My retort to that kind of analysis (that my dad was so fond of when growing up) is this:
Kids today don't know how shitty they have it compared to kids in 20-30 years.
Unfair relativistic comparisons go both ways and in the end its all perspective-- I'm pretty hungry right now. In Ethiopia there are entire villages that have eaten less than I've eaten today, surely they're more hungry than me.. But that doesn't make me feel any less hungry.
Maybe theres nothing wrong with it? The point of using an old stable kernel is its stable. If theres no bugs found between 2005 and now, why would they touch it? Keep in mind 2.2 was about the equivalent of windows95, which hasn't been updated at all for a long time before 2005.
As for not having drivers for new hardware.. I don't see the situation where you'd want to upgrade your hardware but still run such an outdated kernel.
I think that was the original posters point. He posts a blog and plays games, same as a lot of guys. I mean no disrespect for the guy, but he's done as much to be on a "top 10 geek males" list as Paris Hilton has to get on this list, hence the analogy. Imagine "guy who played Wesley Crusher then ran a blogsite" getting on a top10 list leaving off "guy who invented TCP/IP" or whatever other more important geeky male is out there.
Whats the difference between a guy who was hacked and all of his items were stolen and a guy who gave away all his items (possibly in exchange for money) and more importantly, how can your friend prove which one he is?
They can't just do a per-character rollback because then you'll be able to easily dupe all your items by just giving it all away to a laundering account before contacting blizzard. You can't just take all the items back because they could have been legitly given away, not to mention disenchanted, enchanted with something new, or otherwise modified.
Because the overhead of monitoring every single one of their customers might cost more than they'd make. It also seem kind of shitty that someone on dialup could just leave ping running 24/7 hitting your router. If they can sustain 3.5KB/s for the better part of a month you just transfered 7 gigs right there (on top of your normal usage). Not to mention what someone with good colo could do-- I have 6mbit down, and I see 10 gigabyes/month as the standard number for "reasonable". That takes 4 hours out of the entire month to go over if I left an ftpd up over night and someone wanted to push me over the limit, or they just wanted to flood with random IP packets for a while. Easily done in your sleep where you wouldn't even know you went over.
It's just too broken in practice. If bandwidth use was a real concern they should run an ftp with all the big important files people might want so people can get them on the network. A lot of forign ISPs do this and then only charge for bandwidth that leaves the country.
I strongly hope so. My recommendation would be public key authentication, the way SSH can do it. You'd need a private key (possibly on a crypto card, but a thumbdrive or floppy or whatever works fine) and a password for that. You authenticate to the key when launching your encryption agent, then any website that wants to verify who you are contacts your agent and does the authentication there.
Infinitely more secure than our current password system, a lot more convenient (think Microsoft Passport's bragged about convenience, except none of your data is stored on a central server), and all around the BetterWay(tm). The main downside if when roaming to another machine if you don't have your key, you don't have access. This can be addressed with either being able to fall back on a password (removing a lot of the security), or some means of authenticating to your home computer.
You could also add some sort of spec for feeding VCard info into the agent so that sites could use it to do a sort of shared profile feature, where you'd authorize a site to receive certain info and save you a lot of time filling stuff out.
Unfortunately this is just yet another thing on the list of "tech the way I think it should be", not anything on anyones todo lists.
Presumably if you've worked in the industry from 18-40 thats 22 years of specialized experience, compared to 4-8 years of generalized college experience. I'd much rather pay someone who has already proven he knows the ins and outs of real world systems than someone who is good at passing tests. I'm not a manager though, so its hard to say.
Admittedly about 6 months ago I was passed up at a job interview for the kind of MCSE test-head mentioned earlier. From what I hear from some friends that work they strongly regret it because he has no ability to learn their system and actually understand it and instead has to ask for help on everything.
Randi does a good job taking on mediums, psychics and water diviners. That's about the grasp of his abilities.
Which is why Randi hires independent experts when needed. His only real involvement is the publicity and putting up the money.
If Dr. Bussard (yes he is a doctor, so save the passive aggressive trolling by using Mr. constantly) has some research he wants the rest of the world to investigate, it should be by his peers - not some jumped up libertarian magician with a big name for taking on Uri Geller.
Stephen Colbert has a doctorate too, whens the last time you heard Dr. Colbert? If you don't treat patients and you call yourself Doctor, you're a douchebag. For that matter, pointing out someones political preference is far worse than using Mr. instead of Dr.
Doesn't this go back to the betamax case? Just because a tool can be used illegally doesn't mean the use of the tool is illegal. Is Xerox liable if you photocopy pages off a book in violation of copyright laws?
No, but Kinko's would be liable if you did it there (arguably, more easily argued if you used a kneejerk issue like copying child porn, or at least a harsher crime than copyright violation like money counterfitting)
32 gigabits / 6 megabits per second = 1.5hours, you don't work for the department of checking math do you? step 1) www.google.com step 2) type "4 gigabytes / 6 megabits per second" step 3) ??? step 4) MATHS!
"With five times the visual information of a standard-def flick, an HD download of The Matrix, were it even available, could take all day over the average broadband connection."
First off, It is available though not legally(The.Matrix.1999.720p.HDTV.x264-THOR). Second off, thanks to the wonders of good video encoding its no larger than any other DVD - 4gigabytes. How long that takes is obviously a matter of what your connection is, but I see 6mbit as about the current standard for residential cable
According to the wonders of google math, (4 gigabytes) / (6 (megabits per second)) = 1.51703704 hours More than reasonable. Even if you half the download speed for say a slow server or worse connection, we're still at 3hours. It's still not at "video on demand" speeds, but its quicker than netflix and if you plan ahead there would be no issue at all.
You can bring them to a shop and have them flashed, or some systems have a mechanism where a game can update the firmware (often without notifying you, used a means of breaking modchips over time. I think the PS1 did this)
Thats how it was in Halflife(1) under certain conditions, likely the same ones.
Except it did affect your rate of fire in addition to movement. It was full on speedhacks no different than the downloadable program. Luckily Valve's anticheat doesn't detect any form of speedhacking so nobody got globally banned from it, but I'm sure a lot of people got banned from servers for it without knowing how to fix it or even why it was happening.
For that matter, gamers who would rather trade halo2 for all the games that will likely be broken in vista until patches come out. Admittedly I havn't tried vista, but thats how it was in XP. Most serious gamers stuck with 9x until all the tournaments upgraded.
I'm paying for the convenience of not having to wait for a slow boot time and application start up time every time I want to hop on the computer to look up something on IMDB or Wikipedia or whatever.
I have 2 gigs and I still care. If all apps feel free to eat as much of it as they want then it limits the number of said apps you can run. When firefox and your torrent client are both at 600+ mem, you have no room for loading a game that wants >1gig of mem.
Opera used full 80x40 banner ads, the google text ads wern't until much later. I've never looked into the means of the text ads, but they are targeted which means its spying on every page you load much the same way most spyware would do. Again, Don't know enough about the mechanism to say for sure its "evil", but certainly ads targeted based on every page you you have loaded is a lot worse than ads on a single site tied just to your current search.
Middle clicking works wonders on most platforms. Personally I prefer no close button at all as it's just wasted space -- I always either middleclick if I'm closing a bunch of tabs or ctrl+w if I'm closing the current one.
It all depends on if we'll be allowed to install other certs as trusted sources. If we can then that is a great change and will improve the security of the OS at only a minor ease of use hit for some users. If we can't, then it will certainly stand in the way of a lot of valid use.
Unfortunately this seems like it will also put an end to binary patching of system files, which means we'll be stuck with acceleration. In XP the only way to remove acceleration involves patching win32.sys to JMP past the acceleration code (the registry edit floating around just minimizes accel). It will be a shame to not be able to do that anymore, although maybe if we're allowed to add our own trusted sources we could patch it and resign. We'll see how its done.
I'm saying linux on the phone doesn't have software. It's like comparing WindowsMobile and Windows -- Same name, a lot of similarities, but the fact that somethign exits for one doesn't help you much with the other. At the very least you would have to recompile something to get it running on the phones arch, but chances are we're talking full interface redesign to fit remotely on that screen. Apps that were intended to be ran on >1024x768 with a full keyboard on a modern machine will be completely useless on a phone. Things like gtk are so inefficient that I wouldn't even consider it on such a low battery here every wasted cpu cycle counts.
Unless you run identd(common) or fingerd(admittedly antiquated).
Most default identd configurations give out your real username, all someone has to do is repeatedly scan for common user ran stuff (like a daemon for file transfer in an IM or IRC app) and eventually you'll get a login from it.
You can also worldlist logins. Doesn't sound successful, but considering how often I see it in my logs it has to work somewhere.
Don't think that this $600 phone is any more expensive than equivalent piece of hardware from T-mobile or Verizon. Considering that I'll be able to install whatever the hell I want on it I'd say it's a steal.
To my knowledge, you can install whatever you want on the pda/smartphones from the bignames. The only difference here is you won't have anything to install because its running Linux. Linux is nice and all, but unless you feel like writing your own software don't expect this phone to be very useful. The OS a phone runs means little more than what apps you have access to, and Linux on a a phone just doesn't have the selection yet and probably never will.
but no incidences of spyware (that I could see). But it seems to have been resolved now. I haven't opened any ports on my firewall, that's for certain (not that it proves anything), nor has Windows Firewall bugged me about it wanting to open ports. So all traffic is steam-initiated.
Just to clear up potential confusion, There has been incidents of spyware/badness, but they were unfounded. Some silly people were digging around some of steams files and found LOTS of their personal data in them. Ended up just being a filesystem issue -- Steam allocated the disk space but didn't zero it, so parts of the file were showing up as deleted data on the disk leading people to find old playlists, text documents, logs, and other scaryness.
This is potentially what the OP was referring to, so hopefully this clears that up.
Steam has it's downsides, but its really exactly what I used to ask for back in the days where we'd all just trade around HL cdkeys from the platinum pack (came with 5 valid cdkeys, one for each game even though it only took one for all 5). It was a lot more convenient to just grab an iso and a friends key than bother with a disk install, I remember wishing valve would let you just do an online transaction to get a cheap cdkey without wasting anything on packaging and other stuff you don't need.
They can't gouge their prices due to their current agreements, but this is the perfect framework for what I wanted. Most threads you'll find of people complaining about steam are usually just people complaining about HalfLife updates. Admittedly, the HL->steam integration is pretty poor and they messed up some stuff in the process. Steam itself is fine, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Through the clever use of sarcasm.
My retort to that kind of analysis (that my dad was so fond of when growing up) is this:
Kids today don't know how shitty they have it compared to kids in 20-30 years.
Unfair relativistic comparisons go both ways and in the end its all perspective-- I'm pretty hungry right now. In Ethiopia there are entire villages that have eaten less than I've eaten today, surely they're more hungry than me.. But that doesn't make me feel any less hungry.
Maybe theres nothing wrong with it? The point of using an old stable kernel is its stable. If theres no bugs found between 2005 and now, why would they touch it? Keep in mind 2.2 was about the equivalent of windows95, which hasn't been updated at all for a long time before 2005.
As for not having drivers for new hardware.. I don't see the situation where you'd want to upgrade your hardware but still run such an outdated kernel.
I think that was the original posters point. He posts a blog and plays games, same as a lot of guys. I mean no disrespect for the guy, but he's done as much to be on a "top 10 geek males" list as Paris Hilton has to get on this list, hence the analogy. Imagine "guy who played Wesley Crusher then ran a blogsite" getting on a top10 list leaving off "guy who invented TCP/IP" or whatever other more important geeky male is out there.
Whats the difference between a guy who was hacked and all of his items were stolen and a guy who gave away all his items (possibly in exchange for money) and more importantly, how can your friend prove which one he is?
They can't just do a per-character rollback because then you'll be able to easily dupe all your items by just giving it all away to a laundering account before contacting blizzard. You can't just take all the items back because they could have been legitly given away, not to mention disenchanted, enchanted with something new, or otherwise modified.
Because the overhead of monitoring every single one of their customers might cost more than they'd make. It also seem kind of shitty that someone on dialup could just leave ping running 24/7 hitting your router. If they can sustain 3.5KB/s for the better part of a month you just transfered 7 gigs right there (on top of your normal usage). Not to mention what someone with good colo could do-- I have 6mbit down, and I see 10 gigabyes/month as the standard number for "reasonable". That takes 4 hours out of the entire month to go over if I left an ftpd up over night and someone wanted to push me over the limit, or they just wanted to flood with random IP packets for a while. Easily done in your sleep where you wouldn't even know you went over.
It's just too broken in practice. If bandwidth use was a real concern they should run an ftp with all the big important files people might want so people can get them on the network. A lot of forign ISPs do this and then only charge for bandwidth that leaves the country.
I strongly hope so. My recommendation would be public key authentication, the way SSH can do it. You'd need a private key (possibly on a crypto card, but a thumbdrive or floppy or whatever works fine) and a password for that. You authenticate to the key when launching your encryption agent, then any website that wants to verify who you are contacts your agent and does the authentication there.
Infinitely more secure than our current password system, a lot more convenient (think Microsoft Passport's bragged about convenience, except none of your data is stored on a central server), and all around the BetterWay(tm). The main downside if when roaming to another machine if you don't have your key, you don't have access. This can be addressed with either being able to fall back on a password (removing a lot of the security), or some means of authenticating to your home computer.
You could also add some sort of spec for feeding VCard info into the agent so that sites could use it to do a sort of shared profile feature, where you'd authorize a site to receive certain info and save you a lot of time filling stuff out.
Unfortunately this is just yet another thing on the list of "tech the way I think it should be", not anything on anyones todo lists.
Presumably if you've worked in the industry from 18-40 thats 22 years of specialized experience, compared to 4-8 years of generalized college experience. I'd much rather pay someone who has already proven he knows the ins and outs of real world systems than someone who is good at passing tests. I'm not a manager though, so its hard to say.
Admittedly about 6 months ago I was passed up at a job interview for the kind of MCSE test-head mentioned earlier. From what I hear from some friends that work they strongly regret it because he has no ability to learn their system and actually understand it and instead has to ask for help on everything.
Which is why Randi hires independent experts when needed. His only real involvement is the publicity and putting up the money.
Stephen Colbert has a doctorate too, whens the last time you heard Dr. Colbert? If you don't treat patients and you call yourself Doctor, you're a douchebag. For that matter, pointing out someones political preference is far worse than using Mr. instead of Dr.
No, but Kinko's would be liable if you did it there (arguably, more easily argued if you used a kneejerk issue like copying child porn, or at least a harsher crime than copyright violation like money counterfitting)
32 gigabits / 6 megabits per second = 1.5hours, you don't work for the department of checking math do you?
step 1) www.google.com
step 2) type "4 gigabytes / 6 megabits per second"
step 3) ???
step 4) MATHS!
"With five times the visual information of a standard-def flick, an HD download of The Matrix, were it even available, could take all day over the average broadband connection."
First off, It is available though not legally(The.Matrix.1999.720p.HDTV.x264-THOR). Second off, thanks to the wonders of good video encoding its no larger than any other DVD - 4gigabytes. How long that takes is obviously a matter of what your connection is, but I see 6mbit as about the current standard for residential cable
According to the wonders of google math, (4 gigabytes) / (6 (megabits per second)) = 1.51703704 hours
More than reasonable. Even if you half the download speed for say a slow server or worse connection, we're still at 3hours. It's still not at "video on demand" speeds, but its quicker than netflix and if you plan ahead there would be no issue at all.
You can bring them to a shop and have them flashed, or some systems have a mechanism where a game can update the firmware (often without notifying you, used a means of breaking modchips over time. I think the PS1 did this)
Thats how it was in Halflife(1) under certain conditions, likely the same ones.
Except it did affect your rate of fire in addition to movement. It was full on speedhacks no different than the downloadable program. Luckily Valve's anticheat doesn't detect any form of speedhacking so nobody got globally banned from it, but I'm sure a lot of people got banned from servers for it without knowing how to fix it or even why it was happening.
For that matter, gamers who would rather trade halo2 for all the games that will likely be broken in vista until patches come out. Admittedly I havn't tried vista, but thats how it was in XP. Most serious gamers stuck with 9x until all the tournaments upgraded.
I'm paying for the convenience of not having to wait for a slow boot time and application start up time every time I want to hop on the computer to look up something on IMDB or Wikipedia or whatever.
I have 2 gigs and I still care. If all apps feel free to eat as much of it as they want then it limits the number of said apps you can run. When firefox and your torrent client are both at 600+ mem, you have no room for loading a game that wants >1gig of mem.
Opera used full 80x40 banner ads, the google text ads wern't until much later.
I've never looked into the means of the text ads, but they are targeted which means its spying on every page you load much the same way most spyware would do. Again, Don't know enough about the mechanism to say for sure its "evil", but certainly ads targeted based on every page you you have loaded is a lot worse than ads on a single site tied just to your current search.
Middle clicking works wonders on most platforms. Personally I prefer no close button at all as it's just wasted space -- I always either middleclick if I'm closing a bunch of tabs or ctrl+w if I'm closing the current one.
Depends on your work. Drag/drop is important if we're talking a screen full of thumbnails like you might get working in an art department.
As a coder, I'd rather have two screens. One for docs, testing, etc and one for code.
Recreationally, I like one monitor for my "main" task (web browsing, gaming, watching a movie), then the second one for watching my irc client.
It all depends on if we'll be allowed to install other certs as trusted sources. If we can then that is a great change and will improve the security of the OS at only a minor ease of use hit for some users. If we can't, then it will certainly stand in the way of a lot of valid use.
Unfortunately this seems like it will also put an end to binary patching of system files, which means we'll be stuck with acceleration. In XP the only way to remove acceleration involves patching win32.sys to JMP past the acceleration code (the registry edit floating around just minimizes accel). It will be a shame to not be able to do that anymore, although maybe if we're allowed to add our own trusted sources we could patch it and resign. We'll see how its done.
I'm saying linux on the phone doesn't have software. It's like comparing WindowsMobile and Windows -- Same name, a lot of similarities, but the fact that somethign exits for one doesn't help you much with the other.
At the very least you would have to recompile something to get it running on the phones arch, but chances are we're talking full interface redesign to fit remotely on that screen. Apps that were intended to be ran on >1024x768 with a full keyboard on a modern machine will be completely useless on a phone. Things like gtk are so inefficient that I wouldn't even consider it on such a low battery here every wasted cpu cycle counts.
Unless you run identd(common) or fingerd(admittedly antiquated).
Most default identd configurations give out your real username, all someone has to do is repeatedly scan for common user ran stuff (like a daemon for file transfer in an IM or IRC app) and eventually you'll get a login from it.
You can also worldlist logins. Doesn't sound successful, but considering how often I see it in my logs it has to work somewhere.
To my knowledge, you can install whatever you want on the pda/smartphones from the bignames. The only difference here is you won't have anything to install because its running Linux. Linux is nice and all, but unless you feel like writing your own software don't expect this phone to be very useful. The OS a phone runs means little more than what apps you have access to, and Linux on a a phone just doesn't have the selection yet and probably never will.
Just to clear up potential confusion, There has been incidents of spyware/badness, but they were unfounded.
Some silly people were digging around some of steams files and found LOTS of their personal data in them. Ended up just being a filesystem issue -- Steam allocated the disk space but didn't zero it, so parts of the file were showing up as deleted data on the disk leading people to find old playlists, text documents, logs, and other scaryness.
This is potentially what the OP was referring to, so hopefully this clears that up.
Steam has it's downsides, but its really exactly what I used to ask for back in the days where we'd all just trade around HL cdkeys from the platinum pack (came with 5 valid cdkeys, one for each game even though it only took one for all 5). It was a lot more convenient to just grab an iso and a friends key than bother with a disk install, I remember wishing valve would let you just do an online transaction to get a cheap cdkey without wasting anything on packaging and other stuff you don't need.
They can't gouge their prices due to their current agreements, but this is the perfect framework for what I wanted. Most threads you'll find of people complaining about steam are usually just people complaining about HalfLife updates. Admittedly, the HL->steam integration is pretty poor and they messed up some stuff in the process. Steam itself is fine, though.