Does you average home user flash his own BIOS? Does your average home user know what a BIOS is, much less that it can be flashed? Judging by the number of BIOS write protect jumpers and software switches that have been in use practically forever and that fact that many average, non-technical users don't know the BIOS from the floppy drive, I think it's not really a problem of simplifying things too much.
I agree that trashing windows is a bit overdone, especially for the number of people running windows but it is not entirely undeserved. Personally, I use debian on all my machines and I've seen exactly one crash in the three years and many machines I've had on pure linux. A year ago I was the resident computer technician in a college dorm housing approximately 120 students, of those 120 there were my one (at the time) linux machine, roughly 7 OS X machines, a 98 machine, two 2000 machines, and the balance of xp machines. In that year I had to completely rebuild the 98 machine and one of the 2000 machines, which one might say is acceptable for a four and six year old OS in the hands of nontechnical users. Of the macs, the most trouble I had was showing their nontechnical owners how to install one application or another. I had to fix well over half of the xp machines from some thing or other that caused crashes. In most of the cases the culpret was a virus or particularly nasty piece of spyware. There were many xp machines, however, that suffered regular crashes not related to any infection or buggy application and a complete reinstall was necessary.
Not a good statistical distribution or scientific study, just my personal experiences with a large and mostly homogenous (i.e., they all had roughly the same skill level usage patterns) userbase. Plus it's always irked me that application crashes can (not always, but can) cause instability in windows. Only kernel and system level applications should have that risk and I hope msword.exe isn't running as system.
Yes, if by "distribution" you mean "enough tools to boot and to download the rest of the system from the internet" then yes, the distribution can be slimmed down. I personally wouldn't expect anyone to use just what's on the install cd for their desktop system.
Just wanted to add that the latest version of Debian runs on alpha, arm, hppa, x86, x86_64, m68k, mips, mipsel, powerpc, and sparc. That's a fair bit more than modern Windows runs on. Windows CE would be more properly compared with an embedded distribution of linux, which run on everything from automobiles to cell phones to toasters. And this survey was of modern windows versus modern linux, so Windows NT doesn't count.
Well, seeing as the Phoenix BIOS Loader simply replaces the shadowed ROM with a BIOS of your choice, you can choose which modchip to run, so features equivilent there. As for hardware mess ups, the UDE installer that is most popular includes a recovery mode that you can activate by powering on the system with the eject button. It allows you to start a mini linux which you can telnet into and fix whatever you messed up with, or even restore the system partition from an image it creates before installing. Quite safe.
In the midst of all this discussion, I must mention that a modchip isn't needed to run unsigned code. A few enterprising coders have exploited various buffer overflows and gaps in the trusted computing nature of the xbox to allow this. Called the "Ultimate Dashboard Exploit" (UDE) and some related projects (UDE2, PBL, nkpatcher), it is possible to buy an xbox, take it home, insert a memory card with a save from a friend who's already done the procedure (there are several alternatives if you don't have friends), load up a certain game, and voila, open xbox.
The only hardware changes I've made to my xbox are a larger hard drive and an ATA/133 cable, but using the UDE it boots to linux on power-on for a nice, low-cost set top entertainment center.
I think Robert Heinlein's fictional "Larkin decision" as mentioned in Stranger in a Strange Land. Land ownership of spatial objects under that system is pretty much first come (land on) first serve, with a caveat that you must stay yourself or leave human representatives on the property for as long as you intend on laying claim to it.
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No, but amazingly enough you can write C in OS X or Linux.
'specially' isn't a word. 'Especially' is.
Does you average home user flash his own BIOS? Does your average home user know what a BIOS is, much less that it can be flashed? Judging by the number of BIOS write protect jumpers and software switches that have been in use practically forever and that fact that many average, non-technical users don't know the BIOS from the floppy drive, I think it's not really a problem of simplifying things too much.
Maybe your american life, but not mine. I have a TV, it's on roughly 1-3 hours per week.
Actually the changes suggested by the NSA increased the strength of DES rather than decreasing it.
_ legacy_of_d.html
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/10/the
Not a good statistical distribution or scientific study, just my personal experiences with a large and mostly homogenous (i.e., they all had roughly the same skill level usage patterns) userbase. Plus it's always irked me that application crashes can (not always, but can) cause instability in windows. Only kernel and system level applications should have that risk and I hope msword.exe isn't running as system.
Yes, if by "distribution" you mean "enough tools to boot and to download the rest of the system from the internet" then yes, the distribution can be slimmed down. I personally wouldn't expect anyone to use just what's on the install cd for their desktop system.
Just wanted to add that the latest version of Debian runs on alpha, arm, hppa, x86, x86_64, m68k, mips, mipsel, powerpc, and sparc. That's a fair bit more than modern Windows runs on. Windows CE would be more properly compared with an embedded distribution of linux, which run on everything from automobiles to cell phones to toasters. And this survey was of modern windows versus modern linux, so Windows NT doesn't count.
And 7 years newer.
You must be new around here if you think karma means anything.
But JHymn does. http://www.hymn-project.org/
Because the snort rule necessary to detect it pegs your IDS machine's CPU at 100%.
"I do."
--- Sam Vimes, Terry Prachett's Discworld
Unfortunately, FAT32 and NTFS aren't inode based filesystems and don't support in place replacement. That and their lousy file locking method.
Well, seeing as the Phoenix BIOS Loader simply replaces the shadowed ROM with a BIOS of your choice, you can choose which modchip to run, so features equivilent there. As for hardware mess ups, the UDE installer that is most popular includes a recovery mode that you can activate by powering on the system with the eject button. It allows you to start a mini linux which you can telnet into and fix whatever you messed up with, or even restore the system partition from an image it creates before installing. Quite safe.
The only hardware changes I've made to my xbox are a larger hard drive and an ATA/133 cable, but using the UDE it boots to linux on power-on for a nice, low-cost set top entertainment center.
For more pertinent information, see:2 43341
2 43893
http://xbox-linux.org/
http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=
http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=
http://forums.xbox-scene.com/
I think Robert Heinlein's fictional "Larkin decision" as mentioned in Stranger in a Strange Land. Land ownership of spatial objects under that system is pretty much first come (land on) first serve, with a caveat that you must stay yourself or leave human representatives on the property for as long as you intend on laying claim to it.
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I have no