To be fair, the.Net framework (at least one version will almost certainly included with Vista) has compilers for C++, C#, and VB.Net....but I should clarify something. There's space taken up by compiler logic even in the standard.net redistributable, however I don't think the command line tools go along with it (unless you get the.net SDK), so you need to install a 3rd party tool in order to take advantage of it. Go figuire.
To be fair, the.Net framework (at least one version will almost certainly included with Vista) has compilers for C++, C#, and VB.Net.
Basic drivers (See/. article from a week or two ago)
Which article?
Nobody uses Paint. Nobody uses Wordpad. Nobody uses Notepad. Nobody uses Outlook Express. Nobody plays Solitaire and Minesweeper.
That's a big BS. Maybe Wordpad. But paint; people use that sometimes. I personally use Notepad all the freaking time.* So do many people I know. I'll occasionally play Solitare and Minesweeper. I'm pretty sure some people use Outlook.
I'm not disputing your overall point which is that comparing a Linux distro to Vista sizewise is a stupid comparison, but you're being *slightly* unfair to Windows here.
*I was using Notepad++ instead of Notepad, but then I had to reinstall Windows (and everything else) when my hard drive I guess decided that it was tired of spinning, and I've never reassociated.txt files with Notepad++ because Notepad works just as well as Notepad++ would for them.
I'd say it'd restrict the people that could vote for dupes to those who are probably most serious. (Not saying there aren't serious people who aren't subscribers, just that there probably aren't many people who arent' serious who are subscribers.) This reduces the chance that people would essentially DOS a non-dupe story by voting it a dupe, because in order to do so you'd have to pay for enough screennames to do that, as opposed to just register enough bots.
At least that's what I would guess, and it seems somewhat reasonable.
There was an engineer who had an exceptional gift for fixing all things mechanical. After serving his company loyally for over 30 years, he happily retired.
Several years later, the company contacted him regarding a seemingly impossible problem they were having with one of their multi-million dollar machines. They had tried everything and everyone to get the machine fixed, but to no avail. In desperation, they called on the retired engineer who had solved so many of their problems in the past.
The engineer reluctantly took the challenge. He spent a day studying the huge machine. At the end of the day, he marked a small "x" in chalk on a particular component of the machine and proudly stated, "This is where your problem is."
The part was replaced and the machine worked perfectly again. The company received a bill for $50,000 from the engineer for his services. They demanded an itemized accounting of his charges.
The engineer responded:
One chalk mark: $1 Knowing where to put it: $49,999
Is typing a bunch of numbers into a box in a GUI easier than editing a text file? Is there something implicity more intuitive about having a window with little fill in boxes easier than editing a text file?
Yes, and it's called 'recognition vs. recall.' Off of the top of your head, without looking at documentation, what are all the possible options for xorg.conf for, let's take a small subset of options, setting the location of the ctrl key? I've set ONE such option (by hand, in the conf file) to swap ctrl and caps, and I can't think of off the top of my head how I did it. I don't even have a clue how you would do some of the other options such as setting both keys to caps, nor can I give you a list of all possible options.
On the other hand, open up the KDE control panel. There's a pane in there that lets you set those options -- with checkboxes. You can look at the list of options and pick those that you want. No chance of making a typo, no chance of picking an option that you can't, etc.
It also comes down to the fact that you can discover those options just by playing around, without reading documentation. As this is how many people use the computer (who RTFM anyway), it's far preferable for them. (Of course, it's still sorta nice for speed to give the power users, who KNOW the syntax and possible options of the conf files, power to edit by hand, but if I could have one way or the other I would take the dialogs in a second.)
Windows leaves you staring at a 16 color 640x480 screen after the install with no network and a need to download the driver from the internet.
Um... what version of Windows is this? In the XP installations I've done recently it starts up in 640x480 and immediately brings up a dialog saying it's gonna try other settings. It changes to 800x600, brings up a "Can you see this?" dialog, and if you click ok/yes, then it leaves you at 800x600. In fact, the slider in Display -> Settings doesn't even go below 800x600 after that. Even if you click no to leave it in 640x480 I'm nearly positive it's in 16-bit color.
I have to say that this IE7 feaure of previewing tabs (similar to how Expose previews windows) is pretty cool... anyone know of anyone using this in the context of a tabbed program before?
You might enjoy this link about "geocide". It's a HOWTO on how you can destroy the Earth.
This is not a guide for wusses whose aim is merely to wipe out humanity.... If total human genocide is your ultimate goal, you are reading the wrong document. There are far more efficient ways of doing this, many which are available and feasible RIGHT NOW. Nor is this a guide for those wanting to annihilate everything from single-celled life upwards, render Earth uninhabitable or simply conquer it. These are trivial goals in comparison.
This is a guide for those who do not want the Earth to be there anymore.
the position of \ and ~ and backspace might set some people off.
Dear God, there is no keyboard change from normal I hate more than that. It's immensely frustrating, and goes against just about every UI design principle I know. When I'm using one of the Sun labs at college I will actually use the shell within Emacs because I remapped the ` character to the delete-backwards-character or whatever makes it act like backspace. I can deal with the movement of |\, I can deal with Dvorak and Qwerty, I can deal with ctrl and caps switched, but no matter how much I have used those Sun keyboards I haven't been able to deal with the damn backspace not being where it "should" be.
And it's really a pity too, because I'd love to have a keyboard with ctrl and caps lock in the Unix place. (And done through hardware rather than software.) Esc is probably also better in the Unix layout, though I don't notice that.
The other reply to this said that it's usually taking up half the backspace key; I don't think this is the most common layout with the L-shaped enter though. I think more common is to have the right shift key diminished in size then |\ take up the rightmost portion.
If one part of the system takes a hit the rest helps it stay up.
This is a good thing.
What ISN'T good is that if the system CAN'T help it stay up without bringing something else down it will try anyway. With a truly robust system it wouldn't be possible to bring down NYC with a power subsystem failure in Ohio.
You can't possibly convince me that there is no option other than "what we have now" and "power grids not interconnected", one that will allow robust operation of electricity.
(Now, it may be that such a system is cost prohibitive, but I'd have a hard time believing even that.)
Although more reliability and redundancy could be built into the North American power grid, blaming the 2003 outage on poor engineering is not accurate. It was FirstEnergy's failure to adhere to standards that precipitated the cascade failure. As such, it would be more accurate to blame greedy corporate management that was too cheap to shell out adequate funds for operation.
I disagree. It doesn't matter who started the cascade failure; the fact that such a cascade failure is possible is a failure of the design and, IMO, deserves a spot on this list.
The virus actually needs to be able to get a new public key for each computer in infects, which means having a remote site accessible for it to register with, and request a new key from.
No it doesn't. You've got the idea right, but your version is a bit more complicated than it needs to be.
Look at real-world implementations of public-key encryption systems. [I know PGPDisk does this. I don't know if PGP does it for other, smaller things. Almost all the encrypted network protocols I've studied do this too.] You usually don't encrypt data with a public key; it's too performance consuming. What you do is generate a random key for a symmetric cypher, encrypt the data with that, then encrypt the generated key with the public key. In network protocols, this generated key is what you'll see called the session key. When your recipient gets the data, they'll decrypt the session key using their private key, then decrypt the data with their session key.
A virus like the one under discussion could implement this very easily. No need to mess with RSA on two levels, or generate another keypair, just a symmetric key. The virus generates a symmetric key [no need to log onto an external server to request one, just pull from the system clock,/dev/random, whatever], encrypts $HOME using it, encrypts the symmetric key with the extortionist's public key. It then destroys the information in $HOME and discards the unencrypted symmetric key. When you go to get your password, you have to give the extortionist the encrypted symmetric key. He decrypts it with his private key, and gives you the unencrypted key.
Most users don't back up though. So while for people who DO, losing ~ isn't horrible, for 95+% of people out there it's the end of the world.
I've got data so scattered around my hard drive that there's no hope of doing any sort of reasonable backup right now for instance. It's my failing, and some time when I have time I plan to go through and sort stuff out, but right now if I lose my data you might as well toss my computer off the roof.
Get a decent browser, and you'll be able to type "wp: price gouging" in the address bar and find these things out for yourself
Or Firefox, if you set it up right. You can go to en.wikipedia.org (or whatever you want your language to be), right click on the search box, and choose 'add keyword for search'. I choose 'w' as the keyword, so I can type 'w price gouging' and go there.
I also set it up so that 'man whatever' searches the manpages on freebsd.org, 'g whatever' google searches (yeah, I know there's a dedicated box, but the address bar's a bigger target), 'imdb whatever' looks up on imdb, etc.
Still, I want to find a console that can give me a good pinball game. The virtual stuff just isn't the same as a good old machine...
Exactly.
There are also a lot of other specialized hardware that you can't (right now) get for your home. I was at Dave & Buster's a while ago and one of my friends played a cop shooting game where the machine had cameras that would figure out where you were, and you would have to physically dodge the bad guys, duck behind things to reload, etc. There's also the classic racing games and whatnot, and while you can get steering wheels for consoles (I assume; you can get them for the PC) most people don't.
There's also the issue with games. You can walk into an arcade and play a dozen different games for a few bucks, while going out and buying them for your console (and possibly the other two, so you have MS, Sony, and Nintendo, and maybe multiple incarnations of each) would be more expensive if you wouldn't play them much.
And finally, there's still nothing like going out to the arcade with friends. Multiplayer gaming over the 'net doesn't cut it. (Now, if you all bring your consoles to the same place, that's another matter.)
The correct way to go about this is to get a cheap steel case, like this for $20.75
Why's that correct?
What if you have the extra money to spend on alumninum? Then you might be able to drop a fan or two. It also would be lighter, which is important if you're going somewhere.
And have fun working inside that case without any of the touches (mounting rails for optical drives, removable bays for the hard drives, etc.) that make some cases a pleasure.
Oh yeah, and like the other posters said, next time RTFA so you notice the fan that's 4 inches bigger than the one even you suggest.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, the .Net framework (at least one version will almost certainly included with Vista) has compilers for C++, C#, and VB.Net. ...but I should clarify something. There's space taken up by compiler logic even in the standard .net redistributable, however I don't think the command line tools go along with it (unless you get the .net SDK), so you need to install a 3rd party tool in order to take advantage of it. Go figuire.
Compilers (gcc, g++, gnat, fortran, perl, python, ruby, ocaml, haskell, lisp, scheme, awk, ...)
.Net framework (at least one version will almost certainly included with Vista) has compilers for C++, C#, and VB.Net.
/. article from a week or two ago)
.txt files with Notepad++ because Notepad works just as well as Notepad++ would for them.
To be fair, the
Basic drivers (See
Which article?
Nobody uses Paint. Nobody uses Wordpad. Nobody uses Notepad. Nobody uses Outlook Express. Nobody plays Solitaire and Minesweeper.
That's a big BS. Maybe Wordpad. But paint; people use that sometimes. I personally use Notepad all the freaking time.* So do many people I know. I'll occasionally play Solitare and Minesweeper. I'm pretty sure some people use Outlook.
I'm not disputing your overall point which is that comparing a Linux distro to Vista sizewise is a stupid comparison, but you're being *slightly* unfair to Windows here.
*I was using Notepad++ instead of Notepad, but then I had to reinstall Windows (and everything else) when my hard drive I guess decided that it was tired of spinning, and I've never reassociated
P is stable (I have no idea of vista is), the only thing that I think really needs to be imporved is ... the registry ...
Just out of curiosity, what's your gripe with the registry?
I'd say it'd restrict the people that could vote for dupes to those who are probably most serious. (Not saying there aren't serious people who aren't subscribers, just that there probably aren't many people who arent' serious who are subscribers.) This reduces the chance that people would essentially DOS a non-dupe story by voting it a dupe, because in order to do so you'd have to pay for enough screennames to do that, as opposed to just register enough bots.
At least that's what I would guess, and it seems somewhat reasonable.
(Note, I'm not a subscriber)
*installs*
Sweet, thanks!
Is typing a bunch of numbers into a box in a GUI easier than editing a text file? Is there something implicity more intuitive about having a window with little fill in boxes easier than editing a text file?
Yes, and it's called 'recognition vs. recall.' Off of the top of your head, without looking at documentation, what are all the possible options for xorg.conf for, let's take a small subset of options, setting the location of the ctrl key? I've set ONE such option (by hand, in the conf file) to swap ctrl and caps, and I can't think of off the top of my head how I did it. I don't even have a clue how you would do some of the other options such as setting both keys to caps, nor can I give you a list of all possible options.
On the other hand, open up the KDE control panel. There's a pane in there that lets you set those options -- with checkboxes. You can look at the list of options and pick those that you want. No chance of making a typo, no chance of picking an option that you can't, etc.
It also comes down to the fact that you can discover those options just by playing around, without reading documentation. As this is how many people use the computer (who RTFM anyway), it's far preferable for them. (Of course, it's still sorta nice for speed to give the power users, who KNOW the syntax and possible options of the conf files, power to edit by hand, but if I could have one way or the other I would take the dialogs in a second.)
Windows leaves you staring at a 16 color 640x480 screen after the install with no network and a need to download the driver from the internet.
/. needs a (-1, Wrong) moderation.
Um... what version of Windows is this? In the XP installations I've done recently it starts up in 640x480 and immediately brings up a dialog saying it's gonna try other settings. It changes to 800x600, brings up a "Can you see this?" dialog, and if you click ok/yes, then it leaves you at 800x600. In fact, the slider in Display -> Settings doesn't even go below 800x600 after that. Even if you click no to leave it in 640x480 I'm nearly positive it's in 16-bit color.
More proof that
I have to say that this IE7 feaure of previewing tabs (similar to how Expose previews windows) is pretty cool... anyone know of anyone using this in the context of a tabbed program before?
the position of \ and ~ and backspace might set some people off.
Dear God, there is no keyboard change from normal I hate more than that. It's immensely frustrating, and goes against just about every UI design principle I know. When I'm using one of the Sun labs at college I will actually use the shell within Emacs because I remapped the ` character to the delete-backwards-character or whatever makes it act like backspace. I can deal with the movement of |\, I can deal with Dvorak and Qwerty, I can deal with ctrl and caps switched, but no matter how much I have used those Sun keyboards I haven't been able to deal with the damn backspace not being where it "should" be.
And it's really a pity too, because I'd love to have a keyboard with ctrl and caps lock in the Unix place. (And done through hardware rather than software.) Esc is probably also better in the Unix layout, though I don't notice that.
The other reply to this said that it's usually taking up half the backspace key; I don't think this is the most common layout with the L-shaped enter though. I think more common is to have the right shift key diminished in size then |\ take up the rightmost portion.
And when you press caps lock, a black light lights up on a black background to let you know that it's on!
Why can't people make a keyboard that has the feel of the old Model M without sounding like you're firing off a machine gun?
What was the executive meeting for that one? "Hey, boss! Let's insult the hell out of our target market!"
As opposed to the recent Apple commercials that feel as mudslinging as anything you see around election time?
"Finally, the Intel chip is freed from dull little boxes performing dull little tasks"
If one part of the system takes a hit the rest helps it stay up.
This is a good thing.
What ISN'T good is that if the system CAN'T help it stay up without bringing something else down it will try anyway. With a truly robust system it wouldn't be possible to bring down NYC with a power subsystem failure in Ohio.
You can't possibly convince me that there is no option other than "what we have now" and "power grids not interconnected", one that will allow robust operation of electricity.
(Now, it may be that such a system is cost prohibitive, but I'd have a hard time believing even that.)
Although more reliability and redundancy could be built into the North American power grid, blaming the 2003 outage on poor engineering is not accurate. It was FirstEnergy's failure to adhere to standards that precipitated the cascade failure. As such, it would be more accurate to blame greedy corporate management that was too cheap to shell out adequate funds for operation.
I disagree. It doesn't matter who started the cascade failure; the fact that such a cascade failure is possible is a failure of the design and, IMO, deserves a spot on this list.
Yeah, you gotta watch out for those 403 Forbidden errors... they'll leap out and scare you to death.
The virus actually needs to be able to get a new public key for each computer in infects, which means having a remote site accessible for it to register with, and request a new key from.
/dev/random, whatever], encrypts $HOME using it, encrypts the symmetric key with the extortionist's public key. It then destroys the information in $HOME and discards the unencrypted symmetric key. When you go to get your password, you have to give the extortionist the encrypted symmetric key. He decrypts it with his private key, and gives you the unencrypted key.
No it doesn't. You've got the idea right, but your version is a bit more complicated than it needs to be.
Look at real-world implementations of public-key encryption systems. [I know PGPDisk does this. I don't know if PGP does it for other, smaller things. Almost all the encrypted network protocols I've studied do this too.] You usually don't encrypt data with a public key; it's too performance consuming. What you do is generate a random key for a symmetric cypher, encrypt the data with that, then encrypt the generated key with the public key. In network protocols, this generated key is what you'll see called the session key. When your recipient gets the data, they'll decrypt the session key using their private key, then decrypt the data with their session key.
A virus like the one under discussion could implement this very easily. No need to mess with RSA on two levels, or generate another keypair, just a symmetric key. The virus generates a symmetric key [no need to log onto an external server to request one, just pull from the system clock,
Most users don't back up though. So while for people who DO, losing ~ isn't horrible, for 95+% of people out there it's the end of the world.
I've got data so scattered around my hard drive that there's no hope of doing any sort of reasonable backup right now for instance. It's my failing, and some time when I have time I plan to go through and sort stuff out, but right now if I lose my data you might as well toss my computer off the roof.
I think I learned it from a /. comment, so I thought I'd give back ;-)
Get a decent browser, and you'll be able to type "wp: price gouging" in the address bar and find these things out for yourself
Or Firefox, if you set it up right. You can go to en.wikipedia.org (or whatever you want your language to be), right click on the search box, and choose 'add keyword for search'. I choose 'w' as the keyword, so I can type 'w price gouging' and go there.
I also set it up so that 'man whatever' searches the manpages on freebsd.org, 'g whatever' google searches (yeah, I know there's a dedicated box, but the address bar's a bigger target), 'imdb whatever' looks up on imdb, etc.
True, I was too dismissive of the cost of it. BUt I don't think I spent more than 10 bucks over the course of an hour or so.
And they seem to be getting worse too costwise too. It won't be too long until the cost argument goes the other way.
Still, I want to find a console that can give me a good pinball game. The virtual stuff just isn't the same as a good old machine...
Exactly.
There are also a lot of other specialized hardware that you can't (right now) get for your home. I was at Dave & Buster's a while ago and one of my friends played a cop shooting game where the machine had cameras that would figure out where you were, and you would have to physically dodge the bad guys, duck behind things to reload, etc. There's also the classic racing games and whatnot, and while you can get steering wheels for consoles (I assume; you can get them for the PC) most people don't.
There's also the issue with games. You can walk into an arcade and play a dozen different games for a few bucks, while going out and buying them for your console (and possibly the other two, so you have MS, Sony, and Nintendo, and maybe multiple incarnations of each) would be more expensive if you wouldn't play them much.
And finally, there's still nothing like going out to the arcade with friends. Multiplayer gaming over the 'net doesn't cut it. (Now, if you all bring your consoles to the same place, that's another matter.)
The correct way to go about this is to get a cheap steel case, like this for $20.75
Why's that correct?
What if you have the extra money to spend on alumninum? Then you might be able to drop a fan or two. It also would be lighter, which is important if you're going somewhere.
And have fun working inside that case without any of the touches (mounting rails for optical drives, removable bays for the hard drives, etc.) that make some cases a pleasure.
Oh yeah, and like the other posters said, next time RTFA so you notice the fan that's 4 inches bigger than the one even you suggest.