The thing was, he didn't seem to grasp that I was too busy, and as he wouldn't be paying for it (I didn't ask, but he never offered),...
I used to answer a lot of questions on a (free) specialist mainframe bulletin board, and some people would *demand* that you coded (fairly complex) programs for them. I would just say "This is not my paid job; what hourly rate are you offering for this coding?". Then they would go away...
All I was trying to say was that it would be nice if they did see some money once in a while for their hard work, a monetary show of appreciation if you will.
I thought that the majority of open source development these days was done by employees of companies like IBM, Red Hat etc. and so that many open source programmers *are* well rewarded for the work they do. I'd go as far as to say that any open source programmer with good public evidence of a significant contribution to a respected open source application could probably get such a job if they wanted it.
and Ubuntu breaks my wifi if I update from 7.10 to 8.04 because the new kernel doesn't like Broadcoms.
Why are you (and several others in previous posts) complaining about 8.04 breaking things when it hasn't even been released yet? If you want to check out new features and don't mind some things being broken, fair enough. But if you want stuff to actually work, wouldn't it be a good idea to wait for a couple of months *after* the OS is actually released before installing it?
If successful, eBay will roll it out to other markets.
If they roll it out in the EU, this could fall foul of competition laws; the credit card companies/banks could presumably complain of being shut out, given Ebay's near total dominance.
(Obvious the same could apply in other countries, but the EU currently seems keenest on actually enforcing competition laws.)
The problem is about usage patterns of the OS. Put the same person in front of any OS and they will get infected the same way they always did.
You're ignoring the fact that most Windows software is installed by downloading.exe files from multiple websites found by various web search engines, whereas most Linux software is installed from defined secure repositories (and using a suitable gui installer like Synaptic, it is actually easier than installing a.exe, because you don't have to find a website, find the download area, then select the correct executable - just search for program or function, select, and apply). Windows will always be more vulnerable to malware unless the issue of secure repository equivalents for non-MS Windows software is addressed. A user who likes trying new software in Linux will be able to play safely with thousands of programs; it is almost unheard of for repositories to be compromised. The same user trying the same range of software in Windows will probably get at least some sort of malware after a fairly short time.
Unix/Linux/BSD people wondered for years why the mainstream wouldn't adopt their OS, or open source for that matter. How would you expect a normal person to compile their own programs via command line input of a software they have to download at distribution sites?
The 1990's called, they want their Linux criticism back.
If you use a popular distro, most software is Pre-Compiled and in the repositories. 95% of what 95% of the people want - but free (and also Free). Also, it all updates automatically. So you click on a gui box to install a program. Easier than Windows, where you have to find a *trusted* download site first (after researching first to make sure it's not a spyware program). ).
They've confused the kernel with the distribution (Linus has never cared about distributions much), the window manager and the GUI with the OS, the applications with the supporting mechanisms, the I/O with the internals, the implementation with the specification, the client-side with the server-side. This makes playing Operations II: Geek Surgery far harder than necessary and raises questions as to whether they can sing "Dem Bones" correctly.
Please, please, somebody mod this +5 Fucking hilarious...
I've been a Linux user since RedHat 4.1, and even then, distros made a hard effort in order to be user-friendly. The trend has never changed. The results have **improved a lot**, just because this is what Open Source is about: no regressions are imposed, software just can get better.
I started at RH9 and found it interesting but no substitute for Windows in even a primitive multimedia way. I persisted with FC2 and it was a bit of a disappointment - still poor hardware support and multimedia support was not acceptable compared to windows. I was glad that I carried on to FC4 - things improved quite a lot in the hardware support area and the music/video support became less painful (?maybe when I found the livna repo?). FC6 - finally everything worked and I could leave Windows for good. This coincided with my wife taking an interest in the net, so I set her up a Fedora user id and, having never used a computer before (no, not at all) she didn't have any problems using Gnome, Firefox, etc.; and (with the help of adblock) I didn't have to spend ages emphasizing the dangers of Spyware, Viruses, pop-ups etc. The best thing was that I could honestly say to her "Don't worry, It doesn't matter which web sites you visit; you're basically safe - they can't install or run anything dodgy without permission". And I honestly couldn't have said that to her for any version of Windows.
F7 - like FC6 but even less customization needed. WINE really impresses me for the first time - runs Railplan Windows application nearly flawlessly.
F8 - Whoops. nautilus crashes during logon. Still not fixed about 3 months after F8 release. But that's OK, I'll stick with F7 for now. NB. It's not that serious - Nautilus recovers a few seconds after the crash and there's no more crashes after that. And as a 'bleeding edge' distro I expect a bit of this from Fedora. If I wanted something really stable I'd install CentOS or something.
But my main point is that open source software seems to me to be (generally) improving significantly faster than proprietary software (which I use a lot of at work). Maybe that's just because it had a long way to catch up (particularly in terms of polish, not necessarily in terms of function), but I think there's more to it than that - some sort of accelerated pseudo-evolution is going on between KDE/Gnome, Suse/Fedora/Ubuntu etc.
It's too bad their stats are useless since they exclude several European countries... Looks like their stats are only valid for sites that use their tracking beacons, and they refuse to let us know who that is... Could be that they only do tech sites, which would boost Firefox a lot compared to the real usage.
If your speculations are correct, this does not make the stats useless; the absolute values may be suspect, but the trends are still likely to be a useful indicator.
Human DNA isn't compatible in that way with many other species...
It's highly likely you could do something equivalent to splicing jellyfish 'glow' genes into human dna, since this has been done with pigs and chickens, but I guess you wouldn't call that a 'true' hybrid - you've got a glow-in-the dark human, not a humllyfish or a jellman.
But it does raise the question of how many (e.g.) jellyfish characteristics you *would* have to put into a human to make a 'true hybrid'...
After signed drivers comes signed applications. What good will any of this do if you can't run the app without microsoft's blessing?
That's so blatantly anti-competitive that I don't think even MS would be daft enough to try it - yes, they'd like to but they know that this time the EU would get medieval on their ass. Literally hundreds of companies (compared with a handful in the past) would be lodging EU competition complaints, and although MS could drag things out for a few years they'd end up with many more restrictions on their behaviour than they have now. Plus MS is hardly going to suddenly stop people writing applications using MS's own development tools unless they get each app signed. That would undermine the entire 'Windows ecosystem' that is so essential to their profit and market control.
I think they've got enough cunning to at least be a bit more subtle (e.g. exend the 'signed driver only' model by introducing new class of signed 'system' apps and preventing unsigned apps from using certain 'low-level' features. Eventually the only apps you could write/run unsigned would be of a limited sandboxed type.)
The majority in Northern Ireland want to remain part of the UK. Reference:
Presumably in response republicans would say that Northern Ireland was artificially carved out of Ireland with a deliberate built in unionist majority (by choosing the particular 6 counties which would form NI), so this majority was effectively gerrymandered.
(Although personally I don't feel sufficiently well historically informed to take a position on this one way or another)
Yeah, but if they got it from the insect/eel/whatever, they could still call it "all natural", like locust bean gum, carrageenan, polysorbate 80, etc.
Not that you were directly stating that it was, but some folk might think you were implying that locust bean gum had something to do with insects... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locust_bean_gum
I'm sure AAC is superior technology - but *lots* of very cheap music players still only support WAV, MP3 and non-DRM WMA. Judging by the huge range of such players available at large electrical/department stores in the UK, they must sell pretty well. Selling AAC only excludes you from this significant market.
FWIW I've installed and repeatedly updated RH9 and Fedora 2, 4, 6, 7 and now 8 and have had no significant problems with dependancies, libraries etc. at any point. And Fedora is supposed to be pretty close to 'bleeding edge'...
...Joe Sixpack would still try to install on his $150 Wal-Mart PC,...
Surely Joe Sixpack doesn't even attempt to install an operating system? Presumably his Wal-Mart PC came with Windows pre-installed and he doesn't even know that there's an alternative?
Isn't it kinda hard for MS to detect OS'es on other partitions without supporting their file systems?
If it is sufficient just to identify the filesystem type and infer the OS type from this, then it's really easy to do without supporting or understanding the filesystem. You just consult the single byte partition type indicator in the relevant partition table entry (a byte that MS must presumably be checking to distinguish its own FS types). Table of partition identifiers: http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partitions/partition_types-1.html
Note that the presence of partition types 82 and/or 83 is a pretty reliable indicator that Linux is installed.
MP3's are pretty big - 3-5MB depending on the length of the material. Compared to a normal email text message, or even an Excel spreadsheet, they're huge.
3Mb is typical for a 3 minute 128 kbit/s music track. 64 kbit/s and 90s duration should be plenty for these voice message purposes and so would only take about 750k. If my calculations are correct this would take 3s to download on a fairly slow 2Mbit/s connection - not really a problem. However, it's still true that sending even these relatively small mp3 attachments from a typical spambot is going to reduce your throughput a lot, due to the sucky slowness of the upstream on most domestic connections.
Re:My experience differs - embarrass them...
on
Given Up to Spyware?
·
· Score: 1
In short: if you can't beat them with words, embarrass them !
Absolutely. And if that doesn't work, you always try scaring the shit out of them with the "OK, carry on as before, as long as you're not worried about your PC being used as a kiddie porn server" - which may be unlikely but is certainly possible with some exploits installing mini-webservers etc. onto compromised machines.
This thing is not a robot, no matter what the article says. It's a remotely controlled vehicle.
True up to a point, but surely it's going to have to have some sort of 'default behaviour' programmed for cases where its signal is lost or jammed. Does it just shut down (and allow the enemy to capture and study it)? Or does it self-destruct (and possibly kill non-combatants or its own soldiers)? Or does it attempt to 'return to base'?
Personally I would say the least risky default would be a minimal self-destruct with virtually no force that just fries key components. But given the likely cost of these things it wouldn't surprise me if they tried the 'return to base' option, and then you do have an autonomous (but not very bright) armed robot wandering around.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing was, he didn't seem to grasp that I was too busy, and as he wouldn't be paying for it (I didn't ask, but he never offered),...
I used to answer a lot of questions on a (free) specialist mainframe bulletin board, and some people would *demand* that you coded (fairly complex) programs for them. I would just say "This is not my paid job; what hourly rate are you offering for this coding?". Then they would go away...
All I was trying to say was that it would be nice if they did see some money once in a while for their hard work, a monetary show of appreciation if you will.
I thought that the majority of open source development these days was done by employees of companies like IBM, Red Hat etc. and so that many open source programmers *are* well rewarded for the work they do. I'd go as far as to say that any open source programmer with good public evidence of a significant contribution to a respected open source application could probably get such a job if they wanted it.
and Ubuntu breaks my wifi if I update from 7.10 to 8.04 because the new kernel doesn't like Broadcoms.
Why are you (and several others in previous posts) complaining about 8.04 breaking things when it hasn't even been released yet? If you want to check out new features and don't mind some things being broken, fair enough. But if you want stuff to actually work, wouldn't it be a good idea to wait for a couple of months *after* the OS is actually released before installing it?
If successful, eBay will roll it out to other markets.
If they roll it out in the EU, this could fall foul of competition laws; the credit card companies/banks could presumably complain of being shut out, given Ebay's near total dominance.
(Obvious the same could apply in other countries, but the EU currently seems keenest on actually enforcing competition laws.)
The problem is about usage patterns of the OS. Put the same person in front of any OS and they will get infected the same way they always did.
.exe files from multiple websites found by various web search engines, whereas most Linux software is installed from defined secure repositories (and using a suitable gui installer like Synaptic, it is actually easier than installing a .exe, because you don't have to find a website, find the download area, then select the correct executable - just search for program or function, select, and apply). Windows will always be more vulnerable to malware unless the issue of secure repository equivalents for non-MS Windows software is addressed.
You're ignoring the fact that most Windows software is installed by downloading
A user who likes trying new software in Linux will be able to play safely with thousands of programs; it is almost unheard of for repositories to be compromised. The same user trying the same range of software in Windows will probably get at least some sort of malware after a fairly short time.
Unix/Linux/BSD people wondered for years why the mainstream wouldn't adopt their OS, or open source for that matter. How would you expect a normal person to compile their own programs via command line input of a software they have to download at distribution sites?
The 1990's called, they want their Linux criticism back.
If you use a popular distro, most software is Pre-Compiled and in the repositories. 95% of what 95% of the people want - but free (and also Free). Also, it all updates automatically. So you click on a gui box to install a program. Easier than Windows, where you have to find a *trusted* download site first (after researching first to make sure it's not a spyware program).
).
Yes, As long as you have no more questions.
They've confused the kernel with the distribution (Linus has never cared about distributions much), the window manager and the GUI with the OS, the applications with the supporting mechanisms, the I/O with the internals, the implementation with the specification, the client-side with the server-side. This makes playing Operations II: Geek Surgery far harder than necessary and raises questions as to whether they can sing "Dem Bones" correctly.
Please, please, somebody mod this +5 Fucking hilarious...
I've been a Linux user since RedHat 4.1, and even then, distros made a hard effort in order to be user-friendly. The trend has never changed. The results have **improved a lot**, just because this is what Open Source is about: no regressions are imposed, software just can get better.
I started at RH9 and found it interesting but no substitute for Windows in even a primitive multimedia way.
I persisted with FC2 and it was a bit of a disappointment - still poor hardware support and multimedia support was not acceptable compared to windows.
I was glad that I carried on to FC4 - things improved quite a lot in the hardware support area and the music/video support became less painful (?maybe when I found the livna repo?).
FC6 - finally everything worked and I could leave Windows for good. This coincided with my wife taking an interest in the net, so I set her up a Fedora user id and, having never used a computer before (no, not at all) she didn't have any problems using Gnome, Firefox, etc.; and (with the help of adblock) I didn't have to spend ages emphasizing the dangers of Spyware, Viruses, pop-ups etc. The best thing was that I could honestly say to her "Don't worry, It doesn't matter which web sites you visit; you're basically safe - they can't install or run anything dodgy without permission". And I honestly couldn't have said that to her for any version of Windows.
F7 - like FC6 but even less customization needed. WINE really impresses me for the first time - runs Railplan Windows application nearly flawlessly.
F8 - Whoops. nautilus crashes during logon. Still not fixed about 3 months after F8 release. But that's OK, I'll stick with F7 for now. NB. It's not that serious - Nautilus recovers a few seconds after the crash and there's no more crashes after that. And as a 'bleeding edge' distro I expect a bit of this from Fedora. If I wanted something really stable I'd install CentOS or something.
But my main point is that open source software seems to me to be (generally) improving significantly faster than proprietary software (which I use a lot of at work). Maybe that's just because it had a long way to catch up (particularly in terms of polish, not necessarily in terms of function), but I think there's more to it than that - some sort of accelerated pseudo-evolution is going on between KDE/Gnome, Suse/Fedora/Ubuntu etc.
It's too bad their stats are useless since they exclude several European countries... Looks like their stats are only valid for sites that use their tracking beacons, and they refuse to let us know who that is... Could be that they only do tech sites, which would boost Firefox a lot compared to the real usage.
If your speculations are correct, this does not make the stats useless; the absolute values may be suspect, but the trends are still likely to be a useful indicator.
Human DNA isn't compatible in that way with many other species...
It's highly likely you could do something equivalent to splicing jellyfish 'glow' genes into human dna, since this has been done with pigs and chickens, but I guess you wouldn't call that a 'true' hybrid - you've got a glow-in-the dark human, not a humllyfish or a jellman.
But it does raise the question of how many (e.g.) jellyfish characteristics you *would* have to put into a human to make a 'true hybrid'...
It's not going to generate some half cow-half human monster/creature,... ...to the average slashdotter's eternal disappointment.
After signed drivers comes signed applications. What good will any of this do if you can't run the app without microsoft's blessing?
That's so blatantly anti-competitive that I don't think even MS would be daft enough to try it - yes, they'd like to but they know that this time the EU would get medieval on their ass. Literally hundreds of companies (compared with a handful in the past) would be lodging EU competition complaints, and although MS could drag things out for a few years they'd end up with many more restrictions on their behaviour than they have now. Plus MS is hardly going to suddenly stop people writing applications using MS's own development tools unless they get each app signed. That would undermine the entire 'Windows ecosystem' that is so essential to their profit and market control.
I think they've got enough cunning to at least be a bit more subtle (e.g. exend the 'signed driver only' model by introducing new class of signed 'system' apps and preventing unsigned apps from using certain 'low-level' features. Eventually the only apps you could write/run unsigned would be of a limited sandboxed type.)
The majority in Northern Ireland want to remain part of the UK. Reference:
Presumably in response republicans would say that Northern Ireland was artificially carved out of Ireland with a deliberate built in unionist majority (by choosing the particular 6 counties which would form NI), so this majority was effectively gerrymandered.
(Although personally I don't feel sufficiently well historically informed to take a position on this one way or another)
Yeah, but if they got it from the insect/eel/whatever, they could still call it "all natural", like locust bean gum, carrageenan, polysorbate 80, etc.
Not that you were directly stating that it was, but some folk might think you were implying that locust bean gum had something to do with insects...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locust_bean_gum
I'm sure AAC is superior technology - but *lots* of very cheap music players still only support WAV, MP3 and non-DRM WMA. Judging by the huge range of such players available at large electrical/department stores in the UK, they must sell pretty well. Selling AAC only excludes you from this significant market.
So tell me what Distro doesn't have this problem?
FWIW I've installed and repeatedly updated RH9 and Fedora 2, 4, 6, 7 and now 8 and have had no significant problems with dependancies, libraries etc. at any point. And Fedora is supposed to be pretty close to 'bleeding edge'...
b) it only runs on one operating system
Not that I use it much, but IE6 seems to run OK under Fedora/WINE...
...Joe Sixpack would still try to install on his $150 Wal-Mart PC,...
Surely Joe Sixpack doesn't even attempt to install an operating system? Presumably his Wal-Mart PC came with Windows pre-installed and he doesn't even know that there's an alternative?
Isn't it kinda hard for MS to detect OS'es on other partitions without supporting their file systems?
If it is sufficient just to identify the filesystem type and infer the OS type from this, then it's really easy to do without supporting or understanding the filesystem. You just consult the single byte partition type indicator in the relevant partition table entry (a byte that MS must presumably be checking to distinguish its own FS types).
Table of partition identifiers: http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partitions/partition_types-1.html
Note that the presence of partition types 82 and/or 83 is a pretty reliable indicator that Linux is installed.
MP3's are pretty big - 3-5MB depending on the length of the material. Compared to a normal email text message, or even an Excel spreadsheet, they're huge.
3Mb is typical for a 3 minute 128 kbit/s music track. 64 kbit/s and 90s duration should be plenty for these voice message purposes and so would only take about 750k. If my calculations are correct this would take 3s to download on a fairly slow 2Mbit/s connection - not really a problem.
However, it's still true that sending even these relatively small mp3 attachments from a typical spambot is going to reduce your throughput a lot, due to the sucky slowness of the upstream on most domestic connections.
It's room 101 presumably - from Orwell's 1984.
In short: if you can't beat them with words, embarrass them !
Absolutely. And if that doesn't work, you always try scaring the shit out of them with the "OK, carry on as before, as long as you're not worried about your PC being used as a kiddie porn server" - which may be unlikely but is certainly possible with some exploits installing mini-webservers etc. onto compromised machines.
imperfect filters stop people getting information on, say, health issues, or places with names like Middlesex.
And god help you if you live in Scunthorpe...
This thing is not a robot, no matter what the article says. It's a remotely controlled vehicle.
True up to a point, but surely it's going to have to have some sort of 'default behaviour' programmed for cases where its signal is lost or jammed. Does it just shut down (and allow the enemy to capture and study it)? Or does it self-destruct (and possibly kill non-combatants or its own soldiers)? Or does it attempt to 'return to base'?
Personally I would say the least risky default would be a minimal self-destruct with virtually no force that just fries key components. But given the likely cost of these things it wouldn't surprise me if they tried the 'return to base' option, and then you do have an autonomous (but not very bright) armed robot wandering around.