Well the article is somewhat interesting, like where they point out that the cited address has a '.450' in it.
But the real gem so far (in my oddball opinion) has been the discussion of anthracite vs. bituminous coal that followed. That thread was nine messages and two pictures of coal long last time I checked. AND, I felt like I actually learned something on slashdot. Not something I'm likely to use, but interesting trivia for Christmas parties at least.
Here's my collected advice, in no particular order.
1) Firefox. FIREFOX. FIREFOX! You'll wonder how you lived without it.
2) Disable system restore. Run your favorite anti-spyware programs in safemode (after updating definitions). Spyware S&D does a good job, but you've already listed that.
3) Protect your system. Anti-virus software is absolutely essential now. Windows updates are essential. If you've got XP, use the SP2 firewall, it's pretty decent. Otherwise download a firewall and learn how to set it up. (Don't automatically Allow all the connections it asks about, figure out what they actually do)
4) HijackThis! and SysInternal's Process Explorer are pretty useful. Process Explorer will actually end those pesky tasks that Task Manager won't let you touch.
5) Look up the name of every process running on your computer that you are 100% sure about. A lot of spyware programs attempt to "sound" like legitamate process names. spoolsv.exe is legit, spooler.exe is not. Etc. If it's not legitamate, kill it, find out where the executable hides itself, then delete it.
For someone that lives in a tightly-knit community, and only drives a few miles to work and school each day, this seems like it could really be a "free fuel" solution though. Expecially with the switchable conventional gas system for longer trips.
Are you sure about that? An engine in first gear spinning 6000 rpms puts out a LOT of power.
Also, brakes are designed to survive one highway-speed-to-zero hard stop without warping, but that's it. They need cooling-off time after that to cool down from their current temperature of over 1,000 degrees. There's no way they can survive a 120-to-zero stop with the engine pulling at full power.
I'd tend to agree, even though I spend ALL day removing viruses and spyware from computers in the department. My XP machine hums along nicely.
The catch is that it's firewalled behind a linux box. In my experience, a Windows 2000/XP machine with the latest security patches and virus definitions is not likely to remain virus-free.
Take a look at the HTML - There's a table, with the first row having height 676, then... the beginning of ANOTHER row, not the contents of that row like there should be. Everything BESIDES IE is correctly rendering the empty 676px tall row.
A quick run through a HTML validator might benifit the page's author.
It's got more facts in it than the original article, sure; but it's still written from an emotional standpoint, not a factual one. His refutations of the "user's can't choose colors" and "Gnome developers are fighting against Microsoft" are a waste of server space. One would expect him to describe how to change colors in Gnome, what the design philosophies are, and why it's so important that Gnome isn't competing against MS, but instead we get something that would be appropriate on the Jerry Springer show.
A simple feed-forward network with a single hidden layer can approximate any continuous function on the range [0,1] with arbitrary accuracy. (Or is it s/continuous/differentiable/ ? - can't remember.)
A function must be continuous at any point to be differentiable (otherwise you can find the limits from either direction, but not the derivative), so in this case they're basically synonyms, though the word "continuous" makes a lot more sense here.
wow, i'm trying to imagine all the porn that get pulled through a random sample of 6000 dsl lines.
this is going to be the biggest boost for harddrive sales since kazaa!
I don't claim to be an expert on game development, and I might be mistaken in some points here.
Having said that, it's my understanding that games like Unreal Tournament or Enemy Territory install fairly easily under linux because the only libraries they need to access are fairly standardized - X, GLX, OSS, tcp/ip support. The game installer doesn't actually resolve these dependancies itself. It just assumes that the user has a working system with graphics, sound, and network support. Enemy Territory is a modest download, considering all of the maps, graphics, and sounds that are packed into it's 258 megs.
By having minimilistic dependancies, it avoids the situation you're describing. I think many of us would agree that commercial games install on linux fairly easily, even though they're not made for any specific distribution.
Some code bloat can't be avoided, but considering the size of all the data shipped with a game, the executable size is trivial either way.
Isn't that sorta like asking everyone to agree on one distro and discard or assimilate all of the others? I agree, it's a nice idea, but I don't see it happening any time soon. As long as you understand your package manager and your system, does it really matter that someone else's system is configured slightly differently?
As far as the difficulty of making installers for linux, just create a directory, stuff the whole game in it, and compile it staticly. Put a symlink to the game executable under/usr/bin if you want. That seems to be the popular route, and it's worked well enough so far.
FULL support for a mouse driver means that it matches all of the capabilities of the mouse. Moving, clicking, etc.
Having the mouse open programs is the job of a user application, which interactions with the mouse. Luckily with linux, these applications don't have to be tied to one specific model of mouse. We don't call them 'driver features' because they're not.
Windows drivers bundle these appications with the driver as a marketing tool, but since linux development is for the common good, not money, there's no reason to follow marketing strategy over common sense.
Loki's games have them too, but they tend to compile most of them into a big staticly-linked binary, leaving only the major ones like X for the user. Works fine for huge games when another couple of megs doesn't matter. Basically, if you build an executable static, it has almost no dependancies, but it's a huge file. If you build a file with dynamic linking, it'll create a tiny executable, but it relys on various libraries to run, and more than that, certain versions of those libraries.
The upside to this is that all the parts of a linux system can be developed simultaniously and independantly, and the result will still work.
Can you imagine KDE for example, being built staticly linked to all of the sound, video, encryption, math, etc. libraries that it needs to run? You could do that and release a nice installer on CD once a year, and then wait for the next release before you can upgrade ANYTHING on your system, because it's all one giant package.
In a distributed development system without central management, and without a product to ship to Babbages, many small packages are the only real solution.
Today's viruses are absolutely pathetic compared to some of the older stuff.
Really? How so? I recall recent virii attacking the majority of the worlds computers in hours. How are you judging virii? Certainly not in terms of economic damage.
I understand that modern virii don't have to load TSR's, understand assembly language, or modify boot records (not that they don't), but the virus has to fit the system it's living in.
That's more important than you'd think... It seems that everyone loves OSX, which is notable for having an incredible display manager and style standards. People notice the little perks like the camera-shutter sound more than they notice the bigger architectural changes.
At my job, I run a network of mainly Windows XP computers, and a small lab of linux servers with KDE 3.2 installed as the default desktop environment for whoever wants to use it. Invariably the first user comments are on the bouncing icons, translucent menus, or the fact that GAIM shows buddy icons in the main list. People generally don't care what the operating system is, but they do notice changes in the UI.
Linux has matured as a server OS, but being fast and pretty will bring it to the masses.
Assuming Dell does start pushing home user systems with Linux pre-installed, the traffic to Debian/Redhat/whoever's package servers could increase quite a bit, and the traffic to their forums and support pages would skyrocket, as Linux is introduced to less technical users. The overall quality and useability of those lower-budget/volunteer sites would suffer.
Not saying this is a bad thing, but Dell would have to commit some resources to supporting their new product, beyond just shipping out a different set of harddrive images.
If they did commit to Linux, I'd definately be inspired to purchase a Dell PC sometime down the line, rather than building my own.
The problem with that idea, of course, is that most everyone builds their kernel with unique options, so you'd have to have a ton of binaries for each distribution. And if you're going to have to choose your options for the kernel somewhere, it might as well be in the kernel configurator, where's there's some help available, rather than in a ftp server listing.
What could be useful, in my opinion, would be a program that detects current hardware, ala knoppix, along with filesystems, existing kernel options, and maybe a few broad and simple questions to the user (build usb drivers for everything?) and generates a kernel configuration based on that. That would also make it a bit harder to generate a non-booting kernel, which, as I remember, is a real pain in the arse to deal with while you're still learning the OS basics. (not that i'd know or anything...)
In general, my approach to teaching linux to others has been to make it as simple as possible - boot into KDE, click this icon for the internet, etc. If they get used being on the system, they'll naturally start to learn more about it, either out of curiosity or necessity. Then you tell them what a kernel is and how to mess with it.
I have to wonder, when reading articles like this, how closely does the "scene" the article's author has discovered relate to the larger population in general. I've read a few articles that seem to be essentially interviews of some random, anonymous, highschooler, that supposedly represents the general population of computer-savvy evildoers.
Are there actual, functioning, hacker groups, of a scale larger than Joe and his friends? It seems that the social attitude that accompanies black-hats (at least from the article that I'm questioning) doesn't lend itself to large organizations or control structures.
On the other hand, it is kinda cool to imagine that there's a huge organized computer-crime secretly flourishing across the country. You could make a movie about that sorta thing, maybe call it "Hackers". Oh, wait...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the DSP cards are in the synth, not the PC. I don't think those specs are that unusual for commercial synthesizers. Even on the low end, go into Radio Shack, hit the 'Demo' button on any keyboard, and try to count how many different notes, percussion instruments, etc. are playing simultaniously.
Slashdot Mirror
Well the article is somewhat interesting, like where they point out that the cited address has a '.450' in it.
But the real gem so far (in my oddball opinion) has been the discussion of anthracite vs. bituminous coal that followed. That thread was nine messages and two pictures of coal long last time I checked. AND, I felt like I actually learned something on slashdot. Not something I'm likely to use, but interesting trivia for Christmas parties at least.
"Lets compare a hypothetical wrecked Porsche to a working Hyundai?"
I noticed you used bold to get your point across, though.
Here's my collected advice, in no particular order.
1) Firefox. FIREFOX. FIREFOX! You'll wonder how you lived without it.
2) Disable system restore. Run your favorite anti-spyware programs in safemode (after updating definitions). Spyware S&D does a good job, but you've already listed that.
3) Protect your system. Anti-virus software is absolutely essential now. Windows updates are essential. If you've got XP, use the SP2 firewall, it's pretty decent. Otherwise download a firewall and learn how to set it up. (Don't automatically Allow all the connections it asks about, figure out what they actually do)
4) HijackThis! and SysInternal's Process Explorer are pretty useful. Process Explorer will actually end those pesky tasks that Task Manager won't let you touch.
5) Look up the name of every process running on your computer that you are 100% sure about. A lot of spyware programs attempt to "sound" like legitamate process names. spoolsv.exe is legit, spooler.exe is not. Etc. If it's not legitamate, kill it, find out where the executable hides itself, then delete it.
But I'm trying to cultivate my slashdot pudge!
For someone that lives in a tightly-knit community, and only drives a few miles to work and school each day, this seems like it could really be a "free fuel" solution though. Expecially with the switchable conventional gas system for longer trips.
"No brakes? They're stronger than the engine."
Are you sure about that? An engine in first gear spinning 6000 rpms puts out a LOT of power.
Also, brakes are designed to survive one highway-speed-to-zero hard stop without warping, but that's it. They need cooling-off time after that to cool down from their current temperature of over 1,000 degrees. There's no way they can survive a 120-to-zero stop with the engine pulling at full power.
I'd tend to agree, even though I spend ALL day removing viruses and spyware from computers in the department. My XP machine hums along nicely.
The catch is that it's firewalled behind a linux box. In my experience, a Windows 2000/XP machine with the latest security patches and virus definitions is not likely to remain virus-free.
If you use firefox instead of IE, then maybe.
Take a look at the HTML - There's a table, with the first row having height 676, then ... the beginning of ANOTHER row, not the contents of that row like there should be. Everything BESIDES IE is correctly rendering the empty 676px tall row.
A quick run through a HTML validator might benifit the page's author.
Not to critize the open source methodology too much, but I wonder what sort of numbers we're actually talking about here. Any ideas?
2000 people would be in the ballpark of your high school population, or a large concert crowd. That's a lot of kernel hackers.
Won't this cause parking problems as people stay at rest stops as long as their battery lasts, rather than long enough to do their business?
It's got more facts in it than the original article, sure; but it's still written from an emotional standpoint, not a factual one. His refutations of the "user's can't choose colors" and "Gnome developers are fighting against Microsoft" are a waste of server space. One would expect him to describe how to change colors in Gnome, what the design philosophies are, and why it's so important that Gnome isn't competing against MS, but instead we get something that would be appropriate on the Jerry Springer show.
A simple feed-forward network with a single hidden layer can approximate any continuous function on the range [0,1] with arbitrary accuracy. (Or is it s/continuous/differentiable/ ? - can't remember.)
A function must be continuous at any point to be differentiable (otherwise you can find the limits from either direction, but not the derivative), so in this case they're basically synonyms, though the word "continuous" makes a lot more sense here.
Deja vu.
Comparing an actual signalling rate to "fast"? Where have I seen this recently?
wow, i'm trying to imagine all the porn that get pulled through a random sample of 6000 dsl lines. this is going to be the biggest boost for harddrive sales since kazaa!
I don't claim to be an expert on game development, and I might be mistaken in some points here.
Having said that, it's my understanding that games like Unreal Tournament or Enemy Territory install fairly easily under linux because the only libraries they need to access are fairly standardized - X, GLX, OSS, tcp/ip support. The game installer doesn't actually resolve these dependancies itself. It just assumes that the user has a working system with graphics, sound, and network support. Enemy Territory is a modest download, considering all of the maps, graphics, and sounds that are packed into it's 258 megs.
By having minimilistic dependancies, it avoids the situation you're describing. I think many of us would agree that commercial games install on linux fairly easily, even though they're not made for any specific distribution.
Some code bloat can't be avoided, but considering the size of all the data shipped with a game, the executable size is trivial either way.
Isn't that sorta like asking everyone to agree on one distro and discard or assimilate all of the others? I agree, it's a nice idea, but I don't see it happening any time soon. As long as you understand your package manager and your system, does it really matter that someone else's system is configured slightly differently?
/usr/bin if you want. That seems to be the popular route, and it's worked well enough so far.
As far as the difficulty of making installers for linux, just create a directory, stuff the whole game in it, and compile it staticly. Put a symlink to the game executable under
FULL support for a mouse driver means that it matches all of the capabilities of the mouse. Moving, clicking, etc.
Having the mouse open programs is the job of a user application, which interactions with the mouse. Luckily with linux, these applications don't have to be tied to one specific model of mouse. We don't call them 'driver features' because they're not.
Windows drivers bundle these appications with the driver as a marketing tool, but since linux development is for the common good, not money, there's no reason to follow marketing strategy over common sense.
Loki's games have them too, but they tend to compile most of them into a big staticly-linked binary, leaving only the major ones like X for the user. Works fine for huge games when another couple of megs doesn't matter. Basically, if you build an executable static, it has almost no dependancies, but it's a huge file. If you build a file with dynamic linking, it'll create a tiny executable, but it relys on various libraries to run, and more than that, certain versions of those libraries.
The upside to this is that all the parts of a linux system can be developed simultaniously and independantly, and the result will still work.
Can you imagine KDE for example, being built staticly linked to all of the sound, video, encryption, math, etc. libraries that it needs to run? You could do that and release a nice installer on CD once a year, and then wait for the next release before you can upgrade ANYTHING on your system, because it's all one giant package.
In a distributed development system without central management, and without a product to ship to Babbages, many small packages are the only real solution.
Today's viruses are absolutely pathetic compared to some of the older stuff.
Really? How so? I recall recent virii attacking the majority of the worlds computers in hours. How are you judging virii? Certainly not in terms of economic damage.
I understand that modern virii don't have to load TSR's, understand assembly language, or modify boot records (not that they don't), but the virus has to fit the system it's living in.
That's more important than you'd think... It seems that everyone loves OSX, which is notable for having an incredible display manager and style standards. People notice the little perks like the camera-shutter sound more than they notice the bigger architectural changes.
At my job, I run a network of mainly Windows XP computers, and a small lab of linux servers with KDE 3.2 installed as the default desktop environment for whoever wants to use it. Invariably the first user comments are on the bouncing icons, translucent menus, or the fact that GAIM shows buddy icons in the main list. People generally don't care what the operating system is, but they do notice changes in the UI.
Linux has matured as a server OS, but being fast and pretty will bring it to the masses.
Just a random thought...
Assuming Dell does start pushing home user systems with Linux pre-installed, the traffic to Debian/Redhat/whoever's package servers could increase quite a bit, and the traffic to their forums and support pages would skyrocket, as Linux is introduced to less technical users. The overall quality and useability of those lower-budget/volunteer sites would suffer.
Not saying this is a bad thing, but Dell would have to commit some resources to supporting their new product, beyond just shipping out a different set of harddrive images.
If they did commit to Linux, I'd definately be inspired to purchase a Dell PC sometime down the line, rather than building my own.
The problem with that idea, of course, is that most everyone builds their kernel with unique options, so you'd have to have a ton of binaries for each distribution. And if you're going to have to choose your options for the kernel somewhere, it might as well be in the kernel configurator, where's there's some help available, rather than in a ftp server listing.
What could be useful, in my opinion, would be a program that detects current hardware, ala knoppix, along with filesystems, existing kernel options, and maybe a few broad and simple questions to the user (build usb drivers for everything?) and generates a kernel configuration based on that. That would also make it a bit harder to generate a non-booting kernel, which, as I remember, is a real pain in the arse to deal with while you're still learning the OS basics. (not that i'd know or anything...)
In general, my approach to teaching linux to others has been to make it as simple as possible - boot into KDE, click this icon for the internet, etc. If they get used being on the system, they'll naturally start to learn more about it, either out of curiosity or necessity. Then you tell them what a kernel is and how to mess with it.
I have to wonder, when reading articles like this, how closely does the "scene" the article's author has discovered relate to the larger population in general. I've read a few articles that seem to be essentially interviews of some random, anonymous, highschooler, that supposedly represents the general population of computer-savvy evildoers.
Are there actual, functioning, hacker groups, of a scale larger than Joe and his friends? It seems that the social attitude that accompanies black-hats (at least from the article that I'm questioning) doesn't lend itself to large organizations or control structures.
On the other hand, it is kinda cool to imagine that there's a huge organized computer-crime secretly flourishing across the country. You could make a movie about that sorta thing, maybe call it "Hackers". Oh, wait...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the DSP cards are in the synth, not the PC. I don't think those specs are that unusual for commercial synthesizers. Even on the low end, go into Radio Shack, hit the 'Demo' button on any keyboard, and try to count how many different notes, percussion instruments, etc. are playing simultaniously.