Requesting the whole organization use tinfoil hat Linux boxes; with 256bit end to end encryption; with all outgoing and incoming packets sniffed, duplicated and logged; 16 character mixed special char, numeric, and alphabetic passwords; Faraday cages around every office; may be excessive even for the NSA
Actually I bet the NSA is doing everything you name, except for the 256bit thing. I'm sure they're using at least 4096 bit encryption (assuming RS). Maybe biometrics instead of the fancy passwords.
But you can be sure that the rooms are faraday cages; even the CIA does that.;-)
(The CIA also has double walls between which they pump white noise so that people can't read the vibrations of the glass with laser meters. The building is magnetically shielded so people can't "read" the monitors of people remotely.)
He's not claiming to be an average user, he's attempting to evaluate it from their perspective.
Isn't this Dell's issue? Even under Windows, Dell tunes their OEM install. Well, what does Free mean to you Walt? And if there were, then it would be in violation of MPEG licensing. Good call Walt.
All red herrings.
He's not evaluating Linux, or even Ubuntu, in some abstract sense to see if it's "ready for the desktop". He's trying to determine whether Joe Schmoe could go out and buy one of these computers instead of the version with Windows.
So it doesn't matter why something doesn't work, whether it's because Dell set it up wrong, or there's an issue of Free software, or whatever, the point is it doesn't work. (Or works poorly.)
"The Ubuntu-equipped Inspiron 1420N starts at $744, but the configuration that Dell lent me for testing sells for $1,415. The same unit equipped with Windows Vista costs $1,524. The Ubuntu version includes OpenOffice, the free office suite that competes with Microsoft Office. Dell charges an added $149 for Microsoft Office."
So what is your point? That people that don't want to run Microsoft products really should because its almost the same price for the hardware?
I suspect his points are that the machine he tested costs $1415, there's a version with Windows and Office for $109 more, and you could pay another $149 for Office if you wanted.
Do you always assume people have an agenda when they write something?
RTFA. That way you'll be more informed than the submitter... in the very next paragraph from where it talks about that, explains that the Engadget report cited was wrong, and in fact that's not what the copyright office decided.
No, the submitter either didn't RTFA or felt like being misleading. Engadget did report that, but they were wrong, as the article explains in the very next paragraph:
Writing about Apple's iTunes ringtones, John Gruber of the Daring Fireball cited Engadget, which reported that "the RIAA wanted to be able to distribute ringtones of its artists without having to pay them big money to do so (surprised?), and it won a decision last year before the Copyright Office saying that ringtones weren't 'derivative works,' meaning they didn't infringe on the copyright of the songwriter."
Engadget, known for shooting from the hip rather than the brain, didn't really understand whole story. From its report, Gruber concluded, "So if you have the right to play a song, you have the right to use it as a ringtone on your phone."
Gruber blamed a "complicated, confusing mess of a ringtone policy" on Apple, and suggested the company should have simply handed out tools to create ringtones from any users. Incidentally, that's apparently what Apple was going to do back in January.
Derk Nek of Epplegacks explained that--unfortunately--what the RIAA actually won in the case cited by Engadget was instead the right to collect money for ringtones without distributing those fees to the artists they represent. There was no establishing that ringtones are not protected intellectual property, so the RIAA will continue collecting royalty fees, because distributing songs or portions of songs requires mechanical rights. Playing a ringtone might also--in the mind of the RIAA and the letter of the law--require performing rights.
And now ask yourself, who of us had chosen Windows?? Right, nobody. It's the thing which came preinstalled.
*Raises hand*. I'm yet another person who choose Windows. Heck, I choose Vista.
My older computer had XP Pro, my new computer has Vista Business. Both computers are home-built, so neither had anything preinstalled.
In all fairness, I got both copies for "free" through my school, and it's not clear what I would have done had that not been an option. (Especially with my recent machine, now that I'm more familiar with Linux and Unix.) Both machines dual booted Gentoo; when I got my new one, I wiped the old one and it now has FreeBSD (anxiously awaiting the official release of 7.0).
But there are things I rather like about Windows that Linux and Unix don't have, and vice versa. Unix and Linux have a lot of things that I consider unfortunate design characteristics borne out of the fact that it was originally designed in 1970 and hasn't gone through any major reinventions since it was rewritten to C. Many of these things aren't true in Windows. However, Windows has a lot of other "unfortunate design characteristics" borne out of the fact, near as I can tell, that some people at MS are really stupid. (This is being somewhat facetious; a lot of them are also related to evolution to earlier versions of Windows or MS-DOS, but I still think that a lot of the places they could have done a LOT better than they did.)
Most patch maintainers keep their patches up-to-date with the kernels.
If they are keeping their schedulers up-to-date with the kernel so it can be compiled in, they are already doing a large part of the maintenance that would be required to keep a runtime plugin system up-to-date. That's my point.
The parent would have the same circumvention means as the kid.
And as someone who probably wouldn't do much more than try to protect against accidental exposure (e.g. block whitehouse.com), at least once my hypothetical kids are teens, if I found rivets drilled out or my BIOS password reset, they would be grounded for a couple weeks.
If the child is home alone often enough that it is an issue, you have a much bigger family problem on your hands then the computer.
As someone who was a latchkey kid through high school and was home for a couple hours before my parents (who both worked) almost every day, this is a stupid statement.
[He] completey ignores the fact that his kids have friends in the nieghbourhood and some if not all of them have internet access
This sort of statement always confused me. There are some things that parents may want to restrict viewing of that it applies to. I know I saw a couple R movies over at my friends' houses without my parents' knowledge (not that I think they would have minded).
But porn? Who goes over to a friend's house and watches porn? That just seems really weird to me. I wouldn't do that in a million years.
(If it's a girlfriend or something like that things are different of course. But if you're watching porn with your girlfriend, there are probably things other than porn to be concerned about as a parent.)
I shudder at the lack of trust between this young man and his mother though. If it is justified, he will probably end up in jail once he turns 18 and can no longer be legally restrained.
Really? Would you really trust any teenager (especially a teenage boy) to not look at porn, even if you said "don't look at porn"?
The opposite of Vista's network performance taking a nose dive while playing MP3s, Linux systems with the new scheduler will see little/no impact from background/normal operations on their gaming, music, and video.
It's not quite the opposite, because the reason Vista's network performance drops is to achieve that same result.
Now, whether there was a better way that MS could have gone about it is an entirely different matter. But, if they indeed found that they needed to drop network traffic to get short latencies for multimedia, my vote is that this was a worthwhile tradeoff.
Because then every function call becomes an indirect call, causing performance penalties.
You could also patch the code, though whether this is a good idea or not is questionable at best. No performance penalty though except at switching time.
More importantly, however, this requires a stable "scheduler API". Not all schedulers want to hook the same things, which means that you need to add (and maintain) a superset of the hooks required by all the various schedulers.
Finally, anyone who cares enough to be replacing their scheduler should be technically advanced enough to apply a patch and recompile the kernel.
You're (somewhat) contradicting yourself. You seem to suggest that patching the kernel source is a viable option. But if there isn't a stable "scheduler API", then what is the patch you apply to the kernel source going to use?
Finally, the other big point is that the kernel isn't even including multiple schedulers you can choose at compile time. I know I have rather higher faith in general of code that comes with the mainline kernel than someone's website. (There are, of course, exceptions to this; I would be willing to install Reiser4, I have installed the KDB patches, vendor patches (gentoo-kernel instead of vanilla-kernel or whatever it is), etc.)
I don't know...forcing people to sing contracts when they agree, might severely cut back on their [EULA]length. I know my voice would.
You know, having only read the first half of this post, I was sure that you had transposed the "ng" in "sing."
Re:I'm surprised that no-one's mentioned Gorillas
on
DOS 5 Upgrade Video
·
· Score: 1
Agreed. I wanted to teach myself C after doing QBASIC and also Visual Basic for a while, but I couldn't find a compiler I could get working.
I found one called DJGPP (still around; it's a port of GCC for DOS), but didn't know how to get it set up. I'd be curious to look at the documentation I had to work with at the time and see how much was due to poor docs and how much was due to me not knowing about a lot of stuff. (I'm not sure I really knew about environment variables then, and in retrospect, this was probably the biggest issue.) The only way I was able to get programs to compile was to put the.c file into the bin/ directory, copy any include files from include/ to bin/, then write, for instance, #include "stdio.h" instead of #include . I got very frustrated with it and put it aside for some number of years until I took a class in C++.
...the 4 gig limit is now perilously close to the ammount of ram that is in consumer machines.
Well, keep in mind that 32-bit OSs should be able to use Intel's PAE to address 64 GB of memory. The memory space usable by one process would still be limited to 4 GB (minus OS stuff, so 2 or 3 GB on Windows), but it would put off the wall by a couple more years, as one of the reasons you want more memory is to run more processes, not to give individual processes more space. So PAE would help that.
Of course, even Vista doesn't support PAE and is so limited to 4 GB physical memory. I personally find this mind boggling, and wouldn't be surprised if either they change that in a service pack release or it comes back to bite them.
My suggestion? Write the key on the CD itself. If you lose the CD, you've also lost the installation media and are screwed anyway.
Actually, I never understood why companies don't just print the key right on the CD to begin with. They manage to make unique copies of the cases or manuals or whatever has the key, it seems like it wouldn't be that difficult to put it on the CD too. I would notice that and think "hey, that's pretty nice." (Just provide a second copy of the key on paper so that you don't have to copy down the number before putting the CD in the drive or open the drive once the installation is underway.)
No, you can't walk or bike into the data center. It's more of a hike, and a pretty dangerous one.
By the Great River, there's a road to the pass of Minas Morgul. Follow the path inward until you reach steps... lots of steps. This is the road of Cirith Ungol. This is a secret path... security doesn't use it, because security doesn't know about it.
For example, if AMD was targeting 32 TB/s of memory bandwith at 2ms latencies for their year 2 target, that would be quite a sensitive strategy.
If it's a sensitive goal, and they don't want Intel to know about it, then WTF are they telling journalists about it for?
(Really I should put "journalists" in quotes because, IMO, if an article about product X has been approved by X's company, IMO it ceases to be journalism and becomes a press release, but whatever.)
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize there's plenty of history you can look at for what they might do regarding kerberos, right? It's been there since Windows 2000.
(Actually my OS prof last semester was one of the developers on the W2K kerberos stuff.)
He'll just respawn back at the entrance.
"No, don't you get it? If you die in Bejing, you die in real life!"
Requesting the whole organization use tinfoil hat Linux boxes; with 256bit end to end encryption; with all outgoing and incoming packets sniffed, duplicated and logged; 16 character mixed special char, numeric, and alphabetic passwords; Faraday cages around every office; may be excessive even for the NSA
;-)
Actually I bet the NSA is doing everything you name, except for the 256bit thing. I'm sure they're using at least 4096 bit encryption (assuming RS). Maybe biometrics instead of the fancy passwords.
But you can be sure that the rooms are faraday cages; even the CIA does that.
(The CIA also has double walls between which they pump white noise so that people can't read the vibrations of the glass with laser meters. The building is magnetically shielded so people can't "read" the monitors of people remotely.)
How can he claim to be something he's not?
He's not claiming to be an average user, he's attempting to evaluate it from their perspective.
Isn't this Dell's issue? Even under Windows, Dell tunes their OEM install.
Well, what does Free mean to you Walt?
And if there were, then it would be in violation of MPEG licensing. Good call Walt.
All red herrings.
He's not evaluating Linux, or even Ubuntu, in some abstract sense to see if it's "ready for the desktop". He's trying to determine whether Joe Schmoe could go out and buy one of these computers instead of the version with Windows.
So it doesn't matter why something doesn't work, whether it's because Dell set it up wrong, or there's an issue of Free software, or whatever, the point is it doesn't work. (Or works poorly.)
"The Ubuntu-equipped Inspiron 1420N starts at $744, but the configuration that Dell lent me for testing sells for $1,415. The same unit equipped with Windows Vista costs $1,524. The Ubuntu version includes OpenOffice, the free office suite that competes with Microsoft Office. Dell charges an added $149 for Microsoft Office."
So what is your point? That people that don't want to run Microsoft products really should because its almost the same price for the hardware?
I suspect his points are that the machine he tested costs $1415, there's a version with Windows and Office for $109 more, and you could pay another $149 for Office if you wanted.
Do you always assume people have an agenda when they write something?
RTFA. That way you'll be more informed than the submitter... in the very next paragraph from where it talks about that, explains that the Engadget report cited was wrong, and in fact that's not what the copyright office decided.
Now stop that! How are we supposed
And now ask yourself, who of us had chosen Windows?? Right, nobody. It's the thing which came preinstalled.
*Raises hand*. I'm yet another person who choose Windows. Heck, I choose Vista.
My older computer had XP Pro, my new computer has Vista Business. Both computers are home-built, so neither had anything preinstalled.
In all fairness, I got both copies for "free" through my school, and it's not clear what I would have done had that not been an option. (Especially with my recent machine, now that I'm more familiar with Linux and Unix.) Both machines dual booted Gentoo; when I got my new one, I wiped the old one and it now has FreeBSD (anxiously awaiting the official release of 7.0).
But there are things I rather like about Windows that Linux and Unix don't have, and vice versa. Unix and Linux have a lot of things that I consider unfortunate design characteristics borne out of the fact that it was originally designed in 1970 and hasn't gone through any major reinventions since it was rewritten to C. Many of these things aren't true in Windows. However, Windows has a lot of other "unfortunate design characteristics" borne out of the fact, near as I can tell, that some people at MS are really stupid. (This is being somewhat facetious; a lot of them are also related to evolution to earlier versions of Windows or MS-DOS, but I still think that a lot of the places they could have done a LOT better than they did.)
What? No, you're backwards! If you cut the children in half there will be FEWER laptops per child since there will be more kids.
What you need to do is duck tape a few together. Heck, tape them together in bundles of three and you'll have the 1.5 laptops per child p.
Most patch maintainers keep their patches up-to-date with the kernels.
If they are keeping their schedulers up-to-date with the kernel so it can be compiled in, they are already doing a large part of the maintenance that would be required to keep a runtime plugin system up-to-date. That's my point.
gov't != parents
Locking parent out of computer - priceless.
The parent would have the same circumvention means as the kid.
And as someone who probably wouldn't do much more than try to protect against accidental exposure (e.g. block whitehouse.com), at least once my hypothetical kids are teens, if I found rivets drilled out or my BIOS password reset, they would be grounded for a couple weeks.
If the child is home alone often enough that it is an issue, you have a much bigger family problem on your hands then the computer.
As someone who was a latchkey kid through high school and was home for a couple hours before my parents (who both worked) almost every day, this is a stupid statement.
[He] completey ignores the fact that his kids have friends in the nieghbourhood and some if not all of them have internet access
This sort of statement always confused me. There are some things that parents may want to restrict viewing of that it applies to. I know I saw a couple R movies over at my friends' houses without my parents' knowledge (not that I think they would have minded).
But porn? Who goes over to a friend's house and watches porn? That just seems really weird to me. I wouldn't do that in a million years.
(If it's a girlfriend or something like that things are different of course. But if you're watching porn with your girlfriend, there are probably things other than porn to be concerned about as a parent.)
I shudder at the lack of trust between this young man and his mother though. If it is justified, he will probably end up in jail once he turns 18 and can no longer be legally restrained.
Really? Would you really trust any teenager (especially a teenage boy) to not look at porn, even if you said "don't look at porn"?
You could set up a LAN in your house* with all traffic going through a central server, then install filtering software on that.
The whole point is raising the bar; this is just another way to do so.
(* I know it's not you that wants it, but it's easier to phrase if I pretend that it is.)
The opposite of Vista's network performance taking a nose dive while playing MP3s, Linux systems with the new scheduler will see little/no impact from background/normal operations on their gaming, music, and video.
It's not quite the opposite, because the reason Vista's network performance drops is to achieve that same result.
Now, whether there was a better way that MS could have gone about it is an entirely different matter. But, if they indeed found that they needed to drop network traffic to get short latencies for multimedia, my vote is that this was a worthwhile tradeoff.
Because then every function call becomes an indirect call, causing performance penalties.
You could also patch the code, though whether this is a good idea or not is questionable at best. No performance penalty though except at switching time.
More importantly, however, this requires a stable "scheduler API". Not all schedulers want to hook the same things, which means that you need to add (and maintain) a superset of the hooks required by all the various schedulers.
Finally, anyone who cares enough to be replacing their scheduler should be technically advanced enough to apply a patch and recompile the kernel.
You're (somewhat) contradicting yourself. You seem to suggest that patching the kernel source is a viable option. But if there isn't a stable "scheduler API", then what is the patch you apply to the kernel source going to use?
Finally, the other big point is that the kernel isn't even including multiple schedulers you can choose at compile time. I know I have rather higher faith in general of code that comes with the mainline kernel than someone's website. (There are, of course, exceptions to this; I would be willing to install Reiser4, I have installed the KDB patches, vendor patches (gentoo-kernel instead of vanilla-kernel or whatever it is), etc.)
...and, now I see that the OP is where the "sing" came from.
Me == idiot.
I don't know...forcing people to sing contracts when they agree, might severely cut back on their [EULA]length. I know my voice would.
You know, having only read the first half of this post, I was sure that you had transposed the "ng" in "sing."
Agreed. I wanted to teach myself C after doing QBASIC and also Visual Basic for a while, but I couldn't find a compiler I could get working.
.c file into the bin/ directory, copy any include files from include/ to bin/, then write, for instance, #include "stdio.h" instead of #include . I got very frustrated with it and put it aside for some number of years until I took a class in C++.
I found one called DJGPP (still around; it's a port of GCC for DOS), but didn't know how to get it set up. I'd be curious to look at the documentation I had to work with at the time and see how much was due to poor docs and how much was due to me not knowing about a lot of stuff. (I'm not sure I really knew about environment variables then, and in retrospect, this was probably the biggest issue.) The only way I was able to get programs to compile was to put the
...the 4 gig limit is now perilously close to the ammount of ram that is in consumer machines.
Well, keep in mind that 32-bit OSs should be able to use Intel's PAE to address 64 GB of memory. The memory space usable by one process would still be limited to 4 GB (minus OS stuff, so 2 or 3 GB on Windows), but it would put off the wall by a couple more years, as one of the reasons you want more memory is to run more processes, not to give individual processes more space. So PAE would help that.
Of course, even Vista doesn't support PAE and is so limited to 4 GB physical memory. I personally find this mind boggling, and wouldn't be surprised if either they change that in a service pack release or it comes back to bite them.
My suggestion? Write the key on the CD itself. If you lose the CD, you've also lost the installation media and are screwed anyway.
Actually, I never understood why companies don't just print the key right on the CD to begin with. They manage to make unique copies of the cases or manuals or whatever has the key, it seems like it wouldn't be that difficult to put it on the CD too. I would notice that and think "hey, that's pretty nice." (Just provide a second copy of the key on paper so that you don't have to copy down the number before putting the CD in the drive or open the drive once the installation is underway.)
No, you can't walk or bike into the data center. It's more of a hike, and a pretty dangerous one.
By the Great River, there's a road to the pass of Minas Morgul. Follow the path inward until you reach steps... lots of steps. This is the road of Cirith Ungol. This is a secret path... security doesn't use it, because security doesn't know about it.
You might want to bring some off.
For example, if AMD was targeting 32 TB/s of memory bandwith at 2ms latencies for their year 2 target, that would be quite a sensitive strategy.
If it's a sensitive goal, and they don't want Intel to know about it, then WTF are they telling journalists about it for?
(Really I should put "journalists" in quotes because, IMO, if an article about product X has been approved by X's company, IMO it ceases to be journalism and becomes a press release, but whatever.)