Netscape 7 is old, has too many plugins and is no longer actively supported by vendor. Why not Firefox or Opera?
Netscape 7 is in fact Mozilla with a certain skin and Netscape/AOL stuff slapped on it. There wasn't a "real" Netscape browser ever since 4 (version 5 never made it out the door before Netscape went downhill). All Netscape versions from 6 up are actually Mozilla. In fact, pretty soon we'll see AOL shipping yet another "Netscape" browser, probably as soon as Mozilla 1.8 stable comes out.
Take a ballroom, swing, or salsa dancing class. Don't worry if you can't dance, that's why you take the class. As I said I've never been squeamish about touching other people, but I definately felt more comfortable with it after I took a couple dance classes in college.
Or try a karate class. Hell, any form of martial arts will do. After you've had your nuts crushed skillfully by a cute chick half your weight and height, your attitude towards other people, and particularly women, becomes more... well, practical. It's not about the violence. It's just as good a way as dancing to eliminate tension in social contacts.
While Linux may be designed to be more secure than Windows, it is still not bulletproof. It still has flaws, and if it were used by 90-something percent of all home users you can bet someone would exploit those flaws.
I've seen this argument many times. It often translates roughly as: "Linux's only strong point is that it's used by very few people. The moment it becomes mainstream it will be attacked just as hard and there will be just as many flaws discovered".
I'd like to counter this argument with only one example: Apache vs IIS. By all the indications, Apache is the top dog, with much wider deployment than IIS. Well, guess which webserver is the most flawed security wise and used by sites most often exploited, defaced or taken down.
So my point would be: while you can count on mounting attacks as Linux popularity is growing, I'm fairly sure that we'll never see problems amassing to reach the magnitude Windows security problems have reached. And even if particularly nasty problems will appear, I can count that fixes will be available hours later. (Altough whether lazy people will implement the fixes on their machines is entirely another matter).
Even more: increasing popularity and the subsequent increasing number of attacks will only serve to increase security for Linux applications overall, because it will ultimately translate to free bug testing.
You could say that this is also true for MS apps; but the design of the application and what developers understand by patching the flaws matters too. I don't have to go as far as MS products, we have sendmail handy in Linuxworld: add another layer of crummy patches to already existing shaky bloatware and you'll understand why MS might consider (hopefully) finally abandoning Internet Explorer and (seemingly) reimplementing it from scratch in Longhorn.
P.S.: Please note that by "Linux" and "Windows" I meant the collective of their respective software applications of all kinds.
However recent advances have allowed for the creation of a vibrator that is not only small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, but is completly silent.
And it's going... and going... and going... and going...
Come on, I wanna see "Energizer Bunny meets the Fuel Cell" commercials already. Yeah, take that pinky. Not so cocky now, are we?
Or to put it another way: there's always going to be spam as long as there's a profit to be made out of it. No matter what measures are taken, technical or social, it will only be an escalating arms race of spammer vs anti-spammers (whoever they are).
Look at all the wrong things for sale out there: arms dealings, drugs, people and so on. As long as there's someone buying, the incentive remains. The harder it is to sell those things, the bigger the risks, the bigger the profit. The fewer the sellers, the harder they try.
The answer to stopping spam is simple: ordinary people must stop responding to spam, stop buying the things they advertise because of the aggressive manner in which they are advertised. The moment the profits are not there anymore because spam itself kills it, spam will go away.
IMHO, it would only take three or four spammers being found beaten to death in an alleyway somewhere, to scare off the majority of the Ralskys of the world. That would just leave the serious mafia types, and getting rid of them would be very tricky..
This would only escalate violent methods. The big spammers who make the serious buck would just hire bodyguards, personal guards or would be compelled to make deals with actual organized crime. The guy in this story was a small timer and stopped after a while. But if there were angry people on the streets ready to beat him up maybe that would've prompted him to look up the local gangs or mobsters and pay a protection fee. Now where would that go next?
Anyone who uses email frequently cannot live without threaded messaging once exposed to it. This and this alone will keep me off of webmail forever (sure, you *could* thread in webmail, but it would either result in many trips back / forth to the server to expand / collapse the threads, or it would need fancy JS and DHTML magic which I have never seen in a webmail app.).
You don't really need to make it complicated, it can be simple too. The latest IMP from Horde has a threaded display mode. All the threads are expanded all the time and you view N messages per page (with the N of your choice). It works pretty well for me as far as threaded views in webmail are concerned.
Doom 3 is on of the most highly expected games ever, mostly due to the massive popularity of the previous Doom games, [...] I am very much looking forward to finally being able to play Doom 3. I am certain that it will evoke pretty much the same feelings as the original games did. And I won't be surprised if I shed a tear or two due to nostalgia;)
They'd better hurry already. Otherwise there won't be any people left who played Doom and Doom II. Well, OK, I exagerate, they won't be dead, it's just that you kinda grow out of computer games by the time you're 50.
I'm gonna venture and say that PHP-Qt is not as attractive as PHP-GTK. The PHP people probably want PHP-GTK to spread as far as possible, or at least cross equally well between Windows and Linux. And Qt has those licensing issues for commercial apps on Windows.
I used to think that too but I have changed my mind. If there was nothing magical about perl then all languages would have a centralized library of objects and a easy way to download and install them (including dependency resolving). I agree with you that all languages should have this none of them do and there must be a reason for it.
I'm not a genius, but I figured out how to build a computer from scratch and then compile and run Gentoo Linux on it. It's very easy really. People only say it's hard because they've never done it.
Some people don't want to do it, much like I don't want to install my own air conditioner. I'm not the village idiot, I could probably do it myself, I just don't wanna. Some people happen to apply that "life's too short to waste on this" philosophy to computers. Most people actually, 'cause I'm pretty sure geeks haven't inherited the Earth just yet.
I'd second the idea about putting up a LED sign in a pub, except for two issues: one, you can't really filter profanity. The assholes will use spaces, letters and whatnot to mask it and it will still get through. Second, the LED display humor will be limited to the moderator's sense of humor.
Actually, I expect that at some point in the [distant] future, domain names will be freed from such artificial restriction as TLD's. Then we'll be able to have names like "this.is.my.butt.crack" instead of goatse.cx. And if I wanted to give people those expectations you speak of I'd prepend de. or en. or organize things through the paths on the website. Seriously now, the only thing that does make a difference nowadays is the protocol name in the url (http://). Other than respecting the dots and a certain character set (due to the design of DNS) there shouldn't be restrictions. The TLD's are mostly just a conspiracy to keep control of domain names in the hands of a few chosen ones. What does a certain termination of a domain name mean nowadays anyway? Does.de really mean that the site is German? Sure, some TLDs have restrictions (such as.fr) regarding who can buy them, but it's just the respective TLD authorities playing God. We'd be able to keep things organized without TLDs if we really wanted to.
Now I saw no mention of something like that on the compile documentation. Does it have something similar & where is documentation on it?
Compile does implement sandboxing. Check out the list archives or join the GoboLinux mailing list and ask about it. It's been implemented for quite some time, since it's an important concept.
Yeah, but who the hell starts them with capital letters?!?!?! Even with tab-completion, I just got my time quadrupled! Frickin' shift keys.
You must have a tough time writing any kind of text document. I mean, you'd think people who use computers are used to entering capital letters by now.
From Crosby's interview: It changed it from being about the music to being about what you look like.
No wonder Britney Spears is famous!
Actually, it's been like this for quite a while. I remember a story on VH1 stating that it took Mick Jagger something like 10 years to really make in, while the pretty faces can be world famous in months after being spotted. Good looking artists will make it much faster ever since the TV became widespread.
Music just hasn't evolved much in the past 30 years.
I beg to differ. As far as mainstream is concerned, there are huge differences. Compare the Metallica music we used to listen back in the day with the mainstream equivalent today, something like Korn. They don't sound anything alike. Huge changes appeared in all music genres and new genres are invented to put a name on the new kind of music. Think about the evolution of music since it started to be more than just opera or folk, back in the 50s. The young will always lead in terms of music consumption and already I find it hard to enjoy the kind of music at the wavefront.
And what surprised me somewhat is that my friends would rather play Descent in multiplayer mode than "classic" FPS games. Heck, Descent 1 was HUGE in our gang at its time. But then again, other games we thoroughly enjoyed playing in multiplayer were Carmageddon and Retal[iator]. So perhaps we're not exactly representative.
Which brings me to another issue: why isn't the output from 'configure --help' available in machine-readable form? Say, XML? This would help a lot with the creation of graphical configuration tools for source packages. AFAIK there are a couple of helper apps out there that do this, but they have to go through horrible hoops parsing the output from 'configure --help'.
There seem to be two kinds of personal accounts about PayPal going around: either it works well, or it screws you so bad you wish you were never involved with them, ever. I don't have a personal experience with PayPal of my own, but wouldn't the above seem to indicate that PayPal works well for the most part and when it does err (however seldom) and you're the lucky winner, it will make you wish you weren't born? I've put two and two together and I'm not using PayPal. There are other services (more or less similar) out there; even if their best is not as good as PayPal's, their worst isn't quite as bad as PayPal's either. To me, what I've heard about PayPal seems to indicate it's like playing russian roulette. No, I'm not willing to try it myself to actually see what it's like.:)
I'd recommend a 5xx error instead. 4xx suggests that the visitor has done something bad, which isn't the case. "503 Service Unavailable" may do the trick.
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Netscape 7 is old, has too many plugins and is no longer actively supported by vendor. Why not Firefox or Opera?
Netscape 7 is in fact Mozilla with a certain skin and Netscape/AOL stuff slapped on it. There wasn't a "real" Netscape browser ever since 4 (version 5 never made it out the door before Netscape went downhill). All Netscape versions from 6 up are actually Mozilla. In fact, pretty soon we'll see AOL shipping yet another "Netscape" browser, probably as soon as Mozilla 1.8 stable comes out.
Take a ballroom, swing, or salsa dancing class. Don't worry if you can't dance, that's why you take the class. As I said I've never been squeamish about touching other people, but I definately felt more comfortable with it after I took a couple dance classes in college.
Or try a karate class. Hell, any form of martial arts will do. After you've had your nuts crushed skillfully by a cute chick half your weight and height, your attitude towards other people, and particularly women, becomes more... well, practical. It's not about the violence. It's just as good a way as dancing to eliminate tension in social contacts.
While Linux may be designed to be more secure than Windows, it is still not bulletproof. It still has flaws, and if it were used by 90-something percent of all home users you can bet someone would exploit those flaws.
I've seen this argument many times. It often translates roughly as: "Linux's only strong point is that it's used by very few people. The moment it becomes mainstream it will be attacked just as hard and there will be just as many flaws discovered".
I'd like to counter this argument with only one example: Apache vs IIS. By all the indications, Apache is the top dog, with much wider deployment than IIS. Well, guess which webserver is the most flawed security wise and used by sites most often exploited, defaced or taken down.
So my point would be: while you can count on mounting attacks as Linux popularity is growing, I'm fairly sure that we'll never see problems amassing to reach the magnitude Windows security problems have reached. And even if particularly nasty problems will appear, I can count that fixes will be available hours later. (Altough whether lazy people will implement the fixes on their machines is entirely another matter).
Even more: increasing popularity and the subsequent increasing number of attacks will only serve to increase security for Linux applications overall, because it will ultimately translate to free bug testing.
You could say that this is also true for MS apps; but the design of the application and what developers understand by patching the flaws matters too. I don't have to go as far as MS products, we have sendmail handy in Linuxworld: add another layer of crummy patches to already existing shaky bloatware and you'll understand why MS might consider (hopefully) finally abandoning Internet Explorer and (seemingly) reimplementing it from scratch in Longhorn.
P.S.: Please note that by "Linux" and "Windows" I meant the collective of their respective software applications of all kinds.
However recent advances have allowed for the creation of a vibrator that is not only small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, but is completly silent.
And it's going... and going... and going... and going...
Come on, I wanna see "Energizer Bunny meets the Fuel Cell" commercials already. Yeah, take that pinky. Not so cocky now, are we?
Perhaps they're resorting to lawsuites because the technical measures don't cut it anymore?
And what, exactly, is the difference between "Unbearded" and "Beardless" ?
The same kind as between "open-source" and "free-software".
Or to put it another way: there's always going to be spam as long as there's a profit to be made out of it. No matter what measures are taken, technical or social, it will only be an escalating arms race of spammer vs anti-spammers (whoever they are). Look at all the wrong things for sale out there: arms dealings, drugs, people and so on. As long as there's someone buying, the incentive remains. The harder it is to sell those things, the bigger the risks, the bigger the profit. The fewer the sellers, the harder they try. The answer to stopping spam is simple: ordinary people must stop responding to spam, stop buying the things they advertise because of the aggressive manner in which they are advertised. The moment the profits are not there anymore because spam itself kills it, spam will go away.
IMHO, it would only take three or four spammers being found beaten to death in an alleyway somewhere, to scare off the majority of the Ralskys of the world. That would just leave the serious mafia types, and getting rid of them would be very tricky..
This would only escalate violent methods. The big spammers who make the serious buck would just hire bodyguards, personal guards or would be compelled to make deals with actual organized crime. The guy in this story was a small timer and stopped after a while. But if there were angry people on the streets ready to beat him up maybe that would've prompted him to look up the local gangs or mobsters and pay a protection fee. Now where would that go next?
Anyone who uses email frequently cannot live without threaded messaging once exposed to it. This and this alone will keep me off of webmail forever (sure, you *could* thread in webmail, but it would either result in many trips back / forth to the server to expand / collapse the threads, or it would need fancy JS and DHTML magic which I have never seen in a webmail app.).
You don't really need to make it complicated, it can be simple too. The latest IMP from Horde has a threaded display mode. All the threads are expanded all the time and you view N messages per page (with the N of your choice). It works pretty well for me as far as threaded views in webmail are concerned.
Doom 3 is on of the most highly expected games ever, mostly due to the massive popularity of the previous Doom games, [...] I am very much looking forward to finally being able to play Doom 3. I am certain that it will evoke pretty much the same feelings as the original games did. And I won't be surprised if I shed a tear or two due to nostalgia ;)
They'd better hurry already. Otherwise there won't be any people left who played Doom and Doom II. Well, OK, I exagerate, they won't be dead, it's just that you kinda grow out of computer games by the time you're 50.
So what's the name-change going to be for this release?
A new twist: the new and improved browser, reloaded, chooses its own name, randomly.
I'm gonna venture and say that PHP-Qt is not as attractive as PHP-GTK. The PHP people probably want PHP-GTK to spread as far as possible, or at least cross equally well between Windows and Linux. And Qt has those licensing issues for commercial apps on Windows.
I used to think that too but I have changed my mind. If there was nothing magical about perl then all languages would have a centralized library of objects and a easy way to download and install them (including dependency resolving). I agree with you that all languages should have this none of them do and there must be a reason for it.
PHP has PEAR. Examples:
I'm not a genius, but I figured out how to build a computer from scratch and then compile and run Gentoo Linux on it. It's very easy really. People only say it's hard because they've never done it.
Some people don't want to do it, much like I don't want to install my own air conditioner. I'm not the village idiot, I could probably do it myself, I just don't wanna. Some people happen to apply that "life's too short to waste on this" philosophy to computers. Most people actually, 'cause I'm pretty sure geeks haven't inherited the Earth just yet.
Back in the day you'd probably get DDoS'ed by your mom picking up the phone downstairs.
I'd second the idea about putting up a LED sign in a pub, except for two issues: one, you can't really filter profanity. The assholes will use spaces, letters and whatnot to mask it and it will still get through. Second, the LED display humor will be limited to the moderator's sense of humor.
Actually, I expect that at some point in the [distant] future, domain names will be freed from such artificial restriction as TLD's. Then we'll be able to have names like "this.is.my.butt.crack" instead of goatse.cx. And if I wanted to give people those expectations you speak of I'd prepend de. or en. or organize things through the paths on the website. Seriously now, the only thing that does make a difference nowadays is the protocol name in the url (http://). Other than respecting the dots and a certain character set (due to the design of DNS) there shouldn't be restrictions. The TLD's are mostly just a conspiracy to keep control of domain names in the hands of a few chosen ones. What does a certain termination of a domain name mean nowadays anyway? Does .de really mean that the site is German? Sure, some TLDs have restrictions (such as .fr) regarding who can buy them, but it's just the respective TLD authorities playing God. We'd be able to keep things organized without TLDs if we really wanted to.
Now I saw no mention of something like that on the compile documentation. Does it have something similar & where is documentation on it?
Compile does implement sandboxing. Check out the list archives or join the GoboLinux mailing list and ask about it. It's been implemented for quite some time, since it's an important concept.
Yeah, but who the hell starts them with capital letters?!?!?! Even with tab-completion, I just got my time quadrupled! Frickin' shift keys.
You must have a tough time writing any kind of text document. I mean, you'd think people who use computers are used to entering capital letters by now.
From Crosby's interview:
It changed it from being about the music to being about what you look like.
No wonder Britney Spears is famous!
Actually, it's been like this for quite a while. I remember a story on VH1 stating that it took Mick Jagger something like 10 years to really make in, while the pretty faces can be world famous in months after being spotted. Good looking artists will make it much faster ever since the TV became widespread.
Music just hasn't evolved much in the past 30 years.
I beg to differ. As far as mainstream is concerned, there are huge differences. Compare the Metallica music we used to listen back in the day with the mainstream equivalent today, something like Korn. They don't sound anything alike. Huge changes appeared in all music genres and new genres are invented to put a name on the new kind of music. Think about the evolution of music since it started to be more than just opera or folk, back in the 50s. The young will always lead in terms of music consumption and already I find it hard to enjoy the kind of music at the wavefront.
And what surprised me somewhat is that my friends would rather play Descent in multiplayer mode than "classic" FPS games. Heck, Descent 1 was HUGE in our gang at its time. But then again, other games we thoroughly enjoyed playing in multiplayer were Carmageddon and Retal[iator]. So perhaps we're not exactly representative.
Which brings me to another issue: why isn't the output from 'configure --help' available in machine-readable form? Say, XML? This would help a lot with the creation of graphical configuration tools for source packages. AFAIK there are a couple of helper apps out there that do this, but they have to go through horrible hoops parsing the output from 'configure --help'.
There seem to be two kinds of personal accounts about PayPal going around: either it works well, or it screws you so bad you wish you were never involved with them, ever. I don't have a personal experience with PayPal of my own, but wouldn't the above seem to indicate that PayPal works well for the most part and when it does err (however seldom) and you're the lucky winner, it will make you wish you weren't born? I've put two and two together and I'm not using PayPal. There are other services (more or less similar) out there; even if their best is not as good as PayPal's, their worst isn't quite as bad as PayPal's either. To me, what I've heard about PayPal seems to indicate it's like playing russian roulette. No, I'm not willing to try it myself to actually see what it's like. :)
I'd recommend a 5xx error instead. 4xx suggests that the visitor has done something bad, which isn't the case. "503 Service Unavailable" may do the trick.