That's nVidia's fault for having closed-source drivers, not Ubuntu's fault for obeying the law. Or you could say it's your country's Ministry of Information Technology's fault, for not mandating full disclosure of hardware specifications.
How so? I thought once you put an AMD64 processor into 64-bit mode, some of the old 32- / 16- / 8-bit instrictions did not work anymore / behaved differently than in 32-bit mode? Was I misinformed?
This is not a troll. I am asking because I am an old-skool hacker who grew up with VAX/VMS and some sort of Unix, and ended up reasonably competent with a VT220. So, I want to know,
If you're looking for compatibility, you may be disappointed.
At the root of the problem is the fact that many Windows applications were built taking advantage of the exact same wide-open, drive-a-bus-through-sideways security holes in Windows as are used by all the viruses, spyware and rootkits..... not that anybody would ever know about them, being closed-source and all that. Anyway, when you make it impossible for, say, a malicious website to download an application behind your back that sneakily modifies files, you also make it impossible for certain applications to interact with one another -- because they were designed to do that using the same security holes.
XP SP2 broke a lot of Windows 9X software just by closing the holes. Software that was properly written for non-admin use on NT doesn't need to exploit security holes, but when you consider how many developers have been using pirated development tools and inaccurate or incomplete documentation {even the official documentation is incomplete -- there are still some things that Microsoft won't tell anyone} it's not surprising that there is so much crap software out there. Remember, most software is not packaged for retail, nor downloaded as "free" / shareware. There's a huge amount of Windows software that you have never seen, because it was written especially for one particular customer. And most of it was written by self-taught chancers with a pirated copy of Visual Studio.
Vista is going to have to break a lot of software; otherwise it will never be any more secure than XP. But Microsoft speak with a forked tongue. When they say "Vista will be more secure", they aren't talking about keeping your computer secure against malicious intruders {crackers, script kiddies, virus writers, spyware, adware, botnets and so forth}. What they really mean is that the music and video files you paid to download will be secure against anyone else listening to and watching them.
The real tipping point, the straw that breaks the camel's back, will come when Vista {or the release after, or the release after that} breaks your absolute must-have Windows application. Then you will have nothing to lose by biting the bullet and going to a whole 'nother operating system.
Bah! Just scribble all over the mouse with a 6B pencil (or gently toast it with a flamethrower) to give it an even coating of carbon all over. Now suspend this in a tank of any dilute acid. Connect this to the negative pole of a high-capacity rechargeable battery. Connect anything made of gold (stolen jewellery, unreported Treasure Trove or anything without a hallmark, is ideal for this purpose) to the positive pole, via an ammeter, and suspend this in the acid bath. Adjust the positions of the two electrodes (mouse shell and gold) until the meter is reading at least 5 amps or as high as it will go. (Add more acid to increase the current, if required).
There's your gold-plated mouse, and you're rid of that hot gold into the bargain!
So just get two or more spares ready for deployment in an emergency! If you need 50 identical desktops, buy enough bits for 55 machines. If one goes down, you bung in a spare while you fix it -- substituting parts from another, known good machine. The original spare stays put and the fixed machine then becomes another spare.
Installing identical software on many machines is easy too. Either use dd to copy an entire drive (BTW, this even works with Windows: boot from a USB device if possible, otherwise a DVD+RW drive [DMA-capable, won't slow down the bus] on hdb and have hard drives on hda and hdc); or set up your own local mirror of your favourite distro, and install over the LAN via http or ftp.
That's because it's the closed-source analogue of open source software. You're allowed to do things with it that you wouldn't be allowed to do with GPL software..... such as modify it and not release your mods to the Community. Vendors charge a hefty premium on this kind of software, precisely to discourage anyone from using it.
If you confine yourself to GPL and BSD licenced software, you never have to pay for more than one copy.
I think the legal/certification thing is a red herring cooked up by the proprietary software vendors to scare away would-be competitors. Remember, people used to work out their taxes manually in the years Before Computers (which is why a stepwise linear regression is used, rather than a polynomial regression. SWL is easier without a computer, but a polynomial equation is simpler if squares, cubes and higher powers can be calculated trivially). BC wasn't so long ago -- and manual methods are still preferred by some small businesses.
You could campaign for tax reform, and polynomial regressions are the way forward IMHO; but the problem is that somebody is bound to be worse off under any new system you introduce, even if it's actually fairer that way. People who have been getting away with something wrong for a long time are generally resistant to change, and their resistance is usually directly dependent upon wrongness.
If there's really any certification to be done, they can certify based on the source code. Do the appropriate authorities have access to the full source code of the closed, proprietary tax packages? In the worst case, just abstract out all the "this will invalidate certification if changed" functions into a single include file {which is the whole bit that will need to change with the tax régime, from year to year and jurisdiction to jurisdiction}. Take at least two UNRELATED hash functions of this include file. If both/all those hashes are correct, you (and by extension, the appropriate authorities) can assume the code within that file has not changed.
Beside which, not paying your taxes is a criminal offence -- and last time I heard all criminal offences in the USA were still "innocent until proven guilty" -- so it would be up to the authorities to prove your Open Source tax package was wrong and not for you to prove that it was right.
Have you ever thought that it might be cheaper for you to contact a few other firms in your local area, and between yourselves pay a group of local programmers to put together a complete Open Source tax package? Offer your experience with your existing software and the methods you used to use Before Computers. Make it easy to change the regression formulae to suit different tax régimes around the world. Then, once you've tested it in parallel with your existing systems and ironed out the worst of the bugs, release it under the GPL or a Pine-like licence; so nobody can take all your hard work, lock it up and make money out of it.
The Open Source Community is very forthcoming with help. No matter what problem you're having, you can rest assured that someone else has already had that very same problem before -- and solved it, and written about how they it. Google is your friend. Also, Linux at least is modular by design, which simplifies troubleshooting. As counter-intuitive as it may sound, knowing how to fix one problem on a Linux system may help you fix an apparently completely unrelated problem.
The reason why commercial licences for software also available under the GPL are so expensive, is to discourage you from buying them and make you choose the Open Source version instead. As long as you give back any improvements you make (or keep them secret, and keep your trap shut if/when someone else makes the same improvements and gives them away) you'll be fine. If you want to write closed-source software, you have to pay for it in money -- which can be used to fund the creation of Open Source alternatives to your own closed proprietary shite. By the same token, if you're too proud to search the Internet to find a solution to your problems, you can pay for it in money.
The Community generally wants to help. However, if you don't play by the rules of The Community, expect a big, fat "SCREW YOU!" Why should it be any other way?
At the risk of sounding like a troll, what is he doing in a private, fee-paying hospital? Is the National Health Service not good enough for bestselling authors?
To my mind, if someone has gone to the trouble to block adverts (and trouble it is - no browser does so by default)
I'm sure there is at least one Linux distribution which supplies ad-blocking extensions to Konqueror and/or Firefox, enabled by default.
If/when I ever get my own distro together, I know I will be doing so. (My solution will be a simple HTTP proxy server; which will also intercept requests to download certain popular closed source software and display a notice to the effect that an "i-tal" alternative is available [or already installed], but if you really want to pollute your system with potentially-dangerous, poor-quality, crash-prone closed source software then follow these instructions to disable the proxy and re-enable it afterward.)
Slackware (and to a lesser extent, Debian and Gentoo) offers you the chance to poke about under the bonnet while the vehicle is in motion.
Other distributions use GUI tools to configure everything. Sometimes these read their settings from the actual configuration files they are supposed to be editing; sometimes they use a separate database and recreate the config files either on boot, or when exiting. In the first case, you run the risk by manually editing a file that you might make it unparseable to the GUI config tool. In the second case, your changes might only be temporary -- the separate, "hidden" database won't be changed, and either at the next boot, or the next time you run the config tool, your changes will be lost.
Package managers (apart from Gentoo's Portage) generally work with binary packages -- as though the maintainer has done the configure and make, and then you just do the make install. And for historical reasons, "development" files -- those files not needed for everyday use of a package, but which may be required when you try to build something else that will work with the package -- have been packaged separately. This made good sense in the days when target systems had limited RAM, disk space and CPU speed; people who just wanted to use software did not need to spend time compiling it (nowadays, compiling is much faster) nor clutter up their systems with files they were not using (nowadays, they would barely be noticed). On the negative side, it meant that a distribution was limited by design to certain architectures; but the world was already standardising on 80386 by then. Also, in order to resolve dependencies correctly, a package manager needs to keep a database of which files belong to which package -- and can get horrendously confused by the presence of files that it did not put there.
Slackware eschews unnecessary complexity. It doesn't try to do things for you, so you never feel you are fighting with it for control of your system. If you have an irrational aversion to the command line, forget it -- stick with Mandriva or Ubuntu. If you are comfortable with manually editing text files and sometimes having to sort out dependency management for yourself, you won't have problems with it. However, if you're already happily running Debian or Gentoo (both of which have huge package repositories, support many architectures and can easily be extended with home-compiled packages if you need something that is not in the repositories), Slackware can't offer you much. (And that's pretty much true whichever way around you arrange the three.)
I thought Microsoft would have paid them for Product Placement?
As an aside, Tony Blair is thinking of legalising product placement. It was bad enough IMHO when TV programmes were allowed to name their sponsors at the beginning and end of each segment. No, scrub that. It was bad enough when they allowed adverts on TV at all. I think I'm going to get me a Sky Plus, record everything, start watching 15 minutes late and fast-forward through the adverts. Anyone had any joy with this?
Isn't "hype" just an abbreviation of "hyperbole" ? In which case, the phrase "hyperbole and hype" is just unnecessarily re-stating the same thing again more than once without need in a tautological fashion.
Which is not to say that there isn't a lot of abuse of the Queen's English going on. To some extent it's understandable. The world has more "newspapers" (real and virtual) than ever before, but stuff is happening at pretty much the same rate as ever; which means that, in order to fill more papers, the news being reported is going to be less interesting. But people are only interested in headlines and soundbites, so everything has to be exaggerated to make it sound more interesting.
One thing I have noticed is that in English, we put the modifier before the modified word (adjective before noun, adverb before verb &c.) and we also put the given name before the family name. Therefore, the second word of a phrase tends to be the important one. Repeat a phrase such as "binge drinking" or "illegal immigrant" often enough, and pretty soon the second word will start automatically bringing to mind the first -- in other words, when you hear "drinking" you will associate it with "binge drinking", when you hear "immigrant" you will think "illegal immigrant" and so on.
"A Nuke in Every Nation" is just the logical progression from "A Gun in Every Home". Which doesn't work very well at preventing much -- people still break into other people's homes and don't get shot, and people still get shot by intruders in their own homes. Why should we expect the bigger version be any more successful?
All propaganda to the contrary, the dislike and distrust of the US is not markedly different now than it was 23 years ago
..... except that it is more widely shared and more strongly felt. The USA is widely reckoned to be the single greatest threat to world peace today, even among her nominal allies.
Whether or not the system is secure, can be determined by (1) reading the source code and (2) ensuring that the object code you are actually running matches the source code you read. Closed source software can never be considered secure; but neither can open source software when it is running on an untrusted third party's server.
The reason why a movie player window usually comes up blank in a screenshot is a throwback to days gone by. Normally the X desktop is double-buffered: one copy in main memory {or spare memory on the graphics card if there is any}, and one copy in the actual framebuffer memory {which may be real or virtualised, depending upon the driver}. Remember, X is a remote protocol underneath: there's no guarantee that the two copies are necessarily on the same computer! Normal applications only get to see the "main memory" copy. Applications that really do need real-time access to the framebuffer can write to the framebuffer memory directly; but only the application that is writing there can read it.
You can enable double-buffering in VLC with a command-line switch, if your PC is fast enough {or you're patient enough to sit through slow and jerky video with dropped frames to get to the bit you want}. Xine has a screenshot button.
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That's nVidia's fault for having closed-source drivers, not Ubuntu's fault for obeying the law. Or you could say it's your country's Ministry of Information Technology's fault, for not mandating full disclosure of hardware specifications.
How so? I thought once you put an AMD64 processor into 64-bit mode, some of the old 32- / 16- / 8-bit instrictions did not work anymore / behaved differently than in 32-bit mode? Was I misinformed?
This is not a troll. I am asking because I am an old-skool hacker who grew up with VAX/VMS and some sort of Unix, and ended up reasonably competent with a VT220. So, I want to know,
What exactly is wrong with the command line?
If you're looking for compatibility, you may be disappointed.
..... not that anybody would ever know about them, being closed-source and all that. Anyway, when you make it impossible for, say, a malicious website to download an application behind your back that sneakily modifies files, you also make it impossible for certain applications to interact with one another -- because they were designed to do that using the same security holes.
At the root of the problem is the fact that many Windows applications were built taking advantage of the exact same wide-open, drive-a-bus-through-sideways security holes in Windows as are used by all the viruses, spyware and rootkits
XP SP2 broke a lot of Windows 9X software just by closing the holes. Software that was properly written for non-admin use on NT doesn't need to exploit security holes, but when you consider how many developers have been using pirated development tools and inaccurate or incomplete documentation {even the official documentation is incomplete -- there are still some things that Microsoft won't tell anyone} it's not surprising that there is so much crap software out there. Remember, most software is not packaged for retail, nor downloaded as "free" / shareware. There's a huge amount of Windows software that you have never seen, because it was written especially for one particular customer. And most of it was written by self-taught chancers with a pirated copy of Visual Studio.
Vista is going to have to break a lot of software; otherwise it will never be any more secure than XP. But Microsoft speak with a forked tongue. When they say "Vista will be more secure", they aren't talking about keeping your computer secure against malicious intruders {crackers, script kiddies, virus writers, spyware, adware, botnets and so forth}. What they really mean is that the music and video files you paid to download will be secure against anyone else listening to and watching them.
The real tipping point, the straw that breaks the camel's back, will come when Vista {or the release after, or the release after that} breaks your absolute must-have Windows application. Then you will have nothing to lose by biting the bullet and going to a whole 'nother operating system.
Well, what do you expect for being such a cheapskate? :-p
Until someone starts training monkeys to press CTRL+ALT+DEL. Then you won't even need to employ human beings in tech support anymore!
Bah! Just scribble all over the mouse with a 6B pencil (or gently toast it with a flamethrower) to give it an even coating of carbon all over. Now suspend this in a tank of any dilute acid. Connect this to the negative pole of a high-capacity rechargeable battery. Connect anything made of gold (stolen jewellery, unreported Treasure Trove or anything without a hallmark, is ideal for this purpose) to the positive pole, via an ammeter, and suspend this in the acid bath. Adjust the positions of the two electrodes (mouse shell and gold) until the meter is reading at least 5 amps or as high as it will go. (Add more acid to increase the current, if required).
There's your gold-plated mouse, and you're rid of that hot gold into the bargain!
So just get two or more spares ready for deployment in an emergency! If you need 50 identical desktops, buy enough bits for 55 machines. If one goes down, you bung in a spare while you fix it -- substituting parts from another, known good machine. The original spare stays put and the fixed machine then becomes another spare.
Installing identical software on many machines is easy too. Either use dd to copy an entire drive (BTW, this even works with Windows: boot from a USB device if possible, otherwise a DVD+RW drive [DMA-capable, won't slow down the bus] on hdb and have hard drives on hda and hdc); or set up your own local mirror of your favourite distro, and install over the LAN via http or ftp.
That's because it's the closed-source analogue of open source software. You're allowed to do things with it that you wouldn't be allowed to do with GPL software ..... such as modify it and not release your mods to the Community. Vendors charge a hefty premium on this kind of software, precisely to discourage anyone from using it.
If you confine yourself to GPL and BSD licenced software, you never have to pay for more than one copy.
I think the legal/certification thing is a red herring cooked up by the proprietary software vendors to scare away would-be competitors. Remember, people used to work out their taxes manually in the years Before Computers (which is why a stepwise linear regression is used, rather than a polynomial regression. SWL is easier without a computer, but a polynomial equation is simpler if squares, cubes and higher powers can be calculated trivially). BC wasn't so long ago -- and manual methods are still preferred by some small businesses.
You could campaign for tax reform, and polynomial regressions are the way forward IMHO; but the problem is that somebody is bound to be worse off under any new system you introduce, even if it's actually fairer that way. People who have been getting away with something wrong for a long time are generally resistant to change, and their resistance is usually directly dependent upon wrongness.
If there's really any certification to be done, they can certify based on the source code. Do the appropriate authorities have access to the full source code of the closed, proprietary tax packages? In the worst case, just abstract out all the "this will invalidate certification if changed" functions into a single include file {which is the whole bit that will need to change with the tax régime, from year to year and jurisdiction to jurisdiction}. Take at least two UNRELATED hash functions of this include file. If both/all those hashes are correct, you (and by extension, the appropriate authorities) can assume the code within that file has not changed.
Beside which, not paying your taxes is a criminal offence -- and last time I heard all criminal offences in the USA were still "innocent until proven guilty" -- so it would be up to the authorities to prove your Open Source tax package was wrong and not for you to prove that it was right.
Have you ever thought that it might be cheaper for you to contact a few other firms in your local area, and between yourselves pay a group of local programmers to put together a complete Open Source tax package? Offer your experience with your existing software and the methods you used to use Before Computers. Make it easy to change the regression formulae to suit different tax régimes around the world. Then, once you've tested it in parallel with your existing systems and ironed out the worst of the bugs, release it under the GPL or a Pine-like licence; so nobody can take all your hard work, lock it up and make money out of it.
Bollocks.
The Open Source Community is very forthcoming with help. No matter what problem you're having, you can rest assured that someone else has already had that very same problem before -- and solved it, and written about how they it. Google is your friend. Also, Linux at least is modular by design, which simplifies troubleshooting. As counter-intuitive as it may sound, knowing how to fix one problem on a Linux system may help you fix an apparently completely unrelated problem.
The reason why commercial licences for software also available under the GPL are so expensive, is to discourage you from buying them and make you choose the Open Source version instead. As long as you give back any improvements you make (or keep them secret, and keep your trap shut if/when someone else makes the same improvements and gives them away) you'll be fine. If you want to write closed-source software, you have to pay for it in money -- which can be used to fund the creation of Open Source alternatives to your own closed proprietary shite. By the same token, if you're too proud to search the Internet to find a solution to your problems, you can pay for it in money.
The Community generally wants to help. However, if you don't play by the rules of The Community, expect a big, fat "SCREW YOU!" Why should it be any other way?
Don't you have your own National Health Service, or something similar, in the USA?
At the risk of sounding like a troll, what is he doing in a private, fee-paying hospital? Is the National Health Service not good enough for bestselling authors?
If/when I ever get my own distro together, I know I will be doing so. (My solution will be a simple HTTP proxy server; which will also intercept requests to download certain popular closed source software and display a notice to the effect that an "i-tal" alternative is available [or already installed], but if you really want to pollute your system with potentially-dangerous, poor-quality, crash-prone closed source software then follow these instructions to disable the proxy and re-enable it afterward.)
Slackware (and to a lesser extent, Debian and Gentoo) offers you the chance to poke about under the bonnet while the vehicle is in motion.
Other distributions use GUI tools to configure everything. Sometimes these read their settings from the actual configuration files they are supposed to be editing; sometimes they use a separate database and recreate the config files either on boot, or when exiting. In the first case, you run the risk by manually editing a file that you might make it unparseable to the GUI config tool. In the second case, your changes might only be temporary -- the separate, "hidden" database won't be changed, and either at the next boot, or the next time you run the config tool, your changes will be lost.
Package managers (apart from Gentoo's Portage) generally work with binary packages -- as though the maintainer has done the configure and make, and then you just do the make install. And for historical reasons, "development" files -- those files not needed for everyday use of a package, but which may be required when you try to build something else that will work with the package -- have been packaged separately. This made good sense in the days when target systems had limited RAM, disk space and CPU speed; people who just wanted to use software did not need to spend time compiling it (nowadays, compiling is much faster) nor clutter up their systems with files they were not using (nowadays, they would barely be noticed). On the negative side, it meant that a distribution was limited by design to certain architectures; but the world was already standardising on 80386 by then. Also, in order to resolve dependencies correctly, a package manager needs to keep a database of which files belong to which package -- and can get horrendously confused by the presence of files that it did not put there.
Slackware eschews unnecessary complexity. It doesn't try to do things for you, so you never feel you are fighting with it for control of your system. If you have an irrational aversion to the command line, forget it -- stick with Mandriva or Ubuntu. If you are comfortable with manually editing text files and sometimes having to sort out dependency management for yourself, you won't have problems with it. However, if you're already happily running Debian or Gentoo (both of which have huge package repositories, support many architectures and can easily be extended with home-compiled packages if you need something that is not in the repositories), Slackware can't offer you much. (And that's pretty much true whichever way around you arrange the three.)
Someone who seems to advocate stomping on individual liberties posting anonymously.
If it wasn't for the gorgeous fluffy ginger kitten I'm having delivered in a few hours' time, I'd drop dead from the sheer irony.
I thought Microsoft would have paid them for Product Placement?
As an aside, Tony Blair is thinking of legalising product placement. It was bad enough IMHO when TV programmes were allowed to name their sponsors at the beginning and end of each segment. No, scrub that. It was bad enough when they allowed adverts on TV at all. I think I'm going to get me a Sky Plus, record everything, start watching 15 minutes late and fast-forward through the adverts. Anyone had any joy with this?
Isn't "hype" just an abbreviation of "hyperbole" ? In which case, the phrase "hyperbole and hype" is just unnecessarily re-stating the same thing again more than once without need in a tautological fashion.
Which is not to say that there isn't a lot of abuse of the Queen's English going on. To some extent it's understandable. The world has more "newspapers" (real and virtual) than ever before, but stuff is happening at pretty much the same rate as ever; which means that, in order to fill more papers, the news being reported is going to be less interesting. But people are only interested in headlines and soundbites, so everything has to be exaggerated to make it sound more interesting.
One thing I have noticed is that in English, we put the modifier before the modified word (adjective before noun, adverb before verb &c.) and we also put the given name before the family name. Therefore, the second word of a phrase tends to be the important one. Repeat a phrase such as "binge drinking" or "illegal immigrant" often enough, and pretty soon the second word will start automatically bringing to mind the first -- in other words, when you hear "drinking" you will associate it with "binge drinking", when you hear "immigrant" you will think "illegal immigrant" and so on.
No -- that will actually happen at 2038-01-19 03:14:07. So a bit less than 22 years to go.
"A Nuke in Every Nation" is just the logical progression from "A Gun in Every Home". Which doesn't work very well at preventing much -- people still break into other people's homes and don't get shot, and people still get shot by intruders in their own homes. Why should we expect the bigger version be any more successful?
Whether or not the system is secure, can be determined by (1) reading the source code and (2) ensuring that the object code you are actually running matches the source code you read. Closed source software can never be considered secure; but neither can open source software when it is running on an untrusted third party's server.
Oi! I'll have you know, I invented message tapes that self-destructed in the 1970s. The following day, I realised why they were useless.
The reason why a movie player window usually comes up blank in a screenshot is a throwback to days gone by. Normally the X desktop is double-buffered: one copy in main memory {or spare memory on the graphics card if there is any}, and one copy in the actual framebuffer memory {which may be real or virtualised, depending upon the driver}. Remember, X is a remote protocol underneath: there's no guarantee that the two copies are necessarily on the same computer! Normal applications only get to see the "main memory" copy. Applications that really do need real-time access to the framebuffer can write to the framebuffer memory directly; but only the application that is writing there can read it.
You can enable double-buffering in VLC with a command-line switch, if your PC is fast enough {or you're patient enough to sit through slow and jerky video with dropped frames to get to the bit you want}. Xine has a screenshot button.