From what everyone is telling me, they claim they can survive a hard drive format (yet require no hardware install), and that they don't support Firefox. Their site seems perfectly accessible to me on Firefox, but I can't find any mention of hard drive formatting.
In any case, the thing that bugs me here is the stupidity of these people. Of the three testimonials, one is not actually about a theft -- just someone who feels so much more secure now that she has LoJack installed (but really couldn't know if it works, seeing as her laptop hasn't been stolen). Another is a guy who stored all of his term papers on his laptop, with no backup, estimating it to be about 4,000 hours of work -- and credits LoJack with his Bachelor's degree.
I'm sorry, but if you don't know what a backup is, you don't deserve a degree.
SETI@home does provide Linux and OS X binaries, last I checked. Checking again, it seems they've got Windows (probably x32 only), Linux (definitely x86 only), and OSX (universal) binaries for download. Looking deeper, it seems they've finally actually decided to release the source, so you can port it to whatever.
But I don't think the point of the story is that the guy intentionally setup SETI to call home, but rather that he was panicking over the lost laptop, trying to think of all the possibilities, and happened to remember that SETI tracks IPs. I imagine he'll have a trickier call-home script now that everyone who reads the news knows about SETI.
Oh, by the way, your script is ridiculously naive, as others have pointed out -- you do NOT want it to require full passwordless ssh; if anything, you want it to use something akin to email -- that is, append only access. Also, if it's intended to be run by an individual user (and not root), then why bother putting it in the global crontab? Especially, why have it be/home/username/bin/callhome instead of ~/bin/callhome? Put it in a per-user crontab, and make the crontab entry be username-agnostic -- it won't take you any more lines of code, really. And do have it try to fetch something over HTTP, as that's allowed pretty much everywhere, whereas SSH isn't.
I'd probably have it call home every ten minutes or so, using vanilla HTTP or HTTPS. Once I notice it's missing, I'll set a flag on the server, and the client will then delete my SSH and GPG keys (hopefully locking anyone using it out of any of my files there, without actually deleting them), then continue to send more detailed reports, again over some sort of tunnel over HTTP/HTTPS. Optionally, I could also have it attempt to contact the thief, but I think I'd rather try my luck with law enforcement first, as my goal is to get the laptop back, and I'd rather not scare them into destroying it.
But then, I'm currently down a laptop, looking for a good one, so most of this is moot for me.
Hello, world? How, exactly, would I write that poorly?
At a second glance, however, you're right -- it's actually reasonably fast now. I distinctly remember having to wait quite awhile for just about any program -- and it was not disk thrashing, hard disk light was off.
Still, it will be awhile before you can convince me that Java is fast enough, and awhile more before you can convince me that the syntax is even tolerable. Yes, you can run other languages on the JVM, but it's not really designed for them.
If you can break a window during a screen shot, then you aren't using your video card for a backing store.
So you're telling me games are also not using my video card? They certainly can break, and not just on Linux, although they generally seem to compensate for screenshots.
The X cut-and-paste is text only, not rich text.
Ah, I see. And yet, I've always been able to paste with ctrl+c/v in any app that cares about rich text.
ALSA claims to do that. In fact, ALSA *doesn't work*.
Your drivers don't work, sucks to be you. This isn't unheard of on Vista, either.
My ALSA works fine, anywhere I've tried to use it, including a Powerbook, if I remember.
In reality, what you're getting for Vista is things that work.
Except when they don't (see above comment about drivers).
And if you want to do an apples-to-apples comparison, either buy them both preloaded or install them both yourself on some arbitrary "standard" box.
Do you just reformat and reinstall? How long does that take you?
Roughly five minutes of tech time and maybe an hour of computer time. Learn to use images, and standardize hardware. Allow the user one image of their own, as well, but that's not the supported one, and they're expected to know how to use an imaging tool to restore their custom image from the network if they go that route.
And how the hell do you roll out new software packages?
Start by asking why the hell you roll out new software packages. For instance, if it's a version of Office, let the users upgrade if they want and put it on the image, but don't force them -- let them use OpenOffice if they want.
You could actually just put it on a file share and say go for it in that email.
Some users can't be bothered, of course, so you give those users a choice, either:
You get your choice of spyware-laden crap, OSS work programs, even your choice of an OS, so long as you actually get work done.
Or you get to be mass-deployed and supported, and shielded from liability if the company accidentally rolls out pirated software to your box.
I'm sorry, but making IT responsible for everyone's machine is just as much a nightmare. Isn't it?
No, you don't. You may think you do, but you're wrong. (And I know whereof I speak: I run Ubuntu, too.)
No, you don't. You're obviously not running Beryl, and probably not Xubuntu.
You don't have non-tearing movement of windows.
Yes, I do. Hmm, actually, if I take a screenshot while actually dragging a window, I do see it torn a bit; however, I suspect this is my video card more than anything, and in any case, it's utterly imperceptible to me until I actually take the screenshot.
You don't have a working clipboard.
Click, drag. Then middle-click. Actually works a lot better than on Windows.
Actually, it does bother me that there seem to be two different clipboards on Linux, but I find that I can middle-click-paste into ANY app except a game. In fact, the only thing that behaves inconsistently is ctrl+v, which doesn't necessarily paste the hilight, but if I use ctrl+c/ctrl+v, it's consistent everywhere that ctrl+v actually works. Which isn't everywhere, but neither is it everywhere on Windows -- last I checked, you can't ctrl+v into a DOS box (have to menu->paste).
You can't play two separate streams at the same time from different applicaitons and blend them.
Streams of what, as someone else said?
Streams of audio? I use ALSA, which does blend streams of audio from any number of applications -- in hardware. If I didn't have that (and chances are VERY good that you do), I'd be using things like esound, which has done the same thing in software since before Windows could do it at all -- Win98 could not play sound from more than one app source at a time, end of story.
Streams of video? I can hold the Super (Windows) key and use my mousewheel to control window translucency. So, while I can't see why you'd want to do this, I can stack as many videos as I want on top of each other and blend them, I suppose. Only exception is if I'm using XvMC, but I'm not sure anything similar for Windows exists.
And for that matter, how is a working clipboard in any way related to aero-like graphics? And if you're talking about audio streams, again, how's that related? And if you're talking about video streams, seriously dude, WTF are you trying to do?
You know what? I do still use IRC, and although I'm on Beryl now, I do use a terminal for roughly half my work (and a web browser for the other half). I do this because I'm faster that way.
But really, Flash is one of those things that just constantly pisses me off. Not that Gnash seems much better, but given the games I can play on this computer, Flash's puny little vector animations should NOT be lagging at all. Someone's trying to do a 3D engine in Flash now that I think illustrates the point perfectly -- the demos are incredibly simplistic, and the ones that start to look cool also start to slow down -- while still having WAY less going on than a game from five years ago.
Recently, I ran a test -- YouTube on Flash, then the same FLV videos (downloaded via Video Downloader) on mplayer or VLC. Both mplayer and VLC played them like I was used to -- fullscreen, with pretty much zero performance hit. Hell, I'm less than 10% CPU usage even dragging a video window around with Beryl. But in Flash, it looks MUCH worse (horrible anti-aliasing), and uses at least 50-60% CPU, sometimes significantly more.
VLC is more cross-platform than Flash, and Flash is at least ten, possibly a hundred times slower.
Flash, like Windows, embarrasses me as a software professional.
And is it irrelevant? After all, computers will just keep getting faster, right? Trouble is, as raw hardware performance approaches a certain point, a whole new class of applications opens up, or a whole new dimension for existing applications emerges. If your environment is slower, that puts you WAY behind the curve on that. So, for example, Flash has some new 3D stuff that looks about as good as, say, Half-Life, and my system is already plenty fast for Half-Life 2. I guarantee that unless we replace it with something else, AJAX will have its first 3D engine in another five or ten years.
Just imagine how cool that sounds, for a second. Open up a website, and without waiting for any third-party environment (Flash) to start up, without even needing to port anything other than Firefox, you have a fully 3D webpage -- or, for that matter, an actual MMO that just loads from visiting a website.
Or whatever excites you. Explore that concept for a few minutes -- what could you do if absolutely ANY app could be run in a browser. Some people don't like this idea, some people get so excited about it that they invent new words (AJAX, Web 2.0) for the technologies that should already make it possible.
Then think about how if the Web was at all efficient, we could've had something five or ten years ago that looks MUCH better than what we'll half-assedly do in another five or ten years.
Ok, I'll talk about performance. Performance in this context is never, ever plural, unless you were talking about, say, dance performances.
But seriously, look at your Java VM. Look for all the benchmarks and justifications you like, but the fact is, I still have to wait on my machine in order to try Hello.java. It feels slow, and I can actually go find some benchmarks to prove it is slow.
single-threaded apps running dog slow on all these newer multi-core CPUs.
Which becomes irrelevant when you run more than one of them.
Now, I actually agree with you -- in theory, a VM should be as fast or faster than C. In theory, multithreaded apps should be easy to write. And yes, in practice, there are ways to protect yourself from buffer overflows, although it won't save you from other stupid mistakes.
However, the first two have a theory which hasn't caught up with practice yet (I'm working on that), and in practice, buffer overflows are really secondary to sheer programmer stupidity -- see the Tetris/plane exploit? The buffer overflow was what brought the whole system down, but there is no language that automatically saves you from allowing a user to put the system into an invalid state. With a phone.
Buffer overflows are the result of bad C programming, not of the C language in itself. You can, actually, do OO in C, and it's actually a nice lightweight language when compared to, say, C++ and Java.
Personally, I wish we saw more "scripting" languages around, but those don't cut it either as soon as you start to care about performance. Getting there, but nowhere close to C... yet.
First, yes, there is way too much stuff running as root. Would you kindly point me to a system that doesn't have this problem?
But I would hardly call this the "biggest security problem", especially considering the vast majority of stuff does NOT run as root, and even daemons which must be started as root drop privileges later on.
It seems equally likely you'd find some bitwise monstrosity to an actual mention of 1024/1023, but in any case, there is a good reason for this. Think NFS, or basically any other service which doesn't have crypto layered on top of crypto -- even if I tunnel NFS through a VPN (which had its own problems, last I tried), that doesn't stop some local, non-root process of attempting to respond. In fact, suppose it's a fileserver that everyone boots from, and the NFS service has crashed. If we allow non-root to bind privileged ports, that also means non-root can then impersonate that NFS server and gain access to everything out there that relies on that NFS.
Now, NFS is arguably bad design here, but you get the idea. Connecting to a privileged port at least means you know what you are connecting to is owned by root, and thus sanctioned by the machine as a whole. If you're connecting to an unprivileged port, you really don't know if you're connecting to a service that the admin has actually set up, or something run by some user account.
I agree about iptables -- forwarding low ports to high ports is half-assed and stupid. Please at least try to understand the rationale behind a security measure before you willfully disable it.
Also, chroot can be complicated -- but it can also be very easy. However, it's not a replacement for the simplest rule here: Drop privileges. Once you bind to the port, you can drop root and become nobody, bound to that privileged port -- and the code that does that can be very simple. Simple enough that you can even throw it into a separate solution -- think inetd/xinetd, where the inetd itself must at least in part remain root, but your actual daemon (webserver or whatever) can be run as any user you like.
You may think this isn't always feasable, and to an extent, you're right. There may be parts to your program that must remain root. However, traditional *nix style would be breaking your program into small, cooperating programs and having only a few of those remain privileged. A good example here would be postfix -- it is split into five or ten processes, only one of which remains root, all others staying low-privileged and often chrooted. It may look strange and complicated at first glance, but it's actually a remarkably clean architecture.
Personally, I think Unix security is not really fine-grained enough. It provides the primitives that could be used to create a truly secure system, but at the moment, root is irrelevant on 99% of people's desktops. I have my su not even ask for a password if I'm in the "wheel" group, and I don't encrypt my SSH keys, because if someone 0wns my normal, everyday account, they've got me in every way that matters. What we want is a Postfix-like approach to per-user code. However, this is more on the desktop, "Let's get UAC right" side of things -- on the server side, it's actually pretty elegant as-is.
You can't test the complex and massive million-dollar code, fine. At least test the individual components.
And yes, exceptions are the right approach here. I'll have to read about that overhead, though, I've never heard of exceptions being a performance issue...
In fact, you might even consider crashing it repeatedly, although that does kind of destroy any claim to innocence you might have.
If you want them to start rolling out decent software, you have to demonstrate that the existing software is not good enough. If it keeps crashing, and people on the plane start complaining, they might actually fix the problem.
one day, the step value is changed from 1 to 2 (make it go directly from 99 to 101), or some routine fails and returns a default value of -1. And suddenly the code is in the twilight zone.
Seems to me all a < or > would do is prevent it from going farther than 101 or -1, unless you specifically coded with the assumption that it might one day become some random, weird value.
And of course, the right way to prevent against that is to make it an object and wrap it in an interface which doesn't allow you to step by 2 without changing the object. Changing the object implies that you're going to run the test cases, or adjust them and then run them, so at least in the case of changing step value from 1 to 2, you would catch it in your test suite.
And nothing should ever use a return value to indicate an error situation, if you're in anything resembling a decent language. If you run into APIs that like to do that, build wrappers which actually throw exceptions.
And I have to wonder if at some point it might be cheaper for photographers to buy a relatively slow machine with a pair of screaming-fast video cards.
Do I feel deceived Jennifer C.'s tears were fake? Hmmmmm.... had she "acted" them, what would have made them any more real?
Possibly. As others have said, this is a question of how well she could've acted them vs how good the CG has gotten.
But what bugs me here is that generally, when we see a convincing performance, we give credit to the actor, even awards and such. Thus, the same actor is hired over and over, gets ludicrous amounts of money, etc.
As you said:
Most actors are what (famous, popular) they are because they were at the right place at the right time.
But what bothers me is, at least with most actors, they have something that would tend to contribute to that other than sheer luck. They generally would be physically attractive, or at least can be made to look good. They'd generally at least have some acting talent.
I admit it's inevitable that digital effects will be used where they produce a better picture, and I admit that there's not really much we can do about it, other than maybe make indie films which manage to be very good despite not being touched up (I don't mean Blair Witch bad, think more like American Beauty).
But what I see inevitably happening here is a generation of Paris Hiltons and nsync rejects, with no real talent and don't actually look that good (I can take a walk around my town and find much prettier girls), but airbrushed and digitally enhanced to superstars because they were in the right place at the right time. It's not so much that I object to any one actor being enhanced that way -- Jennifer C. is actually a decent actor -- it's that I object to the good actors being stuck in B movies or theater while the horrible ones who have the right parents or sucked the right dick get all the good roles.
Frankly, in that world -- aren't we already in that world, anyway? -- I'd rather have a wholly digital actor than some ludicrously overpaid wench who has no business working anywhere other than McDonald's. I mean, it's not as if it's even that difficult to have a wholly digital starlet -- look at Alyx Vance!
I do not want to deploy Linux on my home machines, but a couple of my sites are hosted on Linux with Rails. It would be nice to be able to work locally with the same apache-mysql-ruby config, even though I don't want to install Linux at home.
You could mess with it on the server, which was my point. What makes your local Windows machine more convenient?
I could make this into a big deal about you refusing to roll out Windows at home, but I imagine this is closer to a minor inconvenience than a major stumbling block.
Ruby also would have probably made more inroads into my Windows-centric workplace if it had better support, but instead I went with ASP.NET after failing to get Rails on Windows to work effectively on Windows with Apache and MySQL.
Again, why are you installing Ruby, Apache and MySQL on Windows, for a server? What is it that Windows makes easier?
The only place I've had problems here is a workplace that's running off of a single Windows server running ASP.NET for a couple of apps. If I remember, ASP is well supported on Linux, and ASP.NET is starting to get some support with Mono.
But I can make the same complaint to Microsoft as you do to Rails -- after going to all the trouble to make a nice bytecode engine, why don't they provide and support a Linux version? Or at least work with the Mono developers to make it easier...
You don't have to, just don't be surprised while we continue to choose Python.
Oh, go right ahead. I actually don't like any of the scripting languages out there -- not that I have anything better (yet) -- so it doesn't matter much to me. I'm just saying that when you ask for things from the OSS community, understand what you're really asking for.
Personally, I couldn't give a damn if scripting languages are well supported on Windows. As far as I'm concerned, that's one of the big attractions of Linux -- so many nice languages supported, often out of the box. Doesn't mean I mind good Python support on Windows, I just won't lift a finger to make it happen until I have a reason to.
Of those that I've played: Unreal Tournament doesn't even come close. Gameplay? Might be better, that's a matter of perspective -- I prefer quality over quantity. But Halo actually had a story-driven single-player campaign -- UT just has a story tacked-on to multiplayer against bots instead of humans.
Half-Life 2: Close enough that I'd call it a matter of taste. Halo restricting you to only one or two weapons carried at a time was a nice mechanic, and it's on the whole more solidly put together -- one of the things I love about Half-Life 2 is that it feels like playing through five different games, but I'm not sure that makes it a good game in itself. There's also plenty of things to like about Halo -- game is mostly streamed in Halo, and entirely streamed in Halo 2, while Half-Life 2 makes you wait through 1-2 minute loading screens. Halo 2 actually has co-op, even if it is splitscreen; I don't know of any PC shooters that do co-op campaigns in any form, except maybe for a mod of Half-Life.
Battlefield 2 -- engine sucks, EA sucks. Don't need to say much more about it, and I won't, as I haven't bought it.
You are right that it's one of the few console shooters that's actually worth playing, but I do think it competes well with PC shooters, on just about everything except raw graphics power -- being an Xbox game, it really can't, but check out the Halo 3 trailer, and anyway, I'll take a Halo or Half-Life over Doom 3 or FEAR any day.
You might as well just install Progress Quest. It will play for you too, and it's free.
Or IdleRPG, but I doubt either of them have particularly good graphics.
Second, if an RPG has simplistic enough mechanics that it *can* be played automatically, then it seems too simple to be interesting to a human.
It's possible. From what I've heard of WoW, it might even be true.
But, I don't think it's really relevant to MMOs in general. Say it was a kickass FPS -- then your statement makes perfect sense. If I can make a bot that plays straight through an FPS, then maybe that FPS was too simple to stay interesting to a human -- although I have to admit, Quake and Doom can still be fun, even though bots could probably play both pretty well.
But in an MMO, it's not linear. You can create a bot which goes and does exactly the same thing, over and over -- basically grinds for you -- but it won't necessarily be as interesting as actually doing it yourself, and doing it right.
In the game I play, one controversy awhile back was "autocutting". Seems people had created scripts to go out into the woods and automatically walk around and chop things. Basically, since "attack" is spacebar, you can just put a rock on your spacebar and let your character keep attacking whatever's in front of it -- and that tree isn't going to move.
Autocutting has been made less practical over the years, but someone actually created a way to auto-level himself, fairly similarly. There is an area -- the Thirsty Ogres -- which just about anyone can kill. Worst case, it'll take you two hits. This is the best experience you can get through about level 12. They're also aggro. So, the guy put a rock on his spacebar and left himself there -- presumably at level one -- and we caught him at level 38.
Now, it's true, if you just stand in one place and kill the same ogre over and over, it's pretty damned boring. But that's NOT what a normal player does. There are all kinds of things to do, some of which help you level up, some of which don't. There are quests to do, there are all kinds of caves to hunt in and explore, and there are PVP events and RP events.
Pretty much the only thing for which a mind-numbing grind is inescapable is crafting skills, but that's entirely optional -- while there are some items which can only be attained through crafting, there are enough people crafting already that most of these are reasonably cheap. The only other thing that requires crafting is the Ee San Culture trial, but there are alternatives to that -- you could win Story Contests or Poetry Revels.
But even crafting isn't bad, considering I can listen to the radio (podcasts, music) while I craft, and no one's forcing you to do it all at once -- I could craft for half an hour every day, then go actually play for an hour or two.
I play a much smaller MMO, but the result is roughly the same. It's possible for any people, of any level or stats, to form a group, and thus, most people nowadays seem to want to be "leeched" to level 99. There are people who specialize in this service, by having a group of high level characters and knowing exactly which areas are best for leveling -- some caves are instanced by level (Mythic Rabbit 1 can be entered at level 25, but Rabbit 2 starts at about 65, thus, you have to be below level 65 to enter Rabbit 1) -- but there are still plenty of areas that can be entered at a very low level, and anyone on up to millions of vitality and mana can still enter the same areas.
So it's possible to actually "buy a leech" with in-game currency, and it's not even particularly expensive if you've got another character.
Someone made a bet, once, that he could get a character to Level 99 in less than 24 hours. I think he did it, too, by bringing in enough high level characters and entering the Wilderness Lobster cave, which he had no business being in -- no group of his level could survive in the last room, so he grouped with people five or ten times as powerful.
I'm a good deal past 99 -- I'm almost Enchanted -- but every one of my other characters, I grind just like everyone else. Actually, it's mostly fun -- if the grind isn't fun, do you really expect things to get more interesting at higher levels? There are certainly aspects of the game that I've found much more challenging -- and much more fun -- at around level 50 or 60 than around level 99. There's also an area I'm about to be able to enter sanely (I'd die too easily now) which sounds like a lot of fun.
Because really, if the game is only fun at level 70 (World of Warcraft), or 75 (Final Fantasy XI), or Sam San (Nexus)... Why are you playing an MMO? Why aren't you just playing, oh, Counter-Strike? If the process (grind?) involved in leveling up isn't fun, you're playing the wrong game, and possibly the wrong genre.
I wanted to hate it because it was an Xbox exclusive.
I wanted to hate it because the PC port was half-assed and years late.
I wanted to hate Bungie for selling out to Microsoft -- I've heard rumors that the original Halo was going to be a truly cross-platform (Windows/Mac/Linux) game before Microsoft bought it and made it Xbox only.
I wanted to hate it because FPSes are supposed to be unimaginative... I wanted to love the PS2, because it had Linux, and Final Fantasies...
I wanted to hate it so I didn't have to give another dime to Microsoft.
But you know what?
It's not just green metal. (Where do people get that, anyway? There is NO green metal through most of the games, other than the protagonist.)
It's actually a really damned good game. The graphics may be technologically dated -- it's hard to tell -- but they were amazing for the time, and the artwork is still amazing. The writing may be "uninspired", but it's not so much what they're saying, it's how they're saying it. The Halo may seem to be a cheap ripoff of Ringworld, but they made it real -- I can feel the world under my feet.
Halo was repetitive? Maybe, but it also meant it was decently long (Halo 2 was over too fast), and gave you time to get good at it. And it was fun... You know, I wanted to love Doom 3, because of the native Linux port, and id being generally cool guys and releasing their source, and all the yummy graphics, but the gameplay just isn't that fun. After you've whacked your 50th zombie on the head with a flashlight, and shotgunned your 200th Imp in the face, it's just no longer fun or even particularly hard, but no matter how many Elites I melee in the back, it never gets old -- or any easier.
And a forgettable storyline? Marathon very likely exists within the Halo universe, but I already forget its storyline, sorry...
So, tell me, what shooters are you playing that are better than the Halo games?
And if your server is Windows, I'd say you're on your own. If, for some perverse reason, you want it to work well, the code is there, but why should we help you?
Slashdot Mirror
From what everyone is telling me, they claim they can survive a hard drive format (yet require no hardware install), and that they don't support Firefox. Their site seems perfectly accessible to me on Firefox, but I can't find any mention of hard drive formatting.
In any case, the thing that bugs me here is the stupidity of these people. Of the three testimonials, one is not actually about a theft -- just someone who feels so much more secure now that she has LoJack installed (but really couldn't know if it works, seeing as her laptop hasn't been stolen). Another is a guy who stored all of his term papers on his laptop, with no backup, estimating it to be about 4,000 hours of work -- and credits LoJack with his Bachelor's degree.
I'm sorry, but if you don't know what a backup is, you don't deserve a degree.
SETI@home does provide Linux and OS X binaries, last I checked. Checking again, it seems they've got Windows (probably x32 only), Linux (definitely x86 only), and OSX (universal) binaries for download. Looking deeper, it seems they've finally actually decided to release the source, so you can port it to whatever.
/home/username/bin/callhome instead of ~/bin/callhome? Put it in a per-user crontab, and make the crontab entry be username-agnostic -- it won't take you any more lines of code, really. And do have it try to fetch something over HTTP, as that's allowed pretty much everywhere, whereas SSH isn't.
But I don't think the point of the story is that the guy intentionally setup SETI to call home, but rather that he was panicking over the lost laptop, trying to think of all the possibilities, and happened to remember that SETI tracks IPs. I imagine he'll have a trickier call-home script now that everyone who reads the news knows about SETI.
Oh, by the way, your script is ridiculously naive, as others have pointed out -- you do NOT want it to require full passwordless ssh; if anything, you want it to use something akin to email -- that is, append only access. Also, if it's intended to be run by an individual user (and not root), then why bother putting it in the global crontab? Especially, why have it be
I'd probably have it call home every ten minutes or so, using vanilla HTTP or HTTPS. Once I notice it's missing, I'll set a flag on the server, and the client will then delete my SSH and GPG keys (hopefully locking anyone using it out of any of my files there, without actually deleting them), then continue to send more detailed reports, again over some sort of tunnel over HTTP/HTTPS. Optionally, I could also have it attempt to contact the thief, but I think I'd rather try my luck with law enforcement first, as my goal is to get the laptop back, and I'd rather not scare them into destroying it.
But then, I'm currently down a laptop, looking for a good one, so most of this is moot for me.
Nor is Vista, or Java. I hate people who do that.
Hello, world? How, exactly, would I write that poorly?
At a second glance, however, you're right -- it's actually reasonably fast now. I distinctly remember having to wait quite awhile for just about any program -- and it was not disk thrashing, hard disk light was off.
Still, it will be awhile before you can convince me that Java is fast enough, and awhile more before you can convince me that the syntax is even tolerable. Yes, you can run other languages on the JVM, but it's not really designed for them.
Fair enough.
Nah, most often I'm actually curious. Given all the driver issues with nvidia, I strongly suspected it wouldn't go so well. Guess I was wrong.
So you're telling me games are also not using my video card? They certainly can break, and not just on Linux, although they generally seem to compensate for screenshots.
Ah, I see. And yet, I've always been able to paste with ctrl+c/v in any app that cares about rich text.
Your drivers don't work, sucks to be you. This isn't unheard of on Vista, either.
My ALSA works fine, anywhere I've tried to use it, including a Powerbook, if I remember.
Except when they don't (see above comment about drivers).
And if you want to do an apples-to-apples comparison, either buy them both preloaded or install them both yourself on some arbitrary "standard" box.
Roughly five minutes of tech time and maybe an hour of computer time. Learn to use images, and standardize hardware. Allow the user one image of their own, as well, but that's not the supported one, and they're expected to know how to use an imaging tool to restore their custom image from the network if they go that route.
Start by asking why the hell you roll out new software packages. For instance, if it's a version of Office, let the users upgrade if they want and put it on the image, but don't force them -- let them use OpenOffice if they want.
You could actually just put it on a file share and say go for it in that email.
Some users can't be bothered, of course, so you give those users a choice, either:
I'm sorry, but making IT responsible for everyone's machine is just as much a nightmare. Isn't it?
No, you don't. You're obviously not running Beryl, and probably not Xubuntu.
Yes, I do. Hmm, actually, if I take a screenshot while actually dragging a window, I do see it torn a bit; however, I suspect this is my video card more than anything, and in any case, it's utterly imperceptible to me until I actually take the screenshot.
Click, drag. Then middle-click. Actually works a lot better than on Windows.
Actually, it does bother me that there seem to be two different clipboards on Linux, but I find that I can middle-click-paste into ANY app except a game. In fact, the only thing that behaves inconsistently is ctrl+v, which doesn't necessarily paste the hilight, but if I use ctrl+c/ctrl+v, it's consistent everywhere that ctrl+v actually works. Which isn't everywhere, but neither is it everywhere on Windows -- last I checked, you can't ctrl+v into a DOS box (have to menu->paste).
Streams of what, as someone else said?
Streams of audio? I use ALSA, which does blend streams of audio from any number of applications -- in hardware. If I didn't have that (and chances are VERY good that you do), I'd be using things like esound, which has done the same thing in software since before Windows could do it at all -- Win98 could not play sound from more than one app source at a time, end of story.
Streams of video? I can hold the Super (Windows) key and use my mousewheel to control window translucency. So, while I can't see why you'd want to do this, I can stack as many videos as I want on top of each other and blend them, I suppose. Only exception is if I'm using XvMC, but I'm not sure anything similar for Windows exists.
And for that matter, how is a working clipboard in any way related to aero-like graphics? And if you're talking about audio streams, again, how's that related? And if you're talking about video streams, seriously dude, WTF are you trying to do?
You know what? I do still use IRC, and although I'm on Beryl now, I do use a terminal for roughly half my work (and a web browser for the other half). I do this because I'm faster that way.
But really, Flash is one of those things that just constantly pisses me off. Not that Gnash seems much better, but given the games I can play on this computer, Flash's puny little vector animations should NOT be lagging at all. Someone's trying to do a 3D engine in Flash now that I think illustrates the point perfectly -- the demos are incredibly simplistic, and the ones that start to look cool also start to slow down -- while still having WAY less going on than a game from five years ago.
Recently, I ran a test -- YouTube on Flash, then the same FLV videos (downloaded via Video Downloader) on mplayer or VLC. Both mplayer and VLC played them like I was used to -- fullscreen, with pretty much zero performance hit. Hell, I'm less than 10% CPU usage even dragging a video window around with Beryl. But in Flash, it looks MUCH worse (horrible anti-aliasing), and uses at least 50-60% CPU, sometimes significantly more.
VLC is more cross-platform than Flash, and Flash is at least ten, possibly a hundred times slower.
Flash, like Windows, embarrasses me as a software professional.
And is it irrelevant? After all, computers will just keep getting faster, right? Trouble is, as raw hardware performance approaches a certain point, a whole new class of applications opens up, or a whole new dimension for existing applications emerges. If your environment is slower, that puts you WAY behind the curve on that. So, for example, Flash has some new 3D stuff that looks about as good as, say, Half-Life, and my system is already plenty fast for Half-Life 2. I guarantee that unless we replace it with something else, AJAX will have its first 3D engine in another five or ten years.
Just imagine how cool that sounds, for a second. Open up a website, and without waiting for any third-party environment (Flash) to start up, without even needing to port anything other than Firefox, you have a fully 3D webpage -- or, for that matter, an actual MMO that just loads from visiting a website.
Or whatever excites you. Explore that concept for a few minutes -- what could you do if absolutely ANY app could be run in a browser. Some people don't like this idea, some people get so excited about it that they invent new words (AJAX, Web 2.0) for the technologies that should already make it possible.
Then think about how if the Web was at all efficient, we could've had something five or ten years ago that looks MUCH better than what we'll half-assedly do in another five or ten years.
Ok, I'll talk about performance. Performance in this context is never, ever plural, unless you were talking about, say, dance performances.
But seriously, look at your Java VM. Look for all the benchmarks and justifications you like, but the fact is, I still have to wait on my machine in order to try Hello.java. It feels slow, and I can actually go find some benchmarks to prove it is slow.
Which becomes irrelevant when you run more than one of them.
Now, I actually agree with you -- in theory, a VM should be as fast or faster than C. In theory, multithreaded apps should be easy to write. And yes, in practice, there are ways to protect yourself from buffer overflows, although it won't save you from other stupid mistakes.
However, the first two have a theory which hasn't caught up with practice yet (I'm working on that), and in practice, buffer overflows are really secondary to sheer programmer stupidity -- see the Tetris/plane exploit? The buffer overflow was what brought the whole system down, but there is no language that automatically saves you from allowing a user to put the system into an invalid state. With a phone.
Buffer overflows are the result of bad C programming, not of the C language in itself. You can, actually, do OO in C, and it's actually a nice lightweight language when compared to, say, C++ and Java.
Personally, I wish we saw more "scripting" languages around, but those don't cut it either as soon as you start to care about performance. Getting there, but nowhere close to C... yet.
First, yes, there is way too much stuff running as root. Would you kindly point me to a system that doesn't have this problem?
But I would hardly call this the "biggest security problem", especially considering the vast majority of stuff does NOT run as root, and even daemons which must be started as root drop privileges later on.
It seems equally likely you'd find some bitwise monstrosity to an actual mention of 1024/1023, but in any case, there is a good reason for this. Think NFS, or basically any other service which doesn't have crypto layered on top of crypto -- even if I tunnel NFS through a VPN (which had its own problems, last I tried), that doesn't stop some local, non-root process of attempting to respond. In fact, suppose it's a fileserver that everyone boots from, and the NFS service has crashed. If we allow non-root to bind privileged ports, that also means non-root can then impersonate that NFS server and gain access to everything out there that relies on that NFS.
Now, NFS is arguably bad design here, but you get the idea. Connecting to a privileged port at least means you know what you are connecting to is owned by root, and thus sanctioned by the machine as a whole. If you're connecting to an unprivileged port, you really don't know if you're connecting to a service that the admin has actually set up, or something run by some user account.
I agree about iptables -- forwarding low ports to high ports is half-assed and stupid. Please at least try to understand the rationale behind a security measure before you willfully disable it.
Also, chroot can be complicated -- but it can also be very easy. However, it's not a replacement for the simplest rule here: Drop privileges. Once you bind to the port, you can drop root and become nobody, bound to that privileged port -- and the code that does that can be very simple. Simple enough that you can even throw it into a separate solution -- think inetd/xinetd, where the inetd itself must at least in part remain root, but your actual daemon (webserver or whatever) can be run as any user you like.
You may think this isn't always feasable, and to an extent, you're right. There may be parts to your program that must remain root. However, traditional *nix style would be breaking your program into small, cooperating programs and having only a few of those remain privileged. A good example here would be postfix -- it is split into five or ten processes, only one of which remains root, all others staying low-privileged and often chrooted. It may look strange and complicated at first glance, but it's actually a remarkably clean architecture.
Personally, I think Unix security is not really fine-grained enough. It provides the primitives that could be used to create a truly secure system, but at the moment, root is irrelevant on 99% of people's desktops. I have my su not even ask for a password if I'm in the "wheel" group, and I don't encrypt my SSH keys, because if someone 0wns my normal, everyday account, they've got me in every way that matters. What we want is a Postfix-like approach to per-user code. However, this is more on the desktop, "Let's get UAC right" side of things -- on the server side, it's actually pretty elegant as-is.
You can't test the complex and massive million-dollar code, fine. At least test the individual components.
And yes, exceptions are the right approach here. I'll have to read about that overhead, though, I've never heard of exceptions being a performance issue...
In fact, you might even consider crashing it repeatedly, although that does kind of destroy any claim to innocence you might have.
If you want them to start rolling out decent software, you have to demonstrate that the existing software is not good enough. If it keeps crashing, and people on the plane start complaining, they might actually fix the problem.
Seems to me all a < or > would do is prevent it from going farther than 101 or -1, unless you specifically coded with the assumption that it might one day become some random, weird value.
And of course, the right way to prevent against that is to make it an object and wrap it in an interface which doesn't allow you to step by 2 without changing the object. Changing the object implies that you're going to run the test cases, or adjust them and then run them, so at least in the case of changing step value from 1 to 2, you would catch it in your test suite.
And nothing should ever use a return value to indicate an error situation, if you're in anything resembling a decent language. If you run into APIs that like to do that, build wrappers which actually throw exceptions.
And I have to wonder if at some point it might be cheaper for photographers to buy a relatively slow machine with a pair of screaming-fast video cards.
Possibly. As others have said, this is a question of how well she could've acted them vs how good the CG has gotten.
But what bugs me here is that generally, when we see a convincing performance, we give credit to the actor, even awards and such. Thus, the same actor is hired over and over, gets ludicrous amounts of money, etc.
As you said:
But what bothers me is, at least with most actors, they have something that would tend to contribute to that other than sheer luck. They generally would be physically attractive, or at least can be made to look good. They'd generally at least have some acting talent.
I admit it's inevitable that digital effects will be used where they produce a better picture, and I admit that there's not really much we can do about it, other than maybe make indie films which manage to be very good despite not being touched up (I don't mean Blair Witch bad, think more like American Beauty).
But what I see inevitably happening here is a generation of Paris Hiltons and nsync rejects, with no real talent and don't actually look that good (I can take a walk around my town and find much prettier girls), but airbrushed and digitally enhanced to superstars because they were in the right place at the right time. It's not so much that I object to any one actor being enhanced that way -- Jennifer C. is actually a decent actor -- it's that I object to the good actors being stuck in B movies or theater while the horrible ones who have the right parents or sucked the right dick get all the good roles.
Frankly, in that world -- aren't we already in that world, anyway? -- I'd rather have a wholly digital actor than some ludicrously overpaid wench who has no business working anywhere other than McDonald's. I mean, it's not as if it's even that difficult to have a wholly digital starlet -- look at Alyx Vance!
Doesn't that mean you still need a full Windows OS? Doesn't that mean you still need stupid things like a fully functioning GUI on a server?
You could mess with it on the server, which was my point. What makes your local Windows machine more convenient?
I could make this into a big deal about you refusing to roll out Windows at home, but I imagine this is closer to a minor inconvenience than a major stumbling block.
Again, why are you installing Ruby, Apache and MySQL on Windows, for a server? What is it that Windows makes easier?
The only place I've had problems here is a workplace that's running off of a single Windows server running ASP.NET for a couple of apps. If I remember, ASP is well supported on Linux, and ASP.NET is starting to get some support with Mono.
But I can make the same complaint to Microsoft as you do to Rails -- after going to all the trouble to make a nice bytecode engine, why don't they provide and support a Linux version? Or at least work with the Mono developers to make it easier...
Oh, go right ahead. I actually don't like any of the scripting languages out there -- not that I have anything better (yet) -- so it doesn't matter much to me. I'm just saying that when you ask for things from the OSS community, understand what you're really asking for.
Personally, I couldn't give a damn if scripting languages are well supported on Windows. As far as I'm concerned, that's one of the big attractions of Linux -- so many nice languages supported, often out of the box. Doesn't mean I mind good Python support on Windows, I just won't lift a finger to make it happen until I have a reason to.
Of those that I've played: Unreal Tournament doesn't even come close. Gameplay? Might be better, that's a matter of perspective -- I prefer quality over quantity. But Halo actually had a story-driven single-player campaign -- UT just has a story tacked-on to multiplayer against bots instead of humans.
Half-Life 2: Close enough that I'd call it a matter of taste. Halo restricting you to only one or two weapons carried at a time was a nice mechanic, and it's on the whole more solidly put together -- one of the things I love about Half-Life 2 is that it feels like playing through five different games, but I'm not sure that makes it a good game in itself. There's also plenty of things to like about Halo -- game is mostly streamed in Halo, and entirely streamed in Halo 2, while Half-Life 2 makes you wait through 1-2 minute loading screens. Halo 2 actually has co-op, even if it is splitscreen; I don't know of any PC shooters that do co-op campaigns in any form, except maybe for a mod of Half-Life.
Battlefield 2 -- engine sucks, EA sucks. Don't need to say much more about it, and I won't, as I haven't bought it.
You are right that it's one of the few console shooters that's actually worth playing, but I do think it competes well with PC shooters, on just about everything except raw graphics power -- being an Xbox game, it really can't, but check out the Halo 3 trailer, and anyway, I'll take a Halo or Half-Life over Doom 3 or FEAR any day.
Or IdleRPG, but I doubt either of them have particularly good graphics.
It's possible. From what I've heard of WoW, it might even be true.
But, I don't think it's really relevant to MMOs in general. Say it was a kickass FPS -- then your statement makes perfect sense. If I can make a bot that plays straight through an FPS, then maybe that FPS was too simple to stay interesting to a human -- although I have to admit, Quake and Doom can still be fun, even though bots could probably play both pretty well.
But in an MMO, it's not linear. You can create a bot which goes and does exactly the same thing, over and over -- basically grinds for you -- but it won't necessarily be as interesting as actually doing it yourself, and doing it right.
In the game I play, one controversy awhile back was "autocutting". Seems people had created scripts to go out into the woods and automatically walk around and chop things. Basically, since "attack" is spacebar, you can just put a rock on your spacebar and let your character keep attacking whatever's in front of it -- and that tree isn't going to move.Autocutting has been made less practical over the years, but someone actually created a way to auto-level himself, fairly similarly. There is an area -- the Thirsty Ogres -- which just about anyone can kill. Worst case, it'll take you two hits. This is the best experience you can get through about level 12. They're also aggro. So, the guy put a rock on his spacebar and left himself there -- presumably at level one -- and we caught him at level 38.
Now, it's true, if you just stand in one place and kill the same ogre over and over, it's pretty damned boring. But that's NOT what a normal player does. There are all kinds of things to do, some of which help you level up, some of which don't. There are quests to do, there are all kinds of caves to hunt in and explore, and there are PVP events and RP events.
Pretty much the only thing for which a mind-numbing grind is inescapable is crafting skills, but that's entirely optional -- while there are some items which can only be attained through crafting, there are enough people crafting already that most of these are reasonably cheap. The only other thing that requires crafting is the Ee San Culture trial, but there are alternatives to that -- you could win Story Contests or Poetry Revels.
But even crafting isn't bad, considering I can listen to the radio (podcasts, music) while I craft, and no one's forcing you to do it all at once -- I could craft for half an hour every day, then go actually play for an hour or two.
Any particular reason you can't just try it yourself?
I play a much smaller MMO, but the result is roughly the same. It's possible for any people, of any level or stats, to form a group, and thus, most people nowadays seem to want to be "leeched" to level 99. There are people who specialize in this service, by having a group of high level characters and knowing exactly which areas are best for leveling -- some caves are instanced by level (Mythic Rabbit 1 can be entered at level 25, but Rabbit 2 starts at about 65, thus, you have to be below level 65 to enter Rabbit 1) -- but there are still plenty of areas that can be entered at a very low level, and anyone on up to millions of vitality and mana can still enter the same areas.
So it's possible to actually "buy a leech" with in-game currency, and it's not even particularly expensive if you've got another character.
Someone made a bet, once, that he could get a character to Level 99 in less than 24 hours. I think he did it, too, by bringing in enough high level characters and entering the Wilderness Lobster cave, which he had no business being in -- no group of his level could survive in the last room, so he grouped with people five or ten times as powerful.
I'm a good deal past 99 -- I'm almost Enchanted -- but every one of my other characters, I grind just like everyone else. Actually, it's mostly fun -- if the grind isn't fun, do you really expect things to get more interesting at higher levels? There are certainly aspects of the game that I've found much more challenging -- and much more fun -- at around level 50 or 60 than around level 99. There's also an area I'm about to be able to enter sanely (I'd die too easily now) which sounds like a lot of fun.
Because really, if the game is only fun at level 70 (World of Warcraft), or 75 (Final Fantasy XI), or Sam San (Nexus)... Why are you playing an MMO? Why aren't you just playing, oh, Counter-Strike? If the process (grind?) involved in leveling up isn't fun, you're playing the wrong game, and possibly the wrong genre.
I wanted to hate it because it was an Xbox exclusive.
I wanted to hate it because the PC port was half-assed and years late.
I wanted to hate Bungie for selling out to Microsoft -- I've heard rumors that the original Halo was going to be a truly cross-platform (Windows/Mac/Linux) game before Microsoft bought it and made it Xbox only.
I wanted to hate it because FPSes are supposed to be unimaginative... I wanted to love the PS2, because it had Linux, and Final Fantasies...
I wanted to hate it so I didn't have to give another dime to Microsoft.
But you know what?
It's not just green metal. (Where do people get that, anyway? There is NO green metal through most of the games, other than the protagonist.)
It's actually a really damned good game. The graphics may be technologically dated -- it's hard to tell -- but they were amazing for the time, and the artwork is still amazing. The writing may be "uninspired", but it's not so much what they're saying, it's how they're saying it. The Halo may seem to be a cheap ripoff of Ringworld, but they made it real -- I can feel the world under my feet.
Halo was repetitive? Maybe, but it also meant it was decently long (Halo 2 was over too fast), and gave you time to get good at it. And it was fun... You know, I wanted to love Doom 3, because of the native Linux port, and id being generally cool guys and releasing their source, and all the yummy graphics, but the gameplay just isn't that fun. After you've whacked your 50th zombie on the head with a flashlight, and shotgunned your 200th Imp in the face, it's just no longer fun or even particularly hard, but no matter how many Elites I melee in the back, it never gets old -- or any easier.
And a forgettable storyline? Marathon very likely exists within the Halo universe, but I already forget its storyline, sorry...
So, tell me, what shooters are you playing that are better than the Halo games?
...why do you care about Windows support?
And if your server is Windows, I'd say you're on your own. If, for some perverse reason, you want it to work well, the code is there, but why should we help you?