By comparison, there are few if any human interface guidelines or cohesive metaphors between multiple pieces of free software that are not driven by the egotism of their authors.
I suspect you're a bit confused by the fact that there are so many different pieces of free software that it's like suggesting that Windows sucks because not all Windows programs look the same.
I should also mention that Apple loves to violate its own human interface guidelines, which pretty much destroys any credibility that statement might've had.
I won't even touch on the pandemic of duplicated effort caused by the free software community's inability to collaborate
And proprietary developers are able to collaborate?
News to me -- I'd always assumed that free software and open source both at least have licenses that allow them to collaborate. Most proprietary software doesn't. How much code is shared between Apple Mail and Microsoft Entourage?
When speaking of user interface quality it's important to be objective.
What the fuck?
How, exactly, can anyone be objective about this? Obviously, you can't:
Apple spends an incredible amount of time and energy making a single, unified interface that will work as best as possible for the entire range of users.
They tested it on the entire range of users, did they?
If not, then it's entirely their opinion -- specifically, often Steve Jobs' opinion -- on which interface will work "as best as possible for the entire range of users."
The Mac is capable of empowering users (even seasoned Linux users) to do far more with much more efficiency, but one must accept the application of its metaphors rather than demanding that it work the way they want and complaining bitterly when it won't.
That is exactly why we use Linux in the first place.
Linux doesn't force us to work the way it wants us to. It lets us work however we want to -- including the OS X way. This is a feature, which allows it to actually support all users, after a bit of tweaking for each user, rather than most users out of the box.
And I find that I do far more, with much more efficiency, without OS X getting in the way. And I did use it for a very long time -- long enough, I think, to understand the "application of its metaphors" (or, in less flowery-bullshit words, the way its UI works).
I needed to connect to the Mac for file sharing and Ubuntu presented me with a GUI scp!
That's nothing. On Kubuntu, KDE supports the "fish" kio-slave. Short of some FUSE hackery, you're not going to get anything like this anywhere else -- type a fish uri into Konqueror (or Dolphin) and I have the equivalent of a GUI SCP, though it's more than just SCP. I can rename files, move them around on the remote server, or open them with local apps -- if I wasn't so comfortable with vim, I might feel a bit more smug about being able to use Kate to edit the fstab on a remote server, which doesn't even have any X/KDE libs, let alone Kate.
It sucked. Linux was difficult to make work, it wasn't a very powerful machine, and it was a PowerPC, which means I can't play Windows games reasonably on it. Nor would win32codecs work, or, of course, anything x86. Then the monitor died, and Apple decided it had died because of physical damage, and thus wasn't covered by the warranty.
And the OS wasn't that great. Zoom is not the same thing as Maximize. I had to tack on virtual desktop support, and it didn't work that well. No package manager meant I had to update everything separately, except for the things which auto-updated, and they'd do that on their own time. There was one particular keybinding which the OS would forget about on every reboot -- I reported this bug to Apple, under terms which basically said that I couldn't tell anyone about that bug.
There were a few things about it, though, that were beautiful.
First, the UI was pretty slick. So of course, I immediately put Beryl on my Linux desktop to laugh at that.
Second, and more troubling: Terminal is actually a better experience for the way I work than any terminal app I've used since. I now use KDE and Konsole, but I've also used aterm, eterm, gnome-terminal, xterm, etc.
Here's what I miss: On OS X, while windows can be managed individually, everything is grouped by application, not window.
I like to have as many terminals open as I reasonably can, all at 80x24 -- on my Powerbook, this turned out to be four, and still have room for Adium and, occasionally, other things, and I'd put my browser, email, etc on other desktops. But the point is for them all to be visible, not to be modal tabs of a window.
On Linux, this means multiple instances of aterm (not a problem, since I could probably run several thousand instances comfortably on my desktop) or Konsole. On OS X, there's only one instance of Terminal. Which makes absolutely no difference until you realize that on OS X, this means there's one Terminal icon on the dock (clicking it raises all Terminal windows and takes you to a workspace with one on it), one menu bar at the top of the screen common to all Terminals...
There's exactly one thing this allowed that I really miss, that I have not been able to duplicate on Linux short of writing it myself -- and haven't had the time to even figure out where to begin on writing it myself. And that is the ability to cycle through all terminals with keystrokes.
I had command+left as "previous terminal window", and command+right as "next terminal window". This is not based on order of use, but order of opening -- so by "cycle through", I mean if I was in the upper-left terminal and I wanted to be in the lower-left one, I would press command+right twice.
I mean, I was SSH'd in to Linux machines 99% of the time, with my only other UI a browser window. There was absolutely nothing tying me to OS X, or even to proprietary software. And yet, the single most efficient way to work was with OS X. Hands down, that workflow beats my current habit of using sloppy focus.
I agree with your essential point that Linux is at least as good, just pointing out that there are a few things remaining, even in Terminal, which are better on OS X than on Linux. Which makes me sad, because how they treated my warranty means I'm not likely to buy an Apple again, if I can help it.
Oh, by the way, why the fuck are you using Win98 as a webserver? Especially when you know Linux?
This is just stupid. This is not 1990. A browser is an integral part of an operating system in 2007. It's a standardized document display application. The operating system depends on it being there.
No, it really doesn't. (My Linux servers do just fine without a browser on them.)
Regarding your analogy, it's not as if Microsoft's TCP/IP stack violates major standards and makes everyone else in the world have to adjust their network hardware/software to be able to ping Windows. Nor is it like Notepad violates ASCII specs -- ok, CR/LF is kind of annoying, but also completely open, transparent, and easy to deal with. And the Windows clock does generally show you the right time. Are you seeing a pattern?
I can see more than just clock companies suing MS if the Windows clock was randomly an hour fast or an hour slow, but your boss would always require you to show up on "Windows time", not the real, reliable time.
If IE was not an overwhelming majority of the browser market, or if IE was forced to comply with standards, Opera would both have to spend less time dealing with web quirks (and just tell non-standard sites to fuck off), and web sites would more likely work with Opera, which increases Opera's value.
Microsoft has every right to create a web browser and integrate it into their other products.
No, they don't. However, KDE, Apple, and even Nintendo, do.
Why? Because Microsoft is a monopoly. Monopolies have to play by different rules.
It is no fundamentally different than Konqueror being the default browser within the KDE environment.
Actually, it is, because I can actually uninstall Konqueror. Dolphin is the new default file manager, and nothing else requires Konqueror. I can then set Firefox or Opera as the default browser.
Now, I like Konqueror, so I keep it around, but that is fundamentally different than IE. If Dell wanted to ship Kubuntu machines with Firefox instead of Konqueror, they could do that. But Dell cannot ship Windows machines with Firefox instead of IE, because you cannot remove IE from Windows.
The catch is, there isn't a demand for that because the very people who would use Opera and Firefox instead of IE wouldn't have any problems installing it on their own. The people that Opera is whining about not having access to, are largely the people who think that Internet Explorer is "The Internet."
Isn't that a legitimate complaint?
More importantly, IE is the least standards-compliant of any browser, STILL. Isn't it damaging to the Web as a whole to have the most popular browser also be the least compliant? It's precisely because of these people you talk about that I can't simply design a page for standards -- I now have to design it once for the standards (tested in Firefox, Konqueror, Safari, and Opera), and then add in a ton of hacks to make it work in IE.
How many people who use IE actually know what a "web browser" is?
I imagine most of them, upon finding a browser wasn't included with their OS, would start asking each other and their geek friends what browser to use, rather than walking right down to the store and buying IE. The reason they assume IE == Internet is because it came with their OS. As soon as they have a choice between a free download and paying for an (arguably) inferior product, which will they choose?
It's not like you can't install another browser if you don't want.
Well, that's semantically weird. Why would I install another browser if I "don't want"? Or do you mean "don't want IE"?
Unbundling it would mean the OS doesn't have a functioning browser
Read TFS, at least? Here, look:
obligate Microsoft to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows and/or carry alternative browsers pre-installed on the desktop
In other words, nothing to prevent them shipping Opera and/or Firefox with Windows, whether or not they unbundle IE.
(not to mention it's built-in to the OS, so removal would be only a cosmetic feat (removing the icon) not actually removing the browser)
And that is absolute bullshit. It is not now, and never was, "built-in to the OS".
There are quite a lot of programs that use the IE ActiveX plugin, but in almost all cases, that works perfectly well using other browser engines instead. For instance: Steam embeds IE, but I can run it on Linux and have Gecko (the Mozilla/Firefox engine) render those message-of-the-day windows.
Or maybe you're confusing Internet Explorer with Windows Explorer? Wouldn't be the first time.
I should also mention that, at least back in Windows 98, someone actually wrote some software which removes IE from the browser, which proves Microsoft was lying (and you believed them, you idiot) about Windows being so tied to IE.
Including other browsers makes more sense, but won't it make Windows even more bloaty?
If you're talking about RAM, you're a moron.
If you're talking about disk space, does that really matter, at this point? Manufacturers frequently sacrifice a few gigabytes for a "restore" partition, and Windows itself is a multi-gigabyte install. Both Firefox and Opera are about five megabytes. I imagine they spent more on Aero graphics.
Is this just a sandy vagina move, or do they have a point?
Are you just an astroturfer, or do you have a point?
Microsoft should've lost the antitrust suit in the US, but then Bush got elected and the suit was "coincidentally" dropped. So give me one good reason why Opera shouldn't be doing this.
Oh. Well, I do respect your opinions, even if you don't respect mine. I still think you're wrong though.
That wasn't sarcastic. I meant that I respect your opinions.
Very perceptive. I do know it. I'm more referring to the lawsuits that aren't faux pas or travesties in justice.
They use the same methods to gather evidence for all of them, which makes all of them suspect.
Consider that evidence has been thrown out because it was obtained without a proper search. I believe in at least one case, this has caused a murderer to go free. We (used to) take our process seriously.
OK, let's just say that there is a certain probability that you will buy a certain piece of media. That figure is, of course, debatable and subjective. Most people would generally agree that it lies between 1 and 0, not inclusive. Whenever most people pirate a piece of media, the probability that they will buy that media falls considerably.
"Most people"?
I know that in at least some cases, the probability that they will buy that media rises considerably. There are still the occasional stories like the Battlestar Galactica remake, whose pilot was rejected, but released onto the Internet. People loved it -- the response was strong enough that the network reconsidered, which is why the show was ever on the air to begin with.
That's ignoring the individual level -- I know I would likely never have bought Firefly without having first seen it in someone else's dorm in college, then downloading it (and Serenity) and watching them in order.
In a sample as big as piracy currently is, I have little to no doubt the **AA is losing money they would have had (i.e. p1,p2~=0), had piracy never existed.
And I still debate that, simply because there are still many, many cases where you'd never know about something, were it not for piracy. Or, more relevantly, a case where the probability rises because of that.
I'm not asserting it one way or another, I think it comes back to "you can't know".
Also, each item is not an island unto itself. There is a total maximum amount of money that a person has, or is willing to spend, on media. Anything they pirate above and beyond that, well, that's probability zero, because they'd never have bought it.
Yes, but they actually put their reputation and money on the line, and were proactive about stopping it. It's adaptation enough for me.
Have they never done that before? They seemed to put up quite a proactive fight against VHS. (They also put their reputation and money on the line, and lost, and then won because VHS gave them a whole new market, while actually costing them nothing from their old market.)
It is slowing down piracy. If it continues to slow much further, and people do use PeerGuardian to cover their tracks, then expect it to become illegal and piracy to slow even more.
How would it become illegal?
I mean, really, how would anyone justify that? "Yes, we're outlawing blacklists. Spamhaus is now illegal."
I wasn't planning to. I know how long NDAs can last.
Far as I know, this one expires when the item in question becomes public knowledge. I don't know if they could enforce it if I did go public, but I have no intention of doing so until we give the stealth approach a try.
I see no reason why stores have more potential than P2P clients.
Well, the biggest reason is, they're preloaded, and/or a prerequisite for using a particular very popular portable media player.
P2P will never reach that level of ubiquity without a huge amount of help. KTorrent came with Kubuntu, but let's face it, Kubuntu is a lot more of a leap, for most people, than uTorrent.
Aside from that, there is a certain level of "close enough" which
For the know-it-all, if you have to, their suggestion of blindsiding them with jargon isn't a bad one, but face it, that may not work. What you really want to do here is tell them that if they can't follow the rules, they are officially cut off from IT. That means potentially cutting them off even from things like the fileserver, which they need to do their job, but absolutely cutting them off from help if things go wrong.
Of course, for that approach, you do kind of need management to be on your side, but I think you could make a good case to management that this kind of policy is a good thing -- at least you're not firing them, right?
I would suggest locking down their computer, and yeah, do that, too. But they may actually know enough to be dangerous, meaning you may not be able to sufficiently lock them down.
For the know-nothing, train them, as much as you possibly can, to be independent. Prime example: my mother. I taught her right-click, and all but lied to her by telling her she couldn't screw anything up. (Really, most of the time, you get an "Are you sure?" dialog if you're about to.) She's now entirely self-sufficient, and only every few months does she have a problem that she actually needs me for. She may be slow, but she's never completely stuck.
If they can't or won't learn, get them fired if you possibly can. If you can't, maybe you want to look for a job. That ties right into Mr. Entitlement -- most people don't consider it their job to know anything about their computers. Even though they need a computer to get their job done, they consider everything to be the IT person's job. If at all possible, slap these people with a message from even higher up to stop eating up IT resources.
Alternatively, get them a mildly sophisticated intern and/or secretary -- something like the know-it-all in terms of knowledge, but not arrogance.
Finger-pointer: Ignore them. Explain (once) that you didn't do anything to their stuff, but really, if they're going to continue to accuse you of things, it's not worth your time to correct them.
If you have to help them, selectively ignore them -- don't respond to any accusatory remarks, just fix the problem and be on your way.
Whiz kid: Well, first of all, he knows more than whoever wrote that article -- if you want non-GPL'd stuff to link to your library, use an LGPL library.
More importantly, try, as much as you can, to get this kid within the rules. That may mean changing some of the rules, too, if there's a good reason for it. And if at all possible, suggest that they take over IT for their own machine, as well as all the responsibility that entails. If they "own" their own machine to an extent, they probably won't be inclined to wreak havok on the rest of your network. And they probably can handle its IT needs, so it's less work for you.
But whatever you do, don't make an enemy of him. Not because he's so fearsome an enemy, but because if you win, you'll be crushing a very good thing.
If you are a whiz kid, well, you could come work for us, we treat our whiz kids well... But seriously, get to know IT, and stay within the rules. If they like you, they might bend some things for you -- which means those are things you don't have to worry about being caught doing.
Unfortunetly, this means the user now has to remember yet another password (unless you use something like smartcards.)
Unless you're logging into a Windows domain, it doesn't matter -- you can simply have it auto-login to that user's account.
And I am starting to like this idea of using Linux-based "FDE" (even if it's not really), so that the entire Windows disk image is encrypted without having to tell Windows you're doing it.
Just wanted to get the point in the clear, so that I can officially say they wasted their money. (Or, excuse me, their taxpayers' money.)
And that's why I love working for a small company. While we are likely to outsource anything we can, we absolutely do not hire underpaid monkeys, even for the kind of job you'd think is perfect for underpaid monkeys. Much better, if you're going to just throw money at the problem (rather than manpower), throw it at a group of experts, not at a pile of software. (So, for example, don't hire a part-time admin with an impressive-looking certificate, hire a hosting company which has a bunch of full-time admins, even if they largely work on servers which aren't yours -- at least they will know what they're doing.)
I will say that the risks of your method, vs, say, having a physically removable boot partition (like I do), are very small -- just as the risks of my method vs a TCPA chip are pretty small.
However, it is still possible to mess with that boot partition you describe, and thus intercept not only the keys and passphrases, but anything else you want later in the boot process -- much moreso than if a hypervisor wasn't used. Really, about the only way to make this entirely tamper-proof is to use some sort of dedicated hardware (like a TCPA chip), which is itself tamper-proof.
Sorry about the "retarded" comment, looks like it wasn't deserved. (I should reserve that for people who actually don't know what they're talking about -- I thought you didn't -- rather than semantic debates.)
We can't stop it, of course, but we can slow it, and we can attempt to force the ones we do catch to reimburse the copyright holder.
Suing the pants off a 12-year-old girl is not about reimbursing anyone, and you know it. She simply doesn't have the money.
And reimburse them for what? First, you have to prove that a pirated movie is a lost sale. (Not legally, just saying, if you don't have that equivalency, then it's not "reimbursing" anything.)
The legitimate industries have already woken up and adapted: they have started a campaign of suing, putting their own resources on the line in order to put a stop to the trend.
Somehow, that doesn't seem so much an adaptation to me. I'm sure they knew how to sue already.
It also doesn't really do much even to slow down piracy. All it does right now is ensure that people use PeerGuardian.
Sounds pretty interesting. I'll put a journal entry up, and you can reply to it when you're ready.
Don't hold your breath, but I'll bookmark that.
(Don't hold your breath because right now, we are focused on HD-DVD. We kick ass at it, and we stand to make fistfulls of money doing it. And the format as a whole may die out within five years, but still, there's probably a good year or two before we get to work on the larger vision.)
I realised. My point was that you're never going to surpass the potential of a P2P network. Bittorrent happens to be a bad example because of its tracking system.
And my point is that no P2P network is going to surpass the potential of a legitimate shop.
One example: iTunes. DRM aside, people have to install iTunes anyway to put stuff on their iPod (or assume they do), so, once they have it installed, the iTunes Music Store really isn't far away at all. If they wanted to use BitTorrent, Gnutella, or anything similar, they'd have to download some (possibly questionable) software, learn to use that (and have it feed into iTunes), learn to spot the fakes and actual viruses from the real content (not hard, but many don't), and risk getting caught -- all to save $0.99 on a song.
Imagine if the songs cost $0.20 instead.
Of course, some people will always pirate. But do the legitimate stores right, and the number will drop significantly -- especially if we know that most of our money is going straight to the band -- maybe not the case with iTunes, but certainly is with some other online stores, and absolutely if it's right off the band's website.
For now they did. What happens when more music is presented this way?
Whatever happens, it can't be worse than the total, catastrophic failure that is the music industry today. As I keep saying (and I hope I'm right), they make most of their money from ringtones. How long until most people have a phone that lets them rip their own ringtones from their own CDs? (Or iPods?)
I think a risky business model is better than a guaranteed-failing one.
Although I will say, that idea I mentioned before has nothing to do with the Radiohead idea -- and I'll also say that I wouldn't mind most bands naming a minimum price, so long as there's no DRM.
I don't really have a problem with the DMCA/DRM either. It's their works, they can do what they want with them in that time
What worries me about that is not entirely the stuff that's protected that way now, but the stuff that might be. For example: What happens when the Presidential debates are only available on, say, YouTube? (Hint: I can't run Flash on 64-bit Linux.)
I need to run out the door soon, so find it yourself, but Stallman wrote an essay about this. I think it's called "The right to read."
Agreed about the term of copyright, though. But here's a question: Will it be legal to circumvent DRM on stuff for which copyright has expired? Will that stuff even be pr
What would you call that first partition on the disk, which houses the (unencrypted) hypervisor? Oh yeah, a boot partition! Maybe not technically a/boot partition, according to Unix philosophy, but it's the same idea.
And before you say it, having the entire thing be in the bootloader in the MBR does not count either.
Which is why you rotate them on more than one tape! Bet no one thought of that before!
(Hint: If last night's tape is entirely hosed, the one from two nights ago should work.)
For bonus points, run the entire image through par2 and keep the parity locally, then include it on the next tape. But that seems kind of pointless, when you have a next tape to begin with.
Not that I know of, but maybe I just don't know. I do know that Eclipse has a plugin (Aptana), which is also available as an IDE in its own right (basically a modified eclipse), which other people at work use for Rails development. But they also do a lot of that from Windows, though some is from OS X.
As someone doing a lot of Flash/Actionscript/Javascript it seems easier and more efficient to use an environment that most folks in the U.S. are using.
Wrong attitude.
The way I see it, the reason it's easier for you to use Windows is, there really isn't an alternative to Flash (the program). Solve that one problem, and Linux wouldn't be a problem for you (I think).
I kind of dread learning the ins and outs of the linux GUI.
Start with Kubuntu. You'll hardly have to learn anything about the GUI; most of what you already knew on Windows is still true. Your biggest challenge would be something not working, and needing to know the exact trick to make it work, even if that trick will seem amazingly simple once you know it -- for instance, probably the first thing you'll want to do is setup Medibuntu, as well.
Now, I am still tied to exactly Windows XP, and although it seems to sort of work with Windows Media Player 11, I should really be tied to WMP 10. I also occasionally need to fire up Visual Studio, to use its debugger. However, Eclipse seems to run better for me on Linux, and all of my Linux partitions can be encrypted, so a Windows virtual machine could be, too -- so if I can ever make a Windows virtual machine work properly, I'll probably use that for work, and only actually boot a physical Windows to play games.
Oddly enough, the game I play most is one that I only play on Linux, under Wine, despite it being a Windows game. It's better that way, actually -- it crashes less often for me than for some Windows people I know, and I can force it to run in a window, which is not easy to do under Windows, but absolute child's play for Wine.
And I do only use Linux on every machine which cannot also be a good gaming machine.
It's such a trip to set up a website with a forum and payment gateway and image uploads, etc. and have it run flawlessly for 2 years without a hitch or reboot.
Yikes, though. There are kernel patches every few months. I mean, 2 years is cool and all, but if you're accepting payments on that thing, you really want to keep it patched. (And on Ubuntu/Debian, that isn't hard -- sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade, and every six months, Google for how to upgrade to the next major version.)
Block ciphers can be used to encrypt/decrypt any data stream, including generic file I/O operations; there is no reason you should think of tape storage media as any different from any other type of media.
*head explodes*
Maybe... durrr... because of the insanely slow seek times that consist of rewinding possibly the entire fucking tape???
Nothing about tape backup requires storage of the items being written in "plaintext."
I'll agree with you there. But the way I'd do that is something like: tar | bzip2 | gpg >/dev/mt0
(Obviously with more arguments, but those would be the basic commands.)
I'd be astonished if the software in question didn't support tape backup devices.
Show me where it does, then.
"Just another device" may not mean what you think it means. It may appear to Windows as just another drive letter, which would be astonishingly stupid, because of the seek issue I just mentioned. (And that's why I suggested tar -- which does stand for "tape archive", after all.) And most crypto software doesn't support every Windows device, because that would be just as astonishingly stupid -- you expect it to support an encrypted mouse? An encrypted video card?
About the only logical solution other than tar, or some similar archive format writing to the raw device, would be a log-structured filesystem. I don't know of any log-structured filesystems for Windows. Perhaps that is what you meant? (If so, I take back my earlier mockery and hang my head in shame.)
Unless you are using FDE (full disk encryption), you just can't trust that Windows or some Windows application won't write your sensitive data in a place you won't think to encrypt.
It is actually possible to be pretty confident of that -- enough that I don't bother with trying to encrypt the whole thing (yet).
I say "yet" because I still intend to do my work with the Windows-specific stuff in a virtual machine, and everything else on Linux -- which means I can throw the VM image on an encrypted partition, and the only thing unencrypted would be my physical Windows install for Steam games.
Even this isn't really, truly secure as it doesn't take care f anything in the Windows swap file.
I'm not sure if it's possible to relocate the Windows swapfile. I believe it's possible to (mostly) disable it. I know it's possible to tell Windows not to swap out a particular chunk of data, so for anything you're really paranoid about, I'm sure you can find some text editor willing to do that. I know GPG, for instance, uses that feature to avoid swapping out decrypted private keys.
My own setup: Postfix/Bincimap/Bogofilter/Maildrop. Plenty of documentation all around.
Of course, I also wrote some custom software that goes somewhere in that stack, so maybe I'm not the right person to say what documentation.
However, I did not put a virus scanner there, as I don't access my email from any mail clients other than Thunderbird and KMail, or any OSes other than Linux. I laugh at virus attempts -- and then train Bogofilter on them.
For my desktop I run windows because I need Adobe Flash.
Just for the hell of it, have you tried that under Wine? And have you considered dual boot / virtualization?
And I'm assuming you're talking about Flash, the authoring suite, and not Flash, the browser plugin. The latter has been on Linux for some time now.
The other possibility is, of course, generating Flash from something else, like OpenLaszlo, but that's almost certainly not a replacement in all cases. (I don't know if you just program Flash, or if you also do the artwork in Flash.)
The reason this was prefixed with "just for the hell of it" is, I, too, have been forced into using Windows at work. But I do use Linux entirely at home, except for the occasional game. Most people don't even go that far.
Actually, the only people who go blind under this system of justice are those who go around poking others people's eyes out.
Does that include those who go around poking convicts' eyes out?
Specifically, do you kill an executioner for killing a murderer?
By the way, "an eye for an eye" also also limits punishment to equality with the offence. This protects against "overpunishment" where the sentence is worse than the crime.
You're almost there...
"An eye for an eye" is a mistranslation. What it actually said was "No more than an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."
As for the prison rape thing, I don't wish that on anyone. It goes against the "eye for an eye principle" because they should already be serving punishement equal to their crime.
In what sense is being locked up for years and years equivalent to being raped?
It only really works, you see, if you include the "no more than" clause above.
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I suspect you're a bit confused by the fact that there are so many different pieces of free software that it's like suggesting that Windows sucks because not all Windows programs look the same.
I should also mention that Apple loves to violate its own human interface guidelines, which pretty much destroys any credibility that statement might've had.
And proprietary developers are able to collaborate?
News to me -- I'd always assumed that free software and open source both at least have licenses that allow them to collaborate. Most proprietary software doesn't. How much code is shared between Apple Mail and Microsoft Entourage?
What the fuck?
How, exactly, can anyone be objective about this? Obviously, you can't:
They tested it on the entire range of users, did they?
If not, then it's entirely their opinion -- specifically, often Steve Jobs' opinion -- on which interface will work "as best as possible for the entire range of users."
That is exactly why we use Linux in the first place.
Linux doesn't force us to work the way it wants us to. It lets us work however we want to -- including the OS X way. This is a feature, which allows it to actually support all users, after a bit of tweaking for each user, rather than most users out of the box.
And I find that I do far more, with much more efficiency, without OS X getting in the way. And I did use it for a very long time -- long enough, I think, to understand the "application of its metaphors" (or, in less flowery-bullshit words, the way its UI works).
That's nothing. On Kubuntu, KDE supports the "fish" kio-slave. Short of some FUSE hackery, you're not going to get anything like this anywhere else -- type a fish uri into Konqueror (or Dolphin) and I have the equivalent of a GUI SCP, though it's more than just SCP. I can rename files, move them around on the remote server, or open them with local apps -- if I wasn't so comfortable with vim, I might feel a bit more smug about being able to use Kate to edit the fstab on a remote server, which doesn't even have any X/KDE libs, let alone Kate.
Isn't an executable stack needed for Wine?
More importantly, what is your job? And what happens when you find those exploits?
I had a Powerbook with Tiger.
It sucked. Linux was difficult to make work, it wasn't a very powerful machine, and it was a PowerPC, which means I can't play Windows games reasonably on it. Nor would win32codecs work, or, of course, anything x86. Then the monitor died, and Apple decided it had died because of physical damage, and thus wasn't covered by the warranty.
And the OS wasn't that great. Zoom is not the same thing as Maximize. I had to tack on virtual desktop support, and it didn't work that well. No package manager meant I had to update everything separately, except for the things which auto-updated, and they'd do that on their own time. There was one particular keybinding which the OS would forget about on every reboot -- I reported this bug to Apple, under terms which basically said that I couldn't tell anyone about that bug.
There were a few things about it, though, that were beautiful.
First, the UI was pretty slick. So of course, I immediately put Beryl on my Linux desktop to laugh at that.
Second, and more troubling: Terminal is actually a better experience for the way I work than any terminal app I've used since. I now use KDE and Konsole, but I've also used aterm, eterm, gnome-terminal, xterm, etc.
Here's what I miss: On OS X, while windows can be managed individually, everything is grouped by application, not window.
I like to have as many terminals open as I reasonably can, all at 80x24 -- on my Powerbook, this turned out to be four, and still have room for Adium and, occasionally, other things, and I'd put my browser, email, etc on other desktops. But the point is for them all to be visible, not to be modal tabs of a window.
On Linux, this means multiple instances of aterm (not a problem, since I could probably run several thousand instances comfortably on my desktop) or Konsole. On OS X, there's only one instance of Terminal. Which makes absolutely no difference until you realize that on OS X, this means there's one Terminal icon on the dock (clicking it raises all Terminal windows and takes you to a workspace with one on it), one menu bar at the top of the screen common to all Terminals...
There's exactly one thing this allowed that I really miss, that I have not been able to duplicate on Linux short of writing it myself -- and haven't had the time to even figure out where to begin on writing it myself. And that is the ability to cycle through all terminals with keystrokes.
I had command+left as "previous terminal window", and command+right as "next terminal window". This is not based on order of use, but order of opening -- so by "cycle through", I mean if I was in the upper-left terminal and I wanted to be in the lower-left one, I would press command+right twice.
I mean, I was SSH'd in to Linux machines 99% of the time, with my only other UI a browser window. There was absolutely nothing tying me to OS X, or even to proprietary software. And yet, the single most efficient way to work was with OS X. Hands down, that workflow beats my current habit of using sloppy focus.
I agree with your essential point that Linux is at least as good, just pointing out that there are a few things remaining, even in Terminal, which are better on OS X than on Linux. Which makes me sad, because how they treated my warranty means I'm not likely to buy an Apple again, if I can help it.
Oh, by the way, why the fuck are you using Win98 as a webserver? Especially when you know Linux?
No, it really doesn't. (My Linux servers do just fine without a browser on them.)
Regarding your analogy, it's not as if Microsoft's TCP/IP stack violates major standards and makes everyone else in the world have to adjust their network hardware/software to be able to ping Windows. Nor is it like Notepad violates ASCII specs -- ok, CR/LF is kind of annoying, but also completely open, transparent, and easy to deal with. And the Windows clock does generally show you the right time. Are you seeing a pattern?
I can see more than just clock companies suing MS if the Windows clock was randomly an hour fast or an hour slow, but your boss would always require you to show up on "Windows time", not the real, reliable time.
If IE was not an overwhelming majority of the browser market, or if IE was forced to comply with standards, Opera would both have to spend less time dealing with web quirks (and just tell non-standard sites to fuck off), and web sites would more likely work with Opera, which increases Opera's value.
No, they don't. However, KDE, Apple, and even Nintendo, do.
Why? Because Microsoft is a monopoly. Monopolies have to play by different rules.
Actually, it is, because I can actually uninstall Konqueror. Dolphin is the new default file manager, and nothing else requires Konqueror. I can then set Firefox or Opera as the default browser.
Now, I like Konqueror, so I keep it around, but that is fundamentally different than IE. If Dell wanted to ship Kubuntu machines with Firefox instead of Konqueror, they could do that. But Dell cannot ship Windows machines with Firefox instead of IE, because you cannot remove IE from Windows.
Isn't that a legitimate complaint?
More importantly, IE is the least standards-compliant of any browser, STILL. Isn't it damaging to the Web as a whole to have the most popular browser also be the least compliant? It's precisely because of these people you talk about that I can't simply design a page for standards -- I now have to design it once for the standards (tested in Firefox, Konqueror, Safari, and Opera), and then add in a ton of hacks to make it work in IE.
How many people who use IE actually know what a "web browser" is?
I imagine most of them, upon finding a browser wasn't included with their OS, would start asking each other and their geek friends what browser to use, rather than walking right down to the store and buying IE. The reason they assume IE == Internet is because it came with their OS. As soon as they have a choice between a free download and paying for an (arguably) inferior product, which will they choose?
Well, that's semantically weird. Why would I install another browser if I "don't want"? Or do you mean "don't want IE"?
Read TFS, at least? Here, look:
In other words, nothing to prevent them shipping Opera and/or Firefox with Windows, whether or not they unbundle IE.
And that is absolute bullshit. It is not now, and never was, "built-in to the OS".
There are quite a lot of programs that use the IE ActiveX plugin, but in almost all cases, that works perfectly well using other browser engines instead. For instance: Steam embeds IE, but I can run it on Linux and have Gecko (the Mozilla/Firefox engine) render those message-of-the-day windows.
Or maybe you're confusing Internet Explorer with Windows Explorer? Wouldn't be the first time.
I should also mention that, at least back in Windows 98, someone actually wrote some software which removes IE from the browser, which proves Microsoft was lying (and you believed them, you idiot) about Windows being so tied to IE.
If you're talking about RAM, you're a moron.
If you're talking about disk space, does that really matter, at this point? Manufacturers frequently sacrifice a few gigabytes for a "restore" partition, and Windows itself is a multi-gigabyte install. Both Firefox and Opera are about five megabytes. I imagine they spent more on Aero graphics.
Are you just an astroturfer, or do you have a point?
Microsoft should've lost the antitrust suit in the US, but then Bush got elected and the suit was "coincidentally" dropped. So give me one good reason why Opera shouldn't be doing this.
That wasn't sarcastic. I meant that I respect your opinions.
They use the same methods to gather evidence for all of them, which makes all of them suspect.
Consider that evidence has been thrown out because it was obtained without a proper search. I believe in at least one case, this has caused a murderer to go free. We (used to) take our process seriously.
"Most people"?
I know that in at least some cases, the probability that they will buy that media rises considerably. There are still the occasional stories like the Battlestar Galactica remake, whose pilot was rejected, but released onto the Internet. People loved it -- the response was strong enough that the network reconsidered, which is why the show was ever on the air to begin with.
That's ignoring the individual level -- I know I would likely never have bought Firefly without having first seen it in someone else's dorm in college, then downloading it (and Serenity) and watching them in order.
And I still debate that, simply because there are still many, many cases where you'd never know about something, were it not for piracy. Or, more relevantly, a case where the probability rises because of that.
I'm not asserting it one way or another, I think it comes back to "you can't know".
Also, each item is not an island unto itself. There is a total maximum amount of money that a person has, or is willing to spend, on media. Anything they pirate above and beyond that, well, that's probability zero, because they'd never have bought it.
Have they never done that before? They seemed to put up quite a proactive fight against VHS. (They also put their reputation and money on the line, and lost, and then won because VHS gave them a whole new market, while actually costing them nothing from their old market.)
How would it become illegal?
I mean, really, how would anyone justify that? "Yes, we're outlawing blacklists. Spamhaus is now illegal."
Far as I know, this one expires when the item in question becomes public knowledge. I don't know if they could enforce it if I did go public, but I have no intention of doing so until we give the stealth approach a try.
Well, the biggest reason is, they're preloaded, and/or a prerequisite for using a particular very popular portable media player.
P2P will never reach that level of ubiquity without a huge amount of help. KTorrent came with Kubuntu, but let's face it, Kubuntu is a lot more of a leap, for most people, than uTorrent.
Aside from that, there is a certain level of "close enough" which
But you're claiming someone was simultaneously a Jew Puppet and Hitler?
For the know-it-all, if you have to, their suggestion of blindsiding them with jargon isn't a bad one, but face it, that may not work. What you really want to do here is tell them that if they can't follow the rules, they are officially cut off from IT. That means potentially cutting them off even from things like the fileserver, which they need to do their job, but absolutely cutting them off from help if things go wrong.
Of course, for that approach, you do kind of need management to be on your side, but I think you could make a good case to management that this kind of policy is a good thing -- at least you're not firing them, right?
I would suggest locking down their computer, and yeah, do that, too. But they may actually know enough to be dangerous, meaning you may not be able to sufficiently lock them down.
For the know-nothing, train them, as much as you possibly can, to be independent. Prime example: my mother. I taught her right-click, and all but lied to her by telling her she couldn't screw anything up. (Really, most of the time, you get an "Are you sure?" dialog if you're about to.) She's now entirely self-sufficient, and only every few months does she have a problem that she actually needs me for. She may be slow, but she's never completely stuck.
If they can't or won't learn, get them fired if you possibly can. If you can't, maybe you want to look for a job. That ties right into Mr. Entitlement -- most people don't consider it their job to know anything about their computers. Even though they need a computer to get their job done, they consider everything to be the IT person's job. If at all possible, slap these people with a message from even higher up to stop eating up IT resources.
Alternatively, get them a mildly sophisticated intern and/or secretary -- something like the know-it-all in terms of knowledge, but not arrogance.
Finger-pointer: Ignore them. Explain (once) that you didn't do anything to their stuff, but really, if they're going to continue to accuse you of things, it's not worth your time to correct them.
If you have to help them, selectively ignore them -- don't respond to any accusatory remarks, just fix the problem and be on your way.
Whiz kid: Well, first of all, he knows more than whoever wrote that article -- if you want non-GPL'd stuff to link to your library, use an LGPL library.
More importantly, try, as much as you can, to get this kid within the rules. That may mean changing some of the rules, too, if there's a good reason for it. And if at all possible, suggest that they take over IT for their own machine, as well as all the responsibility that entails. If they "own" their own machine to an extent, they probably won't be inclined to wreak havok on the rest of your network. And they probably can handle its IT needs, so it's less work for you.
But whatever you do, don't make an enemy of him. Not because he's so fearsome an enemy, but because if you win, you'll be crushing a very good thing.
If you are a whiz kid, well, you could come work for us, we treat our whiz kids well... But seriously, get to know IT, and stay within the rules. If they like you, they might bend some things for you -- which means those are things you don't have to worry about being caught doing.
Don't feel bad, I'm sure there are lots of people out there, who, just like you, can't turn...
Well, hey, at least UPS trucks can't turn left!
Unless you're logging into a Windows domain, it doesn't matter -- you can simply have it auto-login to that user's account.
And I am starting to like this idea of using Linux-based "FDE" (even if it's not really), so that the entire Windows disk image is encrypted without having to tell Windows you're doing it.
Just wanted to get the point in the clear, so that I can officially say they wasted their money. (Or, excuse me, their taxpayers' money.)
And that's why I love working for a small company. While we are likely to outsource anything we can, we absolutely do not hire underpaid monkeys, even for the kind of job you'd think is perfect for underpaid monkeys. Much better, if you're going to just throw money at the problem (rather than manpower), throw it at a group of experts, not at a pile of software. (So, for example, don't hire a part-time admin with an impressive-looking certificate, hire a hosting company which has a bunch of full-time admins, even if they largely work on servers which aren't yours -- at least they will know what they're doing.)
I will say that the risks of your method, vs, say, having a physically removable boot partition (like I do), are very small -- just as the risks of my method vs a TCPA chip are pretty small.
However, it is still possible to mess with that boot partition you describe, and thus intercept not only the keys and passphrases, but anything else you want later in the boot process -- much moreso than if a hypervisor wasn't used. Really, about the only way to make this entirely tamper-proof is to use some sort of dedicated hardware (like a TCPA chip), which is itself tamper-proof.
Sorry about the "retarded" comment, looks like it wasn't deserved. (I should reserve that for people who actually don't know what they're talking about -- I thought you didn't -- rather than semantic debates.)
Suing the pants off a 12-year-old girl is not about reimbursing anyone, and you know it. She simply doesn't have the money.
And reimburse them for what? First, you have to prove that a pirated movie is a lost sale. (Not legally, just saying, if you don't have that equivalency, then it's not "reimbursing" anything.)
Somehow, that doesn't seem so much an adaptation to me. I'm sure they knew how to sue already.
It also doesn't really do much even to slow down piracy. All it does right now is ensure that people use PeerGuardian.
Don't hold your breath, but I'll bookmark that.
(Don't hold your breath because right now, we are focused on HD-DVD. We kick ass at it, and we stand to make fistfulls of money doing it. And the format as a whole may die out within five years, but still, there's probably a good year or two before we get to work on the larger vision.)
And my point is that no P2P network is going to surpass the potential of a legitimate shop.
One example: iTunes. DRM aside, people have to install iTunes anyway to put stuff on their iPod (or assume they do), so, once they have it installed, the iTunes Music Store really isn't far away at all. If they wanted to use BitTorrent, Gnutella, or anything similar, they'd have to download some (possibly questionable) software, learn to use that (and have it feed into iTunes), learn to spot the fakes and actual viruses from the real content (not hard, but many don't), and risk getting caught -- all to save $0.99 on a song.
Imagine if the songs cost $0.20 instead.
Of course, some people will always pirate. But do the legitimate stores right, and the number will drop significantly -- especially if we know that most of our money is going straight to the band -- maybe not the case with iTunes, but certainly is with some other online stores, and absolutely if it's right off the band's website.
Whatever happens, it can't be worse than the total, catastrophic failure that is the music industry today. As I keep saying (and I hope I'm right), they make most of their money from ringtones. How long until most people have a phone that lets them rip their own ringtones from their own CDs? (Or iPods?)
I think a risky business model is better than a guaranteed-failing one.
Although I will say, that idea I mentioned before has nothing to do with the Radiohead idea -- and I'll also say that I wouldn't mind most bands naming a minimum price, so long as there's no DRM.
What worries me about that is not entirely the stuff that's protected that way now, but the stuff that might be. For example: What happens when the Presidential debates are only available on, say, YouTube? (Hint: I can't run Flash on 64-bit Linux.)
I need to run out the door soon, so find it yourself, but Stallman wrote an essay about this. I think it's called "The right to read."
Agreed about the term of copyright, though. But here's a question: Will it be legal to circumvent DRM on stuff for which copyright has expired? Will that stuff even be pr
Or are you just playing devil's advocate?
/boot partition, according to Unix philosophy, but it's the same idea.
What would you call that first partition on the disk, which houses the (unencrypted) hypervisor? Oh yeah, a boot partition! Maybe not technically a
And before you say it, having the entire thing be in the bootloader in the MBR does not count either.
Which is why you rotate them on more than one tape! Bet no one thought of that before!
(Hint: If last night's tape is entirely hosed, the one from two nights ago should work.)
For bonus points, run the entire image through par2 and keep the parity locally, then include it on the next tape. But that seems kind of pointless, when you have a next tape to begin with.
Not that I know of, but maybe I just don't know. I do know that Eclipse has a plugin (Aptana), which is also available as an IDE in its own right (basically a modified eclipse), which other people at work use for Rails development. But they also do a lot of that from Windows, though some is from OS X.
Wrong attitude.
The way I see it, the reason it's easier for you to use Windows is, there really isn't an alternative to Flash (the program). Solve that one problem, and Linux wouldn't be a problem for you (I think).
Start with Kubuntu. You'll hardly have to learn anything about the GUI; most of what you already knew on Windows is still true. Your biggest challenge would be something not working, and needing to know the exact trick to make it work, even if that trick will seem amazingly simple once you know it -- for instance, probably the first thing you'll want to do is setup Medibuntu, as well.
Now, I am still tied to exactly Windows XP, and although it seems to sort of work with Windows Media Player 11, I should really be tied to WMP 10. I also occasionally need to fire up Visual Studio, to use its debugger. However, Eclipse seems to run better for me on Linux, and all of my Linux partitions can be encrypted, so a Windows virtual machine could be, too -- so if I can ever make a Windows virtual machine work properly, I'll probably use that for work, and only actually boot a physical Windows to play games.
Oddly enough, the game I play most is one that I only play on Linux, under Wine, despite it being a Windows game. It's better that way, actually -- it crashes less often for me than for some Windows people I know, and I can force it to run in a window, which is not easy to do under Windows, but absolute child's play for Wine.
And I do only use Linux on every machine which cannot also be a good gaming machine.
Yikes, though. There are kernel patches every few months. I mean, 2 years is cool and all, but if you're accepting payments on that thing, you really want to keep it patched. (And on Ubuntu/Debian, that isn't hard -- sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade, and every six months, Google for how to upgrade to the next major version.)
*head explodes*
Maybe... durrr... because of the insanely slow seek times that consist of rewinding possibly the entire fucking tape???
I'll agree with you there. But the way I'd do that is something like: tar | bzip2 | gpg > /dev/mt0
(Obviously with more arguments, but those would be the basic commands.)
Show me where it does, then.
"Just another device" may not mean what you think it means. It may appear to Windows as just another drive letter, which would be astonishingly stupid, because of the seek issue I just mentioned. (And that's why I suggested tar -- which does stand for "tape archive", after all.) And most crypto software doesn't support every Windows device, because that would be just as astonishingly stupid -- you expect it to support an encrypted mouse? An encrypted video card?
About the only logical solution other than tar, or some similar archive format writing to the raw device, would be a log-structured filesystem. I don't know of any log-structured filesystems for Windows. Perhaps that is what you meant? (If so, I take back my earlier mockery and hang my head in shame.)
It is actually possible to be pretty confident of that -- enough that I don't bother with trying to encrypt the whole thing (yet).
I say "yet" because I still intend to do my work with the Windows-specific stuff in a virtual machine, and everything else on Linux -- which means I can throw the VM image on an encrypted partition, and the only thing unencrypted would be my physical Windows install for Steam games.
I'm not sure if it's possible to relocate the Windows swapfile. I believe it's possible to (mostly) disable it. I know it's possible to tell Windows not to swap out a particular chunk of data, so for anything you're really paranoid about, I'm sure you can find some text editor willing to do that. I know GPG, for instance, uses that feature to avoid swapping out decrypted private keys.
My own setup: Postfix/Bincimap/Bogofilter/Maildrop. Plenty of documentation all around.
Of course, I also wrote some custom software that goes somewhere in that stack, so maybe I'm not the right person to say what documentation.
However, I did not put a virus scanner there, as I don't access my email from any mail clients other than Thunderbird and KMail, or any OSes other than Linux. I laugh at virus attempts -- and then train Bogofilter on them.
Just for the hell of it, have you tried that under Wine? And have you considered dual boot / virtualization?
And I'm assuming you're talking about Flash, the authoring suite, and not Flash, the browser plugin. The latter has been on Linux for some time now.
The other possibility is, of course, generating Flash from something else, like OpenLaszlo, but that's almost certainly not a replacement in all cases. (I don't know if you just program Flash, or if you also do the artwork in Flash.)
The reason this was prefixed with "just for the hell of it" is, I, too, have been forced into using Windows at work. But I do use Linux entirely at home, except for the occasional game. Most people don't even go that far.
Does that include those who go around poking convicts' eyes out?
Specifically, do you kill an executioner for killing a murderer?
You're almost there...
"An eye for an eye" is a mistranslation. What it actually said was "No more than an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."
In what sense is being locked up for years and years equivalent to being raped?
It only really works, you see, if you include the "no more than" clause above.
And then what do the criminals do, when you've taken their eye? They see themselves as victims, you know...
Justice shouldn't be based on who deserves what.