But why would they be able to make sense of it? Even if they found out that the CD contained data, managed to build a player that could read it, and deciphered the file system etc., why would they know that - for example - a certain bit pattern stands for "George Bell" rather than "Xklpbk Tkww"?
The problem is that when you're not familiar with the alphabet, both of these are equally cryptic. Think about it - the letters of the alphabet aren't information themselves, they're an encoding of information. We can pronounce "George Bell" and not "Xklpbk Tkww" because we associate certain sounds with the letters, but the writing system could be anything - in fact, if I simply change around the letters of the alphabet, I can trivially arrive in one where "Xklpbk Tkww" in fact does read "George Bell".
So it's non-trivial to start from the bit pattern on the disc and arrive at the ASCII representation "George Bell" - not at all. And it's also non-trivial to start from the ASCII representation "George Bell" and arrive at the spoken words "George Bell", especially when you don't know anything about the human body and how we produce different sounds. *And* on top of that, it's also non-trivial to start at the spoken words "George Bell" and arrive at the *concept* of the person "George Bell", who had his name put on this CD.
An alien civilisation would probably be able to understand that the bit patterns mean *something*, but without a Rosetta stone, how would they be able to find out what? How would they even be able to find out that they're names?
Hum. The security risk is that someone with *physical* access to your machine while you are *not around* can use your account?
I don't know, but that doesn't sound like such a big deal to me. If I'm not around and someone else has physical access to my computer, then I have lost anyway, no matter whether I'm logged in at that moment or not. He could just as well steal my computer (which does not require me to be logged in).
Al Coholic Oliver Clothesoff I. P. Freely Jacques Strap Seymour Butz Homer Sexual Mike Rotch Hugh Jass Bea O'Problem Amanda Huggenkiss Ivana Tinkle Anita Bath Maya Buttreeks Eura Snotball Heywood U. Cuddleme
It's going to take a lot less than that to get there, actually. The reason why the trip back will take so long is that it's not actually needed - it just so *happens* that the probe will probably return after 50000 years, but noone's actually really interested in it doing so (not today, anyway).
Of course, the trip to Pluto is going to take a couple of years, but not that much - you're certainly going to see it in your lifetime. Well, assuming you don't die first (but that goes without saying).:)
*s* Well, I just remembered this strip because I thought it was rather funny, and then took a Dilbert book and looked it up again. ^_~
Anyhow, in that strip, Dilbert's handing an urgent document to the boss, who promptly proceeds to shred it in his portable shredder, and, when Dilbert remarks how much he hates that thing, asks whether Dilbert's tie's made of silk.
I think it fits perfectly with the boss' personality.:)
Look up the Dilbert strip for April 29th 1992.:) It's not available on the Dilbert website, it seems (they only go back one month - shame), but if you have the books, you should be able to find it.
Actually, it would create a burst of gamma radiation, not an explosion. The outcome would probably be the same, of course, though, or at least for any bystanders...
I'd prove you wrong, but I stopped reading after you said that there's no major improvements "under the hood" (is there any part to the kernel that is not considered "under the hood") anymore. That claim alone shows that no matter how insightful you might otherwise be, you're completely out of touch with reality.:)
Because that's the new development process. Stuff gets tested in -mm, and if it's deemed stable and useful enough, it eventually gets promoted to Linus' tree (or not). There is no development series anymore.
The reason for that is apparent in what you say, too: in the old development process, such changes could only happen in an unstable series, which means that in the worst case, it'd take *years* until they'd actually reach the stable series where people could benefit from them (those who don't want to live on the bleeding edge, that is).
If you don't like this, stick to 2.4. Or 2.2 - even 2.0 is still getting fixes. Or start your own, more conservative, kernel tree. But you won't be able to change the basic development process - it's been discussed to hell and back on lkml already, and, believe it or not, it's working.
You could use OTR. Yes, it's primarily intended for AIM, but the GAIM plugin at least seems to work with all underlying protocols, so if you and the one you want to talk to both use GAIM (or, if you're using OS X, Adium X, which IIRC has native support for OTR), you can use it on Google Talk, too.
For those who can't / don't want to use GAIM (or Adium X), they have an AIM proxy server. I imagine that it wouldn't be impossible to do similar proxies for other protocols as well.
Sure. But then, it's like the USA uphold the Geneva convention, anyway - camp X-ray is full of people who'd be able to tell stories you about that.
But it's not limited to the Geneva convention, actually. Pretty much all international law is ignored by the USA (and, for that matter, other nations as well) whenever it doesn't match their goals. Take, for example, the Kellogg-Briand pact, signed and ratified by (among others) the USA, which went into effect in 1929 and which outlaws war - and then ask how many wars the USA has not only waged but in fact started since then.
International law is a bit like western civilization according to Gandhi - it would be a good idea. But in reality, it's only invoked when there's a propagandistic need to portray your adversaries as villains to the general public so that you can subsequently ignore it yourself.
I think you're misunderstanding the problem, though - the BIOS (on x86 boxen) only loads 512 bytes from disk, so you *have* to have some code that pulls in the rest of the kernel from disk. Whether that's in the kernel or a bootloader doesn't matter, of course, but I don't think that Linux does that (at least not by default).
Compatibility reasons. Why do modern x86 processors still have an A20 gate? Or, for that matter, why does Real Mode still exist? There's no real reason for it if you're only running modern OSes, but Intel/AMD/... know that there *will* be flak if they do get rid of these - somewhere, someone's still using DOS or something similar, and wants to be able to continue to do so.
It's an article, not a study; and for that matter, it's an article concerning Linux, not windows. Contrary to what you might think, not everyone dual-boots, even those that do use boot managers.
That being said, whatever happened to OS/2's Boot Manager? I recall using that one back in the ol' days (starting with OS/2 2.0; I don't know if earlier versions also had it), and I still think it's better than LILO or GRUB in terms of its user interface. Granted, you needed an extra partition for it (1 MB only, though, which isn't much anymore these days really), but still, it was very nice and usable.
Not that it would've fit into this article, but I think it's worth remembering, at least. Great piece of software.
I think you're contradicting yourself here. Let me explain why:
On one hand, you say that the point is a typical Linux distribution does not really *rely* on X, KDE, Gnome or anything like that - that these are not a crucial part of the system. Sure, that's true.
On the other hand, though, you also concede that it's possible to use Linux without using GNU tools - the kernel can be compiled using other compilers, different userland toolchains can be used, etc.
That seems like a contradiction to me. If neither is really necessary, then why is GNU being treated differently than X11? Of course, you argue that in reality, the GNU tools *are* used pretty much exclusively, but so is X11. How many Linux users do you know that don't use X11? There are a number of distros that don't use it, that much is true, but most of those are special-purpose distros, anyway - if you look at the general purpose ones, both the "big players" (like Red Hat, SuSE, Debian etc.) and the smaller ones (like Gentoo, Slackware etc.), you'll find that they all include X11. So I'd argue that yes, X11 is also an integral part of Linux systems - not one that strictly *cannot* be left out, of course, but then, that goes for the GNU tools, too.
Furthermore, you say that the term "GNU/Linux" should only apply to those distributions that actually include the GNU tools, anyway. That's certainly true as well - but if *that*'s the case, then you can't even argue that the GNU tools are different from X11, or KDE, or Gnome, or TeX, or anything like that anymore - if the term is only supposed to apply to systems that include them, anyway, then it doesn't matter how widespread the subsystem in question is or isn't; it only matters how much it contributes to the size of the codebase.
Does KDE have a larger codebase than the GNU utilities that are typically installed on a Linux distro? I wouldn't be surprised if it was the case. What about X11?
As you say, systems that don't actually include GNU tools shouldn't be called "GNU/Linux", because that's misleading. But by the same reasoning you used, I could also demand that all the major distros call themselves "GNU/Linux/X11" (or a variant thereof; why does "GNU" come before "Linux", anyway? The kernel is more fundamental than the tools building on top of it, so the proper name would probably be "Linux/GNU", as opposed to "Linux/Busybox" or "Linux/BSD-variants-of-the-usual-Unix-tools" etc). Sure, not all distros are including X11, and it's not integral to the system, but you can't argue that way since I'm only talking about systems that do include it, anyway.
And finally... what never was answered to me is why this whole thing only seems to apply when you're on Linux, anyway. For example, I have worked as a Solaris system administrator in the past, and pretty much all the machines I worked with had GNU tools installed, replacing the regular Sun versions of the standard utilities. Does that mean those systems were running "GNU/Solaris"? Of course not - it was still Solaris, pure and simple, with some tools installed that simply happened to come from the GNU project. But what's different about Linux? Sure, there's no non-GNU standard set of utilities, but so what? As we saw above, you don't need the GNU utilities even on Linux; you don't need the GNU compiler to compile Linux, either. It's just that most (but not all) distributions include them by default - but then, most (but not all) distributions also include X11 by default, and KDE, and Gnome, and so on.
The real reason why RMS is demanding this is that he wants to draw attention to the GNU project, and that he's unhappy with the fact that Linux came along (so the Hurd didn't take of), just like he's unhappy that ESR coined the term "open source" (so "free software" isn't what entered the mainstream). I have a lot of respect for RMS, but I think it's important to realise that this is mostly a personal thing for him.
Not *that* hard, though. Yes, it's possible to remain quite anonymous online, but if you're playing for real money, then you will have to identify yourself in some way so that the money can be sent to you - and I don't think you'd be able to get away with creating a hundred PayPal accounts.
The only ones who'll be able to get around that are the organised crime people, and I wouldn't be surprised if these really turn out to be a hard problem in the end. But casual players that just want to make money fast... not really, or at least not in the long run.
You raise an interesting point when you say that there's more to poker than simply calculating what move is best based on the objective information available and that you also need to be able to "read" your opponent etc., but the unspoken conclusion - namely, that this kind of thing is necessary to be good at poker - is wrong.
Take chess, for example - admittedly, there's not much bluffing etc. in there, but when humans play against each other, anticipating the other's moves and guessing what he plans to do so you can foil his plans is an important thing. Computers are unable to do that, of course, but they're still extremely good at chess, mostly due to the overwhelming computing power that's available to them. A computer chess program is comparatively dumb, but it can get away with being dumb.
That's not to say that all games are like that, of course. There are also other examples; for example, in Backgammon, even a very simple computer player will be able to beat the living daylights out of *any* human player, while in Go, a reasonably skilled human player can win against any computer player.
It remains to be seen where poker will rank in this regard, but the assumption that computer can't be good at poker because they can't play the same way that humans do is wrong.
Or, for that matter, this one. Admittedly, that's not a UI design bug, but it's a very good example of the arrogance that some Mozilla users unfortunately show at times.
It's been open for six years, there's more than 750 votes (IIRC, it's the single most voted-for bug in Mozilla's bugzilla), and patches have been provided and kept in sync for a long, long time.
Still, it's not implemented because it might cause the default installer to grow by 50 KB. Sad.
Slashdot Mirror
That story *has* been posted (well, maybe not your submission, but the story itself).
Look at the comment IDs. Your post has 13431850, while mine has 13431008 - in other words, I posted mine before you did. Get over it.
That was intentional. It was funny, true, but the joke's lost if you don't know what's going on in the episode. :)
A CVS replacement? Why? There's already Subversion. ;)
But why would they be able to make sense of it? Even if they found out that the CD contained data, managed to build a player that could read it, and deciphered the file system etc., why would they know that - for example - a certain bit pattern stands for "George Bell" rather than "Xklpbk Tkww"?
The problem is that when you're not familiar with the alphabet, both of these are equally cryptic. Think about it - the letters of the alphabet aren't information themselves, they're an encoding of information. We can pronounce "George Bell" and not "Xklpbk Tkww" because we associate certain sounds with the letters, but the writing system could be anything - in fact, if I simply change around the letters of the alphabet, I can trivially arrive in one where "Xklpbk Tkww" in fact does read "George Bell".
So it's non-trivial to start from the bit pattern on the disc and arrive at the ASCII representation "George Bell" - not at all. And it's also non-trivial to start from the ASCII representation "George Bell" and arrive at the spoken words "George Bell", especially when you don't know anything about the human body and how we produce different sounds. *And* on top of that, it's also non-trivial to start at the spoken words "George Bell" and arrive at the *concept* of the person "George Bell", who had his name put on this CD.
An alien civilisation would probably be able to understand that the bit patterns mean *something*, but without a Rosetta stone, how would they be able to find out what? How would they even be able to find out that they're names?
Hum. The security risk is that someone with *physical* access to your machine while you are *not around* can use your account?
I don't know, but that doesn't sound like such a big deal to me. If I'm not around and someone else has physical access to my computer, then I have lost anyway, no matter whether I'm logged in at that moment or not. He could just as well steal my computer (which does not require me to be logged in).
No, it's the other way around - Zotob is cleaned by some other worms.
F-Secure has a hi-tech diagram how it works here.
For that matter, try these (from the Simpsons):
Al Coholic
Oliver Clothesoff
I. P. Freely
Jacques Strap
Seymour Butz
Homer Sexual
Mike Rotch
Hugh Jass
Bea O'Problem
Amanda Huggenkiss
Ivana Tinkle
Anita Bath
Maya Buttreeks
Eura Snotball
Heywood U. Cuddleme
SpaceSpam(tm)?
It's going to take a lot less than that to get there, actually. The reason why the trip back will take so long is that it's not actually needed - it just so *happens* that the probe will probably return after 50000 years, but noone's actually really interested in it doing so (not today, anyway).
:)
Of course, the trip to Pluto is going to take a couple of years, but not that much - you're certainly going to see it in your lifetime. Well, assuming you don't die first (but that goes without saying).
*s* Well, I just remembered this strip because I thought it was rather funny, and then took a Dilbert book and looked it up again. ^_~
:)
Anyhow, in that strip, Dilbert's handing an urgent document to the boss, who promptly proceeds to shred it in his portable shredder, and, when Dilbert remarks how much he hates that thing, asks whether Dilbert's tie's made of silk.
I think it fits perfectly with the boss' personality.
Look up the Dilbert strip for April 29th 1992. :) It's not available on the Dilbert website, it seems (they only go back one month - shame), but if you have the books, you should be able to find it.
:)
You're not the first one to have this idea.
Actually, it would create a burst of gamma radiation, not an explosion. The outcome would probably be the same, of course, though, or at least for any bystanders...
I'd prove you wrong, but I stopped reading after you said that there's no major improvements "under the hood" (is there any part to the kernel that is not considered "under the hood") anymore. That claim alone shows that no matter how insightful you might otherwise be, you're completely out of touch with reality. :)
Because that's the new development process. Stuff gets tested in -mm, and if it's deemed stable and useful enough, it eventually gets promoted to Linus' tree (or not). There is no development series anymore.
The reason for that is apparent in what you say, too: in the old development process, such changes could only happen in an unstable series, which means that in the worst case, it'd take *years* until they'd actually reach the stable series where people could benefit from them (those who don't want to live on the bleeding edge, that is).
If you don't like this, stick to 2.4. Or 2.2 - even 2.0 is still getting fixes. Or start your own, more conservative, kernel tree. But you won't be able to change the basic development process - it's been discussed to hell and back on lkml already, and, believe it or not, it's working.
You could use OTR. Yes, it's primarily intended for AIM, but the GAIM plugin at least seems to work with all underlying protocols, so if you and the one you want to talk to both use GAIM (or, if you're using OS X, Adium X, which IIRC has native support for OTR), you can use it on Google Talk, too.
For those who can't / don't want to use GAIM (or Adium X), they have an AIM proxy server. I imagine that it wouldn't be impossible to do similar proxies for other protocols as well.
Sure. But then, it's like the USA uphold the Geneva convention, anyway - camp X-ray is full of people who'd be able to tell stories you about that.
But it's not limited to the Geneva convention, actually. Pretty much all international law is ignored by the USA (and, for that matter, other nations as well) whenever it doesn't match their goals. Take, for example, the Kellogg-Briand pact, signed and ratified by (among others) the USA, which went into effect in 1929 and which outlaws war - and then ask how many wars the USA has not only waged but in fact started since then.
International law is a bit like western civilization according to Gandhi - it would be a good idea. But in reality, it's only invoked when there's a propagandistic need to portray your adversaries as villains to the general public so that you can subsequently ignore it yourself.
I think you're misunderstanding the problem, though - the BIOS (on x86 boxen) only loads 512 bytes from disk, so you *have* to have some code that pulls in the rest of the kernel from disk. Whether that's in the kernel or a bootloader doesn't matter, of course, but I don't think that Linux does that (at least not by default).
Compatibility reasons. Why do modern x86 processors still have an A20 gate? Or, for that matter, why does Real Mode still exist? There's no real reason for it if you're only running modern OSes, but Intel/AMD/... know that there *will* be flak if they do get rid of these - somewhere, someone's still using DOS or something similar, and wants to be able to continue to do so.
That's it, mostly.
It's an article, not a study; and for that matter, it's an article concerning Linux, not windows. Contrary to what you might think, not everyone dual-boots, even those that do use boot managers.
That being said, whatever happened to OS/2's Boot Manager? I recall using that one back in the ol' days (starting with OS/2 2.0; I don't know if earlier versions also had it), and I still think it's better than LILO or GRUB in terms of its user interface. Granted, you needed an extra partition for it (1 MB only, though, which isn't much anymore these days really), but still, it was very nice and usable.
Not that it would've fit into this article, but I think it's worth remembering, at least. Great piece of software.
I think you're contradicting yourself here. Let me explain why:
On one hand, you say that the point is a typical Linux distribution does not really *rely* on X, KDE, Gnome or anything like that - that these are not a crucial part of the system. Sure, that's true.
On the other hand, though, you also concede that it's possible to use Linux without using GNU tools - the kernel can be compiled using other compilers, different userland toolchains can be used, etc.
That seems like a contradiction to me. If neither is really necessary, then why is GNU being treated differently than X11? Of course, you argue that in reality, the GNU tools *are* used pretty much exclusively, but so is X11. How many Linux users do you know that don't use X11? There are a number of distros that don't use it, that much is true, but most of those are special-purpose distros, anyway - if you look at the general purpose ones, both the "big players" (like Red Hat, SuSE, Debian etc.) and the smaller ones (like Gentoo, Slackware etc.), you'll find that they all include X11. So I'd argue that yes, X11 is also an integral part of Linux systems - not one that strictly *cannot* be left out, of course, but then, that goes for the GNU tools, too.
Furthermore, you say that the term "GNU/Linux" should only apply to those distributions that actually include the GNU tools, anyway. That's certainly true as well - but if *that*'s the case, then you can't even argue that the GNU tools are different from X11, or KDE, or Gnome, or TeX, or anything like that anymore - if the term is only supposed to apply to systems that include them, anyway, then it doesn't matter how widespread the subsystem in question is or isn't; it only matters how much it contributes to the size of the codebase.
Does KDE have a larger codebase than the GNU utilities that are typically installed on a Linux distro? I wouldn't be surprised if it was the case. What about X11?
As you say, systems that don't actually include GNU tools shouldn't be called "GNU/Linux", because that's misleading. But by the same reasoning you used, I could also demand that all the major distros call themselves "GNU/Linux/X11" (or a variant thereof; why does "GNU" come before "Linux", anyway? The kernel is more fundamental than the tools building on top of it, so the proper name would probably be "Linux/GNU", as opposed to "Linux/Busybox" or "Linux/BSD-variants-of-the-usual-Unix-tools" etc). Sure, not all distros are including X11, and it's not integral to the system, but you can't argue that way since I'm only talking about systems that do include it, anyway.
And finally... what never was answered to me is why this whole thing only seems to apply when you're on Linux, anyway. For example, I have worked as a Solaris system administrator in the past, and pretty much all the machines I worked with had GNU tools installed, replacing the regular Sun versions of the standard utilities. Does that mean those systems were running "GNU/Solaris"? Of course not - it was still Solaris, pure and simple, with some tools installed that simply happened to come from the GNU project. But what's different about Linux? Sure, there's no non-GNU standard set of utilities, but so what? As we saw above, you don't need the GNU utilities even on Linux; you don't need the GNU compiler to compile Linux, either. It's just that most (but not all) distributions include them by default - but then, most (but not all) distributions also include X11 by default, and KDE, and Gnome, and so on.
The real reason why RMS is demanding this is that he wants to draw attention to the GNU project, and that he's unhappy with the fact that Linux came along (so the Hurd didn't take of), just like he's unhappy that ESR coined the term "open source" (so "free software" isn't what entered the mainstream). I have a lot of respect for RMS, but I think it's important to realise that this is mostly a personal thing for him.
Not *that* hard, though. Yes, it's possible to remain quite anonymous online, but if you're playing for real money, then you will have to identify yourself in some way so that the money can be sent to you - and I don't think you'd be able to get away with creating a hundred PayPal accounts.
The only ones who'll be able to get around that are the organised crime people, and I wouldn't be surprised if these really turn out to be a hard problem in the end. But casual players that just want to make money fast... not really, or at least not in the long run.
You raise an interesting point when you say that there's more to poker than simply calculating what move is best based on the objective information available and that you also need to be able to "read" your opponent etc., but the unspoken conclusion - namely, that this kind of thing is necessary to be good at poker - is wrong.
Take chess, for example - admittedly, there's not much bluffing etc. in there, but when humans play against each other, anticipating the other's moves and guessing what he plans to do so you can foil his plans is an important thing. Computers are unable to do that, of course, but they're still extremely good at chess, mostly due to the overwhelming computing power that's available to them. A computer chess program is comparatively dumb, but it can get away with being dumb.
That's not to say that all games are like that, of course. There are also other examples; for example, in Backgammon, even a very simple computer player will be able to beat the living daylights out of *any* human player, while in Go, a reasonably skilled human player can win against any computer player.
It remains to be seen where poker will rank in this regard, but the assumption that computer can't be good at poker because they can't play the same way that humans do is wrong.
In other words... IPv6?
Or, for that matter, this one. Admittedly, that's not a UI design bug, but it's a very good example of the arrogance that some Mozilla users unfortunately show at times.
It's been open for six years, there's more than 750 votes (IIRC, it's the single most voted-for bug in Mozilla's bugzilla), and patches have been provided and kept in sync for a long, long time.
Still, it's not implemented because it might cause the default installer to grow by 50 KB. Sad.