried it? I think it's pretty safe to say the KDE people are thinking "OOookay, we aren't going THAT route" since they've seen Gnome do it.
I hope the Gnome people get this worked out and come up with some really cool ideas, which can be incorporated into KDE. So I may not care about the details of where Gnome sits, but overall I still want Gnome to be better even though I don't use it.
I think the problem the Mozilla team has is the same problem that the IE team has, which is the same problem that the Opera team probably has - if you can make a blank window, you can redraw the interface pretty easy. But how do you fix it is the question? If you always draw the menu bar and the status bar you can still recreate the other elements. If you require that the browser always look like the parent window... well that would probably work, although many things on the web would look like crap.
I'm not making excuses for the Mozilla team (I mean this sort of freaks me out) , but I have no idea how to fix it. You could make all the bars "collapsed" on a "blank" window which would allow the user to always click them and look at the mormal UI again, but then you sort of expect that the user would know what those collapseable bars are for. Well it's better than nothing so maybe that's not such a bad idea... Anyway it's a problem with the way web browsers work as much as anything.
MSH is innovative compaired to many shells, but it also embodies the fact that MS just doesn't GET the Unix phylosophy that makes the shell so powerful. I was sort of dismayed by the fact that bash3 doesn't do much more than bash2 does. But bash really doesn't DO much of anything, and that's the point. It's just an interface to the system. It's all the small programs that you can tie together in bash (or any shell) that makes it powerful.
MS is sort of missing the point here. They are essentially creating a huge programming language that allows you interactivly do tasks on the system. This coupled with the fact that almost all programs on Windows require GUI interaction, and that people using windows more often than not are clueless about a command prompt, and MS making things overly complicated will probably lead to MSH being another windows scripting host.
A shell is a cornerstone in Unix system administration because it is simple and familiar, but still quite powerful and can grow with you. When you turn a shell into a programming language, you've just weeded out a large base of Windows admins who don't want anything too complex. Basically this will probably only end up catering to the more elite Windows admins which is a relativly small percentage =/
Re:People still use a shell for Linux?
on
Bash 3.0 Released
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· Score: 1
In my opinion WinFS isn't a bad idea, but it's preaching to the chior. The people who would actually take the time to type out crap in the description fields are probably the same people who already organize their things pretty well. I doubt the people who put 10,000 files in My Documents will bother. And as you say, many of us have vague conceptions on what is in a document that would have nothing to do with any metadata descriptors anyway.
I think the difference between music and movies is that just anyone can make music with a cheap instrament from a pawn shop and a couple friends. Movies (typically) require a lot more thought, cooperation of people, and have much more overhead in order to produce. I mean a minimal movie setup I would imagine would take at least $1000 - and I think that's obserdly conservative. So basically our cultural achivement in movies is often limited to whatever Holywood gives us, while music is not. I think technology may eventually become common enough and cheap enough to lower the entry level, but it's not quite there yet. We can already write books quite cheaply (on a computer anyway) it's just that fewer and fewer people even read, which leads to a downward spiral in writing interest.
Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death
- heh, I love that movie
Compaired to California, pretty much all of the midwest qualifies.
But there are some problems with the above list as well. The work ethic in America is seriously on the decline. People in these other countries are quite often very well educated as well. With the decline in our education system (which has been sub par with much of the world for some time) that could be even a bigger issue.
So what you are basically looking at is being regionally closer and being similar to the company it works for. That's fine, but I think we're going to find that IT is undergoing what happened at the turn of the century to manufactoring. Instead of having hand crafted parts, factories suddenly evolved into assembly lines. Where do the parts come from? In a global economy, that basically means wherever its cheapest.
It may be annoying to my end users when I attempt to explain things to them and they don't understand the terms I'm using.
You know, I try to explain things in more simple terms like: "Your computer wasn't talking to the DNS server which is basically like a phone book". But then some people INSIST on pestering me with more and more fucking questions - like they don't accept my answer (maybe because I'm dumbing it down). So eventually you end up explaining to them why things don't show up on the "Network Neighborhood" when a local SMB Master browser on another subnet loses an election and whatever machine picked it up didn't send the updated list to the Master server. Then they get all in a huff because the explanation is over their head like I'm trying to make it sound too complicated. Right, and I'm the annoying one. Computer terminoligy is very complicated. If they can't accept whatever answer I give them when they don't understand the topic themselves, then they need to shut up. You don't see me harassing my doctor over overly complicated stuff I don't understand. If I get the gist of it and sufficent amount of knowlege then I just leave it at that.
Well it's a bit easier if you use a mental aid for association. Hatch is a polititian. When you think of polititian, just think of that 'cha-ching' sound from an old cash register. Suddenly you understand why nothing makes sense in govenment. It's basically the soundtrack for all officials in Washington D.C - Republican or Democrat, whichever state they come from.
Yeah, that's what I thought but it's not so. I went to Canada for the weekend and came back across the border. So they start asking me questions. One question was "Where were you born?". For me that was New Zealand. Guess what? A drivers licence only proves you can DRIVE. It doesn't say anything about your actual ID or that you are a citizen.
Funny thing was, that this was the only time I forgot my passport. So I spent 4 hours at the border waiting for extremely bored looking office workers to finish interrogating some poor old Polish couple before finally talking to me and deciding I was safe. I knew I should have kept my National Guard ID when I went inactive...
So yeah, a passport is really the only national ID you have, but who actually carries it around?
Yeah, I started to see that with RedHat 7x. When they decided to rip out the new VM and go with something else on a "stable" kernel, plus who knows how many RedHat modifacations. But if you wanted to stay secure, you were going to have to go with whatever new kernel and 'enhancements' RedHat gave you. I think I had enough of that ride, and once RedHat dumped our support I just jumped ship.
To FreeBSD. Now I get software that is as up to date as I want it, and the base system and kernel are left alone other than for security fixes. I'm free to stay with that release, or move to a newer release as I choose. I like Linux, and use it at home, but I've gotten kind of weary of letting any Linux vendor drag me along on a production machine.
Remember that SCO is still entrenched in many places. Some companies have specalty software that runs on SCO that hasn't been ported (or usually updated) to something else. SCO could easily just recieve money for the next 10 years ( although less than it used to and decreasing) from old customers who can't upgrade.
You know, one of the more recent slashdot crazes by adding "in Japan" to the end of insane/futuristic stuff actually works in a similar way to what you say.
I think your right that the problem would probably be lessened by a "push" structure. But as you say firewalls are a problem there.
Now I haven't thought about this really deeply, but there is a push system that would probably make it through firewalls. Basically just send the feed out by email. You "bcc" a message to "X" ammount of clients, they can then hammer their own pop3 servers or recieve it directly. You can have some sort of validation system by certificates. Not as simple as just connecting to a server, but as far as hacks go, it would aliviate the firewall issue.
Unfortunately they're too busy attacking the trees to realize that the forest is moving in to kill them.
If you are attacking trees, and/or a forest is moving in for a kill you are in much bigger trouble. It's time to get your ass OUT of that Stephen King movie.
Um... I actually have a lot of music I purchased as ogg vorbis. If I need mp3 I'll just have to accept the loss from q5 vorbis to mp3. If I need a player I'd probably only accept one with ogg support. It's annoying that I can't just use any player, but I don't expect support for every weird format out there. People who can't accept that need to chill out a little.
Apple is well known for doing this. Not so long ago people who bought a Mac with OSX 10.2 got an upgrade to 10.3 if they had purchaced one within 3 months of the new OS upgrade. My iBook had a defect with the logic board and Apple just replaced it for free - 10 months after the warrenty expired. They payed for all shipping and handling and expenses. They also offered to upgrade my CD/DVD drive but I already had the newer version. Try getting THAT kind of service from Dell.
the term you are looking for is "correlation" - which 95% of people don't seem to understand when they look at the facts.
Violent kids watch more TV.
Ridiculous conclusion: TV causes kids to be violent
This is incorrect. There is a correlation between the two, but nothing more. Kids who were violent to begin with may be attracted to TV, among thousands of other possibilities.
I make it a point to bring this stuff up every time people make these bad conclusions, but it gets sort of scary when you realize that on a mass scale, these misinformed people are the ones pushing our politicians to pass laws based on bad assumptions.
I think you are assuming that if you invest X that you will actually get Y. This isn't neccesarily the case. The average lifespan is around 72, the retirement age is now 67. Thats 5 years on average to withdraw money, assuming that somone will live long enough to even retire (which most do). I'm no expert on social security, but it seems to me the system is certainly geared towards giving out money longer than 5 years so the government makes more money in that exchange as well.
It seems to me through reinvestment and compound interest (plus people not withdrawing all their money) would more than make up the difference reguardless of the population (provided there is no extreme difference in numbers between young and old when the system is started). We're only now starting to see real numbers in the system, and since it's been f'ed up we'll probably never really know if it would have worked if left alone (although I'm willing to bet I would have at least seen SOME money when I retire).
Slashdot Mirror
I think you are overlooking the mentality of many windows users. They want to use a specific app (which I will call "X") to do something. They don't want something that is better than 'X' they wan't 'X'. If it's at all differen't than 'X', they'll complain. It doesn't matter if there's a billion other programs that do the same thing, they specifically want that ONE application - even if the next upgrade is so drastically different that they could just as well use something else anyway.
No offence, but if you lose interest in Linux because someone says it will "Free you from the BSOD" then you probably shouldn't use it anyway. If you don't want to use it out of spite because some annoying geek told you to, then that's okay by me. But you should really only be using Linux if you are interested in it. If you don't want something new, and are happy with what you have, then stick to windows - to use Linux you are probably going to need a little stronger resolve then just being swayed by what other people say. I have had frequent BSOD issues with Win2k machines, but that's not why I switched. I switched because I like to tinker and I want a computer to do things MY way.
If you don't like negative comments comming from Linux zealots, then it's best to ignore them. Believe me there are more than enough of them, and they aren't going to go away.
I think it's less of an issue of who is more like who, as opposed to who makes the right decisions and moves forward. Unix is not the end all pinnacle of operating systems. Posix compliance is a good thing, but Linux needs to move where the community wants it to, not where the Unix standards neccesarily is.
The interesting thing about port knocking is that it can protect a daemon that is vulerable. For instance, if sshd is unpatched and an exploit just needs to be able to connect, then portknocking will at least protect the server from people just checking your ports for sshd .
Personally I think the fingerprinting part is a bad idea, since I often don't know what kind of computer I'll need to connect from, or maybe I was booted into windows that day to have a sane sound recording enviornment.
KDE zealots who have no business doing so, since they don't use it anyway and shouldn't really care
As a KDE user who doesn't want anything to do with Gnome, I'd have to say I disagree. Competition is good, and I'm not sure KDE would be where it is today if it weren't for Gnome. Granted I can snicker at this ridiculous file browsing thing, but the bad ideas are as important in competition as the good ones. Who's to say if Gnome hadn't decided to do it, that the KDE people wouldn't have tried it? I think it's pretty safe to say the KDE people are thinking "OOookay, we aren't going THAT route" since they've seen Gnome do it.
I hope the Gnome people get this worked out and come up with some really cool ideas, which can be incorporated into KDE. So I may not care about the details of where Gnome sits, but overall I still want Gnome to be better even though I don't use it.
I think the problem the Mozilla team has is the same problem that the IE team has, which is the same problem that the Opera team probably has - if you can make a blank window, you can redraw the interface pretty easy. But how do you fix it is the question? If you always draw the menu bar and the status bar you can still recreate the other elements. If you require that the browser always look like the parent window... well that would probably work, although many things on the web would look like crap.
I'm not making excuses for the Mozilla team (I mean this sort of freaks me out) , but I have no idea how to fix it. You could make all the bars "collapsed" on a "blank" window which would allow the user to always click them and look at the mormal UI again, but then you sort of expect that the user would know what those collapseable bars are for. Well it's better than nothing so maybe that's not such a bad idea... Anyway it's a problem with the way web browsers work as much as anything.
MSH is innovative compaired to many shells, but it also embodies the fact that MS just doesn't GET the Unix phylosophy that makes the shell so powerful. I was sort of dismayed by the fact that bash3 doesn't do much more than bash2 does. But bash really doesn't DO much of anything, and that's the point. It's just an interface to the system. It's all the small programs that you can tie together in bash (or any shell) that makes it powerful.
MS is sort of missing the point here. They are essentially creating a huge programming language that allows you interactivly do tasks on the system. This coupled with the fact that almost all programs on Windows require GUI interaction, and that people using windows more often than not are clueless about a command prompt, and MS making things overly complicated will probably lead to MSH being another windows scripting host.
A shell is a cornerstone in Unix system administration because it is simple and familiar, but still quite powerful and can grow with you. When you turn a shell into a programming language, you've just weeded out a large base of Windows admins who don't want anything too complex. Basically this will probably only end up catering to the more elite Windows admins which is a relativly small percentage =/
Krename ?
Hey, if it saves us from the Slashdot 'IT' color scheme, I don't care. Hell, keep EVERYTHING out of IT I say.
In my opinion WinFS isn't a bad idea, but it's preaching to the chior. The people who would actually take the time to type out crap in the description fields are probably the same people who already organize their things pretty well. I doubt the people who put 10,000 files in My Documents will bother. And as you say, many of us have vague conceptions on what is in a document that would have nothing to do with any metadata descriptors anyway.
I think the difference between music and movies is that just anyone can make music with a cheap instrament from a pawn shop and a couple friends. Movies (typically) require a lot more thought, cooperation of people, and have much more overhead in order to produce. I mean a minimal movie setup I would imagine would take at least $1000 - and I think that's obserdly conservative. So basically our cultural achivement in movies is often limited to whatever Holywood gives us, while music is not. I think technology may eventually become common enough and cheap enough to lower the entry level, but it's not quite there yet. We can already write books quite cheaply (on a computer anyway) it's just that fewer and fewer people even read, which leads to a downward spiral in writing interest.
Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death
- heh, I love that movie
Apperently half of slashdot. Possibly farm animals - but that's just a rumor I'm starting.
Compaired to California, pretty much all of the midwest qualifies.
But there are some problems with the above list as well. The work ethic in America is seriously on the decline. People in these other countries are quite often very well educated as well. With the decline in our education system (which has been sub par with much of the world for some time) that could be even a bigger issue.
So what you are basically looking at is being regionally closer and being similar to the company it works for. That's fine, but I think we're going to find that IT is undergoing what happened at the turn of the century to manufactoring. Instead of having hand crafted parts, factories suddenly evolved into assembly lines. Where do the parts come from? In a global economy, that basically means wherever its cheapest.
It may be annoying to my end users when I attempt to explain things to them and they don't understand the terms I'm using.
You know, I try to explain things in more simple terms like: "Your computer wasn't talking to the DNS server which is basically like a phone book". But then some people INSIST on pestering me with more and more fucking questions - like they don't accept my answer (maybe because I'm dumbing it down). So eventually you end up explaining to them why things don't show up on the "Network Neighborhood" when a local SMB Master browser on another subnet loses an election and whatever machine picked it up didn't send the updated list to the Master server. Then they get all in a huff because the explanation is over their head like I'm trying to make it sound too complicated. Right, and I'm the annoying one. Computer terminoligy is very complicated. If they can't accept whatever answer I give them when they don't understand the topic themselves, then they need to shut up. You don't see me harassing my doctor over overly complicated stuff I don't understand. If I get the gist of it and sufficent amount of knowlege then I just leave it at that.
Well it's a bit easier if you use a mental aid for association. Hatch is a polititian. When you think of polititian, just think of that 'cha-ching' sound from an old cash register. Suddenly you understand why nothing makes sense in govenment. It's basically the soundtrack for all officials in Washington D.C - Republican or Democrat, whichever state they come from.
Yeah, that's what I thought but it's not so. I went to Canada for the weekend and came back across the border. So they start asking me questions. One question was "Where were you born?". For me that was New Zealand. Guess what? A drivers licence only proves you can DRIVE. It doesn't say anything about your actual ID or that you are a citizen.
Funny thing was, that this was the only time I forgot my passport. So I spent 4 hours at the border waiting for extremely bored looking office workers to finish interrogating some poor old Polish couple before finally talking to me and deciding I was safe. I knew I should have kept my National Guard ID when I went inactive...
So yeah, a passport is really the only national ID you have, but who actually carries it around?
Yeah, I started to see that with RedHat 7x. When they decided to rip out the new VM and go with something else on a "stable" kernel, plus who knows how many RedHat modifacations. But if you wanted to stay secure, you were going to have to go with whatever new kernel and 'enhancements' RedHat gave you. I think I had enough of that ride, and once RedHat dumped our support I just jumped ship.
To FreeBSD. Now I get software that is as up to date as I want it, and the base system and kernel are left alone other than for security fixes. I'm free to stay with that release, or move to a newer release as I choose. I like Linux, and use it at home, but I've gotten kind of weary of letting any Linux vendor drag me along on a production machine.
Remember that SCO is still entrenched in many places. Some companies have specalty software that runs on SCO that hasn't been ported (or usually updated) to something else. SCO could easily just recieve money for the next 10 years ( although less than it used to and decreasing) from old customers who can't upgrade.
You know, one of the more recent slashdot crazes by adding "in Japan" to the end of insane/futuristic stuff actually works in a similar way to what you say.
Take [any concept]
Add [over the internet]
Result = patent
I think your right that the problem would probably be lessened by a "push" structure. But as you say firewalls are a problem there.
Now I haven't thought about this really deeply, but there is a push system that would probably make it through firewalls. Basically just send the feed out by email. You "bcc" a message to "X" ammount of clients, they can then hammer their own pop3 servers or recieve it directly. You can have some sort of validation system by certificates. Not as simple as just connecting to a server, but as far as hacks go, it would aliviate the firewall issue.
Unfortunately they're too busy attacking the trees to realize that the forest is moving in to kill them.
If you are attacking trees, and/or a forest is moving in for a kill you are in much bigger trouble. It's time to get your ass OUT of that Stephen King movie.
Um... I actually have a lot of music I purchased as ogg vorbis. If I need mp3 I'll just have to accept the loss from q5 vorbis to mp3. If I need a player I'd probably only accept one with ogg support. It's annoying that I can't just use any player, but I don't expect support for every weird format out there. People who can't accept that need to chill out a little.
Apple is well known for doing this. Not so long ago people who bought a Mac with OSX 10.2 got an upgrade to 10.3 if they had purchaced one within 3 months of the new OS upgrade. My iBook had a defect with the logic board and Apple just replaced it for free - 10 months after the warrenty expired. They payed for all shipping and handling and expenses. They also offered to upgrade my CD/DVD drive but I already had the newer version. Try getting THAT kind of service from Dell.
the term you are looking for is "correlation" - which 95% of people don't seem to understand when they look at the facts.
Violent kids watch more TV.
Ridiculous conclusion: TV causes kids to be violent
This is incorrect. There is a correlation between the two, but nothing more. Kids who were violent to begin with may be attracted to TV, among thousands of other possibilities.
I make it a point to bring this stuff up every time people make these bad conclusions, but it gets sort of scary when you realize that on a mass scale, these misinformed people are the ones pushing our politicians to pass laws based on bad assumptions.
.
I think you are assuming that if you invest X that you will actually get Y. This isn't neccesarily the case. The average lifespan is around 72, the retirement age is now 67. Thats 5 years on average to withdraw money, assuming that somone will live long enough to even retire (which most do). I'm no expert on social security, but it seems to me the system is certainly geared towards giving out money longer than 5 years so the government makes more money in that exchange as well.
It seems to me through reinvestment and compound interest (plus people not withdrawing all their money) would more than make up the difference reguardless of the population (provided there is no extreme difference in numbers between young and old when the system is started). We're only now starting to see real numbers in the system, and since it's been f'ed up we'll probably never really know if it would have worked if left alone (although I'm willing to bet I would have at least seen SOME money when I retire).