I need to write a bot that will auto respond to this stupid statement.
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Because the user files can't be that important, right?
Really, It's all about the user files. If noone cared about their user files, then security would not be an issue. We could just wipe our computer's clean everynight. But it's not so - backups are a huge pita, so we do everything we can to avoid reloading the os.
Sure knoppix solves some of this by making the OS read only, and forcing the user to keep their files on a separate filesystem. But there are still a few problems with this.
First of all, the system is made up of processes in memory. There is nothing to stop an attacker from having the user download a malicious app to their own filesystem and running it from there, or even terminating or replacing system processes. Nothing aside from unix security - score one more for knoppix vs. windows, I guess.
More importantly, the user's data is still on a read-write media. As I already mentioned, this is really the important stuff. If someone can find a hole in Firefox that can delete your home directory, you won't really care that the system is still safe, will you?
And finally, the if the user wants to install software that is not on the CD, they are out of luck. That is unless they can install it into their home directory. Review problem 1 for why this counteract the benefit of a read-only system disk.
If booting off of a CD makes knoppix more secure, then RiscOS must be even more secure, since it boots from ROM. It probably is, but not for that reason - more likely because it's not a target. Knoppix is certainly more convenient to secure because of the reason you mentioned, but is not really any more secure than a hard-disk based linux like fedora.
That's fair, but when three articles in a row (all posted by Taco) are little more than product promotion it does not seem unreasonable to point it out, or even make a humourous (albeit sarcastic) comment to the effect.
I believe you are right, because people like "candy". The music industry in particular has done a fantastic job of mass-marketing crap. But at the same time, there are some fantastic artists doing some great work in music that are selling records even to the same people who are buying the crap.
I don't expect that all media will improve, I just expect that the technical barriers that prevent the talented artists from producing a great product are going away.
After all, Dvorak is not only claiming that the industry was full of low quality unimaginative works, he is claiming that it will be the demise of the industry. I do not concurr, since the evidence indicates that it only takes a very low percentage of quality output to sustain the entertainment industry.
I look forward to that low percentage of titles. Makes me feel elite. Like posting on/./me punctures cheek with tongue.
Although Dvorak is wrong about a "collapse" of the gaming industry, he is right that there is a fundamental change brewing. What he doesn't get is that this change is not just taking place in the gaming industry, but in the movie industry. Technology has reached a point where we can tell any story we want, in any way we want, effortlessly. There is no visual experience we cannot simulate cinematically (did I just make up a word?)
As the realtime visualization of a video game catches up with the pre-rendered illusion of film, the video game industry will end up having to solve some of the same problems that the movie industry is now starting to face: special effects are no longer enough. We take them for granted. Film-makers are now trying to catch our attention in other ways - mostly by remaking old stories or producing sequels. That will get old soon, and when it does there will be a new breed of films that reach people more deeply, challenge their emotions and intellect. We are seeing a smattering of this now, but not in force.
For game-makers, the challenge will be to use their newly available photo-realistic engines ot produce a challenging game. Currently, game companies are development shops - but soon the development will be complete and the art will take over.
I am looking forward to this - maybe I will start to play games again. But currently I am like Dvorak - I have seen too many versions of Quake, and I am not interested in memorizing the correct sequence of keypresses to fire the Super-Duper-Cannon in order to beat the boss on level 17. Great games have a low barrier of entry and are immersive. Think Tetris, and Bejewelled, but also think Doom or Half-Life.
With a few quick calculations base on the information in the article we can see whether or not Jon is totally out of his tree. Of course I have done some rounding, and had to guess at one number, but the rest of thsi should be fairly accurate.
9:00 am CET = 8:00 am GMT current time = 15:40 GMT time remaining = 16:20:00
worst case - opera servers meltdown -> 120 downloads/sec = 432,000/hour 16.3 * 432000 = 7,041,600
current total = 600,000 potential worst case total = 7,641,600
projected from current download rate - time of launch = sometime tuesday? (lets estimate noon local) tuesday 11:00 GMT elapsed time since launch = 76:40 average download rate since launch = 7823 downloads/hour remaining time 16:20 7823 * 16.3 = 127,510
current total 600,000 potential expected total 727,510
-
So it definitely within the realm of physics that he could be swimming, but not too likely.
Re:luminocity = longhorn in linux?
on
Next Generation X11
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Oh brother.
There is a language being developed codenamed cairo..
No. Cairo is a 2D vector graphics library, not a language....to be used in Linux...
or Windows. or Mac. It is a cross platform library.
its a GTK fork...
No. It is not. The CVS head version of GTK uses cairo for drawing....and its special feature is ability to use opengl rendered screens in place of bitmaps for window drawing...
Among its features are multiple drawing back-ends. One is OpenGL, another is Render. Because it is a vector library, it may or may not render to bitmaps - depending on the backend.
A product is already being developed using this called luminocity.
Luminocity is a fork of the metacity window manager that has a built in composite manager that renders to OpenGL.
depending on how strict or loose the person was being with a 'couple.'
I think couple should mean "two" as in "my wife and I make a wonderful couple". I think a deviation would be more logical if explained like "somewhere between 1900 and 2100", not "2 or 3 thousand". Or maybe I'm just being anal.
We definitely should not expect "billions" to mean "one hundred million", at any rate - British, American, or even dirty Canadian...
The Register? Courting controversy? No way! That would be like Bruce Perens calling someone an idiot!
I think if this whole episode has done anything, it has illustrated to us that people, even Linus, are prone to doing silly things, (and when they do the Register will be there to mock them for it). As you say, everyone is really excited here, and it will take some time for everyone to calm down. There is no point in everyone saying Bruce or Linus should keep their mouth shut, Tridge should keep out of Bitkeeper, Larry should stop being an ass - we should just sit back, enjoy the show, and wait for the next kernel release.
These guys have reverse engineered the protocol between the camera and the PC, not between two PC. It's damn hard to convert the video to ichat/aim if you can't get a readable video off of the camera in the first place.
What's cool about this is that Logitech are the kings of decent webcams, and now they can be used with free software like linux.
If you didn't notice, both iPods are female (hence the need to a "dock"). Therefore offspring are not possible without artificial insemination - perhaps Griffin or Belkin can locate a donor?
Slashdot Mirror
I need to write a bot that will auto respond to this stupid statement.
This is the Slashdot Humour-Impairment (TM) automated reply system. Thank you for posting your comment on Slashdot - however it has been detected that you may may have missed the joke in the parent posting. Please re-read the post located here, keeping in mind that many slashdot posters that complain are in fact only trying to be humourous, used devices such as "sarcasm" and sometimes even "wit".
Please do not post again, but instead wait for one of our Technical Reply on Laughless Larts (T.R.O.L.L.s) will reply to your posting within 2 business hours.
Thank you again, and have a nice day.
It IS a good reason - remember the days when everyone coded for IE, and pages looked like shit in Netscape? I'd rather NOT go back to that.
That would be, like, today I have a lot of sites I would like to use firefox on, but they are borked unless I use IE.
Back in the day when we did use something called "Netscape", it was more than likely the other way around - broken in IE, but functional in Netscape.
Your point is right on, though. More (and more standards-compliant) browsers cannot help be be good for web.
Because the user files can't be that important, right?
Really, It's all about the user files. If noone cared about their user files, then security would not be an issue. We could just wipe our computer's clean everynight. But it's not so - backups are a huge pita, so we do everything we can to avoid reloading the os.
Sure knoppix solves some of this by making the OS read only, and forcing the user to keep their files on a separate filesystem. But there are still a few problems with this.
First of all, the system is made up of processes in memory. There is nothing to stop an attacker from having the user download a malicious app to their own filesystem and running it from there, or even terminating or replacing system processes. Nothing aside from unix security - score one more for knoppix vs. windows, I guess.
More importantly, the user's data is still on a read-write media. As I already mentioned, this is really the important stuff. If someone can find a hole in Firefox that can delete your home directory, you won't really care that the system is still safe, will you?
And finally, the if the user wants to install software that is not on the CD, they are out of luck. That is unless they can install it into their home directory. Review problem 1 for why this counteract the benefit of a read-only system disk.
If booting off of a CD makes knoppix more secure, then RiscOS must be even more secure, since it boots from ROM. It probably is, but not for that reason - more likely because it's not a target. Knoppix is certainly more convenient to secure because of the reason you mentioned, but is not really any more secure than a hard-disk based linux like fedora.
I expect these are not safe for work? I'm not going to click to find out...
Aren't all clicks with a Mac middle-clicks?
That's fair, but when three articles in a row (all posted by Taco) are little more than product promotion it does not seem unreasonable to point it out, or even make a humourous (albeit sarcastic) comment to the effect.
Ads for nerds, stuff that pays.
I believe you are right, because people like "candy". The music industry in particular has done a fantastic job of mass-marketing crap. But at the same time, there are some fantastic artists doing some great work in music that are selling records even to the same people who are buying the crap.
/. /me punctures cheek with tongue.
I don't expect that all media will improve, I just expect that the technical barriers that prevent the talented artists from producing a great product are going away.
After all, Dvorak is not only claiming that the industry was full of low quality unimaginative works, he is claiming that it will be the demise of the industry. I do not concurr, since the evidence indicates that it only takes a very low percentage of quality output to sustain the entertainment industry.
I look forward to that low percentage of titles. Makes me feel elite. Like posting on
Although Dvorak is wrong about a "collapse" of the gaming industry, he is right that there is a fundamental change brewing. What he doesn't get is that this change is not just taking place in the gaming industry, but in the movie industry. Technology has reached a point where we can tell any story we want, in any way we want, effortlessly. There is no visual experience we cannot simulate cinematically (did I just make up a word?)
As the realtime visualization of a video game catches up with the pre-rendered illusion of film, the video game industry will end up having to solve some of the same problems that the movie industry is now starting to face: special effects are no longer enough. We take them for granted. Film-makers are now trying to catch our attention in other ways - mostly by remaking old stories or producing sequels. That will get old soon, and when it does there will be a new breed of films that reach people more deeply, challenge their emotions and intellect. We are seeing a smattering of this now, but not in force.
For game-makers, the challenge will be to use their newly available photo-realistic engines ot produce a challenging game. Currently, game companies are development shops - but soon the development will be complete and the art will take over.
I am looking forward to this - maybe I will start to play games again. But currently I am like Dvorak - I have seen too many versions of Quake, and I am not interested in memorizing the correct sequence of keypresses to fire the Super-Duper-Cannon in order to beat the boss on level 17. Great games have a low barrier of entry and are immersive. Think Tetris, and Bejewelled, but also think Doom or Half-Life.
With a few quick calculations base on the information in the article we can see whether or not Jon is totally out of his tree. Of course I have done some rounding, and had to guess at one number, but the rest of thsi should be fairly accurate.
9:00 am CET = 8:00 am GMT
current time = 15:40 GMT
time remaining = 16:20:00
worst case
-
opera servers meltdown -> 120 downloads/sec = 432,000/hour
16.3 * 432000 = 7,041,600
current total = 600,000
potential worst case total = 7,641,600
projected from current download rate
-
time of launch = sometime tuesday? (lets estimate noon local) tuesday 11:00 GMT
elapsed time since launch = 76:40
average download rate since launch = 7823 downloads/hour
remaining time 16:20
7823 * 16.3 = 127,510
current total 600,000
potential expected total 727,510
-
So it definitely within the realm of physics that he could be swimming, but not too likely.
oh, well. I bit. ;-)
Oh brother.
...to be used in Linux...
...and its special feature is ability to use opengl rendered screens in place of bitmaps for window drawing...
There is a language being developed codenamed cairo..
No. Cairo is a 2D vector graphics library, not a language.
or Windows. or Mac. It is a cross platform library.
its a GTK fork...
No. It is not. The CVS head version of GTK uses cairo for drawing.
Among its features are multiple drawing back-ends. One is OpenGL, another is Render. Because it is a vector library, it may or may not render to bitmaps - depending on the backend.
A product is already being developed using this called luminocity.
Luminocity is a fork of the metacity window manager that has a built in composite manager that renders to OpenGL.
Now that that's been cleared up...
That is not the XGL that you are looking for. This is.
Not very good googling.
Except mirrordot doesn't have the page either. Really suuuuucks.
Apparently in his world, "a couple" = 20.
Oh, one of those types. I hope he films his "dates".
depending on how strict or loose the person was being with a 'couple.'
I think couple should mean "two" as in "my wife and I make a wonderful couple". I think a deviation would be more logical if explained like "somewhere between 1900 and 2100", not "2 or 3 thousand". Or maybe I'm just being anal.
We definitely should not expect "billions" to mean "one hundred million", at any rate - British, American, or even dirty Canadian...
From TFA
"...But if we sold say a couple thousand, $50,000 a piece, that's a billion dollars."
If that's how this guy does math, I think I'll wait for some other manufacturer to create these things before I buy...
Ah, thanks. I guess I'm behind on my Get Smart lore.
The Register? Courting controversy? No way! That would be like Bruce Perens calling someone an idiot!
I think if this whole episode has done anything, it has illustrated to us that people, even Linus, are prone to doing silly things, (and when they do the Register will be there to mock them for it). As you say, everyone is really excited here, and it will take some time for everyone to calm down. There is no point in everyone saying Bruce or Linus should keep their mouth shut, Tridge should keep out of Bitkeeper, Larry should stop being an ass - we should just sit back, enjoy the show, and wait for the next kernel release.
Tridge should break his cone of silence...
I know this is a typo, but I'm having so much fun trying to figure out what this could actually mean.
I thought that the most appropriate commentary was issued by Hansen, who stated "mmmmmmmm-bop!"
These guys have reverse engineered the protocol between the camera and the PC, not between two PC. It's damn hard to convert the video to ichat/aim if you can't get a readable video off of the camera in the first place.
What's cool about this is that Logitech are the kings of decent webcams, and now they can be used with free software like linux.
If you didn't notice, both iPods are female (hence the need to a "dock"). Therefore offspring are not possible without artificial insemination - perhaps Griffin or Belkin can locate a donor?
I actually want to buy these items!
As a MySQL user, I believe he is entitled to troll. I use MySQL myself, and I can confirm it is indeed as trollworthy as it is useful.