The iriver ifp-795 supports OGG (with some bitrate limitations--google around for details), has a radio, battery life seems reasonable. Lots of features. The user interface is adequate though not great. I've been happy enough with mine.
Firefox extensions are in a combination of XML and JavaScript, so their functionality is a bit more limited. They are better sandboxed than IE ActiveX controls used to be.
From the submission: "Extensions also have as much access to the file system as the user running Firefox." What sandboxing?
"Able bodied" may be somewhat relevant when they're probably all a bit food-, water-, and sleep- deprived at this point.
NONE of them have organized enough to stow the bodies somewhere out of sight?
Where would you suggest that they put them? How are they going to clean their hands afterwards? (You understand the disease risks here, right?)
NONE of these people have organized to WALK out of the city?
I believe the superdome is surrounded by flooded areas. This means wading through rather deep water that, by this point, has a pretty good level of sewage, dead bodies, and weird chemicals in it. Given that, I suspect they're right to stay put.
And where are they going to walk out of the city to? How far? Where are they going to get food and water along the way?
There's a few details here that aren't clear to me.
Of course. But security is a lot more than just killing a few bad people. It's also figuring out who the bad people are and getting the cooperation of the vast majority that want to move forward.
They're doing better than that...national guardsmen now have orders to shoot to kill.
So there are some twenty thousand people stuck together without food or water, who don't believe they've recieved the emergency supplies and evacuation aid they were led to expect. This isn't a straightforward military problem that can be solved by going in with a lot of force and killing a few bad people. This is a political problem--these people need to cooperate so they can evacuate safely, but it's not obvious how to do that when they don't know who to trust.
Looked at as a solution to that political problem, sending in a bunch of national guardsmen with "orders to shoot to kill" sounds like a "solution" that could produce the worst possible results.
How will these kiosks work in the areas where they are needed most? What about internet access?
Unfortunately, it's probably too late for the average geek to help with, e.g., the people still stranded in New Orleans.
What they can help with is the wave of evacuees who suddenly want to find a new job, find a new place to live, replace all the necessities they left behind, get in touch with their scattered friends and relatives, and in general assemble the kind of support system they need for something like a normal life. Even if they eventually plan to move back to New Orleans, they're probably going to be living somewhere else for some time.
It's not hard to imagine that some cheap communications technology could come in very handy here.
Also, I'd point out that raising the application fees doesn't stop big companies from filing as many patents as they do today. It just hurts small inventors.
If your mythical "small inventors" can't find the funding to pay the application fee, how on earth are they going to find the funds to turn it into a product?
And the point isn't to stop anyone from filing patents, it's to make sure the patent office is funded well enough to actually do its job.
If you want to see a system that's unfair to the "small inventor", look at the current system. How is one person going to compete with one of these patent factories?
These could work in really big Cities. Traffic in big congested cities is stop and go and averages about 20MPH. Unfortunately modern U.S. cities have given up the grid patern and let the developers do the planing ad hoc with huge high ways.
The big arteries usually have more than 2 lanes, and the outer lanes (on a surface street, not a restricted-access freeway) probably already has people turning in and out of driveways, parallel parking, etc. A slow-moving vehicle in the outer lane isn't going to be a big deal.
Even on fast two-lane streets it's usually not going to be that hard to pass a small slow-moving vehicle.
I've been using Linux since 2.0.27. It has usually been generally quite stable for me. But recently, I've been encountering more and more kernel crashes.... Can anyone else who has been using Linux for a significant amount of time attest to this?
Not me.
But it's very hard to generalize from one person's experience to any general "recent trend of unstability." Most of the bugs are in drivers, so people's experiences tend to be highly dependent on exactly which hardware they have.
I wish Linus would arrive at a policy and just stick with it instead of all these gyrations of "we'll use this method from now on...no wait...we'll use this one from now on...
This case is typical of most such "policy changes" in that he's really just voicing something that's been a defacto policy for a while. All of 2.6 has followed the pattern that the biggest changes went in at the beginning of the -rc, with later -rc's being for stabilization, it's just that this hasn't been an explicit policy and hasn't been consistently enforced, so there have been some weird exceptions.
and by the way I want everyone to switch revision control systems now...oh wait...sigh.
Linus has switched revision control systems twice in the history of the kernel. The first time, from nothing to Bitkeeper, took a long time to happen. The second, from Bitkeeper to Git, was obviously much more sudden. But Linus didn't really have much choice (except that many would argue it was partly his fault for choosing Bitkeeper in the first place).
Those of us that aren't among the few big subsystem maintainers mostly haven't been affected since most of us just rely on emailing patches and ignore bitkeeper and git anyway.
From the point of someone just reading slashdot or kerneltrap it may look like things are changing very often. But really these changes have been pretty gradual.
Doesn't that pretty much negate your assumption? Same budget, same costs. P.S. Things cost the same here as they do in the city.
Well, not comparable real estate at least. Most people aren't going to be able to afford a lot of the same size in any reasonable dense downtown. So even if they own their home, the average city dweller is much more likely to be sharing at least a wall or two with the neighbors....
1 cord of wood can heat a very large home for an entire year.
My parents had a wood stove for heating.;-)
You win! Out of curiosity--any idea how much time and space it takes to grow a cord of wood?
I think my assumptions about wood-burning efficiency were based on vaguely remembered stories about communities in some third-world countries having trouble with deforestation--but maybe there's other reasons why wood burning becomes in practical beyond a certain population density.
My issue wasn't with the homeschooling, it was with the blanket statement that city living is more economical.
Fair enough. I'm assuming a fairly dense city (new york or boston, as you say, not LA), and assuming for comparison purposes a family with roughly the same budget in both places.
When you live outside of town, even a few miles, you actually plan your shopping trips. Personally, now that I live in town, I probably make 20 trips to the store for every 2 that we made when I was a kid and we lived 5 miles outside of town.
Personally I do all those trips under my own power--and I don't think continuing to be completely without a car would be a possibility in the country. Also, I suspect that most of us would find we use more energy today then we did when we were kids--that's just the way things have gone....
How so? If you live in the country the way people did 100 or even 50 years ago, you can live very cheaply. Only come to town once a week or so, homeschool your kids, grow your own food, about the only fuel source you would need would be for heat.
I don't know the numbers (would be curious if someone else did), but I had the impression it required a pretty fair swath of forest to keep a family in cooking and heating fuel for a year. OK, forget the 50 to 100 years ago bit and assume we can do better than wood-burning. Maybe you can do it, I don't know.
But I got the impression most home schoolers shipped their kids around pretty regularly for social reasons and to share teaching duties.
For the typical person, I'd imagine the differences are that you're heating a house instead of an appartment and travelling 20 miles for your supplies and social life instead of 2....
Anyone who dooms their children to twelve* years in government schools is guilty of gross negligence, bordering on purposeful, intended cruelty - maybe even sadism.
That sort of exageration for effect is exactly the sort of language the flamebait moderation was invented for.
--Bruce Fields (spent 12 years in "government schools", got a pretty good education out of it, don't consider my parents guilty of gross negligence--quite the opposite)
Having gone to the movies at least once every two weeks for the past 10 years (usually once a week), I have never once had a showing ruined by a phone ringing, someone's kid screaming, or someone else throwing food.
I think you exaggerate the problem a bit much.
Same here, I've always wondered where all these complaints come from.
My current theory is that people are seeing the most-hyped movies on the first weekend, so they're always in the theater when there's tons of people, so they're more likely to encounter jerks.
Wait a couple weeks--if it's worth seeing it'll probably still be there. Or go earlier in the day--it's cheaper and you'll have something to talk about over dinner, instead of having to rush through dinner to get to the theater on time.
The wireless network was not "inviting" him to connect. The wireless network is not a sentient entity, still less one with the legal power to do so.
A piece of paper with writing on it is also not a sentient entity. So what?
Geeks need to get out of the habit of assuming that a default configuration amounts to "permission to use".
What about when the "default configuration" actually issues invitations?
The only surefire way to know if you have permission or not to use a network is to look for a publically posted notice
How is an ssid broadcast not a public notice?
I personally want to invite people to use my network. How the heck am I supposed to do that now? We could add a broadcast that says "here's my ssid, you can use it, and yes I really mean it this time". But then there's nothing we can do to stop the stupid hardware manufacturers from turning that on by default too. Repeat ad infinitum....
...most WAPs are configured by default to have no encryption and to publically broadcast a SSID...
If the default apartment configuration featured an unlocked door and a sign that said "please come in and have some coffee", would you blame the coffee drinkers or the landlords?
I'm not a hardcore linux geek, but I watch the news, read the paper, and I'm on slashdot every day. You guys are going to *have* to do a better job advertising this!
They've always expressed more of an interest in getting the right people together than in being as large as possible.
So if you're not a "hardcore linux geek", maybe it's not really the event for you. It's mainly a chance for linux developers to get together and discuss their work.
The worlds-geeks-home-computer market segment makes up about 0.000005% of the PC market.
By my calculations, then, that would leave us with about 300 geeks worldwide.
They wouldn't make a cent on such a machine, they wouldn't cover development costs.
This may well be true, but let's try to make at least some effort to come up with reasonable numbers. The geeks-home-computer market is large enough to make *some* money off of, even if it's not large enough to support dirt-cheap hardware made specially for it....
like using port 80 for all new services, since that's the only one you can count on to get through all the firewalls
I don't really get why people do this
The firewall may be run by someone's ISP, or by some distant IT department, neither of which necessarily answer to the person who actually wants to use whatever application it is that needs a port opened up.
More likely, in fact, someone's just firing up an application, finding that it doesn't work, and complaining to the software company that their application is broken, not realizing the failure is due to a firewall someplace. So if you're in the business of selling software that uses the network, you just use http if possible and avoid having to troubleshoot people's firewall setups.
The only way I really see it being useful is if someone wants to run unauthorized stuff.
Yup. But in a large organization I imagine it's easy for the IT department to get out of touch with what individual groups actually need to use the network for. "Unauthorized" isn't really the same as illegimate.
It's good to work on the idea that no systetem is undefeatable, so arranging a few different security systems can only gain you more security than just one method.
Well, not necessarily. Additional layers of code can also expose additional (exploitable) code complexity. There's no reason your IDS or firewall themselves can't have buffer overflows.
I also wonder time spent setting up and configuring another layer of defenses wouldn't be better spent making sure that what you've got works as designed. Administrators don't have infinite time, and it's important to spend what you have on the stuff that's most important.
I agree that firewalls should not be implemented as a crutch in lieu of a good security model for your servers, but why not have that and a firewall.
Because the existance of firewalls everywhere breaks lots of useful tools (ping) and forces all sorts of stupid behaviour, like using port 80 for all new services, since that's the only one you can count on to get through all the firewalls....
In 10 years port 80 will be the only port anyone uses, and some genius will no doubt start selling http-level firewalls that look inside the http requests to decide what to let through. Rinse, lather, repeat.
Having a standard is only helpful if every distro actually uses the same packages
There are also advantages just to sharing the same packaging system--sharing of bug fixes for rpm itself, ability to easily transfer rpm-building or -using skills from one distribution to another, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
The iriver ifp-795 supports OGG (with some bitrate limitations--google around for details), has a radio, battery life seems reasonable. Lots of features. The user interface is adequate though not great. I've been happy enough with mine.
From the submission: "Extensions also have as much access to the file system as the user running Firefox." What sandboxing?
"Able bodied" may be somewhat relevant when they're probably all a bit food-, water-, and sleep- deprived at this point.
Where would you suggest that they put them? How are they going to clean their hands afterwards? (You understand the disease risks here, right?)
I believe the superdome is surrounded by flooded areas. This means wading through rather deep water that, by this point, has a pretty good level of sewage, dead bodies, and weird chemicals in it. Given that, I suspect they're right to stay put.
And where are they going to walk out of the city to? How far? Where are they going to get food and water along the way?
There's a few details here that aren't clear to me.
Of course. But security is a lot more than just killing a few bad people. It's also figuring out who the bad people are and getting the cooperation of the vast majority that want to move forward.
So there are some twenty thousand people stuck together without food or water, who don't believe they've recieved the emergency supplies and evacuation aid they were led to expect. This isn't a straightforward military problem that can be solved by going in with a lot of force and killing a few bad people. This is a political problem--these people need to cooperate so they can evacuate safely, but it's not obvious how to do that when they don't know who to trust.
Looked at as a solution to that political problem, sending in a bunch of national guardsmen with "orders to shoot to kill" sounds like a "solution" that could produce the worst possible results.
Unfortunately, it's probably too late for the average geek to help with, e.g., the people still stranded in New Orleans.
What they can help with is the wave of evacuees who suddenly want to find a new job, find a new place to live, replace all the necessities they left behind, get in touch with their scattered friends and relatives, and in general assemble the kind of support system they need for something like a normal life. Even if they eventually plan to move back to New Orleans, they're probably going to be living somewhere else for some time.
It's not hard to imagine that some cheap communications technology could come in very handy here.
--Bruce Fields
If your mythical "small inventors" can't find the funding to pay the application fee, how on earth are they going to find the funds to turn it into a product?
And the point isn't to stop anyone from filing patents, it's to make sure the patent office is funded well enough to actually do its job.
If you want to see a system that's unfair to the "small inventor", look at the current system. How is one person going to compete with one of these patent factories?
The big arteries usually have more than 2 lanes, and the outer lanes (on a surface street, not a restricted-access freeway) probably already has people turning in and out of driveways, parallel parking, etc. A slow-moving vehicle in the outer lane isn't going to be a big deal.
Even on fast two-lane streets it's usually not going to be that hard to pass a small slow-moving vehicle.
I doubt there's really any serious problem here.
--Bruce Fields
Not me.
But it's very hard to generalize from one person's experience to any general "recent trend of unstability." Most of the bugs are in drivers, so people's experiences tend to be highly dependent on exactly which hardware they have.
--Bruce Fields
This case is typical of most such "policy changes" in that he's really just voicing something that's been a defacto policy for a while. All of 2.6 has followed the pattern that the biggest changes went in at the beginning of the -rc, with later -rc's being for stabilization, it's just that this hasn't been an explicit policy and hasn't been consistently enforced, so there have been some weird exceptions.
Linus has switched revision control systems twice in the history of the kernel. The first time, from nothing to Bitkeeper, took a long time to happen. The second, from Bitkeeper to Git, was obviously much more sudden. But Linus didn't really have much choice (except that many would argue it was partly his fault for choosing Bitkeeper in the first place).
Those of us that aren't among the few big subsystem maintainers mostly haven't been affected since most of us just rely on emailing patches and ignore bitkeeper and git anyway.
From the point of someone just reading slashdot or kerneltrap it may look like things are changing very often. But really these changes have been pretty gradual.
--Bruce Fields
Well, not comparable real estate at least. Most people aren't going to be able to afford a lot of the same size in any reasonable dense downtown. So even if they own their home, the average city dweller is much more likely to be sharing at least a wall or two with the neighbors....
Maybe he lived someplace warmer? Or if this was the place he lived as a kid, maybe he's just forgotten the details....
Also, I suppose if wood really was your main energy source then you'd have to take into account year-round daily cooking.
You win! Out of curiosity--any idea how much time and space it takes to grow a cord of wood?
I think my assumptions about wood-burning efficiency were based on vaguely remembered stories about communities in some third-world countries having trouble with deforestation--but maybe there's other reasons why wood burning becomes in practical beyond a certain population density.
Fair enough. I'm assuming a fairly dense city (new york or boston, as you say, not LA), and assuming for comparison purposes a family with roughly the same budget in both places.
Personally I do all those trips under my own power--and I don't think continuing to be completely without a car would be a possibility in the country. Also, I suspect that most of us would find we use more energy today then we did when we were kids--that's just the way things have gone....
I don't know the numbers (would be curious if someone else did), but I had the impression it required a pretty fair swath of forest to keep a family in cooking and heating fuel for a year. OK, forget the 50 to 100 years ago bit and assume we can do better than wood-burning. Maybe you can do it, I don't know.
But I got the impression most home schoolers shipped their kids around pretty regularly for social reasons and to share teaching duties.
For the typical person, I'd imagine the differences are that you're heating a house instead of an appartment and travelling 20 miles for your supplies and social life instead of 2....
--Bruce Fields
That sort of exageration for effect is exactly the sort of language the flamebait moderation was invented for.
--Bruce Fields (spent 12 years in "government schools", got a pretty good education out of it, don't consider my parents guilty of gross negligence--quite the opposite)
Oh, right, move out to the sticks and home-school, that's the way to economize on fuel....
(Sorry, but if the goal is energy efficiency, we're waaay better off with people living in the big city and taking the bus to school.)
Same here, I've always wondered where all these complaints come from.
My current theory is that people are seeing the most-hyped movies on the first weekend, so they're always in the theater when there's tons of people, so they're more likely to encounter jerks.
Wait a couple weeks--if it's worth seeing it'll probably still be there. Or go earlier in the day--it's cheaper and you'll have something to talk about over dinner, instead of having to rush through dinner to get to the theater on time.
A piece of paper with writing on it is also not a sentient entity. So what?
What about when the "default configuration" actually issues invitations?
How is an ssid broadcast not a public notice?
I personally want to invite people to use my network. How the heck am I supposed to do that now? We could add a broadcast that says "here's my ssid, you can use it, and yes I really mean it this time". But then there's nothing we can do to stop the stupid hardware manufacturers from turning that on by default too. Repeat ad infinitum....
If the default apartment configuration featured an unlocked door and a sign that said "please come in and have some coffee", would you blame the coffee drinkers or the landlords?
They've always expressed more of an interest in getting the right people together than in being as large as possible.
So if you're not a "hardcore linux geek", maybe it's not really the event for you. It's mainly a chance for linux developers to get together and discuss their work.
By my calculations, then, that would leave us with about 300 geeks worldwide.
This may well be true, but let's try to make at least some effort to come up with reasonable numbers. The geeks-home-computer market is large enough to make *some* money off of, even if it's not large enough to support dirt-cheap hardware made specially for it....
The firewall may be run by someone's ISP, or by some distant IT department, neither of which necessarily answer to the person who actually wants to use whatever application it is that needs a port opened up.
More likely, in fact, someone's just firing up an application, finding that it doesn't work, and complaining to the software company that their application is broken, not realizing the failure is due to a firewall someplace. So if you're in the business of selling software that uses the network, you just use http if possible and avoid having to troubleshoot people's firewall setups.
Yup. But in a large organization I imagine it's easy for the IT department to get out of touch with what individual groups actually need to use the network for. "Unauthorized" isn't really the same as illegimate.
Well, not necessarily. Additional layers of code can also expose additional (exploitable) code complexity. There's no reason your IDS or firewall themselves can't have buffer overflows.
I also wonder time spent setting up and configuring another layer of defenses wouldn't be better spent making sure that what you've got works as designed. Administrators don't have infinite time, and it's important to spend what you have on the stuff that's most important.
--bruce Fields
Because the existance of firewalls everywhere breaks lots of useful tools (ping) and forces all sorts of stupid behaviour, like using port 80 for all new services, since that's the only one you can count on to get through all the firewalls....
In 10 years port 80 will be the only port anyone uses, and some genius will no doubt start selling http-level firewalls that look inside the http requests to decide what to let through. Rinse, lather, repeat.
--Bruce Fields
There are also advantages just to sharing the same packaging system--sharing of bug fixes for rpm itself, ability to easily transfer rpm-building or -using skills from one distribution to another, etc.