the POSIX subsystem, like all microsoft "announced products", reappeared coincidentally at around the same time that opennt.com, which provided a full third party POSIX subsystem, disappeared.
anyone may, if you have sufficient information on how the NT kernel works or are prepared to reverse-engineer it (like the ReactOS guys are doing), write their own subsystem. there are THREE types THAT I KNOW OF: OS/2, Win32 and POSIX. okay, maybe there are four now - win64.
having a POSIX subsystem sit on top of the NT kernel, which is a microkernel based on the Mach microkernel, is NOT the same as having fast and direct access to the NT kernel functions.
and the reason why the samba guys have such difficulty getting information is because there either ISN'T any (it's all in the code) or there's too much!
the only reason why the CIFS documentation effort was initiated by microsoft is because the original people who worked on it (having embraced-and-sensibly-extended the IBM Lanman SMB spec and also the X-Open SMB spec), having retired with their stock options up to millions, left no clues as to how this HORRIBLY complex code worked.
it was therefore ESSENTIAL that they get it documented.
the first time they released cifsbrow.txt, in 1997, because i'd just spent five months network-reverse-engineering the network neighbourhood and WINS server code, i spent a WEEK throwing email messages at them, explaining various inconsistencies, helping them improve the documentation they'd created. it takes TWO YEARS to correctly implement the network neighbourhood. it's a FULL peer-to-peer registration and management system, very robust, very complex, _extremely_ good, and people have xxxx-all idea of quite how useful it is ("oh, it's netbios - switch that xxxx off")
after the first CIFS conference, andrew, jeremy and i hung around for an extra day: i got to meet the guy responsible for the network neighbourhood, and spent a good couple of hours drumming into him the things that had been forgotten since the email flurry - there's nothing like meeting someone face-to-face to explain stuff, as you well know.
so.
i'd say that the reason proper documentation doesn't "exist" is partially deliberate, and partially it's your average development/management incompetence.
Lucifer - he is the fallen angel, the "Prince of Light". and GUESS what radiation and microwaves and electricity all are?
yep - you guessed it - they're all "waves" - just like light is.
so you worship your technology, do you? well LOOKEE here, we got a surpriiise for you:)
oh - and to cap it all? i heard that some RFID chips can be made to work by utilising "heat" as a power source. and GUESS where the hottest parts on the human body are?
p.s. no i'm not a christian. i might be insane, though...
very simple, very straightforward. it's set up to be useable by non-totally-technical administrators, with a looovely simple front-end for setting up DNS, DHCP, adding packages for use on the LTSP-clients (which includes rdesktop).
You can add LTSP to ANY "desktoppy-servery" machine and it will be useable by dozens of simultaneous clients. So, you pick your distro (deadrat, debian, debian-edu, edubuntu) and then you just follow the LTSP instructions and voila, its desktop environment is magically available across all the LTSP thin clients.
An AMD64 machine with 1Gb RAM would simultaneously serve 10 students. A Dual XEON with 4gb of RAM would simultaneously serve 50 students, with a fair chance that (unless it's a "lab" environment where everybody is told to do the same things simultaneously) you will be able to push that to 100 students.
With RDesktop as an option.
The crucial thing is that the kids WILL love it - and time and time and time again, Sirius (who roll out LTSP regularly) find that the kids simply... don't go near windows: the windows machines sit there unused (until they are converted to LTSP clients) because the kids don't find windows "to be cool" any more.
He said: "From later this year, the encryption landscape is going to change with the release of Microsoft Vista."
The system uses BitLocker Drive Encryption through a chip called TPM (Trusted Platform Module) in the computer's motherboard.
It is partly aimed at preventing people from downloading unlicensed films or media.
oh please, yes please. switch on encryption that uses TPM. then all it takes is a virus to overwrite the TPM keys in the BIOS memory and that's it - game over: your entire hard drive rendered useless. mwhahahahah
yeh, but unless he did a special deal with them it's also well-outside the normal one-year stock-option maturity arrangement. which means he lost a _lot_ of money.
Think of the 14-year-old schoolgirl (steady, slashdotters).
From their perspective, communication with their friends is their LIFE. When they get home, they instantly go online and chat to their friends. When they go to school, they start using their mobile phone to SMS them.
herein lies the disparity: that when they are on the way to school, and when they are in class, they aren't in front of a computer, they're on the mobile phone.
If the phone operators can make it possible for people who are used to massive amounts of computer-enabled world-wide communications to use ONE device to "seamlessly" stay connected, irrespective of where those people are, then that's GOT to be an all-round winner.
My take on this initiative is that it will be an absolute massive hit, IF the pricing is kept reasonable, bearing in mind that it's going to have to be GSM-based.
What they need to do is to proxy UDP traffic over SMS, and to write an IM protocol that is UDP-based, not TCP-based, that has its own _very slow_ self-sequencing acknowledgment (to save people SMS charges!)
it would appear that you have not read my reply very carefully, at all.
how can i love dictators, when i am not from a culture where one is in place?
and i think that you will find that chris patten, ken livingstone and paddy ashdown would be very offended to be called "dictators".
and also, you did not read my reply very carefully: note well the statements about "china being very large" and therefore difficult even for a dictator to control and "pretty much runs itself".
and also the point "small dictatorships are typically run by greedy people"
companies are REQUIRED to stick to their... statute (whatever it's called) because if they DON'T then the directors can be kicked out by the shareholders.
things like "maximise profits" are REQUIRED.
maximising profits tends to conflict badly, as we have noted repeatedly, with things like "environmental impact" and stuff like that.
so oh yes governments damn well _do_ have a right to dictate what businesses can and can't do, because it is a system of checks-and-balances against the stupidity of "maximise profits" above all else.
be very _very_ careful when you start saying things like "businesses can do what the xxxx they like".
everybody assumes that democracy is great. well, it ain't. anybody who thinks that democracy is great is deluding themselves, or lives in a country which operates under a corrupted version of democracy (where money talks, buys laws and generally runs things).
democracy as advocated by anyone who thinks "democracy should run the world esp. where there are dictatorships YEAH" actually results in a paralysed country that remains fragmented and weak. people in general are TOO STUPID and TOO SELFISH to "do the right thing".
france. they can't get rid of the crippling cost of pensions which is going to kill off the economy in ten years, because "everybody wants some", and any politician that even THINKS of mentioning "social cuts" gets kicked out.
iraq. the voting is polarising along religious lines, into three main groups. the entire country is fracturing into chaos, ripe for being plucked and whipped up by religious fanatics ["ahh things were better in the old days even dare i say it better with saddam around: let's go kill some americans, it must be their fault: if you die you will go to heaven, my poor downtrodden son"].
now.
let's see...
you want china, the world's most populous country (and a nuclear power) to... become a friggin _democracy_???? what is WRONG with you???
they have a perfectly good working bureaucracy that has helped stunt irresponsible decision-making for thousands of years; they have a figure-head who makes silly decisions like banning tai-ji, which has been practiced (again) for thousands of years, so the ban cannot be enforced and his authority is weakened; they have very _sensible_ censorship laws in place which make it clear to people that "western corruption" is not "officially" tolerated.
i used to think, probably like you do, that "china is evil" because they have communism and they have dictatorship, and that their pttoeyy-attitude towards "the corruption and decadence of the west" was just bad manners and ideology.
_then_ i went to america, and i began to understand what they were on about. when chinese say "the west" they mean "america". the land where a friend of mine was asked what the weather was like where he was from (australia) and when he said "oh, it's snowing, mate" the guy looked at him like he was a fucking idiot.
dictatorship _works_ in certain places, and it is appropriate (and a very very heavy burden of responsibility). chris patten (hong kong). fidel castro (responsible for the BEST healthcare system anywhere in the world). red ken (mayor of london for 11 years with only another nine more to go. dang you don't get _prison_ sentences that long!!). more recently: paddy ashdown (croatia, i think) has been placed as the governor there i mean mr ashdown has serious SERIOUS xxxxing responsibility: police of chief, head of state, most senior judge, president of the country's bank... that kind of responsibility REALLY gets to you.
when people sign up for these things it's usually for life - or a significant portion of it - and as a general rule, they take it frickin seriously.
where it goes wrong is usually because the people who "take over" are interested in corruption and greed and aren't _actually_ interested in the populace.
what we find distasteful is that instead of being able to "vote the bastards out", it usually requires a bit more violence to get rid of them.... well... c'est la vie. but i think you'll find that a country like china is a bit different from a tiny country in africa or south america. china pretty much runs itself; their culture is radically different from ours. who are we to dictate to them that our corrupt and weak system of government is better than theirs that has been in place for thousands of xxxxing years?
the best bit about Moo is the CLR, for which IronPython has been written.
IronPython is a complete reimplementation of python, that uses the common lala rumbleburper and therefore it understands - and directly interfaces with -.NET and Mono binaries. this is _fantastic_, because it means that you can write code in python and yet access a stack of rubbish written in some daft microsoft language.
the only thing: you _do not_ have access to the python system libraries (but that's okay because you have full access to the.NET system ones instead).
when i said you are programming in.NET runtime but it's just that you're using a python syntax to do it i really meant it. so that even means that you have access to gtk-sharp.
so you really _can_ write platform-independent prprograms in a de ecent programming language.
all it means is that people will get kidnapped and told to drive their vehicles to a location, where they will be held for several days until their vehicle has been safely disposed of.
in cases where the vehicle is expensive, it may even be worth the criminal's time to actually kill the owner rather than have them identify the people and the location to where the vehicle was driven.
i _got_ to get out this country, it's becoming more fascist than hitler.
_excellent_! will google get dumber, or will AOL get smarter, we shall see...
i _like_ google, because they put simplicity in front of complexity.
i don't particularly like AOL (with caveats) because they put _stupid users_ in front of complexity, via a restricted interface.
the caveats are: at least a damn computer that's connected to the internet via AOL stands less of a chance of being attacked - as long as you stay the fuck away from IE and Outlook.
so, despite being a geek techie linux dude, i actually _recommend_ AOL to people that are too stupid to use anything other than windows, and to those people who insist on "following the herd" because the don't believe linux cuts it.
yes, it was a stupid decision, because as pointed out in the header-article, it made further room for attacks, and also, third party driver writers' stupidity causes _microsoft_ headaches as they get blamed for third party fuck-ups.
they even tried moving printer drivers into the kernel for a while - and very _very_ quickly backed out of _that_ decision.
the biggest mistake MS made was to listen to the marketing droids (Windows 95 ist faster! Nein!) and to move the video drivers into kernelspace in NT 4.0.
to do that, they had to rip out the entire terminal server subsystem, to the extent that in order to fix it for NT 4.0 and NT 5.0 (aka Windows 2000) they had to _buy_ a company that had managed to do it (Citrix, i think it was - someone correct me, here).
NT 3.5 and 3.51, the screen driver, being userspace, could crash - and leave the machine, as a server, completely unaffected. If you _did_ need to use the screen, as long as you knew what keys to press, or where to move the mouse....:) but if it was a Terminal Server - WHO CARED! keep it running!
Now - surprise, surprise, hardware is fast enough, memory is cheap enough, the [stupid] decision has been revisited.
one _very_ interesting test to do is to disconnect _all_ machines from the internet; windows, gnome, kde - and see whether people find it useable or even useful.
set something up that is MAC-like. see how much it takes to set up a MAC look-alike (use kroller.sez - search for it on kde-look.org or even just kroller)
use the MAC kde theme (baghira i think it is).
try to do the same thing on gnome (which is near impossible).
but most importantly, take note - over time - how long it takes people to _adapt_ to using linux.
compare the bitch-awful time that people have with windows viruses and spyware to _not_ having to deal with viruses and spyware at all.
compare the bitch-awful time that people have with printing, on windows, to printing on linux (both kde and gnome). don't tell them how to set up a printer.
plug in a scanner, see what happens.
plug in a USB memory stick, see what happens. if you install debian or any debian-based distro, remember to read this:
yes - basically: the advice about doing a "long-term" study is a very good one.
if at all possible, set up a four-way (actually 8-way or maybe more!) matrix, all using "dumb users":
* windows or kde or gnome * access or with no access to the internet * access or with no access to a "geek" who can provide advice
the internet access on will test your "dumb users" ability to seek out advice for themselves, and the quality of that advice - including posting on mailing lists and getting useful replies, and being able to action them.
the "geek" access will provide a reasonable guide to what happens when you have an "IT department".
i bet you that the failures will occur in windows when there's internet access but no geeks, because of spyware, virus and adware attacks.
that, depending on your users, the failures will occur in linux when you have no internet access or geek access [unless you drop them in front of ubuntu or kubuntu].
that, when you put users in touch with geeks, that linux wins hands-down.
that, overall, your "intelligent" users who just want to get on with stuff, when in touch with geeks, find KDE _much_ easier to live with.
that, overall, your "stupid" users, when in touch with geeks, find gnome fits their level of stupidity _just_ fine.
okay - if this is the chip i think it is, then it's already used by microsoft's XP.
on first install, if you make any unauthorised changes, then you must phone MS to get a code to re-enable your computer.
what i _really_ look forward to is the first virus that overwrites the key in the BIOS on an ever-increasing frequency.
first a few calls to MS, then some more, then a few thousand...
but anyway.
my main concern is that this chip doesn't stop identity theft: it just means that there's another thing on the list of things that need to be stolen or cloned for identity theft to continue.
the _proper_ way to do it is the way that (i think... don't quote me on this) the romanian government have done it: everybody creates any number of keys that they want and they get a notary to digitally sign them on presentation of two forms of "real" ID.
then you take _one_ of your keys, copied by you onto a separate smart card, and present it to the bank, who then provide you with a digitally signed key for use in any money transactions.
everybody has smart cards ($0.50?) and everybody has smart card readers ($20).
if you add 20% new material to an existing copyright work, it is no longer considered to be anything to do with the material on which it is derived: the new work comprises a new and SEPARATE copyrighted work, of which, you, the creators, own 100% of that copyright.
this is not very commonly known.
the difficulty comes, of course, in demonstrating how much is different (and paying for the proving). counting lines of code is an obvious metric - but in the case of new "ideas", that's much more intangible.
in this case, if he added 20% more rules, if he added 20% more types of units (in the original Risk there is only armies so it's hard to add less than 200% more types of units), etc.... you get the idea.
you can do QoS - and ask it to prioritise SIP and RTP packets. however, RTP is a pain: the _clients_ decide which damn range of ports they will go out on, so you need to use a sip proxy to "rewrite" the SIP/RTP packets to be within a certain range (apt-cache search sip proxy if using debian - don't bother with anything else).
so, you've installed a sip proxy, it rewrites the RTP packets so they only go out on... say... ports 10000 to 11000, and you can set your QoS to prioritise any UDP traffic on those ports...... and your ISP has set the MTU _so_ high that it makes absolutely bugger-all difference: all those "internet surfing" packets come in on an MTU of 1500 which _totally_ dominates your line for so long that the UDP SIP/RTP packets don't stand a chance.
hence the requirement to have a second _separate_ line, on which _nothing_ else comes in.
regarding putting the public IP address direct on the box [there are other ways to achieve that other than doing an ADSL card in the server, i knowwwww - it's just that the kit is expensive, and ADSL PCI cards like the bewan - unicorn chipset - and conexant falcon 2p cards - are £12 to £25].
what you can do there is write a custom firewall that copes properly with the setup - and the problems associated with SIP/RTP behind NAT can be made to vanish by having asterisk actually on the same box that's doing the outgoing routing.
the other advantage of having asterisk - even though it's a complete BASTARD to set up - is that it provides a common interface for all those incompatible SIP phones your company is about to buy because they won't listen to advice about making sure you only buy the same make, model and brand of SIP phone for _evverryone_.
SIP is a bastard protocol and no two SIP phones - hardware or software - are properly interoperable.
asterisk helps take some of the non-interoperability out of the equation, but not completely.
Slashdot Mirror
the "environmental protection agency", which uses linux, got a "grade A"!
the POSIX subsystem, like all microsoft "announced products", reappeared coincidentally at around the same time that opennt.com, which provided a full third party POSIX subsystem, disappeared.
anyone may, if you have sufficient information on how the NT kernel works or are prepared to reverse-engineer it (like the ReactOS guys are doing), write their own subsystem. there are THREE types THAT I KNOW OF: OS/2, Win32 and POSIX. okay, maybe there are four now - win64.
having a POSIX subsystem sit on top of the NT kernel, which is a microkernel based on the Mach microkernel, is NOT the same as having fast and direct access to the NT kernel functions.
and the reason why the samba guys have such difficulty getting information is because there either ISN'T any (it's all in the code) or there's too much!
the only reason why the CIFS documentation effort was initiated by microsoft is because the original people who worked on it (having embraced-and-sensibly-extended the IBM Lanman SMB spec and also the X-Open SMB spec), having retired with their stock options up to millions, left no clues as to how this HORRIBLY complex code worked.
it was therefore ESSENTIAL that they get it documented.
the first time they released cifsbrow.txt, in 1997, because i'd just spent five months network-reverse-engineering the network neighbourhood and WINS server code, i spent a WEEK throwing email messages at them, explaining various inconsistencies, helping them improve the documentation they'd created. it takes TWO YEARS to correctly implement the network neighbourhood. it's a FULL peer-to-peer registration and management system, very robust, very complex, _extremely_ good, and people have xxxx-all idea of quite how useful it is ("oh, it's netbios - switch that xxxx off")
after the first CIFS conference, andrew, jeremy and i hung around for an extra day: i got to meet the guy responsible for the network neighbourhood, and spent a good couple of hours drumming into him the things that had been forgotten since the email flurry - there's nothing like meeting someone face-to-face to explain stuff, as you well know.
so.
i'd say that the reason proper documentation doesn't "exist" is partially deliberate, and partially it's your average development/management incompetence.
l.
Lucifer - he is the fallen angel, the "Prince of Light".
:)
and GUESS what radiation and microwaves and electricity
all are?
yep - you guessed it - they're all "waves" - just like light
is.
so you worship your technology, do you? well LOOKEE here,
we got a surpriiise for you
oh - and to cap it all? i heard that some RFID chips
can be made to work by utilising "heat" as a power source.
and GUESS where the hottest parts on the human body are?
p.s. no i'm not a christian. i might be insane, though...
http://ltsp.org/
very simple, very straightforward. it's set up to be useable by non-totally-technical administrators, with a looovely simple front-end for setting up DNS, DHCP, adding packages for use on the LTSP-clients (which includes rdesktop).
You can add LTSP to ANY "desktoppy-servery" machine and it will be useable by dozens of simultaneous clients.
So, you pick your distro (deadrat, debian, debian-edu, edubuntu) and then you just follow the LTSP instructions
and voila, its desktop environment is magically available across all the LTSP thin clients.
An AMD64 machine with 1Gb RAM would simultaneously serve 10 students.
A Dual XEON with 4gb of RAM would simultaneously serve 50 students, with a fair chance
that (unless it's a "lab" environment where everybody is told to do the same
things simultaneously) you will be able to push that to 100 students.
With RDesktop as an option.
The crucial thing is that the kids WILL love it - and time and time and time again,
Sirius (who roll out LTSP regularly) find that the kids simply... don't go near
windows: the windows machines sit there unused (until they are converted to LTSP
clients) because the kids don't find windows "to be cool" any more.
oh please, yes please. switch on encryption that uses TPM. then all it takes is a virus to overwrite the TPM keys in the BIOS memory and that's it - game over: your entire hard drive rendered useless. mwhahahahah
yeh, but unless he did a special deal with them it's also well-outside the normal one-year stock-option maturity arrangement. which means he lost a _lot_ of money.
Think of the 14-year-old schoolgirl (steady, slashdotters).
From their perspective, communication with their friends is their LIFE.
When they get home, they instantly go online and chat to their friends.
When they go to school, they start using their mobile phone to SMS them.
herein lies the disparity: that when they are on the way to school,
and when they are in class, they aren't in front of a computer, they're
on the mobile phone.
If the phone operators can make it possible for people who are used to
massive amounts of computer-enabled world-wide communications to use
ONE device to "seamlessly" stay connected, irrespective of where those
people are, then that's GOT to be an all-round winner.
My take on this initiative is that it will be an absolute massive hit,
IF the pricing is kept reasonable, bearing in mind that it's going to
have to be GSM-based.
What they need to do is to proxy UDP traffic over SMS, and to write
an IM protocol that is UDP-based, not TCP-based, that has its own
_very slow_ self-sequencing acknowledgment (to save people SMS charges!)
ahh, dear linguae,
it would appear that you have not read my reply very carefully, at all.
how can i love dictators, when i am not from a culture where one is in place?
and i think that you will find that chris patten, ken livingstone and paddy ashdown would be very offended to be called "dictators".
and also, you did not read my reply very carefully: note well the statements about "china being very large" and therefore difficult even for a dictator to control and "pretty much runs itself".
and also the point "small dictatorships are typically run by greedy people"
did you read and understand these points?
did you?
it's okay: that's what ssh tunnels are for.
companies are REQUIRED to stick to their... statute (whatever it's called) because if they DON'T then the directors can be kicked out by the shareholders.
things like "maximise profits" are REQUIRED.
maximising profits tends to conflict badly, as we have noted repeatedly, with things like "environmental impact" and stuff like that.
so oh yes governments damn well _do_ have a right to dictate what businesses can and can't do, because it is a system of checks-and-balances against the stupidity of "maximise profits" above all else.
be very _very_ careful when you start saying things like "businesses can do what the xxxx they like".
everybody assumes that democracy is great. well, it ain't. anybody who thinks that democracy is great is deluding themselves, or lives in a country which operates under a corrupted version of democracy (where money talks, buys laws and generally runs things).
... well... c'est la vie. but i think you'll find that a country like china is a bit different from a tiny country in africa or south america. china pretty much runs itself; their culture is radically different from ours. who are we to dictate to them that our corrupt and weak system of government is better than theirs that has been in place for thousands of xxxxing years?
democracy as advocated by anyone who thinks "democracy should run the world esp. where there are dictatorships YEAH" actually results in a paralysed country that remains fragmented and weak. people in general are TOO STUPID and TOO SELFISH to "do the right thing".
france. they can't get rid of the crippling cost of pensions which is going to kill off the economy in ten years, because "everybody wants some", and any politician that even THINKS of mentioning "social cuts" gets kicked out.
iraq. the voting is polarising along religious lines, into three main groups. the entire country is fracturing into chaos, ripe for being plucked and whipped up by religious fanatics ["ahh things were better in the old days even dare i say it better with saddam around: let's go kill some americans, it must be their fault: if you die you will go to heaven, my poor downtrodden son"].
now.
let's see...
you want china, the world's most populous country (and a nuclear power) to... become a friggin _democracy_???? what is WRONG with you???
they have a perfectly good working bureaucracy that has helped stunt irresponsible decision-making for thousands of years; they have a figure-head who makes silly decisions like banning tai-ji, which has been practiced (again) for thousands of years, so the ban cannot be enforced and his authority is weakened; they have very _sensible_ censorship laws in place which make it clear to people that "western corruption" is not "officially" tolerated.
i used to think, probably like you do, that "china is evil" because they have communism and they have dictatorship, and that their pttoeyy-attitude towards "the corruption and decadence of the west" was just bad manners and ideology.
_then_ i went to america, and i began to understand what they were on about. when chinese say "the west" they mean "america". the land where a friend of mine was asked what the weather was like where he was from (australia) and when he said "oh, it's snowing, mate" the guy looked at him like he was a fucking idiot.
dictatorship _works_ in certain places, and it is appropriate (and a very very heavy burden of responsibility). chris patten (hong kong). fidel castro (responsible for the BEST healthcare system anywhere in the world). red ken (mayor of london for 11 years with only another nine more to go. dang you don't get _prison_ sentences that long!!). more recently: paddy ashdown (croatia, i think) has been placed as the governor there i mean mr ashdown has serious SERIOUS xxxxing responsibility: police of chief, head of state, most senior judge, president of the country's bank... that kind of responsibility REALLY gets to you.
when people sign up for these things it's usually for life - or a significant portion of it - and as a general rule, they take it frickin seriously.
where it goes wrong is usually because the people who "take over" are interested in corruption and greed and aren't _actually_ interested in the populace.
what we find distasteful is that instead of being able to "vote the bastards out", it usually requires a bit more violence to get rid of them.
ahh, smaller - so it takes _less_ than 3 seconds to fry these chips in a microwave oven.
it's always nice when a company lets you know how much easier it is to destroy privacy-invading technology.
the best bit about Moo is the CLR, for which IronPython has been written.
.NET and Mono binaries. this is _fantastic_, because it means that you can write code in python and yet access a stack of rubbish written in some daft microsoft language.
.NET system ones instead).
.NET runtime but it's just that you're using a python syntax to do it i really meant it. so that even means that you have access to gtk-sharp.
IronPython is a complete reimplementation of python, that uses the common lala rumbleburper and therefore it understands - and directly interfaces with -
the only thing: you _do not_ have access to the python system libraries (but that's okay because you have full access to the
when i said you are programming in
so you really _can_ write platform-independent prprograms in a de ecent programming language.
.
all it means is that people will get kidnapped and told to
drive their vehicles to a location, where they will be held
for several days until their vehicle has been safely disposed
of.
in cases where the vehicle is expensive, it may even be worth
the criminal's time to actually kill the owner rather than have
them identify the people and the location to where the vehicle
was driven.
i _got_ to get out this country, it's becoming more fascist
than hitler.
_excellent_! will google get dumber, or will AOL get smarter, we shall see...
i _like_ google, because they put simplicity in front of complexity.
i don't particularly like AOL (with caveats) because they put _stupid users_
in front of complexity, via a restricted interface.
the caveats are: at least a damn computer that's connected to the
internet via AOL stands less of a chance of being attacked - as long
as you stay the fuck away from IE and Outlook.
so, despite being a geek techie linux dude, i actually _recommend_
AOL to people that are too stupid to use anything other than windows,
and to those people who insist on "following the herd" because the
don't believe linux cuts it.
yes, it was a stupid decision, because as pointed out in the header-article,
it made further room for attacks, and also, third party driver writers' stupidity
causes _microsoft_ headaches as they get blamed for third party fuck-ups.
they even tried moving printer drivers into the kernel for a while -
and very _very_ quickly backed out of _that_ decision.
the biggest mistake MS made was to listen to the marketing droids
:) but if it was a Terminal Server - WHO CARED! keep it running!
(Windows 95 ist faster! Nein!) and to move the video drivers into
kernelspace in NT 4.0.
to do that, they had to rip out the entire terminal server subsystem,
to the extent that in order to fix it for NT 4.0 and NT 5.0 (aka Windows 2000) they had to _buy_ a company that had managed to do it (Citrix, i think it was - someone correct me, here).
NT 3.5 and 3.51, the screen driver, being userspace, could crash - and leave the machine, as a server, completely unaffected. If you _did_ need to use the screen, as long as you knew what keys to press, or where to move the mouse....
Now - surprise, surprise, hardware is fast enough, memory is cheap enough, the [stupid] decision has been revisited.
your girlfriend needs to become an expert in _all_ systems,
in order to make a comparison.
she needs to _locate_ suitable dumb-idiots who haven't been thingied.
biased. and intelligent people. etc.
but she needs to _become_ a geek - to know the pitfalls and
advantages of the various setups - in order to not _accidentally_
introduce bias.
if she were one of the _subjects_ of the test, that would be
a different matter.
one _very_ interesting test to do is to disconnect _all_ machines from the internet;
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windows, gnome, kde - and see whether people find it useable or even useful.
another:
http://kde-look.org/ and http://gnome-look.org/ (when they're back up/online)
set something up that is MAC-like. see how much it takes to set up a MAC look-alike
(use kroller.sez - search for it on kde-look.org or even just kroller)
use the MAC kde theme (baghira i think it is).
try to do the same thing on gnome (which is near impossible).
but most importantly, take note - over time - how long it takes people to
_adapt_ to using linux.
compare the bitch-awful time that people have with windows viruses and
spyware to _not_ having to deal with viruses and spyware at all.
compare the bitch-awful time that people have with printing, on windows,
to printing on linux (both kde and gnome). don't tell them how to set
up a printer.
plug in a scanner, see what happens.
plug in a USB memory stick, see what happens. if you install debian or
any debian-based distro, remember to read this:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169444&cid=14
including the follow-up comments i added.
yes - basically: the advice about doing a "long-term" study is a very
good one.
if at all possible, set up a four-way (actually 8-way or maybe more!) matrix,
all using "dumb users":
* windows or kde or gnome
* access or with no access to the internet
* access or with no access to a "geek" who can provide advice
the internet access on will test your "dumb users" ability to seek out
advice for themselves, and the quality of that advice - including
posting on mailing lists and getting useful replies, and being able
to action them.
the "geek" access will provide a reasonable guide to what happens
when you have an "IT department".
i bet you that the failures will occur in windows when there's
internet access but no geeks, because of spyware, virus and adware
attacks.
that, depending on your users, the failures will occur in linux
when you have no internet access or geek access [unless you drop
them in front of ubuntu or kubuntu].
that, when you put users in touch with geeks, that linux wins hands-down.
that, overall, your "intelligent" users who just want to get on with
stuff, when in touch with geeks, find KDE _much_ easier to live with.
that, overall, your "stupid" users, when in touch with geeks, find
gnome fits their level of stupidity _just_ fine.
okay - if this is the chip i think it is, then it's already used by microsoft's XP.
on first install, if you make any unauthorised changes, then you must phone
MS to get a code to re-enable your computer.
what i _really_ look forward to is the first virus that overwrites the
key in the BIOS on an ever-increasing frequency.
first a few calls to MS, then some more, then a few thousand...
but anyway.
my main concern is that this chip doesn't stop identity theft: it just means
that there's another thing on the list of things that need to be stolen
or cloned for identity theft to continue.
the _proper_ way to do it is the way that (i think... don't quote
me on this) the romanian government have done it: everybody creates
any number of keys that they want and they get a notary to digitally
sign them on presentation of two forms of "real" ID.
then you take _one_ of your keys, copied by you onto a separate smart card,
and present it to the bank, who then provide you with a digitally signed
key for use in any money transactions.
everybody has smart cards ($0.50?) and everybody has smart card readers
($20).
simple.
that's already been done:
http://handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/BlueAngel
whatwhatwhat? are you talking about the requirements for politicians?
oh.
of course.
if he rewrote 20% of the original rules, that'd comprise a new
copyright work.
yeh.
definitely.
work through each of their complaints, and tell them to xxxx off.
claim it's a "risk-inspired" or "risk-like" game.
etc.
if you add 20% new material to an existing copyright work,
... you
it is no longer considered to be anything to do with the
material on which it is derived: the new work comprises
a new and SEPARATE copyrighted work, of which, you, the
creators, own 100% of that copyright.
this is not very commonly known.
the difficulty comes, of course, in demonstrating how much
is different (and paying for the proving). counting lines of code
is an obvious metric - but in the case of new "ideas", that's
much more intangible.
in this case, if he added 20% more rules, if he added 20% more
types of units (in the original Risk there is only armies so it's
hard to add less than 200% more types of units), etc.
get the idea.
you can do QoS - and ask it to prioritise SIP and RTP packets. however, RTP is a pain: the _clients_ decide which damn range of ports they will go out on, so you need to use a sip proxy to "rewrite" the SIP/RTP packets to be within a certain range (apt-cache search sip proxy if using debian - don't bother with anything else).
... say... ports 10000 to 11000, and you can set your QoS to prioritise any UDP traffic on those ports... ... and your ISP has set the MTU _so_ high that it makes absolutely bugger-all difference: all those "internet surfing" packets come in on an MTU of 1500 which _totally_ dominates your line for so long that the UDP SIP/RTP packets don't stand a chance.
so, you've installed a sip proxy, it rewrites the RTP packets so they only go out on
hence the requirement to have a second _separate_ line, on which _nothing_ else comes in.
regarding putting the public IP address direct on the box [there are other ways to achieve that other than doing an ADSL card in the server, i knowwwww - it's just that the kit is expensive, and ADSL PCI cards like the bewan - unicorn chipset - and conexant falcon 2p cards - are £12 to £25].
what you can do there is write a custom firewall that copes properly with the setup - and the problems associated with SIP/RTP behind NAT can be made to vanish by having asterisk actually on the same box that's doing the outgoing routing.
the other advantage of having asterisk - even though it's a complete BASTARD to set up - is that it provides a common interface for all those incompatible SIP phones your company is about to buy because they won't listen to advice about making sure you only buy the same make, model and brand of SIP phone for _evverryone_.
SIP is a bastard protocol and no two SIP phones - hardware or software - are properly interoperable.
asterisk helps take some of the non-interoperability out of the equation, but not completely.