To point out that Gnome acts and looks like Windows etc is really a pointless activity, but at the same time you'd think a company with 40 billion in the bank could afford to design their own wallpaper.
Yeah! What's the deal, Novell / Ximian / GNOME? Why ya gotta front like that?
And no, as much as I like both Linux & Linus, I'm not convinced that either has yet earned a place in the computer history texts. Linux & its development methodology is clearly derivative, unique mainly in going further than any earlier [or later?] project with the development tools in order to build a system that is just a modernized version of a decades old framework.
Like Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds hasn't really innovated all that much, in spite of what his fans will say. (The main difference seems to be that Torvalds appears to be a genuinely nice guy that it would be fun to have beers with, while Gates is just a rich little brat, prone to temper tantrums but wealthy enough to have friends & followers anyway -- these personality qualities appeal to different types of people:).
But anyway, I think we've reach a point where Linux has reached parity or better with the systems that it was designed to emulate. The questio now is where will it go now that those which it was copying are now copying it? If Linux evolves into a system that truly starts to break new ground in ways not necessarily imaginable today, that may deserve an earlier reference in the textbook. If Linux & FOSS evolves into something that, like Ford's assembly line, causes high quality products to become freely available to everyone, that too may earn an earlier place in the computer history textbooks.
But to date, Torvalds has plainly not come along with anything as plainly novel as Turing's machine, von Neumann's stored program concept, or "my" (heh) difference engine. Nor has anyone else living today, for that matter, as far as I can think of -- fundamental beakthroughs are a rare thing, and it's hardly a slight to Torvalds that he hasn't built a whole new world yet.
I've seen Sonic Youth, and they have lots of guitars -- indeed, a different guitar with a different tuning for every song. If you were a polite co-worker, I'm sure you could talk them into sharing with you:-)
Yeah, but these people work for a frickin' guitar company. I bet someone like AC/DC or Sonic Youth is sitting over in the next cubicle from the average desk worker, rocking out all day long. How could you get bored in an environment like that?
Linus's real contribution was that he found a way to build an operating system at a lower development cost and equivalent quality to other products.
No, that would be Richard Stallman. Linus is a great programmer and a good manager of a huge and successful open source project - the Linux kernel.
I'm willing to concede the earlier poster's point, given the way he phrased it. Torvalds didn't discover his methodology, but stating that he "found" it is a fair assessment.
Did Henry Ford invent his mass production techniques, or did he bring together things that were starting to be done in different manufacturing industries, and managed to do something that others had to date only hinted at?
If there was prior art that Ford drew on, then, by the earlier commenter's analogy, that would be the equivalent to Richard Stallman's role: he laid out a prootype working model for the development methodology under which Linux would eventually be developed.
A lot of the advice about how sluggish OSX will run on this machine is probably being spouted off by people that tried this when OSX first came out, got horrified, and vowed never to mix the two again. Apple listened to such complaints, and the fact is, 10.1 and 10.2 don't run nearly as badly as 10.0 or the public beta did.
At my last job, I spent most of a year using a beige G3/300mhz as my main desktop. It wasn't as snappy as my G4 at home, but it was much nicer to use as an everyday desktop than the more modern Linux & Windows machines I had access to, and for the sort of work I do (almost all in a command shell or web browser), this old Mac ran just fine.
The biggest problem wasn't actually the old CPU, but the fact that, with only 320mb of ram, I'd end up swapping a lot; and with a 4gb hard drive that was nearly full just with the OS and a few applications & some files (but not much, most data I'd store & access remotely via Samba or NFS), the virtual memory system would start trying to take up more disc space than was available. I ended up having to reboot the thing every couple of weeks, but *not* because the overall system was unstable, but because I was using 25% or more of my disc for swap, the drive was full, and applications started acting funny when they couldn't allocate more space. Usually it would help a lot just to log out & back in again, but to be sure I'd just reboot, since logging out & in took say three minutes, while rebooting took four. It was just as easy to flush everything out that way rather than logout only -- I'd already lost state in all my applications anyway, so why not reboot...
So yes, you can more or less happily run OSX on old beige G3s. As others have said, it makes sense to put in as much ram as you can, but not so much because you want to improve performance (that will actually be fine, for the most part), but because having more ram will stave off swap-death as long as possible. Likewise, if you can find an old SCSI drive to put in there, that will help for similar reasons -- once you start swapping, you have more leeway with a bigger disc. The actual speed at which an old G3 does things should for the most part be pretty reasonable for many tasks (shell, web, Office, etc).
Actually, my point was that the writeup implied that it's good to "minimize the risk" involved in adding features & drivers. Obviously, "risk" is a funny way to describe driver support, so I think they wrote the opposite of what they meant.
I'm not advacting a halt on anything in X11 or XFree:-)
Coming to the story late, I see everyone griping over either [a] "why are they ruining a perfectly good name?", and [b] "what's with the digits 1 and 0 in the logo?" Both are fine points to argue over -- or have everyone argue the same side of the argument, as Slashdot readers are wont to do:) -- but there was actually a reason for this, as an article written last week on Brighthand.com foresaw:
When it comes to names, few companies are as unlucky as Palm. Several years ago it was forced to abandon the name Pilot -- as in Palm Pilot -- when Pilot Pen Corporation claimed ownership. Now it's being asked to leave the name Palm behind as well. While it's not unusual for a company to change its name (in fact, Palm did it once before when it shortened its name from Palm Computing), the reason behind Palm's upcoming name change is unique. And it has something to do with what happened to Apple Computer.
[....]
[....] Apple Computer in the 1980s was much like Palm today; it built the computers and wrote the software to run them. And it owned the market. But Microsoft came along with its operating system, MS-DOS, and licensed it to computer manufacturers. The rest is history. Apple now has 3% of the market while Microsoft has gone on to become one of the biggest and most powerful companies in the world.
The similarity with Apple did not escape Palm management. So it began a concerted effort to license its operating system, called the Palm OS, to other companies -- something Apple failed to do early on. Handspring, Kyocera, Samsung, Sony and others jumped on the Palm OS bandwagon and incorporated it into its handhelds. While this staved off the encroaching threat from Microsoft and established Palm OS as a platform, Palm still had a major problem. Licensees worried that Palm, as both maker of the Palm platform and user of the Palm platform, had an unfair advantage when it came to devices. So Palm addressed their concerns by dividing Palm, Inc. into two business units, Palm Solutions Group, which would make handhelds, and PalmSource, which would develop and license the Palm platform. They created a "Chinese wall" between the entities, with the Solutions Group becoming a licensee of the platform from PalmSource, just like other licensees.
[....]
Palm realized there was only one solution: split the company into two independent businesses, and give all rights to the Palm name to PalmSource, which it will then license to other companies.
Which leaves the Solutions Group with an unenviable task: change its name -- with no reference to Palm -- and hope that consumers follow. And with the PalmSource spin-off expected to be completed this fall and new handhelds from Palm rumored for October, we expect the new name to be announced very soon -- possibly even this week.
So this was, for better or worse, a necessary move, and while the name may not be great, they may not have had many other options. As some of the recent Mozilla spinoffs have seen, coming up with a good, unique name can be a royal pain in the ass these days (Chimera, Firebird both having been forced to change & possibly change again...). There are worse things they could have done than go along with the $foo-"one" meme that's so trendy these days...
You talk about KDE's extensive ability to be customized, but you take the flawed approach of thinking that people that enjoy this option use every last capability of it.
Actually, the last time I spent a significant amount of time using KDE as my default desktop, I did spend a lot of time noodling around in customizing every last aspect of the interface. I did not do this because it was fun. It was not fun. No.
I did this because if I didn't find a way to fix the default settings, I was going to shoot somebody.
For some reason, the default font for many text displays -- such as the source for a web page -- was a big loopy cursive, like what you'd see on a wedding invitation. I don't ever want to use a big loopy cursive as my default font, unless I'm using a program like Illustrator to take a crack at designing my own wedding invitation. It wouldn't bother me to purge such fonts from my hard drive forever (it wouldn't bother me if my wedding invitation were in GillSans instead), but no amount of tinkering could get the setting for cursive fonts to go away. Oh there were times that I thought I had it, but the next time I logged in the cursive would come back with a vengence: "thought you were rid of me, eh? muhahaha!"
My other favorite was printing. I never did get the default print setting to be anythign other than (say) 5pts. To simulate this, take your browser and hit CMD- or CTRL- or ALT- or whatever your browser's "make the text smaller" keychord is, and hit this chord as many times as your browser will allow you to do. Now take that final small setting, divide it in half again in your mind, and imagine it printed out. I could have printed out "War & Peace" as a 20 page pamphlet sure to drive the strongest eyes blind if I had been cruel enough to try it.
Plus, half the time it would be cursive tiny type.
So yeah, I spent a lot of time trying to get my shiny new P4 desktop with gobs of ram and a fast processor to feel like anything other than a Medieval torture device.
Then I found an ancient beige G3 Macintosh in a supply closet, and I begged the tech support guys to let me use it as my desktop. It was old, flaky, and took forever to get OSX installed & running, but once I did I never ever had to think about customizing the system again. That brand new KDE machine ended up being a headless server under my desk as I connected to it via SSH & HTTP from the Mac, and I was happy as a clam.
So, the moral: please don't try to convince people that, as you say,
The point of KDE customizing is so that people that want one or two things to be a very specific way can make it that way and be happy.
The "very specific way" I want my computer to be is non-braindead. I'm willing to accept a wide interpretation of what non-braindead might mean, but I know it when I see it, and I don't want to have to fight to get it.
KDE forced me to fight, like an arrogant Kung Fu master that I really wasn't hoping to confront. OSX got out of my way without making me think. Sometimes, the best way to win a fight is to not fight at all.
KDE for MacOS X could be a Holy Grail for these people - OS of their choice running on a machine of their choice WITH A DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT OF THEIR CHOICE.
But what would be the point? At that point OSX will just be reduced to a Linux clone (albeit one that can run Photoshop etc natively). Why bother?
If having a desktop environment of their own choice on OSX is such a big deal, run rooted X11 and take Aqua out of the equation. It won't run quite as snappily as Linux, but hey if that's what you want to do you're welcome to.
Choice is one thing; indecision is another. If a UI is well designed, you don't need much by way of customization. If a UI is well designed, it is possible to be flexible in useful ways -- that is, in the tasks that can be performed, which after all is the whole point of using computers -- without being ridiculously configurable, like X11 / KDE / GNOME.
Take a UI class and you'll learn in the first week that there are better & worse ways to design an interface, and that giving a choice can mean choosing "worse".
Would be interesting to know how the system and software works, but then again, that information could be dangerous in the wrong hands.
Actually, this is very unlikely. Systems like the American power grid are highly resilient.
Blow up a transformer? So what, there goes a neighborhood.
Blow up a substation? Big deal, so a town or small city is messed up for a little while.
Blow up a power plant? A shame, but other production facilities on the grid can pick up the slack for a while.
Catastrophic power failures are rare, because minor failures are common, expected, planned for, and almost always isolated to a small area. By definition, terrorist groups do not have the resources to do any more than minor damage. In attacking the airline system, "minor" damage can be effective, as September 11 showed, but the power system takes more damage from a little summer thunderstorm than al-Qaeda could ever do -- and for the most part life goes on unaffected.
This is why I find all the bleating on by the newscasters & politicians that "the power outage was not the result of terrorism." Well of course it wasn't, this isn't the sort of attack that a small malicious party can pull off. It just isn't. Power stations go out all the time, but normally nobody ever notices. Indeed, it is very, very hard to deliberately bring down a power system: NATO spent a month bombing the power grid & computer networks in Yugoslavia, but they never managed to do much more than bring a city like Belgrade down for a few hours before power was restored. If NATO couldn't do it, then I doubt terrorists could either.
If you want to bring down a whole grid, the best way to do it is by plain dumb luck (or an overwhelming lack of luck, depending on your point of view:-). It was a random fluke that caused yesterday's outage, just as it was random flukes that brought down the grid in the last two major outages, in 1977 & 1965. On the bright side, that suggests that the mean time between power grid failures may have doubled, and the next event like this may happen in 50 years...:-). (Incidently, the Presidential Report on the 1965 outage makes for fascinating -- and newly relevant -- reading material).
Resist the culture of fear! Most of the fears that the government and media have been pushing on us for the past couple of years are way overblown. The news this week wasn't that the power system is unstable, or that terrorists could have done this. No! The news is that the system is remarkably robust, and that our system is so good that we can go for decades at a time without glitches like this. That's a very good record, when you put things in perspective.
Them: "What's your 20?"
Me: "3rd and Maple."
Them: "Copy. Need assistance?"
Me: "Negative. Thanks."
*boggle*
Does it really work better if you sound like truckers talking on their CB radios?
Buford T. Justice: Hey boy, where is Sheriff Branford at?
Sheriff Branford: I AM Sheriff Branford.
Buford T. Justice: Oh, pardon me. For some reason you sounded a little taller on radio.
Or is it more fun to have long, rambling monologues to yourself, with your co-workers etc as the audience, to the tune of...
This is Jack Burton in the Pork Chop Express, and I'm talkin' to whoever's out there.
[....]
Now I'm not saying that I've been everywhere and I've done everything, but I do know it's a pretty amazing planet we live on, and a man would have to be some kind of FOOL to think we're alone in THIS universe.
[....]
Just remember what ol' Jack Burton does when the earth quakes, the poison arrows fall from the sky, and the pillars of Heaven shake. Yeah, Jack Burton just looks that big old storm right in the eye and says, "Give me your best shot. I can take it."
[....]
When some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the barroom wall, looks you crooked in the eye and asks you if ya paid your dues, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol' Jack Burton always says at a time like that: "Have ya paid your dues, Jack?" "Yessir, the check is in the mail."
[....]
You know what Jack Burton always says... what the hell?
Out of curiosity, do you think that Rendezvous based spontaneous mDNS networking could bring some of AppleTalk's convenience to the IT oriented TCP/IP networks? My hunch is that if Rendezvous catches on, it might be able to bring us back towards the near-utopia you describe, without the cited performance issues.
If the power grid were "incredibly brittle", then we'd have failures like this all the time. But we don't. The last one of this magnitude was 1977; the other was 1965. That means that we went 26 years without a collapse, and 12 years before that.
One way to interpret this is that we have a mean time between failures of 19 years. That's IMO superb.
Another way to interpret it is that we have managed to almost double the MTBF figure, and so can expect that the next such event could be 50 years from now. That's even better, if maybe wildly optimistic.
The pessimistic interpretation is that we were doing well before deregulation came along and screwed up our winning streak.
Clearly this seems to be your interpretation, but personally I'm not so sure. While I don't think deregulation has been a good thing, and maybe it did contribute to this event, on the other hand I think that failures like this are inevitable.
People can argue all week over what caused this -- and I have no doubt people will -- but the fact is that the facts aren't in yet, and it's all wild speculation. Politics aside, nobody really knows if deregulation deserves any blame for this, nevermind what portion of the blame (none / some / all).
What is obvious to me is that this was an extraordinary event, but it was not the way the power system usually works -- or fails. Local outages happen all the time (especially if you've lived in Alabama, as I have), but the power companies are very competent at isolating the damage and restoring service promptly. System collapse is an edge case, not routine.
Wait, so if you didn't like the way OSX ran on your old iMac, but you're now looking forward to running Panther on your new G4, then... you could get a refund on the copy of 10.0 you bought for the iMac, and use the money to buy 10.3 when it comes out?
I actually don't want to get into whether or not having source code access improves security. A lot of people firmly believe that openness lends to security (and I happen to agree with them, in general), but some of the arguments against source availability are pretty persuasive too. Let's not get into that right now.
You write...
Apache (the core) isn't resistant to attack because it can be compiled and run just about anywhere. It's resistant because the developers assume that it *will* be attacked and they take that very seriously -- beyond adding features.
Well put. After re-reading my post again, I think you've done a better job of putting your thumb on Schneier's argumeent about the pliability of systems that have well designed security. The point, which I guess I didn't really explain well enough, is that a well designed system sags instead of buckles; it softens instead of shatters. Apache tends to sag & soften; IIS tends to buckle & shatter.
No system can ever be completely resistant to catastrophic failure. I think that Godel's incompleteness theorem and Turing's halting problem are, in a way, proofs of this assertion: no matter how well any system is designed, there are always cases that fall out of the design scope, and will cause Interesting Failures.
This can be a depressing insight. You will never have a perfectly safe system. Ever.
You can respond to that in a couple of ways. One is to say "fuck it, we can't win, so why try"? Another way is to say "we can't anticipate what will happen, but we can try to compartmentalize the damage from certain problem classes." You could say that Microsoft has been moving to the second point of view here, but it's taking them an agonizingly long time to get there, while Apache/Linux/etc have long beeen designed from this point of view.
Interestingly, and to go back to Schneier's excellent article again, this sort of thinking also comes up in real world security considerations. Some of our systems are brittle (the airlines), and single failures can have catastrophic results. Other systems tend to be plastic (the power grid), and catastrophic failures are rare -- because single failures are common, expected, and planned for.
This is why I find all the bleating on by the newscasters & politicians that "the power outage was not the result of terrorism." Well of course it wasn't, this isn't the sort of attack that a small malicious party can pull off. Power stations go out all the time, but normally nobody ever notices. Indeed, it is very, very hard to deliberately bring down a power system: NATO spent a month bombing the power grid & computer netwroks in Yugoslavia, but they never managed to do much more than bring a city like Belgrade down for a few hours before power was restored.
If you want to bring down a whole grid, the best way to do it is by plain dumb luck (or an overwhelming lack of luck, depending on your point of view:-). It was a random fluke that caused yesterday's outage, just as it was random flukes that brought down the grid in the last two major outages, in 1977 & 1965. (On the bright side, that suggests that the mean time between power grid failures may be stretching out...:-). (Incidently, the Presidential Report on the 1965 outage makes for fascinating -- and newly relevant -- reading material).
(To get even further off track, this kind of thing is also why Bayesian spam filters are such a good idea: at the micro level, each filter tends to do a fairly good job of being able to classify each user's patterns. But at a macro level, everyone ends up with a unique profile, and spam crafted to circumvent one user's Bay
Where there's a will, there's a way. Past malware has been writtn to listen to IRC channels, waiting for instructions for which targets to go after in DDOS attacks. I'm sure that it would be possible to do something similar with or without the help of IRC.
Of course, this leaves them open to alternative attacks.
For example, if someone hijacks or otherwise poisons some DNS servers, then all the traffic to windowsupdate.com will make it through to windowsupdate.microsoft.com anyway.
Or, a future worm could be written to target & attack a variety of Microsoft servers.
Or a future fowm could be written in such a way that the target is not part of the worm's code, but rather can be directed remotely somehow. This way, even if Microsoft tries to switch addresses, the person[s] directing the attack can just change the target.
The real solution isn't to keep trying to dodge the bullet.
The solution to become bulletproof.
Even after all this time, Microsoft still doesn't seem to get that.
Part of the reason Microsoft is such a prominent target is of course because it is so, well, prominent. Taking down (say) an FSF server doesn't raise nearly as many headlines (as this week's headlines will attest to). But I don't think that all of the problem here can be traced to how widespread Windows is -- while the Internet's clients are nearly all running Windows, a large fraction of the server architecture is running some Unix variant, and while there is of course some malware that targets *nix (Linux, Solaris, MacOSX, BSD, etc), the results never seem to be as catastrophic as the typical Windows outbreak
To rip of Bruce Schneier's analogy from his security article in Atlantic Monthly a year ago, it seems to me that the what security mechanisms Windows has tend to be brittle, while those that the *nix etc world have tend to be pliable. That is to say, when a problem comes up with (say) Apache, the damage tends to be isolated. This is partly because each installation will be configured differently, with different features enabled or disabled, and partly because the server runs on a variety of systems, each of which may have different mechanisms for providing underlying security protections. On the other hand, IIS installations tend to be pretty homogeneous, and a flaw with one very well could be a flaw with all.
That's not to say that IIS couldn't be just as secure as Apache, if not much more so. But part of Apache (etc)'s strength is it's heterogeneous nature -- people are able to tinker, adapt, mix & match components to suit their needs, and in the process this will also tend to protect them from catastrophic failure. Microsoft has actively resisted this kind of diversity -- witness their howls about having to come up with "thousands of versions of Windows" if some of the firmer antitrust penalties were put into force. Those thousands of permutations are, arguably, exactly what is needed: this will give their users greater choice, and it will make emergencies like this more rare.
I don't get why they're so opposed to the idea.
Maybe they've got cleverer plans than anything I can think of. I certainly wouldn't claim to be any kind of security expert. But if the best they can come up with is a change of address card, I can't help but wonder if they're fumbling in the dark here...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah! What's the deal, Novell / Ximian / GNOME? Why ya gotta front like that?
Heh... :-)
My impression was that it's their idea of fun, like learning to be proficient in every different command shell or scripting language :)
Just me would be fine in the textbooks, thanks :-)
And no, as much as I like both Linux & Linus, I'm not convinced that either has yet earned a place in the computer history texts. Linux & its development methodology is clearly derivative, unique mainly in going further than any earlier [or later?] project with the development tools in order to build a system that is just a modernized version of a decades old framework.
Like Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds hasn't really innovated all that much, in spite of what his fans will say. (The main difference seems to be that Torvalds appears to be a genuinely nice guy that it would be fun to have beers with, while Gates is just a rich little brat, prone to temper tantrums but wealthy enough to have friends & followers anyway -- these personality qualities appeal to different types of people :).
But anyway, I think we've reach a point where Linux has reached parity or better with the systems that it was designed to emulate. The questio now is where will it go now that those which it was copying are now copying it? If Linux evolves into a system that truly starts to break new ground in ways not necessarily imaginable today, that may deserve an earlier reference in the textbook. If Linux & FOSS evolves into something that, like Ford's assembly line, causes high quality products to become freely available to everyone, that too may earn an earlier place in the computer history textbooks.
But to date, Torvalds has plainly not come along with anything as plainly novel as Turing's machine, von Neumann's stored program concept, or "my" (heh) difference engine. Nor has anyone else living today, for that matter, as far as I can think of -- fundamental beakthroughs are a rare thing, and it's hardly a slight to Torvalds that he hasn't built a whole new world yet.
Give him a few decades, he's still young.... :-)
I've seen Sonic Youth, and they have lots of guitars -- indeed, a different guitar with a different tuning for every song. If you were a polite co-worker, I'm sure you could talk them into sharing with you :-)
Yes, accounting software is needed, and there was a desperate plea for help not all that long ago.
"Patches welcome."
Yeah, but these people work for a frickin' guitar company. I bet someone like AC/DC or Sonic Youth is sitting over in the next cubicle from the average desk worker, rocking out all day long. How could you get bored in an environment like that?
"Hey Thurston, more feedback? Thanks!"
I'm willing to concede the earlier poster's point, given the way he phrased it. Torvalds didn't discover his methodology, but stating that he "found" it is a fair assessment.
Did Henry Ford invent his mass production techniques, or did he bring together things that were starting to be done in different manufacturing industries, and managed to do something that others had to date only hinted at?
If there was prior art that Ford drew on, then, by the earlier commenter's analogy, that would be the equivalent to Richard Stallman's role: he laid out a prootype working model for the development methodology under which Linux would eventually be developed.
Clearly you don't know what Georgy Russel looks or dressed like.
Somehow, I'm guessing that she doesn't have to suffer from this terrible affliction is she chooses not to.
*ahem*
At my last job, I spent most of a year using a beige G3/300mhz as my main desktop. It wasn't as snappy as my G4 at home, but it was much nicer to use as an everyday desktop than the more modern Linux & Windows machines I had access to, and for the sort of work I do (almost all in a command shell or web browser), this old Mac ran just fine.
The biggest problem wasn't actually the old CPU, but the fact that, with only 320mb of ram, I'd end up swapping a lot; and with a 4gb hard drive that was nearly full just with the OS and a few applications & some files (but not much, most data I'd store & access remotely via Samba or NFS), the virtual memory system would start trying to take up more disc space than was available. I ended up having to reboot the thing every couple of weeks, but *not* because the overall system was unstable, but because I was using 25% or more of my disc for swap, the drive was full, and applications started acting funny when they couldn't allocate more space. Usually it would help a lot just to log out & back in again, but to be sure I'd just reboot, since logging out & in took say three minutes, while rebooting took four. It was just as easy to flush everything out that way rather than logout only -- I'd already lost state in all my applications anyway, so why not reboot...
So yes, you can more or less happily run OSX on old beige G3s. As others have said, it makes sense to put in as much ram as you can, but not so much because you want to improve performance (that will actually be fine, for the most part), but because having more ram will stave off swap-death as long as possible. Likewise, if you can find an old SCSI drive to put in there, that will help for similar reasons -- once you start swapping, you have more leeway with a bigger disc. The actual speed at which an old G3 does things should for the most part be pretty reasonable for many tasks (shell, web, Office, etc).
Have fun :-)
I'm not advacting a halt on anything in X11 or XFree :-)
*phew*
That's great, because the last thing we need is to cram even more drivers & features into XFree/X11. Thanks for reducing the risk, guys!
Actually, the last time I spent a significant amount of time using KDE as my default desktop, I did spend a lot of time noodling around in customizing every last aspect of the interface. I did not do this because it was fun. It was not fun. No.
I did this because if I didn't find a way to fix the default settings, I was going to shoot somebody.
For some reason, the default font for many text displays -- such as the source for a web page -- was a big loopy cursive, like what you'd see on a wedding invitation. I don't ever want to use a big loopy cursive as my default font, unless I'm using a program like Illustrator to take a crack at designing my own wedding invitation. It wouldn't bother me to purge such fonts from my hard drive forever (it wouldn't bother me if my wedding invitation were in GillSans instead), but no amount of tinkering could get the setting for cursive fonts to go away. Oh there were times that I thought I had it, but the next time I logged in the cursive would come back with a vengence: "thought you were rid of me, eh? muhahaha!"
My other favorite was printing. I never did get the default print setting to be anythign other than (say) 5pts. To simulate this, take your browser and hit CMD- or CTRL- or ALT- or whatever your browser's "make the text smaller" keychord is, and hit this chord as many times as your browser will allow you to do. Now take that final small setting, divide it in half again in your mind, and imagine it printed out. I could have printed out "War & Peace" as a 20 page pamphlet sure to drive the strongest eyes blind if I had been cruel enough to try it.
Plus, half the time it would be cursive tiny type.
So yeah, I spent a lot of time trying to get my shiny new P4 desktop with gobs of ram and a fast processor to feel like anything other than a Medieval torture device.
Then I found an ancient beige G3 Macintosh in a supply closet, and I begged the tech support guys to let me use it as my desktop. It was old, flaky, and took forever to get OSX installed & running, but once I did I never ever had to think about customizing the system again. That brand new KDE machine ended up being a headless server under my desk as I connected to it via SSH & HTTP from the Mac, and I was happy as a clam.
So, the moral: please don't try to convince people that, as you say,
The "very specific way" I want my computer to be is non-braindead. I'm willing to accept a wide interpretation of what non-braindead might mean, but I know it when I see it, and I don't want to have to fight to get it.
KDE forced me to fight, like an arrogant Kung Fu master that I really wasn't hoping to confront. OSX got out of my way without making me think. Sometimes, the best way to win a fight is to not fight at all.
Aqua 1, KDE 0.
But what would be the point? At that point OSX will just be reduced to a Linux clone (albeit one that can run Photoshop etc natively). Why bother?
If having a desktop environment of their own choice on OSX is such a big deal, run rooted X11 and take Aqua out of the equation. It won't run quite as snappily as Linux, but hey if that's what you want to do you're welcome to.
Choice is one thing; indecision is another. If a UI is well designed, you don't need much by way of customization. If a UI is well designed, it is possible to be flexible in useful ways -- that is, in the tasks that can be performed, which after all is the whole point of using computers -- without being ridiculously configurable, like X11 / KDE / GNOME.
Take a UI class and you'll learn in the first week that there are better & worse ways to design an interface, and that giving a choice can mean choosing "worse".
Oh for a browser with a built in typo-checker. And think-o checker :)
Actually, this is very unlikely. Systems like the American power grid are highly resilient.
Blow up a transformer? So what, there goes a neighborhood.
Blow up a substation? Big deal, so a town or small city is messed up for a little while.
Blow up a power plant? A shame, but other production facilities on the grid can pick up the slack for a while.
Catastrophic power failures are rare, because minor failures are common, expected, planned for, and almost always isolated to a small area. By definition, terrorist groups do not have the resources to do any more than minor damage. In attacking the airline system, "minor" damage can be effective, as September 11 showed, but the power system takes more damage from a little summer thunderstorm than al-Qaeda could ever do -- and for the most part life goes on unaffected.
This is why I find all the bleating on by the newscasters & politicians that "the power outage was not the result of terrorism." Well of course it wasn't, this isn't the sort of attack that a small malicious party can pull off. It just isn't. Power stations go out all the time, but normally nobody ever notices. Indeed, it is very, very hard to deliberately bring down a power system: NATO spent a month bombing the power grid & computer networks in Yugoslavia, but they never managed to do much more than bring a city like Belgrade down for a few hours before power was restored. If NATO couldn't do it, then I doubt terrorists could either.
If you want to bring down a whole grid, the best way to do it is by plain dumb luck (or an overwhelming lack of luck, depending on your point of view :-). It was a random fluke that caused yesterday's outage, just as it was random flukes that brought down the grid in the last two major outages, in 1977 & 1965. On the bright side, that suggests that the mean time between power grid failures may have doubled, and the next event like this may happen in 50 years... :-). (Incidently, the Presidential Report on the 1965 outage makes for fascinating -- and newly relevant -- reading material).
Resist the culture of fear! Most of the fears that the government and media have been pushing on us for the past couple of years are way overblown. The news this week wasn't that the power system is unstable, or that terrorists could have done this. No! The news is that the system is remarkably robust, and that our system is so good that we can go for decades at a time without glitches like this. That's a very good record, when you put things in perspective.
*boggle*
Does it really work better if you sound like truckers talking on their CB radios?
Or is it more fun to have long, rambling monologues to yourself, with your co-workers etc as the audience, to the tune of...Heh... :-)
:-)
Out of curiosity, do you think that Rendezvous based spontaneous mDNS networking could bring some of AppleTalk's convenience to the IT oriented TCP/IP networks? My hunch is that if Rendezvous catches on, it might be able to bring us back towards the near-utopia you describe, without the cited performance issues.
If the power grid were "incredibly brittle", then we'd have failures like this all the time. But we don't. The last one of this magnitude was 1977; the other was 1965. That means that we went 26 years without a collapse, and 12 years before that.
One way to interpret this is that we have a mean time between failures of 19 years. That's IMO superb.
Another way to interpret it is that we have managed to almost double the MTBF figure, and so can expect that the next such event could be 50 years from now. That's even better, if maybe wildly optimistic.
The pessimistic interpretation is that we were doing well before deregulation came along and screwed up our winning streak.
Clearly this seems to be your interpretation, but personally I'm not so sure. While I don't think deregulation has been a good thing, and maybe it did contribute to this event, on the other hand I think that failures like this are inevitable.
People can argue all week over what caused this -- and I have no doubt people will -- but the fact is that the facts aren't in yet, and it's all wild speculation. Politics aside, nobody really knows if deregulation deserves any blame for this, nevermind what portion of the blame (none / some / all).
What is obvious to me is that this was an extraordinary event, but it was not the way the power system usually works -- or fails. Local outages happen all the time (especially if you've lived in Alabama, as I have), but the power companies are very competent at isolating the damage and restoring service promptly. System collapse is an edge case, not routine.
In other words, free upgrade to 10.3?
This doesn't sound bad to me at all...
I actually don't want to get into whether or not having source code access improves security. A lot of people firmly believe that openness lends to security (and I happen to agree with them, in general), but some of the arguments against source availability are pretty persuasive too. Let's not get into that right now.
You write...
Well put. After re-reading my post again, I think you've done a better job of putting your thumb on Schneier's argumeent about the pliability of systems that have well designed security. The point, which I guess I didn't really explain well enough, is that a well designed system sags instead of buckles; it softens instead of shatters. Apache tends to sag & soften; IIS tends to buckle & shatter.
No system can ever be completely resistant to catastrophic failure. I think that Godel's incompleteness theorem and Turing's halting problem are, in a way, proofs of this assertion: no matter how well any system is designed, there are always cases that fall out of the design scope, and will cause Interesting Failures.
This can be a depressing insight. You will never have a perfectly safe system. Ever.
You can respond to that in a couple of ways. One is to say "fuck it, we can't win, so why try"? Another way is to say "we can't anticipate what will happen, but we can try to compartmentalize the damage from certain problem classes." You could say that Microsoft has been moving to the second point of view here, but it's taking them an agonizingly long time to get there, while Apache/Linux/etc have long beeen designed from this point of view.
Interestingly, and to go back to Schneier's excellent article again, this sort of thinking also comes up in real world security considerations. Some of our systems are brittle (the airlines), and single failures can have catastrophic results. Other systems tend to be plastic (the power grid), and catastrophic failures are rare -- because single failures are common, expected, and planned for.
This is why I find all the bleating on by the newscasters & politicians that "the power outage was not the result of terrorism." Well of course it wasn't, this isn't the sort of attack that a small malicious party can pull off. Power stations go out all the time, but normally nobody ever notices. Indeed, it is very, very hard to deliberately bring down a power system: NATO spent a month bombing the power grid & computer netwroks in Yugoslavia, but they never managed to do much more than bring a city like Belgrade down for a few hours before power was restored.
If you want to bring down a whole grid, the best way to do it is by plain dumb luck (or an overwhelming lack of luck, depending on your point of view :-). It was a random fluke that caused yesterday's outage, just as it was random flukes that brought down the grid in the last two major outages, in 1977 & 1965. (On the bright side, that suggests that the mean time between power grid failures may be stretching out... :-). (Incidently, the Presidential Report on the 1965 outage makes for fascinating -- and newly relevant -- reading material).
(To get even further off track, this kind of thing is also why Bayesian spam filters are such a good idea: at the micro level, each filter tends to do a fairly good job of being able to classify each user's patterns. But at a macro level, everyone ends up with a unique profile, and spam crafted to circumvent one user's Bay
Where there's a will, there's a way. Past malware has been writtn to listen to IRC channels, waiting for instructions for which targets to go after in DDOS attacks. I'm sure that it would be possible to do something similar with or without the help of IRC.
Cheaper than a drastic scrapping & overhaul of their automatic update & security patching site?
I would find such reasoning very surprising.
That's not to say you're wrong -- actually you're probably right -- but this kind of thinking is very short sighted of them.
One of these days they might even figure that out.
For example, if someone hijacks or otherwise poisons some DNS servers, then all the traffic to windowsupdate.com will make it through to windowsupdate.microsoft.com anyway.
Or, a future worm could be written to target & attack a variety of Microsoft servers.
Or a future fowm could be written in such a way that the target is not part of the worm's code, but rather can be directed remotely somehow. This way, even if Microsoft tries to switch addresses, the person[s] directing the attack can just change the target.
The real solution isn't to keep trying to dodge the bullet.
The solution to become bulletproof.
Even after all this time, Microsoft still doesn't seem to get that.
Part of the reason Microsoft is such a prominent target is of course because it is so, well, prominent. Taking down (say) an FSF server doesn't raise nearly as many headlines (as this week's headlines will attest to). But I don't think that all of the problem here can be traced to how widespread Windows is -- while the Internet's clients are nearly all running Windows, a large fraction of the server architecture is running some Unix variant, and while there is of course some malware that targets *nix (Linux, Solaris, MacOSX, BSD, etc), the results never seem to be as catastrophic as the typical Windows outbreak
To rip of Bruce Schneier's analogy from his security article in Atlantic Monthly a year ago, it seems to me that the what security mechanisms Windows has tend to be brittle, while those that the *nix etc world have tend to be pliable. That is to say, when a problem comes up with (say) Apache, the damage tends to be isolated. This is partly because each installation will be configured differently, with different features enabled or disabled, and partly because the server runs on a variety of systems, each of which may have different mechanisms for providing underlying security protections. On the other hand, IIS installations tend to be pretty homogeneous, and a flaw with one very well could be a flaw with all.
That's not to say that IIS couldn't be just as secure as Apache, if not much more so. But part of Apache (etc)'s strength is it's heterogeneous nature -- people are able to tinker, adapt, mix & match components to suit their needs, and in the process this will also tend to protect them from catastrophic failure. Microsoft has actively resisted this kind of diversity -- witness their howls about having to come up with "thousands of versions of Windows" if some of the firmer antitrust penalties were put into force. Those thousands of permutations are, arguably, exactly what is needed: this will give their users greater choice, and it will make emergencies like this more rare.
I don't get why they're so opposed to the idea.
Maybe they've got cleverer plans than anything I can think of. I certainly wouldn't claim to be any kind of security expert. But if the best they can come up with is a change of address card, I can't help but wonder if they're fumbling in the dark here...