Don't forget about its possible use in forensics, like at crime scenes. Even if they don't keep this stuff in a permanent record, they could still use it to contradict or support other evidence. More evidence is always better, unless you're guilty.
Of course, this would be of varying use depending on the accuracy of the process and the sensitivity. Make it too sensitive, and you'll get the smell of the cop who handled whatever it is you're looking at... and then they can use that as an excuse to explain planted evidence, or evidence when a cop commits a crime.
Do they need to know how to install the OS first, or should I let them look that up on their own while I make them power-users?
Take them through the installation of the OS. Take a long time with it, because there are a lot of important topics they need to grasp. And there are, of course, tons of terms they aren't likely to know ("interface," "device," "terminal," "shell") that will come up. Giving them a light introduction to networking and things like that will also help you out later on.
What distributions of Linux and BSD should they be first introduced to? (I'm only familiar with Debian, and I know virtually nil about *BSD.)
For a week-long course, RedHat and no BSD at all. I loathe RedHat with all my heart, but it's what everyone and their mothers use, so it'll be the most useful for them. Moreover, 90% of all Linux distros are based on RH in one form or another, which means they can translate at least some of their RH-specific skills to other distros.
The BSDs are all really wonderful, but in a week you aren't going to be able to teach these kids enough about Unix to keep them from hating it. And since your goal is to bring them out of this with a positive impression toward free software and operating systems...
Initially, do they need to be more adept at the GUI, or do they first need to know how to use the shell?
You shouldn't have to teach them anything significant about the GUI at all, if they've ever used a Windows machine before. Both KDE and GNOME are Windows clones, occasionally with a few extra features thrown in. In fact, if you want to teach them Unix, don't use those desktops at all: install FluxBox or AfterStep or something similar to give them a real taste of what Unix GUIs are like.
But the command line should occupy the majority of your time, I think. It's both the most important skill and the most difficult to teach. But you should probably stay away from the more complex tools like sed and awk and keep it to cp/rm/mv/find/xargs and friends. (find/xargs is really illustrative of the powerful things you can do in Unix, and it might inspire them to learn about sed and all the rest on their own.)
Should I give away Debian CDs no-questions-asked, or should I talk with the almighty Parents so little Daniel doesn't install Linux over Dad's 'work computer.'
Give away the CDs. You're only responsible for the kids while they're in the classroom. If they get home and fsck up dad's computer, that's dad's fault.
The primary thing here is that you want to give these kids a push in the right direction. Give them an appreciation for Unix, and the tools to take their appreciation to the next level. If they have Debian CDs and a basic familiarity, maybe they want to install it on their home computers to learn more. That's exactly the sort of response you want, right? And if the kids' parents are smart, they'll encourage this sort of learning-on-your-own too. I know my parents did, even though it meant my mother went two weeks where she couldn't use her computer because I'd put Solaris on it.
Yes, that's a good plan. Spend the government's money fighting battles it already knows it can't possibly win. Because God only knows the government doesn't have enough other stuff to waste all its money.
Incidentally, I found this line really funny:
back to tormenting little buissnesses, OEMs, EULAs and the such.
(No, please don't torment my EULAs! They've suffered so much already!)
If you scatter your config files far and wide across the filesystem, how to you expect to back them up?
Probably using find / -type d -name etc | xargs tar czf etc.tar.gz, which would also get/etc. Not a difficult task for anyone with basic Unix sysadmin experience.
Storing configuration for/opt on/etc/opt wastes space in the root filesystem and causes annoying replication problems for when/opt is an NFS share imported by many clients. Of course, there's no fundamental reason you couldn't make/opt/$program/etc a symlink to/etc/opt/$program, but that's working in the wrong direction (making the corner-case solution easiest, making the common-case solution hardest).
That stupidity/oddity is a requirement of the FHS. Configuration files for/opt go in/etc/opt, which is not a cleaner solution in any way than just putting them in/opt. Configuration files sensibly belong in/opt/$package/etc, but that's not where they go. Just like configuration files for/usr/local programs sensibly belong in/usr/local/etc, but again, according to the FHS you can't put them there.
But still, there's no reason you couldn't roll your own./configure wrapper that sets up your programs to install to/opt or/wherever/you/want.
Red Hat likes everything nicely tucked away in/usr/bin, and/etc, completly forgeting/opt and/usr/local/bin, and/usr/local/etc ever existed. It kinda breaks some traditional locations of files.
No, RedHat is exactly correct in not installing binaries into/usr/local, and it's probably correct in not installing binaries into/opt./usr/local is exclusively for the benefit of the administrator, the distribution must never touch it at all. In other words:/usr is for programs you install via your package manager,/usr/local is for programs you install by hand (make install). This is all very sensible and according to the FHS.
Though the company remains profitable, Aapple's recent performance in the market [apple.com] has been marked by a decline in sales, in comparison to both the previous quarter, and the previous year. Per-share revenues have dropped by almost half compared with 3rd quarter 2001, down to $0.09 per share from $0.17
I guess that means it's time to fire Jobs and then, a year later when the company is about to file for Chapter 11, re-hire him so he can save Apple for... what, the fourth time?
You have legitimate points, but you're not talking about commercialization bringing down our economy... you're talking about lack of ethics bringing down our economy. And while you're complaining about all the bad things commercialization does for us, don't forget completely about the good things it's brought us.
Part of the reason banks collect information on your spending and deposit habits is for your benefit, as well as for compliance with federal laws. For example, if I withdraw $200 a week, every week, for five years, and then suddenly there's a $7500 withdrawal, the bank can red-flag that and call to make sure someone hasn't stolen my credit card number. Or, if I'm getting $20000 wire deposits from a crooken bank, my bank can inform the FBI or whoever would be the appropriate authority. There's been plenty of news on the quality of the software that does the above testing, but even poor testing is probably better than none at all.
So the reason you don't want to do the above is twofold. First, if the software is working correctly, it will get a really perverse idea of your "normal" usage, and fraudulent claims (or claims in error) might go unnoticed (even by you, if they're only for a few hundred bucks). Second, if the software isn't working correctly, you will get red-flagged every other week, which will make working with your bank a real PITA. Even worse, if you run into a lot of problems your bank may make a note on your record that you might be, for example, trying to launder money for some organization. So when your country's anti-terrorism organization shows up with a subpeona for suspicious account activity at a bank, your name might get on a whole bunch of lists that you really don't want to be on.
I really think this is one of those slow-news-day articles, but even if it's not, you can just ask. Go into your branch office and discuss your concerns. Pin them down on what they mean when they say "affiliates." If they do give away your personal info for advertising purposes, ask them if you can opt out. This is not an uncommon question for banks at all. As part of my new account "package" (about 50 pamphlets), I got a privacy notice that described, both in legalese and plain English, the circumstances under which my information might be released. It contained a section specifically on advertising.
Here's something/. readers will just get: Suspenders and a Belt. It's a good policy for computer security, and it's a good policy for safe sex. For hook-ups and other short-term relationships resulting in sex, condoms are still the way to go because of STDs; but if you've been with your partner for a long time and trust him or her, physical barrier-free sex can be a very good thing. But some girls have negative reactions to birth control pills; and some are security-minded, like the/. crowd. A male birth control pill helps out those situations.
Plus, this is important because it gives guys a little more say in whether a girl gets pregnant. (If she gets pregnant by me, anyway.) A lot of people seem to think girls are the only ones who care about getting pregnant by accident, but... I'd have to live with myself, and that, for the rest of my life. Yes, it's not as terrible, but it's still pretty damn bad, and it's not something I'd like to see happen.
I know, and we'll have to come up with more insulting nicknames for the pathetic, lifeless losers who sit in front of the computer all day playing EQ-alikes.
(As opposed to the nicknames for the pathetic, lifeless losers who sit in front of the computer all day playing Natural Selection, which would include me.)
Except that sometimes it matters, and there's no way within the XML spec to selectively discard whitespaces. You could write a program to do it, but then you're not using "pure" XML any more, and you lose the benefits of structure-portability: your XML looks like normal XML, but it's not, and users have no way of knowing that unless they read the manual carefully. And that negates most, though perhaps not all, of the advantages of XML for config files.
(Don't forget that spaces matter in XML, so if you insert newlines around "TheValue" - which most people would be tempted to do on long lines - the program must treat them as important!)
Or this:
TheKey=TheValue
The problem is that using XML for all, or most, configuration files will dramatically impair the readability of the majority of cases: simple configuration files, the syntax of which can be explained in a few sentences. And it will not help significantly with the cases you are trying to improve. Sendmail's configuration file is so complex because the program is complex, and because it's so configurable. Sure, using XML would make your life a little bit easier, but there would still be 15,000 things you could tweak. Oh, and unless XML has built-in macros, you'd quite possibly still be stuck with M4.
Ah, I see. Bias in reporting is perfectly acceptable, as long as you can go find bias in the other direction from a different source.
Sometimes you read the news to be agreed with; sometimes you read the news to argue. But sometimes you just want to be informed, with a minimum of bias. Salon drove me away because its writers seemed to have a lot of difficulty dealing with that third case. I think that's what the complaint is here.
A few things to consider if you decide to look for a new keyboard. First, I advise against mail order. I know it's tough to find quality keyboards in a local store, but it's really important to try out a keyboard to see if you like it. Trust me, you'd be amazed at the difference in quality even from one model to the next from the same manufacturer. I extend this to opening the box of the keyboard you might buy, taking it out, and typing a paragraph or two before buying it.
Second, it doesn't have to be loud to have positive feedback. My Logitech keyboard has the exact same feedback as the old IBMs - that's why I bought it - but with less resistance and less key travel. This means I don't have to bang the keys as hard to register a press, so there's less noise.
Third, when you're looking at a keyboard, wiggle the keys around from side to side. Not only does this help select the keyboards that are probably poorly built, a lot of noise can come from the keys sliding around. It's not often that your fingers come down on a key perfectly straight: almost always, you're pushing a little to one side or the other. All keyboards have some looseness, but... well, in my case it was either "a lot" or "very little," with no keyboards in the middle ground. And you'd be surprised at some of the names (and prices) that have a lot of looseness in the keys.
It actually doesn't matter, because speedups are calculated using algorithm speed, not clock ticks or anything concrete like that. In other words, speedups only give you part of the story. A poorly-written program using a O(log n) search algorithm may be slower than a well-written program using a O(n) one; but in the normal case, the programmers will be sufficiently competent for the better algorithm to make the better program as well.
There are a whole bunch of ways you can conceal information or mislead readers by claiming really good big-oh times, but this isn't really one of them. (How about a perfect hash table that calculates keys using a O(m^n) hashing algorithm?)
Are you including time that the machines are idle and you're not using them? That's the only way I can make sense of your claim. Even if you're not a hardcore developer (where MP is a big bonus) or gamer (where the faster CPU make all the difference, and it doesn't matter how many of them you have), the difference is still going to be visible for ordinary desktop tasks, like ripping a CD and surfing the web at the same time.
And while we're comparing experience, I have a 2-way PPro-200 system, a 2-way P3-450 system, and a 1-way P4-1.6 system. Both of the MP machines are far more responsive for, well, every task that I throw at them: the only reason I don't have only MP boxes is the cost.
Also, don't the chips SLOW DOWN automatically when they get too hot, thus negating any increase in speed you might get from them.
Yes, they do, but "too hot" is about twice the normal operating temperature of the CPU, and "slow down" is "to nearly a halt." I seem to remember someone donating a CPU to test this, and I believe the hysteresis was 80-85C. He got to those temperatures, by the way, by unplugging his CPU fan and running SETI@home.
I don't think this part, at least, is something people need to worry about. I don't know if it ever was, but I heard the stories about early P4s too.
Of course, if Korea and China can't control their problems, the spammers just won't get extradited, period. China is working very hard to regulate its Internet access, so it clearly has the ability to filter email easily; the fact that it's not doing so suggests it might deliberate.
I don't know what possible benefit China would get from this; perhaps they hope to use spam as an excuse to regulate the Internet even more. "Spam here is terrible, we have to scan all emails to stop it."
Re:Economic incentives do work...
on
Solar Power Play
·
· Score: 1
I thought I'd made it clear from the latter half of my post, but apparently not. You may feel that the government is capable of cutting costs, then using that money to fund your research. I don't. So while you may feel you're proposing something fairly minor, I think the inevitable result would be more taxes and more waste.
I also doubt very much that the money would be spent on anything useful, no matter what the government says. Oh, I'm sure some of it would; but a lot of it would find its way to welfare, or the Pentagon.
I'm sorry about my feelings, and I'll ditch my point bonus for this (and any further) replies. But the way most/.'ers feel about MS, that's how I sometimes feel about the government.
Re:Economic incentives do work...
on
Solar Power Play
·
· Score: 2
So in other words, you're perfectly happy to let the government take away your money and spend it on whatever the government thinks it should. If you want to do that, check the box that says you want to give a voluntary donation to the IRS. (I think it all goes to reducing the deficit; there may be a way to earmark it for specific purposes, but I don't know it.) In the meantime, kindly keep your grabby fingers out of my wallet. I'm more than capable of making my own decisions on how to spend my own money. I don't need you, or anyone else, telling me how to do it.
Incidentally, you don't mention the many hundreds of idiotic, redundant, and wildly unsuccessful projects the government continually funds. For every polio vaccine, how many millions of dollars are wasted on things that don't ultimately benefit mankind?
I wouldn't object much if the government were to subsidize research with the money it already has. But there's no way in hell I'm going to approve a tax hike for anything an insubstantial as this. And governments are like Windows: cruft doesn't get taken out, it only gets added. The chances of the government cutting some do-nothing worthless program that wastes millions of dollars are exactly zero.
Re:Economic incentives do work...
on
Solar Power Play
·
· Score: 2
I hope not. If I want to promote solar power, I'm quite capable of using my hard-earned money to do it myself. I don't need Big Brother leaning over and taking a chunk out of my wallet to force me to support something that I don't.
Furthermore, subsidies for solar power at this point would be the wrong way to use them. You should use subsidies to encourage the purchase or use of a technology (or product) that is ready for bigtime: the only reason it costs more is because not enough people are buying it. And the only reason people aren't buying it is that it costs too much. Subsidies get around the chicken and the egg by, well, forcing people to buy something they normally wouldn't. With Uncle Sam (aka, you) paying to dilute the price, the sticker comes down, which tricks people into thinking the product costs less than it does. They start buying, and eventually the price naturally comes down and the subsidies are discontinued.
Subsidies for something so unproven (it's doubtful solar power will work on anywhere near a large scale at this point) and in its early stages of development (for your stated purpose of breaking our dependance on fossil fuels) would only serve to waste money and stifle innovation.
I do support alternative energy sources, by the way. But I'm also firmly against the government taking away my money unless it has a damn good reason to do so. Supporting preliminary research is not a damn good reason; it's a pretty damn poor one.
iptables can do some of what you want, but not all. Still, it may get you close enough to get by (at least until you find a better option). There is an iptables module called "owner" that lets you perform various tests on the owner of a packet, including its "owning command" (creator process) if the kernel supports it. This still doesn't interactively query if you want to pass a connection, but at least you can hardcode in your basic rules:
# iptables -A OUTPUT -m owner --cmd-owner outlook ! --dport 25 -m state --state NEW -j REJECT
It's possible that someone has used that functionality, along with userspace iptables packet queueing, to do exactly what you want, but I haven't heard of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, this would be of varying use depending on the accuracy of the process and the sensitivity. Make it too sensitive, and you'll get the smell of the cop who handled whatever it is you're looking at... and then they can use that as an excuse to explain planted evidence, or evidence when a cop commits a crime.
The BSDs are all really wonderful, but in a week you aren't going to be able to teach these kids enough about Unix to keep them from hating it. And since your goal is to bring them out of this with a positive impression toward free software and operating systems...
You shouldn't have to teach them anything significant about the GUI at all, if they've ever used a Windows machine before. Both KDE and GNOME are Windows clones, occasionally with a few extra features thrown in. In fact, if you want to teach them Unix, don't use those desktops at all: install FluxBox or AfterStep or something similar to give them a real taste of what Unix GUIs are like.But the command line should occupy the majority of your time, I think. It's both the most important skill and the most difficult to teach. But you should probably stay away from the more complex tools like sed and awk and keep it to cp/rm/mv/find/xargs and friends. (find/xargs is really illustrative of the powerful things you can do in Unix, and it might inspire them to learn about sed and all the rest on their own.)
Give away the CDs. You're only responsible for the kids while they're in the classroom. If they get home and fsck up dad's computer, that's dad's fault.The primary thing here is that you want to give these kids a push in the right direction. Give them an appreciation for Unix, and the tools to take their appreciation to the next level. If they have Debian CDs and a basic familiarity, maybe they want to install it on their home computers to learn more. That's exactly the sort of response you want, right? And if the kids' parents are smart, they'll encourage this sort of learning-on-your-own too. I know my parents did, even though it meant my mother went two weeks where she couldn't use her computer because I'd put Solaris on it.
Incidentally, I found this line really funny:
(No, please don't torment my EULAs! They've suffered so much already!)Storing configuration for /opt on /etc/opt wastes space in the root filesystem and causes annoying replication problems for when /opt is an NFS share imported by many clients. Of course, there's no fundamental reason you couldn't make /opt/$program/etc a symlink to /etc/opt/$program, but that's working in the wrong direction (making the corner-case solution easiest, making the common-case solution hardest).
But still, there's no reason you couldn't roll your own ./configure wrapper that sets up your programs to install to /opt or /wherever/you/want.
You have legitimate points, but you're not talking about commercialization bringing down our economy... you're talking about lack of ethics bringing down our economy. And while you're complaining about all the bad things commercialization does for us, don't forget completely about the good things it's brought us.
So the reason you don't want to do the above is twofold. First, if the software is working correctly, it will get a really perverse idea of your "normal" usage, and fraudulent claims (or claims in error) might go unnoticed (even by you, if they're only for a few hundred bucks). Second, if the software isn't working correctly, you will get red-flagged every other week, which will make working with your bank a real PITA. Even worse, if you run into a lot of problems your bank may make a note on your record that you might be, for example, trying to launder money for some organization. So when your country's anti-terrorism organization shows up with a subpeona for suspicious account activity at a bank, your name might get on a whole bunch of lists that you really don't want to be on.
I really think this is one of those slow-news-day articles, but even if it's not, you can just ask. Go into your branch office and discuss your concerns. Pin them down on what they mean when they say "affiliates." If they do give away your personal info for advertising purposes, ask them if you can opt out. This is not an uncommon question for banks at all. As part of my new account "package" (about 50 pamphlets), I got a privacy notice that described, both in legalese and plain English, the circumstances under which my information might be released. It contained a section specifically on advertising.
Plus, this is important because it gives guys a little more say in whether a girl gets pregnant. (If she gets pregnant by me, anyway.) A lot of people seem to think girls are the only ones who care about getting pregnant by accident, but... I'd have to live with myself, and that, for the rest of my life. Yes, it's not as terrible, but it's still pretty damn bad, and it's not something I'd like to see happen.
(As opposed to the nicknames for the pathetic, lifeless losers who sit in front of the computer all day playing Natural Selection, which would include me.)
Except that sometimes it matters, and there's no way within the XML spec to selectively discard whitespaces. You could write a program to do it, but then you're not using "pure" XML any more, and you lose the benefits of structure-portability: your XML looks like normal XML, but it's not, and users have no way of knowing that unless they read the manual carefully. And that negates most, though perhaps not all, of the advantages of XML for config files.
New development: And they are brown!!!
In related news, /. comment-posters will no longer be held personally liable for the business decisions of Microsoft Corporation.
Sometimes you read the news to be agreed with; sometimes you read the news to argue. But sometimes you just want to be informed, with a minimum of bias. Salon drove me away because its writers seemed to have a lot of difficulty dealing with that third case. I think that's what the complaint is here.
Don't forget brief appearances as one of the ghosts in the Harry Potter movies!
Second, it doesn't have to be loud to have positive feedback. My Logitech keyboard has the exact same feedback as the old IBMs - that's why I bought it - but with less resistance and less key travel. This means I don't have to bang the keys as hard to register a press, so there's less noise.
Third, when you're looking at a keyboard, wiggle the keys around from side to side. Not only does this help select the keyboards that are probably poorly built, a lot of noise can come from the keys sliding around. It's not often that your fingers come down on a key perfectly straight: almost always, you're pushing a little to one side or the other. All keyboards have some looseness, but... well, in my case it was either "a lot" or "very little," with no keyboards in the middle ground. And you'd be surprised at some of the names (and prices) that have a lot of looseness in the keys.
There are a whole bunch of ways you can conceal information or mislead readers by claiming really good big-oh times, but this isn't really one of them. (How about a perfect hash table that calculates keys using a O(m^n) hashing algorithm?)
And while we're comparing experience, I have a 2-way PPro-200 system, a 2-way P3-450 system, and a 1-way P4-1.6 system. Both of the MP machines are far more responsive for, well, every task that I throw at them: the only reason I don't have only MP boxes is the cost.
I don't think this part, at least, is something people need to worry about. I don't know if it ever was, but I heard the stories about early P4s too.
I don't know what possible benefit China would get from this; perhaps they hope to use spam as an excuse to regulate the Internet even more. "Spam here is terrible, we have to scan all emails to stop it."
I also doubt very much that the money would be spent on anything useful, no matter what the government says. Oh, I'm sure some of it would; but a lot of it would find its way to welfare, or the Pentagon.
I'm sorry about my feelings, and I'll ditch my point bonus for this (and any further) replies. But the way most /.'ers feel about MS, that's how I sometimes feel about the government.
Incidentally, you don't mention the many hundreds of idiotic, redundant, and wildly unsuccessful projects the government continually funds. For every polio vaccine, how many millions of dollars are wasted on things that don't ultimately benefit mankind?
I wouldn't object much if the government were to subsidize research with the money it already has. But there's no way in hell I'm going to approve a tax hike for anything an insubstantial as this. And governments are like Windows: cruft doesn't get taken out, it only gets added. The chances of the government cutting some do-nothing worthless program that wastes millions of dollars are exactly zero.
Furthermore, subsidies for solar power at this point would be the wrong way to use them. You should use subsidies to encourage the purchase or use of a technology (or product) that is ready for bigtime: the only reason it costs more is because not enough people are buying it. And the only reason people aren't buying it is that it costs too much. Subsidies get around the chicken and the egg by, well, forcing people to buy something they normally wouldn't. With Uncle Sam (aka, you) paying to dilute the price, the sticker comes down, which tricks people into thinking the product costs less than it does. They start buying, and eventually the price naturally comes down and the subsidies are discontinued.
Subsidies for something so unproven (it's doubtful solar power will work on anywhere near a large scale at this point) and in its early stages of development (for your stated purpose of breaking our dependance on fossil fuels) would only serve to waste money and stifle innovation.
I do support alternative energy sources, by the way. But I'm also firmly against the government taking away my money unless it has a damn good reason to do so. Supporting preliminary research is not a damn good reason; it's a pretty damn poor one.