I guess what I find annoying isn't the Linux kernel, per se, but rather the maze of infrastructure around it. DON'T Hate me. I love Linux, but confession is cleansing and most of these are things Linux inherited from *NIX/SystemV and the fact that it was put together over a period of decades by thousands of contibutors, so there wasn't a history of system management to learn from yet when it was initially designed.
I also may be overdue for my meds. (Ahem...)
TWO desktop environments with similar capabilities.
Distros that put things in weird places.
The fact that distros have the freedom to put things in weird places.
The fact that 'weird places' means that there are a half-dozen places for binaries to go (/bin,/sbin,/usr/bin,/usr/sbin/, etc...)
... in fact, I find the whole/usr heirarchy annoying. Why was that necessary? Weren't the six other folders for binaries enough?
Don't even bring up/opt!
...or/usr/share!
"User-friendly" management tools with a learning curve that is almost as steep as that for the service or feature they are managing.
The same goes for script-based management systems.
The fact that these tools are necessary so I can cope with the management idiosynchosies and conventions of two dudes in Argentina that have been sysadmins of a UNIX server farm for 16 years.
/root is not under/home.
The SH/BASH scripting language. (!!!!)
Configuration files based on archaic paradigms like the SH/BASH scripting language.
Software that uses configuration files that served as an experiment in parsing for somebody's undergrad senior project. (Therefore, it has a unique, confusing syntax with zero readability and requires one of them there "management tools" I mentioned earlier.... I'M TALKING TO YOU, SENDMAIL!!!!)
I'm sure I can think up more, but that'll get the discussion started.
As I understand it, MS designed.NET as a platform-independent, hardware-agnostic technology like Java. This is an ironic shift from their "Use everything to sell Windows and Office" modus operendi of the past.
To be honest, I understand why MS would want to pursue.NET, but I'm completely stumped why they would submit it to ECMA - they aren't trying to embrace and extend an existing standard, they are trying to establish a new one. In terms of maintaining the uniqueness and exclusivity of the Windows platform (and therefore a reason for people to continue buying it) this move just doesn't make sense.
Tell me if I'm wrong, but the whole point of the Mono project is that it provides a way for developers to code binaries that will run on any ECMA/.NET-compliant platform, INCLUDING MS Windows! And using MS tools (C#), none the less! For a company that is scared to death of the threat of Linux, this just doesn't sound like a company that is circling the wagons to put up a fight -- it sounds like contrition. This makes it a hell of a lot easier for Linux developers to compete with Windows developers, don't you think?
I dunno.... I think I am missing a subtle but critical piece of information about the.NET platform or their marketing strategy for it that would link this all together, because the alternative is that Linux has ALREADY won, and MS is, in fact, planning to abandon Windows, one of the two divisions in the company that turn a profit.
Maybe on April Fool's Day, they'll announce "Microsoft Window Manager and Desktop for Linux".
It would shock and amaze me, for all the energy Microsoft has put into Linux FUD, if they DIDN'T have a secret test lab somewhere with a Windows compatible desktop for X, a Linux Active Directory integration module, and ports of MS Office and all of their other software underway. It makes sense for them to speculate in secret about what they would do if they needed to shift their market focus.
Doesn't anyone else find it a little bit bizarre that MS has submitted the specs for their next-generation platform technology to ECMA for certification as a standard?...that there is a project underway (Mono) that is close to 1.0 release which aims to clone the.Net dev platform, class libraries and CLR as open source on the Linux platform and MS hasn't even raised a finger to stop it? Hell, to look at the mono web site, it even sounds like MS is encouraging this sort of thing! This means that if they can work out the code-signing issues, you'll be able to take the next release of Great Plains Accounting.NET and drop it right onto your X desktop and run it next to The Gimp!
I am a dumb-ass. RTFA - I just saw a diagram of what he did, and that 360kph is probaby right, I thought he was using a paraplane-like-device. Someone mod me down to spare me the humility of repeated flamings.
I'm not saying it isn't possible, what with wind currents and all, but that top speed bothers me. 360 km/h ~= 226 mph, and that's NASCAR racing speed, folks, not a paraplane. I have a hunch we may be in the presence of a typo -- 36.0km/h would be more in line with my expectations of reality.
I'm trying to make sure that I'm not being a jerk, but I went and re-read the article, and you aren't even close to reporting his stated position accurately. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that your stated position agrees with his: it's not that copy protection didn't work, it's that it hurt sales more than it was worth.
To wit:
"The software industry was the first to face the issue that bits are easily copyable. It was also the first to try to create artificial boundaries to that copying. But because copy protection greatly inconvenienced customers, it slowed the adoption of any software that used it. We're seeing exactly the same thing now with music, where copy protection schemes have caused consumers to reject the crippled offerings of the commercial online music services."
I can't stop playing Tennis Critters from Garage Games. If I understand correctly, their actual line of business is a 3D game development engine and platform, which they promote by selling/distributing games developed by others USING the engine as demos!
As far as I'm concerned, they can go right on ahead and withhold their 'content' forever. I don't need my PC to be a $1200 TV, when my $300 TV fits that niche perfectly. I watch too damn much TV anyway.
Stores and organizations are already starting to ban cell phones with integrated cameras because of public safety, privacy and crime probems that are cropping up. I think this is a bad idea, even **if** it's local only.
Just as one example, suppose I want to burglarize your house. I can glue one of these to your car and before you leave and I've got something like five minutes warning when you're coming back into the area.
I, too, am very bothered that it is actually Woz who is planning to sell these.
This might be an easy question, and it's probably offtopic, but can anyone provide a 5 cent explanation about how the salt bits work?
To clarify: I understand the hashing part:
data bits + salt bits ==(hashing algorithm)==> hashed data
The idea is that the hashed result is unpredictable because of the addition of the salt bits, so the data is more difficult to decode with a dictionary attack.
What I don't understand is how you get the salt out on the other side to recover the original data. I know, I know - it's a one-way hash so you have to hash the thing you want to compare it to and see if its hash matches, but without knowing the salt before-hand, how do you get this to work?
Are the salt bits selected so that they get mapped to the kernel of the hashing function? That can't be it - the result would the same as with no salt. (Definition of kernel(f), IIRC - my group theory is old.
Ummm.... I don't like being the rain, but you won't even make a dent. The people who trade stock professionally in these quantities don't hang out in chat rooms.
When I got to college in 1986, the big political issue of conversation on campus was Apartheid. Well, not Apartheid, actually, but rather the divestment of university funds from companies maintained a business relationship with the country of South Africa, where Apartheid was the status quo. It seems that a bunch of empty-headed group-thinking pseudo-intellectual protestor types woke up halfway through macro-economics 101 classes and concluded that the best way to deal with the humanitarian atrocities committed by the South African government was to protest so convincingly that it compelled the university trustees to sell off all ownership in friendly corporations, thereby putting pressure on the South African government to abolish Apartheid. and restore political freedom to the black majority of the population.
In other words, they wanted to coerce the S.A. goverment by artificially manipulating the stock prices of friendly corporations in such a way that would result in additional control of the corporations being handed over AT A DISCOUNT to people who didn't give a rats ass how many black people were murdered to maintain the white minority control.
Brilliant, simply brilliant.
I would suggest that if you really want to fight SCO with their own stock, that you would be better off advising groups friendly to Linux to BUY as much SCO stock as possible. Stock is ownership ('0wn3X0r5h1p'?). Literally.
With 13 million shares outstanding, at worst, we need 51%, or around 7 million voting shares (almost all of the publicly available outstanding shares) to make it work. If I'm reading this right, this is less than the number of shares they are floating publicly (7.1 million) so technically it should be *possible* (however unlikely) to get 7 million friends to pony up $20 or so each to fire McBride and his dork friends with a big fat bonus at next years shareholder meeting.
Realisticaly, my plan probably won't work either without a sugar daddy, but at least it takes the market seriously.
(BTW, that Yahoo! The numbers on that finance page make for a fun read. Their EBITDA was $168K for all last year? On sales of 65+ million? That's close enough to zero to arouse my suspicions about their accounting. Microsoft's had almost 15 billion, NVidia was around 10+ million, IBM: 8+ billion, Red Hat's was -10 million (a loss), Wal-Mart reported 18+ billion. FYI.)
Discontinuing all Linux support? Did I miss something or did sombody BUY Cnet this week?
Oh, I see the problem now. Take a look at this snippet from the new upload.com web page:
Welcome to the new Upload.com! Submitting your software product through Upload.com gets you listed in CNET Networks' download library, which delivers 2.5 million downloads per day. The basic processing fee is $79 to list your product in Download.com, ZDNet Downloads, and MSN Downloads.
Does anyone know who owns Cnet?
(Yeah, probably a troll, but not really. I'm genuine about the "who owns them" question because it just seems like an odd choice to make, you know, like Netscape announcing they're laying off 50 Netscape developers a couple of weeks after signing the MS agreement that gives them IE for seven years. It's just odd, you know?)
"I think that Valve tries very hard to support as far back with system as we humanly can, and in this case we're going back to a Pentium II 800 with 128mb of RAM, but as get up to a Pentium 4 class you'll see better water and better effects."
So, clearly filesystems like MS is describing have not only been around since before 2000, but MS lost lawsuits over them 10 years ago! THAT'S JUST ONE EXAMPLE!
In fact, didn't they lose a patent lawsuit back in the early 90's over the disk/volume compression driver they included with DOS 6.0 or 6.2? It's been so long I don't remember the name, but IIRC they had to remove the patented algorithm in favor of a less efficient unencumbered alternative, change the name of the compression system and issue the changes as a DOS6.21 update release.
Am I crazy or is there really no difference, and MS has fallen into some IP time-warp? What's next; patenting the linked list?
We need a private alternative to the PTO - it's clear they can't do their jobs anymore. Hell, all they'd have to learn is "google.com" and "slashdot.org" and they could reduce the number of crap patents by a factor of 100.
I would argue that Yahoo! never really *had* a search engine. Their gig was creating an categorical index to sites, not pages. You are right in pointing out the deficiency in this approach, but if you think about how they got started, it makes sense that they never got around to it: they were a portal/start page from day one, and (I don't think) never really considered their options at trying to be anything else until very recently.
The thing that bothers me about the Overture deal is that it's not even a good search engine - it's all about ad placement. Well, Google has that AND a great search engine, so I'm not even sure how this makes them more competitive! The extra ad revenue will give them some breathing room to tweak the books, but something stinks here -- 1.6 billion seems like a steep, steep price for the right to sell ads. I think Yahoo is in more trouble than they are letting on, and this one may sink them permanently.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess what I find annoying isn't the Linux kernel, per se, but rather the maze of infrastructure around it. DON'T Hate me. I love Linux, but confession is cleansing and most of these are things Linux inherited from *NIX/SystemV and the fact that it was put together over a period of decades by thousands of contibutors, so there wasn't a history of system management to learn from yet when it was initially designed.
I also may be overdue for my meds. (Ahem...)
TWO desktop environments with similar capabilities.
Distros that put things in weird places.
The fact that distros have the freedom to put things in weird places.
The fact that 'weird places' means that there are a half-dozen places for binaries to go (/bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin/, etc...)
Don't even bring up /opt!
"User-friendly" management tools with a learning curve that is almost as steep as that for the service or feature they are managing.
The same goes for script-based management systems.
The fact that these tools are necessary so I can cope with the management idiosynchosies and conventions of two dudes in Argentina that have been sysadmins of a UNIX server farm for 16 years.
The SH/BASH scripting language. (!!!!)
Configuration files based on archaic paradigms like the SH/BASH scripting language.
Software that uses configuration files that served as an experiment in parsing for somebody's undergrad senior project. (Therefore, it has a unique, confusing syntax with zero readability and requires one of them there "management tools" I mentioned earlier.... I'M TALKING TO YOU, SENDMAIL!!!!)
I'm sure I can think up more, but that'll get the discussion started.
As I understand it, MS designed
To be honest, I understand why MS would want to pursue
Tell me if I'm wrong, but the whole point of the Mono project is that it provides a way for developers to code binaries that will run on any ECMA/.NET-compliant platform, INCLUDING MS Windows! And using MS tools (C#), none the less! For a company that is scared to death of the threat of Linux, this just doesn't sound like a company that is circling the wagons to put up a fight -- it sounds like contrition. This makes it a hell of a lot easier for Linux developers to compete with Windows developers, don't you think?
I dunno.... I think I am missing a subtle but critical piece of information about the
Maybe on April Fool's Day, they'll announce "Microsoft Window Manager and Desktop for Linux".
It would shock and amaze me, for all the energy Microsoft has put into Linux FUD, if they DIDN'T have a secret test lab somewhere with a Windows compatible desktop for X, a Linux Active Directory integration module, and ports of MS Office and all of their other software underway. It makes sense for them to speculate in secret about what they would do if they needed to shift their market focus.
Doesn't anyone else find it a little bit bizarre that MS has submitted the specs for their next-generation platform technology to ECMA for certification as a standard?
Nobody finds that to be weird?
I am a dumb-ass. RTFA - I just saw a diagram of what he did, and that 360kph is probaby right, I thought he was using a paraplane-like-device. Someone mod me down to spare me the humility of repeated flamings.
Thank you.
I'm not saying it isn't possible, what with wind currents and all, but that top speed bothers me. 360 km/h ~= 226 mph, and that's NASCAR racing speed, folks, not a paraplane. I have a hunch we may be in the presence of a typo -- 36.0km/h would be more in line with my expectations of reality.
I'm trying to make sure that I'm not being a jerk, but I went and re-read the article, and you aren't even close to reporting his stated position accurately. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that your stated position agrees with his: it's not that copy protection didn't work, it's that it hurt sales more than it was worth.
To wit:
"The software industry was the first to face the issue that bits are easily copyable. It was also the first to try to create artificial boundaries to that copying. But because copy protection greatly inconvenienced customers, it slowed the adoption of any software that used it. We're seeing exactly the same thing now with music, where copy protection schemes have caused consumers to reject the crippled offerings of the commercial online music services."
I can't stop playing Tennis Critters from Garage Games. If I understand correctly, their actual line of business is a 3D game development engine and platform, which they promote by selling/distributing games developed by others USING the engine as demos!
Ingenious!
As far as I'm concerned, they can go right on ahead and withhold their 'content' forever. I don't need my PC to be a $1200 TV, when my $300 TV fits that niche perfectly. I watch too damn much TV anyway.
other than the rude behavior of blowing smoke up people's asses. (which many people have addressed time and again)
Why would you trust the CRC?
Beautiful. Glorious and beautiful.
Keep up the good work, Diebold. You are making my case for me.
So the salt is not secret since you have to provide it to the recipient for them to make use of the hashed data? Got it.
So, all the salt does is force attackers to make 2^(NumOfSaltBits) dictionaries to be guaranteed that their data 'library' is complete, right?
Stores and organizations are already starting to ban cell phones with integrated cameras because of public safety, privacy and crime probems that are cropping up. I think this is a bad idea, even **if** it's local only.
Just as one example, suppose I want to burglarize your house. I can glue one of these to your car and before you leave and I've got something like five minutes warning when you're coming back into the area.
I, too, am very bothered that it is actually Woz who is planning to sell these.
This might be an easy question, and it's probably offtopic, but can anyone provide a 5 cent explanation about how the salt bits work?
To clarify: I understand the hashing part:
data bits + salt bits ==(hashing algorithm)==> hashed data
The idea is that the hashed result is unpredictable because of the addition of the salt bits, so the data is more difficult to decode with a dictionary attack.
What I don't understand is how you get the salt out on the other side to recover the original data. I know, I know - it's a one-way hash so you have to hash the thing you want to compare it to and see if its hash matches, but without knowing the salt before-hand, how do you get this to work?
Are the salt bits selected so that they get mapped to the kernel of the hashing function? That can't be it - the result would the same as with no salt. (Definition of kernel(f), IIRC - my group theory is old.
Help?
Actually, my point was that if you have money, you *ARE* the people making the decisions. /nitpick.
Ummm.... I don't like being the rain, but you won't even make a dent. The people who trade stock professionally in these quantities don't hang out in chat rooms.
When I got to college in 1986, the big political issue of conversation on campus was Apartheid. Well, not Apartheid, actually, but rather the divestment of university funds from companies maintained a business relationship with the country of South Africa, where Apartheid was the status quo. It seems that a bunch of empty-headed group-thinking pseudo-intellectual protestor types woke up halfway through macro-economics 101 classes and concluded that the best way to deal with the humanitarian atrocities committed by the South African government was to protest so convincingly that it compelled the university trustees to sell off all ownership in friendly corporations, thereby putting pressure on the South African government to abolish Apartheid. and restore political freedom to the black majority of the population.
In other words, they wanted to coerce the S.A. goverment by artificially manipulating the stock prices of friendly corporations in such a way that would result in additional control of the corporations being handed over AT A DISCOUNT to people who didn't give a rats ass how many black people were murdered to maintain the white minority control.
Brilliant, simply brilliant.
I would suggest that if you really want to fight SCO with their own stock, that you would be better off advising groups friendly to Linux to BUY as much SCO stock as possible. Stock is ownership ('0wn3X0r5h1p'?). Literally.
Take a look: SCOX
With 13 million shares outstanding, at worst, we need 51%, or around 7 million voting shares (almost all of the publicly available outstanding shares) to make it work. If I'm reading this right, this is less than the number of shares they are floating publicly (7.1 million) so technically it should be *possible* (however unlikely) to get 7 million friends to pony up $20 or so each to fire McBride and his dork friends with a big fat bonus at next years shareholder meeting.
Realisticaly, my plan probably won't work either without a sugar daddy, but at least it takes the market seriously.
(BTW, that Yahoo! The numbers on that finance page make for a fun read. Their EBITDA was $168K for all last year? On sales of 65+ million? That's close enough to zero to arouse my suspicions about their accounting. Microsoft's had almost 15 billion, NVidia was around 10+ million, IBM: 8+ billion, Red Hat's was -10 million (a loss), Wal-Mart reported 18+ billion. FYI.)
(BTWA, Investor Words will help you decipher the data.)
From the headline, I could have **sworn** that "Puzzle Pirates" was about something VERY different.
Sincerely,
Relieved in Rhode Island
Discontinuing all Linux support? Did I miss something or did sombody BUY Cnet this week?
Oh, I see the problem now. Take a look at this snippet from the new upload.com web page:
Welcome to the new Upload.com! Submitting your software product through Upload.com gets you listed in CNET Networks' download library, which delivers 2.5 million downloads per day. The basic processing fee is $79 to list your product in Download.com, ZDNet Downloads, and MSN Downloads.
Does anyone know who owns Cnet?
(Yeah, probably a troll, but not really. I'm genuine about the "who owns them" question because it just seems like an odd choice to make, you know, like Netscape announcing they're laying off 50 Netscape developers a couple of weeks after signing the MS agreement that gives them IE for seven years. It's just odd, you know?)
"I think that Valve tries very hard to support as far back with system as we humanly can, and in this case we're going back to a Pentium II 800 with 128mb of RAM, but as get up to a Pentium 4 class you'll see better water and better effects."
Pentium II 800?
I thought they peaked at, like 450!
My old PC is worse than I thought.
Yup, I'm right. MS's DoubleSpace infringed on sisk compression patents held by Stac, Inc.
To wit:
Here is Stac's original complaint
One guy's opinion
Wikipedia entry (scroll down a ways to 1993)
I should just let you Google these yourself.
So, clearly filesystems like MS is describing have not only been around since before 2000, but MS lost lawsuits over them 10 years ago! THAT'S JUST ONE EXAMPLE!
Remember Stacker?
In fact, didn't they lose a patent lawsuit back in the early 90's over the disk/volume compression driver they included with DOS 6.0 or 6.2? It's been so long I don't remember the name, but IIRC they had to remove the patented algorithm in favor of a less efficient unencumbered alternative, change the name of the compression system and issue the changes as a DOS6.21 update release.
Am I crazy or is there really no difference, and MS has fallen into some IP time-warp? What's next; patenting the linked list?
We need a private alternative to the PTO - it's clear they can't do their jobs anymore. Hell, all they'd have to learn is "google.com" and "slashdot.org" and they could reduce the number of crap patents by a factor of 100.
CRAP!
Stupid typos....
That was supposed to read "Duke NUKEM Forever", not "Duke NUMEM Forever".
OK, you ready? really? you sure? OK, here goes...
(ahem)
Well, the developers of Duke Numem Forever are chasing women -- I can't imagine what else could have distracted them *this* long.
[applause sign]
Thank you, thank you... you've been a wonderful crowd... I'll be here all week....
Why would you want to be a woman in a game, when you can already be one in an AOL chat room?
I would argue that Yahoo! never really *had* a search engine. Their gig was creating an categorical index to sites, not pages. You are right in pointing out the deficiency in this approach, but if you think about how they got started, it makes sense that they never got around to it: they were a portal/start page from day one, and (I don't think) never really considered their options at trying to be anything else until very recently.
The thing that bothers me about the Overture deal is that it's not even a good search engine - it's all about ad placement. Well, Google has that AND a great search engine, so I'm not even sure how this makes them more competitive! The extra ad revenue will give them some breathing room to tweak the books, but something stinks here -- 1.6 billion seems like a steep, steep price for the right to sell ads. I think Yahoo is in more trouble than they are letting on, and this one may sink them permanently.