You start out making (reasonable) predictions as to Linux's server market share. How do you jump from that to saying that Linux will reach a 10% overall market share by next year, thus damaging Microsoft? From my own (non-scientific) research, Linux's desktop market share is somewhere below 1%, more likely less than 0.5%. Linux users account for approximately 0.08% of the hits to my website (slightly more than Solaris users, who are at 0.05%). I'd consider 3% desktop market share (comparable to Apple's) to be a difficult achievement for Linux.
1. Command shell that doesn't involve a lot of learning. "move" should be the command to move a file, "copy" should be the command to copy a file, "delete" and "remove" should remove a file. Joe Blow doesn't care that when all we had was 6 letter commands, using "rm" for delete a good idea. We don't have those limits any more, we shouldn't be limited by them. (My suggestion is to call this DOS, for Dumb Old Shell, and make it work much like the MS-DOS command line.)
Definitely! Help should also do something. Print out "use man for help" or print out a list of commonly used commands, or something. "Help" is the first thing most newbies type when they're stuck, and giving them an error message doesn't help things.
2. Plug and Play Everywhere! Joe Blow does not want to mount and unmount CDs himself, nor does he want to figure out the IRQ, base I/O address, etc. for his hardware. So make sure that Joe Blow doesn't have to deal with those things.
Most definitely. I was amazed when I found out I had to manually mount and unmount/cdrom (or whatever you use for the CD-ROM mountpoint) on Linux. I had a CD-ROM working fine, I switched CDs, and then i did a "cd/cdrom" and "ls" and i didn't see anything. Even MS-DOS auto-mounts CD-ROMs by default.
I also don't want XF86Setup to force me to guess a bunch of specs relating to my monitor's refresh rate, supported resolutions, etc. Windows tells me what stuff my monitor can support, and it shouldn't be too hard for Linux to do the same.
3. A good GUI/WM combination that comes default with all Linux distros. Joe Blow does not like command line interfaces and will avoid them wherever possible. So give him a GUI he can use easily and not be (too) confused by.
Yeah, and it should boot up without having to configure it. Boot up in standard 640x480 VGA mode or something, but don't (as is currently done) give an error message, especially one that doesn't even say "you need to run XF86Setup first."
4. Official suppourt from hardware vendors. If Joe Blow can't buy a new peice of hardware, plug it in, turn it on, install some drivers, and start using it; Joe Blow doesn't want it.
Indeed. Linux could be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but if I paid $500 for a digital camera that connects to my computer via USB, I'll use Windows if Linux won't let me transfer my images with it.
And perhaps I'm just weird, but I (mostly) like DR-DOS's CLI. It's much more intuitive than bash, at least to me, and using up/down arrow keys to scroll through previous commands (like using DOSKEY under MS-DOS) is a handy feature.
Why would a 4D creature be stretched out throughout all time? We are 3D creatures, but that doesn't mean that we're stretched out throughout all 3D space - we exist in only some of it. Why wouldn't a 4D creature exist in only some part of time (much as we do)?
Re:Now that MTV has lowered the IQ level a bit...
on
MTV's Hacker Portrayal
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· Score: 2
I agree that MTV's "journalism" is definitely crap. This show was innaccurate no matter what definition of "hacker" you use. If you use the definition in favor at/., it wasn't even close. Even if you use the more common definition (somebody who breaks into computers), it was incorrect - they had this guy talking about how he downloaded the Matrix online before it came out on DVD. That has nothing to do with hacking of any definition, it's simply movie piracy.
I agree - this is not an issue. The same thing can happen with any other Windows user, regardless of whether he/she is using AOL or another ISP. Countless non-AOL users have accidentally installed Back Orifice on themselves, which leaves them open to anybody getting their ISP password.
I don't see why this is a Slashdot story - it's happened many times before and it's not anything particularly restricted to AOL.
On top of that, the slashdot story is just plain wrong. The user does not just have to open his email. He must open it, download the executable, and run the executable. Big difference.
You still don't seem to understand that source code available is NOT equivalent to Open Source. For example, Sun's new source code license allows people to view the source. It is not an Open Source (or Free Software) license, however, as it does not allow redistribution of modifications.
These restrictions apply equally to Open Source licenses and non-Open Source licenses. All source code is restricted in an identical fashion, regardless of its licensing. Therefore, it is indeed incorrect to say that Open Source software is specifically targeted.
I agree, but for an opposite reason. This seems more like an attempt to shove the BSD articles to a separate, little-read page (except by those very interested in BSD). While this wouldn't bother me, Linux articles are on the main page. If both Linux and BSD articles were put in separate sections, that'd be fine, but putting all Linux articles on the main page, and only a small percentage of the BSD articles, seems biased. This isn't, after all, a Linux news site (or isn't supposed to be anyway, according to the FAQ).
Well, to be fair to Opera, those comments are mainly aimed at IE. People say "Microsoft gives away IE for free, so why should I pay for Opera?" and Opera responds by pointing out, correctly, that IE isn't *really* free - it's subsidized by the cost of Windows and other Microsoft products.
If your "karma" on slashdot, which is the sum of all moderation done on your comments, is over 20 (i.e. your comments have been moderated up 20 times more than they've been moderated down), you get a +1 bonus to your posts. Since my karma is 44, my posts start off at 2, rather than the usual one. However, to make you happy, I'll post this one at 1 =)
Yes, that sounds right. However, in my version of the Bible, the part about "let there be light" and then dividing the light and the dark come in verses 3-5, whereas the part about putting in the plants and stuff doesn't come until verse 11.
But it seems like verses 14-16 is a repeat of 3-5. This time, though, it is specifically talking about the sun, moon and stars -- and does indeed appear that they were clearly created after the plants and stuff. Wow, I never read it that closely before.:-)
It appears to me that God first created the concepts of Light and Dark, then created plants, and then created the sun, moon, and stars. This is obviously not the correct order...
As for the rest, who knows =) The four gospels themselves don't even agree on everything, and what we now consider the Bible was pretty much arbitrarily decided upon (with a bunch of just-as-good books being thrown out, now making up the apocrypha).
Well, they're not supposed to be here either, and a few teachers do follow the rules, but the majority of the teachers, being Christian, "forget" to mark the students tardy on these occasions.
This is the opposite of the experience I had at my (public) high school. It has a Fellowship of Christian Athletes (sponsored by some coaches...bit of a conflict of interest there), some sort of Christian Gospel group, and occasional prayers at the flagpole in the mornings (from which the students come in late to class and are excused). I've never heard of an atheist being allowed in to class late because he was reading philosophical literature and didn't show up on time.
Actually, gravity is not a very agreed-upon subject. Based on simple observation, we obviously know that gravity exists, but we have a better understanding of how evolution occurs than we do of how gravity occurs. There are at least three conflicting theories as to why mass attracts other mass, and none have a whole lot of evidence behind them.
Your argument seems to be the "theistically guided evolution" that around 40% of Americans believe in (just behind the 45% or so that believe in creationism, and way ahead of the 15% or so that don't involve deities in their evolution). This makes some sense, if Genesis is viewed as allegorical, rather than literal, but viewing the Bible as anything other than literal tends to annoy a great many fundamentalists. There's also the slight problem that in Genesis plants are created before the sun is created, which is not how evolution worked.
Well, based on the track record of the 2.1.x to 2.2.0 release, this doesn't look too promising. Linus promised October 1998 then, and the kernel came out in January 1999. Alan says November 1999 now, so I'm looking for late December 99 or sometime in January 2000.
Also, I hope the stability is a hell of a lot better. Something labeled the "stable kernel" should be just that - stable. 2.2.12 isn't even really stable yet, though 2.2.13 is promised to be good (and Alan Cox's pre-13 stuff seems to solve most of the major problems). IMHO 2.2.12 should've been 2.2.0, and the previous kernels should've been part of the development cycle - they were not stable kernels by any stretch of the imagination, so should not have been falsely called that.
If we continue to release things before they're ready, people will be scared off, and everybody will still be using 2.0.38 forever (many many people still do) - do we really want that?
On my 1984 Apple//c it's even easier. There's a button on the keyboard to switch back and forth (it's hardware-based...when you switch to Dvorak, the key labeled "s" now sends a "o" charcode, "d" sends an "e" charcode and so on with the other keys).
If modern computer were like that, it'd be nice. That way, I could learn Dvorak and completely forget QWERTY, and if I wanted to use a public terminal or a friend's computer, I'd just press the button to switch, and toggle back when I was done. Unfortunately, modern computers aren't as good as my Apple =)
Well, you can write programs in either GTK or Qt and both KDE and GNOME will have no problem running them. However, to take advantage of the special functionality of the desktop environment requires you to code for that desktop's specs. You can use any toolkit you want, but your "made for KDE" program won't work as well under GNOME unless you use a bunch of #define's to provide the equivalent functionality (and write all the relevant sections twice, once for each environment). That could quickly get tedious.
Hopefully they'll get their acts together soon. Until then, I'd recommend not writing for either one.
Let's take your last point first. Your assertion that "cracking" and viruses did not exist prior to the Internet shows your lack of knowledge on this subject. Phrack ezine, the most well-known phreaking/hacking ezine, was founded around 1984. Teenagers and college kids were breaking into computers using modems and corporate dialups as early as the late 70s and early 80s. Viruses began to appear around the same time. You most certainly could have been a "cracker" in 1982, if you had been knowledgeable about computers at the time.
Now let's get to the hacker vs. cracker argument. Using "cracker" to refer to those who break into computers is incorrect. The term was coined in 1984, according to the Jargon file, to describe these types of people, years after the term "hacker" was already being used to refer to them. I personally continue to use "hacker" to refer to those who break security and deserve the moniker (such as L0pht Heavy Industries), and "script kiddie" to refer to those who merely download some exploits and run them. "Cracker" when applied to computers refers to the extremely talented asm coders who remove the copy protection from software (usually shareware), and hence the term is not related to this discussion.
Finally, These people you call "crackers" have indeed greatly advanced computers, and not just in the field of security. Many people who had a great influence on the development of computers became interested in computers while teenagers through phreaking/hacking. Steve Wozniak, who created the Apple I and Apple ][ personal computers in his garage, comes to mind. During the 1970s he was involved in "red boxing," the technique of using tones to trick payphones into thinking you'd inserted payment. He designed and built red boxes out of radio shack parts, and later moved on to designing and building personal computers. There are countless other influential people who got their start in similar ways.
You need to read up on some history before making uninformed statements.
The previous doom license allowed you to use portions of the source code in your own programs ("Educational Use"), but did *not* allow you to distribute your own modified versions of the source. Many people (such as GL Doom that you noted above) did anyway, and id didn't seem to care, but nonetheless, this wasn't permitted by the license. The shift to GPL allows you to do this legally now.
What is more restrictive is that if you only want to use one function from the Doom code in your own program, you'd have to GPL the whole program. Under the old license this was not required.
There seems to be some confusion about the previous license of the Doom source. Based on my reading of the license (IANAL, however), you were allowed to use portions of the source in your own programs (which you could do anything with, including sell, and were not required to make the source code to them available). This is referred to as "Educational Use" in the license. However, the license also specifically prohibited you from redistributing the original source code. It seems like somewhat of a judgement call how much source code constitutes using it in your own work (which you can do whatever you want with, BSD-style), and how much constitutes a derivative of the original Doom source (which is "all rights reserved").
This presents an interesting situtation now. Although it has been re-licensed under the GPL, I have a copy of the source code under the old license, and they can't rescind this license. Therefore, I could take some functions from it, and use them in my own closed-source program (which the license allows), thereby effectively bypassing the requirements of the GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
You start out making (reasonable) predictions as to Linux's server market share. How do you jump from that to saying that Linux will reach a 10% overall market share by next year, thus damaging Microsoft? From my own (non-scientific) research, Linux's desktop market share is somewhere below 1%, more likely less than 0.5%. Linux users account for approximately 0.08% of the hits to my website (slightly more than Solaris users, who are at 0.05%). I'd consider 3% desktop market share (comparable to Apple's) to be a difficult achievement for Linux.
1. Command shell that doesn't involve a lot of learning. "move" should be the command to move a file, "copy" should be the command to copy a file, "delete" and "remove" should remove a file. Joe Blow doesn't care that when all we had was 6 letter commands, using "rm" for delete a good idea. We don't have those limits any more, we shouldn't be limited by them. (My suggestion is to call this DOS, for Dumb Old Shell, and make it work much like the MS-DOS command line.)
/cdrom (or whatever you use for the CD-ROM mountpoint) on Linux. I had a CD-ROM working fine, I switched CDs, and then i did a "cd /cdrom" and "ls" and i didn't see anything. Even MS-DOS auto-mounts CD-ROMs by default.
Definitely! Help should also do something. Print out "use man for help" or print out a list of commonly used commands, or something. "Help" is the first thing most newbies type when they're stuck, and giving them an error message doesn't help things.
2. Plug and Play Everywhere! Joe Blow does not want to mount and unmount CDs himself, nor does he want to figure out the IRQ, base I/O address, etc. for his hardware. So make sure that Joe Blow doesn't have to deal with those things.
Most definitely. I was amazed when I found out I had to manually mount and unmount
I also don't want XF86Setup to force me to guess a bunch of specs relating to my monitor's refresh rate, supported resolutions, etc. Windows tells me what stuff my monitor can support, and it shouldn't be too hard for Linux to do the same.
3. A good GUI/WM combination that comes default with all Linux distros. Joe Blow does not like command line interfaces and will avoid them wherever possible. So give him a GUI he can use easily and not be (too) confused by.
Yeah, and it should boot up without having to configure it. Boot up in standard 640x480 VGA mode or something, but don't (as is currently done) give an error message, especially one that doesn't even say "you need to run XF86Setup first."
4. Official suppourt from hardware vendors. If Joe Blow can't buy a new peice of hardware, plug it in, turn it on, install some drivers, and start using it; Joe Blow doesn't want it.
Indeed. Linux could be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but if I paid $500 for a digital camera that connects to my computer via USB, I'll use Windows if Linux won't let me transfer my images with it.
And perhaps I'm just weird, but I (mostly) like DR-DOS's CLI. It's much more intuitive than bash, at least to me, and using up/down arrow keys to scroll through previous commands (like using DOSKEY under MS-DOS) is a handy feature.
Why would a 4D creature be stretched out throughout all time? We are 3D creatures, but that doesn't mean that we're stretched out throughout all 3D space - we exist in only some of it. Why wouldn't a 4D creature exist in only some part of time (much as we do)?
I agree that MTV's "journalism" is definitely crap. This show was innaccurate no matter what definition of "hacker" you use. If you use the definition in favor at /., it wasn't even close. Even if you use the more common definition (somebody who breaks into computers), it was incorrect - they had this guy talking about how he downloaded the Matrix online before it came out on DVD. That has nothing to do with hacking of any definition, it's simply movie piracy.
I agree - this is not an issue. The same thing can happen with any other Windows user, regardless of whether he/she is using AOL or another ISP. Countless non-AOL users have accidentally installed Back Orifice on themselves, which leaves them open to anybody getting their ISP password.
I don't see why this is a Slashdot story - it's happened many times before and it's not anything particularly restricted to AOL.
On top of that, the slashdot story is just plain wrong. The user does not just have to open his email. He must open it, download the executable, and run the executable. Big difference.
I agree, except for the vertical switch configuration. In the United States at least, it's almost always the opposite - down is "off," and up is "on."
Another interesting, and tangentally on-topic site, is a graphical history of GUIs.
You still don't seem to understand that source code available is NOT equivalent to Open Source. For example, Sun's new source code license allows people to view the source. It is not an Open Source (or Free Software) license, however, as it does not allow redistribution of modifications.
These restrictions apply equally to Open Source licenses and non-Open Source licenses. All source code is restricted in an identical fashion, regardless of its licensing. Therefore, it is indeed incorrect to say that Open Source software is specifically targeted.
I agree, but for an opposite reason. This seems more like an attempt to shove the BSD articles to a separate, little-read page (except by those very interested in BSD). While this wouldn't bother me, Linux articles are on the main page. If both Linux and BSD articles were put in separate sections, that'd be fine, but putting all Linux articles on the main page, and only a small percentage of the BSD articles, seems biased. This isn't, after all, a Linux news site (or isn't supposed to be anyway, according to the FAQ).
No, that's 127 centimetres.
Well, to be fair to Opera, those comments are mainly aimed at IE. People say "Microsoft gives away IE for free, so why should I pay for Opera?" and Opera responds by pointing out, correctly, that IE isn't *really* free - it's subsidized by the cost of Windows and other Microsoft products.
If your "karma" on slashdot, which is the sum of all moderation done on your comments, is over 20 (i.e. your comments have been moderated up 20 times more than they've been moderated down), you get a +1 bonus to your posts. Since my karma is 44, my posts start off at 2, rather than the usual one. However, to make you happy, I'll post this one at 1 =)
Yes, that sounds right. However, in my version of the Bible, the part about "let there be light" and then dividing the light and the dark come in verses 3-5, whereas the part about putting in the plants and stuff doesn't come until verse 11.
:-)
But it seems like verses 14-16 is a repeat of 3-5. This time, though, it is specifically talking about the sun, moon and stars -- and does indeed appear that they were clearly created after the plants and stuff. Wow, I never read it that closely before.
It appears to me that God first created the concepts of Light and Dark, then created plants, and then created the sun, moon, and stars. This is obviously not the correct order...
As for the rest, who knows =) The four gospels themselves don't even agree on everything, and what we now consider the Bible was pretty much arbitrarily decided upon (with a bunch of just-as-good books being thrown out, now making up the apocrypha).
Well, they're not supposed to be here either, and a few teachers do follow the rules, but the majority of the teachers, being Christian, "forget" to mark the students tardy on these occasions.
This is the opposite of the experience I had at my (public) high school. It has a Fellowship of Christian Athletes (sponsored by some coaches...bit of a conflict of interest there), some sort of Christian Gospel group, and occasional prayers at the flagpole in the mornings (from which the students come in late to class and are excused). I've never heard of an atheist being allowed in to class late because he was reading philosophical literature and didn't show up on time.
Actually, gravity is not a very agreed-upon subject. Based on simple observation, we obviously know that gravity exists, but we have a better understanding of how evolution occurs than we do of how gravity occurs. There are at least three conflicting theories as to why mass attracts other mass, and none have a whole lot of evidence behind them.
Your argument seems to be the "theistically guided evolution" that around 40% of Americans believe in (just behind the 45% or so that believe in creationism, and way ahead of the 15% or so that don't involve deities in their evolution). This makes some sense, if Genesis is viewed as allegorical, rather than literal, but viewing the Bible as anything other than literal tends to annoy a great many fundamentalists. There's also the slight problem that in Genesis plants are created before the sun is created, which is not how evolution worked.
Well, based on the track record of the 2.1.x to 2.2.0 release, this doesn't look too promising. Linus promised October 1998 then, and the kernel came out in January 1999. Alan says November 1999 now, so I'm looking for late December 99 or sometime in January 2000.
Also, I hope the stability is a hell of a lot better. Something labeled the "stable kernel" should be just that - stable. 2.2.12 isn't even really stable yet, though 2.2.13 is promised to be good (and Alan Cox's pre-13 stuff seems to solve most of the major problems). IMHO 2.2.12 should've been 2.2.0, and the previous kernels should've been part of the development cycle - they were not stable kernels by any stretch of the imagination, so should not have been falsely called that.
If we continue to release things before they're ready, people will be scared off, and everybody will still be using 2.0.38 forever (many many people still do) - do we really want that?
On my 1984 Apple //c it's even easier. There's a button on the keyboard to switch back and forth (it's hardware-based...when you switch to Dvorak, the key labeled "s" now sends a "o" charcode, "d" sends an "e" charcode and so on with the other keys).
If modern computer were like that, it'd be nice. That way, I could learn Dvorak and completely forget QWERTY, and if I wanted to use a public terminal or a friend's computer, I'd just press the button to switch, and toggle back when I was done. Unfortunately, modern computers aren't as good as my Apple =)
Not to mention that Slashdot isn't a nonprofit organization, and freshmeat isn't a network provider.
sounds like *cough*Netscape*cough*
Well, you can write programs in either GTK or Qt and both KDE and GNOME will have no problem running them. However, to take advantage of the special functionality of the desktop environment requires you to code for that desktop's specs. You can use any toolkit you want, but your "made for KDE" program won't work as well under GNOME unless you use a bunch of #define's to provide the equivalent functionality (and write all the relevant sections twice, once for each environment). That could quickly get tedious.
Hopefully they'll get their acts together soon. Until then, I'd recommend not writing for either one.
Let's take your last point first. Your assertion that "cracking" and viruses did not exist prior to the Internet shows your lack of knowledge on this subject. Phrack ezine, the most well-known phreaking/hacking ezine, was founded around 1984. Teenagers and college kids were breaking into computers using modems and corporate dialups as early as the late 70s and early 80s. Viruses began to appear around the same time. You most certainly could have been a "cracker" in 1982, if you had been knowledgeable about computers at the time.
Now let's get to the hacker vs. cracker argument. Using "cracker" to refer to those who break into computers is incorrect. The term was coined in 1984, according to the Jargon file, to describe these types of people, years after the term "hacker" was already being used to refer to them. I personally continue to use "hacker" to refer to those who break security and deserve the moniker (such as L0pht Heavy Industries), and "script kiddie" to refer to those who merely download some exploits and run them. "Cracker" when applied to computers refers to the extremely talented asm coders who remove the copy protection from software (usually shareware), and hence the term is not related to this discussion.
Finally, These people you call "crackers" have indeed greatly advanced computers, and not just in the field of security. Many people who had a great influence on the development of computers became interested in computers while teenagers through phreaking/hacking. Steve Wozniak, who created the Apple I and Apple ][ personal computers in his garage, comes to mind. During the 1970s he was involved in "red boxing," the technique of using tones to trick payphones into thinking you'd inserted payment. He designed and built red boxes out of radio shack parts, and later moved on to designing and building personal computers. There are countless other influential people who got their start in similar ways.
You need to read up on some history before making uninformed statements.
The previous doom license allowed you to use portions of the source code in your own programs ("Educational Use"), but did *not* allow you to distribute your own modified versions of the source. Many people (such as GL Doom that you noted above) did anyway, and id didn't seem to care, but nonetheless, this wasn't permitted by the license. The shift to GPL allows you to do this legally now.
What is more restrictive is that if you only want to use one function from the Doom code in your own program, you'd have to GPL the whole program. Under the old license this was not required.
There seems to be some confusion about the previous license of the Doom source. Based on my reading of the license (IANAL, however), you were allowed to use portions of the source in your own programs (which you could do anything with, including sell, and were not required to make the source code to them available). This is referred to as "Educational Use" in the license. However, the license also specifically prohibited you from redistributing the original source code. It seems like somewhat of a judgement call how much source code constitutes using it in your own work (which you can do whatever you want with, BSD-style), and how much constitutes a derivative of the original Doom source (which is "all rights reserved").
This presents an interesting situtation now. Although it has been re-licensed under the GPL, I have a copy of the source code under the old license, and they can't rescind this license. Therefore, I could take some functions from it, and use them in my own closed-source program (which the license allows), thereby effectively bypassing the requirements of the GPL.