Of course, there's the following counterargument: suppose companies like Google paid more taxes. Then they couldn't afford to pay as many people to work for them, so there would be fewer people paying taxes. In addition, there would be fewer jobs.
This is only as good as the signature scheme. If collisions can be easily found for the signatures then it's useless, and sometimes even having a known collision makes it useless: several attacks on MD5-based signature schemes do not require finding a collision, but simply use a widely-known MD5 collision. The KB article doesn't say what signature scheme is used, so it's impossible to know whether or not that's an issue.
The other problem I see is that there appears to be a single point of failure in the catalog of known-good signatures. If you can successfully attack that, you can change any protected file to whatever you like.
So the system is a stumbling block for those wishing to overwrite protected dlls, but if you really want to you can probably get around it.
The question is, however, *what did he lost to*? Now, if you look at the quote more closely, he's saying 'those smart guys from Ximian will pick up on kernel maintenance in no time' - which is of course untrue
I dunno dude, Robert Love is a pretty damn decent kernel hacker. The only kernel hacker, in fact, who has managed to both wite a non-sucky file notification API and get it checked into the kernel. There is also other more "low-level" talent on the Beagle team. So the Ximian team may very well be able to handle the kernel side of things.
However, it's a shame that there's this level of infighting at Novell; this kind of stuff totally destroys productivity. I really want Novell to do well; they're doing lots of good stuff, from fixing OpenOffice to Beagle to Mono. But at this rate, things don't look good.
In many cases, what they need is food, clean drinking water, and shelter. Let's get those bases covered before we start doling out the software, shall we?
I had a prof that did that, at the University of Waterloo, of all places.
It's one thing to use somebody else's lecture notes. But this guy clearly didn't even read them before coming to class. You'd ask him a question and he'd just say "Uh, I don't know, these aren't my notes." For crying out loud! And I was paying $700 or so for that course!
The prof was Mavaddat in case you're curious. If you're ever scheduled to have a course with him, SWITCH as fast as you freaking can! You're better off Googling for stuff and reading other people's PowerPoint slides by yourself.
Heh - you're obviously doing better than me. I've never been able to get XP to "see" Win2k or Samba shares in Network Neighbourhood. Are there any tricks you need to do? I looked on the MS KB and stuff, and ran that god awful "Networking Wizard" a couple dozen times, and could never get it to work.
That's my biggest problem with XP; the "need to type//servername/share" issue. Plus the cached list of shares you've visited in "My Network Places" instead of the actual machines on the network is kind of annoying. If a share is ever removed, then one of those cached icons doesn't work anymore, yet it still seems to sit there forever, now useless.
Sigh. But seriously, if there's any black magic you need to do to get XP to "see" shares better, let me know! I'd really appreciate it. Oh, and is there any reason that it takes forever to browse Win9x shares from XP/2k? It's like pulling teeth. Browse them from another 9x machine and they're plenty fast, though. Grr.
At least I don't use that crap every day. I think I really would end up losing what few fragments of my sanity I have left =)
Myself, Gentoo's biggest feature was the kernal compile options, adding patches for pre-emptive mulitasking, and improved responsiveness.
Really? Hmm.. I run Gentoo and I use vanilla kernels because I find they perform better. I'm on an SMP box though, so that might have something to do with it. But I tried a couple Gentoo kernels and I had *seriously* bad performance problems. Whenever I was compiling the mouse cursor would get all jittery, as would the scrolling song title in XMMS - even if I niced the emerge down to 12 or something!
Vanilla kernels tend to run really nicely for me and if I nice the compiles down I barely even notice them (even if I don't, I barely notice them, being on an SMP box:)
Maybe I'm choosing bad options in the Gentoo kernel though; do some of the patches (i.e. low-latency and pre-empt) interact badly or something? What options do you use for your Gentoo kernels? Just curious.
One thing the Gentoo kernels are good for, though, is Starcraft in Wine. Dunno what it is about them, but man Starcraft sure runs really fast with those kernels. Vanilla kernels run it really, really slowly. At least in recent versions of Wine; 20020510 was the sweet spot for Starcraft, IMO, but it's incompatible with glibc 2.3 and thus no longer an option. Sigh.
There is minimal support for this on *nix, but good luck getting it configured and working well.
It's not that hard, not really much harder than Samba. I've set it up in the past. It's not as hard as, say, OpenLDAP to set up. You do have to (gasp!) edit a config file.
nix really needs some kind of GUI client for AFP/TCP much like the Go To Server window in OS X. That is, something that scans the LAN for servers as well as allows direct IP entry of the server if you know it.
Sure, that'd be cool, but I'd remind you that the "Go To Server" window in OS X sucks monkey brains through a straw. The "browser" thingy that lets you see the network doesn't see very much, for some reason (Nautilus SMB browser sees more in my experience) and if anything at all goes wrong, all you get is some inscrutible error number (at least with most of the Linux Samba implementations, you'll get messages like "Invalid username/password," or "Permission denied," or "Host not found.")
NFS sure is convenient but it's a security nightmare and no sysadmin worth his pay will let you set up and use NFS on a network.
NFS on its own definitely has security problems. But NFS along with something like NIS or LDAP authentication can be pretty decent.
What we REALLY need is a platform agnostic networking solution that works well, is fast, is reliable and works the same everywhere.
Hoh man, that's the exact first thing that came to my mind too =)
Re:Do younger minds absorb quicker?
on
Ageism in IT?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I either have a similar condition, or I drink WAY too much coffee (seems to be the opinion of my roommates - I don't think coffee actually causes grey hair but I don't have any proof that it doesn't, either).
In any case, I'm 19 now, with some grey hair, and I'm already having trouble in job interviews. I do co-op through my university, and although I've never been asked explicitly about it, I do get "vibes" from interviewers, sorta wondering why such an "old" guy is still in school. I think they sorta get to wondering why I only graduated high school 2 years ago if I'm as old as I must be.. sigh.
The 2 companies I've worked for so far, I've been the youngest person there, but nobody would believe it until I pulled out the ID. I can't imagine the trouble I'll have 5 to 10 years down the road when I look nearly 40.. urgh. So yeah, ageism in IT definitely worries me. I don't think I'll be able to work after 30, so I'll probably have to go back to school and become a prof or something - the one profession where you're allowed to be nice and ripe =)
On the plus side, I was able to buy beer and get into bars when I was 16 (had grey hair back then too, and for us Canucks, the drinking age is 18 or 19 depending on region).
Re:amazingly, the world of gentoo
on
Gentoo Reviewed
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Erm, ok, and what precisely would those benchmarks be? Just saying "I've run some benchmarks..." doesn't really say much. I'm sure there are many programs that don't gain a lot from optimisation - find, for example. Since find is largely dependent on the I/O subsystem having it optimised for your arch isn't likely to make two hoots of a difference when it comes to how fast it can find your stuff.
I use Gentoo every day, and have been for over a year now. I definitely noticed a tangible difference when I installed it on my laptop (which, at the time, was a PII 266 - yes I'm patient:) Before I had been running RedHat 7.2, and had been unable to smoothly play DivX files in Xine on the machine, at 320x240 resolution (even when the RPMs for Xine itself were optimised for i686). After installing Gentoo and Xine, (same versions of X and Xine) I was able to play the same files, smooth as butter on a hot summer day.
I have seen a number of other *tangible* performance differences. I'm not saying I doubt that your benchmarks didn't show any differences; I'm just saying that a few benchmarks can't be used to draw the kind of sweeping conclusion you did.
As for stability, I more or less agree, but Gentoo (like most distros) do sometimes have their own custom patches for certain packages, that *could* potentially increase stability. But in general I don't think stability is particularly great in Gentoo; it seems stable to me (I tend to get 100-day or greater uptimes, rebooting only for kernel upgrades, etc. and not due to crashes), just like most other Linux distros I've used.
I gotta say I agree.. it's the 1GB/day thing that makes it slightly unreasonable. It's pretty easy to do a gig in a day with some ISOs or what not. But I'm currently on Bell Sympatico and I have a 10GB/month transfer limit (up + down combined). I'm only on Sympatico because it's all there was in my area (I don't have cable TV and didn't want to get it just for the 'net). I thought the bandwidth was going to be a huge problem, but it totally hasn't been. There have been some days when I've used a lot (I use Gentoo and an emerge -up world can suck in a lot of stuff) but I'm almost at the end of my first month and I've only used 1.6GB down and 0.1GB up. I use Kazaa Lite on Linux too, for ST eps. So I gotta say, somebody doing more than a gig per day *on average* is probably abusing the service. But just doing more than a gig in a day once in a while.. I don't think that should be a problem.
As an aside, in most areas in Canada you can still get unlimited broadband for like $30-$40 Canuck bucks per month.. I don't know how long it'll be before that changes though.. I sure hope things stay this good.
I went to school with that guy.. he's definitely one of the most intelligent people I know. He doesn't always put that intelligence to use before trying something new though.. he's had a few close ones:)
Cool to see him up on/. though - Sam, if you're reading this.. "lekker gebakt??"
The thing that bothers me about LCDs is not the response time. A lot of people seem to be bothered about it, and say that playing games is not feasible on LCDs, but even though I notice the ghosting a bit, I can't really say it bothers me all that much, at least not on the newer displays. No, what bothers me is always the resolution. Sure, a 17" LCD usually has the viewable area of a 19" CRT, but on my 19" CRT I can run 1600x1200x85Hz, and every 17" LCD I've ever seen is 1280x1024. Give me an LCD that'll run 1600x1200 at <= $500 and I'd be all over it...
I don't get why in laptops they make the resolution uber-high (well, PC laptops anyway, Apple is a different case) and then make the desktop LCDs with such low resolution.. I mean you can barely even see stuff on those Dell laptops with 15" 1600x1200 screens, for crying out loud!
If somebody could elaborate the differences between 2k and XP. I'm don't really know much about what's different besides the cosmetic changes and the addition of extra crap (iMovie-esque things). And in this case, I really would like to know (out of curiosity mostly) what is different in XP that might make it more secure.
Also, like I said.. no Windows buff, but.. wouldn't the 9x stuff be less secure than NT/2k? Or is 9x just less stable, while the NT/2k stuff has more holes?
I tend not to really think about the differences between Windows versions and just think of it all as 'Windows' so this kinda interested me in a perverse sorta way.
Well.. we are talking about the states, where judges have been known to award *millions* for people receiving *hot* coffee from McDonald's (cost of McDonald's coffee: probably not more than $1.50).
Imagine that, you order a coffee and it's hot! What's the world coming to?? And then you spill it because you're fumbling with a cell phone or something and you're millions richer. If these plaintiffs get the same judge then methinks they're in luck...
I'm not sure this is entirely correct. Most of the people I know living in Europe only have 1 IP and run NAT just like most people in North America. I realise, however, that just because people *I know* do that, it's not necessarily the only way things are done. Still, bandwidth is *much* more expensive in Europe than it is in North America. You may be able to get 4 or 5 IPs, whoopee.. you've still only got 512kbps down. Maybe you think 512kbps is a lot? Well coming from Canada where you literally cannot get broadband at less than 1mbit down it doesn't seem like all that much... And for that 512kbps down you'll have to pay at least 50 quid or 75 euro a month.. that seems like an awful lot for a Canuck used to paying $40 - $50 Canuck bucks (around 25 - 30 euro) for 1mbit or more. I'd rather have more bandwidth and run NAT personally...
NAT works fine and then (as the previous poster mentions) boxes behind your NAT box aren't completely exposed so it gives you a bit of extra security. I wouldn't, however, go so far as to say it's all well and good to run telnet behind NAT. There's just something about clear-text passwords that makes me winge, even if they are behind NAT.
But, to put at least one thing in here that's on-topic, I don't see a problem with the fact that this new Linux for the Xbox "distro" (I guess it's not really a distro yet) runs telnet. Few people are gonna put LinuXboxes online with this release, and telnet is nice and simple for testing to see if it's up and running. Plus in clusters (a potentially big thing for LinuXboxes) Xboxes almost certainly wouldn't be connected to the 'net at all, even through NAT.
Frozen Bubble. Is that game ever addictive. The music is a bit repetitive but very fitting. And the cute little noises it makes when you shoot the little spheres.. delightful. An easy way to kill a few hours. It's Perl/SDL so I'm sure you could compile it on OS X.
I agree.. but in a sense I feel it's a bit like trying to "stuff the genie back in the bottle" - where my parents live they get 5mbit down/512kbit up for $40 Canuck bucks per month. That's like $25 Yank bucks. After getting used to that, suddenly being told that for "guaranteed bandwidth" (i.e. they won't bitch if you d/l or up/l lots) you have to pay a lot more (usually about twice as much) does kinda stink. The cable company where my parents live is Shaw, and as far as I know they don't have any plans to do so right now, but they always could. Another cable company in Canada, Rogers, is doing this kind of thing I think, and I think they had similar bandwidth for $45 Canuck bucks a month, and now want $80 or something that's almost twice as much.
I also have a problem with how broadband is advertised; you always see commercials of people watching streaming videos or teleconferencing, or other bandwidth-intensive things. If you actually use your broadband that way though, chances are increasing these days that your cable/xDSL company will come after you for "heavy use" and tell you to upgrade to their "power user" super-duper thingamajig broadband. I'd have less of a problem with this if broadband companies stuck to fast web browsing and less misleading things in their advertising of the "normal" broadband services.
Meh, my two bits...
Re:a non-GUI solution that works
on
GUIs for Everyone
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I beg to differ. Have you actually installed Linux *recently?* I tried installing Windows 2k and XP recently. No really, I did try. The stupid things wouldn't find my onboard 3Com network cards though. Yes, that's right, 3Com (not no-name) and Windows couldn't find them. Any Linux distro can easily use these cards; they use the 3c59x module that's been in the kernel for eons now.
So I had Windows installed, but it was only 640x480 16 colors (also couldn't handle my video card) and I couldn't get online to download video drivers. And get this - the installation for the network drivers required at least 256 colors! So I couldn't install the network drivers to download the video drivers.. so I nuked the fucking partition having been reminded how much Windows can suck sometimes.
In general I think people are just used to having Windows installed, and zero installation is of course easier than any Linux installation. But Windows can be a real bitch to get going, esp. when some of your hardware isn't supported. I've had quite a few problems installing Windows. On one machine I was trying to install 2k and it would always lock up at a certain point, and tell me to reboot, and then do the same thing over. There's nothing you can do in a situation like that, except throw the drive in another box for the install and move it over. That's not very user friendly.
These things go two ways.. I know Linux installs can be a right pain in the ass too, but that doesn't mean everything with Windows is fine and dandy just because you can sometimes click next a couple times and it'll work. A lot of the time that doesn't work, and then you curse the fact that you have such little control over the install process.
A friend of mine who uses Windows almost exclusively was able to install Lycoris all on his own without any problems last week; the only question he asked me was how to burn the ISO he downloaded.. so like I say - two way street buddy.
I can't think of a single person that I know that runs Connectiva. But that doesn't mean they're in trouble. Connective just isn't all that popular where I live (Britain). Similarly, Turbolinux isn't that popular stateside or here. But just like Connectiva is really popular in Brazil, Turbolinux is really popular in Korea, China, Japan and other areas of Asia.
< rant >
I know this is slashdot, but for some reason I was under the impression that the blokes who actually posted the stories had something at least partially resembling a clue. Maybe the reason that you don't know anybody who uses Turbolinux, dear poster, is that you almost certainly live in the states! Sigh.
</rant >
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, there's the following counterargument: suppose companies like Google paid more taxes. Then they couldn't afford to pay as many people to work for them, so there would be fewer people paying taxes. In addition, there would be fewer jobs.
This is only as good as the signature scheme. If collisions can be easily found for the signatures then it's useless, and sometimes even having a known collision makes it useless: several attacks on MD5-based signature schemes do not require finding a collision, but simply use a widely-known MD5 collision. The KB article doesn't say what signature scheme is used, so it's impossible to know whether or not that's an issue.
The other problem I see is that there appears to be a single point of failure in the catalog of known-good signatures. If you can successfully attack that, you can change any protected file to whatever you like.
So the system is a stumbling block for those wishing to overwrite protected dlls, but if you really want to you can probably get around it.
I dunno dude, Robert Love is a pretty damn decent kernel hacker. The only kernel hacker, in fact, who has managed to both wite a non-sucky file notification API and get it checked into the kernel. There is also other more "low-level" talent on the Beagle team. So the Ximian team may very well be able to handle the kernel side of things.
However, it's a shame that there's this level of infighting at Novell; this kind of stuff totally destroys productivity. I really want Novell to do well; they're doing lots of good stuff, from fixing OpenOffice to Beagle to Mono. But at this rate, things don't look good.
In many cases, what they need is food, clean drinking water, and shelter. Let's get those bases covered before we start doling out the software, shall we?
Meh, don't feel bad dude, I've done that a few times :) I know to look for it now when things just don't seem right...
I had a prof that did that, at the University of Waterloo, of all places.
It's one thing to use somebody else's lecture notes. But this guy clearly didn't even read them before coming to class. You'd ask him a question and he'd just say "Uh, I don't know, these aren't my notes." For crying out loud! And I was paying $700 or so for that course! The prof was Mavaddat in case you're curious. If you're ever scheduled to have a course with him, SWITCH as fast as you freaking can! You're better off Googling for stuff and reading other people's PowerPoint slides by yourself.
Alright, but here's something that does make no sense: they use "hair-splitting accuracy" and "Humvees" in the same sentence =)
Heh - you're obviously doing better than me. I've never been able to get XP to "see" Win2k or Samba shares in Network Neighbourhood. Are there any tricks you need to do? I looked on the MS KB and stuff, and ran that god awful "Networking Wizard" a couple dozen times, and could never get it to work.
That's my biggest problem with XP; the "need to type //servername/share" issue. Plus the cached list of shares you've visited in "My Network Places" instead of the actual machines on the network is kind of annoying. If a share is ever removed, then one of those cached icons doesn't work anymore, yet it still seems to sit there forever, now useless.
Sigh. But seriously, if there's any black magic you need to do to get XP to "see" shares better, let me know! I'd really appreciate it. Oh, and is there any reason that it takes forever to browse Win9x shares from XP/2k? It's like pulling teeth. Browse them from another 9x machine and they're plenty fast, though. Grr.
At least I don't use that crap every day. I think I really would end up losing what few fragments of my sanity I have left =)
Myself, Gentoo's biggest feature was the kernal compile options, adding patches for pre-emptive mulitasking, and improved responsiveness.
Really? Hmm.. I run Gentoo and I use vanilla kernels because I find they perform better. I'm on an SMP box though, so that might have something to do with it. But I tried a couple Gentoo kernels and I had *seriously* bad performance problems. Whenever I was compiling the mouse cursor would get all jittery, as would the scrolling song title in XMMS - even if I niced the emerge down to 12 or something!
Vanilla kernels tend to run really nicely for me and if I nice the compiles down I barely even notice them (even if I don't, I barely notice them, being on an SMP box :)
Maybe I'm choosing bad options in the Gentoo kernel though; do some of the patches (i.e. low-latency and pre-empt) interact badly or something? What options do you use for your Gentoo kernels? Just curious.
One thing the Gentoo kernels are good for, though, is Starcraft in Wine. Dunno what it is about them, but man Starcraft sure runs really fast with those kernels. Vanilla kernels run it really, really slowly. At least in recent versions of Wine; 20020510 was the sweet spot for Starcraft, IMO, but it's incompatible with glibc 2.3 and thus no longer an option. Sigh.
There is minimal support for this on *nix, but good luck getting it configured and working well.
It's not that hard, not really much harder than Samba. I've set it up in the past. It's not as hard as, say, OpenLDAP to set up. You do have to (gasp!) edit a config file.
nix really needs some kind of GUI client for AFP/TCP much like the Go To Server window in OS X. That is, something that scans the LAN for servers as well as allows direct IP entry of the server if you know it.
Sure, that'd be cool, but I'd remind you that the "Go To Server" window in OS X sucks monkey brains through a straw. The "browser" thingy that lets you see the network doesn't see very much, for some reason (Nautilus SMB browser sees more in my experience) and if anything at all goes wrong, all you get is some inscrutible error number (at least with most of the Linux Samba implementations, you'll get messages like "Invalid username/password," or "Permission denied," or "Host not found.")
NFS sure is convenient but it's a security nightmare and no sysadmin worth his pay will let you set up and use NFS on a network.
NFS on its own definitely has security problems. But NFS along with something like NIS or LDAP authentication can be pretty decent.
What we REALLY need is a platform agnostic networking solution that works well, is fast, is reliable and works the same everywhere.
Yep.
Hoh man, that's the exact first thing that came to my mind too =)
I either have a similar condition, or I drink WAY too much coffee (seems to be the opinion of my roommates - I don't think coffee actually causes grey hair but I don't have any proof that it doesn't, either).
In any case, I'm 19 now, with some grey hair, and I'm already having trouble in job interviews. I do co-op through my university, and although I've never been asked explicitly about it, I do get "vibes" from interviewers, sorta wondering why such an "old" guy is still in school. I think they sorta get to wondering why I only graduated high school 2 years ago if I'm as old as I must be.. sigh.
The 2 companies I've worked for so far, I've been the youngest person there, but nobody would believe it until I pulled out the ID. I can't imagine the trouble I'll have 5 to 10 years down the road when I look nearly 40.. urgh. So yeah, ageism in IT definitely worries me. I don't think I'll be able to work after 30, so I'll probably have to go back to school and become a prof or something - the one profession where you're allowed to be nice and ripe =)
On the plus side, I was able to buy beer and get into bars when I was 16 (had grey hair back then too, and for us Canucks, the drinking age is 18 or 19 depending on region).
Erm, ok, and what precisely would those benchmarks be? Just saying "I've run some benchmarks..." doesn't really say much. I'm sure there are many programs that don't gain a lot from optimisation - find, for example. Since find is largely dependent on the I/O subsystem having it optimised for your arch isn't likely to make two hoots of a difference when it comes to how fast it can find your stuff.
:) Before I had been running RedHat 7.2, and had been unable to smoothly play DivX files in Xine on the machine, at 320x240 resolution (even when the RPMs for Xine itself were optimised for i686). After installing Gentoo and Xine, (same versions of X and Xine) I was able to play the same files, smooth as butter on a hot summer day.
I use Gentoo every day, and have been for over a year now. I definitely noticed a tangible difference when I installed it on my laptop (which, at the time, was a PII 266 - yes I'm patient
I have seen a number of other *tangible* performance differences. I'm not saying I doubt that your benchmarks didn't show any differences; I'm just saying that a few benchmarks can't be used to draw the kind of sweeping conclusion you did.
As for stability, I more or less agree, but Gentoo (like most distros) do sometimes have their own custom patches for certain packages, that *could* potentially increase stability. But in general I don't think stability is particularly great in Gentoo; it seems stable to me (I tend to get 100-day or greater uptimes, rebooting only for kernel upgrades, etc. and not due to crashes), just like most other Linux distros I've used.
I gotta say I agree.. it's the 1GB/day thing that makes it slightly unreasonable. It's pretty easy to do a gig in a day with some ISOs or what not. But I'm currently on Bell Sympatico and I have a 10GB/month transfer limit (up + down combined). I'm only on Sympatico because it's all there was in my area (I don't have cable TV and didn't want to get it just for the 'net). I thought the bandwidth was going to be a huge problem, but it totally hasn't been. There have been some days when I've used a lot (I use Gentoo and an emerge -up world can suck in a lot of stuff) but I'm almost at the end of my first month and I've only used 1.6GB down and 0.1GB up. I use Kazaa Lite on Linux too, for ST eps. So I gotta say, somebody doing more than a gig per day *on average* is probably abusing the service. But just doing more than a gig in a day once in a while.. I don't think that should be a problem.
As an aside, in most areas in Canada you can still get unlimited broadband for like $30-$40 Canuck bucks per month.. I don't know how long it'll be before that changes though.. I sure hope things stay this good.
I went to school with that guy.. he's definitely one of the most intelligent people I know. He doesn't always put that intelligence to use before trying something new though.. he's had a few close ones :)
/. though - Sam, if you're reading this.. "lekker gebakt??"
Cool to see him up on
The thing that bothers me about LCDs is not the response time. A lot of people seem to be bothered about it, and say that playing games is not feasible on LCDs, but even though I notice the ghosting a bit, I can't really say it bothers me all that much, at least not on the newer displays. No, what bothers me is always the resolution. Sure, a 17" LCD usually has the viewable area of a 19" CRT, but on my 19" CRT I can run 1600x1200x85Hz, and every 17" LCD I've ever seen is 1280x1024. Give me an LCD that'll run 1600x1200 at <= $500 and I'd be all over it...
I don't get why in laptops they make the resolution uber-high (well, PC laptops anyway, Apple is a different case) and then make the desktop LCDs with such low resolution.. I mean you can barely even see stuff on those Dell laptops with 15" 1600x1200 screens, for crying out loud!
If somebody could elaborate the differences between 2k and XP. I'm don't really know much about what's different besides the cosmetic changes and the addition of extra crap (iMovie-esque things). And in this case, I really would like to know (out of curiosity mostly) what is different in XP that might make it more secure.
Also, like I said.. no Windows buff, but.. wouldn't the 9x stuff be less secure than NT/2k? Or is 9x just less stable, while the NT/2k stuff has more holes?
I tend not to really think about the differences between Windows versions and just think of it all as 'Windows' so this kinda interested me in a perverse sorta way.
Well.. we are talking about the states, where judges have been known to award *millions* for people receiving *hot* coffee from McDonald's (cost of McDonald's coffee: probably not more than $1.50).
Imagine that, you order a coffee and it's hot! What's the world coming to?? And then you spill it because you're fumbling with a cell phone or something and you're millions richer. If these plaintiffs get the same judge then methinks they're in luck...
I'm not sure this is entirely correct. Most of the people I know living in Europe only have 1 IP and run NAT just like most people in North America. I realise, however, that just because people *I know* do that, it's not necessarily the only way things are done. Still, bandwidth is *much* more expensive in Europe than it is in North America. You may be able to get 4 or 5 IPs, whoopee.. you've still only got 512kbps down. Maybe you think 512kbps is a lot? Well coming from Canada where you literally cannot get broadband at less than 1mbit down it doesn't seem like all that much... And for that 512kbps down you'll have to pay at least 50 quid or 75 euro a month.. that seems like an awful lot for a Canuck used to paying $40 - $50 Canuck bucks (around 25 - 30 euro) for 1mbit or more. I'd rather have more bandwidth and run NAT personally...
NAT works fine and then (as the previous poster mentions) boxes behind your NAT box aren't completely exposed so it gives you a bit of extra security. I wouldn't, however, go so far as to say it's all well and good to run telnet behind NAT. There's just something about clear-text passwords that makes me winge, even if they are behind NAT.
But, to put at least one thing in here that's on-topic, I don't see a problem with the fact that this new Linux for the Xbox "distro" (I guess it's not really a distro yet) runs telnet. Few people are gonna put LinuXboxes online with this release, and telnet is nice and simple for testing to see if it's up and running. Plus in clusters (a potentially big thing for LinuXboxes) Xboxes almost certainly wouldn't be connected to the 'net at all, even through NAT.
Slight correction. It's a "school" of CS and it's still within the Faculty of Math.
Frozen Bubble. Is that game ever addictive. The music is a bit repetitive but very fitting. And the cute little noises it makes when you shoot the little spheres.. delightful. An easy way to kill a few hours. It's Perl/SDL so I'm sure you could compile it on OS X.
I agree.. but in a sense I feel it's a bit like trying to "stuff the genie back in the bottle" - where my parents live they get 5mbit down/512kbit up for $40 Canuck bucks per month. That's like $25 Yank bucks. After getting used to that, suddenly being told that for "guaranteed bandwidth" (i.e. they won't bitch if you d/l or up/l lots) you have to pay a lot more (usually about twice as much) does kinda stink. The cable company where my parents live is Shaw, and as far as I know they don't have any plans to do so right now, but they always could. Another cable company in Canada, Rogers, is doing this kind of thing I think, and I think they had similar bandwidth for $45 Canuck bucks a month, and now want $80 or something that's almost twice as much.
I also have a problem with how broadband is advertised; you always see commercials of people watching streaming videos or teleconferencing, or other bandwidth-intensive things. If you actually use your broadband that way though, chances are increasing these days that your cable/xDSL company will come after you for "heavy use" and tell you to upgrade to their "power user" super-duper thingamajig broadband. I'd have less of a problem with this if broadband companies stuck to fast web browsing and less misleading things in their advertising of the "normal" broadband services.
Meh, my two bits...
I beg to differ. Have you actually installed Linux *recently?* I tried installing Windows 2k and XP recently. No really, I did try. The stupid things wouldn't find my onboard 3Com network cards though. Yes, that's right, 3Com (not no-name) and Windows couldn't find them. Any Linux distro can easily use these cards; they use the 3c59x module that's been in the kernel for eons now.
So I had Windows installed, but it was only 640x480 16 colors (also couldn't handle my video card) and I couldn't get online to download video drivers. And get this - the installation for the network drivers required at least 256 colors! So I couldn't install the network drivers to download the video drivers.. so I nuked the fucking partition having been reminded how much Windows can suck sometimes.
In general I think people are just used to having Windows installed, and zero installation is of course easier than any Linux installation. But Windows can be a real bitch to get going, esp. when some of your hardware isn't supported. I've had quite a few problems installing Windows. On one machine I was trying to install 2k and it would always lock up at a certain point, and tell me to reboot, and then do the same thing over. There's nothing you can do in a situation like that, except throw the drive in another box for the install and move it over. That's not very user friendly.
These things go two ways.. I know Linux installs can be a right pain in the ass too, but that doesn't mean everything with Windows is fine and dandy just because you can sometimes click next a couple times and it'll work. A lot of the time that doesn't work, and then you curse the fact that you have such little control over the install process.
A friend of mine who uses Windows almost exclusively was able to install Lycoris all on his own without any problems last week; the only question he asked me was how to burn the ISO he downloaded.. so like I say - two way street buddy.
I can't think of a single person that I know that runs Connectiva. But that doesn't mean they're in trouble. Connective just isn't all that popular where I live (Britain). Similarly, Turbolinux isn't that popular stateside or here. But just like Connectiva is really popular in Brazil, Turbolinux is really popular in Korea, China, Japan and other areas of Asia.
/rant >
< rant > I know this is slashdot, but for some reason I was under the impression that the blokes who actually posted the stories had something at least partially resembling a clue. Maybe the reason that you don't know anybody who uses Turbolinux, dear poster, is that you almost certainly live in the states! Sigh. <