Current crypto, even at the consumer level, is not particularly breakable. I feel comfortable with my GPG key. Endpoints, however, are definitely vulnerable.
I remember reading about the FBI executing a search warrant on a Mafia member who had GPG-encrypted his files. Instead of screwing around with the encryption, the FBI just left a keygrabber on his computer (was this Magic Lantern, perhaps?) and snagged his password.
Why bother with trying to break encryption when there are much easier ways to get the data you want.
I believe the problem in this case is a lack of skilled IT workers, based on other comments.
I doubt they have a spare Linux sysadmin floating around. Paying for a Linux consultant is going to cost them more than just getting the local guy that uses Windows a lot to take a look at problems.
Linux inroads are more likely to be in situations where the entity has a decent-budget IT department already and quite a few computers to manage. You can then get past the initial steep cost of hiring in-house support personnel and enjoy the cost savings in software and in better remote management capabilities.
The hit to small businesses or small government bureaus with entrenched Windows systems is too high unless MS is abusing their EULA privs.
Every time I drive from WV to PA you see the "Welcome to Pennsylvania" sign and then immediately hear "ka-thump, ka-thump, ka-thump" of my tires hitting patched places. It's kind of ridiculous, especially since WV has hills all over and is ass-poor...yet they still manage to get decent highways.
Probably Senator Byrd funneling federal money in...he's pretty good at that.:-)
People have stopped palying[sic] FreeSpace about 3 years ago
That doesn't stop people from learning from the code and making neat projects with it.
Open Source isn't just about getting a free dinner...it's about getting to play around with code. We just covered Wolf 3d and Doom algorithms in our graphics course when covering older graphics techniques.
If you want direct, practical, non-developer benefits, it's led to Linux ports of neat games, such as Bungie's Marathon/Aleph One. It's led to improved games, like PrBoom. It's revived development interest in various projects, such as zsnes (still the only Linux snes emulator that can do Seiken Densetsu 3).
Besides, maybe you're the type that plays games for a bit, but there are also people (myself included) that don't play new releases much, but love going back and playing an old nostalgic game now and then.:-)
I guarantee you that people will be poking around at and playing with Freespace 2 much longer because of the source release. I suspect that most people would have forgotten about neat games like Abuse had it not been for its open-sourcing. The result of an open-source clone -- Exult has produced quite a bit of Ultima 7 playing again. The same goes for scummvm, the clone of Lucasart's engine used in Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max. Plus AGIL and Sierra's AGI system.
Open Source is generally a Good Thing. Please don't rag on people for doing good things like this -- sit back and enjoy it, or if you aren't yet interested, wait until someone hacks around with the code a bit. Then enjoy.:-)
Based on the replies to this post, there should be a website for this sort of information and stories...sorta like the late resellerratings.com but for tech support.
Really? I bought a 3c905b to *avoid* this (previously bought both a tulip and realtek rtl8139-based card). Had an *extremely* heavily loaded dorm ethernet where transmit failures (couldn't transmit in 16 tries) were not uncommon. The latter two cards went through a 2-second full reset every time they had a transmit failure, making them almost useless when other people were using the network. The 3com card worked wonderfully. Now, that *is* a driver issue, but it was well worth the money for me.
Yeah, but Windows doesn't need to be intuitive. It's force-fed to students in public schools. Employees are trained in it. Almost everyone uses Windows, so most employees have some degree of knowledge of its workings. Take Windows away and their hoarded knowledge goes out the window.
Okay, I've run both lilo and ntldr (NT's boat loader) as my primary bootloader.
First, as people have pointed out, you can move the "win" section to the top of lilo.conf and rerun lilo, which will make *it* the default choice.
Second, arguing that MS's boot loader is flexible (unless it has *drastically* changed recently in XP) is a joke. NT's boot loader is downright weak compared to lilo. It does have a menu, which can be nice, but if you want a pretty interface, there are linux bootloaders that are even more attractive, like grub.
Lilo does not have to exhibit the behavior you described -- that's just how your distributor set things up. It could just as easily have had Windows as the default. Even these defaults beat the shit out of the MS defaults -- at least most Linux distributors bother to make Windows bootable through their bootloader by default. MS will happily make a Linux setup unbootable (necessitating use of rescue disks or a distro-on-a-CD with lilo).
So don't call it "Microsoft" Windows. Call it "Dell Windows" or something like that. Yes, it's using mostly MS components (hopefully with the VM subsystem at least replaced with something that doesn't suck, a la RAM Doubler on the Mac OS)
If the user experience is reasonably consistent, it's no big deal. Hell, have an industry consortium come up with standards to follow. If the software is properly modularized, people can use systemwide spell checker engine A from MS or systemwide spell checker engine B from DictionaryCorp, and not know the difference (other than that one probably has more accurate word guessing).
You know, Leonardo da Vinci was dyslexic. Now he's seen as a brilliant man and his detractors as idiots.
The poster wasn't writing a letter to a Congressman. He was posting to Slashdot, something that I'd consider a similar form of communication to chatting with friends. Accurate spelling and typing is nice, but hardly considered a necessity in this context.
Pointing out spelling mistakes is reasonable in most contexts and helpful. Saying "Do you REALLY expect anyone to take you seriously when you can't even properly spell a six letter word?", however, seems a bit rude.
Frankly, I'd consider language mistakes far more egregious in a post complaining about someone else's language. So let's look at your own post.
It's considered proper to capitalize "lord" when used to refer to God. A comma should have followed "lord". Caps aren't a very good way of emphasizing a word in an environment when you can use bold and italics (ironically enough, you did all three of these in this post...partly bad language, partly bad typography). You have an extra "the" in the third sentence in your first paragraph. "K" is accepted as an informal shortening of "okay" when speaking, not when writing, and if it were written it would require an apostrophe before it.
I admit that you did realize that your post probably had errors in it. However, that seems like all the more reason to do the proofreading that you demanded the other person do.
In addition, a fair number of Slashdot readers do not have English as their native language. It seems only reasonable to take them into account.
Frankly, I'd like to see Creative just write up a bunch of source, send it to the ALSA guys, and have everyone be happy. They get their cards supported out of box on new Linux systems, the ALSA guys get top notch support (ALSA emu10k1 support is good but lacks DSP microcode support, unlike the OSS drivers), and the users Just Have Things Work.
I believe you're the one in error here. Running a DNS server doesn't do you a lot of good if it doesn't have a "parent" domain name server to recurse to on lookups that it can't answer.
So if he was running a name server (as I am), he'd still be in the same fix -- he'd need the new DNS IP.
Now, I *do* advocate keeping multiple DNS entries...
Slashdot Mirror
Current crypto, even at the consumer level, is not particularly breakable. I feel comfortable with my GPG key. Endpoints, however, are definitely vulnerable.
I remember reading about the FBI executing a search warrant on a Mafia member who had GPG-encrypted his files. Instead of screwing around with the encryption, the FBI just left a keygrabber on his computer (was this Magic Lantern, perhaps?) and snagged his password.
Why bother with trying to break encryption when there are much easier ways to get the data you want.
I believe the problem in this case is a lack of skilled IT workers, based on other comments.
I doubt they have a spare Linux sysadmin floating around. Paying for a Linux consultant is going to cost them more than just getting the local guy that uses Windows a lot to take a look at problems.
Linux inroads are more likely to be in situations where the entity has a decent-budget IT department already and quite a few computers to manage. You can then get past the initial steep cost of hiring in-house support personnel and enjoy the cost savings in software and in better remote management capabilities.
The hit to small businesses or small government bureaus with entrenched Windows systems is too high unless MS is abusing their EULA privs.
anecdotal evidence beats a bunch of claims totally unsupported by evidence...
Every time I drive from WV to PA you see the "Welcome to Pennsylvania" sign and then immediately hear "ka-thump, ka-thump, ka-thump" of my tires hitting patched places. It's kind of ridiculous, especially since WV has hills all over and is ass-poor...yet they still manage to get decent highways.
:-)
Probably Senator Byrd funneling federal money in...he's pretty good at that.
The word "forth" brings to mind something other than a programming language to a Slashdot user?
I loved that game too. Ambrosia Software makes amazing Mac-only stuff.
But the Open Source community is coming through for you -- check out Epiar, an open source project based on Escape Velocity.
Assuming it isn't using MFC, it probably could be ported to gcc in a week tops.
You're going to also want the original data files if you want to play the game intead of coding on it.
People have stopped palying[sic] FreeSpace about 3 years ago
:-)
:-)
That doesn't stop people from learning from the code and making neat projects with it.
Open Source isn't just about getting a free dinner...it's about getting to play around with code. We just covered Wolf 3d and Doom algorithms in our graphics course when covering older graphics techniques.
If you want direct, practical, non-developer benefits, it's led to Linux ports of neat games, such as Bungie's Marathon/Aleph One. It's led to improved games, like PrBoom. It's revived development interest in various projects, such as zsnes (still the only Linux snes emulator that can do Seiken Densetsu 3).
Besides, maybe you're the type that plays games for a bit, but there are also people (myself included) that don't play new releases much, but love going back and playing an old nostalgic game now and then.
I guarantee you that people will be poking around at and playing with Freespace 2 much longer because of the source release. I suspect that most people would have forgotten about neat games like Abuse had it not been for its open-sourcing. The result of an open-source clone -- Exult has produced quite a bit of Ultima 7 playing again. The same goes for scummvm, the clone of Lucasart's engine used in Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max. Plus AGIL and Sierra's AGI system.
Open Source is generally a Good Thing. Please don't rag on people for doing good things like this -- sit back and enjoy it, or if you aren't yet interested, wait until someone hacks around with the code a bit. Then enjoy.
I wanna know if this will compile under gcc.
To be brutally honest, if you don't know the difference between a master and a slave IDE drive, you probably shouldn't be installing them.
Based on the replies to this post, there should be a website for this sort of information and stories...sorta like the late resellerratings.com but for tech support.
Really? I bought a 3c905b to *avoid* this (previously bought both a tulip and realtek rtl8139-based card). Had an *extremely* heavily loaded dorm ethernet where transmit failures (couldn't transmit in 16 tries) were not uncommon. The latter two cards went through a 2-second full reset every time they had a transmit failure, making them almost useless when other people were using the network. The 3com card worked wonderfully. Now, that *is* a driver issue, but it was well worth the money for me.
Hard to write drivers for any OS. Royal pain to debug.
Yeah, but Windows doesn't need to be intuitive. It's force-fed to students in public schools. Employees are trained in it. Almost everyone uses Windows, so most employees have some degree of knowledge of its workings. Take Windows away and their hoarded knowledge goes out the window.
Okay, I've run both lilo and ntldr (NT's boat loader) as my primary bootloader.
First, as people have pointed out, you can move the "win" section to the top of lilo.conf and rerun lilo, which will make *it* the default choice.
Second, arguing that MS's boot loader is flexible (unless it has *drastically* changed recently in XP) is a joke. NT's boot loader is downright weak compared to lilo. It does have a menu, which can be nice, but if you want a pretty interface, there are linux bootloaders that are even more attractive, like grub.
Lilo does not have to exhibit the behavior you described -- that's just how your distributor set things up. It could just as easily have had Windows as the default. Even these defaults beat the shit out of the MS defaults -- at least most Linux distributors bother to make Windows bootable through their bootloader by default. MS will happily make a Linux setup unbootable (necessitating use of rescue disks or a distro-on-a-CD with lilo).
So don't call it "Microsoft" Windows. Call it "Dell Windows" or something like that. Yes, it's using mostly MS components (hopefully with the VM subsystem at least replaced with something that doesn't suck, a la RAM Doubler on the Mac OS)
If the user experience is reasonably consistent, it's no big deal. Hell, have an industry consortium come up with standards to follow. If the software is properly modularized, people can use systemwide spell checker engine A from MS or systemwide spell checker engine B from DictionaryCorp, and not know the difference (other than that one probably has more accurate word guessing).
Doesn't work. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs built Apple from selling illegal blue boxes, which they both openly admit. :-)
Please do not submit links to the NY Times!
There are other excellent places to link to that do not require registration.
You know, Leonardo da Vinci was dyslexic. Now he's seen as a brilliant man and his detractors as idiots.
The poster wasn't writing a letter to a Congressman. He was posting to Slashdot, something that I'd consider a similar form of communication to chatting with friends. Accurate spelling and typing is nice, but hardly considered a necessity in this context.
Pointing out spelling mistakes is reasonable in most contexts and helpful. Saying "Do you REALLY expect anyone to take you seriously when you can't even properly spell a six letter word?", however, seems a bit rude.
Frankly, I'd consider language mistakes far more egregious in a post complaining about someone else's language. So let's look at your own post.
It's considered proper to capitalize "lord" when used to refer to God. A comma should have followed "lord". Caps aren't a very good way of emphasizing a word in an environment when you can use bold and italics (ironically enough, you did all three of these in this post...partly bad language, partly bad typography). You have an extra "the" in the third sentence in your first paragraph. "K" is accepted as an informal shortening of "okay" when speaking, not when writing, and if it were written it would require an apostrophe before it.
I admit that you did realize that your post probably had errors in it. However, that seems like all the more reason to do the proofreading that you demanded the other person do.
In addition, a fair number of Slashdot readers do not have English as their native language. It seems only reasonable to take them into account.
I don't fucking care if they think that people will grow regular weed and they can't figure out how to distinguish between the two.
Oh, come on now. You obviously do care -- just the opposite way of what you probably should.
The king of marketing video games
I'd think of a game as closer to a movie.
Are movies protected?
Scanner support is really annoying. I wish that people would just make HID-compliant USB scanners and solve the problem for once and for all.
I believe this used to be the case.
Frankly, I'd like to see Creative just write up a bunch of source, send it to the ALSA guys, and have everyone be happy. They get their cards supported out of box on new Linux systems, the ALSA guys get top notch support (ALSA emu10k1 support is good but lacks DSP microcode support, unlike the OSS drivers), and the users Just Have Things Work.
I believe you're the one in error here. Running a DNS server doesn't do you a lot of good if it doesn't have a "parent" domain name server to recurse to on lookups that it can't answer.
So if he was running a name server (as I am), he'd still be in the same fix -- he'd need the new DNS IP.
Now, I *do* advocate keeping multiple DNS entries...