My ancient 1985 AmigaOS and C=64 GEOS have keyboard shortcuts, so keyboard shortcuts are not really anything innovative.
I didn't say that they were. However, AIUI, some of the UI designers didn't want them, but Gates insisted that they be included in case anything happened to the mouse.
I remember, about twenty-five years or so ago, working on a system where the shortcuts weren't active by default. You had to reboot, go into setup and activate them, or you didn't have them. And, I might add, the only way you could go into setup the first time, was by mouse, so if it went bad, you were SOL until you got another one. (Yes, my boss had a spare, JIC.)
So the whole "Doomsday Machine" thing was an automated system based on ground sensors to launch the missiles in case US attacks.
I realize that this is Slashdot, and it's not reasonable to expect people to RTFA before commenting. However, if you had, as I did, you'd learn that IF the machine is active, and IF it detects a strike, and IF it's cut off from military command, THEN, AND ONLY THEN, it transfers the authority to launch to whoever's running a hardened bunker with the ability to launch. THEN, IF AND ONLY IF that person decides that it's appropriate, the counterstrike is launched.
To summarize, Perimeter can't launch a strike, it can only bypass several layers of normal control to allow the man on the spot to make the decision.
I can't recall ANY time in the 10 years (including a few years running Win/ME) when I had to reboot "several times a day".
I take it, then, that you never used NT 4. I was stuck with it at work, once, and it would BSOD three to five times a day because of a bug in the video driver. For some weird reason, MS had decided to "speed things up" by putting all drivers in RNG 0, so that if one of them crashed, they took down the whole box. Ever since, I've been wary of anything based on the NT kernel, and that's one of the reasons I went over to the Bright Side of the Farce.
Yes, and you can thank Bill Gates for insisting on them. I still remember having a caller's mouse stop responding when I was talking her through reconfiguring Network Control Panel, nine or ten years ago. I brought up the same window on my box (Normally, I did this by memory, but this time I needed to see exactly what was going on.) Counted how many tabs it took to get to the right place, told her how to use the arrow keys to reach what she needed and got everything tidied up. I just checked, and I can maneuver around control panels with tab and arrow keys just fine in Gnome. Somebody in another post mentioned that you can't do this on a Mac. If so, I wonder why not.
when is window going to get multi-desktop on a stock install?
I have a friend who's a die-hard Microsoft fanboi. At most, he will grudgingly admit that Linux is good for servers, but he wouldn't trust it on the desktop. I asked him about that, and he told me that you can set Vista to have "virtual desktops," but that he's never seen it done because "nobody can see the point."
Unless none of your Windows boxes are connected to the Internet, there's a very good chance that they're all infected. Sorry, but just letting the malware run rampant isn't a good response.
Two reasons. First, Linux is designed to run 24/7 and many of us like the convenience of not having to wait for it to boot when we want to use our computer. Second, we're doing distributed computing (SETI, Einstein@home and so on) and leave the box running when we're not using it to let it keep working. Also, of course, it's a measure of stability, and that's something that's important to some of us. Why? Well, let's just say it's part of the Linux enthusiast mindset and let it go at that.
Your sister surfing for flash games, printing documents, or whatever the hell she's doing on the internet doesn't need uptime, she needs for her computer to work as intended.
Actually, she never shut down her computer at night when she had Windows, either. Of course, it had to be rebooted for other reasons. I use her as an example not because she's a great Linux guru, but to show that an "Aunt Minni class" user will find Linux stable, easy to use and more than sufficient for what she needs.
Can we please stop using uptime as a metric for how well an operating system functions for a desktop?
It's not much of a metric for how well the OS functions, but it does tend to demonstrate stability. At this point, unless you're using some very specialized software that hasn't been ported and won't work under Wine, or your main use for a computer is gaming, whatever OS you pick will have the functionality you need. At this point, such things as stability, presence or absence of malware, availability of support and cost become important, so that's what I've been discussing.
I have a friend who's a computer columnist, among other things. He's mentioned several times that his Vista box will sometimes refuse to find one or another of the computers on his LAN until it gets rebooted, and he can't find out why. From what I can tell, his experience and yours are quite different. If you know how he can stop his Vista box from "forgetting" about other boxes, I'm sure he'd be glad to know.
It's not good enough for a gamer, or a hardcore graphical designer or any number of niche users.
And yet, both my desktop and my laptop are using compiz-fusion with the desktop effects active, and you just can't do that with Windows. I show friends the cube and they're all very impressed. Some of them want to know if that runs under Windows and they're all very disappointed when they find out it doesn't. So far, not one of them's decided to switch just to get the eye candy, but then, I don't have foolish, superficial friends. (My main reason for showing them, BTW, is that I think they'll enjoy the show, and it's not easy to describe the cube in a way that really makes sense to somebody who's never seen it.)
When people ask me about Linux, I tell them the distro I use, what I use it for, what issues I have discovered, and ask them what they would like to use it for.
So do I. I also tell them that if they're happy with the way Windows works for them and are comfortable with it, there's no real reason to change, except to experiment. If they're just curious, I point them toward a LiveCD, and caution them not to let it install unless they Really Mean It. Linux isn't for everybody. But then, neither are Windows or Mac OS.
Right now, I'm running Windows 7 on my main machine, with close to 85 days uptime.
As I've pointed out in another post, Fedora is a bleeding-edge distro, with fairly frequent kernel updates, and it's kinda hard to get the new one running without a reboot. Still, unless there's a kernel update or a power failure, I never need to reboot. How many Windows users do you know who can go a full day without rebooting their main desktop at least once? I'm glad you've reached almost three months without rebooting, and hope you can go at least twice that long, but your experience isn't exactly average; mine is for Linux users, and if I wanted to use something like Mint or CentOS, I could probably get uptimes of a year or more.
You point out that the number of Linux viruses, Trojans and so-on is rising, and I'm sure it is. However, how many of them are in the wild, and not just Proof Of Concept? I honestly don't know, but I do know that, as you point out, sooner or later I'm going to need an anti-virus. Judging from what I can see, it's probably going to be later, but who knows? And, before I leave, I might add that there are 3D games written for Linux, such as OpenArena, and they work Just Fine.
Not for Linux it isn't, that's for sure. And, I must admit you were able to get remarkable performance from your Windows installations; most people need to reboot several times a day. As I think I've mentioned, I run Fedora 10, so my uptime is limited by how fast they shove out kernel updates. With Windows, and Patch Tuesday, if you know exactly what you're doing and have everything set up Just Right, you only need to worry about updates requiring a reboot once a month. Of course, that also means that security holes don't get patched as soon as they could unless Microsoft decides they're important enough for an emergency update. Like with everything, there's a trade-off. You find it acceptable, I don't.
Besides the fact that there are plenty of free(!) and perfectly working solutions for Windows to avoid malware and protect yourself against viruses.
True. However, you have to download them, install them and keep them updated or they don't do you any good. And, they take up hard disk space, (Granted, that's not a big concern now, but it's still true.) they have to be loaded every time you boot and they're always running in the background, slowing down your computer and making it less responsive. I use Linux. Right now, I'm running Fedora 10, with 27 days up uptime. My sister uses Ubuntu, and hasn't rebooted in well over a month, because Ubuntu isn't as bleeding-edge as Fedora is. Both of our boxes are crisp, responsive and unhindered either by malware or the band-aids needed to keep malware off of our systems. And, I might add, I've been using Linux in one form or another for at least a decade, now, and I've yet to see my first kernel panic. If what you want from your computer is the ability to surf the web, read and send email and maybe compose the occasional document to be printed out, Linux can do that for you at least as well as Windows can, if not better, and for most adults, that's all they want from a home computer.
The difference from an absolute defence is that in the case of an absolute defence, the court is required to consider whether it is true or not,
No. In the case of an absolute defense, if the defense proves their defense, the litigation is ended in their favor, and it is not subject to mitigation or collateral attack. Note that in the article cited, it's mentioned that the truth is an absolute defense in any defamation case in the US but is not in England. (emphasis added.)
It isn't word games, routers and firewalls are not the same thing.
And I never said they were. Insisting on calling a home router a "NAT Device," however, is just playing word games, and that's what I was referring to. NAT makes your computers harder to find by port scanners, and packet filtering is one layer needed for a firewall, and making quibbling over the nomenclature isn't going to change that no matter how many brownie points it gets you in class. And no, before you accuse me of thinking that machines on a home LAN don't need a real firewall, that's not what I'm saying.
*Shrug!* At this point, you're just playing word games with the nomenclature. The common name for the device in question is "router," and wanking about the definition isn't going to change that.
Agreed. I never said that it did. NAT and packet filtering are two separate functions that a home router can do. Combined, they make the beginnings of a firewall, but you still need more to be properly protected.
IT people setup security that's needlessly inconvenient.
How true! IT people seem to think that if you can make security tighter, you must, even where it doesn't make a difference. I once worked at a company where IT had set things up so that you had to log into three different databases to get your work done. Each one required a different ten-character password with at least one uppercase letter, one digit and one punctuation mark, and they all expired after thirty days. Sound good? What would you say if I told you that all three databases were on the local intranet and not accessible from outside of the firewall? There was no telecommuting, so you had to be on-site to reach the servers in question. The only thing IT did with their draconian password policy was make work harder for everybody, but there was no way to make them understand that.
Router's don't drop requests, at least not by default. Firewalls do. Best Buy has never sold a single router, no matter what it says on the box.
I have a home LAN, with a router. In order to get bittorrent working correctly, I had to set up this machine with a static IP on the LAN, and tell my router to forward all rquests on the appropriate ports to that IP. I have my own domain, and I've used dynamic DNS to let me use SSH to connect to my home machine when I'm away from home. Again, I had to tell the router where to send incoming requests on Port 22. Now, you may prefer to call that a "residential gateway" as Wikipedia does, but most people would look at you funny if you called it anything other than a router.
So, what exactly _is_ the difference that everyone is so worked up about?
In the US, the truth is an absolute defense; if the defendant can prove that what they said/wrote is true, they're home free. In England, it's an allowable defense; judges commonly follow the precedent that no damages are awarded if the statements are proven true, but AIUI, there's nothing in the law to require that. In fact, the Wikipedia article on libel says that a charge can be brought if the statements are defamatory or harmful to a person's reputation, but avoids the word "false." In fact, in the Wikipedia discussion page for Libel, there's an explicit statement (by a non-lawyer) that "...UK law (along with that of other Commonwealth countries) does NOT require falsehood to establish libel."
A number of posters are denying this and insisting that because they're all saying the same thing, they must be right. Shame, really, to see so many slashdotters falling for the fallacy that the truth can be decided by consensus, no matter what the actual evidence says.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't say that they were. However, AIUI, some of the UI designers didn't want them, but Gates insisted that they be included in case anything happened to the mouse.
I remember, about twenty-five years or so ago, working on a system where the shortcuts weren't active by default. You had to reboot, go into setup and activate them, or you didn't have them. And, I might add, the only way you could go into setup the first time, was by mouse, so if it went bad, you were SOL until you got another one. (Yes, my boss had a spare, JIC.)
I realize that this is Slashdot, and it's not reasonable to expect people to RTFA before commenting. However, if you had, as I did, you'd learn that IF the machine is active, and IF it detects a strike, and IF it's cut off from military command, THEN, AND ONLY THEN, it transfers the authority to launch to whoever's running a hardened bunker with the ability to launch. THEN, IF AND ONLY IF that person decides that it's appropriate, the counterstrike is launched.
To summarize, Perimeter can't launch a strike, it can only bypass several layers of normal control to allow the man on the spot to make the decision.
I take it, then, that you never used NT 4. I was stuck with it at work, once, and it would BSOD three to five times a day because of a bug in the video driver. For some weird reason, MS had decided to "speed things up" by putting all drivers in RNG 0, so that if one of them crashed, they took down the whole box. Ever since, I've been wary of anything based on the NT kernel, and that's one of the reasons I went over to the Bright Side of the Farce.
Thank you; I've emailed him the link.
Yes, and you can thank Bill Gates for insisting on them. I still remember having a caller's mouse stop responding when I was talking her through reconfiguring Network Control Panel, nine or ten years ago. I brought up the same window on my box (Normally, I did this by memory, but this time I needed to see exactly what was going on.) Counted how many tabs it took to get to the right place, told her how to use the arrow keys to reach what she needed and got everything tidied up. I just checked, and I can maneuver around control panels with tab and arrow keys just fine in Gnome. Somebody in another post mentioned that you can't do this on a Mac. If so, I wonder why not.
I have a friend who's a die-hard Microsoft fanboi. At most, he will grudgingly admit that Linux is good for servers, but he wouldn't trust it on the desktop. I asked him about that, and he told me that you can set Vista to have "virtual desktops," but that he's never seen it done because "nobody can see the point."
Should he? If so, I'll pass it on.
Unless none of your Windows boxes are connected to the Internet, there's a very good chance that they're all infected. Sorry, but just letting the malware run rampant isn't a good response.
Two reasons. First, Linux is designed to run 24/7 and many of us like the convenience of not having to wait for it to boot when we want to use our computer. Second, we're doing distributed computing (SETI, Einstein@home and so on) and leave the box running when we're not using it to let it keep working. Also, of course, it's a measure of stability, and that's something that's important to some of us. Why? Well, let's just say it's part of the Linux enthusiast mindset and let it go at that.
Actually, she never shut down her computer at night when she had Windows, either. Of course, it had to be rebooted for other reasons. I use her as an example not because she's a great Linux guru, but to show that an "Aunt Minni class" user will find Linux stable, easy to use and more than sufficient for what she needs.
Can we please stop using uptime as a metric for how well an operating system functions for a desktop?
It's not much of a metric for how well the OS functions, but it does tend to demonstrate stability. At this point, unless you're using some very specialized software that hasn't been ported and won't work under Wine, or your main use for a computer is gaming, whatever OS you pick will have the functionality you need. At this point, such things as stability, presence or absence of malware, availability of support and cost become important, so that's what I've been discussing.
I have a friend who's a computer columnist, among other things. He's mentioned several times that his Vista box will sometimes refuse to find one or another of the computers on his LAN until it gets rebooted, and he can't find out why. From what I can tell, his experience and yours are quite different. If you know how he can stop his Vista box from "forgetting" about other boxes, I'm sure he'd be glad to know.
And yet, both my desktop and my laptop are using compiz-fusion with the desktop effects active, and you just can't do that with Windows. I show friends the cube and they're all very impressed. Some of them want to know if that runs under Windows and they're all very disappointed when they find out it doesn't. So far, not one of them's decided to switch just to get the eye candy, but then, I don't have foolish, superficial friends. (My main reason for showing them, BTW, is that I think they'll enjoy the show, and it's not easy to describe the cube in a way that really makes sense to somebody who's never seen it.)
So do I. I also tell them that if they're happy with the way Windows works for them and are comfortable with it, there's no real reason to change, except to experiment. If they're just curious, I point them toward a LiveCD, and caution them not to let it install unless they Really Mean It. Linux isn't for everybody. But then, neither are Windows or Mac OS.
As I've pointed out in another post, Fedora is a bleeding-edge distro, with fairly frequent kernel updates, and it's kinda hard to get the new one running without a reboot. Still, unless there's a kernel update or a power failure, I never need to reboot. How many Windows users do you know who can go a full day without rebooting their main desktop at least once? I'm glad you've reached almost three months without rebooting, and hope you can go at least twice that long, but your experience isn't exactly average; mine is for Linux users, and if I wanted to use something like Mint or CentOS, I could probably get uptimes of a year or more.
You point out that the number of Linux viruses, Trojans and so-on is rising, and I'm sure it is. However, how many of them are in the wild, and not just Proof Of Concept? I honestly don't know, but I do know that, as you point out, sooner or later I'm going to need an anti-virus. Judging from what I can see, it's probably going to be later, but who knows? And, before I leave, I might add that there are 3D games written for Linux, such as OpenArena, and they work Just Fine.
Not for Linux it isn't, that's for sure. And, I must admit you were able to get remarkable performance from your Windows installations; most people need to reboot several times a day. As I think I've mentioned, I run Fedora 10, so my uptime is limited by how fast they shove out kernel updates. With Windows, and Patch Tuesday, if you know exactly what you're doing and have everything set up Just Right, you only need to worry about updates requiring a reboot once a month. Of course, that also means that security holes don't get patched as soon as they could unless Microsoft decides they're important enough for an emergency update. Like with everything, there's a trade-off. You find it acceptable, I don't.
So do Slackware, OpenSuse and Gentoo. Your point is?
Because it's not. Ubuntu is based on Debian, not RedHat.
True. However, you have to download them, install them and keep them updated or they don't do you any good. And, they take up hard disk space, (Granted, that's not a big concern now, but it's still true.) they have to be loaded every time you boot and they're always running in the background, slowing down your computer and making it less responsive. I use Linux. Right now, I'm running Fedora 10, with 27 days up uptime. My sister uses Ubuntu, and hasn't rebooted in well over a month, because Ubuntu isn't as bleeding-edge as Fedora is. Both of our boxes are crisp, responsive and unhindered either by malware or the band-aids needed to keep malware off of our systems. And, I might add, I've been using Linux in one form or another for at least a decade, now, and I've yet to see my first kernel panic. If what you want from your computer is the ability to surf the web, read and send email and maybe compose the occasional document to be printed out, Linux can do that for you at least as well as Windows can, if not better, and for most adults, that's all they want from a home computer.
No. In the case of an absolute defense, if the defense proves their defense, the litigation is ended in their favor, and it is not subject to mitigation or collateral attack. Note that in the article cited, it's mentioned that the truth is an absolute defense in any defamation case in the US but is not in England. (emphasis added.)
And I never said they were. Insisting on calling a home router a "NAT Device," however, is just playing word games, and that's what I was referring to. NAT makes your computers harder to find by port scanners, and packet filtering is one layer needed for a firewall, and making quibbling over the nomenclature isn't going to change that no matter how many brownie points it gets you in class. And no, before you accuse me of thinking that machines on a home LAN don't need a real firewall, that's not what I'm saying.
*Shrug!* At this point, you're just playing word games with the nomenclature. The common name for the device in question is "router," and wanking about the definition isn't going to change that.
Agreed. I never said that it did. NAT and packet filtering are two separate functions that a home router can do. Combined, they make the beginnings of a firewall, but you still need more to be properly protected.
How true! IT people seem to think that if you can make security tighter, you must, even where it doesn't make a difference. I once worked at a company where IT had set things up so that you had to log into three different databases to get your work done. Each one required a different ten-character password with at least one uppercase letter, one digit and one punctuation mark, and they all expired after thirty days. Sound good? What would you say if I told you that all three databases were on the local intranet and not accessible from outside of the firewall? There was no telecommuting, so you had to be on-site to reach the servers in question. The only thing IT did with their draconian password policy was make work harder for everybody, but there was no way to make them understand that.
I have a home LAN, with a router. In order to get bittorrent working correctly, I had to set up this machine with a static IP on the LAN, and tell my router to forward all rquests on the appropriate ports to that IP. I have my own domain, and I've used dynamic DNS to let me use SSH to connect to my home machine when I'm away from home. Again, I had to tell the router where to send incoming requests on Port 22. Now, you may prefer to call that a "residential gateway" as Wikipedia does, but most people would look at you funny if you called it anything other than a router.
In the US, the truth is an absolute defense; if the defendant can prove that what they said/wrote is true, they're home free. In England, it's an allowable defense; judges commonly follow the precedent that no damages are awarded if the statements are proven true, but AIUI, there's nothing in the law to require that. In fact, the Wikipedia article on libel says that a charge can be brought if the statements are defamatory or harmful to a person's reputation, but avoids the word "false." In fact, in the Wikipedia discussion page for Libel, there's an explicit statement (by a non-lawyer) that "...UK law (along with that of other Commonwealth countries) does NOT require falsehood to establish libel."
A number of posters are denying this and insisting that because they're all saying the same thing, they must be right. Shame, really, to see so many slashdotters falling for the fallacy that the truth can be decided by consensus, no matter what the actual evidence says.