Or for that matter, music selection. It only mentions that it will only be available to people with Mac AND iPOD, whatever that means. Where did the poster get this information? We really need to have a moderation system for articles, with karma influencing bonus @slashdot or something.
I don't think a common OS is really necessary. Microsoft's competitors could just get together and agree to support OpenGL on every platform other than Windows. Then developers would be able to release a game for PS2, Gamecube, MacOSX and Linux at the same time, with a minimum porting effort (assuming updated graphics software is included on game disks). Together, it's more than half of the market, so XBox and Windows will just have to wait. Unix workstation vendors like Sun could join the gang to leverage the skills of developers familiar with OpenGL for CAD or animation software.
Microsoft might as well drop HTML support from Internet Explorer.
Hey! I just thought I'd be a pain and mention how often that great new invention of years has been misused. My company used to have well organized, human-maintained web sites to find out about company's projects, facilities and self-service applications. Everyone was impressed and happy. Until they rolled out One Site To Rule Them All. Now we must search for bits of useful information mixed with various news articles, marketing documents and groups' internal files. Often the only way to find information or a web app for particular task is to ask someone who used it before and hope they remember. I hope my fellow oppressed coworkers will join me in battle, take the website where it came from and cast it into molten lava together with it's designer. But I am getting sidetracked.
Anyway, search engines are great but sometimes it's easier and more pleasant to have a sentinent human being answer your questions. For example, I just searched on yahoo and couldn't find any site to suggest to people who never heard about LTR before. I mean, except sites that try to sell stuff without introducing it to you properly. Are the novels still copyrighted?
OSX, Linux and Cygwin are all written specifically to be source code and user experience compatible with other versions of UNIX. Therefore, there is no question that all 3 are UNIX implementations. The only question is how successful they are, and the answer is "not bad".
Otherwise, you can say "Windows is dead" with the release of XP, because MS replaced the last of the old Windows code with a whole new 32-bit implementation.
Can you post a list of revolutionary and improved Longhorn features for us to enjoy? All the article shows is some minor UI changes, especially at the relatively-unimportant install time.
VT220s in my school lab used to have a feature that you can send them ACK character and they'll reply with a string configured in the terminal menu. I used to reprogram the string to do some UNIX commands and then put ^E in my.plan - back in the days when people used finger as a web browser. Also, you could just write a simple shell script that simulated the login sequence and leave it running without logging out. On older UNIX systems, this worked even over dialup if your shell script ignored SIGHUP.
But the later option was too risky for my taste, because the "login" process was owned by you. So instead, I wrote a doomsday shell script. It gave you a # prompt to make you believe you are running as root. It then emulated various UNIX commands. For example "jobs" showed [1] rm -rf / & and "kill" returned "Permission denied". It logged all the commands and responses to an obscure file in my home directory. Once I got our semi-knowlegable system administrator's assistant to "interact" with this script and it was quite fun reading him using kill 10 times in a row with the same arguments. She really thought the filesystem was going south.
Terrible abuse that can be inflicted on X terminals or public lab PCs with terminal emulators is left to the imagination of the reader.
I tried to order BREW builder to develop a library for a rather big company where I work. Because of the 5K price tag, my purchase order was held up for more than half a year now, and the handset sits unused. On the other hand, Linux port was started the same day it was planed, right after downloading some ISOs off the net. If I had to write UI on it and choose between KDE and GNOME, get what I would do, regardless of technical merits? Well, what I would really do is write a Java app with non-UI code native. Or perhaps try TK.
On the other hand, say I want to write a shareware program with $25 registration fee. How much do you think is in my cookie jar to pay for what is mostly a hobby?
Of course, trolltech can charge all they want, but then they can not expect to be a standard for Linux users who occasionally run shareware and commercial programs (yeah, you can launch GNOME apps under KDE, but who is leeching now?). Perhaps if the fee was $150 per developer, it would be a different story.
Either you want to make your data machine readable, or you want it human readable. In the first case, many efficient options are available, such as relational database, XDR, Java serialized options and so on. No need to waste your disk space and network bandwidth with text files. Think also about people implementing on your protocol on really constraint devices like J2ME cell phones, where you really don't have the luxary of a parser.
If you go for human readable, think about the nature of the data and target audience and choose an optimal format based on that. For example, SMTP is easy enough that some people were faking e-mail by just telneting to port 25 and entering messages without any tool. Try this with XML! Now think about the effect on a programmer trying to send a simple e-mail message from his app.
If you go for XML, you are creating data that both machines and humans have to strain to understand.
I just did and it looks very clued in. If they go, I wonder how The Register is going to survive. Whatever happened to micropayments? I would pay a quarter to get access to many sites for a day, including possibly slashdot. As long as I could really just pay a quarter and not have to subscribe.
Yes, so what I am saying is that going for the gun is not always "psychosis". It could be just self-defence if no other options exist or you can not see them because of your age and/or conditioning.
If you an adult, it's perfectly acceptable to defend yourself against mugging, even if pull out a gun and kill a couple of attackers. If your story is supported by the evidence, I don't think you will even go to trial.
On the other hand, say you are severely abused at work AND you can't/don't know how to get another job AND you complain to managers or police many times and they just ignore what you say. Now if you bring a machine gun to work and go Rembo... well you have a good chance with an insanity plea. Only it's not really insanity. It's still self-defence, by someone who doesn't know of any other way to defend himself.
Now, I am not suggesting a tempting option of letting nerds carry guns to protect themselves against bullies (not that most nerds would be able to shoot someone). But if a child/teenager is threatened by physical abuse in the hands of gang of overgrown potheads, surely he has a right to defend himself by any means available.
And if a student goes to parents or teachers and complains about bullies, they better listen. You can not expect a child to talk directly to police or file court documents. If he is refused help by an adult, he may well think that the only way to stop bullies is shown in action movies.
If a few bullies are killed and the nerds go free on self-defense or insanity (== desperation) plea, who knows, maybe bullies' parents will stop making excuses for their children being "normal boys" and bullies' teachers will start expelling students.
FYI, my school (in Soviet Russia!) had some pretty liberal "playground rules". Like throwing darts made from a needle, rubber and paper until they are dozens stuck under your skin (you really get swollen after that!). Or taking your coat and hat and making you walk home wearing indoor cloth at -40C. Every day, I was trying to sneak out of the window and use some small back streets to avoid bullies on the way home. Every school break, I had to run out of class at the first bell ring and hide under shelves in the library or be beaten.
Into amatuer chemistry at that time, I was thinking daily about somehow making cyanide from K Fe (CN)4 (rusty now, is that the formula? would sublimation with diluted sulphiric acid do it?) and adding some to bullies' meals in school cafeteria. Just a comforting dream, never likely to act on it. But I can relate to someone with less hope and under more pressure.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - famous hero and womenizer Duke Nukem was found dead in his Los Angeles, CA penthouse this morning. There were no more official details, but the rumor has it that he was surrounded by radioactive green babes and was looking good even dead. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his exploits, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon. May his soul respawn in a nice, seedy place where hotels can be rented by the hour.
Surely some code to share can be found between autoratitive and recursive DNS servers. I am going to expose my ignorance of DNS here, but I assume both speak the same UDP and TCP protocols. Why not share the code that parses and assemble the packets? Likewise, both will need a database and an in-memory cache to answer requests efficiently. Do two versions really need to be written separately?
Now I am going to dig an even bigger hole for myself, but aren't most DNS servers authoratitive for one or several domains and caching data for all the others? Why shouldn't they benefit from the optimized authoratitive code?
I guess you wouldn't like embedded Linux then, because desktop Linux has all that bloated mainframe scalabilty code that is not needed on a PDA. Of course, unnecessary weight should be compiled out whenever possible, but I don't see how refusing to reuse code without a specific reason is superior. If BIND sucks or is not modular enough, then write a nicer, more modular DNS server that covers the needs of most users.
Finally, why shouldn't dialup users run a caching-only DNS server to reduce the number of lookups going over the modem? Last I checked, this was an option in Redhat.
One bad thing is that NSD is only for authoratitive name servers, so the efforts spent developing, debugging, porting and optimizing its code will be wasted for most of us. More people using NSD would also mean that any security exploits are discovered faster and on less important systems than root name servers. And couldn't we all use a lightweight, secure, chaching name server to use over a dialup connection?
I would rather see them pick some alternative general purpose DNS implementation and optimize it for their needs.
You did say you work in the banking industry. Then of course you think about interest rates and services on regular basis. By contrast, I know someone who applied for a second bank account to get a sign on bonus and higher interest rates. Before long, she didn't know what is the balance in each account, got bounced checks, had to find charge-free ATMs for each account and was generally miserable. Most people are better off just staying with one big bank and not worrying about it.
You are asking me to choose between possibly reencoding my library in the future and not being able to use it now. Give me a dual MP3 and OGG player that is light enough to jog with a shoulder band, lasts 10 hours on 1 AAA battery, sturdy enough to drop without ill effects and compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux so that I can transfer files.
I am not a professional in digital audio and I just want to carry my music around with a minimum of hassle. MP3 consortium is not bothering me at the moment. If they ever do, I will switch. For example, MS bothered me enough with hangs and crashes to buy a Mac. I lost some WMA files that I recorded before I knew better, but I can just dust off my CDs and reencode them. And if you are talking about a "collection" from gnutella, well you are not the person likely to pay license fees anyway.
I buy a few patented items every time I go to the grocery store. It doesn't bother me if there is a patent on that stand-up toothpaste dispenser and I don't see why it should, as long as it doesn't prevent me from getting the product and it only makes up a small fraction of its price. Why should it be different when paying $2 extra for that portable player or iTunes?
There is a loose end of non-commercial encoders, decoders and streams. But so far, mp3 consortium is just letting them exist and going after commercial licenses (that's as far as I know, any corrections?). Another good solution would be for them to ask end users go to some website and pay $5 for the right to use any MP3 software of their choice.
Yes, mp3 consortium could start going after LAME and WinAmp, harassing P2P users and otherwise turn evil. And that's a good thing that OGG and WMA are around to keep them reasonable. But they didn't turn evil yet and in the worst case I'll lose a couple of hundred bucks then buying new devices.
As for quality, interoperability is far more important. If you make an 128Khz, CBR MP3, you can give it to about anyone and be sure they'll be able to play it. With OGG or WMA, a Mac user will be at least forced to do some painful things to hear the sound. And with portable players all bets are off. Even Linux-based Zaurus doesn't come with OGG support by default.
Besides, mp3pro is not bad if you want quality at low bandwidth and still works with regular MP3 players in a pinch. Why not give it a try if you are not worried about interoperability?
What exactly do you do with your pink monitor to make it come back?
Not so sharp Zaurus
on
Palm PDA Roundup
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I tried to give a cradled Zaurus access to our company's network by bridging connections. The bridge dutifully forwarded DHCP requests on the LAN to the server that the thing runs by default. Dozens of PCs got the bogus addresses and stopped working. The anger of the admin that came to my office to investigate quickly gave way to laughter when he realized just which device was acting as the "Enterprise" DHCP server.
Maybe Zaurus is powerful but its not very polished. It's bad enough that the desktop software is Windows only. Last time I checked, there was no Mac software and you had to wait for a patch for your exact version of Linux kernel, recompile it and run ipconfig by yourself. But even on Windows, it doesn't look as nice as Palm desktop and doesn't support network or modem sync.
At this stage, Zaurus is a good PDA for curious developers, not for people who want to have their address book, calendar and star trek e-books and not worry too much about setting things up.
I am holding my breath for iWalk. One can always dream, right?
If someone gets me the contact information of this guy, I will fix his iBook problems for free, as long as he publishes a correction. His screen freezes sound like either a hardware problem or a bad case of running OS 9. Personally, I saw my last one on a WinXP desktop before ditching it a few months ago. Palm desktop is probably just an old version, and then there is also iSync to play with.
I am sure people have bad experiences with any hardware and software platforms in existance. But I don't think his experiences are typical for recent versions of OSX. While slashdot users are expected to post based on a single personal experience, I expect more from articles in newspapers and journals.
Why bother with the small fish?
on
MicroBSD Is No More
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Lindows charges lots of money for a dervitive or Linux and Wine might well be in violation of GPL because they make it so difficult to get the source. If you follow links they suggest, it asks you to buy their stuff before getting source code of the GPLed components. No word on what to do if I got a Walmart PC. There are
links on their website that could mislead users to think that Lindows is just a regular commercial product with no extra obligations to customers.
I hope GPL will be modified to require the source to be as easily available and featured as binaries and to be usable on it's own without any commercial software added on. Like Darwin distributions from Apple, not obscure changes that do not compile and do not explain what was done.
You want to push the device out and more often than not people will buy games anyway. If you already have an XBox with Linux, would you really buy a PS2 together with that version of the game when you could just buy one for XBox?
In addition, Linux is not exactly a mainstream solution. Geeks who know how to use it will likely buy a lot of games or at the very least promote the hardware at no charge to MS.
You can think of an esoteric case of someone running a beowulf cluster of Xboxes and costing Microsoft $$$. But this threat is not likely to materialize because it would still cost money and companies with money to burn will not run their enterprise servers on a home entertainment system.
All considered, supporting Linux will promote sales of both hardware and games. MS can even charge money for a boot disk with signature without violating GPL on Linux itself.
Seeing how everyone is getting rich selling private information, I am putting MY private information on sale right here on slashdot. YES, IT'S 100% LEGAL. You will get a signed, limited edition booklet with my address, phone number, SSN, credit card numbers AND the illustrated history of both my and my cat's love life with an invitation to add a new episode to either one. 10 booklets will be sold to the highest bidders, so take advantage of this unique opportunity and RESERVE YOUR COPY TODAY.
Which will let you specify the referer as part of URL (ANMD, just speculating). They could get really creative and use one-time cookies. But even DRMed nytimes.com running on Palladium can not stop someone from taking screenshots with a camera and posting them on the web.
I don't think they worry too much about leaking links. Since they give away the stuff anyway, serving a static text page doesn't cost more than returning a denied error. And the happy user might even click on an ad.
While obviously malicious code might be easy to spot, how difficult would it be for someone to slip an obscure buffer overflow into honeyd and have fun after its released. Anyone knows of any good hacks that happened BECAUSE of the honeypot bugs?
There used to be a package called COPS to check UNIX security. The author made use of eval to scan users'.rhosts for suspicious entry. I promptly modified my own file to contain some ` characters and UNIX commands. Worked like a charm. Thought about modifying sendmail to send a few randomly selected local messages to a random local account, but decided it would be too mean. Exchanging screens of two lab suns with screendump and screenload or playing sounds telling a user that his or her shoe is untied is as far as I got.
Slashdot Mirror
Or for that matter, music selection. It only mentions that it will only be available to people with Mac AND iPOD, whatever that means. Where did the poster get this information? We really need to have a moderation system for articles, with karma influencing bonus @slashdot or something.
Microsoft might as well drop HTML support from Internet Explorer.
Anyway, search engines are great but sometimes it's easier and more pleasant to have a sentinent human being answer your questions. For example, I just searched on yahoo and couldn't find any site to suggest to people who never heard about LTR before. I mean, except sites that try to sell stuff without introducing it to you properly. Are the novels still copyrighted?
Otherwise, you can say "Windows is dead" with the release of XP, because MS replaced the last of the old Windows code with a whole new 32-bit implementation.
Can you post a list of revolutionary and improved Longhorn features for us to enjoy? All the article shows is some minor UI changes, especially at the relatively-unimportant install time.
But the later option was too risky for my taste, because the "login" process was owned by you. So instead, I wrote a doomsday shell script. It gave you a # prompt to make you believe you are running as root. It then emulated various UNIX commands. For example "jobs" showed [1] rm -rf / & and "kill" returned "Permission denied". It logged all the commands and responses to an obscure file in my home directory. Once I got our semi-knowlegable system administrator's assistant to "interact" with this script and it was quite fun reading him using kill 10 times in a row with the same arguments. She really thought the filesystem was going south.
Terrible abuse that can be inflicted on X terminals or public lab PCs with terminal emulators is left to the imagination of the reader.
On the other hand, say I want to write a shareware program with $25 registration fee. How much do you think is in my cookie jar to pay for what is mostly a hobby?
Of course, trolltech can charge all they want, but then they can not expect to be a standard for Linux users who occasionally run shareware and commercial programs (yeah, you can launch GNOME apps under KDE, but who is leeching now?). Perhaps if the fee was $150 per developer, it would be a different story.
If you go for XML, you are creating data that both machines and humans have to strain to understand.
I just did and it looks very clued in. If they go, I wonder how The Register is going to survive. Whatever happened to micropayments? I would pay a quarter to get access to many sites for a day, including possibly slashdot. As long as I could really just pay a quarter and not have to subscribe.
Yes, so what I am saying is that going for the gun is not always "psychosis". It could be just self-defence if no other options exist or you can not see them because of your age and/or conditioning.
On the other hand, say you are severely abused at work AND you can't/don't know how to get another job AND you complain to managers or police many times and they just ignore what you say. Now if you bring a machine gun to work and go Rembo... well you have a good chance with an insanity plea. Only it's not really insanity. It's still self-defence, by someone who doesn't know of any other way to defend himself.
Now, I am not suggesting a tempting option of letting nerds carry guns to protect themselves against bullies (not that most nerds would be able to shoot someone). But if a child/teenager is threatened by physical abuse in the hands of gang of overgrown potheads, surely he has a right to defend himself by any means available.
And if a student goes to parents or teachers and complains about bullies, they better listen. You can not expect a child to talk directly to police or file court documents. If he is refused help by an adult, he may well think that the only way to stop bullies is shown in action movies.
If a few bullies are killed and the nerds go free on self-defense or insanity (== desperation) plea, who knows, maybe bullies' parents will stop making excuses for their children being "normal boys" and bullies' teachers will start expelling students.
FYI, my school (in Soviet Russia!) had some pretty liberal "playground rules". Like throwing darts made from a needle, rubber and paper until they are dozens stuck under your skin (you really get swollen after that!). Or taking your coat and hat and making you walk home wearing indoor cloth at -40C. Every day, I was trying to sneak out of the window and use some small back streets to avoid bullies on the way home. Every school break, I had to run out of class at the first bell ring and hide under shelves in the library or be beaten.
Into amatuer chemistry at that time, I was thinking daily about somehow making cyanide from K Fe (CN)4 (rusty now, is that the formula? would sublimation with diluted sulphiric acid do it?) and adding some to bullies' meals in school cafeteria. Just a comforting dream, never likely to act on it. But I can relate to someone with less hope and under more pressure.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - famous hero and womenizer Duke Nukem was found dead in his Los Angeles, CA penthouse this morning. There were no more official details, but the rumor has it that he was surrounded by radioactive green babes and was looking good even dead. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his exploits, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon. May his soul respawn in a nice, seedy place where hotels can be rented by the hour.
Now I am going to dig an even bigger hole for myself, but aren't most DNS servers authoratitive for one or several domains and caching data for all the others? Why shouldn't they benefit from the optimized authoratitive code?
I guess you wouldn't like embedded Linux then, because desktop Linux has all that bloated mainframe scalabilty code that is not needed on a PDA. Of course, unnecessary weight should be compiled out whenever possible, but I don't see how refusing to reuse code without a specific reason is superior. If BIND sucks or is not modular enough, then write a nicer, more modular DNS server that covers the needs of most users. Finally, why shouldn't dialup users run a caching-only DNS server to reduce the number of lookups going over the modem? Last I checked, this was an option in Redhat.
I would rather see them pick some alternative general purpose DNS implementation and optimize it for their needs.
You are asking me to choose between possibly reencoding my library in the future and not being able to use it now. Give me a dual MP3 and OGG player that is light enough to jog with a shoulder band, lasts 10 hours on 1 AAA battery, sturdy enough to drop without ill effects and compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux so that I can transfer files.
I am not a professional in digital audio and I just want to carry my music around with a minimum of hassle. MP3 consortium is not bothering me at the moment. If they ever do, I will switch. For example, MS bothered me enough with hangs and crashes to buy a Mac. I lost some WMA files that I recorded before I knew better, but I can just dust off my CDs and reencode them. And if you are talking about a "collection" from gnutella, well you are not the person likely to pay license fees anyway.
There is a loose end of non-commercial encoders, decoders and streams. But so far, mp3 consortium is just letting them exist and going after commercial licenses (that's as far as I know, any corrections?). Another good solution would be for them to ask end users go to some website and pay $5 for the right to use any MP3 software of their choice.
Yes, mp3 consortium could start going after LAME and WinAmp, harassing P2P users and otherwise turn evil. And that's a good thing that OGG and WMA are around to keep them reasonable. But they didn't turn evil yet and in the worst case I'll lose a couple of hundred bucks then buying new devices.
As for quality, interoperability is far more important. If you make an 128Khz, CBR MP3, you can give it to about anyone and be sure they'll be able to play it. With OGG or WMA, a Mac user will be at least forced to do some painful things to hear the sound. And with portable players all bets are off. Even Linux-based Zaurus doesn't come with OGG support by default.
Besides, mp3pro is not bad if you want quality at low bandwidth and still works with regular MP3 players in a pinch. Why not give it a try if you are not worried about interoperability?
What exactly do you do with your pink monitor to make it come back?
Maybe Zaurus is powerful but its not very polished. It's bad enough that the desktop software is Windows only. Last time I checked, there was no Mac software and you had to wait for a patch for your exact version of Linux kernel, recompile it and run ipconfig by yourself. But even on Windows, it doesn't look as nice as Palm desktop and doesn't support network or modem sync.
At this stage, Zaurus is a good PDA for curious developers, not for people who want to have their address book, calendar and star trek e-books and not worry too much about setting things up.
I am holding my breath for iWalk. One can always dream, right?
I am sure people have bad experiences with any hardware and software platforms in existance. But I don't think his experiences are typical for recent versions of OSX. While slashdot users are expected to post based on a single personal experience, I expect more from articles in newspapers and journals.
I hope GPL will be modified to require the source to be as easily available and featured as binaries and to be usable on it's own without any commercial software added on. Like Darwin distributions from Apple, not obscure changes that do not compile and do not explain what was done.
In addition, Linux is not exactly a mainstream solution. Geeks who know how to use it will likely buy a lot of games or at the very least promote the hardware at no charge to MS.
You can think of an esoteric case of someone running a beowulf cluster of Xboxes and costing Microsoft $$$. But this threat is not likely to materialize because it would still cost money and companies with money to burn will not run their enterprise servers on a home entertainment system.
All considered, supporting Linux will promote sales of both hardware and games. MS can even charge money for a boot disk with signature without violating GPL on Linux itself.
Seeing how everyone is getting rich selling private information, I am putting MY private information on sale right here on slashdot. YES, IT'S 100% LEGAL. You will get a signed, limited edition booklet with my address, phone number, SSN, credit card numbers AND the illustrated history of both my and my cat's love life with an invitation to add a new episode to either one. 10 booklets will be sold to the highest bidders, so take advantage of this unique opportunity and RESERVE YOUR COPY TODAY.
I don't think they worry too much about leaking links. Since they give away the stuff anyway, serving a static text page doesn't cost more than returning a denied error. And the happy user might even click on an ad.
There used to be a package called COPS to check UNIX security. The author made use of eval to scan users' .rhosts for suspicious entry. I promptly modified my own file to contain some ` characters and UNIX commands. Worked like a charm. Thought about modifying sendmail to send a few randomly selected local messages to a random local account, but decided it would be too mean. Exchanging screens of two lab suns with screendump and screenload or playing sounds telling a user that his or her shoe is untied is as far as I got.
Before you start to congratulate me on the extraordinary frequency range of my ear. Guess I should have used the preview button!