I've never understood why people argued for removing the creative expresitivity possible via a CLI. What other place can you speak in english (older Sierra games), or even abreviated english (your favourite/bin/sh derivitive or replacement;-))? A GUI as a complete, and only, computer interface is the equivalent of reducing your vocabulary to pointing and grunting (with one grunt for Mac users, two for Windows users, and 3 for X11:)). This also places the onus on the user for doing a simple action to multiple files. Sure, it might be easy to drag a selection of files from one folder to another, but it is very hard if your regexp for the move includes anything other than files of one type (cp a*d[ea]d*.txt/text/sorted/a cannot be done easily in a GUI).
Anyone who argues against a richer, fuller user interface (once past the initial, and short, time as a newbie -- I only spent a few months learning Linux related things, but I have spent years using those skills effectively) for one that is 100% GUI is obviously not thinking in terms of the big picture..
Drunk drivers cause accidents. Yet nobody seems to do much about it. Why? I honestly do not know.
A drunk driver in an SUV caused an accident which almost killed a fine human being. Each day, many drunk drivers in many types of vehicles cause accidents which do kill fine human beings, or damage them for life. Piers Anythony wrote about a young girl named Jenny who can't do anything, aside from breathe and focus her attention on something, thanks to a drunk driver who hit her and damaged her spinal column. Her life will never be as full as it might have been, thanks to a hit and run.
The US has a minimum drinking age of 21 in most States. In Canada, it's generally 18 or 19. A lot of people in both countries die because of drunk drivers. So does a minimum drinking age help? Not much, because people still die. If you are going to drink, you have to drink responsibly. Cab drivers may drive poorly, but they are generally sober.
Even driving a car is a great responsibility. So do they retest people every year or two to see if their driving skills have "gone off," and need to be corrected? Heck no. Every day at every corner, I can watch cars that start their turns too early, and don't turn sharply enough (thus crossing several lanes instead of turning into one). Or people who need those extra few seconds (seconds which are averaged by every single red light you stop at) to get to work, and so swerve around a person turning left (or just stopped) -- generally right into the car or thing they were stopped for. I've been hit this way (turning left, person runs yellow. THUD). Hit and run drivers are the worst, because they can't even take the time to help the victims of their actions.
Sigh. Until your car has enough technology to gauge driver maturity and sobriety, it will basically be a large object used to assist the ability of people with poor judgement to commit random murders.
"I really hope they put in support for writing directly to the framebuffer. That way OpenGL could be put on it and we'd be in desktop heaven."
This is why the Vesa frame buffer + X11 frame buffer server exist. The problem is that it is totally non-accelerated. X11 uses the XAA (X Acceleration Architecture), which is a gain. True, redraws are somewhat expensive, but that's mainly because the app is written poorly.
Use Slackware -- BSD style init scripts:-)
"B) Its X compatible so no re-writing apps to support a next Gen interface!"
I do not understand why companies must feel that giving away information on how to operate the hardware they sell is somehow wrong. This is like saying, "here is a large black box. To use it, you must also get one of our trained operators. If the operator somehow misoperates the box for some reason -- tough" This is totally isane from a consumer stand point.
Take they NV3 (the Riva 128). I have a Diamond V330 (using the Riva 128) for doing 2D things. Thanks to the closed-source drivers for windows, I'm forced to deal with strange region redrawing issues that have not gone away after updating it to the latest BIOS and driver. Under X, there is not problem because it is driven via an OpenSource X server which has been properly debugged thanks to its opensource nature.
For 3D, I have a Voodoo 2 which works fine in both operating systems (thanks to a nice quality commitment from 3Dfx, whom I will heartily recommend to people, alongside Matrox).
Conclusion: There is no excuse for not including information on how to operate the product you are selling. If your products are so flawed as to be obviously broken from its interface, it shouldn't even be purchased in the first place. Let things stand and fall on their own merits. ---
Maybe a compressed file using the fairly unecumbered zip compression routines? Flat zip files UU encoded are great in terms of how easy they are to transfer around...
I don't like those annoying 8.3 habits which chop off the L from HTML, though:-P ---
It goes against open standards. If you want to have a document that renders exactly the same way on multiple platforms, use PS or PDF (which is basically PS + some). PS and PDF readers exist for practically everything.
If you want the code to contain proper markup indicating meaning (perhaps for braile or blind readers, as well as normal document printing and rendering), use SGML. SGML becomes so many things so easyily. It's also an open standard.
CHM is just another 8.3 security hole, IMO. No source means no true multi-vendor support, too. ---
Let's look at situations where forking has managed to get past a missing/closed-minded maintainer, or just been used to introduce revolutionary ideas: NetBSD designed for portability. OpenBSD designed for security. FreeBSD designed for performance.
Emacs and XEmacs, both the same interface, but each with a separate design philosophy for the various developers.
Forking of Windows into the "professional" (NT) and "home user" (3.1/9x/WM).
Exactly which of these have caused great turbulence for the people involved with those programs?
None. Although the NetBSD people are a bit touchy about Theo, still;-)
Once we are allowed to compete on our merits, opensource darwinism allows the best to be created. We've seen what monocultures do before, and will likely do in the future. Heck, nature has forked people in the past. Why do you think we have different skin/hair colours and other differences? ---
The program encrypts it in a trivial fashion to stop any namby from just going in and looking in. However, given enough time, anyone could decrypt it -- even by hand. This is why the shadow password system exists -- only UID 0 processes can access the (trivial to brute force) crypt DES hashes of the passwords. True, modern distros (Slackware) use MD5 hashes now, but they can still be brute forced given a dictionary, an MD5 encoder, and a final "hash" to compare to.
It is not possible to store secrets on the client computer if the client computer cannot be trusted.
Let me reiterate: it is not possible to store complete secrets on the local computer if the local computer cannot be trusted.
Solution: Don't write apps that store passwords on the local computer without using another password to encrypt them.
Workaround: Disable all "remember this password for me" checkboxes that keep cropping up in all sorts of apps
If I have access to your money box, I can break the lock. If I have access to your passwords, I can brute the hash. That's why you shouldn't "remember passwords" unless you 1) have the computer some place secure, and 2) are willing to remember it yourself so you don't put yourself in that situation. ---
"An example: the SYN DoS weakness discovered a while back, in both Windows and various UNIXen. Open source administrators and Linux/FreeBSD kernel hackers had a fix out within hours, while Microsoft and others languished for days or even weeks before releasing a fix. "
So a skilled administrator would then install an opensource firewall of some type over night.
Any competent system administrator would be able to install a firewall, and work around the operating system bug (hack around, in this case):-)
Just scale up your thinking beyond the case/case scenario. Any admin worth his/her salt would just grab a 486, firewall with NAT/MASQ, and then report the problem to the PHBs. If the PHBs insisted on insecurity, the admin would then follow the job description (security over all), and lie to them like many other IT people have had to in the past (see false authority syndrome).
QED a knowledgeable, competent sysadmin is the most crucial part of any security:-) ---
Beta means all known bugs are fixed. Will all known bugs be fixed? No. Heck, a CSS layout problem I submited has been targetted for M16, which is at least one revision past the beta. They should be calling it "Netscape 6.0 Alpha" based on the M15 build. Not a beta release.
Netscape has rushed things before. At least the code is fairly open, and can be worked on by people who do not need to heed insane deadlines. I look forward to a stable release "when it's done":-) ---
Just mark is as alpha or beta.. Freshmeat tracks version numbers and allows notes and upgrade importance (low, medium, high) based on the fixes/changes.
It really would be nice, and other people could also use/test your stuff, and send in patches:-) ---
PCI or ISA 10Base2/10BaseT (RJ45) combo NIC: 20$ Cdn
50x CDROM drive ISA: 80$ Cdn
I can't email you one, but I can say that it wouldn't be too hard to go and work for a few weeks at some high-turnover job (like a McJob), or just save allowance (if that young, and if getting an allowance) to get the money required.. If the prices are higher in the States, I can buy and send you one of the above, as long as I get paid the amount I pay for the device + shipping. ---
Slackware has a different directory hierachry than Redhat which, IMO, makes more sense.
Slackware uses the BSD-tyle init scripts (/etc/rc.d/rc.M, rc.inet1, rc.inet2) which, IMO, is easier for newbie and guru alike to use.
Slackware can be installed in 80mb as a firewall 486, or in a gb or so as a Workstation with Gnome and KDE with a lot of little apps for both.
Slackware's text-installer is slick, and easy to use. I personally love the "expert" mode added in Slackware 4.0 which lets you pick which pieces of each disk set you want before it installs that disk set.
That, and unlike RedHat, Slackware's packages are organised logically. I've never had an install of Slackware crap out because I'd not installed something important. RedHat custom installs are downright satanic in terms of how hard they are (IMO).. Slackware also has a cool support message board on slackware.com which I sometimes frequent:) ---
I don't know. I've always liked to be free and breezy, like a Saturday morning. That's why I wear boxers -- there's nothing like the feeling of freedom and motion that comes from such loose-fitting underwear. And, as a bonus, they make silk ones! ---
Alternate methods for install: get packages s-l-o-w-l-y over dialup, or rapidly over xDSL/CM. Pop the HD into another machine which the packages on them, and copy. Use a burnt copy of the CD.
I remember watching a local LUG member install Slackware via floppy back when a 333Mhz Alpha with 180mb of ram and a 21" monitor was incredibly cool (woah, that could be now, it was back in 1996:-)). He had a binder of the things. Floppies go bad all the time. It was painful.
Cheap-bytes has the CDs for a few bucks. Have you tried CD install? ---
How hard is it to download those packages to your harddrive before hand?
Not too hard.
How hard is it to burn a CD from the ISO, or setup an NFS server on another machine?
Not too hard.
... Installing Slackware is not dependant on a method of retrieving packages. If you *really* wanted to try Slackware, you'd just download the packages to a dir, mount it, and choose install from a premounted dir.
As for packaging system.. I don't know why you say that. RPMs? rpm2tgz; installpkg works great. Debs? Well, people usually also have RPMs alongside those;) Source tarballs? They're great, and the ones I always use. You have many options when compiling a program. vim, for example, lets you use a lot of different widget sets for the gvim front end, which are compile-time options. And you can use a different compiler, perhaps pgcc or some such, as well as tweak the program at will, and submit patches to the maintainer. I love helping make programs better.
Again, it's all a matter of are you serious about running Slackware, or more of a "GUI all the way" guy who should stick with RedHat. I know what I *love*:-) ---
AFAIK, all universities are controlled by their own local boards, but do receive government money for projects taken by professors for the government and for the students that take the courses. They are, in that sense, government funded (Canada has the separate provincial governments, under the central federal government).
Given the rate of exchange the 2K US for a US U would likely work out to 3.2K Cdn, which is easily enough for tuition + books at any university, even the fancy-smancy U of T:) ---
Perhaps the best way to reveal the problem with security via obscurity is to use the multi-monitor feature in Windows, design what is essentially a "null" monitor/card driver that looks like a second video out, and use it to capture any and all content that is video driven (perhaps with a a "null" sound driver).
Put the drivers under the GPL, and ask the content providers to open up their streaming codecs now that people can arbitrarily save them easily. ---
Perhaps she should go to a Canadian college then. US Universities are.. insanely expensive, due to the US budget people deciding that military spending is better than subsidizing the education of its citizens.
100,000$ US would last for aprox 20 years, without any form of interest or savings program (also not taking into account inflation), at most Canadian universities assuming 8,000$ Canadian is spent per year (average residence + fees + food + "small" disposably budget). Why get a masters from MIT when you can get a Ph.D in several things from the U of C?:-)
Of course, with proper investment, the girl could come to Canada, and retire around age 40 with such a head-start towards "critical mass" with her money. Read "The Wealthy Barber" if you want to know more about this:-) (It's a Canadian finance book) ---
Slashdot Mirror
You're absolutely right..
/bin/sh derivitive or replacement ;-))? A GUI as a complete, and only, computer interface is the equivalent of reducing your vocabulary to pointing and grunting (with one grunt for Mac users, two for Windows users, and 3 for X11 :)). This also places the onus on the user for doing a simple action to multiple files. Sure, it might be easy to drag a selection of files from one folder to another, but it is very hard if your regexp for the move includes anything other than files of one type (cp a*d[ea]d*.txt /text/sorted/a cannot be done easily in a GUI).
I've never understood why people argued for removing the creative expresitivity possible via a CLI. What other place can you speak in english (older Sierra games), or even abreviated english (your favourite
Anyone who argues against a richer, fuller user interface (once past the initial, and short, time as a newbie -- I only spent a few months learning Linux related things, but I have spent years using those skills effectively) for one that is 100% GUI is obviously not thinking in terms of the big picture..
---
Drunk drivers cause accidents. Yet nobody seems to do much about it. Why? I honestly do not know.
A drunk driver in an SUV caused an accident which almost killed a fine human being. Each day, many drunk drivers in many types of vehicles cause accidents which do kill fine human beings, or damage them for life. Piers Anythony wrote about a young girl named Jenny who can't do anything, aside from breathe and focus her attention on something, thanks to a drunk driver who hit her and damaged her spinal column. Her life will never be as full as it might have been, thanks to a hit and run.
The US has a minimum drinking age of 21 in most States. In Canada, it's generally 18 or 19. A lot of people in both countries die because of drunk drivers. So does a minimum drinking age help? Not much, because people still die. If you are going to drink, you have to drink responsibly. Cab drivers may drive poorly, but they are generally sober.
Even driving a car is a great responsibility. So do they retest people every year or two to see if their driving skills have "gone off," and need to be corrected? Heck no. Every day at every corner, I can watch cars that start their turns too early, and don't turn sharply enough (thus crossing several lanes instead of turning into one). Or people who need those extra few seconds (seconds which are averaged by every single red light you stop at) to get to work, and so swerve around a person turning left (or just stopped) -- generally right into the car or thing they were stopped for. I've been hit this way (turning left, person runs yellow. THUD). Hit and run drivers are the worst, because they can't even take the time to help the victims of their actions.
Sigh. Until your car has enough technology to gauge driver maturity and sobriety, it will basically be a large object used to assist the ability of people with poor judgement to commit random murders.
---
"I really hope they put in support for writing directly to the framebuffer. That way OpenGL could be put on it and we'd be in desktop heaven."
:-)
:-/
This is why the Vesa frame buffer + X11 frame buffer server exist. The problem is that it is totally non-accelerated. X11 uses the XAA (X Acceleration Architecture), which is a gain. True, redraws are somewhat expensive, but that's mainly because the app is written poorly.
Use Slackware -- BSD style init scripts
"B) Its X compatible so no re-writing apps to support a next Gen interface!"
It's QT compatible. I'm a GNOME guy.
---
I do not understand why companies must feel that giving away information on how to operate the hardware they sell is somehow wrong. This is like saying, "here is a large black box. To use it, you must also get one of our trained operators. If the operator somehow misoperates the box for some reason -- tough" This is totally isane from a consumer stand point.
Take they NV3 (the Riva 128). I have a Diamond V330 (using the Riva 128) for doing 2D things. Thanks to the closed-source drivers for windows, I'm forced to deal with strange region redrawing issues that have not gone away after updating it to the latest BIOS and driver. Under X, there is not problem because it is driven via an OpenSource X server which has been properly debugged thanks to its opensource nature.
For 3D, I have a Voodoo 2 which works fine in both operating systems (thanks to a nice quality commitment from 3Dfx, whom I will heartily recommend to people, alongside Matrox).
Conclusion:
There is no excuse for not including information on how to operate the product you are selling. If your products are so flawed as to be obviously broken from its interface, it shouldn't even be purchased in the first place. Let things stand and fall on their own merits.
---
Maybe a compressed file using the fairly unecumbered zip compression routines? Flat zip files UU encoded are great in terms of how easy they are to transfer around...
:-P
I don't like those annoying 8.3 habits which chop off the L from HTML, though
---
It goes against open standards. If you want to have a document that renders exactly the same way on multiple platforms, use PS or PDF (which is basically PS + some). PS and PDF readers exist for practically everything.
If you want the code to contain proper markup indicating meaning (perhaps for braile or blind readers, as well as normal document printing and rendering), use SGML. SGML becomes so many things so easyily. It's also an open standard.
CHM is just another 8.3 security hole, IMO.
No source means no true multi-vendor support, too.
---
Let's look at situations where forking has managed to get past a missing/closed-minded maintainer, or just been used to introduce revolutionary ideas:
;-)
NetBSD designed for portability.
OpenBSD designed for security.
FreeBSD designed for performance.
Emacs and XEmacs, both the same interface, but each with a separate design philosophy for the various developers.
Forking of Windows into the "professional" (NT) and "home user" (3.1/9x/WM).
Exactly which of these have caused great turbulence for the people involved with those programs?
None. Although the NetBSD people are a bit touchy about Theo, still
Once we are allowed to compete on our merits, opensource darwinism allows the best to be created. We've seen what monocultures do before, and will likely do in the future. Heck, nature has forked people in the past. Why do you think we have different skin/hair colours and other differences?
---
The program encrypts it in a trivial fashion to stop any namby from just going in and looking in. However, given enough time, anyone could decrypt it -- even by hand. This is why the shadow password system exists -- only UID 0 processes can access the (trivial to brute force) crypt DES hashes of the passwords. True, modern distros (Slackware) use MD5 hashes now, but they can still be brute forced given a dictionary, an MD5 encoder, and a final "hash" to compare to.
It is not possible to store secrets on the client computer if the client computer cannot be trusted.
Let me reiterate: it is not possible to store complete secrets on the local computer if the local computer cannot be trusted.
Solution: Don't write apps that store passwords on the local computer without using another password to encrypt them.
Workaround: Disable all "remember this password for me" checkboxes that keep cropping up in all sorts of apps
If I have access to your money box, I can break the lock. If I have access to your passwords, I can brute the hash. That's why you shouldn't "remember passwords" unless you 1) have the computer some place secure, and 2) are willing to remember it yourself so you don't put yourself in that situation.
---
"An example: the SYN DoS weakness discovered a while back, in both Windows and various UNIXen. Open source administrators and Linux/FreeBSD kernel hackers had a fix out within hours, while Microsoft and others languished for days or even weeks before releasing a fix. "
:-)
:-)
So a skilled administrator would then install an opensource firewall of some type over night.
Any competent system administrator would be able to install a firewall, and work around the operating system bug (hack around, in this case)
Just scale up your thinking beyond the case/case scenario. Any admin worth his/her salt would just grab a 486, firewall with NAT/MASQ, and then report the problem to the PHBs. If the PHBs insisted on insecurity, the admin would then follow the job description (security over all), and lie to them like many other IT people have had to in the past (see false authority syndrome).
QED a knowledgeable, competent sysadmin is the most crucial part of any security
---
"Netscape 6/Mozilla Beta Release in 25 Days"
:-)
Beta means all known bugs are fixed. Will all known bugs be fixed? No. Heck, a CSS layout problem I submited has been targetted for M16, which is at least one revision past the beta. They should be calling it "Netscape 6.0 Alpha" based on the M15 build. Not a beta release.
Netscape has rushed things before. At least the code is fairly open, and can be worked on by people who do not need to heed insane deadlines. I look forward to a stable release "when it's done"
---
three minutes of that repetitive noise!!!
:)
I mean, I can understand 20 seconds or so of it during the intros.. but minutes !?
ARG! Kill!!!
---
There never was such a kernel, nor such a Slackware at the time.
Vim with GTK+ widgets is nice.
Cool edit within Midnight Commander is nice.
Emacs is a bit much, IMO, but I can use it.
:)
---
Just mark is as alpha or beta ..
:-)
Freshmeat tracks version numbers and allows notes and upgrade importance (low, medium, high) based on the fixes/changes.
It really would be nice, and other people could also use/test your stuff, and send in patches
---
*make sound of giraffee dieing*
:-)
Bob, he's onto us! Get the IPO money and run!!!
Seriously, though, I'd love it if you could post said init script system to freshmeat.net or similar.
---
I /like/ Bash :)
I also use the arrows for command history. tcsh is something I've not tried.
---
Tab completion!
Bash has it, so use it.
installpkg work^T
-> installpkg workbone-x86-4.2.1.tgz
:-)
---
PCI or ISA 10Base2/10BaseT (RJ45) combo NIC: 20$ Cdn
50x CDROM drive ISA: 80$ Cdn
I can't email you one, but I can say that it wouldn't be too hard to go and work for a few weeks at some high-turnover job (like a McJob), or just save allowance (if that young, and if getting an allowance) to get the money required.. If the prices are higher in the States, I can buy and send you one of the above, as long as I get paid the amount I pay for the device + shipping.
---
Slackware has a different directory hierachry than Redhat which, IMO, makes more sense.
:)
Slackware uses the BSD-tyle init scripts (/etc/rc.d/rc.M, rc.inet1, rc.inet2) which, IMO, is easier for newbie and guru alike to use.
Slackware can be installed in 80mb as a firewall 486, or in a gb or so as a Workstation with Gnome and KDE with a lot of little apps for both.
Slackware's text-installer is slick, and easy to use. I personally love the "expert" mode added in Slackware 4.0 which lets you pick which pieces of each disk set you want before it installs that disk set.
That, and unlike RedHat, Slackware's packages are organised logically. I've never had an install of Slackware crap out because I'd not installed something important. RedHat custom installs are downright satanic in terms of how hard they are (IMO).. Slackware also has a cool support message board on slackware.com which I sometimes frequent
---
I don't know. I've always liked to be free and breezy, like a Saturday morning. That's why I wear boxers -- there's nothing like the feeling of freedom and motion that comes from such loose-fitting underwear. And, as a bonus, they make silk ones!
---
No ethernet? Ouch..
:-)). He had a binder of the things. Floppies go bad all the time. It was painful.
Alternate methods for install: get packages s-l-o-w-l-y over dialup, or rapidly over xDSL/CM. Pop the HD into another machine which the packages on them, and copy. Use a burnt copy of the CD.
I remember watching a local LUG member install Slackware via floppy back when a 333Mhz Alpha with 180mb of ram and a 21" monitor was incredibly cool (woah, that could be now, it was back in 1996
Cheap-bytes has the CDs for a few bucks. Have you tried CD install?
---
How hard is it to download those packages to your harddrive before hand?
;) Source tarballs? They're great, and the ones I always use.
:-)
Not too hard.
How hard is it to burn a CD from the ISO, or setup an NFS server on another machine?
Not too hard.
... Installing Slackware is not dependant on a method of retrieving packages. If you *really* wanted to try Slackware, you'd just download the packages to a dir, mount it, and choose install from a premounted dir.
As for packaging system.. I don't know why you say that. RPMs? rpm2tgz; installpkg works great. Debs? Well, people usually also have RPMs alongside those
You have many options when compiling a program. vim, for example, lets you use a lot of different widget sets for the gvim front end, which are compile-time options. And you can use a different compiler, perhaps pgcc or some such, as well as tweak the program at will, and submit patches to the maintainer. I love helping make programs better.
Again, it's all a matter of are you serious about running Slackware, or more of a "GUI all the way" guy who should stick with RedHat. I know what I *love*
---
AFAIK, all universities are controlled by their own local boards, but do receive government money for projects taken by professors for the government and for the students that take the courses. They are, in that sense, government funded (Canada has the separate provincial governments, under the central federal government).
:)
Given the rate of exchange the 2K US for a US U would likely work out to 3.2K Cdn, which is easily enough for tuition + books at any university, even the fancy-smancy U of T
---
Perhaps the best way to reveal the problem with security via obscurity is to use the multi-monitor feature in Windows, design what is essentially a "null" monitor/card driver that looks like a second video out, and use it to capture any and all content that is video driven (perhaps with a a "null" sound driver).
Put the drivers under the GPL, and ask the content providers to open up their streaming codecs now that people can arbitrarily save them easily.
---
Perhaps she should go to a Canadian college then. US Universities are .. insanely expensive, due to the US budget people deciding that military spending is better than subsidizing the education of its citizens.
:-)
:-) (It's a Canadian finance book)
100,000$ US would last for aprox 20 years, without any form of interest or savings program (also not taking into account inflation), at most Canadian universities assuming 8,000$ Canadian is spent per year (average residence + fees + food + "small" disposably budget). Why get a masters from MIT when you can get a Ph.D in several things from the U of C?
Of course, with proper investment, the girl could come to Canada, and retire around age 40 with such a head-start towards "critical mass" with her money. Read "The Wealthy Barber" if you want to know more about this
---
Inventor(s): Gellert; Reinhard R. , Arlington Heights, IL 60004
So it's not IBM that has the patent, per-se, you just used IBM's patent database.
---