For everyone who doesn't use OS X: The main difference between an administrator and a normal user under OS X is that the administrator may sudo. When using shell programs as a normal user sudoing will fail (because the normal user is not in/etc/sudoers) and Aqua apps that require administrative access will ask you for both the name of an administrator and the corresponding password. As an administrator manual sudo works and Aqua apps will only ask for your password.
root has much greater (and usually unnecessary) privileges than an administrator and is locked by default. I have only had to use root twice, in both cases because I had broke/etc/sudoers.
FAT sucks, but it's ubiquitous. There is no other file system that does what FAT does: Run pretty much everywhere. I take a FAT-formatted USB drive, plug it into a Win box and put some files on it, then I put it into my Linux box and copy the files to my home directory, then I put it into my iBook and do the same there. With a different file system I might have needed to install drivers or use some other method of moving my files around.
Until we can get another file system to where FAT is now we're pretty much stuck with FAT. Unfortunately Microsoft won't support a non-Microsoft file system and NTFS (or any other new file system from Redmond) won't be released as freely as FAT is. Unless the next big rewritable medium has a portable, adaptable (to different media) and modern file system we'll be stuck with FAT until MSFT gets forced to release the NTFS specs or until the Unices reach a 50% market share on the desktop, whichever comes first.
I just noticed that I first wrote that DVD-ROM is supposed to be the best choice for backups. That's nonsense (as a DVD-ROM backup would require the use of DVD pressing equipment), I meant DVD-RAM.
That's the reason why I tend to mount USB drives without using a buffer - even though I lose some performance I can be sure that the data gets written immediately.
What I'm wondering: How reliable is solid state storage? Sure, the iPod nano is not exactly an ideal storage medium, but maybe flash memory might be suitable to store small amounts of data.
I have been told that DVD-RW is more secure than DVD-R because the Rs dye degrades faster than the alloy used in RWs. DVD-ROM is supposed to be the best choice for backups because like RW it uses metal and additionally it has uses the same error-correction method used in hard drives (bad sectors are marked as such and the data is moved elsewhere. Yes, DVD-RAMs have tracks and sectors like a hard disk and not the single track DVD(-R/RW)s have). Also, according to the specification, DVD-RAMs are supposed to last about thirty years.
It's a precursor to the Compact Disc, but it was abandoned because it was "inferior" to the CD. In reality the content providers axed it becauce the players didn't support DRM.
Hell, people are going berserk over the way we currently do things (they don't want the waste to be buried on-site, but they also don't want it to be transported and they don't want terminal storage sites either - maybe we should ask David Copperfield to let the stuff disappear); asking whether we could build a breeder of any kind is equivalent to asking people to please vote for someone else in the next elections. I usually vote for the Greens, because they have some good ideas about things like privacy, but unfortunateln the focus of their politics is on making sure that the idea that nuclear power == teh evil is firmly entrenched in everyone's minds.
Germany isn't critical about nuclear power, it's hysterical. I expect us to shut down our last nuclear reactor n a few years; then we have to buy our power from nuclear reactors in Slovakia, but everything is much safer and cleaner etc.
Logically, if they started reprocessing waste, it would be such a small amount you would only need a single salt mine or similar.
Yup. A couple fast breeders could reduce Germany's nuclear waste output by about 90%, but neither we nor the rest of the world are too keen about us having weapons-grade plutonium, even if it's only used in power plants.
I won't break into a flamefest like the sibling, but there are a few points I have to make.
Firstly, 3D acceleration is not that bad, at least as far as NVIDIA cards are concerned. I don't know if I can use the latest-and-greatest features, but then again I just upgraded to a FX5200 and am wondering at the marvels of pixel shaders... But yes, hardware support with Linux is not as good as with Windows; you have to make sure that the stuff you buy is compatible. However, if it is you generally have much less of a hassle with drivers than with windows.
NTFS is nice but unfortunately it has some quirks which make it sub-optimal, starting with the lack of interoperability (FAT32 is a de-facto industry standard, NTFS isn't) and continuing with the rate of fragmentation (from my experience NTFS partitons tend to fragment faster than ines running FAT32) and occasional strange behavior (although I suspect that the hidden (= completely undetectable from Explorer) folder contatining five gigabytes of files some of which are undeletable is actually a Windows hiccup).
However, AFAIK ther is a ReiserFS driver for windows, so it's not like Reiser war Linux-only...
The Windows UI is somewhat consistent (except for the fact that every second program brings it's own widgets or even window decoration), but unfortunately it also suffers from bad design ranging from "OK/Cancel" dialogs to the horribly, badly-documented registry (and the fact that some bad behavior can't be fixed without tweaking undocumented registry settings by hand!) and small things like the software manager being unable to tell the user where a certain program is installed.
I used to be a Win user from 3.11 to XP SP1, but after switching to Linux and OS X I feel that both of them have a much more pleasant user experience when the user has some experience with computers and wants to customize the systm to fit his needs. Windows makes customization unnecessarily difficult and has (compared to OS X or KDE) a rather clunky and inflexible GUI. (Although, to be honest, I haven't looked at Aston Shell that much lately.)
With more support from the software/gaming industry both OSX86 and Linux could blow Windows right out of the water. OSX86 more so than Linux - after all many gamers don't want to care about how their computer works.
It has and Microsoft has released an operating system that (apart from some really ugly UI design choices carried on since Win95) is quite pleasant to work with. It's called Windows 2000. Windows XP is everything Win2k is with a higher overhead, worse performance and pseudo-helpful balloon tips that you can't make less annoying without also turning off useful functionality (e.g. you can only turn off the "this drive is low on space" warnings as a whole, not for a single drive, which means constant interruptions when you're using a dedicated partition for your swapfile. "Constant" meaning that there is a popup stealing you attention every five minutes).
I expect Vista to be even worse than XP in terms of wasted resources and UI annoyingness.
I rely on high-quality game review sites such as Penny Arcade, Ctrl-Alt-Del or 8-bit Theater. The personal tastes of people like Jerry Holkins or Brian Clevinger are pretty much everything I need to know about the video game industry. Okay, and I read the databeses on the WINE and Cedega websites because the games listed there are the only ones I'm going to be able to play anyway... But as for reviews I'd rather wait for a game to show up in a PA rant by chance than read a publication that just can't get over the fact that "F.E.A.R." sounds just like the German word for "four" (I live in Germany).
Besides, I will not pay for game reviews until a mag has the balls to say something like "Half-Life 3 looks nice but unfortunately that stops once something blows up and the smoke puffs start clipping through walls because Valve used cheap bitmap particles".
Hey, let's make a story that pits the flaws reported for a Linux From Scratch system with the most recent kernel and only the most basic packages installed in the most recent versions (as of today) against all MS-DOS, Windows and XENIX versions combined (as well as OS/2, because that one's slightly related to Windows)!
Especially because C++ allows the programmer to write code that breaks when compiled with a different bittage (or using libraries which are) than intended, which is why people running Gentoo on AMD64 usually have to install a second Gentoo compiled for 32-bit in a chroot.
BTW, GP seems to not have gotten the point of my post. I pointed out that the notion that C++ can do everything better than any other language is silly - things like package management don't need extreme performance and have to work reliably across various platforms; obviously scripting languages like Python are more useful there.
BTW, Java is portable, well-designed language with very good safety while C++ and friends are here only because of performance.
Still, the loading time can be annoying. It is when you're working with many small scripts. At least Ruby isn't as bad as PHP, which I currently use as a shell scripting language (and which suffers from a hearty delay between the issuing of the command and the starting of the script).
Also, Java is semi-compiled while Ruby is purely interpreted, making it even slower. However, if computers keep getting faster as they have been I doubt that Ruby's performance will be much of an issue in the future.
As a side note, why is it the people so quickly forget what these languages are really for. They are Rapid Application Development(RAD) and prototyping languages. You're not supposed to ship products developed with these languages! You're supposed to prototype the application and if it looks viable, develop it in a real language like C or C++!
Someone better tell the Gentoo guys to redo Portage in C++. Obviously the current implementation does not have the performance neccessary for the critical job of zero-latency package management.
Of course I'm kidding. No one would develop in a language like C++, which was developed for schools in order to make learning real languages like PHP, Visual Prolog or Objective-Befunge easier.;)
I just googled for a Haskell implementation in Java. I'm in the development team of an (admittedly comatose) project to create a Java-based game RAD environment (we are (were) aiming for something like the RPG Maker XP, if you happen to know it) and one of the key features is "script in any language you please (as long as it's on the list)". Java interpreters for script languages like Rhino or JRuby would plug into a defined interface and the scripts would be saved with metadata indicating dependencies like the interpreter version. This vening I thought how cool (although mostly impractical) it would be to script a game in Haskell.
Although, of course, for math-heavy games (economy simulations?) Haskell would suddenly turn into the epitome of elegance. I think that Haskell only really shines when it's used to do stuff that would be expressed as formulae anyway. But it really does shine, then.
I'm sorry that I can't offer deeper insight into Lisp, but I could make a generic comment about parentheses.
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When I mentioned that non-admins are not in the sudoers file I forgot to mention that admins are in it via the admin group.
For everyone who doesn't use OS X: The main difference between an administrator and a normal user under OS X is that the administrator may sudo. When using shell programs as a normal user sudoing will fail (because the normal user is not in /etc/sudoers) and Aqua apps that require administrative access will ask you for both the name of an administrator and the corresponding password. As an administrator manual sudo works and Aqua apps will only ask for your password.
/etc/sudoers.
root has much greater (and usually unnecessary) privileges than an administrator and is locked by default. I have only had to use root twice, in both cases because I had broke
Scientists can prove that a certain observation fits a certain theory. They can't prove a theory, but they certainly can't not prove anything.
FAT sucks, but it's ubiquitous. There is no other file system that does what FAT does: Run pretty much everywhere. I take a FAT-formatted USB drive, plug it into a Win box and put some files on it, then I put it into my Linux box and copy the files to my home directory, then I put it into my iBook and do the same there. With a different file system I might have needed to install drivers or use some other method of moving my files around.
Until we can get another file system to where FAT is now we're pretty much stuck with FAT. Unfortunately Microsoft won't support a non-Microsoft file system and NTFS (or any other new file system from Redmond) won't be released as freely as FAT is. Unless the next big rewritable medium has a portable, adaptable (to different media) and modern file system we'll be stuck with FAT until MSFT gets forced to release the NTFS specs or until the Unices reach a 50% market share on the desktop, whichever comes first.
I just noticed that I first wrote that DVD-ROM is supposed to be the best choice for backups. That's nonsense (as a DVD-ROM backup would require the use of DVD pressing equipment), I meant DVD-RAM.
That's the reason why I tend to mount USB drives without using a buffer - even though I lose some performance I can be sure that the data gets written immediately.
What I'm wondering: How reliable is solid state storage? Sure, the iPod nano is not exactly an ideal storage medium, but maybe flash memory might be suitable to store small amounts of data.
Not to forget the content industry. At least they'd like to.
I have been told that DVD-RW is more secure than DVD-R because the Rs dye degrades faster than the alloy used in RWs. DVD-ROM is supposed to be the best choice for backups because like RW it uses metal and additionally it has uses the same error-correction method used in hard drives (bad sectors are marked as such and the data is moved elsewhere. Yes, DVD-RAMs have tracks and sectors like a hard disk and not the single track DVD(-R/RW)s have). Also, according to the specification, DVD-RAMs are supposed to last about thirty years.
It's a precursor to the Compact Disc, but it was abandoned because it was "inferior" to the CD. In reality the content providers axed it becauce the players didn't support DRM.
Hell, people are going berserk over the way we currently do things (they don't want the waste to be buried on-site, but they also don't want it to be transported and they don't want terminal storage sites either - maybe we should ask David Copperfield to let the stuff disappear); asking whether we could build a breeder of any kind is equivalent to asking people to please vote for someone else in the next elections. I usually vote for the Greens, because they have some good ideas about things like privacy, but unfortunateln the focus of their politics is on making sure that the idea that nuclear power == teh evil is firmly entrenched in everyone's minds.
Germany isn't critical about nuclear power, it's hysterical. I expect us to shut down our last nuclear reactor n a few years; then we have to buy our power from nuclear reactors in Slovakia, but everything is much safer and cleaner etc.
Yes, and then the Bulrathi land on Earth and wipe out our troops. I tell you, we need to go for laser cannons and tritanium armor first!
Logically, if they started reprocessing waste, it would be such a small amount you would only need a single salt mine or similar.
Yup. A couple fast breeders could reduce Germany's nuclear waste output by about 90%, but neither we nor the rest of the world are too keen about us having weapons-grade plutonium, even if it's only used in power plants.
I won't break into a flamefest like the sibling, but there are a few points I have to make.
Firstly, 3D acceleration is not that bad, at least as far as NVIDIA cards are concerned. I don't know if I can use the latest-and-greatest features, but then again I just upgraded to a FX5200 and am wondering at the marvels of pixel shaders... But yes, hardware support with Linux is not as good as with Windows; you have to make sure that the stuff you buy is compatible. However, if it is you generally have much less of a hassle with drivers than with windows.
NTFS is nice but unfortunately it has some quirks which make it sub-optimal, starting with the lack of interoperability (FAT32 is a de-facto industry standard, NTFS isn't) and continuing with the rate of fragmentation (from my experience NTFS partitons tend to fragment faster than ines running FAT32) and occasional strange behavior (although I suspect that the hidden (= completely undetectable from Explorer) folder contatining five gigabytes of files some of which are undeletable is actually a Windows hiccup).
However, AFAIK ther is a ReiserFS driver for windows, so it's not like Reiser war Linux-only...
The Windows UI is somewhat consistent (except for the fact that every second program brings it's own widgets or even window decoration), but unfortunately it also suffers from bad design ranging from "OK/Cancel" dialogs to the horribly, badly-documented registry (and the fact that some bad behavior can't be fixed without tweaking undocumented registry settings by hand!) and small things like the software manager being unable to tell the user where a certain program is installed.
I used to be a Win user from 3.11 to XP SP1, but after switching to Linux and OS X I feel that both of them have a much more pleasant user experience when the user has some experience with computers and wants to customize the systm to fit his needs. Windows makes customization unnecessarily difficult and has (compared to OS X or KDE) a rather clunky and inflexible GUI. (Although, to be honest, I haven't looked at Aston Shell that much lately.)
With more support from the software/gaming industry both OSX86 and Linux could blow Windows right out of the water. OSX86 more so than Linux - after all many gamers don't want to care about how their computer works.
It has and Microsoft has released an operating system that (apart from some really ugly UI design choices carried on since Win95) is quite pleasant to work with. It's called Windows 2000. Windows XP is everything Win2k is with a higher overhead, worse performance and pseudo-helpful balloon tips that you can't make less annoying without also turning off useful functionality (e.g. you can only turn off the "this drive is low on space" warnings as a whole, not for a single drive, which means constant interruptions when you're using a dedicated partition for your swapfile. "Constant" meaning that there is a popup stealing you attention every five minutes).
I expect Vista to be even worse than XP in terms of wasted resources and UI annoyingness.
Dont dis the notepad. That's one of the most useful programs shipped with the OS...
I rely on high-quality game review sites such as Penny Arcade, Ctrl-Alt-Del or 8-bit Theater. The personal tastes of people like Jerry Holkins or Brian Clevinger are pretty much everything I need to know about the video game industry. Okay, and I read the databeses on the WINE and Cedega websites because the games listed there are the only ones I'm going to be able to play anyway... But as for reviews I'd rather wait for a game to show up in a PA rant by chance than read a publication that just can't get over the fact that "F.E.A.R." sounds just like the German word for "four" (I live in Germany).
Besides, I will not pay for game reviews until a mag has the balls to say something like "Half-Life 3 looks nice but unfortunately that stops once something blows up and the smoke puffs start clipping through walls because Valve used cheap bitmap particles".
To answer your question: Yes, Sony should su. Unfortunately they don't have the root password.
This patch will eliminate any Windows- or WINE-related vulnerabilities.
Hey, let's make a story that pits the flaws reported for a Linux From Scratch system with the most recent kernel and only the most basic packages installed in the most recent versions (as of today) against all MS-DOS, Windows and XENIX versions combined (as well as OS/2, because that one's slightly related to Windows)!
Especially because C++ allows the programmer to write code that breaks when compiled with a different bittage (or using libraries which are) than intended, which is why people running Gentoo on AMD64 usually have to install a second Gentoo compiled for 32-bit in a chroot.
BTW, GP seems to not have gotten the point of my post. I pointed out that the notion that C++ can do everything better than any other language is silly - things like package management don't need extreme performance and have to work reliably across various platforms; obviously scripting languages like Python are more useful there.
BTW, Java is portable, well-designed language with very good safety while C++ and friends are here only because of performance.
Still, the loading time can be annoying. It is when you're working with many small scripts. At least Ruby isn't as bad as PHP, which I currently use as a shell scripting language (and which suffers from a hearty delay between the issuing of the command and the starting of the script).
Also, Java is semi-compiled while Ruby is purely interpreted, making it even slower. However, if computers keep getting faster as they have been I doubt that Ruby's performance will be much of an issue in the future.
As a side note, why is it the people so quickly forget what these languages are really for. They are Rapid Application Development(RAD) and prototyping languages. You're not supposed to ship products developed with these languages! You're supposed to prototype the application and if it looks viable, develop it in a real language like C or C++!
;)
Someone better tell the Gentoo guys to redo Portage in C++. Obviously the current implementation does not have the performance neccessary for the critical job of zero-latency package management.
Of course I'm kidding. No one would develop in a language like C++, which was developed for schools in order to make learning real languages like PHP, Visual Prolog or Objective-Befunge easier.
I just googled for a Haskell implementation in Java. I'm in the development team of an (admittedly comatose) project to create a Java-based game RAD environment (we are (were) aiming for something like the RPG Maker XP, if you happen to know it) and one of the key features is "script in any language you please (as long as it's on the list)". Java interpreters for script languages like Rhino or JRuby would plug into a defined interface and the scripts would be saved with metadata indicating dependencies like the interpreter version. This vening I thought how cool (although mostly impractical) it would be to script a game in Haskell.
Although, of course, for math-heavy games (economy simulations?) Haskell would suddenly turn into the epitome of elegance. I think that Haskell only really shines when it's used to do stuff that would be expressed as formulae anyway. But it really does shine, then.
I'm sorry that I can't offer deeper insight into Lisp, but I could make a generic comment about parentheses.