One nice thing is that most people are reading their mail unencrypted even if they used ssh for shell logins. Still one can often ask for passwords and user rights by email. Also one can easily sniff the passwords (in case of POP3 you don't even need to know anything about the protocol, never checked IMAP closely enough) and often use the same password for an ssh connection.
The best part however is sending mail. How many email users believe it's not possible to fake email address when sending mail ? How many believe it's hard ? And how many are actually authenticating with something when sending mail ? Most are using their ISP's SMTP server, sending plain text mail, no digital signatures, with a address field that can be filled with almost anything, are not aware of the extra headers that would give some pointers for were the mail actually came from, and are reading their mail using unencrypted POP3.
But hey, you understand why if you're ever tried using PGP (or GPG) with Outlook or Hotmail:)
This is really about RPG's, but applies also in MMORPG's..
In good old RuneQuest (pen and paper =) there is a experience system that works somewhat like this:
When you (successfully) use a skill, you get a "XP mark" to that skill, but only once per a quest. It also has a combat system where almost anyone with enough luck can kill almost anyone (or anything) making combat always dangerous even if more experienced people will be less likely to die.
There are few other things also, but those are the most important.
Now, when we started, we had quite short quest (or adventures or whatever you want to call them), and it was common to players to try to utilize every skill once to be able to gain experience quickly.
However, as time went by, quest became longer and this "check experience gains moment" became more rare. Because of this, you often got the combat "marks" from the first battle for a specific quest and after that there was no experience gain from other fights.
Because of these things there was to changes in the way players played their characters: They no longer fought any extra combat, since there was no experience gain but a danger of death (one good blow can kill in RQ). Instead, they started doing things to gain marks to the more rarely used skills.
Examples would include starting a (little) bar fight to get a XP mark to bare handed combat, but also things like searching herbs, making weapons, worshipping gods, trading, playing, singing, hunting, and well, anything that there is a skill for in RQ.. this also included things like "wait a minute, i think this wall is not too strong, if go through it we won't have to wake up that troll" and "no way i'm going there, let's go back and hire an army".
People want to get experience. But most of them don't just want to became better in fighting.
I think the problem in present MMORPG's is that fighting is the only thing that you can became so good that other notice you.
Building cities isn't necessary to make people famous. If you could became the best damn swordsmith in the whole world, and your friend was a mage so good that together you could make blessed simitars so powerful that only the ancient artifacts would be more valuable..
I propose less combat experience, more fatal combat, more other skills, no skill limit for things other than fighting (some kind of more close to perfect skill system maybe), and ability to make items at least as good as those found in dungeons..
It really doesn't hurt if nobody is interested to risk their characters life for a sword in a dungeon that can be bought for the local smith. It just removes some stupid combat.
The best way to document a project, is to make the source so well commented that no additional documentation is needed. Everybody reading the source must be able to understand from the comments what it is supposed to do.
If you need to be able to generate formal documentation, you should probably go for JavaDoc standard (that works well with almost any other language too). There are following reasons why to keep the documentation in the same place as the code:
Anybody can read the documentation for something he doesn't understand just by reading the comments without having to find the same function/whatever in the documentation files too.
Or check the implementation of something the documentation describes.
It's much easier to maintain one file with both the source AND the documentation than to separate files. If you have separate files it's more likely to have them out of sync.
When the documentation is done at the same time with (or before) the implementation, by the same person, it's much more likely to be correct, as
the implementator is (should be) the one that knows best what the code is supposed to do.
If there is a bug, it's often spotted as a by product of trying the understand the code (since there is comments telling how it's supposed to work. This applies both to mistakes in implementation AND problems with documentation.
I don't see why running Linux on a PPC is a reasong to buy this thing...
It's true that i86 architecture isn't the best around but still.. I'd rather see something that is designed to be simple but efficient, and that would scale from a handheld to a "mainframe".. dah.
Then port Linux on THAT thing.. there.. go.. but well.. maybe it was just me dreaming..
Desktop Unix is dead. Sun lost that battle ten years ago.
You're missing the point. GNU/Linux is gaining desktop space also. And a UNIX server is much more likely backend for GNU/Linux desktop than NT on the otherhand supports Windows desktops in more "native" way.
...Sun is supporting Linux, but really they want to sell you Solaris.
Take the H, S, and V values of both colors. Then calculate a difference for each of them like: |h2 - h1| and |s2-s1| and |v2-v1|
Use Hue so that the min-value and max-value are the same (effectively to create a circle and find the smaller arc between the points on in)
Then do something like dH*dS*dV possibly with some constant weights and the result shoul should be larger when the difference is larger.
For this to give useful numbers H, S and V should probably be a float between 0 and 1.
Sun is dead. They'll go the way of DEC by the end of the decade. They picked up on Linux way too late.
Sun's problem really is, that where it supports Linux, it still has it's own OS to sell. After all,
Solaris probably is the number one, non-MS, "non-free" OS when you look at new installs.
Where MS's futher success cut's down Sun's share of the cake, Free Software is usually written for Unix like systems and therefore often run on Solaris too. As long as Sun can still sell it's own systems, Open Source is beneficial to it.
I mean, how many people actually use Sun's own shell on Solaris these days ? Anyone of you have bash, gcc, GNU grep, GNU tar, gzip, less, etc installed on their Solaris boxes ? I'd say quite many.
Solaris is known as stable platform by management
people and you can use most of the great opensource apps on it. Why not ?
Also, if desktops run UNIX-like systems (like GNU) it becomes much easier for a UNIX company like Sun to make products that work together with other products. What I mean is that UNIX is much more open in design also than MS-Windows. In UNIX you can go ahead and try writing a superior MTA, but with MS you're pretty much stuck with Exchange, and you can't even replace the Exchange with some UNIX MTA because Outlook is so heavily integrated with Exchange that end users will start complaining about missing features (that depend on Exchange). Same goes for most of the other things.
Only problem is that when FreeBSD (or GNU/Linux) starts to gain more space in serverspace, it might mean that Solaris sales drop and Sun will become weaker to help us.
Back to 1995 or something all the apps out there actually worked with a slow 486. We'll what's the problem then ? Use the old distro ?
The problem is that bug fixes and security updates cannot be applied without a LOT of hand work and/or a great amount of new FEATURES which usually are there just to slow down the application.
the question here is that setting up a TCP port for incoming connections should be so hard that only a hardcore wizard (guru's not good enough) can do it...
from them we MIGHT be able to expect even SOME sort of idea about what patching and updating is all about.. then again.. MS has teached people that patching means new features so many will just think "it works fine, why patch ?"
Also it has became common that there are no patches to old versions.. you can't have the security without new features.. and some of those features might break you config.. this is not the case just with MS but also with Open Source and Free Software (as in speech)
..and there is on going development for things like audigy with the old system so hopefully they keep the old style drivers and modules as an option...
It actually appears really weird to me, that there actually exist a lot of people that are happy to copy music with tools like Napster (the old free one) but still say that they "hate piracy". Weird thing this world:(
Actually, once one can save money by using Free Software, one should spend that to support what is important to them, was that good music or great movies.
If they can delete accounts at will, and they don't even need to recover the data you had there, then they can basicly remove all admins from a project if they wish so. This means that you need to have a copy of everything somewhere else just in case. (which you should have anyway but..)
It's a bit questionable if you need a CVS somewhere else, a mailing list archive somewhere else, a patch archive somewhere else, project homepage somewhere else.. whether it's any use to have them a SourceForge at all.. too bad since it really is a great tool, even if sometimes really laggy.
This sure ain't good news for maintainers of small projects.. especially of projects of questionable usefulness..
So, Bill is finally going to release a version of windows that will automatically simulate pressing ctrl-alt-delete when it blue screens.
Actually, they already invented that with W2k.. if you khappen to be on a coffee break while it crashes and don't pay attention whether you are doing a login or a unlock, then you might be surprised to a fresh desktop just when you thought there was too many apps anyway..
Another BIG difference is that you can use Google without the toolbar. I never knew there was one, until I saw installed on somebodys browser at work last summer.
Point 1 is true, but for most of the time, at least here in Finland, there is no access. Backend servers seem to be running mostly Oracle on Solaris. It doesn't matter there though, as those have good reputation and users never see them. What I think is that replacing Servers with GNU or BSD would be more likely to happen than replacing Desktop software.
Samba can do pretty well as a fileshare replacement. Nobody won't know the difference.
Normal people most often don't even know that over half of webservers are already running Apache.
OpenSource database servers like PostgreSQL already compete with Oracle.
PHP is one of the most efficient was to handle dynamic web content. ASP is not.
Only that some of this won't most Slashdotters any happier since it's Sun, Oracle, Netscape (iPlanet's still widely used) and others that are more likely to lose their share than MicroSoft, because those that understand are already running something else, and most of the time couldn't care a sh*t about somebody elses desktop software.
When we were still using floppy disks in PC's, nobody saw nothing wrong with first loading a database (which had to be quite small though) into the RAM and then serving it from there. Nobody would imagine more than one person waiting for a floppy disk to load something. When floppy disk was 390 MB and memory 640 you could read almost TWO FULL DISKS into memory. No one would have bought million computers with two floppy drives each just to serve some little database. And you also need to save that data there.
Now that we have all the "fast" hard drives almost nobody keeps stuff in memory. It's not the same, but if you're hard drive is 10000 as fast as your good old floppy drive, and you have million users instead of those 10 you used to have... are you going to buy million computers ? No, you increase memory cache. At some point however there is so much "memory cache" that you can actually get some more ram and throw that slow hard drive to a "Recycle Bin".
You save the powerbill for hard-drives, you save the powerbill for cooling, and you don't need that many machines.
Also for reliablity. RAM fails yeah. But so does hard drives. So double the powerbill saved as nobody will be running a non-RAID hard disk for a serious server. And then compare the time wasted when copying all the data to the newly added hard drive. Yes, SCSI can do it without CPU. But you also lose performance from the disk access.
In SERVER environment every little save counts,
everything breaks, and the more of it you can have
running and faster it will run.. well.. the cheaper it will be.. nobody actually cares what the hardware will cost. It will be little compared to what administration, power, spare-parts, replacement servers, whatever.. will cost in long run.
GCC is the only compiler that haven't disagreed with me about how control structures of typedefinitions or "name your favourite compiler problem" should work.
With GCC you can compile just about anything that resebles C/C++ to on almost any platform TO almost any platform.
I mean, just as I would love a web browser that is 100% CSS and XHTML compliant, I also like to have a compiler that does what it's told to, even if the coder was creative.
Not tested that Intel thing.. but when writing a compiler from scratch isn't that easy to get it all right on first try.
Howabout a movement. Every/. reader out there stop buying/reading/using/etc anything that doesn't state that it's public domain or GPL or something like that ?
Slashdot Mirror
The best part however is sending mail. How many email users believe it's not possible to fake email address when sending mail ? How many believe it's hard ? And how many are actually authenticating with something when sending mail ? Most are using their ISP's SMTP server, sending plain text mail, no digital signatures, with a address field that can be filled with almost anything, are not aware of the extra headers that would give some pointers for were the mail actually came from, and are reading their mail using unencrypted POP3.
But hey, you understand why if you're ever tried using PGP (or GPG) with Outlook or Hotmail :)
Needs a geek to use it.
In good old RuneQuest (pen and paper =) there is a experience system that works somewhat like this:
When you (successfully) use a skill, you get a "XP mark" to that skill, but only once per a quest. It also has a combat system where almost anyone with enough luck can kill almost anyone (or anything) making combat always dangerous even if more experienced people will be less likely to die. There are few other things also, but those are the most important.
Now, when we started, we had quite short quest (or adventures or whatever you want to call them), and it was common to players to try to utilize every skill once to be able to gain experience quickly.
However, as time went by, quest became longer and this "check experience gains moment" became more rare. Because of this, you often got the combat "marks" from the first battle for a specific quest and after that there was no experience gain from other fights.
Because of these things there was to changes in the way players played their characters: They no longer fought any extra combat, since there was no experience gain but a danger of death (one good blow can kill in RQ). Instead, they started doing things to gain marks to the more rarely used skills.
Examples would include starting a (little) bar fight to get a XP mark to bare handed combat, but also things like searching herbs, making weapons, worshipping gods, trading, playing, singing, hunting, and well, anything that there is a skill for in RQ.. this also included things like "wait a minute, i think this wall is not too strong, if go through it we won't have to wake up that troll" and "no way i'm going there, let's go back and hire an army".
People want to get experience. But most of them don't just want to became better in fighting. I think the problem in present MMORPG's is that fighting is the only thing that you can became so good that other notice you.
Building cities isn't necessary to make people famous. If you could became the best damn swordsmith in the whole world, and your friend was a mage so good that together you could make blessed simitars so powerful that only the ancient artifacts would be more valuable..
I propose less combat experience, more fatal combat, more other skills, no skill limit for things other than fighting (some kind of more close to perfect skill system maybe), and ability to make items at least as good as those found in dungeons..
It really doesn't hurt if nobody is interested to risk their characters life for a sword in a dungeon that can be bought for the local smith. It just removes some stupid combat.
If you need to be able to generate formal documentation, you should probably go for JavaDoc standard (that works well with almost any other language too). There are following reasons why to keep the documentation in the same place as the code:
Think of it. It should make sense.
I don't see why running Linux on a PPC is a reasong to buy this thing...
It's true that i86 architecture isn't the best around but still.. I'd rather see something that is designed to be simple but efficient, and that would scale from a handheld to a "mainframe".. dah.
Then port Linux on THAT thing.. there.. go.. but well.. maybe it was just me dreaming..
A "friend" of mine used to work for Bitboys.. as one of the main designers if I understood correctly.
I think the company failed because the business these days doesn't care for "now" but only "future" or something..
This has nothing to do with when are you going to get up :)
You're missing the point. GNU/Linux is gaining desktop space also. And a UNIX server is much more likely backend for GNU/Linux desktop than NT on the otherhand supports Windows desktops in more "native" way.
Which is the point of my writing ;)
Take the H, S, and V values of both colors. Then calculate a difference for each of them like: |h2 - h1| and |s2-s1| and |v2-v1|
Use Hue so that the min-value and max-value are the same (effectively to create a circle and find the smaller arc between the points on in) Then do something like dH*dS*dV possibly with some constant weights and the result shoul should be larger when the difference is larger.
For this to give useful numbers H, S and V should probably be a float between 0 and 1.
And I'd hope that humans will GET basic rights before 2020.
Sun's problem really is, that where it supports Linux, it still has it's own OS to sell. After all, Solaris probably is the number one, non-MS, "non-free" OS when you look at new installs.
Where MS's futher success cut's down Sun's share of the cake, Free Software is usually written for Unix like systems and therefore often run on Solaris too. As long as Sun can still sell it's own systems, Open Source is beneficial to it.
I mean, how many people actually use Sun's own shell on Solaris these days ? Anyone of you have bash, gcc, GNU grep, GNU tar, gzip, less, etc installed on their Solaris boxes ? I'd say quite many.
Solaris is known as stable platform by management people and you can use most of the great opensource apps on it. Why not ?
Also, if desktops run UNIX-like systems (like GNU) it becomes much easier for a UNIX company like Sun to make products that work together with other products. What I mean is that UNIX is much more open in design also than MS-Windows. In UNIX you can go ahead and try writing a superior MTA, but with MS you're pretty much stuck with Exchange, and you can't even replace the Exchange with some UNIX MTA because Outlook is so heavily integrated with Exchange that end users will start complaining about missing features (that depend on Exchange). Same goes for most of the other things.
Only problem is that when FreeBSD (or GNU/Linux) starts to gain more space in serverspace, it might mean that Solaris sales drop and Sun will become weaker to help us.
You can get the components and it doesn't cost any more.. sometimes even less..
You put it all together yourself and:
If you fear that the components might not sync with each other just get a list of components for your favourite vendor-PC and go with that list :)
No need to buy that useless MS crap either ;)
Back to 1995 or something all the apps out there actually worked with a slow 486. We'll what's the problem then ? Use the old distro ?
The problem is that bug fixes and security updates cannot be applied without a LOT of hand work and/or a great amount of new FEATURES which usually are there just to slow down the application.
Try running latest nethack on a 286 (or 386)..
from them we MIGHT be able to expect even SOME sort of idea about what patching and updating is all about.. then again.. MS has teached people that patching means new features so many will just think "it works fine, why patch ?"
Also it has became common that there are no patches to old versions.. you can't have the security without new features.. and some of those features might break you config.. this is not the case just with MS but also with Open Source and Free Software (as in speech)
..and there is on going development for things like audigy with the old system so hopefully they keep the old style drivers and modules as an option...
Actually, once one can save money by using Free Software, one should spend that to support what is important to them, was that good music or great movies.
I never had any problem with Debian or LFS so this might have something to do with Redhat's odd idea of "stable libraries" :)
It's a bit questionable if you need a CVS somewhere else, a mailing list archive somewhere else, a patch archive somewhere else, project homepage somewhere else.. whether it's any use to have them a SourceForge at all.. too bad since it really is a great tool, even if sometimes really laggy.
This sure ain't good news for maintainers of small projects.. especially of projects of questionable usefulness..
Actually, they already invented that with W2k.. if you khappen to be on a coffee break while it crashes and don't pay attention whether you are doing a login or a unlock, then you might be surprised to a fresh desktop just when you thought there was too many apps anyway..
Another BIG difference is that you can use Google without the toolbar. I never knew there was one, until I saw installed on somebodys browser at work last summer.
Well, the old saying goes along the lines: "If it ain't broken, don't fix it".
If you happen to have a IDE drive then at least that stuff is a bit buggy. If you happen to have a USB drive (like I do) that is even worse.
- Samba can do pretty well as a fileshare replacement. Nobody won't know the difference.
- Normal people most often don't even know that over half of webservers are already running Apache.
- OpenSource database servers like PostgreSQL already compete with Oracle.
- PHP is one of the most efficient was to handle dynamic web content. ASP is not.
Only that some of this won't most Slashdotters any happier since it's Sun, Oracle, Netscape (iPlanet's still widely used) and others that are more likely to lose their share than MicroSoft, because those that understand are already running something else, and most of the time couldn't care a sh*t about somebody elses desktop software.When we were still using floppy disks in PC's, nobody saw nothing wrong with first loading a database (which had to be quite small though) into the RAM and then serving it from there. Nobody would imagine more than one person waiting for a floppy disk to load something. When floppy disk was 390 MB and memory 640 you could read almost TWO FULL DISKS into memory. No one would have bought million computers with two floppy drives each just to serve some little database. And you also need to save that data there.
Now that we have all the "fast" hard drives almost nobody keeps stuff in memory. It's not the same, but if you're hard drive is 10000 as fast as your good old floppy drive, and you have million users instead of those 10 you used to have... are you going to buy million computers ? No, you increase memory cache. At some point however there is so much "memory cache" that you can actually get some more ram and throw that slow hard drive to a "Recycle Bin".
You save the powerbill for hard-drives, you save the powerbill for cooling, and you don't need that many machines.
Also for reliablity. RAM fails yeah. But so does hard drives. So double the powerbill saved as nobody will be running a non-RAID hard disk for a serious server. And then compare the time wasted when copying all the data to the newly added hard drive. Yes, SCSI can do it without CPU. But you also lose performance from the disk access.
In SERVER environment every little save counts, everything breaks, and the more of it you can have running and faster it will run.. well.. the cheaper it will be.. nobody actually cares what the hardware will cost. It will be little compared to what administration, power, spare-parts, replacement servers, whatever .. will cost in long run.
What if slashdot did no caching ?
GCC is the only compiler that haven't disagreed with me about how control structures of typedefinitions or "name your favourite compiler problem" should work.
With GCC you can compile just about anything that resebles C/C++ to on almost any platform TO almost any platform.
I mean, just as I would love a web browser that is 100% CSS and XHTML compliant, I also like to have a compiler that does what it's told to, even if the coder was creative.
Not tested that Intel thing.. but when writing a compiler from scratch isn't that easy to get it all right on first try.
Howabout a movement. Every /. reader out there stop buying/reading/using/etc anything that doesn't state that it's public domain or GPL or something like that ?