Actually, you will strike fear and awe into the hearts of all those redhat (linux equiv of gingers in southpark?) and ubuntu users. Telling people you use Slackware even makes gentoo users gasp in amazement. By using Slack, everyone around you will know that your kung-fu is the best kung-fu.
I know it's not "official" (in that it is not overseen by Pat) but slamd64 runs quite nicely. I've been running it for almost a year now on a core2 system with almost the same ease as official slackware on older systems. Just in case anyone is looking for 64 bit slack.
Now if only I could get an install that works easily on my PS3.
I've lived in Quebec for over ten years now (Montreal and Sherbrooke) and have never had any trouble getting service in English when it comes to government or big business. Bell, in particular, always seems to be happy to find someone to speak to me in English, especially when money is in question.
Yes, the official language is French, but they are part of an officially bilingual country (Canada) and big businesses realize that they operate in a world where English is the most common language. Once you get away from the sociopathic hard line politicians, common sense does exert some influence.
Finally, the number is a Montreal number for a firm that deals with politics and legislation and consumer rights for big business issues. I'd put the odds at 95%> that if you dialled that number and started speaking in English the person at the other end would respond to you in English... Those sorts of people, especially in Montreal, are about as perfectly bilingual as you are likely to find anywhere on the planet.
Hopefully this doesn't go the way of Full Throttle II. I loved the first Beyond Good and Evil. I really hope the do a good job on the sequel and actually manage to get it released.
Another part of the problem may be the lack of immediate and obvious consequence. Your comment about rm -rf is a good example of something with an immediate and obvious consequence. Suddently there are no files in/home/$USER and you realize that you've done something stupid that you will likely never do again (I know once was enough for me). On the other hand, clicking yes rarely seems to do anything... until a month later when you suddenly get a credit card bill for $15k and your computer is running slower than a drunk snail.
I made some interesting mistakes when I first started toying with Linux... most of them had obvious and immediate consequences that I learned from pretty fast. What I've seen of Vista and what I remember of windows up to XP... many of the mistakes that can be made don't seem to do much to start with.
I've had the exact opposite experience. My new (as in fresh out of the box) lenovo x61 tablet took just over five minutes to boot Vista, and then a furnther 7 minutes (wtf!) to finish grinding at the hard-drive after I login. Shutting down I never timed but I walked away in disgust after three mintues. My seven year old desktop put the tablet's performance to shame when I did use it for "regular work". Granted, some of that has to do with the crapware that gets loaded onto a new laptop these days, but it's still pretty extreme. I kept it there for three days to see what was so "wow" about vista. For me, there's really not much "wow" there. To be fair, this is largely because I'm used to a computer behaving a certain way, like doing what I tell it to do. Also, glitzy eye-candy doesn't impress me... especially if I've already been using a faster version of it for two years.
Slackware 12.0 boots up in 47 s and once you login, KDE grinds the HD for about 30 s more. Now, the response times I'm getting are better than my 7 year old desktop... as you would expect rather than the other way around as was the case with vista on there.
An OS shouldn't limit your hardware performance. This, more than the nagging, is what turned me of of Vista.
Or a screw-driver followed by steel wool on the platters.
BTW, nitric acid would likely be more effective than sulphuric. And a mix of nitric and hydrochloric (commonly known as aqua regia) will probably do an even better job. The nitric acts as an oxidizing agent while the hydrochloric can help complex some of the resulting metal ions making the mixture more effective. Sulphuric would probably just get rid of some of the organic coatings in the time that it would take the aqua regia to chew through all the metals.
Not to condone IBM's prior misdeeds, but even when they were at their worst, IBM was still doing hard research and expanding scientific knowledge. That is much more than any modern patent troll can say.
A bad patent is a bad patent no matter who has it.
True enough. So, maybe this will finally wake some people up to the fact that there are some problems with the way the current patent system works. If the patent passes, they may be able to stop other patent troll's (I'm not sure the patent actually does what the summary says it does). If it doesn't, the reasons for denying the patent may make these activities more difficult in future anyway (is it possible to deny a patent because the activity being patented is unethical/illegal?)
It may also be used as the example of just how screwed up the patent system has become. If any company has to have this patent, I can think of much worse companies than IBM to have this one granted.
Not really. Once you login to your linux computer, the environment variables USER and HOME get set to your username and home directory respectively. If Skype can't find a config file with your skype username/password (which is probably why it needs to know your home directory) then it can always ASK you for that info. Finally, even if this was a valid reason to look in/etc/passwd, it still doesn't explain the need to rifle through all the other files. If you read through the list in the article, it's quite impressive. Some of them I can cobble together an excuse in my head (it needs to check/dev/snd so that it knows how to deal with your sound card). Others make no sense to me at all (why does it need to sift through my firefox pluggins? What does it need with my.Xauthority file?). And some, like/etc/passwd just seem like a poor choice for how to get info that is already available through other means.
As for/etc/passwd itself, things like ls need it since you may use ls to look at stuff that isn't always yours (try ls -l/dev). If you run skype, you're making a phone call, not listing the/dev tree. If it wants to find out who you are, there are other ways that aren't going to seem so fishy.
Third: There's nothing wrong with reading/etc/passwd. POSIX even has an API for accessing it in user code. See the man pages for getpwuid, getpwnam, getpwent, setpwent and endpwent. For example, everytime you do "ls -l", it uses information from/etc/passwd.
There are legitimate reasons for a command like ls to want to connect a bunch of UID's and usernames. Making the same argument for a program like skype that should only ever have to read one (or possibly two) config files is a bit more of a stretch. When you consider the fact that ls generally doesn't broadcast stuff allover an internal p2p network at unknown machines, the difference is even more important (especially if you're slightly paranoid about security).
OK, since this can also detect prescription drugs... does this mean that the sewage company will have to abide by HIPAA regs in the states if they allow testing of this sort?
OK, even if the flaw was on Skype's end, it would be nice if the linux version was reasonably in sync with the windows and mac version. Maybe if more people were able to use all of the features of Skype on alternative OS's, they wouldn't have to worry about getting hammered and taken out due to an event like this. I still don't understand why Linux support is in version 1.4 while windows is up to 3.5 and has "amazing" features like video support. Oh well, until they at least try to get it right I'll stick with something else (Ekiga, Kopete, Pidgin).
I'm still waiting to hear something from the trinity of shills. The Didiot, the Pretenderly, and Lyin' Dan have been completely silent on this. They've been making be scream at my screen for months whenever they said anything about this case, and now that it's blown up in exactly the opposite way they were all predicting, I think it's only fair that they give me some choice words to laugh about. At least I'll always have fond memories of Rob's review of the Ferrari laptop.
If I didn't know better, I'd say this was an attempt to hide how pathetic our North American school systems have become. I recently finished my first year teaching chemistry at a small University, and it included a course of "Chemistry for Liberal Arts Students" (mostly education students). At one point I made the mistake of trying to explain the concept of equilibrium... which tends to come up with square roots and the quadratic equation. This produced a near revolt because I was trying to use "advanced math"... If our school system has fallen to the point where university students think of the quadratic equation (grade 10 math) as "advanced math", then it's no wonder people are trying to introduce idiotic ideas like this into society.
Forget emacs vs. vi or windows vs. linux. If you really want to start a flame war slam on peoples music. Like the '90s were much of an improvement... grunge, gangsta rap and Britney Spears. Oooh. Yeah baby. Hit me one more time.
Actually, emacs in conjunction with LaTeX (or one of the many other spawn of TeX) can give you all of the pretty flashiness in your final doc without the silly popup for the speelckecher. But that's getting off topic. After just finishing my first year of university teaching, I think anything that will require the students to think about what the computer is doing is asking a bit too much (ie, asking them to install something that didn't come with their computer and doesn't pop up automatically asking them if it's OK to install itself like a Firefox or IE plugin.)
Firstly, the current development version of POV may be the last one released under the POV license... there is talk of releasing it under GPL along with Moray in the future.
Secondly... POV-Ray is not a modeler. Unlike Blender or Moray, Povray scenes are coded, not modeled. That's kinda what the scene description language is all about. Moray and other modellers that can output.pov files are kinda like using Visual Basic to write a program... but not really.
I think the idea of universities patenting anything is insane and contrary to the ideology of universities freely exchanging knowledge. I have, however, watched several friends get burned because of exactly the sort of thing I described in my original post.
If all research results from uni's had to be publicly disclosed that would be the best situation in the long run.
If big pharma wants to get good research, let them hire someone or fund a university project under conditions of full disclosure. As long as big pharma (or any other businesses) want to take advantage of the universities, they should not be surprised when the universities wake up and start taking advantage of their own results.
For the record, I do hope to hold tenure some day. I find the recent (last decade or so) trend of patenting rather than publishing to be very disturbing. But for better or worse, that's the way things are going.
The reason for this is simple. For decades multinationals have been taking advantage of the Uni's. Why bother hiring a PhD at $100k a year starting salary plus twice that amount per year in operating costs when you can give some prof. $100k over three years to fund two or three grad students and piggyback the operating costs onto the back of the Uni that already has all the infrastructure and equipment in place anyway. If the Uni's finally woke up to the fact that they were being taken advantage of (at the expense of their own graduate no less) then good for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you will strike fear and awe into the hearts of all those redhat (linux equiv of gingers in southpark?) and ubuntu users. Telling people you use Slackware even makes gentoo users gasp in amazement. By using Slack, everyone around you will know that your kung-fu is the best kung-fu.
I know it's not "official" (in that it is not overseen by Pat) but slamd64 runs quite nicely. I've been running it for almost a year now on a core2 system with almost the same ease as official slackware on older systems. Just in case anyone is looking for 64 bit slack.
Now if only I could get an install that works easily on my PS3.
I've lived in Quebec for over ten years now (Montreal and Sherbrooke) and have never had any trouble getting service in English when it comes to government or big business. Bell, in particular, always seems to be happy to find someone to speak to me in English, especially when money is in question.
... Those sorts of people, especially in Montreal, are about as perfectly bilingual as you are likely to find anywhere on the planet.
Yes, the official language is French, but they are part of an officially bilingual country (Canada) and big businesses realize that they operate in a world where English is the most common language. Once you get away from the sociopathic hard line politicians, common sense does exert some influence.
Finally, the number is a Montreal number for a firm that deals with politics and legislation and consumer rights for big business issues. I'd put the odds at 95%> that if you dialled that number and started speaking in English the person at the other end would respond to you in English
Hopefully this doesn't go the way of Full Throttle II. I loved the first Beyond Good and Evil. I really hope the do a good job on the sequel and actually manage to get it released.
Another part of the problem may be the lack of immediate and obvious consequence. Your comment about rm -rf is a good example of something with an immediate and obvious consequence. Suddently there are no files in /home/$USER and you realize that you've done something stupid that you will likely never do again (I know once was enough for me). On the other hand, clicking yes rarely seems to do anything ... until a month later when you suddenly get a credit card bill for $15k and your computer is running slower than a drunk snail.
I made some interesting mistakes when I first started toying with Linux ... most of them had obvious and immediate consequences that I learned from pretty fast. What I've seen of Vista and what I remember of windows up to XP ... many of the mistakes that can be made don't seem to do much to start with.
I've had the exact opposite experience. My new (as in fresh out of the box) lenovo x61 tablet took just over five minutes to boot Vista, and then a furnther 7 minutes (wtf!) to finish grinding at the hard-drive after I login. Shutting down I never timed but I walked away in disgust after three mintues. My seven year old desktop put the tablet's performance to shame when I did use it for "regular work". Granted, some of that has to do with the crapware that gets loaded onto a new laptop these days, but it's still pretty extreme. I kept it there for three days to see what was so "wow" about vista. For me, there's really not much "wow" there. To be fair, this is largely because I'm used to a computer behaving a certain way, like doing what I tell it to do. Also, glitzy eye-candy doesn't impress me ... especially if I've already been using a faster version of it for two years.
... as you would expect rather than the other way around as was the case with vista on there.
Slackware 12.0 boots up in 47 s and once you login, KDE grinds the HD for about 30 s more. Now, the response times I'm getting are better than my 7 year old desktop
An OS shouldn't limit your hardware performance. This, more than the nagging, is what turned me of of Vista.
Facebank needs a creepier face.
GTA 6: Parental Approval!
GTA 7: Sunday Driver!
GTA 8: Horse and Buggy!
Or a screw-driver followed by steel wool on the platters.
BTW, nitric acid would likely be more effective than sulphuric. And a mix of nitric and hydrochloric (commonly known as aqua regia) will probably do an even better job. The nitric acts as an oxidizing agent while the hydrochloric can help complex some of the resulting metal ions making the mixture more effective. Sulphuric would probably just get rid of some of the organic coatings in the time that it would take the aqua regia to chew through all the metals.
Gene Simmons is just bitter they he doesn't have as much cultural impact for "college kids" as Gene Frenkle.
Not to condone IBM's prior misdeeds, but even when they were at their worst, IBM was still doing hard research and expanding scientific knowledge. That is much more than any modern patent troll can say. A bad patent is a bad patent no matter who has it. True enough. So, maybe this will finally wake some people up to the fact that there are some problems with the way the current patent system works. If the patent passes, they may be able to stop other patent troll's (I'm not sure the patent actually does what the summary says it does). If it doesn't, the reasons for denying the patent may make these activities more difficult in future anyway (is it possible to deny a patent because the activity being patented is unethical/illegal?)
It may also be used as the example of just how screwed up the patent system has become. If any company has to have this patent, I can think of much worse companies than IBM to have this one granted.
Mmmmm beer.
Not really. Once you login to your linux computer, the environment variables USER and HOME get set to your username and home directory respectively. If Skype can't find a config file with your skype username/password (which is probably why it needs to know your home directory) then it can always ASK you for that info. Finally, even if this was a valid reason to look in /etc/passwd, it still doesn't explain the need to rifle through all the other files. If you read through the list in the article, it's quite impressive. Some of them I can cobble together an excuse in my head (it needs to check /dev/snd so that it knows how to deal with your sound card). Others make no sense to me at all (why does it need to sift through my firefox pluggins? What does it need with my .Xauthority file?). And some, like /etc/passwd just seem like a poor choice for how to get info that is already available through other means. /etc/passwd itself, things like ls need it since you may use ls to look at stuff that isn't always yours (try ls -l /dev). If you run skype, you're making a phone call, not listing the /dev tree. If it wants to find out who you are, there are other ways that aren't going to seem so fishy.
As for
Third: There's nothing wrong with reading /etc/passwd. POSIX even has an API for accessing it in user code. See the man pages for getpwuid, getpwnam, getpwent, setpwent and endpwent. For example, everytime you do "ls -l", it uses information from /etc/passwd.
There are legitimate reasons for a command like ls to want to connect a bunch of UID's and usernames. Making the same argument for a program like skype that should only ever have to read one (or possibly two) config files is a bit more of a stretch. When you consider the fact that ls generally doesn't broadcast stuff allover an internal p2p network at unknown machines, the difference is even more important (especially if you're slightly paranoid about security).
OK, since this can also detect prescription drugs ... does this mean that the sewage company will have to abide by HIPAA regs in the states if they allow testing of this sort?
OK, even if the flaw was on Skype's end, it would be nice if the linux version was reasonably in sync with the windows and mac version. Maybe if more people were able to use all of the features of Skype on alternative OS's, they wouldn't have to worry about getting hammered and taken out due to an event like this. I still don't understand why Linux support is in version 1.4 while windows is up to 3.5 and has "amazing" features like video support. Oh well, until they at least try to get it right I'll stick with something else (Ekiga, Kopete, Pidgin).
I'm still waiting to hear something from the trinity of shills. The Didiot, the Pretenderly, and Lyin' Dan have been completely silent on this. They've been making be scream at my screen for months whenever they said anything about this case, and now that it's blown up in exactly the opposite way they were all predicting, I think it's only fair that they give me some choice words to laugh about. At least I'll always have fond memories of Rob's review of the Ferrari laptop.
If I didn't know better, I'd say this was an attempt to hide how pathetic our North American school systems have become. I recently finished my first year teaching chemistry at a small University, and it included a course of "Chemistry for Liberal Arts Students" (mostly education students). At one point I made the mistake of trying to explain the concept of equilibrium ... which tends to come up with square roots and the quadratic equation. This produced a near revolt because I was trying to use "advanced math" ... If our school system has fallen to the point where university students think of the quadratic equation (grade 10 math) as "advanced math", then it's no wonder people are trying to introduce idiotic ideas like this into society.
Except that if you read what Theo has to say, he doesn't have kind words for AMD either.
Ouch! Them's fightin' words boy!
... grunge, gangsta rap and Britney Spears. Oooh. Yeah baby. Hit me one more time.
Forget emacs vs. vi or windows vs. linux. If you really want to start a flame war slam on peoples music. Like the '90s were much of an improvement
Actually, emacs in conjunction with LaTeX (or one of the many other spawn of TeX) can give you all of the pretty flashiness in your final doc without the silly popup for the speelckecher. But that's getting off topic. After just finishing my first year of university teaching, I think anything that will require the students to think about what the computer is doing is asking a bit too much (ie, asking them to install something that didn't come with their computer and doesn't pop up automatically asking them if it's OK to install itself like a Firefox or IE plugin.)
Firstly, the current development version of POV may be the last one released under the POV license... there is talk of releasing it under GPL along with Moray in the future. Secondly ... POV-Ray is not a modeler. Unlike Blender or Moray, Povray scenes are coded, not modeled. That's kinda what the scene description language is all about. Moray and other modellers that can output .pov files are kinda like using Visual Basic to write a program ... but not really.
Neither actually.
I think the idea of universities patenting anything is insane and contrary to the ideology of universities freely exchanging knowledge. I have, however, watched several friends get burned because of exactly the sort of thing I described in my original post.
If all research results from uni's had to be publicly disclosed that would be the best situation in the long run.
If big pharma wants to get good research, let them hire someone or fund a university project under conditions of full disclosure. As long as big pharma (or any other businesses) want to take advantage of the universities, they should not be surprised when the universities wake up and start taking advantage of their own results.
For the record, I do hope to hold tenure some day. I find the recent (last decade or so) trend of patenting rather than publishing to be very disturbing. But for better or worse, that's the way things are going.
The reason for this is simple. For decades multinationals have been taking advantage of the Uni's. Why bother hiring a PhD at $100k a year starting salary plus twice that amount per year in operating costs when you can give some prof. $100k over three years to fund two or three grad students and piggyback the operating costs onto the back of the Uni that already has all the infrastructure and equipment in place anyway. If the Uni's finally woke up to the fact that they were being taken advantage of (at the expense of their own graduate no less) then good for them.