"...we will lose the ability to collectively affect the policies of our country, no matter how small your individual voice might be."
Not to be a cynic, but can you tell me of any recent elections that have been decided by one vote? Sure, I know, if everyone thought this way, etc. Or yeah, we all know that Florida came down to a few hundred votes. Fine. Unless an election came down to one vote, yours was not the one that made the difference, nor was mine. Know what this means? Had you stayed home, things would be the same as they are today.
Just a cheery thought to brighten up your day. I still vote, when I get the chance. But I do so knowing it makes no difference.
Aside from the arguments about superiority (FreeBSD versus Linux on Intel hardware, for example, is a bit of a tough one, though OpenBSD versus most Linuxes for security is not, and any BSD versus Linux for stability is pretty much not a competition, either), you seem a bit misguided about the BSD's.
You assume that it is ego that's responsible for Theo to run the OpenBSD project (which as I said really does have a number of security features that Linux hasn't got--compare http://openbsd.org/errata.html to the track record of the Linux kernel alone). You seem to forget that the BSD's are distinct projects; Theo runs Open, but not Free or Net (or Darwin, or the number of commercial OSes that borrowed BSD code--OSX and Solaris, if I remember right, among likely others).
Judging by that little misconception alone, I'm guessing you aren't a BSD user. I'm going to go out on a limb here and ask if you've ever even used a BSD (me, I'm both a Linux and a BSD person; posting from a Linux desktop, run Linux and Free and Open on servers, and my laptop is a nice new OSX powerbook). You might assume from the hype that Linux is technologically superior, but that is often not the case. The BSD's have their strengths and weeknesses, just as Linux does. Linux has momentum and publicity as a principle strength. But that doesn't mean it's always better (and truly, even if I've got PAX and SELinux or GRSec or similar on my Linux install, I still have to worry about reasonably frequent kernel vulnerabilities a bit more than I do with OpenBSD or even FreeBSD).
Not entirely true, ya big troll. I know it's easy to just repost this drivel, but cut us all a break, will ya?
Trusted Computing, depending on what you apply the lable to, does mean that media distributors can trust the computer. But it also means you can. The idea of providing each computer with a secure cryptographic ID of some sort is pretty valuable to anyone concerned with security just as well as media distributors.
For example, if I want to filter virus and spam mail from the real thing, I can see if the e-mails I got claiming to be from my mother are really signed by her computer or not. If I want to be able to buy things online with the click of a button, I can have my credit card company authorize this particular PC to be able to make purchases online, and show my ID by being able to sign things with my unique private key.
Certainly most of this could be done in other ways, and a driving factor is certainly the desire to set up better DRM, but who cares? I don't pirate music, and I don't buy crippled CDs. So if someone wants to put unobtrusive DRM in their media and I'm OK with that, I'll buy it (like, say the protected iTMS AACs). If the DRM makes it unusable to me (like, say, Napster 2.0's), then I won't. It's all about market pressure.
Same goes for trusted computing. If I'm building my own machine, or buying one from an OEM, I'm not going to buy one with features that I don't like. So what's the big deal?
Regardless, I know IHBT, but try to at least keep the trolls creative. This post of yours is just offtopic garbage with nothing new to add to the conversation. Too bad my mod points ran out yesterday, or this would be marked down Redundant so fast your head would spin.
Not only that, but isn't the whole point of a backup disk to be able to restore your OS and software if the hard drive fails? Sure, you can still use this to restore if the software just gets screwed up beyond the hope of fixing, but if the hardware fails, I'd rather have a CD than another partition on the hard drive.
And seriously, cost of the media? How much could this possibly cost (even if the partition is only the size of a CDROM; 700MB or less)?
Point being, perhaps (the review is being ridiculously slow to load for me; don't know if its Slashdotted or just that I'm stuck on dialup), that there is no secondary OS loaded after the BIOS for this functionality. The poster is implying that the BIOS itself (which is loaded initially upon boot) is the OS that does the playback. This would be significantly different than a traditional setup, I would think.
Re:32k is more than I dreamed of a few (25) years
on
The Disposable Computer
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It really depends on what you do. Of course for Internet, word processing, etc, el Cheapo is fine.
Even for Photoshop, Flash, and most coding, it's fine.
For CAD you might get by. I've got no experience with CAD software. But for 3d modelling and rendering, the state of the art truly still isn't fast enough. A fast graphics card is necessary for showing the textured model on the fly. The better the card, the better this model, the easier it is to work on and see how it'll look compared to the real thing. The better the processor, the faster the render, the less time you have to wait to see the final product (and for a high-quality complex render, that wait is a pretty long time).
It's good that people are catching on that they don't need the fastest machine anymore for pretty much anything. But there are still a few specialized tasks for which you do.
I'm currently implementing some pretty small-scale VPN-ification at work. Something to allow traffic between wireless APs and a router to pass over the wired network without mixing the two. Was looking at FreeS/WAN, but I figured what with all the complaints I've seen on the code quality that it'd be better to go with the 2.6 built-in IPSec (which does seem to be available as a backpatch for 2.4). Took me a little while, but I got it working just fine.
I figured that FreeS/WAN would soon be replaced by it anyway. That's what all the mailing list comments I could find seemed to indicate. I'm surprised it happened this soon, though.
That's kind of silly. India isn't really known for serious tribal violence or natural calamities; at least, not in the big cities where the outsourcing is taking place. We aren't talking about small villiages in northern provinces that don't have running water. We're talking about corporate campuses that, from everything I've seen and read, look just like parts of Silicon Valley circa 1998.
Pitching national infrastructure as a selling point for staying here won't work. Building the necessary infrastructure in India or Bangladesh or Eastern Europe isn't all that expensive, when you think about how much cheaper the labor and the cost of living is. Instead, pitch the unique advantages to having American workers--that they're the ones connected to American consumers, that even if coding isn't done here, creativity and management should be. Get the drift?
You're completely right. I was being entirely facetious. I am dismayed I was moderated either Insightful, Interesting, or Troll. I was hoping for a few Funnies and an Overrated. Ah, well.
You are completely correct about the expansion of the user base. I was being facetious when I made that comment, and I am rather dismayed that I was moderated Interesting, Insightful, or Troll. I was hoping for maybe a Funny or two and an Overrated.
Users haven't gotten stupider. There are simply more of them. And while the kind of coding I like is the kind that's solving difficult problems, the sad truth is that the majority of code in many desktop applications is code to deal with user interaction, and much of that is dealing with stupid users. C'est la vie.
This isn't the evolution of technology in the workplace. It's the evolution of stupidity in the user. At least what you mention about GUI apps for people who can't follow directions and web applications for people with broken browsers.
The point seems to be that exploits, as in easy-to-use bits of software that any kiddie can download and use, tend not to be released until after the patches come out. Doesn't mean that the holes shouldn't be patched, since the more adept attackers don't need a VisualBasic-built GUI to launch an attack.
In this respect, the claim might be largely valid. It's just a really, really stupid thing to say, and has no bearing on absolutely anything at all. You'd still want to release patches, you'd still be responsible for writing buggy software, and you'd just be wasting your time saying things like this. I think the point was just, ``we never see massive outbreaks of this in the wild until after the patch is released.'' But that doesn't mean your software is any more secure.
When I was in high school, I got in trouble for just that, as a matter of fact. The teacher said, ``what if small children see it?'' I thought it was highly unlikely that small children would be reading my code, but on the other hand, his power to give detensions did make me see things his way.
See, the real reason MS doesn't want the code spreading is because they are embarassed at the frequency the word ``fuck'', ``shit'', and ``BUGBUG'' occurs in code comments (13, 577, and 7462 times, a little bird told me).
That, and the whole stolen-intelllectual-property thing.
That said, while they are certainly within their rights, it seems to me like the cat's outta the bag. They won't be able to stop the real malicious types, the virus writers and pirates, so they may as well save their time. For that matter, they'd released enough source to governments and researchers that it was bound to happen sooner or later.
OK. So these are hardly ironclad statistics, but let me do a little refutation.
Fedora: I know a number of people adopting Fedora to replace RedHat on the desktop. In fact, while many divisions are still evaluating plans for what to do, my University has probably a few hundred RedHat desktops at a minimum, many of which will be upgraded to Fedora (I can't speak for the other schools, but the one in which I work is largely very pro-RedHat, and will therefore most likely adopt Fedora as a replacement). This seems to be fairly common practice in places that don't want to pay for desktop licenses but want to keep something similar to RedHat.
Mandrake: Mandrake is European, just like SuSE (though French, if I recall right). Mandrake is supposed to be a very polished desktop solution, and I would expect them to benefit from the RedHat refugees who still want to be RPM-based but don't want to pay for RedHat for desktops. That said, in the US it has traditionally enjoyed less popularity than RedHat and Debian.
Gentoo: I'm a fan of Gentoo on the desktop, but chances are it will never gain a large presence in the enterprise environment. It lacks the maturity and focus on stability and reliability that make Debian and RedHat ideal for servers (RedHat benefitting primarily from it's commercial support, obviously), and lacks anything like Kickstart for use in an enterprise-desktop environment.
SuSE: Had a very big presence at LWE NYC this year. SuSE seems to be the distro of choice for European enterprise deployment (similar to how RedHat is here). After their recent purchase by Novell (who apparently plan to get into the Linux business) and their use as a base for Sun's JDS, they are clearly not just an ``older'' distro; if anything, they are set to be bigger than RedHat.
Debian: Debian is by far the most widely-used non-commercial distro, and probably, in the US at least, second choice to RedHat for servers and mission-critical equipment. That said, it has never enjoyed terrific success on the desktop, due to it's older software and it's text-based installer. However, a number of Debian-based distros like Lycoris and Librenix have done quite a bit better.
Slackware: Due to it's lack of good package management, I've never see Slackware widely deployed. However, it's often used as a starting-point for stripped-down, customized distros. I evaluated it for use on an embedded system application (on a Soekris SBC), but eventually went with Debian. Slackware, just like Debian and Gentoo, is also popular among hobbyists.
RedHat: RedHat undoubtedly has the widest distribution (which certainly doesn't mean widest growth, but growth is easier for a tiny distro, as well). Being the commercial distro of choice in the US, it is used widely in enterprise environments, on both desktops and servers.
Point being, your post was based on what you'd heard. Whoop-de-freakin'-do. The thing that gets me most about Slashdot is the people who try to sound knowledgeable, even when they're talking out of their ass. If you don't know something, you don't know it. No big deal. I'm not a professional industry analyst, so I couldn't tell you, either! So what?
I'm not trying to give you a hard time. I'm just suggesting that you try to keep on the side of stating an opinion instead of stating BS as fact.
But still. You made no attempt to found any of your comments on the article, on industry analysts, on any other sort of logic. Way to promote the scientific method.
Can you back any of this up? Or is it just speculation?
Mandrake, which you say is probably one of the top two, isn't even mentioned in the article. Gentoo may be growing very fast, but it's still far, far less common than SuSE, Debian, or Redhat/Fedora.
I'm not sure by what metric you say ``Fedora just isn't that popular'', or that ``Debian isn't as `big' as Mandrake''. But you do make a good point. You haven't heard much about Slackware in a while, and if you haven't heard of it, surely it's not used at all anymore.
Sorry for the sarcasm. I guess if I wanted well-reasoned opinions and fact-backed comments, I'd go somewhere else.
Yes they do. Obviously it depends on the type of airplane, but if you put a Cessna through a barrel roll, you'd better be ready to retire it (when I was getting my training, some guy did exactly that with a 172R--they didn't discover who did it or when, but noticed during a routine inspection that all the control surfaces were out of whack). The maximum stresses on that plane are something like +3g -1g, if I remember right.
Regardless, the FA-18 was undoubtedly built to take a good bit more stress than a Cessna. I can't see why the airframe would necessarily be any bit the worse for wear after so few flight hours, so long as it wasn't pushed past its limits (which I doubt the Navy would tolerate on a multi-million dollar piece of equipment like that).
The seller claims it has an N number. If it were experimental, I don't believe it would have an N number (I don't talk to many ultralight pilots because they're all idiots, but I don't believe ultralights--classified as experimental--have N numbers). On the other hand, I've become seriously vague on the FARs, so I could be mistaken.
Re:on a serious note...
on
Space Burial
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· Score: 1
I'd suspect the probability of actually reaching some alien civilization is so small as to not be worth discussing. Consider the number of things that have to go right for this to happen, each of which is itself highly unlikely (have to escape the solar system, have to avoid being pulverized on some comet in the Oort cloud, have to actually have alien civilization, have to actually hit that precise planet out of billions of stars, planets, and so forth...
Regardless, they only send up a gram of your ashes, so this isn't quite what you are hoping for.
Point being that while robotic cars may in fact be safer, the incidents that would get the press would be the rare accidents. Remember when airbags were becoming common, and you started to hear about airbag related fatalities? People reacted as if airbags were inherently unsafe, even though this was patently untrue.
For that matter, I read recently about a study done by a couple of psychologists in which they described to schoolchildren about accidents in which seatbelts saved lives, and then about ones in which they caused injuries. The children, after hearing about the first, said, ``oh, then you should wear your seatbelt always.'' After hearing about the latter, they said the opposite. When asked repeatedly by the researcher, ``so, when should you wear it and when shouldn't you?'', one subject replied, ``well, I guess you should wear the seatbelt half the time.''
People aren't rational; one theory is that we interpret probabilities by ``representativeness'', a heuristic in which the situation being judged is compared to a similar situation thought to be probable or frequently heard of. So the more people hear about robotic-automobile-caused deaths (which would certainly be more publicised than the same old same old), they'd assume such vehicles are less-safe than traditional cars.
Many people judge the risk of very rare, unlikely deaths (from rare diseases, freak accidents, and the like) to be far higher than they are, while they judge the risk of death from things like car accidents and other more normal causes to be significantly lower than it really is. This is because they hear about far more of the freak accident deaths--precisely because they are freak accidents--than the ordinary, normal deaths.
Of course, just as with airbags, after the breaking-in period, I think people would probably get used to it. And the economic demand, if great enough, would be enough incentive to let them on the road.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to be a cynic, but can you tell me of any recent elections that have been decided by one vote? Sure, I know, if everyone thought this way, etc. Or yeah, we all know that Florida came down to a few hundred votes. Fine. Unless an election came down to one vote, yours was not the one that made the difference, nor was mine. Know what this means? Had you stayed home, things would be the same as they are today.
Just a cheery thought to brighten up your day. I still vote, when I get the chance. But I do so knowing it makes no difference.
You assume that it is ego that's responsible for Theo to run the OpenBSD project (which as I said really does have a number of security features that Linux hasn't got--compare http://openbsd.org/errata.html to the track record of the Linux kernel alone). You seem to forget that the BSD's are distinct projects; Theo runs Open, but not Free or Net (or Darwin, or the number of commercial OSes that borrowed BSD code--OSX and Solaris, if I remember right, among likely others).
Judging by that little misconception alone, I'm guessing you aren't a BSD user. I'm going to go out on a limb here and ask if you've ever even used a BSD (me, I'm both a Linux and a BSD person; posting from a Linux desktop, run Linux and Free and Open on servers, and my laptop is a nice new OSX powerbook). You might assume from the hype that Linux is technologically superior, but that is often not the case. The BSD's have their strengths and weeknesses, just as Linux does. Linux has momentum and publicity as a principle strength. But that doesn't mean it's always better (and truly, even if I've got PAX and SELinux or GRSec or similar on my Linux install, I still have to worry about reasonably frequent kernel vulnerabilities a bit more than I do with OpenBSD or even FreeBSD).
Trusted Computing, depending on what you apply the lable to, does mean that media distributors can trust the computer. But it also means you can. The idea of providing each computer with a secure cryptographic ID of some sort is pretty valuable to anyone concerned with security just as well as media distributors.
For example, if I want to filter virus and spam mail from the real thing, I can see if the e-mails I got claiming to be from my mother are really signed by her computer or not. If I want to be able to buy things online with the click of a button, I can have my credit card company authorize this particular PC to be able to make purchases online, and show my ID by being able to sign things with my unique private key.
Certainly most of this could be done in other ways, and a driving factor is certainly the desire to set up better DRM, but who cares? I don't pirate music, and I don't buy crippled CDs. So if someone wants to put unobtrusive DRM in their media and I'm OK with that, I'll buy it (like, say the protected iTMS AACs). If the DRM makes it unusable to me (like, say, Napster 2.0's), then I won't. It's all about market pressure.
Same goes for trusted computing. If I'm building my own machine, or buying one from an OEM, I'm not going to buy one with features that I don't like. So what's the big deal?
Regardless, I know IHBT, but try to at least keep the trolls creative. This post of yours is just offtopic garbage with nothing new to add to the conversation. Too bad my mod points ran out yesterday, or this would be marked down Redundant so fast your head would spin.
And seriously, cost of the media? How much could this possibly cost (even if the partition is only the size of a CDROM; 700MB or less)?
Point being, perhaps (the review is being ridiculously slow to load for me; don't know if its Slashdotted or just that I'm stuck on dialup), that there is no secondary OS loaded after the BIOS for this functionality. The poster is implying that the BIOS itself (which is loaded initially upon boot) is the OS that does the playback. This would be significantly different than a traditional setup, I would think.
For CAD you might get by. I've got no experience with CAD software. But for 3d modelling and rendering, the state of the art truly still isn't fast enough. A fast graphics card is necessary for showing the textured model on the fly. The better the card, the better this model, the easier it is to work on and see how it'll look compared to the real thing. The better the processor, the faster the render, the less time you have to wait to see the final product (and for a high-quality complex render, that wait is a pretty long time).
It's good that people are catching on that they don't need the fastest machine anymore for pretty much anything. But there are still a few specialized tasks for which you do.
ipsec-tools
I figured that FreeS/WAN would soon be replaced by it anyway. That's what all the mailing list comments I could find seemed to indicate. I'm surprised it happened this soon, though.
Pitching national infrastructure as a selling point for staying here won't work. Building the necessary infrastructure in India or Bangladesh or Eastern Europe isn't all that expensive, when you think about how much cheaper the labor and the cost of living is. Instead, pitch the unique advantages to having American workers--that they're the ones connected to American consumers, that even if coding isn't done here, creativity and management should be. Get the drift?
You're completely right. I was being entirely facetious. I am dismayed I was moderated either Insightful, Interesting, or Troll. I was hoping for a few Funnies and an Overrated. Ah, well.
Users haven't gotten stupider. There are simply more of them. And while the kind of coding I like is the kind that's solving difficult problems, the sad truth is that the majority of code in many desktop applications is code to deal with user interaction, and much of that is dealing with stupid users. C'est la vie.
This isn't the evolution of technology in the workplace. It's the evolution of stupidity in the user. At least what you mention about GUI apps for people who can't follow directions and web applications for people with broken browsers.
In this respect, the claim might be largely valid. It's just a really, really stupid thing to say, and has no bearing on absolutely anything at all. You'd still want to release patches, you'd still be responsible for writing buggy software, and you'd just be wasting your time saying things like this. I think the point was just, ``we never see massive outbreaks of this in the wild until after the patch is released.'' But that doesn't mean your software is any more secure.
When I was in high school, I got in trouble for just that, as a matter of fact. The teacher said, ``what if small children see it?'' I thought it was highly unlikely that small children would be reading my code, but on the other hand, his power to give detensions did make me see things his way.
That, and the whole stolen-intelllectual-property thing.
That said, while they are certainly within their rights, it seems to me like the cat's outta the bag. They won't be able to stop the real malicious types, the virus writers and pirates, so they may as well save their time. For that matter, they'd released enough source to governments and researchers that it was bound to happen sooner or later.
Meh. Like I said, I don't talk to ultralight pilots ;)
Fedora: I know a number of people adopting Fedora to replace RedHat on the desktop. In fact, while many divisions are still evaluating plans for what to do, my University has probably a few hundred RedHat desktops at a minimum, many of which will be upgraded to Fedora (I can't speak for the other schools, but the one in which I work is largely very pro-RedHat, and will therefore most likely adopt Fedora as a replacement). This seems to be fairly common practice in places that don't want to pay for desktop licenses but want to keep something similar to RedHat.
Mandrake: Mandrake is European, just like SuSE (though French, if I recall right). Mandrake is supposed to be a very polished desktop solution, and I would expect them to benefit from the RedHat refugees who still want to be RPM-based but don't want to pay for RedHat for desktops. That said, in the US it has traditionally enjoyed less popularity than RedHat and Debian.
Gentoo: I'm a fan of Gentoo on the desktop, but chances are it will never gain a large presence in the enterprise environment. It lacks the maturity and focus on stability and reliability that make Debian and RedHat ideal for servers (RedHat benefitting primarily from it's commercial support, obviously), and lacks anything like Kickstart for use in an enterprise-desktop environment.
SuSE: Had a very big presence at LWE NYC this year. SuSE seems to be the distro of choice for European enterprise deployment (similar to how RedHat is here). After their recent purchase by Novell (who apparently plan to get into the Linux business) and their use as a base for Sun's JDS, they are clearly not just an ``older'' distro; if anything, they are set to be bigger than RedHat.
Debian: Debian is by far the most widely-used non-commercial distro, and probably, in the US at least, second choice to RedHat for servers and mission-critical equipment. That said, it has never enjoyed terrific success on the desktop, due to it's older software and it's text-based installer. However, a number of Debian-based distros like Lycoris and Librenix have done quite a bit better.
Slackware: Due to it's lack of good package management, I've never see Slackware widely deployed. However, it's often used as a starting-point for stripped-down, customized distros. I evaluated it for use on an embedded system application (on a Soekris SBC), but eventually went with Debian. Slackware, just like Debian and Gentoo, is also popular among hobbyists.
RedHat: RedHat undoubtedly has the widest distribution (which certainly doesn't mean widest growth, but growth is easier for a tiny distro, as well). Being the commercial distro of choice in the US, it is used widely in enterprise environments, on both desktops and servers.
Point being, your post was based on what you'd heard. Whoop-de-freakin'-do. The thing that gets me most about Slashdot is the people who try to sound knowledgeable, even when they're talking out of their ass. If you don't know something, you don't know it. No big deal. I'm not a professional industry analyst, so I couldn't tell you, either! So what?
I'm not trying to give you a hard time. I'm just suggesting that you try to keep on the side of stating an opinion instead of stating BS as fact.
Hmm. I see your point.
But still. You made no attempt to found any of your comments on the article, on industry analysts, on any other sort of logic. Way to promote the scientific method.
Mandrake, which you say is probably one of the top two, isn't even mentioned in the article. Gentoo may be growing very fast, but it's still far, far less common than SuSE, Debian, or Redhat/Fedora.
I'm not sure by what metric you say ``Fedora just isn't that popular'', or that ``Debian isn't as `big' as Mandrake''. But you do make a good point. You haven't heard much about Slackware in a while, and if you haven't heard of it, surely it's not used at all anymore.
Sorry for the sarcasm. I guess if I wanted well-reasoned opinions and fact-backed comments, I'd go somewhere else.
Regardless, the FA-18 was undoubtedly built to take a good bit more stress than a Cessna. I can't see why the airframe would necessarily be any bit the worse for wear after so few flight hours, so long as it wasn't pushed past its limits (which I doubt the Navy would tolerate on a multi-million dollar piece of equipment like that).
The seller claims it has an N number. If it were experimental, I don't believe it would have an N number (I don't talk to many ultralight pilots because they're all idiots, but I don't believe ultralights--classified as experimental--have N numbers). On the other hand, I've become seriously vague on the FARs, so I could be mistaken.
Sounds vaguely similar to sudo.
Regardless, they only send up a gram of your ashes, so this isn't quite what you are hoping for.
For that matter, I read recently about a study done by a couple of psychologists in which they described to schoolchildren about accidents in which seatbelts saved lives, and then about ones in which they caused injuries. The children, after hearing about the first, said, ``oh, then you should wear your seatbelt always.'' After hearing about the latter, they said the opposite. When asked repeatedly by the researcher, ``so, when should you wear it and when shouldn't you?'', one subject replied, ``well, I guess you should wear the seatbelt half the time.''
People aren't rational; one theory is that we interpret probabilities by ``representativeness'', a heuristic in which the situation being judged is compared to a similar situation thought to be probable or frequently heard of. So the more people hear about robotic-automobile-caused deaths (which would certainly be more publicised than the same old same old), they'd assume such vehicles are less-safe than traditional cars.
Many people judge the risk of very rare, unlikely deaths (from rare diseases, freak accidents, and the like) to be far higher than they are, while they judge the risk of death from things like car accidents and other more normal causes to be significantly lower than it really is. This is because they hear about far more of the freak accident deaths--precisely because they are freak accidents--than the ordinary, normal deaths.
Of course, just as with airbags, after the breaking-in period, I think people would probably get used to it. And the economic demand, if great enough, would be enough incentive to let them on the road.