What you discribe is called PKI. (Public Key Infrastructure) It would work nicely too. Netscape already supports two way authentication with SSL and certificates. Basically you the user would buy a Verisign type certificate, and load it into you browser. A web server could request the public part of your certificate and use that to authenticate you to the server. Now it would be nice to add roaming capabilites so that you can use a friends web browser but that would be pretty trivial.
It is true open source has not generated any big software companies. Open source probably won't on its own. However open source has been sucessfull for companies that use open source as a support for their key products. The best example I can think of is Internet service providers. I know of atleast one local ISP that uses open source extensively to support their primary bussiness of selling Internet access and hosting services. In return they have contributed source. I suspect that many ISPs, especially the smaller ones, would not exist if it weren't for open source software. Open source has been very sucessfull for them.
How do you tell which
internal machine spouted the mail?
That is what my email logs are for. All the interesting header bits are removed by the final outgoing mail server after it has been logged. Pretty simple.
I am not even sure it will slow down Joe Users much. In my experience the kids who are doing the ripping are taking the time to learn the best way to do it. While visiting friends it was their 13y old who made the compilation CD's for travelling and who could comment on the merits of various mp3 rippers. I doubt that this is uncommon.
I wonder if you even have to muck around with a D/A A/D setup. I have a cd player with a "digital out" (spdif?) on the back. I have a soundcard with a "digital cd in." From the sounds of it the cd player will do all the interpolation stuff and the digital out will be the correct sound. I guessing that I can rip at 1x speed pulling the digital sound straight off the sound card.
Re:MySQL AB is Absolutely Right!
on
MySQL & Nusphere
·
· Score: 4
MySQL AB owns the copyright to the mysql code. NuSphere could enter into an agreement with MySQL AB to license the mysql code under a non-GPL license.
NuSphere claims that it did enter into an agreement with MySQL AB that allowed NuSphere to bundle the non-GPL Gemini with mysql code. MySQL AB claims that the agreement is no longer in effect. This is a case for the courts to decide.
Psion may be better then the iPaq. I would love to own a 5mx. But good luck trying to find one in North America. I have never seen a 5 or 5mx for sale. It has always been a special order item (ie expensive), or, more often then not, a no longer carried item.
REALvideo: typically not the best video quality. (it sucks) Also Real is usually streamed which makes it hard(er) to save a copy to cd and show to a friend. When I start up the player it does annoying things like check for updates.
Quicktime: good quality sound and video, but the player is awfull. In particular I don't like how it does not play videos full-screen. IE if I have a 640x480 vid I want the player to change my screen resolution to 640x480 and play the video. I don't want to see the foolish silver/grey app thingy. My last version of Quick time refused to work as there was a "newer version." I could not dl the new version as apple was hosed. It was needlessly annoying.
Windows media: I haven't used the the player enough.
Personally I like mpeg as it has decent quality, and I can play it full screen.
Yes. There is a lot of unlearning Linux habits for OpenBSD habits. For what it is worth switching between distros can be similar. For me it was getting my head around the disk partitioning and that silly 'c' slice/partition. ('c' partion is supposed to be the entire disk.)
Yes. RSI affects many occupations. Any task that involves repetative body motion that the body was not designed for can result in repetative stress injuries. Tennis elbow is another common example of an RSI. I don't believe that piano players suffer from carpal tunnel syndrom specifically. I am not a pianist. If you compare how you play a piano to your typeing I believe that you will find that typeing requires a lot more little finger movements. Playing a piano looks like it uses more arm and hand movements. Also pianos have been around for a longer time and the injuries, and how to prevent them are better understood.
The studies you are refering to are really economic studies. These studies do not refute the ERGOnomics of the Dvorak layout which is superior to qwerty keyboards. That is not a hard claim to make. The keypress frequency numbers speak for themselves.
I have used a dvorak keyboard. My typeing speed never increased but I can type for longer on a Dvorak keybord before my hands and wrists get tired. You should try one.
Various cable companies have been talking about something along these lines for years. It used to be called "video on demand." The technology to do this has been around for a while. The show stopper has been convincing consumers and producers (TV networks) that it is a good idea. Both groups want features the other group specifically dosen't want. "Time shifting" would be one of these examples. The producer's business model is going to change (hello RIAA). If the TV networks were smart they would change their business model on their own terms. Some TV networks are smart.
The more I listen to TV insider types the more I am convinced that small specialty tv stations are the way of the future. In my area there is no way that a traditional TV station specializing in Chinese programming could survive. There just aren't enough viewers. However a small station could survive with just a few hours of programming a day, distributed on a subscribtion basis as "video on demand."
Re:I remember something like that...
on
Linux Anecdotes
·
· Score: 1
I suspect lots of people have had the opportunity to do this. While installing Win95 for dual boot I made the big mistake of using MS fdisk. I was trying to figure out why MS didn't like the partition I had create using linux fdisk. I didn't think that I told MS fdisk to write anything to disk but it overwrote large chunks of the partition table. When I tried to boot into linux I found that I didn't have any filesystems left and that all my linux partitions except for / were gone. I used some scribbled down notes from several weeks earlier to figure out what my partition boundaries had been. I recovered everything but/usr. I goofed with/usr and didn't use 'fsck -b' correctly.
I love Debian. I use it when I want a linux distro. Its package management (apt-get) rocks. But its installer does suck. I don't know what it is that makes it suck, but it does. I always feel like I am fighting with it. I don't use the installer anymore if I can help it. I made a pretty generic install of base2_2, and the drivers. Upgraded to woody and made a nice tar ball. A few hacks to the boot disks later and I have a bootable cdrom with fdisk, tar, and lilo to make the hard drive bootable. It works great. I can now get past the install quickly and install all those great.debs.
I think that sums it up. I would not however say that irc and email are changing that image. Irc and email are older then the web. Some would argue that email (and usenet) drove the Internet into the home as thousands of university grads were willing to pay a lot for access to email after they graduated. I think it has to be something more recent. You are correct that email and irc are the tools of online communities. However I think it is sites like Slashdot that have been promoting communities. While Slashdot may not be a great community site, it has shown people that there is more to the Internet then being consumers.
It is funny. When an attacker illegally slips past security mechanims to retrieve someone elses data it is "because information wants to be free." When an agent of the "government" illegally obtains information, or a corperation quietly accumulates information it is "an invasion of privacy that must be stopped!"
...the majority of computers are nothing more than glorified dumb terminals...
As a testement to that my main "workstation" is a K6 233. Workstation is an exageration. I use the 233 mostly for www, and email. I have a more powerfull machine, but it is for games.
My hope is that one day, the average person won't "use" the Internet, but instead "be" the Internet.
What do you mean by "be the Internet"? I thought at first that it mean that each person can serve information directly to others. I think that we are pretty close to that now. Many of those people who want to, run good presonal web sites. So I have decided that "to be" the Internet must be something greater. Something that the cyberpunk authors haven't predicted yet. I think that in order "to be" the Internet our interfaces (mostly www browers) have to change completely. In my mind "to be" anything is an active role. Currently I find much of the Internet to be passive in nature. I think our interfaces encourage that.
Would you post a white-paper saying that the 802.3 NIC you bought didn't encrypt your traffic?
Unlike Ehternet/802.3, IEEE 802.11b is advertised as being secure. It isen't.
Papers like this one are important as it shows how expected features aren't there. It is a paper that that techs can use to show their managers why 802.11b should not be used, or why it is going to cost more then a few hours and the cost of the nics.
/usr/ports/ trolls go home./usr/ports is nice. It gets the job done. But it dosen't beat Debain's apt-get install package_name. And yes the Debian packages list is as big as the FreeBSD/usr/ports list.
I am sorry, but I am tired of seeing this/usr/ports argument. It is not a big reason to use FreeBSD over Linux. Most linux distros are huge. Most of the software you could ever want it packaged up and ready to install. I have not had to install from source on my Debian systems in a long time. I understand that Suse has an equally huge list of packages. If you want to promote FreeBSD over a Linux distro look at FreeBSDs real strenghts:
FreeBSD is a well integrated system not just a kernel.
/etc/rc.conf is your one stop daemon startup config file
the man pages are really well done
the default install comes with everything a Unix system should have, and nothing more.
There are other reasons I am sure. The/usr/ports argument is only good to counter the "FreeBSD dosen't come with any 3rd party software" argument.
True. I would like to elaborate on the publicity issue. My bias: I use Debian/Linux on my workstation, and OpenBSD on my servers.
There is a big perception issue. I have found that several Linux distros are designed to be more of a "desktop" OS. They install KDE or Gnome by default. There are fancy gui system admin tools and a million and one IRQ/AIM clients. When I last installed FreeBSD 4.1.1 (one my fileserver[1]) it came installed with fvwm2. I think the bigger Linux distros have the manpower to put more effort towards a desktop then FreeBSD can. It can be the little things that make the difference. For example, when I install a new app under Debian, a new menu item is automatically added to my X menus. I can also quickly install a new binary under Debian with few short apt-get commands.
*BSD is an Admin's Unix. (So is Slackware Linux [2].) The default install is pretty bare by Linux distro standards. It has a lot of nice features so that admins can have their *BSD running exactly as they want it. For servers this is an important feature. For workstations I don't care if I burn a few cpu cycles on a suboptimal configuration. At the end of the day I don't want to have to admin my desktop any more then I have too. I do however want to have the ability to configure a few things as I see fit hence the use of Debian/Linux.
From a technical point of view I found that as much "desktop" software is developed on Linux (such as large bits of Gnome and other flashy bits) it works better on Linux. This is less of an issue today as Gnome recently announced that FreeBSD was
"officially supported".
There is nothing stopping you from using FreeBSD on your desktop. There are no signification techinical issues. Out of the box FreeBSD requires more effort to get a "modern" desktop, then many Linux distros which come with KDE or Gnome. However, the bottom line is FreeBSD has not publicised itself as a desktop Unix. Mandrake, Red Hat, and others have worked to publicise Linux as a desktop Unix.
[1] I had to switch my home fileserver over to OpenBSD to support my OpenBSD firewall. The firewall is too slow and dosen't have enough ram to compile anything important like a new kernel. Going with OpenBSD on both made more sense as I am more familiar with Open than with Free.
[2]I use Slackware in places where I need a generic Linux server. Usually it is due to a piece of hardware only having Linux support, or I need a VMWare machine. I might have used another distro, but I created a custom bootable cdrom that installs all the Slackware bits I want, adds some customization, and does this unattended. It was pretty straight forward to setup Slackware to do this.
Slashdot Mirror
What you discribe is called PKI. (Public Key Infrastructure) It would work nicely too. Netscape already supports two way authentication with SSL and certificates. Basically you the user would buy a Verisign type certificate, and load it into you browser. A web server could request the public part of your certificate and use that to authenticate you to the server. Now it would be nice to add roaming capabilites so that you can use a friends web browser but that would be pretty trivial.
It is true open source has not generated any big software companies. Open source probably won't on its own. However open source has been sucessfull for companies that use open source as a support for their key products. The best example I can think of is Internet service providers. I know of atleast one local ISP that uses open source extensively to support their primary bussiness of selling Internet access and hosting services. In return they have contributed source. I suspect that many ISPs, especially the smaller ones, would not exist if it weren't for open source software. Open source has been very sucessfull for them.
How do you tell which internal machine spouted the mail?
That is what my email logs are for. All the interesting header bits are removed by the final outgoing mail server after it has been logged. Pretty simple.
I use Linux
I am not even sure it will slow down Joe Users much. In my experience the kids who are doing the ripping are taking the time to learn the best way to do it. While visiting friends it was their 13y old who made the compilation CD's for travelling and who could comment on the merits of various mp3 rippers. I doubt that this is uncommon.
I wonder if you even have to muck around with a D/A A/D setup. I have a cd player with a "digital out" (spdif?) on the back. I have a soundcard with a "digital cd in." From the sounds of it the cd player will do all the interpolation stuff and the digital out will be the correct sound. I guessing that I can rip at 1x speed pulling the digital sound straight off the sound card.
You are speaking, kbits, he is speaking kbytes.
MySQL AB owns the copyright to the mysql code. NuSphere could enter into an agreement with MySQL AB to license the mysql code under a non-GPL license.
NuSphere claims that it did enter into an agreement with MySQL AB that allowed NuSphere to bundle the non-GPL Gemini with mysql code. MySQL AB claims that the agreement is no longer in effect. This is a case for the courts to decide.
Psion may be better then the iPaq. I would love to own a 5mx. But good luck trying to find one in North America. I have never seen a 5 or 5mx for sale. It has always been a special order item (ie expensive), or, more often then not, a no longer carried item.
REALvideo: typically not the best video quality. (it sucks) Also Real is usually streamed which makes it hard(er) to save a copy to cd and show to a friend. When I start up the player it does annoying things like check for updates.
Quicktime: good quality sound and video, but the player is awfull. In particular I don't like how it does not play videos full-screen. IE if I have a 640x480 vid I want the player to change my screen resolution to 640x480 and play the video. I don't want to see the foolish silver/grey app thingy. My last version of Quick time refused to work as there was a "newer version." I could not dl the new version as apple was hosed. It was needlessly annoying.
Windows media: I haven't used the the player enough.
Personally I like mpeg as it has decent quality, and I can play it full screen.
Yes. There is a lot of unlearning Linux habits for OpenBSD habits. For what it is worth switching between distros can be similar. For me it was getting my head around the disk partitioning and that silly 'c' slice/partition. ('c' partion is supposed to be the entire disk.)
Yes. RSI affects many occupations. Any task that involves repetative body motion that the body was not designed for can result in repetative stress injuries. Tennis elbow is another common example of an RSI. I don't believe that piano players suffer from carpal tunnel syndrom specifically. I am not a pianist. If you compare how you play a piano to your typeing I believe that you will find that typeing requires a lot more little finger movements. Playing a piano looks like it uses more arm and hand movements. Also pianos have been around for a longer time and the injuries, and how to prevent them are better understood.
The studies you are refering to are really economic studies. These studies do not refute the ERGOnomics of the Dvorak layout which is superior to qwerty keyboards. That is not a hard claim to make. The keypress frequency numbers speak for themselves.
I have used a dvorak keyboard. My typeing speed never increased but I can type for longer on a Dvorak keybord before my hands and wrists get tired. You should try one.
Various cable companies have been talking about something along these lines for years. It used to be called "video on demand." The technology to do this has been around for a while. The show stopper has been convincing consumers and producers (TV networks) that it is a good idea. Both groups want features the other group specifically dosen't want. "Time shifting" would be one of these examples. The producer's business model is going to change (hello RIAA). If the TV networks were smart they would change their business model on their own terms. Some TV networks are smart.
The more I listen to TV insider types the more I am convinced that small specialty tv stations are the way of the future. In my area there is no way that a traditional TV station specializing in Chinese programming could survive. There just aren't enough viewers. However a small station could survive with just a few hours of programming a day, distributed on a subscribtion basis as "video on demand."
I suspect lots of people have had the opportunity to do this. While installing Win95 for dual boot I made the big mistake of using MS fdisk. I was trying to figure out why MS didn't like the partition I had create using linux fdisk. I didn't think that I told MS fdisk to write anything to disk but it overwrote large chunks of the partition table. When I tried to boot into linux I found that I didn't have any filesystems left and that all my linux partitions except for / were gone. I used some scribbled down notes from several weeks earlier to figure out what my partition boundaries had been. I recovered everything but /usr. I goofed with /usr and didn't use 'fsck -b' correctly.
I love Debian. I use it when I want a linux distro. Its package management (apt-get) rocks. But its installer does suck. I don't know what it is that makes it suck, but it does. I always feel like I am fighting with it. I don't use the installer anymore if I can help it. I made a pretty generic install of base2_2, and the drivers. Upgraded to woody and made a nice tar ball. A few hacks to the boot disks later and I have a bootable cdrom with fdisk, tar, and lilo to make the hard drive bootable. It works great. I can now get past the install quickly and install all those great .debs.
The install really does suck. Sorry.
It is funny. When an attacker illegally slips past security mechanims to retrieve someone elses data it is "because information wants to be free." When an agent of the "government" illegally obtains information, or a corperation quietly accumulates information it is "an invasion of privacy that must be stopped!"
we are all hypocrites
I like the last one in particular:
As a testement to that my main "workstation" is a K6 233. Workstation is an exageration. I use the 233 mostly for www, and email. I have a more powerfull machine, but it is for games. What do you mean by "be the Internet"? I thought at first that it mean that each person can serve information directly to others. I think that we are pretty close to that now. Many of those people who want to, run good presonal web sites. So I have decided that "to be" the Internet must be something greater. Something that the cyberpunk authors haven't predicted yet. I think that in order "to be" the Internet our interfaces (mostly www browers) have to change completely. In my mind "to be" anything is an active role. Currently I find much of the Internet to be passive in nature. I think our interfaces encourage that.just some random after bed time thoughts
That would be fine if Microsoft published the standards so that others could use them.
Would you post a white-paper saying that the 802.3 NIC you bought didn't encrypt your traffic?
Unlike Ehternet/802.3, IEEE 802.11b is advertised as being secure. It isen't.
Papers like this one are important as it shows how expected features aren't there. It is a paper that that techs can use to show their managers why 802.11b should not be used, or why it is going to cost more then a few hours and the cost of the nics.
hey not bad! :)
/usr/ports/ trolls go home. /usr/ports is nice. It gets the job done. But it dosen't beat Debain's apt-get install package_name. And yes the Debian packages list is as big as the FreeBSD /usr/ports list.
I am sorry, but I am tired of seeing this /usr/ports argument. It is not a big reason to use FreeBSD over Linux. Most linux distros are huge. Most of the software you could ever want it packaged up and ready to install. I have not had to install from source on my Debian systems in a long time. I understand that Suse has an equally huge list of packages. If you want to promote FreeBSD over a Linux distro look at FreeBSDs real strenghts:
- FreeBSD is a well integrated system not just a kernel.
- /etc/rc.conf is your one stop daemon startup config file
- the man pages are really well done
- the default install comes with everything a Unix system should have, and nothing more.
There are other reasons I am sure. TheTrue. I would like to elaborate on the publicity issue. My bias: I use Debian/Linux on my workstation, and OpenBSD on my servers.
There is a big perception issue. I have found that several Linux distros are designed to be more of a "desktop" OS. They install KDE or Gnome by default. There are fancy gui system admin tools and a million and one IRQ/AIM clients. When I last installed FreeBSD 4.1.1 (one my fileserver[1]) it came installed with fvwm2. I think the bigger Linux distros have the manpower to put more effort towards a desktop then FreeBSD can. It can be the little things that make the difference. For example, when I install a new app under Debian, a new menu item is automatically added to my X menus. I can also quickly install a new binary under Debian with few short apt-get commands.
*BSD is an Admin's Unix. (So is Slackware Linux [2].) The default install is pretty bare by Linux distro standards. It has a lot of nice features so that admins can have their *BSD running exactly as they want it. For servers this is an important feature. For workstations I don't care if I burn a few cpu cycles on a suboptimal configuration. At the end of the day I don't want to have to admin my desktop any more then I have too. I do however want to have the ability to configure a few things as I see fit hence the use of Debian/Linux.
From a technical point of view I found that as much "desktop" software is developed on Linux (such as large bits of Gnome and other flashy bits) it works better on Linux. This is less of an issue today as Gnome recently announced that FreeBSD was "officially supported".
There is nothing stopping you from using FreeBSD on your desktop. There are no signification techinical issues. Out of the box FreeBSD requires more effort to get a "modern" desktop, then many Linux distros which come with KDE or Gnome. However, the bottom line is FreeBSD has not publicised itself as a desktop Unix. Mandrake, Red Hat, and others have worked to publicise Linux as a desktop Unix.
[1] I had to switch my home fileserver over to OpenBSD to support my OpenBSD firewall. The firewall is too slow and dosen't have enough ram to compile anything important like a new kernel. Going with OpenBSD on both made more sense as I am more familiar with Open than with Free.
[2]I use Slackware in places where I need a generic Linux server. Usually it is due to a piece of hardware only having Linux support, or I need a VMWare machine. I might have used another distro, but I created a custom bootable cdrom that installs all the Slackware bits I want, adds some customization, and does this unattended. It was pretty straight forward to setup Slackware to do this.
Just because you keep posting this dosen't make it correct. *BSD will die the day the last developer dies.