So, Single User, no one ever touches your system besides you?* Locally or remotely?
Even a system with only one interactive user ID is potentially multi-user. And then your machine is trojaned (running a server you never wanted installed, and running it for purposes you never would have approved of).
*And even if this is true for you personally, it won't be true for at least one other single-user system user out there. So, yeah, maybe make it configurable, but then your laziness degrades the quality and safety of the entire Internet.
It's one teensy tiny password. How damn lazy can you get?
I hope you're not trying to claim everyone's using either gcc or MS Visual C++.
gcc, while free and flexible (and generally "good enough"), is mildly terrible. The output tends to be substantially larger and slightly slower than that from other compiler products, like the Intel compiler mentioned. And as for Visual... I haven't used it in a long time, so I won't comment, other than to say it's not ubiquitous.
I have had high recommendations from some pretty smart people for the Intel compiler, which is why it's a criminal shame they chose to try to cripple the execution speed of code compiled for their binary-compatible competitor.
You're a classic example of why Linux has problems, claiming there is "NO reason" for something shows a lack of foresight or even imagination. Too many Linux developers feel the same. Because they don't have a problem with something, they firmly believe nobody should have a problem with something, and refuses to support it.
+1 Right On
There's a lot of "If I don't need it, no one needs it" arrogance in the OS community. Part of it comes from "it works for me, I don't care about you" (which is just fundamental human nature); part of it is the longstanding "RTFM" tradition (i.e., the root geek community that Free Software sprung from put a high premium on self-help. The extreme manifestation, and also the practical reason for full source code disclosure in FOSS, is "Read the Fucking Source" as the rejoinder for someone asking for help.)
It's a cultural weakness now that FOSS has spread into the general public. Unless you're paying for support, no one is obligated to help you, so if you're not technically savvy and have enough time and effort to chase it down, you're stuck.
Very true. I ran Fedora on the household server for a few years, but the in-place upgrade to Fedora 9 blew everything up. Not quite bleeding edge, but at least bruising.
I realized then that (A) it's not my day-to-day desktop box, so I don't need to keep up with the distro Joneses, and (B) I can keep the RedHat heritage (and admin knowledge) without the Fedora treadmill by switching to CentOS. And I've been happy with that for a couple of years now.
Let me put it a better way - requiring a password to install software is no more useful than windows UAC on a single-user system.
True. But on a non-single-server system, it can be a fatal flaw. Not every user is trusted. And not every environment is prosperous enough to give each user a personal machine. So the trusted/non-trusted user distinction has to be maintained, and requiring trusted-user-authentication is a pretty good way to do it.
Well, that's a difference that makes no difference. A nation made up entirely of transported convicts and ne'er-do-wells is, by definition, all bad guys.
That's the problem with analogies; you can pick your analogs to prove anything.
This situation would be almost precisely analogous to Compaq cloning an IBM PC, putting it into a new case, installing IBM PC-DOS instead of MS-DOS, and reselling it as Compaq's IBM PC clone.
Which, other than the PC-DOS part, is precisely what they did. Installing PC-DOS would have changed NOTHING, except the branding on the software.
However, even this analogy is flawed too, even if it's structurally closer to the Psystar thing. IBM had, as far as I could tell, no special copyright hold over PC-DOS; it was a tailored and rebranded version of MS-DOS, and still belonged to Microsoft.
Which goes to show that the only analogies which have any hope of credibility are car and pizza analogies.
Case in point: I've heard a friend-of-friend horror story about an electronic tech in (military technical) training playing with a multimeter with high current capability and about 9v DC voltage in their power supply. (Line-powered). Genius puts the meter into mega-ohmmeter mode and jabs the (sharp) probe tips through the pads of his thumbs (macho crap) and gets a lethal DC current through his chest... because once you breach the dry-skin resistance (100K ohm or so) of the human body, the innards are about 1k ohm.
Talkin' about rechargeable power tool batteries... the replacements are damn expensive.
I'm seriously considering just buying the NiCd cells, cracking open the battery cartridges, and doing a little solder-fu. Looks like it would save me about $25 per battery.
All the spiffy things you can do with scripting-enabled PDF really should qualify it as an "attractive nuisance". Every good trap has irresistible bait, after all.
The designer of the laptop system selects batteries on things like power capacity and form factor/size. But since laptop batteries are, in fact, batteries of cells, the form factor can be customized. You can arrange cells within the battery casing almost at will, as long as you're willing to design the wiring appropriately, so the form factor of the battery becomes something which can be customized. (Also can be standardized, but we've already discussed that.)
So, all things being equal, you design the battery to best match the available space among the layout of the other components in the laptop casing. And, while you're at it, coincidentally, the battery will be incompatible with laptops of other manufacturers, darn the luck.
You're describing the effect. "Greed" describes the cause.
It's against the profit interests of laptop manufacturers to standardize batteries because then they'd have to compete with each other on them. Since these batteries are essentially commodity items, the only competitive variable would be pricing. And no producer likes competing on price.
Your strawman argument posits that things that are similar are the same, and that the passage of time doesn't matter. That's not necessarily reasonable, as in the legal principle of the "Reasonableness Test".
Would a reasonable observer of the situation think that demanding information five years after termination is reasonable? Almost certainly no.
Would a reasonable observer of the situation think that demanding information in the course of out-processing a person after termination is reasonable? Yes, absolutely. It's in the same basic category as "leave your office keys with security".
Would a reasonable observer of the situation think demanding information a few days after termination reasonable? Maybe. Maybe not. That's why we have juries, to establish the bounds of reasonableness in disputable cases. If the case goes that way, anyway.
But the FCC concluded in 1984 there was no fair way to write regulations controlling the "apparent loudness" of commercials.'"...every time my wife yells at me to "turn down that damned TV" because commercial suddenly starts blasting, the advertising executive for that commercial gets a 24 kvolt shock?
There, FTFY.
Yes, I know the chances of surviving a 24 kilovolt shock are pretty low, but I'm willing to risk it.
Why, yes, I'm not an advertising executive. And yes, I do hate those God-awful advertisements. How could you tell?
* Why is this under "Your Rights Online?" You don't have a right to internet traffic. It's a commercial service you pay for.
The fact that you pay to have your free speech published is both timelessly ancient and irrelevant to freedom of speech. The fact that your ability to speak freely is impeded by commercial mechanisms rather than direct intervention of State Force may the point you're trying to get at, but it's also not germane, unless you think that devolution of State powers to commercial interests is harmless rather than a circumvention of the Rule of Law.
I for one welcome my media overlord, as a good serf should. I hope I don't pressed into his peasant militia in his campaign against his neighboring Baron.
The "authorities" have now realised that the internet allows people to collaborate and learn openly whats really going on in the world, and how the puzzle fits togther. this to them is danderous
:) As in, "makes their scalps itch and shed flakes?"
I know, that's just a typo, but it's a good one. Almost Freudian: this kind of freedom of information makes their skin crawl.
Anyway, this comment (without typo) brought to mind a Monty Python sketch most apropos:
He's that most dangerous of creatures, a clever sheep. 'e's realized that a sheep's life consists of standin' around for a few months and then bein' eaten. And that's a depressing prospect for an ambitious sheep.
This reply is just a hair away from: you only have to worry about your privacy if you have got something to hide.
Of course it's close; it's a related corollary; one so intuitive that usually it doesn't have to be spoken.
"If you have something to hide, hide it." Sharing it with your friend and his 50 readers isn't hiding it.
Complaining about the aftereffects of voluntary publication of embarrassing facts is akin to complaining about gravity after stepping out of a 3rd story window.
People will judge you. Period. If you, of your own free will, give them ample reason to judge you, more of them will, and more harshly. We're social creatures, and measure ourselves in terms of those around us. "I may have problems, but at least I didn't..."
I think the the attitude has to change regarding this sort of thing. I once heard that in some conservative circles people tend to distrust those who were not communist or socialist when they were young. Or in other words: when you are young you are allowed to do stupid things, otherwise you are somehow not right in the head when you are older.
There is wisdom in this, true, but it's not common wisdom. And there aren't enough of the wise in this world to make up for the perfect crapstorm you get from the unwashed hordes. If some of the unwashed hordes are in control of some aspect of your life (like employment prospects), you have to decide if the admiration of the "cool few" is worth it. Simple cost-benefit analysis, really. "I gain this, I lose this. Is the final sum positive?"
Slashdot Mirror
I believe "installed" doesn't matter if it's not activated on the "Addons" page for that particular character.
I'd argue that YaST in a console is pretty close to a GUI. I haven't tried it, but I think it even works with GPM-based console mouse modes.
So, Single User, no one ever touches your system besides you?* Locally or remotely?
Even a system with only one interactive user ID is potentially multi-user. And then your machine is trojaned (running a server you never wanted installed, and running it for purposes you never would have approved of).
*And even if this is true for you personally, it won't be true for at least one other single-user system user out there. So, yeah, maybe make it configurable, but then your laziness degrades the quality and safety of the entire Internet.
It's one teensy tiny password. How damn lazy can you get?
I hope you're not trying to claim everyone's using either gcc or MS Visual C++.
gcc, while free and flexible (and generally "good enough"), is mildly terrible. The output tends to be substantially larger and slightly slower than that from other compiler products, like the Intel compiler mentioned. And as for Visual... I haven't used it in a long time, so I won't comment, other than to say it's not ubiquitous.
I have had high recommendations from some pretty smart people for the Intel compiler, which is why it's a criminal shame they chose to try to cripple the execution speed of code compiled for their binary-compatible competitor.
You're a classic example of why Linux has problems, claiming there is "NO reason" for something shows a lack of foresight or even imagination. Too many Linux developers feel the same. Because they don't have a problem with something, they firmly believe nobody should have a problem with something, and refuses to support it.
+1 Right On
There's a lot of "If I don't need it, no one needs it" arrogance in the OS community. Part of it comes from "it works for me, I don't care about you" (which is just fundamental human nature); part of it is the longstanding "RTFM" tradition (i.e., the root geek community that Free Software sprung from put a high premium on self-help. The extreme manifestation, and also the practical reason for full source code disclosure in FOSS, is "Read the Fucking Source" as the rejoinder for someone asking for help.)
It's a cultural weakness now that FOSS has spread into the general public. Unless you're paying for support, no one is obligated to help you, so if you're not technically savvy and have enough time and effort to chase it down, you're stuck.
Very true. I ran Fedora on the household server for a few years, but the in-place upgrade to Fedora 9 blew everything up. Not quite bleeding edge, but at least bruising.
I realized then that (A) it's not my day-to-day desktop box, so I don't need to keep up with the distro Joneses, and (B) I can keep the RedHat heritage (and admin knowledge) without the Fedora treadmill by switching to CentOS. And I've been happy with that for a couple of years now.
True. But on a non-single-server system, it can be a fatal flaw. Not every user is trusted. And not every environment is prosperous enough to give each user a personal machine. So the trusted/non-trusted user distinction has to be maintained, and requiring trusted-user-authentication is a pretty good way to do it.
Fedora 12 initially screwed up, period.
Well, that's a difference that makes no difference. A nation made up entirely of transported convicts and ne'er-do-wells is, by definition, all bad guys.
That's the problem with analogies; you can pick your analogs to prove anything.
This situation would be almost precisely analogous to Compaq cloning an IBM PC, putting it into a new case, installing IBM PC-DOS instead of MS-DOS, and reselling it as Compaq's IBM PC clone.
Which, other than the PC-DOS part, is precisely what they did. Installing PC-DOS would have changed NOTHING, except the branding on the software.
However, even this analogy is flawed too, even if it's structurally closer to the Psystar thing. IBM had, as far as I could tell, no special copyright hold over PC-DOS; it was a tailored and rebranded version of MS-DOS, and still belonged to Microsoft.
Which goes to show that the only analogies which have any hope of credibility are car and pizza analogies.
Case in point: I've heard a friend-of-friend horror story about an electronic tech in (military technical) training playing with a multimeter with high current capability and about 9v DC voltage in their power supply. (Line-powered). Genius puts the meter into mega-ohmmeter mode and jabs the (sharp) probe tips through the pads of his thumbs (macho crap) and gets a lethal DC current through his chest... because once you breach the dry-skin resistance (100K ohm or so) of the human body, the innards are about 1k ohm.
I propose that the researchers pursue a grant for a LOLmarine for safer undersea research.
The Spam Club is sending a message. That posting was the /. equivalent of a horse's head in your bed.
Talkin' about rechargeable power tool batteries... the replacements are damn expensive.
I'm seriously considering just buying the NiCd cells, cracking open the battery cartridges, and doing a little solder-fu. Looks like it would save me about $25 per battery.
+1 Ironically Funny
All the spiffy things you can do with scripting-enabled PDF really should qualify it as an "attractive nuisance". Every good trap has irresistible bait, after all.
The designer of the laptop system selects batteries on things like power capacity and form factor/size. But since laptop batteries are, in fact, batteries of cells, the form factor can be customized. You can arrange cells within the battery casing almost at will, as long as you're willing to design the wiring appropriately, so the form factor of the battery becomes something which can be customized. (Also can be standardized, but we've already discussed that.)
So, all things being equal, you design the battery to best match the available space among the layout of the other components in the laptop casing. And, while you're at it, coincidentally, the battery will be incompatible with laptops of other manufacturers, darn the luck.
"Science" and "Idle" look nothing alike. How did this article get into "Science"?
You're describing the effect. "Greed" describes the cause.
It's against the profit interests of laptop manufacturers to standardize batteries because then they'd have to compete with each other on them. Since these batteries are essentially commodity items, the only competitive variable would be pricing. And no producer likes competing on price.
Your strawman argument posits that things that are similar are the same, and that the passage of time doesn't matter. That's not necessarily reasonable, as in the legal principle of the "Reasonableness Test".
Would a reasonable observer of the situation think that demanding information five years after termination is reasonable? Almost certainly no.
Would a reasonable observer of the situation think that demanding information in the course of out-processing a person after termination is reasonable? Yes, absolutely. It's in the same basic category as "leave your office keys with security".
Would a reasonable observer of the situation think demanding information a few days after termination reasonable? Maybe. Maybe not. That's why we have juries, to establish the bounds of reasonableness in disputable cases. If the case goes that way, anyway.
But the FCC concluded in 1984 there was no fair way to write regulations controlling the "apparent loudness" of commercials.'" ...every time my wife yells at me to "turn down that damned TV" because commercial suddenly starts blasting, the advertising executive for that commercial gets a 24 kvolt shock?
There, FTFY.
Yes, I know the chances of surviving a 24 kilovolt shock are pretty low, but I'm willing to risk it.
Why, yes, I'm not an advertising executive. And yes, I do hate those God-awful advertisements. How could you tell?
An orbital space heater, more like. As if the poles weren't getting warm enough as it is...
* Why is this under "Your Rights Online?" You don't have a right to internet traffic. It's a commercial service you pay for.
The fact that you pay to have your free speech published is both timelessly ancient and irrelevant to freedom of speech. The fact that your ability to speak freely is impeded by commercial mechanisms rather than direct intervention of State Force may the point you're trying to get at, but it's also not germane, unless you think that devolution of State powers to commercial interests is harmless rather than a circumvention of the Rule of Law.
Welcome to the 21st Century revival of Feudalism.
I for one welcome my media overlord, as a good serf should. I hope I don't pressed into his peasant militia in his campaign against his neighboring Baron.
The "authorities" have now realised that the internet allows people to collaborate and learn openly whats really going on in the world, and how the puzzle fits togther. this to them is danderous
:) As in, "makes their scalps itch and shed flakes?"
I know, that's just a typo, but it's a good one. Almost Freudian: this kind of freedom of information makes their skin crawl.
Anyway, this comment (without typo) brought to mind a Monty Python sketch most apropos:
Let's hear it for dangerous sheep!
This reply is just a hair away from: you only have to worry about your privacy if you have got something to hide.
Of course it's close; it's a related corollary; one so intuitive that usually it doesn't have to be spoken.
"If you have something to hide, hide it." Sharing it with your friend and his 50 readers isn't hiding it.
Complaining about the aftereffects of voluntary publication of embarrassing facts is akin to complaining about gravity after stepping out of a 3rd story window.
People will judge you. Period. If you, of your own free will, give them ample reason to judge you, more of them will, and more harshly. We're social creatures, and measure ourselves in terms of those around us. "I may have problems, but at least I didn't..."
I think the the attitude has to change regarding this sort of thing. I once heard that in some conservative circles people tend to distrust those who were not communist or socialist when they were young. Or in other words: when you are young you are allowed to do stupid things, otherwise you are somehow not right in the head when you are older.
There is wisdom in this, true, but it's not common wisdom. And there aren't enough of the wise in this world to make up for the perfect crapstorm you get from the unwashed hordes. If some of the unwashed hordes are in control of some aspect of your life (like employment prospects), you have to decide if the admiration of the "cool few" is worth it. Simple cost-benefit analysis, really. "I gain this, I lose this. Is the final sum positive?"