I have to ask you to read your post back to yourself.
I run Gentoo on most of my machines as well, and yea, for the power user it's great.
But to even think about asking your mom or dad to "tell the kernel to load the right modules" sounds silly.
What's a Kernel? Module? After you explain these concepts, you need to actually locate the right module which may or may not be compiled in. "Okay mom, at the bash prompt, type make menuconfig and select the right options for your hardware. And don't forget to turn on MTRR and I2C as well. You might need them."
I wouldn't say that the vast majority of people using computers are only surfing and e-mail, although it is a lot. From my own experience, these same people tend to also go out and buy printers and digital cameras.
As far as the media player thing, WMP and Quicktime are often pre-installed on machines and will play 90% of the media out there.
The other 10% being Real, and from what I can tell a lot of people are starting to phase out the use of Real on websites.
But, I digress. Xine is a very nice media player for Linux, and has played everything I threw at it. Hopefully the DV playback gets a little better though.
What, I ask you, would motivate me to re-read your mangled post that jumped all over the place, when you got all upset about it like an 8 year old girl?
You're wrong about the snappy remark when my reply warranted no such thing.
Look, this is dumb. You wanna be a little punkass internet dude, fine. I can't stop you.
And I'll call you whatever fucking names I want. This ain't High School, in the real world people perform "name-calling" on a regular basis, you dweeb.
I've never really had a problem because I like to keep my hardware up to date, and I don't upgrade the OS if it won't support my hardware.
Much in the same way as you only buy hardware that is compatible with your OS, I won't just upgrade my OS and expect the reverse to be true every time.
"Besides, having Linux native drivers might only serve to discourage people from creating open-source versions of the drivers."
Who gives a shit. I'd rather have a driver from the company that actually built the hardware, over some guy that had to reverse-engineer the fucking thing the best he could. I can actually call my hardware manufacturer if I have a problem, not Jack Smith of Nowhere, Iowa.
I love the guys that reverse-engineer shit, I really do. But why re-invent the wheel if the manufacturer releases a driver? Who cares if it's binary if it works and comes at no extra charge..
"Their experience leads me to think that some kind of stable ABI is needed to allow device drivers to be distributed in a binary form."
"and after all who wants more binary-only cruft floating around?"
"Besides, having Linux native drivers might only serve to discourage people from creating open-source versions of the drivers."
Huh? Well which is it?
Personally, I don't have a problem with Binary drivers. I wish the kernel would stop the messages of "This software will TAINT the kernel!" and such. I don't mind some of the software on my PC being "normal binary only" software.
I understand some hardware developers not wanting to release their drivers in source form. Maybe they license other non-free software for use in it. Who knows. If they are providing a driver for me, to run on my Linux system, that works, I don't care.
As long as the core OS (including the base kernel, file system things, desktop environment) remains open source/GPL, I'm happy.
And to top it all off, I actually (gasp) BUY software sometimes. I have absolutely no problem paying Adobe for Photoshop. Or Premiere. I don't mind paying $50 for a cool game. I believe in getting paid for programming, but in the case of the Operating System, it really needs to be out of the hands of any one company.
"You Linux geeks need to quit being so elitist, suck it up, and make it easy to use."
I hope that comment wasn't to me. I said that I wish it was as easy (as windows,) and I said that it's slow going.
My KDE desktop *IS* very pretty though. I have a nice Plastik style with the Knifty window decoration. It's smooth and quick, and it looks very nice.
I don't think the user interface is the problem, nor "fun." KDE is a mature desktop system in my opinion and it's getting better with every release. It has taken some of the successful Windows desktop elements and expanded on them. It's very easy to use and navigate the system.
The problem lies in application and device support. Device support is showing up all over the place; fast graphics drivers direct from the manufacturers, sound support that as far as I can tell supports everything, etc. The problem isn't for hardware that's a little older, it's for the new stuff that's sitting on the shelves now. And probably even more important then that, most linux distributions don't make it easy to install new hardware. Either it works automatically when you plug it in, or you're in for some pain.
Application support is even harder. It's not easy to get companies to write software for Linux since it's not yet widely used. But we've been seeing more of this too.
It's not about being elitist, or sucking anything up. It's about breaking into a monopoly market with a very loud voice, with a product that breaks the rules of conventional software development.
Using my mother as another example, I've tried to explain Linux to her, how it's free for everyone to use, change, and distribute. She doesn't understand how such software could be any good, or really free. These are the kind of people that will have to come to an understanding before it becomes widespread.
But whatever. I run Linux on my machines, and I really like it a lot. I recommend it to people. I'm doing my part to spread the word.
I have a neat little sharp DV camcorder that can also take still shots onto those little SD cards. The still image quality isn't very good and the thing has no flash (it's a camcorder, mostly) but since the whole thing was like $240 I couldn't go wrong. It's got a big LCD screen and it's extremely compact (I'd say about the size of a DLT tape in it's case, but shorter.)
ANYWAYS, I had to install special sharp drivers for getting stuff off the SD card. It only took a moment.
I really *wish* that Linux was as "easy" as Windows when it comes to this stuff. I really feel good about the future of Linux on the Desktop. We have support from the two leading 3D Grapgics Card manufacturers, which is a big step forward. When trying to compete with a monopoly, it's slow going.
I don't think it's as simple as that unfortunately. Users plug in multifunction devices (printer/scanners), cameras, camcorders, etc. Games.
They can't easily use Linux and plug in something and have it just work. Not so say that in Windows everything just works either, but it's supposed to work without doing much. Linux usually isn't, you often have to mess with things a lot.
Depends on what you need to do. If you're a very light computer user you could get away with it. Hell, I even had OS/2 on my mom's computer for a long time and it was fine.
Yes, the connection would be lost, but since they are talking about RAID on this thing, when the node comes back online you'd have to rebuild the entire "virtual disk" which would be fairly time consuming and network intensive I'd imagine. Even if there was some mechanism in place that did a consistency check on the "disk" to see what data needs to be updated to be in sync with the raid volume, it would be slow. And most raid's just rebuild the volume, I don't think the Linux software raid is any different. (could be wrong, never used Linux raid before.)
And yes, it's a property of RAID, of course, obviously.
I sure wouldn't trust my data to this type of system. Too many points of failure. Like I said, your average RAID wasn't designed for this type of application. A mirror set might work okay, but I can think of a lot better ways to accomplish redundant data on a network - plus, I don't think duplicating data is exactly what the guy had in mind on his question.
What if you reboot one of the NBD servers? While you'll still have access to the data since it's a raid, I would well imagine that you would have to rebuild the entire "disk" once it comes back online.
Assuming a Raid5 with three nodes, and two go down not at the same moment, will all your data be lost?
I would think very carefully about these issues before putting all your valuable data on it. RAID isn't really designed for frequently unreliable connections like this. It's meant to prevent data loss if a hard drive crashes, which should be a fairly uncommon thing within a single system.
"I would call it Malware or Idiotware, but Spyware is a complete misnomer."
I'm not a trend setter. I call it what everyone else calls it. Hey, I already try to use "GNU/Linux" where I can, and that's enough for me.
"Yes, they do tell you exactly how to uninstall."
But... it doesn't *get* uninstalled. Go for it, install it on your machine. Then un-install it the add/remove programs way they tell you. See what happens in a few days.
"They also pay a lot of software developers to make great free software to use."
What great free software? If you mean masking "malware" under the guise of a password saving utility, that doesn't sound so great to me.
"It what they do constitutes spying, I expect the CIA to have neon sides on top of their covert agents from now on."
Why you gotta be a dick? I was simply suggesting a possible reason for why people call it that. You're the one that went on a tangent about internet privacy. Personally, I don't give a shit who knows where I live or what color boxers I'm wearing - just don't fuck with my PC by sticking all these advertisements on it using crappy code that is known to cause major headaches for the desktop support folks. (and major money. Gator and pals must cost the industry millions in support calls. I've been called on site to fix these crappy problems at least once a week, and we're just a very, very small company.)
Yes, it would be nice if the virus scanners said "This file is a virus. It is being removed." when the whole file is the virus, not just some normal file with the virus attached.
Glad to hear that some AV's are picking this crap up. Hope it really starts catching on. I really don't think most companies would shell out the extra cash for a spyware-blocker program like the commercial version of adaware, for software that they don't even realize does a lot more harm to your system then most viruses.
What do you want me to say here? If you're looking for cold hard facts, slashdot is generally the wrong place for it. I don't keep a journal of my gator run-ins. I have not reverse-engineered the software.
In my own experience, installing JUST gator, will net you lots of other spyware in a few weeks time. I've done it on some machines as a test. Now, I did it awhile back, but the machine generally just did nothing, with gator installed. Maybe they've cleaned up their act a little bit, but the history of the product will forever keep it in the "spyware" category for me and anyone else that scans for spyware.
You can't ignore the fact that you can't uninstall gator gracefully. They say you can, but you can't. Gator remains, and will re-appear soon enough. Unless you delete dozens of registry keys and remove DLL's, or run a program like ad-aware, you can't remove it.
You approve of this? They get you to install this software under the premise that you'll "sometimes get an add on your screen." They don't mention that you can't remove it and it's going to download other adware for you.
Not sure where you're going with the the whole privacy issue. They call this stuff spyware, I think, because it spies on what you do and it shows you ads according to what it thinks you like. None of it (yet.. I think..) is sending your keystorkes out to a remote server, or letting people view your desktop.
It might be more of a Trojan then a virus, but either way, software like Symmantec Antivirus should start picking this crap up like it was a virus.
I've been working desktop support for the last few months... yes, I hate it. A lot. But in this market, you take what you can get...
Anyways, out of the maybe 100 pc's I've sat down at over the last few months, I can't think of one user that actually intended to install any of the spyware that's crashing thier machines, showing popups every 2 minutes, and redirecting searches. None of them wanted 6 "searchbars" in IE. And I've only met one dude that wanted Gator (and I argued with him for about 20 minutes about it.)
This software uses misleading ways to get you to install it, and once you get one spyware, it opens the door for all the others. On a corporate network where you must allow internet access and allow people to have admin rights to their own machines, this presents a serious security hole in your network. It doesn't take a stretch for one of these spyware packages to start sending out your network passwords and other information.
Gator has historically been a catalyst for other spyware. Maybe they've stopped doing it now (which I highly doubt) but in the past if you install gator, it will eventually download and install other spyware for you, for free! Maybe Gator itself isn't too bad.. (although any software that makes it very difficult to uninstall is really shady) but the other spyware that you'll get might not be.
Every other workstation I sit at, at any company with internet access (most of them), IE has about 10 "search" bars, popups spring up every 5 seconds, and gator is in the task tray (or not... user might have tried to remove it, but it's still there.. you just can't see it.)
If you "killed" your workstation by driving the CPU hard for awile, it was not because 100% utilized CPU = bad.
You had most likely a defective part somewhere, as you suspect (a "fluke" you called it) that showed when things heated up a bit.
The problem would have surfaced in on form or another anyways. Blaming prime95 for bringing your defective hardware to attention doesn't make any sense.
I think everyone should run something like distributed.net, prime, etc for awhile on a new PC to use as a crude test. If it locks up, you have problems. If it doesn't, it will probably not have any CPU/case heat issues in the future.
People used to expect to have to learn to use a computer. Now a days, people expect the computer to use itself.
It seems like getting hired as an office worker no longer requires computer skills. Lots of the people that use these things at work have absolutely no clue.
I think everyone that uses a PC should learn the very basics.. and every company should teach them. Spending a little cash for basic computer training will save a lot in support calls in the future.
Nobody has found the key to the Xbox yet. If people are going to be able to copy and run the software, it will be via some hack or weakness in the software/hardware.
I'd imagine each card to have a special hard-coded ID that would be imprinted on the game image when it's written to the thing. All encrypted on the fly by the store's machine.
There was an article on Slashdot a few months ago with a printer that you kinda "waved" over a surface and it would automatically print dots where they were supposed to go when you waved over the correct position.
From the demos that I saw on the article, it printed some pretty good images.
It was about the size of an old hand-scanner.
Look around, I'm sure you can find it. I just don't remember the name. It would be perfect if you need to print text/basic images on any surface.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to ask you to read your post back to yourself.
I run Gentoo on most of my machines as well, and yea, for the power user it's great.
But to even think about asking your mom or dad to "tell the kernel to load the right modules" sounds silly.
What's a Kernel? Module? After you explain these concepts, you need to actually locate the right module which may or may not be compiled in. "Okay mom, at the bash prompt, type make menuconfig and select the right options for your hardware. And don't forget to turn on MTRR and I2C as well. You might need them."
I wouldn't say that the vast majority of people using computers are only surfing and e-mail, although it is a lot. From my own experience, these same people tend to also go out and buy printers and digital cameras.
As far as the media player thing, WMP and Quicktime are often pre-installed on machines and will play 90% of the media out there.
The other 10% being Real, and from what I can tell a lot of people are starting to phase out the use of Real on websites.
But, I digress. Xine is a very nice media player for Linux, and has played everything I threw at it. Hopefully the DV playback gets a little better though.
What, I ask you, would motivate me to re-read your mangled post that jumped all over the place, when you got all upset about it like an 8 year old girl?
You're wrong about the snappy remark when my reply warranted no such thing.
Look, this is dumb. You wanna be a little punkass internet dude, fine. I can't stop you.
And I'll call you whatever fucking names I want. This ain't High School, in the real world people perform "name-calling" on a regular basis, you dweeb.
If you can't handle it, stay off the net.
I've never really had a problem because I like to keep my hardware up to date, and I don't upgrade the OS if it won't support my hardware.
Much in the same way as you only buy hardware that is compatible with your OS, I won't just upgrade my OS and expect the reverse to be true every time.
Just the response I'd expect from someone that's in the wrong.
Ohh and to further disagree with you, this quote:
"Besides, having Linux native drivers might only serve to discourage people from creating open-source versions of the drivers."
Who gives a shit. I'd rather have a driver from the company that actually built the hardware, over some guy that had to reverse-engineer the fucking thing the best he could. I can actually call my hardware manufacturer if I have a problem, not Jack Smith of Nowhere, Iowa.
I love the guys that reverse-engineer shit, I really do. But why re-invent the wheel if the manufacturer releases a driver? Who cares if it's binary if it works and comes at no extra charge..
Sorry, I only speak pig-latin.
Ouyay areway away uckingfay assholeway.
I wasn't trying to be rude, but since you're a prick, I'll be one too. Happy?
"Their experience leads me to think that some kind of stable ABI is needed to allow device drivers to be distributed in a binary form."
"and after all who wants more binary-only cruft floating around?"
"Besides, having Linux native drivers might only serve to discourage people from creating open-source versions of the drivers."
Huh? Well which is it?
Personally, I don't have a problem with Binary drivers. I wish the kernel would stop the messages of "This software will TAINT the kernel!" and such. I don't mind some of the software on my PC being "normal binary only" software.
I understand some hardware developers not wanting to release their drivers in source form. Maybe they license other non-free software for use in it. Who knows. If they are providing a driver for me, to run on my Linux system, that works, I don't care.
As long as the core OS (including the base kernel, file system things, desktop environment) remains open source/GPL, I'm happy.
And to top it all off, I actually (gasp) BUY software sometimes. I have absolutely no problem paying Adobe for Photoshop. Or Premiere. I don't mind paying $50 for a cool game. I believe in getting paid for programming, but in the case of the Operating System, it really needs to be out of the hands of any one company.
"You Linux geeks need to quit being so elitist, suck it up, and make it easy to use."
I hope that comment wasn't to me. I said that I wish it was as easy (as windows,) and I said that it's slow going.
My KDE desktop *IS* very pretty though. I have a nice Plastik style with the Knifty window decoration. It's smooth and quick, and it looks very nice.
I don't think the user interface is the problem, nor "fun." KDE is a mature desktop system in my opinion and it's getting better with every release. It has taken some of the successful Windows desktop elements and expanded on them. It's very easy to use and navigate the system.
The problem lies in application and device support. Device support is showing up all over the place; fast graphics drivers direct from the manufacturers, sound support that as far as I can tell supports everything, etc. The problem isn't for hardware that's a little older, it's for the new stuff that's sitting on the shelves now. And probably even more important then that, most linux distributions don't make it easy to install new hardware. Either it works automatically when you plug it in, or you're in for some pain.
Application support is even harder. It's not easy to get companies to write software for Linux since it's not yet widely used. But we've been seeing more of this too.
It's not about being elitist, or sucking anything up. It's about breaking into a monopoly market with a very loud voice, with a product that breaks the rules of conventional software development.
Using my mother as another example, I've tried to explain Linux to her, how it's free for everyone to use, change, and distribute. She doesn't understand how such software could be any good, or really free. These are the kind of people that will have to come to an understanding before it becomes widespread.
But whatever. I run Linux on my machines, and I really like it a lot. I recommend it to people. I'm doing my part to spread the word.
I have a neat little sharp DV camcorder that can also take still shots onto those little SD cards. The still image quality isn't very good and the thing has no flash (it's a camcorder, mostly) but since the whole thing was like $240 I couldn't go wrong. It's got a big LCD screen and it's extremely compact (I'd say about the size of a DLT tape in it's case, but shorter.)
ANYWAYS, I had to install special sharp drivers for getting stuff off the SD card. It only took a moment.
I really *wish* that Linux was as "easy" as Windows when it comes to this stuff. I really feel good about the future of Linux on the Desktop. We have support from the two leading 3D Grapgics Card manufacturers, which is a big step forward. When trying to compete with a monopoly, it's slow going.
I don't think it's as simple as that unfortunately. Users plug in multifunction devices (printer/scanners), cameras, camcorders, etc. Games.
They can't easily use Linux and plug in something and have it just work. Not so say that in Windows everything just works either, but it's supposed to work without doing much. Linux usually isn't, you often have to mess with things a lot.
Depends on what you need to do. If you're a very light computer user you could get away with it. Hell, I even had OS/2 on my mom's computer for a long time and it was fine.
Yes, the connection would be lost, but since they are talking about RAID on this thing, when the node comes back online you'd have to rebuild the entire "virtual disk" which would be fairly time consuming and network intensive I'd imagine. Even if there was some mechanism in place that did a consistency check on the "disk" to see what data needs to be updated to be in sync with the raid volume, it would be slow. And most raid's just rebuild the volume, I don't think the Linux software raid is any different. (could be wrong, never used Linux raid before.)
And yes, it's a property of RAID, of course, obviously.
I sure wouldn't trust my data to this type of system. Too many points of failure. Like I said, your average RAID wasn't designed for this type of application. A mirror set might work okay, but I can think of a lot better ways to accomplish redundant data on a network - plus, I don't think duplicating data is exactly what the guy had in mind on his question.
What if you reboot one of the NBD servers? While you'll still have access to the data since it's a raid, I would well imagine that you would have to rebuild the entire "disk" once it comes back online.
Assuming a Raid5 with three nodes, and two go down not at the same moment, will all your data be lost?
I would think very carefully about these issues before putting all your valuable data on it. RAID isn't really designed for frequently unreliable connections like this. It's meant to prevent data loss if a hard drive crashes, which should be a fairly uncommon thing within a single system.
"I would call it Malware or Idiotware, but Spyware is a complete misnomer."
I'm not a trend setter. I call it what everyone else calls it. Hey, I already try to use "GNU/Linux" where I can, and that's enough for me.
"Yes, they do tell you exactly how to uninstall."
But... it doesn't *get* uninstalled. Go for it, install it on your machine. Then un-install it the add/remove programs way they tell you. See what happens in a few days.
"They also pay a lot of software developers to make great free software to use."
What great free software? If you mean masking "malware" under the guise of a password saving utility, that doesn't sound so great to me.
"It what they do constitutes spying, I expect the CIA to have neon sides on top of their covert agents from now on."
Why you gotta be a dick? I was simply suggesting a possible reason for why people call it that. You're the one that went on a tangent about internet privacy. Personally, I don't give a shit who knows where I live or what color boxers I'm wearing - just don't fuck with my PC by sticking all these advertisements on it using crappy code that is known to cause major headaches for the desktop support folks. (and major money. Gator and pals must cost the industry millions in support calls. I've been called on site to fix these crappy problems at least once a week, and we're just a very, very small company.)
Yes, it would be nice if the virus scanners said "This file is a virus. It is being removed." when the whole file is the virus, not just some normal file with the virus attached.
Glad to hear that some AV's are picking this crap up. Hope it really starts catching on. I really don't think most companies would shell out the extra cash for a spyware-blocker program like the commercial version of adaware, for software that they don't even realize does a lot more harm to your system then most viruses.
What do you want me to say here? If you're looking for cold hard facts, slashdot is generally the wrong place for it. I don't keep a journal of my gator run-ins. I have not reverse-engineered the software.
In my own experience, installing JUST gator, will net you lots of other spyware in a few weeks time. I've done it on some machines as a test. Now, I did it awhile back, but the machine generally just did nothing, with gator installed. Maybe they've cleaned up their act a little bit, but the history of the product will forever keep it in the "spyware" category for me and anyone else that scans for spyware.
You can't ignore the fact that you can't uninstall gator gracefully. They say you can, but you can't. Gator remains, and will re-appear soon enough. Unless you delete dozens of registry keys and remove DLL's, or run a program like ad-aware, you can't remove it.
You approve of this? They get you to install this software under the premise that you'll "sometimes get an add on your screen." They don't mention that you can't remove it and it's going to download other adware for you.
Not sure where you're going with the the whole privacy issue. They call this stuff spyware, I think, because it spies on what you do and it shows you ads according to what it thinks you like. None of it (yet.. I think..) is sending your keystorkes out to a remote server, or letting people view your desktop.
It might be more of a Trojan then a virus, but either way, software like Symmantec Antivirus should start picking this crap up like it was a virus.
I've been working desktop support for the last few months... yes, I hate it. A lot. But in this market, you take what you can get...
Anyways, out of the maybe 100 pc's I've sat down at over the last few months, I can't think of one user that actually intended to install any of the spyware that's crashing thier machines, showing popups every 2 minutes, and redirecting searches. None of them wanted 6 "searchbars" in IE. And I've only met one dude that wanted Gator (and I argued with him for about 20 minutes about it.)
This software uses misleading ways to get you to install it, and once you get one spyware, it opens the door for all the others. On a corporate network where you must allow internet access and allow people to have admin rights to their own machines, this presents a serious security hole in your network. It doesn't take a stretch for one of these spyware packages to start sending out your network passwords and other information.
Come on Symmantec, help us out!
Gator has historically been a catalyst for other spyware. Maybe they've stopped doing it now (which I highly doubt) but in the past if you install gator, it will eventually download and install other spyware for you, for free! Maybe Gator itself isn't too bad.. (although any software that makes it very difficult to uninstall is really shady) but the other spyware that you'll get might not be.
Every other workstation I sit at, at any company with internet access (most of them), IE has about 10 "search" bars, popups spring up every 5 seconds, and gator is in the task tray (or not... user might have tried to remove it, but it's still there.. you just can't see it.)
Didn't you read the article? RISC is only good for cell phones now a days.
They *DID* sue AMD and others over x86 - and lost.
If you "killed" your workstation by driving the CPU hard for awile, it was not because 100% utilized CPU = bad.
You had most likely a defective part somewhere, as you suspect (a "fluke" you called it) that showed when things heated up a bit.
The problem would have surfaced in on form or another anyways. Blaming prime95 for bringing your defective hardware to attention doesn't make any sense.
I think everyone should run something like distributed.net, prime, etc for awhile on a new PC to use as a crude test. If it locks up, you have problems. If it doesn't, it will probably not have any CPU/case heat issues in the future.
People used to expect to have to learn to use a computer. Now a days, people expect the computer to use itself.
It seems like getting hired as an office worker no longer requires computer skills. Lots of the people that use these things at work have absolutely no clue.
I think everyone that uses a PC should learn the very basics.. and every company should teach them. Spending a little cash for basic computer training will save a lot in support calls in the future.
They will probably encrypt the stuff.
Nobody has found the key to the Xbox yet. If people are going to be able to copy and run the software, it will be via some hack or weakness in the software/hardware.
I'd imagine each card to have a special hard-coded ID that would be imprinted on the game image when it's written to the thing. All encrypted on the fly by the store's machine.
WHAT!?!? I LOVE GENTOO!! USE IT LOVE IT!!
Actually, I do run Gentoo on my boxes. Not because it's fast or source based, but simply because it's easy as hell to update. I'm lazy =)
There was an article on Slashdot a few months ago with a printer that you kinda "waved" over a surface and it would automatically print dots where they were supposed to go when you waved over the correct position.
From the demos that I saw on the article, it printed some pretty good images.
It was about the size of an old hand-scanner.
Look around, I'm sure you can find it. I just don't remember the name. It would be perfect if you need to print text/basic images on any surface.