Can't you roll up graphene sheets like rolling up a sheet of paper, or multiple sheets of paper?
Yes, that would be carbon nano-tubes. However last time we played around with tiny incredible strong tubes that didn't turn out to well. Have to wait and see how things work out for carbon nanotubes.
The time it takes to complete games hasn't changed.
Yep, some numbers of games I played over the last year:
Outlaws(1997) ~11h (main story + extra missions) Tie Fighter CD-Edition(1994) ~40h (main story + add-on content) Mass Effect 2(2010) ~36h (main story + all side quests) Dead Space(2008) ~12h (main story) Dark Void(2008) ~7h (main story) Phantasmagoria(1996) ~6h (main story) The Void(2008) ~28h (main story) Zelda:OOT (1998) ~30h (main story, no sidequests) Batman: Arkham (2009) ~10 + ~7h collecting items Metroid Prime (2002) ~16h (main story) Metroid Prime 2 (2005) ~24h (main story) Metroid Prime 3 (2007) ~14h (main story) Metroid 2 (1991) ~4h (main story, but played with map) Super Metroid ~6h (main story) Random modern European Adventure Games ~8-12h Infinite Space DS (2010) ~50h
It is not exactly a perfect random selection, but contains a bit of everything and it shows that there have been 8-12h games in the past and that there are 30h+ games today and of course vice versa. That's not even counting the console 2D platformers and arcade games that are generally 1h or 2h long and stretch their playtime with lots of retries.
That said, many games today feel short. I think sometimes it is due to obnoxious cliffhanger endings that leave you unsatisfied and sometimes it is due to games being just to simple and easy to require any kind of effort or thinking, thus 10h of running through a game without ever encountering any problems can feel a lot less then 3h of actual challenge.
I think a large part is also the fault of main stream press and perception. When games like Modern Warfare get hyped to an extreme and come with a 4h campaign that is going to leave some people wanting more. Same with games like Kayne&Lynch, Homefront or whatever. The issue with those games is that while they are short, they aren't all of todays games, they are a very tiny portion of it, but you very rarely hear as much marketing hype for a 30h+ hour game as you hear for a 5h game. Its the short and consumer friendly games that get the hype, not the hardcore stuff that requires reading a manual and takes 30h, it still exist, it just flies under the radar for most people.
And for me personally a big issue is also that games today just don't hold up to my past expectations. I mean I played Elite in 1991, X-Wing in 1993, EF2000 in 1994 and Operation Flashpoint in 2000, those where all amazing games in their times and some 10 or 15 years later I simply expect games that far surpass those, yet I far to often see the opposite, games that don't even try to do anything close to what those games accomplished. Instead of building large scale dynamical worlds far to much games limit themselves to simplistic "cinematic" experiences, that feel fake, forced and just aren't much fun.
I've heard it from a couple of customers too ("oh you have to fix it, it's guided by the EU regulations"), but obviously managers POV was - your warranty is with the manufacturer.
1. The seller shall be held liable under Article 3 where the lack of conformity becomes apparent within two years as from delivery of the goods. If, under national legislation, the rights laid down in Article 3(2) are subject to a limitation period, that period shall not expire within a period of two years from the time of delivery.
3. Unless proved otherwise, any lack of conformity which becomes apparent within six months of delivery of the goods shall be presumed to have existed at the time of delivery unless this presumption is incompatible with the nature of the goods or the nature of the lack of conformity.
As the EU just provides the outlines, not the exact implementation, details might of course varry from country to country. There is also a page on Implied Warranty on Wikipedia, but it doesn't seem to contain anything specific to the UK.
In Germany and I assume in Dutch too, as those are mostly EU regulations, you have two kinds of warranty:
Regular warranty (Garantie), which is a free service offered by the manufacturer, this can be anything from 90 days to 5 years or just not exist at all, as the manufacturer isn't require to provide it.
And then there is defects liability (GewÃhrleistung), this is required by law for all electronic goods and last two years (even longer in UK I think). This liability however is against the seller not the manufacturer, if you bought your console at Amazon, you send it back to Amazon and you get a new one or they send it in for fixing. Those two years are split into two segments, the first six month the seller has to prove that the device wasn't already broken when he sold it and everything after that requires that you broke that you didn't break it by accident. In practice that is rarely relevant, as no good seller will require proof and instead just exchange the troublesome device unless of course the damage is obviously your fault.
As far as USA is concerned, I don't think here is any mandatory warranty at all, so you often only get 90 days or so from the manufacturer and after that you have to deal with the issues yourself. Class action lawsuits might however allow you to get some of your money back or pressure the manufacturer into extending the warranty (see 3 year warranty on RROD).
Same here, I haven't tried Ekiga in a while, but when I tried it, it always was kind of garbage, hard to setup, didn't work half the time and when it would worked the sound quality was awful. The only good voice chat thing I have seen so far on Linux is Mumble, the sound quality is amazing, you can have conferences with multiple people, etc. It is a fantastic tool, the only big show stopper with it is that it is more IRC with voice then it is a Skype replacement, so setup and use isn't exactly easy.
Or, if you actually believe what you just typed, then I'm sorry it's such an incredibly tremendous burden of just typing "ls -l".
You seem to lack the ability to think a bit more abstractly and not grasp the simple example. Hint: The problem is a very real one and regularly pops up when using "find", thats why there is "find -print0", "xargs -0" and so on. With proper objects you wouldn't need special switches for commands (which some commands don't even provide) and stuff would just work safely by default. Try to split the output of "ls -l" with "gawk" when dealing with files containing a newline if you want to have fun.
The speed with which I can interact with text is much, much faster than it would be pointing and clicking my way through any mess of objects.
Except that has absolutely nothing to do with anything I mentioned. Being ABLE to click on objects is something very different from being REQUIRED, I am not saying that you should be required, but that you should be able to and there is absolutely no good reason why you shouldn't.
I call it a mess of in-band-signaling. Simple example, how many files do you see here:
$ ls test test test
That are two files, not three, one is called "test test". The "data" contains no actual information to tell you that, that information got lost while converting it to plain text. With an advanced shell those wouldn't just be letters on the screen, but actually objects that you can click with your mouse, pipe into other applications, pipe into a file and do other things with it, while still have the shell recognize that they are files, not just strings of text.
Implementing that in a proper way that is flexible and powerful is of course not easy, but there are certainly many areas where the current shell just isn't all that great and could need improvements.
The problem is that in your system, every single time a file was opened for reading/writing the user would have to slosh through an open/save dialog box provided by the OS. This includes intermediate files, temporary files, preferences, multiple output files, etc. etc. etc.
No, almost all of those can be dealt with in isolation without problems. Todays OSs already provide special directories for temp files, for config files and for things like savegames, all those would simply need to be mapped into the isolation, as they are application specific. For multiple output files you could simply use directories or "bundles", that allow you to save multiple files in one go without visiting the file dialog multiple times.
There are a few edge cases of course, something like iTunes is really more of a file browser then it is a regular document driven application, so it might be good to have a way to give an app access to your whole music collection at once, instead file by file, but again, even so iTunes need more access then an average App there is still no reason to give it whole system access.
The most problematic part would probably be the crazy stuff like virus scanners, who essentially violate any rule of good application design, but with a secure OS you might no longer need them in the first place or they might be provided by your OS.
Furthermore, in your system you would never be able to automate this dialog box without losing the security benefits
Could it be a problem for some apps, yes absolutely, but when I look at the applications I run on a daily basis, there really isn't much that wouldn't work perfectly fine in isolation, most of them would actually work much better and easier (consistent file dialogs everywhere, instead of apps rolling their own, app files in well defined places instead of scattered around the HDD, etc.). So far I simply haven't really seen anything that couldn't be made to work in isolation.
the OS cannot possible understand every single file format that every single one of your applications will ever want to write...
It doesn't have to understand anything, it just have to read the byte stream.
that means the OS would just blindly have to write anything your application demands.
The OS wouldn't write anything the application demands, but only what the user requests, i.e. the app provides a blob of data that the user then can drag&drop around.
To put it all in Unix terms:
"cat" is your load dialog and can read files, provided by your OS "tee" is your save dialog and can write files, provided by your OS the app is a filter in between that can't do anything to the system other then read from stdin and write to stdout
cat your_file | potentially_evil_app | tee your_file
This would allow you to read any file on your system, work with it and save it to any file you want. The potentially evil application would have no access to anything, it is the user who would control where the data from the app goes, not the app, it wouldn't even know about it.
Permissions are managed by filesystem
Current permission systems are completely useless for protecting the user from his applications, as each application has full access to the same things as the user.
From my experience DOSBox works perfectly well for almost everything I have thrown at it. Games with which I had the most issues with are of the Win95/Win98 era ones, they are to new for DOSBox and to old to run properly in regular Windows. For those games I keep an old computer with Windows98 around. Sometimes there are of course other workaround, Wine can sometimes work better then regular Windows with old stuff, but sometimes the real hardware is just the easiest to get things up and running.
That works right up until you need privileges outside that isolation, as nearly all non-trivial software would.
There are very few applications that you might want to run that need full system access and are not already part of the OS (i.e. file browser, terminal, etc. are all part of the OS). By far most application only need their binary, their own data, a store for config/state information and user provided data. All of which can be handled in complete isolation without much of a problem.
Yeah, they are already. Have been for a long-ass time.
They haven't, at least not in any meaningful way that would help isolation. Currently a filedialog only gives the application a filename, which still requires the app to have full filesystem access. What it should do is provide the application with the file data, that way there would be no need for filesystem access, while still allowing the user to open any file he wants with the application.
If a user chooses to install some software and it turns out to be rogue then that's not the fault of the OS
Wrong.
it is the nativity of the user.
Wrong again, its the historical ballast of 30 year old OS design that hasn't kept up with times.
But then people would complain about lack of freedom.
Freedom and security are not opposites, they go hand in hand. The problem with todays OS design is that it provides application freedom, while it should focus on user freedom. A good OS should allow a user to run whatever piece of software he wants without fear of system corruption, data theft or anything else. Instead todays OS to the opposite, they force the user to carefully select which apps to run as he has no way to limit what an app might do.
Simple steps for a much more secure OS (really not that much different from a application running in your browser):
1) run all apps in complete isolation 2) make file load/save dialogs a part of the OS, so that the app can exchange data without ever having filesystem access
Maybe it's time to exert the power of the consumer to change the direction in which corporate hegemony is going.
Yes, but thats exactly my point. If you want to get the consumers to listen, you need to inform them, not confuse them with weird campaigns and "all hardware is evil" messages that will just make them turn away. People that are buying 3DSs are not giving them up just because the FSF says so, they might not even care if it has DRM at all, they might however listen to invasion of privacy and other issues. Make that the center of the campaign, get them interesting and tell them a bit about the problems of DRM along the way.
but I don't think we're at the point that the FSF should be called "extreme fundamentalists".
"Extreme fundamentalist" is certainly the wrong word to use, but on the other side the tone that the FSF uses comes across as kind of lunatic and thus regularly misses exactly the people they want to target. The point that the FSF makes here is a very real one, but its hard to look at that page and not just quickly dismiss it as just some crazy people doing their little thing, especially for people who might have never heard of the FSF before (aka most 3DS buyers).
Another thing that bothers me is that the FSF stuff almost comes across as negative, so 3DS is evil, iPad is evil, Kindle is evil, etc. Great, but what hardware is actually ok to buy? Why is there still no hardware database of the good stuff that doesn't limit my rights? Basically whenever I am going out to buy new hardware I have that issue and there is no easy answer to be found what restrictions a particular device might have, all you can do is Google a lot and hope that you find anything, but that's just plane time consuming, especially when you want to compare multiple different products.
The main advantage that btrfs has isn't speed, but that it can do copy-on-write. For a home user that for example means that he could copy his whole root file system before a dist-upgrade and thus have an easy way to undo the dist-upgrade when he doesn't like it, i.e. two commands that take a second to run thanks to copy-on-write instead of messing with a full backup and replay that might take an hour. Or the ability to have timemachine like backup functionality with essentially no overhead.
And how do you propose that the "pristine" packages below it are updated without giving malware the same priviledges or ability to update those packages with infected versions?
Packages and their updates have a proper signature from your distributor, malware doesn't. The point here isn't so much to create the one true final solution to computer security, but to have some robust tracking of origin of a package and its containing files, on top of that you could then build a whitelist, WoT or whatever to improve things even further. As of right now there really isn't much of a build in form of tracking for what an application does to your system or how it was modified.
Sadly, the end result is there isn't any way to have the openness of a PC without having the dilligence of being able to maintain it properly.
Quite the opposite, a proper secure system would be much more open then our current PCs, as it would allow users to mess around with their system, run any app they want and all of that without having the fear of braking anything, as the system would be able to keep track of all the changes and undo them if needed.
The OLPC for example has that (in theory at least, real world implementation is still incomplete). You can essentially setup the thing so that it shows you what applications other people in your friends lists are running. If you want to copy that application you just click on it and the system will copy the app over and run it on your system, all in a secure manner, as applications are run in isolation without full system access. If you want to modify it, you click the "show source" button and hack away, again, the thing keeps track of your modifications and can undo them when needed.
A more interesting question would be why systems are still so shitty at even basic self verification. A Linux might verify a packages signature on install, but after that, there is absolutely no oversight about what is happening to that package. On a regular dist-upgrade it can't even properly tell apart which config files have been touched by the user and which have been automatically generated.
This is not even an especially hard problem to solve, instead of dumping everything into a single directory tree, dump all packages into a read-only tree and save all the changes to that tree into a completely separate directory tree that is mounted on top of the other one via some kind of unionfs. This wouldn't just be good for security, it would also make a users life much easier, as changes and hacks that divert from the vanilla system would be instantly visible.
Having, you know, an actual story maybe? The only line Half Life blurred was the line between levels, where previous games send you on separate missions or levels, Half Life removed that separation and connected everything to one huge construction. Thats what made it special. The actual story in the game was pretty much garbage.
I can replace the card I used with a phone call to the bank (which I already did), but I can't change my address and birthdate.
If you can fuck somebodies live up with that information, somebody has really really shitty security, and it ain't Sony in that case. Birthday and address should not be considered secret to begin with, as that information is stored all over the place and half the time even in public ones (phonebooks, year books, facebook, etc.).
why not?!! It's compensation for the fact that a lot of the games didn't function fully because of the online features.
It's a free service without any guaranteed uptime. I don't expect compensation when Slashdot or Google or whatever else is down either. Yeah, it sucks that some games broke in the process, but that's what you have to expect when buying into a lock-in service with no dedicated servers that you can run on your own. There have been quite a few multiplayer games that have been taken offline permanently because their servers simply got switched off, I don't see anybody getting compensated for that either.
As said, I don't mind the free stuff and I think they should do it, but that's simply marketing, not really compensation.
If it were free, why did Sony have credit card #s?
Because they have a shop where you can buy stuff. The online service and multiplayer is free, the games and DLC stuff isn't. In contrast on XboxLive you have to pay for multiplayer and pay for parts of the online service. You also don't need to give Sony your CC info if you don't plan to buy anything.
The problem is simply that you can't fairly compensate for potential future damage produced by identity theft. Getting two free games now doesn't make the trouble go away that identity theft might produce down the road and getting five instead or $100 won't change that either. If they have broken a law they should get a fine, but compensating individual user really doesn't really serve much of a purpose.
Not only that, the username field is also the only field in which you can type clear text, thus the only field where you can actually see when you have capslock on or loaded a wrong keymap. It always drives me nuts when I have to enter my password and can't even verify that the keys I am hitting are really the keys I think they are.
Sony is giving you a free service that you didn't pay anything for. Why exactly is anybody expecting compensation? If there are actual damaged due to the need to get a new credit card or whatever, sure, they might be help liable, but for average Joe who only enjoys the free service and never entered the credit data in the first place? I don't see any need for compensation there at all.
That said of course I wouldn't mind it getting two free games, but I don't see that as compensation, but simply as additional marketing to bump up the image of PSN, marketing that others do as well, even with out ever having lost your data (GOG.com gives you five free games on login, Valve gave Portal away for free for a few days, etc.).
rr[N] Add data recovery record. Optionally, redundant information (recovery record) may be added to an archive.
No messing around with par needed, rar can do recovery by itself. And even without recovery records rar has no problem extracting files on an incomplete or damaged rar file, some of the extracted files might of course be broken when you extract them, but you can still get the rest.
As for 7zip, see the Wikipedia page, if you don't have the full.7z file in perfect condition you are in trouble, having only half the file leaves you with nothing to extract. If there is a way around that feel free to update the Wikipedia page.
Unless I am mistaken, offline mode in Steam requires you to be online to activate it, so it only helps you when you know that your Internet is going away, but doesn't help much when the network has an unplanned downtime.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't you roll up graphene sheets like rolling up a sheet of paper, or multiple sheets of paper?
Yes, that would be carbon nano-tubes. However last time we played around with tiny incredible strong tubes that didn't turn out to well. Have to wait and see how things work out for carbon nanotubes.
The time it takes to complete games hasn't changed.
Yep, some numbers of games I played over the last year:
Outlaws(1997) ~11h (main story + extra missions)
Tie Fighter CD-Edition(1994) ~40h (main story + add-on content)
Mass Effect 2(2010) ~36h (main story + all side quests)
Dead Space(2008) ~12h (main story)
Dark Void(2008) ~7h (main story)
Phantasmagoria(1996) ~6h (main story)
The Void(2008) ~28h (main story)
Zelda:OOT (1998) ~30h (main story, no sidequests)
Batman: Arkham (2009) ~10 + ~7h collecting items
Metroid Prime (2002) ~16h (main story)
Metroid Prime 2 (2005) ~24h (main story)
Metroid Prime 3 (2007) ~14h (main story)
Metroid 2 (1991) ~4h (main story, but played with map)
Super Metroid ~6h (main story)
Random modern European Adventure Games ~8-12h
Infinite Space DS (2010) ~50h
It is not exactly a perfect random selection, but contains a bit of everything and it shows that there have been 8-12h games in the past and that there are 30h+ games today and of course vice versa. That's not even counting the console 2D platformers and arcade games that are generally 1h or 2h long and stretch their playtime with lots of retries.
That said, many games today feel short. I think sometimes it is due to obnoxious cliffhanger endings that leave you unsatisfied and sometimes it is due to games being just to simple and easy to require any kind of effort or thinking, thus 10h of running through a game without ever encountering any problems can feel a lot less then 3h of actual challenge.
I think a large part is also the fault of main stream press and perception. When games like Modern Warfare get hyped to an extreme and come with a 4h campaign that is going to leave some people wanting more. Same with games like Kayne&Lynch, Homefront or whatever. The issue with those games is that while they are short, they aren't all of todays games, they are a very tiny portion of it, but you very rarely hear as much marketing hype for a 30h+ hour game as you hear for a 5h game. Its the short and consumer friendly games that get the hype, not the hardcore stuff that requires reading a manual and takes 30h, it still exist, it just flies under the radar for most people.
And for me personally a big issue is also that games today just don't hold up to my past expectations. I mean I played Elite in 1991, X-Wing in 1993, EF2000 in 1994 and Operation Flashpoint in 2000, those where all amazing games in their times and some 10 or 15 years later I simply expect games that far surpass those, yet I far to often see the opposite, games that don't even try to do anything close to what those games accomplished. Instead of building large scale dynamical worlds far to much games limit themselves to simplistic "cinematic" experiences, that feel fake, forced and just aren't much fun.
I've heard it from a couple of customers too ("oh you have to fix it, it's guided by the EU regulations"), but obviously managers POV was - your warranty is with the manufacturer.
The relevant paper seems to be: 31999L0044 Directive 1999/44/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 May 1999 on certain aspects of the sale of consumer goods and associated guarantees
And contains this:
As the EU just provides the outlines, not the exact implementation, details might of course varry from country to country. There is also a page on Implied Warranty on Wikipedia, but it doesn't seem to contain anything specific to the UK.
In Germany and I assume in Dutch too, as those are mostly EU regulations, you have two kinds of warranty:
Regular warranty (Garantie), which is a free service offered by the manufacturer, this can be anything from 90 days to 5 years or just not exist at all, as the manufacturer isn't require to provide it.
And then there is defects liability (GewÃhrleistung), this is required by law for all electronic goods and last two years (even longer in UK I think). This liability however is against the seller not the manufacturer, if you bought your console at Amazon, you send it back to Amazon and you get a new one or they send it in for fixing. Those two years are split into two segments, the first six month the seller has to prove that the device wasn't already broken when he sold it and everything after that requires that you broke that you didn't break it by accident. In practice that is rarely relevant, as no good seller will require proof and instead just exchange the troublesome device unless of course the damage is obviously your fault.
As far as USA is concerned, I don't think here is any mandatory warranty at all, so you often only get 90 days or so from the manufacturer and after that you have to deal with the issues yourself. Class action lawsuits might however allow you to get some of your money back or pressure the manufacturer into extending the warranty (see 3 year warranty on RROD).
Same here, I haven't tried Ekiga in a while, but when I tried it, it always was kind of garbage, hard to setup, didn't work half the time and when it would worked the sound quality was awful. The only good voice chat thing I have seen so far on Linux is Mumble, the sound quality is amazing, you can have conferences with multiple people, etc. It is a fantastic tool, the only big show stopper with it is that it is more IRC with voice then it is a Skype replacement, so setup and use isn't exactly easy.
Or, if you actually believe what you just typed, then I'm sorry it's such an incredibly tremendous burden of just typing "ls -l".
You seem to lack the ability to think a bit more abstractly and not grasp the simple example. Hint: The problem is a very real one and regularly pops up when using "find", thats why there is "find -print0", "xargs -0" and so on. With proper objects you wouldn't need special switches for commands (which some commands don't even provide) and stuff would just work safely by default. Try to split the output of "ls -l" with "gawk" when dealing with files containing a newline if you want to have fun.
The speed with which I can interact with text is much, much faster than it would be pointing and clicking my way through any mess of objects.
Except that has absolutely nothing to do with anything I mentioned. Being ABLE to click on objects is something very different from being REQUIRED, I am not saying that you should be required, but that you should be able to and there is absolutely no good reason why you shouldn't.
What the author calls "raw" data, I call data.
I call it a mess of in-band-signaling. Simple example, how many files do you see here:
$ ls
test test test
That are two files, not three, one is called "test test". The "data" contains no actual information to tell you that, that information got lost while converting it to plain text. With an advanced shell those wouldn't just be letters on the screen, but actually objects that you can click with your mouse, pipe into other applications, pipe into a file and do other things with it, while still have the shell recognize that they are files, not just strings of text.
Implementing that in a proper way that is flexible and powerful is of course not easy, but there are certainly many areas where the current shell just isn't all that great and could need improvements.
The problem is that in your system, every single time a file was opened for reading/writing the user would have to slosh through an open/save dialog box provided by the OS. This includes intermediate files, temporary files, preferences, multiple output files, etc. etc. etc.
No, almost all of those can be dealt with in isolation without problems. Todays OSs already provide special directories for temp files, for config files and for things like savegames, all those would simply need to be mapped into the isolation, as they are application specific. For multiple output files you could simply use directories or "bundles", that allow you to save multiple files in one go without visiting the file dialog multiple times.
There are a few edge cases of course, something like iTunes is really more of a file browser then it is a regular document driven application, so it might be good to have a way to give an app access to your whole music collection at once, instead file by file, but again, even so iTunes need more access then an average App there is still no reason to give it whole system access.
The most problematic part would probably be the crazy stuff like virus scanners, who essentially violate any rule of good application design, but with a secure OS you might no longer need them in the first place or they might be provided by your OS.
Furthermore, in your system you would never be able to automate this dialog box without losing the security benefits
Could it be a problem for some apps, yes absolutely, but when I look at the applications I run on a daily basis, there really isn't much that wouldn't work perfectly fine in isolation, most of them would actually work much better and easier (consistent file dialogs everywhere, instead of apps rolling their own, app files in well defined places instead of scattered around the HDD, etc.). So far I simply haven't really seen anything that couldn't be made to work in isolation.
the OS cannot possible understand every single file format that every single one of your applications will ever want to write...
It doesn't have to understand anything, it just have to read the byte stream.
that means the OS would just blindly have to write anything your application demands.
The OS wouldn't write anything the application demands, but only what the user requests, i.e. the app provides a blob of data that the user then can drag&drop around.
To put it all in Unix terms:
"cat" is your load dialog and can read files, provided by your OS
"tee" is your save dialog and can write files, provided by your OS
the app is a filter in between that can't do anything to the system other then read from stdin and write to stdout
cat your_file | potentially_evil_app | tee your_file
This would allow you to read any file on your system, work with it and save it to any file you want. The potentially evil application would have no access to anything, it is the user who would control where the data from the app goes, not the app, it wouldn't even know about it.
Permissions are managed by filesystem
Current permission systems are completely useless for protecting the user from his applications, as each application has full access to the same things as the user.
From my experience DOSBox works perfectly well for almost everything I have thrown at it. Games with which I had the most issues with are of the Win95/Win98 era ones, they are to new for DOSBox and to old to run properly in regular Windows. For those games I keep an old computer with Windows98 around. Sometimes there are of course other workaround, Wine can sometimes work better then regular Windows with old stuff, but sometimes the real hardware is just the easiest to get things up and running.
That works right up until you need privileges outside that isolation, as nearly all non-trivial software would.
There are very few applications that you might want to run that need full system access and are not already part of the OS (i.e. file browser, terminal, etc. are all part of the OS). By far most application only need their binary, their own data, a store for config/state information and user provided data. All of which can be handled in complete isolation without much of a problem.
Yeah, they are already. Have been for a long-ass time.
They haven't, at least not in any meaningful way that would help isolation. Currently a filedialog only gives the application a filename, which still requires the app to have full filesystem access. What it should do is provide the application with the file data, that way there would be no need for filesystem access, while still allowing the user to open any file he wants with the application.
Is it possible to protect a user from themselves?
Yes.
If a user chooses to install some software and it turns out to be rogue then that's not the fault of the OS
Wrong.
it is the nativity of the user.
Wrong again, its the historical ballast of 30 year old OS design that hasn't kept up with times.
But then people would complain about lack of freedom.
Freedom and security are not opposites, they go hand in hand. The problem with todays OS design is that it provides application freedom, while it should focus on user freedom. A good OS should allow a user to run whatever piece of software he wants without fear of system corruption, data theft or anything else. Instead todays OS to the opposite, they force the user to carefully select which apps to run as he has no way to limit what an app might do.
Simple steps for a much more secure OS (really not that much different from a application running in your browser):
1) run all apps in complete isolation
2) make file load/save dialogs a part of the OS, so that the app can exchange data without ever having filesystem access
Maybe it's time to exert the power of the consumer to change the direction in which corporate hegemony is going.
Yes, but thats exactly my point. If you want to get the consumers to listen, you need to inform them, not confuse them with weird campaigns and "all hardware is evil" messages that will just make them turn away. People that are buying 3DSs are not giving them up just because the FSF says so, they might not even care if it has DRM at all, they might however listen to invasion of privacy and other issues. Make that the center of the campaign, get them interesting and tell them a bit about the problems of DRM along the way.
but I don't think we're at the point that the FSF should be called "extreme fundamentalists".
"Extreme fundamentalist" is certainly the wrong word to use, but on the other side the tone that the FSF uses comes across as kind of lunatic and thus regularly misses exactly the people they want to target. The point that the FSF makes here is a very real one, but its hard to look at that page and not just quickly dismiss it as just some crazy people doing their little thing, especially for people who might have never heard of the FSF before (aka most 3DS buyers).
Another thing that bothers me is that the FSF stuff almost comes across as negative, so 3DS is evil, iPad is evil, Kindle is evil, etc. Great, but what hardware is actually ok to buy? Why is there still no hardware database of the good stuff that doesn't limit my rights? Basically whenever I am going out to buy new hardware I have that issue and there is no easy answer to be found what restrictions a particular device might have, all you can do is Google a lot and hope that you find anything, but that's just plane time consuming, especially when you want to compare multiple different products.
The main advantage that btrfs has isn't speed, but that it can do copy-on-write. For a home user that for example means that he could copy his whole root file system before a dist-upgrade and thus have an easy way to undo the dist-upgrade when he doesn't like it, i.e. two commands that take a second to run thanks to copy-on-write instead of messing with a full backup and replay that might take an hour. Or the ability to have timemachine like backup functionality with essentially no overhead.
And how do you propose that the "pristine" packages below it are updated without giving malware the same priviledges or ability to update those packages with infected versions?
Packages and their updates have a proper signature from your distributor, malware doesn't. The point here isn't so much to create the one true final solution to computer security, but to have some robust tracking of origin of a package and its containing files, on top of that you could then build a whitelist, WoT or whatever to improve things even further. As of right now there really isn't much of a build in form of tracking for what an application does to your system or how it was modified.
Sadly, the end result is there isn't any way to have the openness of a PC without having the dilligence of being able to maintain it properly.
Quite the opposite, a proper secure system would be much more open then our current PCs, as it would allow users to mess around with their system, run any app they want and all of that without having the fear of braking anything, as the system would be able to keep track of all the changes and undo them if needed.
The OLPC for example has that (in theory at least, real world implementation is still incomplete). You can essentially setup the thing so that it shows you what applications other people in your friends lists are running. If you want to copy that application you just click on it and the system will copy the app over and run it on your system, all in a secure manner, as applications are run in isolation without full system access. If you want to modify it, you click the "show source" button and hack away, again, the thing keeps track of your modifications and can undo them when needed.
A more interesting question would be why systems are still so shitty at even basic self verification. A Linux might verify a packages signature on install, but after that, there is absolutely no oversight about what is happening to that package. On a regular dist-upgrade it can't even properly tell apart which config files have been touched by the user and which have been automatically generated.
This is not even an especially hard problem to solve, instead of dumping everything into a single directory tree, dump all packages into a read-only tree and save all the changes to that tree into a completely separate directory tree that is mounted on top of the other one via some kind of unionfs. This wouldn't just be good for security, it would also make a users life much easier, as changes and hacks that divert from the vanilla system would be instantly visible.
Having, you know, an actual story maybe? The only line Half Life blurred was the line between levels, where previous games send you on separate missions or levels, Half Life removed that separation and connected everything to one huge construction. Thats what made it special. The actual story in the game was pretty much garbage.
They didn't from a lot of people, that's why they have 70 milllion accounts and only 10 million credit card numbers.
I can replace the card I used with a phone call to the bank (which I already did), but I can't change my address and birthdate.
If you can fuck somebodies live up with that information, somebody has really really shitty security, and it ain't Sony in that case. Birthday and address should not be considered secret to begin with, as that information is stored all over the place and half the time even in public ones (phonebooks, year books, facebook, etc.).
why not?!! It's compensation for the fact that a lot of the games didn't function fully because of the online features.
It's a free service without any guaranteed uptime. I don't expect compensation when Slashdot or Google or whatever else is down either. Yeah, it sucks that some games broke in the process, but that's what you have to expect when buying into a lock-in service with no dedicated servers that you can run on your own. There have been quite a few multiplayer games that have been taken offline permanently because their servers simply got switched off, I don't see anybody getting compensated for that either.
As said, I don't mind the free stuff and I think they should do it, but that's simply marketing, not really compensation.
If it were free, why did Sony have credit card #s?
Because they have a shop where you can buy stuff. The online service and multiplayer is free, the games and DLC stuff isn't. In contrast on XboxLive you have to pay for multiplayer and pay for parts of the online service. You also don't need to give Sony your CC info if you don't plan to buy anything.
The problem is simply that you can't fairly compensate for potential future damage produced by identity theft. Getting two free games now doesn't make the trouble go away that identity theft might produce down the road and getting five instead or $100 won't change that either. If they have broken a law they should get a fine, but compensating individual user really doesn't really serve much of a purpose.
Not only that, the username field is also the only field in which you can type clear text, thus the only field where you can actually see when you have capslock on or loaded a wrong keymap. It always drives me nuts when I have to enter my password and can't even verify that the keys I am hitting are really the keys I think they are.
Sony is giving you a free service that you didn't pay anything for. Why exactly is anybody expecting compensation? If there are actual damaged due to the need to get a new credit card or whatever, sure, they might be help liable, but for average Joe who only enjoys the free service and never entered the credit data in the first place? I don't see any need for compensation there at all.
That said of course I wouldn't mind it getting two free games, but I don't see that as compensation, but simply as additional marketing to bump up the image of PSN, marketing that others do as well, even with out ever having lost your data (GOG.com gives you five free games on login, Valve gave Portal away for free for a few days, etc.).
From the rar man page:
rr[N] Add data recovery record. Optionally, redundant information (recovery record) may be added to an archive.
No messing around with par needed, rar can do recovery by itself. And even without recovery records rar has no problem extracting files on an incomplete or damaged rar file, some of the extracted files might of course be broken when you extract them, but you can still get the rest.
As for 7zip, see the Wikipedia page, if you don't have the full .7z file in perfect condition you are in trouble, having only half the file leaves you with nothing to extract. If there is a way around that feel free to update the Wikipedia page.
Unless I am mistaken, offline mode in Steam requires you to be online to activate it, so it only helps you when you know that your Internet is going away, but doesn't help much when the network has an unplanned downtime.