An insightful post, and good points. I'd like to use a bit of an analogy to respond. Computers and computer system (home network, business networks, the internet) are becoming more and more akin to biology and ecosystems. Your first point is (to a point) right on. But it has less to do with number of system running linux, and more to do with the fact that most linux systems (server or otherwise) are not in fact running the same sets of software and have very different configurations. This means that if you have a virus targeted at a certain flaw in a certain system, the odds that you are going to find a significant number of those system to infect is minimal. Mutations allow for survival. This is why some people can still be killed by the common cold. With something as homogenous as windows (2k,xp,server2k3 are vunerable to all the same problems) you not only have a greater number of hosts to propigate to, you also have the same flaws that allow you to infect them. Mutations are required for survival. Your second point is good but I do not know that it is a correct assumption. Yes, most people who are going to use linux are more tech savvy, but that doesnt mean they are smart about things like securing their systems. They may be more equipped to deal with a problem, but the smart ones know enough to avoid the problem to begin with. Dont you think that 10 years is enough time to improve a product so that it doesnt fall victim to some of these hideous data destroying worms that happen monthly (sometimes weekly)? I'm not trying to bash Microsoft for their flaws so much (they do, after all have 100x more people working against them than for them), but they have not focused on making their product better over the years, just more desireable. Nowadays they are so big, the only thing they really need to concern themselves with is how can they make people (and companies) buy more of their products, any improvements they make are only done so to placate their customers. Does having the source code make something more of a security risk? The answer is really, only if it was hidden to begin with. The benefit to having everyone staring at your code, is that the people who intend to use the code will make sure that youve done a good job coding it and will point out the grevious errors youve made. Opening up closed souce is going to allow people to suddenly find all of those flaws at once because noone ever pointed them out before. Open source code is in a constant state of having its (if any) flaws fixed, and stable releases of such software should be significantly more bug/error/flaw free than similar closed software (again this all varies depending on who is writing the code).
Actually, I asked the magic 8 ball on my desk if this was the case. What it said was "Outlook not so good" A clear sign that Thunderbird has passed Outlook.
I havent switched over to Mac (been using linux since '96), but I did help my sister, whos going into college this year, buy a Mac. She doesnt know a thing about computers, but having played around with my friends Mac I do feel confident that someone like her with very little computer experience will enjoy a Mac. I very much like the fact that I helped her by a *nix system that she is very happy with.:)
Speaking of cells, i've been drooling over the Treo 600[http://www.handspring.com/products/communicato rs/treo600_overview.jhtml]. It has got just damn near everything I _want_ (the emphasis on want as I dont _need_ a pda by anyones stretch of anyones imagination) in a pda, and its a cell phone which means that regardless of how much i use it I will still carry it with me and it will get used (as a phone). I figure I can grap a nice bit SD memory card and use it as an mp3 player as well. Now _THATS_ a useful device (great battery life too).
I want to see a RAM tech that allows for non-volitle (i.e. keeps its data even without power), and unlimited re-rewrites. This would be a great tech for laptops or PDAs as they could suspend very very easily and boot up to same state. This would be a fabulous tool as battery tech seems to be going nowhere fast.
Someone played a composition for me a couple of years back that was lines pulled from that game and put together in such a fashion that it sounded like a really cracked out porno. It was one of the funniest things i've ever heard.
Does this mean that if we find the guy who made this virus we can charge him with terrorist acts? Thats a lot of people to put in danger. I dont care what OS had the hole in it.
I have been very quiet and patient at this point. I was upset when no linux support was given out of box. "I'll wait", I said. I felt confident that I would not be long for a release because Bioware had been very good about keeping linux users up-to-date as to the "status" of the linux port. I was not shocked when it did not come out right away, because I figured that it was indeed not the highest on thier list of priorities. But I never suspected that I was lied to. I never felt that they were stringing me along just to get my purchase. Now, I feel offended. I am upset because I was _Blatently_ lied to. I'm happy about the current status of the game in linux (it runs, its being tweaked). But never have I been this offended by the PR dept of a company. At this point, yes, it has become painfully obvious that they had no intentions of releasing the game for mac/linux concurrently with the windows version. In fact they had done little to no work at all on these ports. Yet they continued to tell us that they were. I hold honesty in high regard, and had I been told that linux support had ceased and that they would work on it post release, I would have been fine with that. I would have gone out and purchased a copy right away. The only thing I demand from a company is honesty. I will not purchase any more bioware games (and I own all of thier D&D games) and will be asking my friends to do the same until they release an apology for having been so dishonest in this matter. I love the games Bioware produces. I play them and replay them all the time. But I will not condone a company that lies so terribly to its customers. If they never put out another linux game, I can live with that (dual-booting works for me), but I will not tolerate such behavior.
I think NWN is great. I think their port to linux is awesome. I dont care if they cease development. But I care if they continue to lie to me. It makes me wonder if they could be sued for false advertising or something (misrepresentation?).
I own 6 Loki games, all of which were purchased at full price because I wanted to see them succeed and now they're filiing for chapter 11?!?
I would just like to give a big FUCK YOU to anyone who owns a windows copy of Quake III. If I had any money right now (starting school is a bitch) I would purchase more games, even if i didn't want them, or as gifts or something. This makes me so angry I can even begin to describe it. You people* suck.
*to those of you who purchased loki products, i aplogize for taking up your time with this vent of anger. you kick ass. if you ARE/WERE a loki member, you indeed kick so much ass, i cannot thank you enough. i hope this is not the end, it would make me very sad
Being the geek that I am, I had read up and compared.ogg to.mp3
I really liked the variable bitrate. I thought that was supersweet. So I decided to be the coolest geek I know (you're right I don't know many) and take the ogg plunge. After ripping 2 cd's I came to a gripping realization. My rio500 would not play them. So much for that idea. I know that the rio is flashable so I'm thinking someone will come up with a patch or flash rom for playing ogg on it. But until then I'll have to stick with the patent shattering mp3 format
I've tried em all. Debian (stable, unstable), Mandrake (7.0, 7.1, 7.2), Redhat (5.2, 6.0, 6.1, 7.0), StormLinux 2000, and SUSe (7.0). Installed and uninstall all of them. I've never used a better distro than slackware. Everything else was bloatware and obtuse (well debian was good, but I just have issues with a distro that wont allow me to do a 'make menuconfig' after a full install). I'll continue to use slack, and I'll continue to try other distros, but I don't think I'll be swayed to leave.
That now we have the code to set up menu navigation in players like xine or vlc? IANA coder (much) but it seems to me that since it's open source it would be fairly easy to grab the relevent bits of code, or probably a nicer way to do it would be to ask the developers to help out, but it would mean that our favorite players would have the small bit of functionality that we crave right now.
LoL. The flamers come out to play. I must admit, I'm impressed by the number of IE advocates on this board. I was expecting more Konqueror users to rear their ugly (geeks are rarely pretty, males anyway) heads. I personally don't have much use for a site that I cant view in lynx, save for my daily does of comic sites. As near as I can tell, between Mozilla and Opera, cross platform users (those of us who use MORE than one OS, and admit it) have a pretty decent choice. I don't blame the IE advocates for being that way. A lot of sites are (sadly) written with IE in mind, and only IE in mind. I remember a day when people wrote thier sites with netscape in mind, because, if it worked in netscape, it worked in IE. The reverse was not (and is not) always been true. But it's not always fair to judge IE as a better browser, just because sites are written for it. It's kind of like saying that windows is a better OS because it runs.exe files better than WINE. Bad compairison. But, you cant argue with results either. It's really a toss up that falls down to preferences. I really like the amount of options that opera gives, I like the standards and power, and portability of mozilla, and I like the support of IE. I guess I won't truely be happy until we get those all rolled into one, but then again, I like to swap around and have a choice as well. Guess I'm fscked until I write my own;)
...of course, i wont be using winXP either. Of course if transgaming does their job, I won't be seeing another blue screen ever again (unless transgaming has a disgusting sense of humour and ports that too)
Eh, that means that anyone who is addicted to windows would have to switch to NT to get ntfs. We don't want that (no solid write support in linux yet). On the plus side it would mean that I would have the last piece of reasoning needed to drop half-life and baldurs gate and remove any none ext2 (or in my case XFS) filesystem from my computer for ever.
Between this and how much better mozilla has gotten I think we can say "buh-bye" to IE. And if we can get the plugins working cross platform... well that's just too cool.
Slashdot Mirror
Would you be willing to pay $600 for a console with all of the capabilities of a standard OEM PC?"
No, but I would be willing to pay $600 dollars for a standard OEM PC with all of the capabilities of a console. Oh wait. I already did that.
If giant Fresnel lens begins to smoke cover head and seek shelter.
An insightful post, and good points. I'd like to use a bit of an analogy to respond. Computers and computer system (home network, business networks, the internet) are becoming more and more akin to biology and ecosystems. Your first point is (to a point) right on. But it has less to do with number of system running linux, and more to do with the fact that most linux systems (server or otherwise) are not in fact running the same sets of software and have very different configurations. This means that if you have a virus targeted at a certain flaw in a certain system, the odds that you are going to find a significant number of those system to infect is minimal. Mutations allow for survival. This is why some people can still be killed by the common cold. With something as homogenous as windows (2k,xp,server2k3 are vunerable to all the same problems) you not only have a greater number of hosts to propigate to, you also have the same flaws that allow you to infect them. Mutations are required for survival.
Your second point is good but I do not know that it is a correct assumption. Yes, most people who are going to use linux are more tech savvy, but that doesnt mean they are smart about things like securing their systems. They may be more equipped to deal with a problem, but the smart ones know enough to avoid the problem to begin with. Dont you think that 10 years is enough time to improve a product so that it doesnt fall victim to some of these hideous data destroying worms that happen monthly (sometimes weekly)? I'm not trying to bash Microsoft for their flaws so much (they do, after all have 100x more people working against them than for them), but they have not focused on making their product better over the years, just more desireable. Nowadays they are so big, the only thing they really need to concern themselves with is how can they make people (and companies) buy more of their products, any improvements they make are only done so to placate their customers.
Does having the source code make something more of a security risk? The answer is really, only if it was hidden to begin with. The benefit to having everyone staring at your code, is that the people who intend to use the code will make sure that youve done a good job coding it and will point out the grevious errors youve made. Opening up closed souce is going to allow people to suddenly find all of those flaws at once because noone ever pointed them out before. Open source code is in a constant state of having its (if any) flaws fixed, and stable releases of such software should be significantly more bug/error/flaw free than similar closed software (again this all varies depending on who is writing the code).
Actually, I asked the magic 8 ball on my desk if this was the case. What it said was
"Outlook not so good"
A clear sign that Thunderbird has passed Outlook.
Check this link outa kers.htm
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~hsakr/hdspeakers/hdspe
I saw this a while back, you gotta check out the movies clips.
I havent switched over to Mac (been using linux since '96), but I did help my sister, whos going into college this year, buy a Mac. She doesnt know a thing about computers, but having played around with my friends Mac I do feel confident that someone like her with very little computer experience will enjoy a Mac. I very much like the fact that I helped her by a *nix system that she is very happy with. :)
Speaking of cells, i've been drooling over the Treo 600[http://www.handspring.com/products/communicato rs/treo600_overview.jhtml]. It has got just damn near everything I _want_ (the emphasis on want as I dont _need_ a pda by anyones stretch of anyones imagination) in a pda, and its a cell phone which means that regardless of how much i use it I will still carry it with me and it will get used (as a phone). I figure I can grap a nice bit SD memory card and use it as an mp3 player as well. Now _THATS_ a useful device (great battery life too).
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/mram.htm
good article on MRAM. Thanks for the heads up.
I want to see a RAM tech that allows for non-volitle (i.e. keeps its data even without power), and unlimited re-rewrites. This would be a great tech for laptops or PDAs as they could suspend very very easily and boot up to same state. This would be a fabulous tool as battery tech seems to be going nowhere fast.
Someone played a composition for me a couple of years back that was lines pulled from that game and put together in such a fashion that it sounded like a really cracked out porno. It was one of the funniest things i've ever heard.
Really any lucas arts adventure game.
Curse of Monkey Island. (Really good bit with singing in this one).
Return to Monkey Island.
Full Throttle
Loom
Take your pick.
Does this mean that if we find the guy who made this virus we can charge him with terrorist acts? Thats a lot of people to put in danger. I dont care what OS had the hole in it.
Forget the hand...
Bigby's Boot of Righteous Rump Kicking
All I want is some honesty at this point.
I have been very quiet and patient at this point. I was upset when no linux support was given out of box. "I'll wait", I said. I felt confident that I would not be long for a release because Bioware had been very good about keeping linux users up-to-date as to the "status" of the linux port. I was not shocked when it did not come out right away, because I figured that it was indeed not the highest on thier list of priorities. But I never suspected that I was lied to. I never felt that they were stringing me along just to get my purchase.
Now, I feel offended. I am upset because I was _Blatently_ lied to. I'm happy about the current status of the game in linux (it runs, its being tweaked). But never have I been this offended by the PR dept of a company. At this point, yes, it has become painfully obvious that they had no intentions of releasing the game for mac/linux concurrently with the windows version. In fact they had done little to no work at all on these ports. Yet they continued to tell us that they were. I hold honesty in high regard, and had I been told that linux support had ceased and that they would work on it post release, I would have been fine with that. I would have gone out and purchased a copy right away. The only thing I demand from a company is honesty. I will not purchase any more bioware games (and I own all of thier D&D games) and will be asking my friends to do the same until they release an apology for having been so dishonest in this matter. I love the games Bioware produces. I play them and replay them all the time. But I will not condone a company that lies so terribly to its customers. If they never put out another linux game, I can live with that (dual-booting works for me), but I will not tolerate such behavior.
I think NWN is great. I think their port to linux is awesome. I dont care if they cease development. But I care if they continue to lie to me. It makes me wonder if they could be sued for false advertising or something (misrepresentation?).
Stoke me a clipper, I'll be back for christmas.
Whatever.
I know exactly the feeling you're describing.
Even have a name for it. We call it....
Nerdvana
Not until I found linux did I ever again achieve nerdvana after the days of dos.
Yes! Yes! Please show support for this wonderful company!
I own 6 Loki games, all of which were purchased at full price because I wanted to see them succeed and now they're filiing for chapter 11?!?
I would just like to give a big FUCK YOU to anyone who owns a windows copy of Quake III. If I had any money right now (starting school is a bitch) I would purchase more games, even if i didn't want them, or as gifts or something. This makes me so angry I can even begin to describe it. You people* suck.
*to those of you who purchased loki products, i aplogize for taking up your time with this vent of anger. you kick ass. if you ARE/WERE a loki member, you indeed kick so much ass, i cannot thank you enough. i hope this is not the end, it would make me very sad
Being the geek that I am, I had read up and compared .ogg to .mp3
I really liked the variable bitrate. I thought that was supersweet. So I decided to be the coolest geek I know (you're right I don't know many) and take the ogg plunge. After ripping 2 cd's I came to a gripping realization. My rio500 would not play them. So much for that idea. I know that the rio is flashable so I'm thinking someone will come up with a patch or flash rom for playing ogg on it. But until then I'll have to stick with the patent shattering mp3 format
I've tried em all. Debian (stable, unstable), Mandrake (7.0, 7.1, 7.2), Redhat (5.2, 6.0, 6.1, 7.0), StormLinux 2000, and SUSe (7.0). Installed and uninstall all of them. I've never used a better distro than slackware. Everything else was bloatware and obtuse (well debian was good, but I just have issues with a distro that wont allow me to do a 'make menuconfig' after a full install). I'll continue to use slack, and I'll continue to try other distros, but I don't think I'll be swayed to leave.
That now we have the code to set up menu navigation in players like xine or vlc? IANA coder (much) but it seems to me that since it's open source it would be fairly easy to grab the relevent bits of code, or probably a nicer way to do it would be to ask the developers to help out, but it would mean that our favorite players would have the small bit of functionality that we crave right now.
LoL. The flamers come out to play. I must admit, I'm impressed by the number of IE advocates on this board. I was expecting more Konqueror users to rear their ugly (geeks are rarely pretty, males anyway) heads. I personally don't have much use for a site that I cant view in lynx, save for my daily does of comic sites. As near as I can tell, between Mozilla and Opera, cross platform users (those of us who use MORE than one OS, and admit it) have a pretty decent choice. I don't blame the IE advocates for being that way. A lot of sites are (sadly) written with IE in mind, and only IE in mind. I remember a day when people wrote thier sites with netscape in mind, because, if it worked in netscape, it worked in IE. The reverse was not (and is not) always been true. But it's not always fair to judge IE as a better browser, just because sites are written for it. It's kind of like saying that windows is a better OS because it runs .exe files better than WINE. Bad compairison. But, you cant argue with results either. It's really a toss up that falls down to preferences. I really like the amount of options that opera gives, I like the standards and power, and portability of mozilla, and I like the support of IE. I guess I won't truely be happy until we get those all rolled into one, but then again, I like to swap around and have a choice as well. Guess I'm fscked until I write my own ;)
...of course, i wont be using winXP either. Of course if transgaming does their job, I won't be seeing another blue screen ever again (unless transgaming has a disgusting sense of humour and ports that too)
Eh, that means that anyone who is addicted to windows would have to switch to NT to get ntfs. We don't want that (no solid write support in linux yet). On the plus side it would mean that I would have the last piece of reasoning needed to drop half-life and baldurs gate and remove any none ext2 (or in my case XFS) filesystem from my computer for ever.
Between this and how much better mozilla has gotten I think we can say "buh-bye" to IE. And if we can get the plugins working cross platform... well that's just too cool.