> Just curious... why would using a GPS on foot have anything to do with > being from the US or not?
He was probably referring to the propensity of US persons to spend on average rather a lot of time driving in motor vehicles, relative to people elsewhere. Granted, it was a _lame_ joke, but this is slashdot, so you expect that.
> On a whim, I tried to drag the.app bundle into the user's home directory, > which worked. However, thanks to the structure of OS X, the worst that any > known exploit can do is wipe that directory and that's it.
On most systems, wiping out the user's home directory is actually *worse* than merely destroying system files. System files can be restored from the restore CD, but only a small percentage of users really back up their home directories, where all their important data lives.
Additionally, there are more things an app can do with normal-user permissions than just delete files. An app running from inside a user's home directory can do any of the following:
* modify.config files in the user's home directory. This is quite enough
to get it run unobtrusively in the background whenever the user logs in. * read the user's files, looking for things like email addresses, credit
card numbers, passwords,... * contact a remote system (e.g., to send it the harvested email addresses,
or to obtain instructions about what IP address to DDOS, or whatever). * send email (e.g. to propagate itself). Bear in mind that it can read
the user's files, so it would be possible (though I don't know of a case
of malware doing this) to construct *replies* to messages the user has
received, quoting something the recipient said, and responding to the
effect of, "Yeah, I see what you mean, have a look at this." with a URI.
The URI could contain an obscured string that the server could decipher
into keywords from the quoted portion, which could be used in constructing
the phony description of what the trojan is good for. Sure, 90% of the
time this wouldn't make sense and the user would be like, "Huh? Why do
I need that?", but think about the other 10% of the time. * pop up advertisements. Although this would be likely to get the thing
noticed and removed. * play jokes on the user, such as renaming files, changing the filetype
and creator codes on files, altering configuration and preferences files
(e.g., to "reconfigure" the AutoCorrect feature of a word processor),
kicking in the screensaver at odd times, taking a screenshot of the
user's desktop and setting it as the wallpaper, moving icons around,...
Granted, all of this relies on convincing the user to install it. So, it relies on having clueless users. OSes with no significant percentage of clueless users are in no great danger here, but any OS with large market share is going to have some clueless users.
Are *nix-based systems inherently more secure than Windows? Yes. Are they inherently immune to attacks that exploit the human factor? Hah hah. No.
Oh, there *is* such an account, you just can't log into it...
> though you can enable it through NetInfo if you really get tired of > using sudo. Why you'd do so, I can barely imagine
For convenience. When you run as root, you don't have to sudo every time you want to do something a regular Administrator account can't do. (Granted, you have to be a *nix geek to ever run into that scenerio; point-and-click users barely have any use for sudo, much less need it often enough to get annoyed enough to want to run as root.)
I run Gnome as root, on my Mandrake systems both at home and at work, because I got tired of doing su or sudo every time I needed to do something a normal user can't do, such as edit something in/etc or make a symlink in/usr/bin. It's very convenient, I can tell you. For the occasional app that refuses to run as root (such as freeciv), I use gdmflexiserver. I also use that for apps that crash X from time to time, so that I don't lose all my open windows in all my other apps whenever that happens. (Railroad Tycoon II is the biggest offender there.)
> Yes it is a software firewall but its supposed to not be able to be bypassed > because of the way it integrates itself with the network driver on my PC
Don't be naive. Anything the software firewall can do, the spyware can do too. If you want a firewall that can't be bypassed, it's got to be an external one. (Of course, then you can't block/unblock on a per-application basis, so I guess a combination of the two approaches is the best you can do.)
> I think it's probably somewhere in between 5% and 90%...
Yes, but do you know *why* the one number is low, and *why* the other is high?
I don't know why the university's number is low. I'd have to know more about how they reached it.
I do know why Dell's number is so high: they're basing it on support calls. Sure, if 20% of the calls are spyware-related, and given the nature of spyware such that many people don't realise they have it installed, probably 80-90% of the people who call have spyware. It does not, however, follow that 90% of *computers* have spyware.
The support centers for places like Dell get the calls from the people who do not have a close friend or relative to call. Statistically, as a gross overgeneralization, these are going to be the people at the bottom of the barrel, the people least educated about computers and substantially most likely therefore to have spyware.
I work at a small public library, in a relatively technophobic community, and my estimate would also be high, for the same reason: I get calls from people who don't know who else to call. However, I would never have gone as high as 90%. 80% at the outside maybe, and that's of the people who call me (or come to the circulation desk and ask for the computer guy). I therefore surmise that the true number is below 80% -- probably quite a bit below, because I don't get the calls from the people who are less likely to have spyware. The people who have close friends or relatives who grok computers call them first -- but also, the people who have close friends or relatives to call are less likely to have spyware in the first place, for several reasons. They're more likely to be more educated, for starters. My parents at this point would not be likely to get spyware, especially my mom, because I've been teaching them stuff -- just little bits and pieces -- for several years. Heck, my mom and dad *both* know how to copy and paste now; virtually none of the people who call me for help at the library know how to do that. (Copying and pasting ability is not in itself related to not getting spyware, but it correlates because both are representative of general level of computer knowledge.) Why don't the people who call me at the library know how to copy and paste? Same reason they don't know how to avoid malware: they've nobody to teach them. Another reason people with close friends or relatives who are geeks are less likely to have spyware is because their computer-smart friend or relative may have installed software on their computer, rather than leaving them to do it themselves. This is a mitigating influence, because people who understand computers better choose software better. People with close friends or relatives who understand computers are vastly more likely to have protective stuff (ad-aware, ZoneAlarm, an external firewally between their Windows PC and the cable modem,...) and in addition are vastly more likely to use a browser other than IE and *overwhelmingly* more likely to use a mailreader other than hotmail or Outlook Express. Consequently, they're less likely to get spyware in the first place -- and more likely to have it removed (by said relative or friend) in short order if they do get it.
Then of course there are the geeks themselves, who are particularly unlikely to have spyware running on their computer at any given time. The geeks who use Windows, besides being less likely to get spyware in the first place, would *notice* it almost right away ("Hey, what's _this_ doing in the task manager? I don't recognize that...") and then of course you have the geeks who use another OS altogether; the probability that _they_ would have any spyware is distinctly underwhelming.
So the question then becomes, what percentage of the population at large has a computer-smart close friend or relative (close enoug
I'm a multibooter. Would I switch my main system to OS X? No. I can't use it for more than a few minutes at a time, due to an accessibility issue[1], so I would still keep Gnome as my primary system. But I would shell out the $129 (assuming architecture price parity), install it, mess with it, shell into it remotely and gain experience administering it, install various software on it, play with Safari,...
The problem is, the number of people who would shell out the $129 for an x86 version of the OS is probably smaller than the number of people who buy the Apple hardware in order to run OS X, given the current situation. That combined with Apple's core goals of maintaining their image and fanbase is good enough reason for Apple to only release their OS for their own hardware.
Would I buy MacOS X86 if Apple released it? Yeah, I would. Will they? No.
---
[1] It forces Evil Satanic Blinding White Backgrounds on me; I go snowblind.
Gates says more has been _invested_ in making IE secure than any other browser. That's probably true. The problem is, it's the wrong approach: no amount of investment will make IE secure.
> But it's here in Ohio that experts believe there is the greatest potential > for another Florida, primarily because more than two-thirds of voters will > use punch-card ballots similar to those that produced the infamous hanging > chads of 2000.
We've used those punch-card ballots since time out of mind in Ohio, and we've never had any problem with them. Apparently, most folks in Ohio know how to follow an arrow; whereas, as a certain comedian pointed out, the driving in Miami proves that voters there have not yet managed this skill.</rimshot>
Seriously, the punch-card ballots work and work well.
> "Ohio is ground zero,"
Ohio is always an important state in any election. We're one of the most borderline swing states, almost exactly balanced between conservative and liberal tendencies. You can just about call the outcome of an election once the Ohio count comes in; we pretty much always vote for the winner.
> said Daniel Tokaji, an Ohio State University law professor who studies > election procedures. "We are one of the last bastions of the punch-card > ballot and there has been a lot of controversy relating to provisional > balloting."
The punchcard ballot has received a lot of criticism since the Florida thing, but in fact the punchcard ballot is an excellent system, quite possibly the best system devised to date. It's simple, but that's not a bad thing. The problems in Florida were not the result of using punchcards.
Mail::Sendmail is technically 807 lines, but over 400 lines of that is documentation (POD) after the __END__ of the actual program code; if you just count the code itself, it's 388 lines.
Oh, and unlike a lot of modules, it's got almost no dependencies: you've gotta have a network connection, and Perl, and that's it.
And the interface is very convenient to work with.
> How many people actually opened this up in Gimp?
Check.
> How many of you swore that each checkerbox was different and got > thoroughly pissed off when you checked the hex value with the dropper > and they were the same?
No. I wasn't sure at first (they _looked_ different, but there were different colors around them, which makes it hard to tell). So I zoomed in and panned back and forth, and then I was able to tell for sure they both had the same base shade for the bulk of their area.
But what pissed me off about the image was how uglifically horrible the Evil Satanic JPEG Compression made it look. When I see an image like that, I want to physically harm the cretinous losers who developed JPEG compression.
Indeed. I know a guy who has purchased half a dozen boxed copies of Windows over the years, operating under the delusion that a new version will solve all of his rather copious computing problems. Usually the cycle goes something like this...
1. He buys some new computer hardware, to make the computer work better.
2. He has trouble getting the new hardware to work properly, so he lets
the computer sit unused for a few months until he gets around to it...
3. When he gets around to it, he asks one of his kids what do do about it.
4. His son tells him to get the latest version of Windows.
5. His computer sits unused for a few months until he gets around to it.
6. He gets the latest Windows but has trouble getting it installed.
7. His computer sits unused for a few months until he gets around to it.
8. He gets someone who's good with computers to come over and help him
reinstall from scratch to get it working, explaining that he doesn't
need all the problems solved, he just needs a little help getting it
to a point where the system will actually boot, and maybe getting the
dialup account setup. Twice this person has been me, and I know of
at least two other people (including the aforementioned son) who have
done it for him too.
9. The geek does a fresh install of Windows, installs the drivers for the
hardware, and generally gets things working. 10. The computer works (mostly) for two or three months. 11. Something (usually the printer) stops working. The computer sits unused
for a few months, until he gets around to doing something about it. 12. Repeat.
He also has boxed copies of things like Office sitting around, not installed.
> Still, I guess there is one good thing that will come of this: I always > felt we should spend more money on basic research and less on the military. > Here, the military is spending its money on basic research;)
The military has been spending money on basic research for years. It's just that usually they keep it classified until it's thoroughly redundant with research that has been done elsewhere. But they do do it.
> Inside these containers, known as Penning traps, magnetic fields prevent > the antiparticles from contacting the material wall of the container -- > lest they annihilate on contact. Unfortunately, because like-charged > particles repel each other, the positrons push each other apart and quickly > squirt out of the trap.
I assume there's some problem with the obvious solution to this, namely getting yourself some antiprotons and putting them together with the positrons to make some antihydrogen, and putting _that_ in the Penning traps.
You can't block.com, because there are too many valid domains there, but.cc? Nothing legitimately worthwhile has ever been hosted there; if the spammers or whoever abuse this, you just instruct your software that all.cc domains are invalid, and your dad is Robert's brother. It's an ugly hack, but it would work; no such thing is possible for.com
I'm not saying that it's right for nameservers to return wildcard results for unregistered domains, but this isn't nearly the problem in.cc that it would be in a major TLD such as.com or.net or.org or.edu or.us or cetera.
> > two inches by three, 1 month/page, with room to write things on each day > Huh?
Well, it folds once. And it might be a little larger than that... (measures) Okay, so it's more like two and a half by three and a half, folded once in the middle, which makes a month two and a half by seven. Each week is one of the four columns, so that gives you an inch and three quarters, enough space to write in a time and the name of an event, such as "9:30am haircut" or whatever. There's enough space vertically to get two such events on each day. I print off about six months of it at a time and keep it in a small clear plastic sleeve (made from Contact paper), and the whole thing is small enough that I when carry it in my shirt pocket all the time, nobody ever notices it's even there except when I take it out to look at it or write something in. This IMO makes it vastly superior to those bulky day planners many people use.
Almost the opposite: I'm very focused, so focused that I often get caught up in a train of thought and become oblivious to the world around me. Twenty minutes later, when everyone else has moved on and jumped to new topics several times since, I'm probably still thinking about it.
In school, I always did very well on written tests but loathed group projects and sometimes had a problem with "daydreaming" wherein the teacher would have moved on to a new subject and my mind would be further exploring something the class had covered earlier.
Once during reading time in third grade I got to the end of the chapter in the book I was reading, looked up, and the classroom was vacant. "Yes, Nathan", the teacher said, "the rest of the class went to bathroom break." While I was reading the book, this had escaped my notice entirely.
> Gartner's making a bold prediction that the number of machines sold as Linux > desktops may eclipse the number of machines actually running Linux."
I don't think that's a fair conclusion. I'm willing to accept that many of the systems sold with Linux end up with pirated Windows, because it makes sense -- but the conclusion doesn't follow.
The unstated assumption is that all machines _not_ sold with Linux don't run it, and this is known to be quite far from the truth. I posit that the overwhelming majority of systems currently running Linux weren't sold with it. Some may have been sold with Windows; many no doubt were sold with no OS, and indeed a lot of them were built from parts by hobbyists.
I don't think it's reasonable to conclude _anything_ (positive _or_ negative) about the number of Linux-running systems based on sales figures of any sort.
In fact, I don't normally carry ANY of the things people usually put in wallets. Money? If I carried it with me all the time, it'd get spent, so I leave it at home until I have a specific reason to take it along. When I do carry money, I put it deep in a front pocket, where it's less likely to fall out and cannot be picked without my knowing about it. Credit cards? I don't own any, and don't want to -- I've seen people screw themselves up badly with those things, and I don't want any part of it. Driver's license? I maintain a carless pedestrian lifestyle -- that's the only exercise I get, and otherwise I'd be completely sedentary. Plus it saves on gas and insurance, to say nothing of the cost of a car itself and repairs. I do have ID, which I keep in my checkbook, because when I write checks is the only time I ever need it. Library card? I have my library card number memorized. Photos of loved ones? I'm a very non-visual thinker, mostly auditory and conceptual, so photographs don't matter much to me. What else do people carry around in wallets? Whatever it is, I don't carry it.
What I *do* carry around all the time goes in my shirt pocket: my short term memory -- in the form of a small schedue (which is generated by a Perl program I wrote that uses DateTime and creates an OpenOffice document, which I print), about two inches by three inches, one month per page, with room to write things on each day. Also a writing utensil usually, and sometimes a Post-It or similar with a note to myself about this or that that I need to remember.
> It's almost certainly those pesky hydrogen bonds - they're responsible > for just about everything interesting in organic chemistry
Indeed, I was just pointing out that the same root cause (hydrogen bonds) are also responsible for certain liquids that expand when they freeze, rather than continuing to contract as most cooling liquids do. (The best known example of this phenomenon is water, which is why ice floats.)
When you boil down (Hah!) chemistry to its roots, it all comes down to physics. In this case, hydrogen bonds are electromagnetic force at work. Of course, when you boil down phyics, it's mostly math. Everything is math. Biology comes down to chemistry; chemistry comes down to physics; physics comes down to math. Many important concepts in art (color spaces, balance, composition, and so forth) also involve a fair amount of math (though artists don't always think about it that way). History, if you want to really understand it, is all about seeing trends and patterns -- a form of math. Everything is math.
> if it weren't for Linus, the OSS movement would now stick to a free OS based > either on 386BSD or GNU/Hurd
It would be BSD. The whole lawsuit thingy was settled and the caveat-free version released a couple years after Linux started to really get popular in the OSS community. Hurd wasn't anywhere near finished yet at the time.
However, I don't think OSS would be as popular as it is without the influence of the Linux kernel. I believe there are *more* people using BSD today than there would have been if Linux hadn't been written, because somehow Linux shone a light of popularity on OSS, and people took notice. There are quite a lot of people who start out experimenting with Linux and then move on to the harder drugs of BSD as it were.
Heck, without the influence of Linux, Hurd might _still_ not exist.
But Hurd isn't the largest influence that Stallman or the FSF have had. Emacs is much more influential than Hurd, for example. So is bash. Still, I think these things are more popular and influential than they otherwise would have been because of the popularizing influence of the Linux kernel.
Slashdot Mirror
> Just curious... why would using a GPS on foot have anything to do with
> being from the US or not?
He was probably referring to the propensity of US persons to spend on average
rather a lot of time driving in motor vehicles, relative to people elsewhere.
Granted, it was a _lame_ joke, but this is slashdot, so you expect that.
> On a whim, I tried to drag the .app bundle into the user's home directory,
.config files in the user's home directory. This is quite enough ... ...
> which worked. However, thanks to the structure of OS X, the worst that any
> known exploit can do is wipe that directory and that's it.
On most systems, wiping out the user's home directory is actually *worse* than
merely destroying system files. System files can be restored from the restore
CD, but only a small percentage of users really back up their home directories,
where all their important data lives.
Additionally, there are more things an app can do with normal-user permissions
than just delete files. An app running from inside a user's home directory
can do any of the following:
* modify
to get it run unobtrusively in the background whenever the user logs in.
* read the user's files, looking for things like email addresses, credit
card numbers, passwords,
* contact a remote system (e.g., to send it the harvested email addresses,
or to obtain instructions about what IP address to DDOS, or whatever).
* send email (e.g. to propagate itself). Bear in mind that it can read
the user's files, so it would be possible (though I don't know of a case
of malware doing this) to construct *replies* to messages the user has
received, quoting something the recipient said, and responding to the
effect of, "Yeah, I see what you mean, have a look at this." with a URI.
The URI could contain an obscured string that the server could decipher
into keywords from the quoted portion, which could be used in constructing
the phony description of what the trojan is good for. Sure, 90% of the
time this wouldn't make sense and the user would be like, "Huh? Why do
I need that?", but think about the other 10% of the time.
* pop up advertisements. Although this would be likely to get the thing
noticed and removed.
* play jokes on the user, such as renaming files, changing the filetype
and creator codes on files, altering configuration and preferences files
(e.g., to "reconfigure" the AutoCorrect feature of a word processor),
kicking in the screensaver at odd times, taking a screenshot of the
user's desktop and setting it as the wallpaper, moving icons around,
Granted, all of this relies on convincing the user to install it. So, it
relies on having clueless users. OSes with no significant percentage of
clueless users are in no great danger here, but any OS with large market
share is going to have some clueless users.
Are *nix-based systems inherently more secure than Windows? Yes. Are they
inherently immune to attacks that exploit the human factor? Hah hah. No.
> There is no default root account on OS X,
/etc or make a symlink in /usr/bin.
Oh, there *is* such an account, you just can't log into it...
> though you can enable it through NetInfo if you really get tired of
> using sudo. Why you'd do so, I can barely imagine
For convenience. When you run as root, you don't have to sudo every time you
want to do something a regular Administrator account can't do. (Granted, you
have to be a *nix geek to ever run into that scenerio; point-and-click users
barely have any use for sudo, much less need it often enough to get annoyed
enough to want to run as root.)
I run Gnome as root, on my Mandrake systems both at home and at work, because
I got tired of doing su or sudo every time I needed to do something a normal
user can't do, such as edit something in
It's very convenient, I can tell you. For the occasional app that refuses to
run as root (such as freeciv), I use gdmflexiserver. I also use that for apps
that crash X from time to time, so that I don't lose all my open windows in
all my other apps whenever that happens. (Railroad Tycoon II is the biggest
offender there.)
> Yes it is a software firewall but its supposed to not be able to be bypassed
> because of the way it integrates itself with the network driver on my PC
Don't be naive. Anything the software firewall can do, the spyware can do too.
If you want a firewall that can't be bypassed, it's got to be an external one.
(Of course, then you can't block/unblock on a per-application basis, so I guess
a combination of the two approaches is the best you can do.)
> I think it's probably somewhere in between 5% and 90%...
...) and in
Yes, but do you know *why* the one number is low, and *why* the other is high?
I don't know why the university's number is low. I'd have to know more about
how they reached it.
I do know why Dell's number is so high: they're basing it on support calls.
Sure, if 20% of the calls are spyware-related, and given the nature of spyware
such that many people don't realise they have it installed, probably 80-90% of
the people who call have spyware. It does not, however, follow that 90% of
*computers* have spyware.
The support centers for places like Dell get the calls from the people who
do not have a close friend or relative to call. Statistically, as a gross
overgeneralization, these are going to be the people at the bottom of the
barrel, the people least educated about computers and substantially most
likely therefore to have spyware.
I work at a small public library, in a relatively technophobic community,
and my estimate would also be high, for the same reason: I get calls from
people who don't know who else to call. However, I would never have gone
as high as 90%. 80% at the outside maybe, and that's of the people who
call me (or come to the circulation desk and ask for the computer guy).
I therefore surmise that the true number is below 80% -- probably quite a
bit below, because I don't get the calls from the people who are less
likely to have spyware. The people who have close friends or relatives
who grok computers call them first -- but also, the people who have close
friends or relatives to call are less likely to have spyware in the first
place, for several reasons. They're more likely to be more educated, for
starters. My parents at this point would not be likely to get spyware,
especially my mom, because I've been teaching them stuff -- just little
bits and pieces -- for several years. Heck, my mom and dad *both* know
how to copy and paste now; virtually none of the people who call me for
help at the library know how to do that. (Copying and pasting ability is
not in itself related to not getting spyware, but it correlates because
both are representative of general level of computer knowledge.) Why
don't the people who call me at the library know how to copy and paste?
Same reason they don't know how to avoid malware: they've nobody to
teach them. Another reason people with close friends or relatives who
are geeks are less likely to have spyware is because their computer-smart
friend or relative may have installed software on their computer, rather
than leaving them to do it themselves. This is a mitigating influence,
because people who understand computers better choose software better.
People with close friends or relatives who understand computers are vastly
more likely to have protective stuff (ad-aware, ZoneAlarm, an external
firewally between their Windows PC and the cable modem,
addition are vastly more likely to use a browser other than IE and
*overwhelmingly* more likely to use a mailreader other than hotmail or
Outlook Express. Consequently, they're less likely to get spyware in
the first place -- and more likely to have it removed (by said relative
or friend) in short order if they do get it.
Then of course there are the geeks themselves, who are particularly unlikely
to have spyware running on their computer at any given time. The geeks who
use Windows, besides being less likely to get spyware in the first place,
would *notice* it almost right away ("Hey, what's _this_ doing in the task
manager? I don't recognize that...") and then of course you have the geeks
who use another OS altogether; the probability that _they_ would have any
spyware is distinctly underwhelming.
So the question then becomes, what percentage of the population at large
has a computer-smart close friend or relative (close enoug
I'm a multibooter. Would I switch my main system to OS X? No. I can't use ...
it for more than a few minutes at a time, due to an accessibility issue[1], so
I would still keep Gnome as my primary system. But I would shell out the
$129 (assuming architecture price parity), install it, mess with it, shell
into it remotely and gain experience administering it, install various software
on it, play with Safari,
The problem is, the number of people who would shell out the $129 for an
x86 version of the OS is probably smaller than the number of people who buy
the Apple hardware in order to run OS X, given the current situation. That
combined with Apple's core goals of maintaining their image and fanbase is
good enough reason for Apple to only release their OS for their own hardware.
Would I buy MacOS X86 if Apple released it? Yeah, I would. Will they? No.
---
[1] It forces Evil Satanic Blinding White Backgrounds on me; I go snowblind.
Gates says more has been _invested_ in making IE secure than any other browser.
That's probably true. The problem is, it's the wrong approach: no amount of
investment will make IE secure.
> But it's here in Ohio that experts believe there is the greatest potential
> for another Florida, primarily because more than two-thirds of voters will
> use punch-card ballots similar to those that produced the infamous hanging
> chads of 2000.
We've used those punch-card ballots since time out of mind in Ohio, and we've
never had any problem with them. Apparently, most folks in Ohio know how to
follow an arrow; whereas, as a certain comedian pointed out, the driving in
Miami proves that voters there have not yet managed this skill.</rimshot>
Seriously, the punch-card ballots work and work well.
> "Ohio is ground zero,"
Ohio is always an important state in any election. We're one of the most
borderline swing states, almost exactly balanced between conservative and
liberal tendencies. You can just about call the outcome of an election
once the Ohio count comes in; we pretty much always vote for the winner.
> said Daniel Tokaji, an Ohio State University law professor who studies
> election procedures. "We are one of the last bastions of the punch-card
> ballot and there has been a lot of controversy relating to provisional
> balloting."
The punchcard ballot has received a lot of criticism since the Florida thing,
but in fact the punchcard ballot is an excellent system, quite possibly the
best system devised to date. It's simple, but that's not a bad thing. The
problems in Florida were not the result of using punchcards.
Mail::Sendmail is technically 807 lines, but over 400 lines of that is
documentation (POD) after the __END__ of the actual program code; if you
just count the code itself, it's 388 lines.
Oh, and unlike a lot of modules, it's got almost no dependencies: you've
gotta have a network connection, and Perl, and that's it.
And the interface is very convenient to work with.
> > if their claims have any merit they'll cough up.
> Like The SCO Group did?
That was a conditional statement.
And if they had as much money to blow on litigation as SCO has done, they
would be going after larger fish than an unknown startup, probably.
> Each XD1 chassis has up to 12 AMD Operton processors. Up to 12 chassis
... (drumroll please...) gross.
> can be clustered together in a rack.
Man, that's just
> Hmmmm new wallpaper
Hmm... now I know what practical joke to play in the office on April 1.
> Everything is more fun naked except cooking with grease.
For example: making snow angels. Also, installing fibreglass insulation.
> How many people actually opened this up in Gimp?
Check.
> How many of you swore that each checkerbox was different and got
> thoroughly pissed off when you checked the hex value with the dropper
> and they were the same?
No. I wasn't sure at first (they _looked_ different, but there were different
colors around them, which makes it hard to tell). So I zoomed in and panned
back and forth, and then I was able to tell for sure they both had the same
base shade for the bulk of their area.
But what pissed me off about the image was how uglifically horrible the
Evil Satanic JPEG Compression made it look. When I see an image like that,
I want to physically harm the cretinous losers who developed JPEG compression.
I also have a z-machine in my Emacs (malyon), and there's one for my browser
too (Gnusto). Next I'm going to try out the Language::Zcode Perl module.
Indeed. I know a guy who has purchased half a dozen boxed copies of Windows
over the years, operating under the delusion that a new version will solve
all of his rather copious computing problems. Usually the cycle goes something
like this...
1. He buys some new computer hardware, to make the computer work better.
2. He has trouble getting the new hardware to work properly, so he lets
the computer sit unused for a few months until he gets around to it...
3. When he gets around to it, he asks one of his kids what do do about it.
4. His son tells him to get the latest version of Windows.
5. His computer sits unused for a few months until he gets around to it.
6. He gets the latest Windows but has trouble getting it installed.
7. His computer sits unused for a few months until he gets around to it.
8. He gets someone who's good with computers to come over and help him
reinstall from scratch to get it working, explaining that he doesn't
need all the problems solved, he just needs a little help getting it
to a point where the system will actually boot, and maybe getting the
dialup account setup. Twice this person has been me, and I know of
at least two other people (including the aforementioned son) who have
done it for him too.
9. The geek does a fresh install of Windows, installs the drivers for the
hardware, and generally gets things working.
10. The computer works (mostly) for two or three months.
11. Something (usually the printer) stops working. The computer sits unused
for a few months, until he gets around to doing something about it.
12. Repeat.
He also has boxed copies of things like Office sitting around, not installed.
> Still, I guess there is one good thing that will come of this: I always ;)
> felt we should spend more money on basic research and less on the military.
> Here, the military is spending its money on basic research
The military has been spending money on basic research for years. It's just
that usually they keep it classified until it's thoroughly redundant with
research that has been done elsewhere. But they do do it.
> Inside these containers, known as Penning traps, magnetic fields prevent
> the antiparticles from contacting the material wall of the container --
> lest they annihilate on contact. Unfortunately, because like-charged
> particles repel each other, the positrons push each other apart and quickly
> squirt out of the trap.
I assume there's some problem with the obvious solution to this, namely
getting yourself some antiprotons and putting them together with the positrons
to make some antihydrogen, and putting _that_ in the Penning traps.
You can't block .com, because there are too many valid domains there, but .cc? .cc domains .com
.cc that it would .com or .net or .org or .edu or .us or cetera.
Nothing legitimately worthwhile has ever been hosted there; if the spammers
or whoever abuse this, you just instruct your software that all
are invalid, and your dad is Robert's brother. It's an ugly hack, but it
would work; no such thing is possible for
I'm not saying that it's right for nameservers to return wildcard results for
unregistered domains, but this isn't nearly the problem in
be in a major TLD such as
> > two inches by three, 1 month/page, with room to write things on each day
> Huh?
Well, it folds once. And it might be a little larger than that... (measures)
Okay, so it's more like two and a half by three and a half, folded once in the
middle, which makes a month two and a half by seven. Each week is one of the
four columns, so that gives you an inch and three quarters, enough space to
write in a time and the name of an event, such as "9:30am haircut" or whatever.
There's enough space vertically to get two such events on each day. I print
off about six months of it at a time and keep it in a small clear plastic
sleeve (made from Contact paper), and the whole thing is small enough that I
when carry it in my shirt pocket all the time, nobody ever notices it's even
there except when I take it out to look at it or write something in. This IMO
makes it vastly superior to those bulky day planners many people use.
> mind you this guy suffers from add
Almost the opposite: I'm very focused, so focused that I often get caught up
in a train of thought and become oblivious to the world around me. Twenty
minutes later, when everyone else has moved on and jumped to new topics several
times since, I'm probably still thinking about it.
In school, I always did very well on written tests but loathed group projects
and sometimes had a problem with "daydreaming" wherein the teacher would have
moved on to a new subject and my mind would be further exploring something
the class had covered earlier.
Once during reading time in third grade I got to the end of the chapter in
the book I was reading, looked up, and the classroom was vacant. "Yes,
Nathan", the teacher said, "the rest of the class went to bathroom break."
While I was reading the book, this had escaped my notice entirely.
> Gartner's making a bold prediction that the number of machines sold as Linux
> desktops may eclipse the number of machines actually running Linux."
I don't think that's a fair conclusion. I'm willing to accept that many of
the systems sold with Linux end up with pirated Windows, because it makes
sense -- but the conclusion doesn't follow.
The unstated assumption is that all machines _not_ sold with Linux don't run
it, and this is known to be quite far from the truth. I posit that the
overwhelming majority of systems currently running Linux weren't sold with
it. Some may have been sold with Windows; many no doubt were sold with no
OS, and indeed a lot of them were built from parts by hobbyists.
I don't think it's reasonable to conclude _anything_ (positive _or_ negative)
about the number of Linux-running systems based on sales figures of any sort.
In fact, I don't normally carry ANY of the things people usually put in wallets.
Money? If I carried it with me all the time, it'd get spent, so I leave it at
home until I have a specific reason to take it along. When I do carry money, I
put it deep in a front pocket, where it's less likely to fall out and cannot be
picked without my knowing about it. Credit cards? I don't own any, and don't
want to -- I've seen people screw themselves up badly with those things, and I
don't want any part of it. Driver's license? I maintain a carless pedestrian
lifestyle -- that's the only exercise I get, and otherwise I'd be completely
sedentary. Plus it saves on gas and insurance, to say nothing of the cost of
a car itself and repairs. I do have ID, which I keep in my checkbook, because
when I write checks is the only time I ever need it. Library card? I have my
library card number memorized. Photos of loved ones? I'm a very non-visual
thinker, mostly auditory and conceptual, so photographs don't matter much to
me. What else do people carry around in wallets? Whatever it is, I don't
carry it.
What I *do* carry around all the time goes in my shirt pocket: my short term
memory -- in the form of a small schedue (which is generated by a Perl program
I wrote that uses DateTime and creates an OpenOffice document, which I print),
about two inches by three inches, one month per page, with room to write
things on each day. Also a writing utensil usually, and sometimes a Post-It
or similar with a note to myself about this or that that I need to remember.
> It's almost certainly those pesky hydrogen bonds - they're responsible
> for just about everything interesting in organic chemistry
Indeed, I was just pointing out that the same root cause (hydrogen bonds) are
also responsible for certain liquids that expand when they freeze, rather than
continuing to contract as most cooling liquids do. (The best known example of
this phenomenon is water, which is why ice floats.)
When you boil down (Hah!) chemistry to its roots, it all comes down to physics.
In this case, hydrogen bonds are electromagnetic force at work. Of course,
when you boil down phyics, it's mostly math. Everything is math. Biology
comes down to chemistry; chemistry comes down to physics; physics comes down
to math. Many important concepts in art (color spaces, balance, composition,
and so forth) also involve a fair amount of math (though artists don't always
think about it that way). History, if you want to really understand it, is
all about seeing trends and patterns -- a form of math. Everything is math.
> if it weren't for Linus, the OSS movement would now stick to a free OS based
> either on 386BSD or GNU/Hurd
It would be BSD. The whole lawsuit thingy was settled and the caveat-free
version released a couple years after Linux started to really get popular
in the OSS community. Hurd wasn't anywhere near finished yet at the time.
However, I don't think OSS would be as popular as it is without the influence
of the Linux kernel. I believe there are *more* people using BSD today than
there would have been if Linux hadn't been written, because somehow Linux
shone a light of popularity on OSS, and people took notice. There are quite
a lot of people who start out experimenting with Linux and then move on to
the harder drugs of BSD as it were.
Heck, without the influence of Linux, Hurd might _still_ not exist.
But Hurd isn't the largest influence that Stallman or the FSF have had.
Emacs is much more influential than Hurd, for example. So is bash. Still,
I think these things are more popular and influential than they otherwise
would have been because of the popularizing influence of the Linux kernel.