Even worse, each toolkit/window manager has a different look and feel, and a different API, making it impossible to let EVERY ONE running Linux run your application without serious changes to either your program, or their system configuration.
Even better are the problems with solutions like: "Oh you have
widget.so.1 linked to widget.so.1.2, this will only work if it is
linked to widget.so.1.1", you wind up with private lib versions
and wrapper scripts that set linker variables.
Shared lib versioning problems can be avoided with care, but it
is a problem that should be handled without the user having to
care. A good example of a project that should know better is
'guile', it's a nice extension language - but poorly planned
versioning changes kept me from using it after a couple bad
experiences.
The best of the DOI has to be
James Watt. Infamous for making the
statement "I don't know how many future generations we can count on until the Lord returns." to a congressional committee
while he served as Secretary of the Interior.
Any level of incompetence and malfeasance displayed by the
DOI would fail to surprise me.
I hope you are right, but I just can't help but think that what
happened to Oregon is a forerunner of globalism - its
relatively undeveloped state meant that it was cheap to buy and
destroy. The developers won't leave until they have wrung out
all the money they can and swarmed to their next victim.
I went back to visit Oregon a couple years ago and
I wish I hadn't. The natural beauty is in the
process of being sold off. The Santiam river system
is filled with shore houses preventing access and
the Bend area is filled with private resorts.
Everywhere I went private estates, gated
communities, resorts...
Oregon may still be green, but it has lost it's
soul.
Diablo more fun than games like NetHack and Angband? Only if you've got the attention span of a 4 year old.
Well that's like, your opinion, Man. Rogue-like games still have
some nostalgic charm, but that is pretty much it. Diablo had
more depth than any of those games except NetHack, the genre
itself gets old unless you are in the mood for some mindless
fun - but it is fun.
Good AI, effects, music, and so on will not make a game fun to
play by themselves, but which was more immersive and
memorable: a 'M' rushing at the your '@' in Angband or Diablo
announcing your doom and hitting you with a lightening blast
followed by an explosion of flame?
The rogue-like games and Diablo are basically the same game,
but Diablo is more fun because of the addition of graphics and
sound to a core fun game. Some games (Dungeon Siege) have
the graphics and sound, but lack core gameplay - it takes
both gameplay and sense candy to make a fun video game.
They might be referring to the zeroeth law that was added to
let Daneel be shoehorned into the later Foundation books.
The problem is that "protecting humanity" will be used as way
to trump the 3 laws and turn the robot into RoboCop, with the
3 laws conflict depicted as a variation of standard drama/action
cop angst.
It might suck, it might not, but I'm 95% certain that it will have
very little to do with anything Asimov ever wrote.
Besides Microsoft could be better analogized to a 'retarded turtle' that is both slow and disoriented/unfocused whereas linux is much more like a determined 'rabbit' which is both 'fast' and steady/focused.
I see this attitude on/. a lot and it kinda surprises me. People
underestimate the ruthlessness and ability of the corporate
juggernauts.
I hate the way that corporations go about maintaining their
power, but they are very focused on it, and they recognized
what the dangers where quite some time ago and are launching
preemptive strikes all over the place.
Bland optimism about historical inevitability and the
acceptance of "facts" about corporate stupidity, sluggishness
and blindness
were the sins of the New Economy. That movement fell apart
and the real core of it (consumer empowerment and portability)
are under attack by MS, Comcast, Disney, AOL, Sony, Verizon,
and others.
I'd compare MS more to a cornered and dangerous predator:
smart, powerful, and unpredictable. Don't make the mistake
of underestimating them.
RealNetworks is a business and they have every right to try and sell their product for money.
Pretty much. The thing that people dislike so much about
Real is how dishonest they are about their product,
practically hiding the free version (despite heavily advertising it),
and their spyware like tactics once they have their software
installed. They locked a lot of early content into their format
and then started getting nasty about it once they thought they
had the whip hand.
In some cases it may take a ridiculous amount of effort to implement a request but in the end, that's what we get paid for. We are there to balance the needs of users with the integrity of the system. We are not there to things hard, we are there to make IT users as productive as possible without compromising system integrity.
Since I work in engineering my customers are marketing and
several operations groups, my job is to build and design things
in a way that helps them accomplish their job. An encounter
with IT never fails to baffle me, because that attitude is missing
entirely.
Even though some of those things my customers need are
difficult or occasionally unworkable I never just shut them down.
Even when we get a new marketing guy who wants to put
anti-gravity in the product I try and stay gracious and explain
why what he wants the impossible (I kinna violate the laws of
physics capin!). Even when an operations group has changed
its mind at the last second, I explain how we can either slip
the date or stay with the original schedule. Even when we do 20
hours of work to avoid 5 minutes of work on the part of another
group,... okay I do get fairly pissed off when that happens - but
I try and give a realistic level of effort and do what needs to be
done.
If we don't have a policy on your unforseen use I can guarantee we will by tomorrow, we have procedures to deal with that.
My IT department doesn't work like that. They either quote
a ridiculous level of effort or just say no. On some projects I
waste more time working around IT than I do on getting
actual work done.
I don't. Computers are tools, they are used to make money.
IT often seems to have the belief that computers are an end unto
themselves. Allah forfend that anyone actually use a system in
a way not forseen by the all knowing IT dept.
The only time that I ask for support is when hardware
fails. I ask IT to replace it, they re-image the drive, I tell them
that didn't work, repeat until I complain to my boss.
I understand the need for IT, I just hate the practice of it:)
For technical reasons, the automatic-detection feature on this web page can only work with IE/Win, with "Active scripting" and "Run ActiveX controls" enabled.
10% seems very low, since your script can only
diagnose users who allow ActiveX and scripting from
the public internet I'd expect 50%+ of such users
to be infected.
3 and 4: Software exists that can recognize a.zip or.tar file, decompress it, and then the normal process can analyze its contents.
This kind of software is too prone to denial of service to be
deployed on public networks. As a trivial case zip a file
containing the string 'pwned' 100 million times or more, the file
will compress at about 1000:1 and probably crash the process
that tries to uncompress it to examine it.
"We are working on a model for European countries and also for the US," Mr Simha told the BBC News Online.
I wonder how long it will take this to become politicized as
"those Indians are stealing our jobs, now they are trying to teach
us how to run a democracy".
That one was pretty easy - in notes and testimony they admited
their motivation.
The problem with terrorism as a crime, as opposed to murder,
theft, kidnapping, and so on, is that there you must know the
intent of the person committing the crime
Is interfering with 911 service illegal? Yes.
Is mailing a malicious script that interferes with the proper
operation of the victim's computer illegal? Yes.
Is an act of revenge that affects the public terrorism? Maybe.
As it stands the government gets to charge people for all the
illegal stuff they do, and their terrorist intent. Where are all the
righties who protest the thought crime and 5th ammendment
aspects of hate crime legislation?
I figured that he meant "no one likes documentation... except
eager beaver newbies out to earn their Linux merit badge".
Once you have a task to accomplish with a computer
there is very little joy in learning technical trivia. After a
technically adept person has learned their
74th config file format the shine is definitely off,
and
someone who just wants to get something done is not going
to want to waste a bunch of time learning about things that
don't matter, like a config file syntax.
I don't think there is anything elitist in this attitude, it is just
a recognition of what people are willing to invest in getting
things
done with a computer. A person creating a spreadsheet should
not have to worry about the filesystem or a fontserver processes,
so even if those aspects of the system are well documented the
user will be understandably upset that he has to read the docs.
if someone submits a patent that has obvious prior art dates back more than 10 years, the patent application is immediately rejected, AND the entity filing the application is permanently banned from ever filing any more patent applications.
That is so extreme that it will never be considered. I do think
that a "bad faith application" should carry a penalty. It sounds
as if companies are currently gaming the uspto; they must
hope to get an examininer who, for whatever reason, lets
something through with a lot broader scope than be should
be allowed.
So maybe a bad faith application shuts down the application
process (with loss of all filing fees) and a penalty, based on the
number of previous offenses by the filing entity, is charged
to the filing entity.
Supposedly that the problem is that the uspto needs
money and that refusing patents does not make them money.
Here is a way that they can get paid for granting patents
and sometimes get paid for shooting down patents.
It matters to customers where the servers
are located if it introduces delay into call setup time or a
perceptible delay to voice conversations.
Also, the FCC gave a result they want, they have not yet
mandated any particular solution. If US providers are being
used for any portion of the communication they are potentially
subject to FCC regulation.
Or hey, maybe he could use a version control system with a sane security model rather than futzing about with all sorts of hacked up workarounds? Or is that too easy and obvious?
Because integration with the system security model is a sane
way to do things and a good default. A jail or chroot
environment is a good compromise in that it does not require
a new security model and lets the OP restrict source
management users from accessing the rest of the system.
The mere fact that/. is a geek site, with, as a consequence, a huge majority of people that don't understand a thing about politics (something else than conspiracy theories, and republican-bashing ?),
Don't forget mindless Libertarianism and Republican
cheerleading as common political stances adopted by the
naive geek.
I'd vote Republican myself were it not for their unholy alliance
with the cultural conservatives, but election year centrist soft
pedaling aside the Republicans have become the party of hate.
Slashdot Mirror
Even better are the problems with solutions like: "Oh you have widget.so.1 linked to widget.so.1.2, this will only work if it is linked to widget.so.1.1", you wind up with private lib versions and wrapper scripts that set linker variables.
Shared lib versioning problems can be avoided with care, but it is a problem that should be handled without the user having to care. A good example of a project that should know better is 'guile', it's a nice extension language - but poorly planned versioning changes kept me from using it after a couple bad experiences.
Any level of incompetence and malfeasance displayed by the DOI would fail to surprise me.
I hope you are right, but I just can't help but think that what happened to Oregon is a forerunner of globalism - its relatively undeveloped state meant that it was cheap to buy and destroy. The developers won't leave until they have wrung out all the money they can and swarmed to their next victim.
Oregon may still be green, but it has lost it's soul.
Well that's like, your opinion, Man. Rogue-like games still have some nostalgic charm, but that is pretty much it. Diablo had more depth than any of those games except NetHack, the genre itself gets old unless you are in the mood for some mindless fun - but it is fun.
Good AI, effects, music, and so on will not make a game fun to play by themselves, but which was more immersive and memorable: a 'M' rushing at the your '@' in Angband or Diablo announcing your doom and hitting you with a lightening blast followed by an explosion of flame?
The rogue-like games and Diablo are basically the same game, but Diablo is more fun because of the addition of graphics and sound to a core fun game. Some games (Dungeon Siege) have the graphics and sound, but lack core gameplay - it takes both gameplay and sense candy to make a fun video game.
Yeah! Maybe Intel should do the Mhz in Italian. Then they could sell to those Mac people, they like European stuff and stuff.
Or anime hyperobole. The 'super mega ultra rating' vs the 'super ultra mega excellent rating'.
The problem is that "protecting humanity" will be used as way to trump the 3 laws and turn the robot into RoboCop, with the 3 laws conflict depicted as a variation of standard drama/action cop angst.
It might suck, it might not, but I'm 95% certain that it will have very little to do with anything Asimov ever wrote.
I see this attitude on /. a lot and it kinda surprises me. People
underestimate the ruthlessness and ability of the corporate
juggernauts.
I hate the way that corporations go about maintaining their power, but they are very focused on it, and they recognized what the dangers where quite some time ago and are launching preemptive strikes all over the place.
Bland optimism about historical inevitability and the acceptance of "facts" about corporate stupidity, sluggishness and blindness were the sins of the New Economy. That movement fell apart and the real core of it (consumer empowerment and portability) are under attack by MS, Comcast, Disney, AOL, Sony, Verizon, and others.
I'd compare MS more to a cornered and dangerous predator: smart, powerful, and unpredictable. Don't make the mistake of underestimating them.
Pretty much. The thing that people dislike so much about Real is how dishonest they are about their product, practically hiding the free version (despite heavily advertising it), and their spyware like tactics once they have their software installed. They locked a lot of early content into their format and then started getting nasty about it once they thought they had the whip hand.
Yes. I also hope that atavisms like you die out soon, I'm tired of subsidizing your breeding with my tax dollars.
Since I work in engineering my customers are marketing and several operations groups, my job is to build and design things in a way that helps them accomplish their job. An encounter with IT never fails to baffle me, because that attitude is missing entirely.
Even though some of those things my customers need are difficult or occasionally unworkable I never just shut them down. Even when we get a new marketing guy who wants to put anti-gravity in the product I try and stay gracious and explain why what he wants the impossible (I kinna violate the laws of physics capin!). Even when an operations group has changed its mind at the last second, I explain how we can either slip the date or stay with the original schedule. Even when we do 20 hours of work to avoid 5 minutes of work on the part of another group, ... okay I do get fairly pissed off when that happens - but
I try and give a realistic level of effort and do what needs to be
done.
My IT department doesn't work like that. They either quote a ridiculous level of effort or just say no. On some projects I waste more time working around IT than I do on getting actual work done.
I don't. Computers are tools, they are used to make money. IT often seems to have the belief that computers are an end unto themselves. Allah forfend that anyone actually use a system in a way not forseen by the all knowing IT dept.
The only time that I ask for support is when hardware fails. I ask IT to replace it, they re-image the drive, I tell them that didn't work, repeat until I complain to my boss.
I understand the need for IT, I just hate the practice of it :)
10% seems very low, since your script can only diagnose users who allow ActiveX and scripting from the public internet I'd expect 50%+ of such users to be infected.
The judge threw that charge out last week. The DA who came up with that ridiculous charge should be spanked - but I doubt that will happen.
Martha is being charged with declaring her innocence nothing more.
Uhm, no - she is charged with breaking the rules regarding stock sales and then lying about it to investigators and in court.
This kind of software is too prone to denial of service to be deployed on public networks. As a trivial case zip a file containing the string 'pwned' 100 million times or more, the file will compress at about 1000:1 and probably crash the process that tries to uncompress it to examine it.
I wonder how long it will take this to become politicized as "those Indians are stealing our jobs, now they are trying to teach us how to run a democracy".
That one was pretty easy - in notes and testimony they admited their motivation.
The problem with terrorism as a crime, as opposed to murder, theft, kidnapping, and so on, is that there you must know the intent of the person committing the crime
Is interfering with 911 service illegal? Yes.
Is mailing a malicious script that interferes with the proper operation of the victim's computer illegal? Yes.
Is an act of revenge that affects the public terrorism? Maybe.
As it stands the government gets to charge people for all the illegal stuff they do, and their terrorist intent. Where are all the righties who protest the thought crime and 5th ammendment aspects of hate crime legislation?
I think that is Kurtz from "Apocalypse Now".
Once you have a task to accomplish with a computer there is very little joy in learning technical trivia. After a technically adept person has learned their 74th config file format the shine is definitely off, and someone who just wants to get something done is not going to want to waste a bunch of time learning about things that don't matter, like a config file syntax.
I don't think there is anything elitist in this attitude, it is just a recognition of what people are willing to invest in getting things done with a computer. A person creating a spreadsheet should not have to worry about the filesystem or a fontserver processes, so even if those aspects of the system are well documented the user will be understandably upset that he has to read the docs.
That is so extreme that it will never be considered. I do think that a "bad faith application" should carry a penalty. It sounds as if companies are currently gaming the uspto; they must hope to get an examininer who, for whatever reason, lets something through with a lot broader scope than be should be allowed.
So maybe a bad faith application shuts down the application process (with loss of all filing fees) and a penalty, based on the number of previous offenses by the filing entity, is charged to the filing entity.
Supposedly that the problem is that the uspto needs money and that refusing patents does not make them money. Here is a way that they can get paid for granting patents and sometimes get paid for shooting down patents.
Also, the FCC gave a result they want, they have not yet mandated any particular solution. If US providers are being used for any portion of the communication they are potentially subject to FCC regulation.
Because integration with the system security model is a sane way to do things and a good default. A jail or chroot environment is a good compromise in that it does not require a new security model and lets the OP restrict source management users from accessing the rest of the system.
Don't forget mindless Libertarianism and Republican cheerleading as common political stances adopted by the naive geek.
I'd vote Republican myself were it not for their unholy alliance with the cultural conservatives, but election year centrist soft pedaling aside the Republicans have become the party of hate.