They're not, really. They don't affect me at all. The reasons that they don't affect me are things that everyone has the capability of doing:
I keep my computers secure. I'm on Linux, so it's easy, but it's not much harder on Windows.
I run a decent spamfilter.
I use an ISP which can provide all of the bandwidth that I use, and more. In fact, they intend to offer a fiber-to-the-home service soon (if they don't already).
#1 and #2 are within reach of just about everyone. The only people who can't do this are people who are not technically minded, can't afford to hire someone who is for an hour or two, and don't have the time to follow instructions from a website or IRC channel.
#3 is a somewhat bigger issue, because it's not available everywhere. But even an ISP without a lot of bandwidth could do better than this -- detect people sending spam, contact them, and if they don't remove the software themselves, block their outbound port 25, or their whole computer.
And that, by the way, is quite different than intercepting and modifying ALL connection attempts to a specific server on a specific port. Blocking outbound port 25 is annoying, yes, but justifiable if the user is sending spam. But I don't think there's anything illegal about participating in a botnet, and that's what this punishes. It doesn't punish the botnet creator, it punishes anyone using efnet from that ISP.
If admins don't take it into their own hands, nobody is going to do anything.
So what?
The solution to this being a strain on their networks is, stop selling "unlimited bandwidth*" that you can't provide, and start actually lighting up more fiber.
The solution to this being a strain on my inbox is, get a decent spam filtering solution, and tie it in with a rate-limiting tarpit.
The solution to this being a hassle for the users is, educate them. If they refuse to be educated, they can't complain to you when their computer's slow.
Would it be better if we could get the politicians and law enforcement involved? Yes. But it's not needed, and it's certainly not something for you to take into your own hands by ruining someone else's service.
It's kind of like, if you were a landlord and one of your tenants started blasting loud music, you can go talk to them, you can try to get them evicted and call the police, and so on. But if none of that works, I really don't think that makes it ok for you to cut power to an entire building just to turn off the damn noise from one apartment.
A DNS response to a widespread bot infection, a worm attack, or other overwhelming threat would be to claim SOA for the offending domain on your network, and resolve the entire domain to 127.0.0.1. Even that's sketchy
Indeed. It goes even farther -- I don't particularly like efnet, but I do imagine there are still legitimate chat and discussions going on between real human beings. So resolving it to localhost means legitimate connections that have nothing to do with the botnet are dropped in order to stop the botnet.
The only correct response to this is to sniff the legit connections for what looks like botnet activity (and even that's "a little sketchy", as you put it), and then notify those people that they seem to have a botnet installed. If it was SpamBotFoo, your next step is to watch that user's outbound SMTP, and if they are sending spam, tell them to stop. Third step, you block their account until they remove the bot.
This is better because it's a long process, and there's always the option for the user to opt out -- to say something like "Ok, I'll just disconnect that computer" or "Actually, that was a sample spam, and no one should be reporting it."
it is not illegal for me to modify my DNS server, even if you use it.
But you shouldn't be allowed to sell it as internet access, if it doesn't behave properly. You can sell it, just not as internet access.
I would very much like to see this kind of stuff enforced. For example, far too many CDs and DVDs sold today use copy protection schemes (on top of the ones built into the DVD spec) including intentionally breaking certain parts of the spec, often with the assumption that a DVD player will use a more simplistic way of reading the disc. In the case of DVDs, one really dumb example involved a disc which had an intentionally corrupt filesystem, since most DVD players don't actually read the filesystem for most things -- the files themselves refer to each other by their physical layout on the disc.
Obviously, you can't prevent someone from creating such a beast. But you should be able to prevent them from calling it a DVD.
It should be that way with Internet access. At the very least, I would really like to see all ISPs which are net-neutral come up with a new name for Internet access and trademark it. Something like "Pure Internet", maybe... That way, at the very least, us geeks would know which ISPs to recommend and which ones to avoid.
Weird moderation. "Troll" I could see, but this is a valid analogy.
In short: Who appointed you judge?
At length: Stopping botnets may be a noble cause, but who gets to decide what's a botnet and what's not, or which services/servers may be blocked and which ones may not? If TimeWarner is allowed to do this, what's stopping them from blocking downloads of Firefox, or preventing you from browsing to, say comcast.net?
Tell you what -- I don't really mind what they intercept and read, since I use crypto for anything I really care about. So the right thing for them to do here would be, sniff the network, and send email to the owner of any machine that appears to be infected. Then, let them deal with it.
black-listing sites that do not prevent themselves from being used in the command-control of a bot-net
Ok, question: Why is this now the site's responsibility?
I mean, I can even understand blocking a server that sends spam, because at least that's directly and actively causing harm. But while a botnet is harmful, I really don't see how an IRC channel is -- not directly.
But even in that case, I'm sorry, but TimeWarner should NOT be doing this on behalf of me without my knowledge and consent, and I don't mean "you signed the service agreement, sucks to be you". I mean, I should be able to easily opt out of any and all attempts by them to filter/hijack my Internet, if I'm paying them. (I'm actually not, but you get the idea.)
I thought the whole point of any part of a company is to make money. That's the whole "bottom line" argument, the excuse people like to drag out whenever they want to justify corporations doing truly evil things -- "because it makes money, and a corporation has to make money."
I guess I just don't get how making someone aware of your brand or product makes you any money at all, unless someone buys it. And didn't we learn that lesson from popup ads? Pissing your customers off is generally not a good way to make them want to buy your product, or even give the ad a moment of your attention.
In other words, you don't matter, because even if your attitude was the usual one, they probably need less than 1% of the people looking at these ads to respond in order to justify what it's costing them.
Now, what does work is, boycotting the game. Here, if they sell 20% less copies, or 50% less copies, even if the other 50% are buying Coke/Pepsi/BonziBuddy/Viagra/whatever like mad, the game company itself might decide to stop selling ads -- whereas even if your method worked, it would probably just result in some other advertiser moving in.
Having an OS that does unnecessary swapping it probably worse than not swapping at all.
The point is, an OS is better equipped to figure out what's "unnecessary" than you are.
Let's take, for example, an applet I have in my system tray called KArm. It's a time logger -- lets me punch in and punch out to separate projects, so I can charge an hourly rate.
Right now, I'm not using it at all. Haven't used it for hours. Not likely to for hours. So the ideal thing to do would be to close it and open it again later, but it's handy to have there, and I bet it takes more time to start it than to pull it out of swap.
So, let's say it can swap out, oh, 10 megs. I now have 10 megs more for disk cache and a write buffer. All that has to do is save me 20 megs of disk IO -- an easy task, if I'm doing enough IO for Linux to want to swap stuff out in the first place -- and it's worth it. Worth it in performance, disk wear, and decreased battery life.
In short, writing to the swap file is no worse than writing to a disk, unless, like you say, you're on Windows and Windows feels like swapping things stupidly.
The generic interface that comes with the browse is not only different on each browser, but on each system, and if they have certain plugins installed.
So they force us to use Flash, which is crappy everywhere, and is -- guess what? -- a plugin that they have to install.
But why not just let 'em have whatever plugin they want? On some platforms, I want to be able to go fullscreen. On most platforms, my native video player knows how to use hardware to do the video and the scaling.
If you're worried about the plugin not being installed, really, anything that comes with Flash is going to at least come with something that can play mpeg2 (.mpg) files. Flash forces you to flv and to the codecs it supports, and I doubt any of those are better than mpeg2.
adds to it with the other suggested clips at the end, etc.
So drop "suggested clips" from the end -- that feature is already there (in standard HTML/CSS/AJAX/etc) on the page, it doesn't need to be at the end of every movie.
Any other feature we desperately need that we couldn't do without Flash?
I've never found Flash to be slow on any system I've ever used it on. Maybe it took up a crazy amount of resources, as noted, but not slow.
Fair enough. But don't assume that just because resources are available that they're "free". I don't want my laptop putting out tons of heat into my balls because someone was lazy enough to use Flash, and not provide an alternative.
People go to Youtube because it works well, not because it's there.
Indeed. In fact, it works so well that people create ways of using youtube from Xbox Media Center, the iPhone, etc. I guarantee that most of these don't run Flash natively, which means they have to code around the fact that Youtube uses flash, and not something else.
It's hard to say whether it would have gone one way or another, but I bet if you told people there was a new website up that lets you watch all kinds of videos for free, and it's really amazingly simple and easy to use, and you just have to download Firefox...
75% of gamers engage with at least one ad per minute across most, but not all, game types; 81% of gamers engage at least every other minute
And it goes on.
So my question: How does this justify calling them "effective"?
I realize that marketing thinks that no PR is bad PR, but in the real world, I'm not convinced. That gamer might be "engaging" with that particular ad by firing rockets at it, "teabagging" it, or otherwise using it to vent their rage at that particular product, or at the very idea of sticking an ad in the middle of a game.
But seriously, I want everyone to go back and think about those "Punch the monkey and win!" web ads from the 90's. Do you even remember what it was an ad for? What about the popups for... some Internet camera? It's certainly not going to make me go out of my way to buy the product. It MAY make me subconsciously more likely to notice the product. But if it ever gets conscious -- if I ever see a physical product, for example, and remember it having something to do with "punch the monkey" -- I'll probably punch the product. Maybe physically -- right there on the supermarket shelf.
In other words -- I strongly suspect the lighter ads are much more likely to be things we'd want to buy. If you create a giant, animated, flashing billboard and stick it in the middle of a medieval dungeon, then no, that's where I take the game back to the store, claim it "wouldn't work on my computer", and ask for my money back.
In another study, parents are more likely to "engage" with children who say "Are we there yet?" every five seconds than children who shut the fuck up and look out the window.
You did quote an example here -- but yes, this is probably my favorite way to do a merge, or an "unfork". Given fork A and fork B, pick fork B, port the features you miss from fork A, then drop A and use B.
But it is quite similar to gcc/egcs, in that the egcs fork got far enough ahead that the gcc people adopted it and "abandoned" their own new gcc version. I strongly suspect, however, that anything gcc had that egcs didn't was ported over before egcs was blessed as the new gcc.
Swap means that stuff that genuinely is NEVER used can be swapped out and forgotten about. That means more space for a disk cache or a write buffer, which, in turn, means fewer writes to the disk.
I've heard (but not checked for myself) that javascript runs in the same thread as the UI stuff, and that includes AJAX. It's horribly short-sighted of them.
Actually, it's very smart of them in one sense -- the UI stuff is mostly written in AJAX, after all. Or DHTML, or whatever buzzword you like -- it's in XUL and JavaScript.
What's short-sighted of them is how much they haven't threaded even in their UI -- I really don't see any reason for Javascript to be less suited for threading than any other language.
If there were a way to do all that stuff in straight HTML, then Flash would never have had a reason to exist or get popular.
Well, video, for example, has been supported by <embed> forever, in all browsers, and in an open way (so it works on Linux). There was absolutely no reason for YouTube etc to go with Flash, except (maybe) that it makes it (slightly) harder to copy the video.
But Flash isn't for programmers, it's for designers.
That's no excuse for it being retardedly slow.
If there were a way to do all that stuff in straight HTML, then Flash would never have had a reason to exist or get popular... The Canvas stuff can apparently do a lot of it now, but it STILL doesn't do well at tying graphics, audio and interaction together well, from what I've seen.
I'm fairly sure that we've had SVG and such available for awhile, but I'll have to take your word for it not being good at tying them together.
As for not working on IE, people would download Firefox if they needed it for Youtube or something like that.
you don't have this feeling of these hundreds of threads demanding your attention....If you are wondering, I might get only about 30/40 emails a day, and I may write only 20 or so, but still it's a chore.
I'll take that trade, if I can be more productive with only a sort of lingering bad feeling that I can ignore.
In email, a lot of the messages I get are sent to more than one person: workplace mailing lists, even the usual habit of CCs. The junk accumulates, and this is a bigger problem than spam, as there are no effective automatic filters for workplace mailing-lists.
That just means the mailing list isn't set up properly. I can certainly filter all of LKML, for example, into its own folder.
In other words: You might still have just as much crap there, but it's much easier when you know that the things sent specifically to you are meant for you, with at least a large chunk of their attention. You can then go look through the workplace-mailing-list-folder, or the workplace forum even, and read/skim through 20 or so much more quickly when you're in the mindset of "reading the mailing list" -- just as you can go through the spam in your "unsure" folder (if your spamfilter is smart enough to have one) much quicker when you're in the "skim through spam for false positives" mode.
Compare that to traditional IM -- if your workplace mailing list could be implemented over IM, it would be something popping up all the time with random things demanding your attention.
I can archive my e-mail discussions, save them to an mbox file and load them into most other mail applications.
Please, please, please let mbox die a well deserved death. Use maildir instead.
With maildir, your email files are stored on-disk in pretty much the same format that you could use to export or import a single email from, say, Outlook -- or, in other words, pretty much exactly the same way they were received by the mailserver, plus whatever headers that mailserver liked to add.
Also, maildir is supported pretty much everywhere, including IMAP and some web email apps. It's generally supported as the format used internally, meaning you don't even have to move your stuff to access it with other apps.
It's also faster -- modifying anything in the middle of an mbox file means you have to recreate the entire file -- or, if you're very clever, you might only add things after that point. To grab all the headers from an mbox file (or to search through them), you have to read the entire file, attachments and all, for the entire mailbox/folder. With maildir, you can delete one file at a time, and grabbing all the headers involves reading the beginning of a bunch of little files, instead of scanning through one HUGE one.
In fact, I've had maildir perform well with around 50,000 files (totalling around 750 megs) in an IMAP folder. It only started to slow down when I switched from Thunderbird to Kmail -- although, since Kmail is faster at everything else, I've settled for creating separate archive folders every few months.
And most importantly, it's more reliable. If your mbox file isn't locked properly (so more than one thing is trying to access it), or your system crashes in the middle of a deletion -- any of these, if you've got a decent journalling filesystem, you're guaranteed not to lose mail, much less corrupt your mailbox. And even if it did, somehow -- bad physical disk, maybe -- you're much more likely to lose a few files than the entire mailbox, whereas with mbox, who knows?
That's not possible with all that web-based stuff.
You've obviously never used gtalk on gmail.
With some IM programs exporting works, too, but it's hard or impossible to import those discussions elsewhere.
If by "document" you meant "message log", it's really not. All three of the IM programs I've used lately -- Gaim (now Pidgin), Adium, and Kopete -- all use some sort of HTML format under the hood, which means worst case, you can search them as HTML. I haven't had Gaim or Pidgin installed for awhile, but Kerry/Beagle will not only index and search my old Gaim conversations, it'll open a nice, native KDE app to browse through them.
I can't really organize them well, though, so you're right about that. I can search them, though, and for IM conversations, that seems to be enough.
The big difference between IM and email is, IMs generally won't be ignored (because the next time you want to talk to that person, you'll see what they had to say)...
But, you can certainly put them off as long as you want.
They also can be answered immediately, which is nice, even if it's someone bugging you for information -- often, an interactive format is best. Take a friend asking me for computer help -- if it's IM, I can ask them things like "what's your browser/OS/whatever" and ask them to try something and not be waiting a day for a response -- or vice versa for them. That works a LOT better for me -- I'm good at focusing on a task until it's done, rather than putting two minutes of thought into it and forgetting it till tomorrow.
As for it being a substitute for the phone -- well, I can effectively carry on three or four separate IM conversations at once, just as I can carry on ten or twenty email/forum/whatever conversations at once. Worst case, I'm making someone wait for me to type a reply, but they could just as easily be in their own three or four conversations, or simply be doing something else (browsing the Web, usually) while they wait.
But I can only really carry on one phone conversation at once. And it's a lot easier to copy and paste a URL over IM, so if I really need to help someone, it's fastest with both -- something like Skype.
I wouldn't replace email with IM, and I wouldn't replace IM with email. If anything, I'd merge them. IM is currently not very good at doing delayed communication, or sorting past conversations (or incoming ones). Email is currently not very good for delivering urgent information, or knowing whether someone's available (although IM can be bad when most people set status to "away/idle" when they're available or "available" when they're gone). And neither integrates particularly well with good voice or video.
This is the third post of yours that I'm replying to. You must be either 13 years old or intentionally playing dumb -- the spelling errors are making it hard to read. It's "whole" when you mean complete, not "hole". In fact, "hole", as in security hole, is the opposite of "whole", as in complete.
A single download side with a single directory per version would be a good start.
Great, so when there's some tiny security patch in some library, you have to go re-download the entire fucking library. But hey, at least you know you've now got KDE version 3.5.6 build 135812903510912385709123, and not build 135812903510912385709122 or 135812903510912385709124.
Fortunately, the KDE developers aren't as stupid as you are. Trying to install the "kde" package suggests an additional 158 packages on Ubuntu -- and I already have kubuntu-desktop installed.
On the other hand: If KDE anounces a new release I go to kde.org and everthing is there. Sourcecode or binaries and a unified subversion archive.
Watch this:
sudo apt-get install gnome-desktop-environment
Need source?
apt-get source gnome-desktop-environment
Was that so hard? Opening it up in Aptitude, I find the package is called 2.14.3.3ubuntu1. Looks like a pretty specific version to me -- and yes, a "common line".
As an added bonus, since I'm letting package management handle it, instead of trying to download all the sources by myself, I can actually get little, incremental updates without having to download every single KDE app again.
KDE is just one project with a common line and not a humble jumble of dozend half independent projects.
Oh, bullshit. How do you even define that in an open source world? You can't.
I challenge you to find one consistent definition that proves GNOME is a mess of independent projects without also proving the same of KDE.
There are advantages to KDE. They do involve integration. But I seriously doubt it has anything to do with how the projects are organized or distributed. If anything, it's because there are parts of KDE that were designed from the ground up to make it very easy to mix and match components to build your app -- for example, Kontact integrates KMail, KOrganizer, Akregator, KAddressBook, KNotes, KArm and MultiSynk into one app -- or you mix and match whichever ones you want. Konqueror will load and run more than one kind of document viewer -- including odd ones like KPDF -- right there in the browser.
But, I'd almost argue that the only "integration" was creating a system like KParts and providing a forum for developers of these different projects to meet. It's precisely because the applications involved have so little to do with each other that they're so light and fast. For the counterexample, just compare Kontact to Evolution or Outlook. Evolution and Outlook are both hugely bloated, slow, unreliable, unmaintainable apps. Probably insecure, too. Kontact does basically the same stuff, but it's nice and modular -- and really, running Kmail in Kontact, for example, isn't any slower than running, say, Thunderbird or Kmail by itself.
(And I'm assuming you mean "KDE is just one project with a common line and not a jumble of a half dozen independent projects." I'm amazed what you actually typed is as readable as it is.)
I have to wonder -- why, exactly, do you think that your gnome-settings-daemon is at all related to GTK+?
That's right, it's not.
I hate GNOME as much as the next guy, but let's be fair here -- it's not that GNOME sucks because of GTK+, and really makes no sense to suggest that a graphical toolkit has anything to do with the rest of the desktop -- it doesn't. All GTK+ does is the graphics.
Kind of like -- oh, I don't know -- QT. Which is also used for KDE's graphical tools (Krita).
I mean, really, what you're saying is kind of like saying Linux is better than Windows because Linux doesn't have a start button.
But just using the standart gui (gnome-control-center) I should not be able to mess up my configuration - If I am then gnome-control-center has not sufficently protected me.
First, spelling check. It's "standard", with a d.
Second, are you absolutely sure there's no way it could have messed up unless it was gnome-control-center? Really? For example: bad RAM, bad disk, etc could all be at fault here. I'm not saying it couldn't possibly be gnome-control-center, but understand that it can't possibly protect you from anything you could possibly do -- and, in fact, a powerful tool should make it possible to hose your system if you were really trying to. (For exmaple, gconf.)
Third, you should have had backups, anyway. It's not difficult -- back up/home and/etc and you can rebuild just about your entire desktop from scratch, or carry it from distro to distro.
Which is what I critisise: To many separate projects.
There's no getting around this. Or rather, none of the ways around it are worth it.
You could force everything to be completely integrated, so that installing a single app requires pulling in tons of dependencies, many of them completely unrelated. Maybe it's just me, but this seems to happen a LOT more with KDE apps than with GTK ones -- maybe because they're typically KDE apps, not QT apps, whereas the other side is usually GTK apps, not GNOME apps.
That's probably what you meant -- KDE does have a pretty bad case of not-invented-here syndrome, and it doesn't seem to be using Cairo, for example. But GNOME and KDE both use dbus and X11, for example. Would you rather that these not be separate projects?
Or, you could force every app to rewrite all the functionality by itself, because you don't like having a separate project for a shared library. Obviously, this is a retarded idea, and you're a retarded person if that's what you were suggesting.
No one complains about Konqueror's kind of similar integration...
But anyway, I think this kind of concept could be done well. Just two obstacles:
No web browser that's advanced enough to run AJAX apps is simple enough to be as secure and stable as we need. It's not that we couldn't write such a browser, it just hasn't been done.
HTML/CSS/JavaScript will always suck, performance-wise. We really should create a better standard GUI toolkit for the web, if we're intending to run applications on it.
There's no practical reason that IDEs and irssi couldn't both be web apps. They'd need some sort of backend that you control, but the interface would be plenty responsive enough.
In fact, if you're willing to limit the IDE to a JavaScript-only IDE, and drop Perl and plugin support from irssi (or replace 'em with a JavaScript API), you could do it all with clientside scripts.
You are right about video editing software, and I don't think Flash is anywhere near ready to do that, even if it was a good idea. And the same is true of games. And you may even be right about JavaFX being better. But the fact is, your typical desktop business type doesn't need a more responsive interface than what web browsers can do.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're an ISP, they are not using your DNS server for free.
(Alright, I know there are some free ISPs out there, and in that case I'd agree with you. However, Cox Cable is most certainly NOT free.)
They're not, really. They don't affect me at all. The reasons that they don't affect me are things that everyone has the capability of doing:
#1 and #2 are within reach of just about everyone. The only people who can't do this are people who are not technically minded, can't afford to hire someone who is for an hour or two, and don't have the time to follow instructions from a website or IRC channel.
#3 is a somewhat bigger issue, because it's not available everywhere. But even an ISP without a lot of bandwidth could do better than this -- detect people sending spam, contact them, and if they don't remove the software themselves, block their outbound port 25, or their whole computer.
And that, by the way, is quite different than intercepting and modifying ALL connection attempts to a specific server on a specific port. Blocking outbound port 25 is annoying, yes, but justifiable if the user is sending spam. But I don't think there's anything illegal about participating in a botnet, and that's what this punishes. It doesn't punish the botnet creator, it punishes anyone using efnet from that ISP.
So what?
The solution to this being a strain on their networks is, stop selling "unlimited bandwidth*" that you can't provide, and start actually lighting up more fiber.
The solution to this being a strain on my inbox is, get a decent spam filtering solution, and tie it in with a rate-limiting tarpit.
The solution to this being a hassle for the users is, educate them. If they refuse to be educated, they can't complain to you when their computer's slow.
Would it be better if we could get the politicians and law enforcement involved? Yes. But it's not needed, and it's certainly not something for you to take into your own hands by ruining someone else's service.
It's kind of like, if you were a landlord and one of your tenants started blasting loud music, you can go talk to them, you can try to get them evicted and call the police, and so on. But if none of that works, I really don't think that makes it ok for you to cut power to an entire building just to turn off the damn noise from one apartment.
*burst bandwidth only
Indeed. It goes even farther -- I don't particularly like efnet, but I do imagine there are still legitimate chat and discussions going on between real human beings. So resolving it to localhost means legitimate connections that have nothing to do with the botnet are dropped in order to stop the botnet.
The only correct response to this is to sniff the legit connections for what looks like botnet activity (and even that's "a little sketchy", as you put it), and then notify those people that they seem to have a botnet installed. If it was SpamBotFoo, your next step is to watch that user's outbound SMTP, and if they are sending spam, tell them to stop. Third step, you block their account until they remove the bot.
This is better because it's a long process, and there's always the option for the user to opt out -- to say something like "Ok, I'll just disconnect that computer" or "Actually, that was a sample spam, and no one should be reporting it."
But you shouldn't be allowed to sell it as internet access, if it doesn't behave properly. You can sell it, just not as internet access.
I would very much like to see this kind of stuff enforced. For example, far too many CDs and DVDs sold today use copy protection schemes (on top of the ones built into the DVD spec) including intentionally breaking certain parts of the spec, often with the assumption that a DVD player will use a more simplistic way of reading the disc. In the case of DVDs, one really dumb example involved a disc which had an intentionally corrupt filesystem, since most DVD players don't actually read the filesystem for most things -- the files themselves refer to each other by their physical layout on the disc.
Obviously, you can't prevent someone from creating such a beast. But you should be able to prevent them from calling it a DVD.
It should be that way with Internet access. At the very least, I would really like to see all ISPs which are net-neutral come up with a new name for Internet access and trademark it. Something like "Pure Internet", maybe... That way, at the very least, us geeks would know which ISPs to recommend and which ones to avoid.
Weird moderation. "Troll" I could see, but this is a valid analogy.
In short: Who appointed you judge?
At length: Stopping botnets may be a noble cause, but who gets to decide what's a botnet and what's not, or which services/servers may be blocked and which ones may not? If TimeWarner is allowed to do this, what's stopping them from blocking downloads of Firefox, or preventing you from browsing to, say comcast.net?
Tell you what -- I don't really mind what they intercept and read, since I use crypto for anything I really care about. So the right thing for them to do here would be, sniff the network, and send email to the owner of any machine that appears to be infected. Then, let them deal with it.
Ok, question: Why is this now the site's responsibility?
I mean, I can even understand blocking a server that sends spam, because at least that's directly and actively causing harm. But while a botnet is harmful, I really don't see how an IRC channel is -- not directly.
But even in that case, I'm sorry, but TimeWarner should NOT be doing this on behalf of me without my knowledge and consent, and I don't mean "you signed the service agreement, sucks to be you". I mean, I should be able to easily opt out of any and all attempts by them to filter/hijack my Internet, if I'm paying them. (I'm actually not, but you get the idea.)
I thought the whole point of any part of a company is to make money. That's the whole "bottom line" argument, the excuse people like to drag out whenever they want to justify corporations doing truly evil things -- "because it makes money, and a corporation has to make money."
I guess I just don't get how making someone aware of your brand or product makes you any money at all, unless someone buys it. And didn't we learn that lesson from popup ads? Pissing your customers off is generally not a good way to make them want to buy your product, or even give the ad a moment of your attention.
The problem is, it's like spam.
In other words, you don't matter, because even if your attitude was the usual one, they probably need less than 1% of the people looking at these ads to respond in order to justify what it's costing them.
Now, what does work is, boycotting the game. Here, if they sell 20% less copies, or 50% less copies, even if the other 50% are buying Coke/Pepsi/BonziBuddy/Viagra/whatever like mad, the game company itself might decide to stop selling ads -- whereas even if your method worked, it would probably just result in some other advertiser moving in.
Completely missing the point.
The point is, an OS is better equipped to figure out what's "unnecessary" than you are.
Let's take, for example, an applet I have in my system tray called KArm. It's a time logger -- lets me punch in and punch out to separate projects, so I can charge an hourly rate.
Right now, I'm not using it at all. Haven't used it for hours. Not likely to for hours. So the ideal thing to do would be to close it and open it again later, but it's handy to have there, and I bet it takes more time to start it than to pull it out of swap.
So, let's say it can swap out, oh, 10 megs. I now have 10 megs more for disk cache and a write buffer. All that has to do is save me 20 megs of disk IO -- an easy task, if I'm doing enough IO for Linux to want to swap stuff out in the first place -- and it's worth it. Worth it in performance, disk wear, and decreased battery life.
In short, writing to the swap file is no worse than writing to a disk, unless, like you say, you're on Windows and Windows feels like swapping things stupidly.
So they force us to use Flash, which is crappy everywhere, and is -- guess what? -- a plugin that they have to install.
But why not just let 'em have whatever plugin they want? On some platforms, I want to be able to go fullscreen. On most platforms, my native video player knows how to use hardware to do the video and the scaling.
If you're worried about the plugin not being installed, really, anything that comes with Flash is going to at least come with something that can play mpeg2 (.mpg) files. Flash forces you to flv and to the codecs it supports, and I doubt any of those are better than mpeg2.
So drop "suggested clips" from the end -- that feature is already there (in standard HTML/CSS/AJAX/etc) on the page, it doesn't need to be at the end of every movie.
Any other feature we desperately need that we couldn't do without Flash?
Fair enough. But don't assume that just because resources are available that they're "free". I don't want my laptop putting out tons of heat into my balls because someone was lazy enough to use Flash, and not provide an alternative.
Indeed. In fact, it works so well that people create ways of using youtube from Xbox Media Center, the iPhone, etc. I guarantee that most of these don't run Flash natively, which means they have to code around the fact that Youtube uses flash, and not something else.
It's hard to say whether it would have gone one way or another, but I bet if you told people there was a new website up that lets you watch all kinds of videos for free, and it's really amazingly simple and easy to use, and you just have to download Firefox...
And it goes on.
So my question: How does this justify calling them "effective"?
I realize that marketing thinks that no PR is bad PR, but in the real world, I'm not convinced. That gamer might be "engaging" with that particular ad by firing rockets at it, "teabagging" it, or otherwise using it to vent their rage at that particular product, or at the very idea of sticking an ad in the middle of a game.
But seriously, I want everyone to go back and think about those "Punch the monkey and win!" web ads from the 90's. Do you even remember what it was an ad for? What about the popups for... some Internet camera? It's certainly not going to make me go out of my way to buy the product. It MAY make me subconsciously more likely to notice the product. But if it ever gets conscious -- if I ever see a physical product, for example, and remember it having something to do with "punch the monkey" -- I'll probably punch the product. Maybe physically -- right there on the supermarket shelf.
In other words -- I strongly suspect the lighter ads are much more likely to be things we'd want to buy. If you create a giant, animated, flashing billboard and stick it in the middle of a medieval dungeon, then no, that's where I take the game back to the store, claim it "wouldn't work on my computer", and ask for my money back.
In another study, parents are more likely to "engage" with children who say "Are we there yet?" every five seconds than children who shut the fuck up and look out the window.
You did quote an example here -- but yes, this is probably my favorite way to do a merge, or an "unfork". Given fork A and fork B, pick fork B, port the features you miss from fork A, then drop A and use B.
But it is quite similar to gcc/egcs, in that the egcs fork got far enough ahead that the gcc people adopted it and "abandoned" their own new gcc version. I strongly suspect, however, that anything gcc had that egcs didn't was ported over before egcs was blessed as the new gcc.
And if you like Debian so much, why don't you use it? No one's forcing you to use iLife.
Swap means that stuff that genuinely is NEVER used can be swapped out and forgotten about. That means more space for a disk cache or a write buffer, which, in turn, means fewer writes to the disk.
Actually, it's very smart of them in one sense -- the UI stuff is mostly written in AJAX, after all. Or DHTML, or whatever buzzword you like -- it's in XUL and JavaScript.
What's short-sighted of them is how much they haven't threaded even in their UI -- I really don't see any reason for Javascript to be less suited for threading than any other language.
Well, video, for example, has been supported by <embed> forever, in all browsers, and in an open way (so it works on Linux). There was absolutely no reason for YouTube etc to go with Flash, except (maybe) that it makes it (slightly) harder to copy the video.
That's no excuse for it being retardedly slow.
I'm fairly sure that we've had SVG and such available for awhile, but I'll have to take your word for it not being good at tying them together.
As for not working on IE, people would download Firefox if they needed it for Youtube or something like that.
I'll take that trade, if I can be more productive with only a sort of lingering bad feeling that I can ignore.
That just means the mailing list isn't set up properly. I can certainly filter all of LKML, for example, into its own folder.
In other words: You might still have just as much crap there, but it's much easier when you know that the things sent specifically to you are meant for you, with at least a large chunk of their attention. You can then go look through the workplace-mailing-list-folder, or the workplace forum even, and read/skim through 20 or so much more quickly when you're in the mindset of "reading the mailing list" -- just as you can go through the spam in your "unsure" folder (if your spamfilter is smart enough to have one) much quicker when you're in the "skim through spam for false positives" mode.
Compare that to traditional IM -- if your workplace mailing list could be implemented over IM, it would be something popping up all the time with random things demanding your attention.
Please, please, please let mbox die a well deserved death. Use maildir instead.
With maildir, your email files are stored on-disk in pretty much the same format that you could use to export or import a single email from, say, Outlook -- or, in other words, pretty much exactly the same way they were received by the mailserver, plus whatever headers that mailserver liked to add.
Also, maildir is supported pretty much everywhere, including IMAP and some web email apps. It's generally supported as the format used internally, meaning you don't even have to move your stuff to access it with other apps.
It's also faster -- modifying anything in the middle of an mbox file means you have to recreate the entire file -- or, if you're very clever, you might only add things after that point. To grab all the headers from an mbox file (or to search through them), you have to read the entire file, attachments and all, for the entire mailbox/folder. With maildir, you can delete one file at a time, and grabbing all the headers involves reading the beginning of a bunch of little files, instead of scanning through one HUGE one.
In fact, I've had maildir perform well with around 50,000 files (totalling around 750 megs) in an IMAP folder. It only started to slow down when I switched from Thunderbird to Kmail -- although, since Kmail is faster at everything else, I've settled for creating separate archive folders every few months.
And most importantly, it's more reliable. If your mbox file isn't locked properly (so more than one thing is trying to access it), or your system crashes in the middle of a deletion -- any of these, if you've got a decent journalling filesystem, you're guaranteed not to lose mail, much less corrupt your mailbox. And even if it did, somehow -- bad physical disk, maybe -- you're much more likely to lose a few files than the entire mailbox, whereas with mbox, who knows?
You've obviously never used gtalk on gmail.
If by "document" you meant "message log", it's really not. All three of the IM programs I've used lately -- Gaim (now Pidgin), Adium, and Kopete -- all use some sort of HTML format under the hood, which means worst case, you can search them as HTML. I haven't had Gaim or Pidgin installed for awhile, but Kerry/Beagle will not only index and search my old Gaim conversations, it'll open a nice, native KDE app to browse through them.
I can't really organize them well, though, so you're right about that. I can search them, though, and for IM conversations, that seems to be enough.
The big difference between IM and email is, IMs generally won't be ignored (because the next time you want to talk to that person, you'll see what they had to say)...
But, you can certainly put them off as long as you want.
They also can be answered immediately, which is nice, even if it's someone bugging you for information -- often, an interactive format is best. Take a friend asking me for computer help -- if it's IM, I can ask them things like "what's your browser/OS/whatever" and ask them to try something and not be waiting a day for a response -- or vice versa for them. That works a LOT better for me -- I'm good at focusing on a task until it's done, rather than putting two minutes of thought into it and forgetting it till tomorrow.
As for it being a substitute for the phone -- well, I can effectively carry on three or four separate IM conversations at once, just as I can carry on ten or twenty email/forum/whatever conversations at once. Worst case, I'm making someone wait for me to type a reply, but they could just as easily be in their own three or four conversations, or simply be doing something else (browsing the Web, usually) while they wait.
But I can only really carry on one phone conversation at once. And it's a lot easier to copy and paste a URL over IM, so if I really need to help someone, it's fastest with both -- something like Skype.
I wouldn't replace email with IM, and I wouldn't replace IM with email. If anything, I'd merge them. IM is currently not very good at doing delayed communication, or sorting past conversations (or incoming ones). Email is currently not very good for delivering urgent information, or knowing whether someone's available (although IM can be bad when most people set status to "away/idle" when they're available or "available" when they're gone). And neither integrates particularly well with good voice or video.
Fixed it here. Sorry about that.
This is the third post of yours that I'm replying to. You must be either 13 years old or intentionally playing dumb -- the spelling errors are making it hard to read. It's "whole" when you mean complete, not "hole". In fact, "hole", as in security hole, is the opposite of "whole", as in complete.
Great, so when there's some tiny security patch in some library, you have to go re-download the entire fucking library. But hey, at least you know you've now got KDE version 3.5.6 build 135812903510912385709123, and not build 135812903510912385709122 or 135812903510912385709124.
Fortunately, the KDE developers aren't as stupid as you are. Trying to install the "kde" package suggests an additional 158 packages on Ubuntu -- and I already have kubuntu-desktop installed.
Watch this:
sudo apt-get install gnome-desktop-environmentNeed source?
apt-get source gnome-desktop-environmentWas that so hard? Opening it up in Aptitude, I find the package is called 2.14.3.3ubuntu1. Looks like a pretty specific version to me -- and yes, a "common line".
As an added bonus, since I'm letting package management handle it, instead of trying to download all the sources by myself, I can actually get little, incremental updates without having to download every single KDE app again.
Oh, bullshit. How do you even define that in an open source world? You can't.
I challenge you to find one consistent definition that proves GNOME is a mess of independent projects without also proving the same of KDE.
There are advantages to KDE. They do involve integration. But I seriously doubt it has anything to do with how the projects are organized or distributed. If anything, it's because there are parts of KDE that were designed from the ground up to make it very easy to mix and match components to build your app -- for example, Kontact integrates KMail, KOrganizer, Akregator, KAddressBook, KNotes, KArm and MultiSynk into one app -- or you mix and match whichever ones you want. Konqueror will load and run more than one kind of document viewer -- including odd ones like KPDF -- right there in the browser.
But, I'd almost argue that the only "integration" was creating a system like KParts and providing a forum for developers of these different projects to meet. It's precisely because the applications involved have so little to do with each other that they're so light and fast. For the counterexample, just compare Kontact to Evolution or Outlook. Evolution and Outlook are both hugely bloated, slow, unreliable, unmaintainable apps. Probably insecure, too. Kontact does basically the same stuff, but it's nice and modular -- and really, running Kmail in Kontact, for example, isn't any slower than running, say, Thunderbird or Kmail by itself.
(And I'm assuming you mean "KDE is just one project with a common line and not a jumble of a half dozen independent projects." I'm amazed what you actually typed is as readable as it is.)
I have to wonder -- why, exactly, do you think that your gnome-settings-daemon is at all related to GTK+?
That's right, it's not.
I hate GNOME as much as the next guy, but let's be fair here -- it's not that GNOME sucks because of GTK+, and really makes no sense to suggest that a graphical toolkit has anything to do with the rest of the desktop -- it doesn't. All GTK+ does is the graphics.
Kind of like -- oh, I don't know -- QT. Which is also used for KDE's graphical tools (Krita).
I mean, really, what you're saying is kind of like saying Linux is better than Windows because Linux doesn't have a start button.
First, spelling check. It's "standard", with a d.
Second, are you absolutely sure there's no way it could have messed up unless it was gnome-control-center? Really? For example: bad RAM, bad disk, etc could all be at fault here. I'm not saying it couldn't possibly be gnome-control-center, but understand that it can't possibly protect you from anything you could possibly do -- and, in fact, a powerful tool should make it possible to hose your system if you were really trying to. (For exmaple, gconf.)
Third, you should have had backups, anyway. It's not difficult -- back up /home and /etc and you can rebuild just about your entire desktop from scratch, or carry it from distro to distro.
There's no getting around this. Or rather, none of the ways around it are worth it.
You could force everything to be completely integrated, so that installing a single app requires pulling in tons of dependencies, many of them completely unrelated. Maybe it's just me, but this seems to happen a LOT more with KDE apps than with GTK ones -- maybe because they're typically KDE apps, not QT apps, whereas the other side is usually GTK apps, not GNOME apps.
That's probably what you meant -- KDE does have a pretty bad case of not-invented-here syndrome, and it doesn't seem to be using Cairo, for example. But GNOME and KDE both use dbus and X11, for example. Would you rather that these not be separate projects?
Or, you could force every app to rewrite all the functionality by itself, because you don't like having a separate project for a shared library. Obviously, this is a retarded idea, and you're a retarded person if that's what you were suggesting.
No one complains about Konqueror's kind of similar integration...
But anyway, I think this kind of concept could be done well. Just two obstacles:
No web browser that's advanced enough to run AJAX apps is simple enough to be as secure and stable as we need. It's not that we couldn't write such a browser, it just hasn't been done.
HTML/CSS/JavaScript will always suck, performance-wise. We really should create a better standard GUI toolkit for the web, if we're intending to run applications on it.
There's no practical reason that IDEs and irssi couldn't both be web apps. They'd need some sort of backend that you control, but the interface would be plenty responsive enough.
In fact, if you're willing to limit the IDE to a JavaScript-only IDE, and drop Perl and plugin support from irssi (or replace 'em with a JavaScript API), you could do it all with clientside scripts.
You are right about video editing software, and I don't think Flash is anywhere near ready to do that, even if it was a good idea. And the same is true of games. And you may even be right about JavaFX being better. But the fact is, your typical desktop business type doesn't need a more responsive interface than what web browsers can do.