This guy is just getting pissy. His suggestion has nothing to do with what the original poster is asking, so he's spinning reality to make his way of doing things look like the only thing that makes any sense.
$700 for a new machine is $700 no matter how you slice it. If he was a corporation who had to balance hardware costs against the cost of having an employee put their time into the project, then yeah, new equipment would probably make sense.
But the guy sounds like a hobbyist who wants to make something cool for work. You can't convert hobbyist hours into some $30/hr + benefits math.
At some point, not letting go of an argument becomes trolling. Let's stop feeding this dude.
You know there's a lot more to programming than webdev and business logic.
Embedded and realtime systems are enormously important and employ a lot of programmers. Not to mention that things like compilers, drivers, and operating systems are still important and heavily developed.
(Treated as a single language) assembler is perennially in the top less than 10 languages.
I'm still rockin 512 megs and doing fine - main system I mean. Integrated graphics.
The only reason this kind of thing bothers me a bit is that I imagine it's pushing videogames further and further into the world of being 1,000 employee, NASA sized engineering projects. Rather than charming little projects that say, that husband and wife that were Sierra could do on their own and be competitive.
This kind of reliance on jet-powered hardware kind of insures that the game is going to be all megacorporations working from market research.
Also, as an armchair activist, that kind of belief depresses me. There really are groups of evil powerful people manipulating the world toward their own ends. But when you start to believe that they're a cartoonish parody of villainy capable of controlling virtually every corner of society like it was an army, the response is just resignation. Real abuse of power is far more mundane, and as such, is something we can actually do something about. It's a GOOD thing that there is no Illuminati to contend with.
This is always my big objection to major conspiracy theories that involve the faking of an event observed by millions.
Even if only a few dozen or hundred people would have to be involved in faking something like the lunar landing or 9-11, the population of experts closely observing the events in question is enormous. Many of them could secure protection from governments or organizations opposed to the US or whatever power is in question. When you begin to total the number of people who would have to keep quiet on something like this, it gets absurd fast. Do we really believe that some shadow government is quietly faking thousands of papers on moon rocks carefully enough to avoid major contradictions over decades of publishing?
Not that the public isn't deceived all the time. But it happens in ways that are simultaneously more subtle and more blatantly obvious. Inducing apathy with a flood of partially true information works a lot better than engineering specific falsehoods.
Biofuel is still stored solar energy as well. What's your point.
You think gasoline bubbles up out of the ground? You don't think there's a massive energy expense refining oil? The drill and pump is just step 1 of many.
It's pretty clear we need a new protocol for semi-platform-neutral networked applications. Something designed from the ground up to offer broad support for doing what the web is trying to do now.
That's some really biting nuanced analysis you got there. I hope all our big technical and regulatory decisions can be made with that degree of deliberation.
Given that the *REAL* danger of an attack (in national terms) isn't the plane and the lives, but the media fear and the response that an attack - attempted or successful, remember the shoe bomb - invites, we want to discourage attempts in addition to foiling them action movie style.
A uniformed guard also lets the law abiders know there's a cop around. Full disclosure should always be the assumed norm to be deviated from. You justify keeping secrets. Informing the public is its own justification.
I'm convinced that there's zero terror threat in america. If "they" were actually scheming to hurt us domestically, they'd just keep doing low level security pings on airports and trainyards. The transportation and freight system in this country would need to be rebuilt from the ground up to be secure. Constant small attacks and the following chicken-with-its-head-cut-off policy shuffle would be completely destabilizing.
But, quiet. Intelligence is pretty good. I'm sure they've stopped a few scary things. But they aren't so good as to be able to halt every pair of dudes with an agenda and a casual attitude toward death or imprisonment.
Our enemies object to our presence abroad. There's very little organized resistance to our day to day operation at home.
What he means is that since human eyes are so piss poor at resolving a blue spectrum, the DVD compression can afford to lose more information in the blue channel than the others.
I mean, that's pretty cool. But conversation bots are just a bunch of clever tricks. There's not much more going on at a fundamental level than a grammar system and a dictionary.
Here's the thing that apologists for the administration's abuses of power never seemed to get:
The gained authority of the whitehouse is going to carry over to the administration of the next pinko commie liberal that gets elected. You've screwed yourselves.
Damn Small Linux. Several other small debian-based projects.
Slackware can be made to install on pretty much anything, and those guys are very security concious.
Debian will install on a USB Key of 512 megs or more.
Your list of distros only really includes ones with commercial support. Which is a requirement in many situations, I know.
I'm not familiar with FaunOS which might be the only available option for a very narrow use profile.
Sorry about the insult, your first post did read a bit like "it doesn't have Norton, your boss won't approve it."
But honestly, in my professional experience, security on Linux is not as much of an issue. While the Unix model abounds with very real security risks, most of them are theoretical. If you are not in a position where people are going to be targetting cutting-edge security breaches directly at your organization, any frequently updated distribution piloted by a sysadmin with a few years of real linux server experience is going to be very secure. Your vulnerabilities are going to come from things like a misconfigured Apache or permissions settings on a web app or (the absolutely most likely) inside jobs.
It does sound like you're trying to make one to one feature comparasons between closed source and open source software security. Both worlds have their share of security problems, but they crop up in different places, and the solutions are very different.
You definitely don't have to keep reinstalling your OS though. On any enterprise distribution, keeping your packages updated will be enough, and you don't have to reinstall except for every X years when support finally lapses (and the 'reinstall' could very well just be a more thorough package update). X here is almost always at least 3 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually this is a very interesting legal question:
Are illegal copyright circumvention technologies copyrightable?
Exposing themselves as a legal entity would *probably* backfire.
I'm just guessing.
Is that 10 lines of automating some utilities? 10 lines in a scripting language that the target would have to install first?
Turning this theoretical exploit into a real threat sounds like interesting engineering.
This guy is just getting pissy. His suggestion has nothing to do with what the original poster is asking, so he's spinning reality to make his way of doing things look like the only thing that makes any sense.
$700 for a new machine is $700 no matter how you slice it. If he was a corporation who had to balance hardware costs against the cost of having an employee put their time into the project, then yeah, new equipment would probably make sense.
But the guy sounds like a hobbyist who wants to make something cool for work. You can't convert hobbyist hours into some $30/hr + benefits math.
At some point, not letting go of an argument becomes trolling. Let's stop feeding this dude.
It searches for MP3s, transcodes them to WMA format, wraps them in an ASF container
Dammit. That sounds more interesting than any programming job I've gotten in the last 5 years.
You know there's a lot more to programming than webdev and business logic.
Embedded and realtime systems are enormously important and employ a lot of programmers. Not to mention that things like compilers, drivers, and operating systems are still important and heavily developed.
(Treated as a single language) assembler is perennially in the top less than 10 languages.
I'm still rockin 512 megs and doing fine - main system I mean. Integrated graphics.
The only reason this kind of thing bothers me a bit is that I imagine it's pushing videogames further and further into the world of being 1,000 employee, NASA sized engineering projects. Rather than charming little projects that say, that husband and wife that were Sierra could do on their own and be competitive.
This kind of reliance on jet-powered hardware kind of insures that the game is going to be all megacorporations working from market research.
Also, as an armchair activist, that kind of belief depresses me. There really are groups of evil powerful people manipulating the world toward their own ends. But when you start to believe that they're a cartoonish parody of villainy capable of controlling virtually every corner of society like it was an army, the response is just resignation. Real abuse of power is far more mundane, and as such, is something we can actually do something about. It's a GOOD thing that there is no Illuminati to contend with.
This is always my big objection to major conspiracy theories that involve the faking of an event observed by millions.
Even if only a few dozen or hundred people would have to be involved in faking something like the lunar landing or 9-11, the population of experts closely observing the events in question is enormous. Many of them could secure protection from governments or organizations opposed to the US or whatever power is in question. When you begin to total the number of people who would have to keep quiet on something like this, it gets absurd fast. Do we really believe that some shadow government is quietly faking thousands of papers on moon rocks carefully enough to avoid major contradictions over decades of publishing?
Not that the public isn't deceived all the time. But it happens in ways that are simultaneously more subtle and more blatantly obvious. Inducing apathy with a flood of partially true information works a lot better than engineering specific falsehoods.
Math groupies exist.
Biofuel is still stored solar energy as well. What's your point.
You think gasoline bubbles up out of the ground? You don't think there's a massive energy expense refining oil? The drill and pump is just step 1 of many.
That does probably let you off the hook.
Of course if you use bittorrent, you're distributing. So you still might want to rationalize a little bit more.
There's very little in law where one half of a transaction is illegal and the other isn't.
So I'm not allowed to use Open Office to track my human trafficking shipments?
I think IBM handles a lot of contracts in that market.
It's pretty clear we need a new protocol for semi-platform-neutral networked applications. Something designed from the ground up to offer broad support for doing what the web is trying to do now.
This shouldn't all be riding on HTTP.
I leave Flash uninstalled. I keep a second browser set up for multimedia, but I rarely use it.
For the most part Flash is a trojan that delivers ads and slows down the damn web.
That's some really biting nuanced analysis you got there. I hope all our big technical and regulatory decisions can be made with that degree of deliberation.
Why have them look like business travellers?
Given that the *REAL* danger of an attack (in national terms) isn't the plane and the lives, but the media fear and the response that an attack - attempted or successful, remember the shoe bomb - invites, we want to discourage attempts in addition to foiling them action movie style.
A uniformed guard also lets the law abiders know there's a cop around. Full disclosure should always be the assumed norm to be deviated from. You justify keeping secrets. Informing the public is its own justification.
I'm convinced that there's zero terror threat in america. If "they" were actually scheming to hurt us domestically, they'd just keep doing low level security pings on airports and trainyards. The transportation and freight system in this country would need to be rebuilt from the ground up to be secure. Constant small attacks and the following chicken-with-its-head-cut-off policy shuffle would be completely destabilizing.
But, quiet. Intelligence is pretty good. I'm sure they've stopped a few scary things. But they aren't so good as to be able to halt every pair of dudes with an agenda and a casual attitude toward death or imprisonment.
Our enemies object to our presence abroad. There's very little organized resistance to our day to day operation at home.
What he means is that since human eyes are so piss poor at resolving a blue spectrum, the DVD compression can afford to lose more information in the blue channel than the others.
May or may not be right.
satire isn't flamebait, mod parent up
I'd love to know how many people have been accidentally crushed in that kind of shelving. It's probably not zero.
I mean, that's pretty cool. But conversation bots are just a bunch of clever tricks. There's not much more going on at a fundamental level than a grammar system and a dictionary.
Claude Shannon = most underappreciated genius of the 20th century.
We're talking Feynman and Einstein level brains.
Here's the thing that apologists for the administration's abuses of power never seemed to get:
The gained authority of the whitehouse is going to carry over to the administration of the next pinko commie liberal that gets elected. You've screwed yourselves.
Damn Small Linux. Several other small debian-based projects.
Slackware can be made to install on pretty much anything, and those guys are very security concious.
Debian will install on a USB Key of 512 megs or more.
Your list of distros only really includes ones with commercial support. Which is a requirement in many situations, I know.
I'm not familiar with FaunOS which might be the only available option for a very narrow use profile.
Sorry about the insult, your first post did read a bit like "it doesn't have Norton, your boss won't approve it."
But honestly, in my professional experience, security on Linux is not as much of an issue. While the Unix model abounds with very real security risks, most of them are theoretical. If you are not in a position where people are going to be targetting cutting-edge security breaches directly at your organization, any frequently updated distribution piloted by a sysadmin with a few years of real linux server experience is going to be very secure. Your vulnerabilities are going to come from things like a misconfigured Apache or permissions settings on a web app or (the absolutely most likely) inside jobs.
It does sound like you're trying to make one to one feature comparasons between closed source and open source software security. Both worlds have their share of security problems, but they crop up in different places, and the solutions are very different.
You definitely don't have to keep reinstalling your OS though. On any enterprise distribution, keeping your packages updated will be enough, and you don't have to reinstall except for every X years when support finally lapses (and the 'reinstall' could very well just be a more thorough package update). X here is almost always at least 3 years.