Re:The Desktop Is Not Important Right Now
on
Linux in 2004?
·
· Score: 1
No stupid e-mail viruses. Security is much easier in a proper UNIX environment.
Er, pardon? I'm currently reading A Short Course On Computer Viruses by Cohen (the father of mathematical viral theory), and I'd have to beg to differ. He's proven _mathematically_ that you can't absolutely get away from viruses without _severely_ limiting the system. Period. Unixes are vulnerable, DOS is vulnerable, Windows is vulnerable, even Bell-LaPadula-based systems. So, as you can guess, Linux will be vulnerable to viruses as well.. But regardless of all that, e-mail viruses can infect regardless of the OS (assuming it's still usable.) If less than intelligent people continue to execute attachments, then e-mail viruses will spread. E-mail viruses are an end-user issue, not an OS issue.
P.S.: While this book is almost ten years old, I'd sincerely suggest that anyone interested in viral theory check it out. As an example of his work, you can see one of his 1984 papers on viruses here.
A Democracy is a regime where the legislature is answerable to the governed. This is currently the case in the United States and a whole host of other countries. The US achieves this by having a directly elected congress and, currently, a directly elected senate.
Not so sure about that one. If you really want to get pedantic about it, the US is a representative democracy. We trust certain people to enact our will, but do not do so directly on the federal level. Our founders placed specific restrictions on majority rule, on the basis of Greece. We have a lot of trappings intentionally in the process that slow the democratic process down. Yes, through the current processes, a majority can end up reigning over the minority. If a super majority had enough cajones(sp.?) to do it, they could completely abolish the Constitution. Of course, in that case, the US wouldn't be the US in all but name.
In short, the point I'm trying to make is that you can't just call the US a democracy, and leave it at that. It's a Representative Democracy, and was (for the most part) intended to be that way. Take either part away, and you have something that is arguably different.
P.S.: Another thing that distinguishes the US from a direct democracy is the possibility for _massive_ agency loss. Some (not necessarily myself) would point to the 2000 election, but you could also point to issues like RIAA lobbying, etc. Does the majority _really_ believe in what the DMCA actually states?
I must say, I've installed LFS 4.0 and 4.1 on a few machines, and it's taught me a _lot_ about Linux. I wasn't totally ignorant before, but I now know a bit more about compilation flags, standard directory structures, etc. It is, of course, a long and sometimes painful install - which is why I highly recommend booting from Knoppix to do the installation, as you'll get lots of things to toy with while you're waiting for some of the longer things to compile. =) Of course, that which really sucks is the fact that I don't want to reinstall until 2.6 becomes stable, and I can run XFS on my box..;.; Oh well. Hopefully that won't be too far off.
On the major tips side of things, if you've never done LFS before, make sure you download and install ssh for scp and sftp or lynx/links before booting into it. LFS is bare to the point of having no www, ftp, or nfs utilities, which can be annoying. =p Anyways, for those brave few souls, good luck, and happy compiling!
This case may not be as strong as it could be, but there's something really good that could come out of it.
The discovery process. I want to see documents presented in court that are imperative to the EFF's case that are absolutely incriminating to Diebold when it comes to voter fraud. If that stuff gets on the record, the news media is going to have a heyday.
Can anyone else see large software companies having this problem? Company sends the project overseas to be developed, employees return the finished source, and then toss their NDA in the trash by holding the source ransom over the internet.
We've all seen what source in the wild can do (whether you believe some of the rumors about how HL2 source was released, it's _still_ delayed), and a group trying to profit off of source code could even be worse. Of course, no manager is going to listen to little old me.. Mainly because I'm not crawling down their throats for this quarters profit margin. =T
It most certainly does not. Our current legal system equates the human species with Constitutional rights under law. (More specifically, citizenship, but that's a whole different barrel of orangutans.)
For instance, there are apes that can communicate via sign language with trainers in a conversation similar to a child. However, there are untrainably mentally handicapped people who can not communicate with others, much less handle taking care of themselves. Yet a non-human primate can still be put down without a trial, where it takes a trial to put someone who is severely mentally handicapped under government custody.
For those of you who are easily offended, I am neither proposing that apes be elevated above mentally handicapped in the rights status, nor trying to be particularly offensive towards the handicapped. =p This is just a legal precedent that's fairly obvious. Humans are specieist (sp.?), as evolution would have them be.
I wouldn't count on that happening very soon. From what I gathered while upgrading the firmware, the BEFSR[4,8]1 routers have _no_ free memory - the firmware developers cram everything they can into those little bitty things. Snort, telnet, vi.. They all seem way to big. =)
P.S.: I never thought I'd say that telnet and vi were too big for something. .
I know, I know, most of the posts have been unhelpful thus far.. But I have to ask, should they be? We rely on Google as a tool for relevance for specific searchs, and "Google Bombing," as it so blatantly suggests, undermines this. If you site is good and relevant, it should rise to the top without any such techniques. If it doesn't.. It probably isn't relevant to the searches.
Sorry for going off on this, but Google is a touchy subject for me lots of others - mainly 'cause other things suck. =)
If you pop off a corner of a solved Rubiks cube, rotate it 120 degrees, and pop it back on, it becomes unsolvable. You should try it on someone you hate, or someone you know who won't murder you repeatedly. >.>
I fear that this post may be lost in the numbers surrounding it, but it needs to be said. First off, I'd like to give an example of how utterly tiny this thing will be. If the sun were to turn into a black hole instantly, its event horizon would have a 3km radius. For the sun, that's extraordinarily tiny. According to the article, this thing should have the mass of a couple hundred protons. That's, in case you can comprehend these numbers, 1.67*10^-25. Now, the radius of this bugger will be that times 1.48*10^-27. Yeah. That's FREAKING TINY. 2.47*10^-52 tiny. Many many many orders of magnitude less than the Planck distance.
Now, to address another issue. Hawking radiation is a pretty solidly entrenched idea. Particle and anti-particle pairs do form in space - the existance of the particles which are a part of it have been experimentally verified through the Casimir effect, which is Googleable. So worries about that not happening are pretty unnecessary. And, as many others have stated, these microscopic black holes have been forming and evaporating all the times due to cosmic rays right above our heads.
For those who wish to learn more about black hole physics, I have to suggest an excellent source for the layman: Jillian's Guide to Black Holes. She can explain things in simple terms, and has some hefty gravitational wave and Penrose diagrams for the really interested.
Oh, and P.S.: If the world really is sucked up by a black hole, it'll be a saving grace for all of the physicists who have been extraordinarily wrong for the past three-quarters of a century. ^-^
And yet another P.S.: For those physicists out there, what interesting things start to happen with black holes at scales this much past the Planck length? I believe that I've read somewhere about quantum gravity showing up heavily, but I'm unsure. =)
I'd just like to point out to people that according to this site, a band may not stick with just one label. A lot of Prodigy's stuff seems to be RIAA tainted, but Jilted Generation is not. In short, if you want a CD, check to see if its under RIAA grips instead of going off of other albums you've seen/may have.
Major props to the creator of this program; I can now feel purchase a replacement of my old Jilted Generation without convulsing from guilt. =)
The difference between Spamhaus and the RIAA is that Spamhaus is interfering with "speech" that interferes with more constructive speech, and the RIAA is trying to interfere with speech that interferes with their monopoly on certain messages.
I disagree. The difference between anti-spam address lists and the RIAA tactics is that anti-spam address lists are utterly and completely voluntary. There's a problem when ISPs start ignoring traffic from certain segments.. But to say that everyone has free speech and then say that you don't have the freedom to plug your ears is hypocrisy. Just don't plug my ears for me.
How many people have actually tried switching to Dvorak? I did once. Researched the necessary stuff, learned why it was better, then remapped my keys and reconfigured my keyboard. To put it simply, the three days I tried it, it was PAINFUL. I'm a 100 wpm typist under QWERTY.. And going to around 10 WPM in about five minutes is a complete system shock. Though, it did open my eyes to one thing.. I know how my mom feels when she needs to write something.
If the teacher isnt passionate about the subject, how is he going to get the students to be.
He isn't. For good examples, see almost all public schools (not all teachers, but far too many), and some post-secondary (college, etc.) institutions. I've always wondered why teachers who hate teaching remain in the job.. God knows it isn't for the money.
Ah you cry, but the time taken by a pendulum does not depend on the weight, well yes but the pennies slightly raise the center of gravity of the bob you see...
Slightly off-topic, but interesting none the less: a normal pendulum does not take the same time to reach the bottom no matter where it is released, contrary to popular belief. The correct curve is actually an inverted cycloid, and the finding of this curve was deemed the 'tautochrone problem.' Obligatory mathworld linkage: Tautochrone Problem.
Of course, this is an example of where reality and theory conflict: constructing a clock with a tautochronic (a made up word?) pendulum wouldn't matter enough due to friction etc.; the semi-circle is just fine for pendulum based clocks. =)
A popular theory is that our universe is but a bubble (or doughnut) in a sea of other universe bubbles (or doughnuts); contained and wrapped up into about 10 dimensions.
You had to do it, didn't you? Now I'm going to picture our universe as a plastic bubble in bubble wrap.. I just hope some possible being that can see these universes doesn't pop us. Though, the thought of doughnut bubble wrap is appealing..
Not too long. Doing an Linux From Scratch install can take less than a day, if you know what you're about. That includes putting everything together the right way, too; not just compile times.
Manufacturers should be allowed to so whatever they want with their product, and on the other side consumers should know what they are getting.
I completely agree. I also think that laws shouldn't be passed regarding this issue. It shouldn't be illegal to break DRM, but it also shouldn't be illegal to put DRM on a disk. When the companies get too greedy and the functionality of their products is lost, they'll feel it in their pocketbook.
Let the consumer decide.
I think that's the problem. These detectors should work in theory, but gravitation waves are so minute when they get to us that it's _really_ hard to be able to get a reading on them. My bet is the first to provide fairly solid evidence of gravitational waves gets a Nobel.
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No stupid e-mail viruses. Security is much easier in a proper UNIX environment.
Er, pardon? I'm currently reading A Short Course On Computer Viruses by Cohen (the father of mathematical viral theory), and I'd have to beg to differ. He's proven _mathematically_ that you can't absolutely get away from viruses without _severely_ limiting the system. Period. Unixes are vulnerable, DOS is vulnerable, Windows is vulnerable, even Bell-LaPadula-based systems. So, as you can guess, Linux will be vulnerable to viruses as well.. But regardless of all that, e-mail viruses can infect regardless of the OS (assuming it's still usable.) If less than intelligent people continue to execute attachments, then e-mail viruses will spread. E-mail viruses are an end-user issue, not an OS issue.
P.S.: While this book is almost ten years old, I'd sincerely suggest that anyone interested in viral theory check it out. As an example of his work, you can see one of his 1984 papers on viruses here.
A Democracy is a regime where the legislature is answerable to the governed. This is currently the case in the United States and a whole host of other countries. The US achieves this by having a directly elected congress and, currently, a directly elected senate.
Not so sure about that one. If you really want to get pedantic about it, the US is a representative democracy. We trust certain people to enact our will, but do not do so directly on the federal level. Our founders placed specific restrictions on majority rule, on the basis of Greece. We have a lot of trappings intentionally in the process that slow the democratic process down. Yes, through the current processes, a majority can end up reigning over the minority. If a super majority had enough cajones(sp.?) to do it, they could completely abolish the Constitution. Of course, in that case, the US wouldn't be the US in all but name.
In short, the point I'm trying to make is that you can't just call the US a democracy, and leave it at that. It's a Representative Democracy, and was (for the most part) intended to be that way. Take either part away, and you have something that is arguably different.
P.S.: Another thing that distinguishes the US from a direct democracy is the possibility for _massive_ agency loss. Some (not necessarily myself) would point to the 2000 election, but you could also point to issues like RIAA lobbying, etc. Does the majority _really_ believe in what the DMCA actually states?
I must say, I've installed LFS 4.0 and 4.1 on a few machines, and it's taught me a _lot_ about Linux. I wasn't totally ignorant before, but I now know a bit more about compilation flags, standard directory structures, etc. It is, of course, a long and sometimes painful install - which is why I highly recommend booting from Knoppix to do the installation, as you'll get lots of things to toy with while you're waiting for some of the longer things to compile. =) Of course, that which really sucks is the fact that I don't want to reinstall until 2.6 becomes stable, and I can run XFS on my box.. ;.; Oh well. Hopefully that won't be too far off.
On the major tips side of things, if you've never done LFS before, make sure you download and install ssh for scp and sftp or lynx/links before booting into it. LFS is bare to the point of having no www, ftp, or nfs utilities, which can be annoying. =p Anyways, for those brave few souls, good luck, and happy compiling!
Wait for it..
Viri! Virii! Viruses! Viren! Viris, viriis, virexies, virusenixien!
Okay, now there's no need for anymore of that.
I don't think I've ever read "nano" so many times in one sitting.
Someone has some damned big balls to do something like that...
Let's hope they're cut off.
This case may not be as strong as it could be, but there's something really good that could come out of it.
The discovery process. I want to see documents presented in court that are imperative to the EFF's case that are absolutely incriminating to Diebold when it comes to voter fraud. If that stuff gets on the record, the news media is going to have a heyday.
Subliminal porn.. It's gotta happen sooner or later..
Hey, I'm not actually typing this, am I? Wait.. The cursor is moving to the submit button! Nooo, sto
Can anyone else see large software companies having this problem? Company sends the project overseas to be developed, employees return the finished source, and then toss their NDA in the trash by holding the source ransom over the internet.
We've all seen what source in the wild can do (whether you believe some of the rumors about how HL2 source was released, it's _still_ delayed), and a group trying to profit off of source code could even be worse. Of course, no manager is going to listen to little old me.. Mainly because I'm not crawling down their throats for this quarters profit margin. =T
It most certainly does not. Our current legal system equates the human species with Constitutional rights under law. (More specifically, citizenship, but that's a whole different barrel of orangutans.)
For instance, there are apes that can communicate via sign language with trainers in a conversation similar to a child. However, there are untrainably mentally handicapped people who can not communicate with others, much less handle taking care of themselves. Yet a non-human primate can still be put down without a trial, where it takes a trial to put someone who is severely mentally handicapped under government custody.
For those of you who are easily offended, I am neither proposing that apes be elevated above mentally handicapped in the rights status, nor trying to be particularly offensive towards the handicapped. =p This is just a legal precedent that's fairly obvious. Humans are specieist (sp.?), as evolution would have them be.
Ford: We're switching to Linux.
Microsoft: Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.
(Shamelessly stolen from D.N.A.)
I wouldn't count on that happening very soon. From what I gathered while upgrading the firmware, the BEFSR[4,8]1 routers have _no_ free memory - the firmware developers cram everything they can into those little bitty things. Snort, telnet, vi.. They all seem way to big. =) P.S.: I never thought I'd say that telnet and vi were too big for something. .
I know, I know, most of the posts have been unhelpful thus far.. But I have to ask, should they be? We rely on Google as a tool for relevance for specific searchs, and "Google Bombing," as it so blatantly suggests, undermines this. If you site is good and relevant, it should rise to the top without any such techniques. If it doesn't.. It probably isn't relevant to the searches.
Sorry for going off on this, but Google is a touchy subject for me lots of others - mainly 'cause other things suck. =)
If you pop off a corner of a solved Rubiks cube, rotate it 120 degrees, and pop it back on, it becomes unsolvable. You should try it on someone you hate, or someone you know who won't murder you repeatedly. >.>
I fear that this post may be lost in the numbers surrounding it, but it needs to be said. First off, I'd like to give an example of how utterly tiny this thing will be. If the sun were to turn into a black hole instantly, its event horizon would have a 3km radius. For the sun, that's extraordinarily tiny. According to the article, this thing should have the mass of a couple hundred protons. That's, in case you can comprehend these numbers, 1.67*10^-25. Now, the radius of this bugger will be that times 1.48*10^-27. Yeah. That's FREAKING TINY. 2.47*10^-52 tiny. Many many many orders of magnitude less than the Planck distance.
Now, to address another issue. Hawking radiation is a pretty solidly entrenched idea. Particle and anti-particle pairs do form in space - the existance of the particles which are a part of it have been experimentally verified through the Casimir effect, which is Googleable. So worries about that not happening are pretty unnecessary. And, as many others have stated, these microscopic black holes have been forming and evaporating all the times due to cosmic rays right above our heads.
For those who wish to learn more about black hole physics, I have to suggest an excellent source for the layman: Jillian's Guide to Black Holes. She can explain things in simple terms, and has some hefty gravitational wave and Penrose diagrams for the really interested.
Oh, and P.S.: If the world really is sucked up by a black hole, it'll be a saving grace for all of the physicists who have been extraordinarily wrong for the past three-quarters of a century. ^-^
And yet another P.S.: For those physicists out there, what interesting things start to happen with black holes at scales this much past the Planck length? I believe that I've read somewhere about quantum gravity showing up heavily, but I'm unsure. =)
I'd just like to point out to people that according to this site, a band may not stick with just one label. A lot of Prodigy's stuff seems to be RIAA tainted, but Jilted Generation is not. In short, if you want a CD, check to see if its under RIAA grips instead of going off of other albums you've seen/may have.
Major props to the creator of this program; I can now feel purchase a replacement of my old Jilted Generation without convulsing from guilt. =)
The difference between Spamhaus and the RIAA is that Spamhaus is interfering with "speech" that interferes with more constructive speech, and the RIAA is trying to interfere with speech that interferes with their monopoly on certain messages.
I disagree. The difference between anti-spam address lists and the RIAA tactics is that anti-spam address lists are utterly and completely voluntary. There's a problem when ISPs start ignoring traffic from certain segments.. But to say that everyone has free speech and then say that you don't have the freedom to plug your ears is hypocrisy. Just don't plug my ears for me.
Get your lawyers lubed up and ready to go.
I think what you meant to say was "Get lubed up and get your lawyers ready to go." They are lawyers, after all. >.>
How many people have actually tried switching to Dvorak? I did once. Researched the necessary stuff, learned why it was better, then remapped my keys and reconfigured my keyboard. To put it simply, the three days I tried it, it was PAINFUL. I'm a 100 wpm typist under QWERTY.. And going to around 10 WPM in about five minutes is a complete system shock. Though, it did open my eyes to one thing.. I know how my mom feels when she needs to write something.
If the teacher isnt passionate about the subject, how is he going to get the students to be.
He isn't. For good examples, see almost all public schools (not all teachers, but far too many), and some post-secondary (college, etc.) institutions. I've always wondered why teachers who hate teaching remain in the job.. God knows it isn't for the money.
Ah you cry, but the time taken by a pendulum does not depend on the weight, well yes but the pennies slightly raise the center of gravity of the bob you see...
Slightly off-topic, but interesting none the less: a normal pendulum does not take the same time to reach the bottom no matter where it is released, contrary to popular belief. The correct curve is actually an inverted cycloid, and the finding of this curve was deemed the 'tautochrone problem.' Obligatory mathworld linkage: Tautochrone Problem.
Of course, this is an example of where reality and theory conflict: constructing a clock with a tautochronic (a made up word?) pendulum wouldn't matter enough due to friction etc.; the semi-circle is just fine for pendulum based clocks. =)
A popular theory is that our universe is but a bubble (or doughnut) in a sea of other universe bubbles (or doughnuts); contained and wrapped up into about 10 dimensions.
You had to do it, didn't you? Now I'm going to picture our universe as a plastic bubble in bubble wrap.. I just hope some possible being that can see these universes doesn't pop us. Though, the thought of doughnut bubble wrap is appealing..
Not too long. Doing an Linux From Scratch install can take less than a day, if you know what you're about. That includes putting everything together the right way, too; not just compile times.
Manufacturers should be allowed to so whatever they want with their product, and on the other side consumers should know what they are getting.
I completely agree. I also think that laws shouldn't be passed regarding this issue. It shouldn't be illegal to break DRM, but it also shouldn't be illegal to put DRM on a disk. When the companies get too greedy and the functionality of their products is lost, they'll feel it in their pocketbook.
Let the consumer decide.
How did they test that it works?
I think that's the problem. These detectors should work in theory, but gravitation waves are so minute when they get to us that it's _really_ hard to be able to get a reading on them. My bet is the first to provide fairly solid evidence of gravitational waves gets a Nobel.