But I'm grateful to experts exchange for at least one laugh. Hint: the hyphen in their domain name appeared some relatively long time after site launched.
emission from many voting machines would mix making it hard to differentiate a vote on a single machine.
Stupid idea #523: equip the voting machine with say two extra displays on the back and make them show some obfuscation video sequence so that it would be hard (if feasible at all) to tell what the hell is going on on the first main screen.
Reading through the comments, it stroke me the same. Van Eck phreaking can't be a problem because it provides literally the same information as exit polls.
... it's only a problem if you are then able to associate votes with individuals.
What again is not a problem if one votes in densely populated area: emission from many voting machines would mix making it hard to differentiate a vote on a single machine.
It might be the problem with VIPs. But for the case one can really go extra mile and install proper shielding.
And older GTK+ apps wouldn't be forced to jump over to Qt and newer Gnome libraries because you can still run both side-by-side.
One can think about it, but generally mixing two different message dispatching systems (and both GTK and Qt have their own: no standard of sorts exists) would be hard as hell... That's I'm telling you as software developer.
Also in GTK many things happen in global context. Message handlers (targets for message dispatching) are in global context. In Qt - global context doesn't exist and everything is tied to an object.
Yes, rewrite from ground zero is possible. No, highly likely no backward compatibility of any sort would be possible. And that is a barrier.
Do not forget, GTK implements in C its own OO system (even inheritance), completely orthogonal to C++: in GTK you can send a random message to a random object (or from higher level: call a method, identified by name on a random object). And all that in C. Qt uses and heavily extends C++'s OO system to achieve similar effect, but in a different manner. And some things GTK does and relies upon simply not present in C++. Conceptually, it is easier to rewrite Qt in GTK, than other way round: in GTK implements and manages OO system on its own - in Qt it is predefined by C++. (And the flexibility is one of the reasons why writing applications in GTK is magnitudes more complicated compared to Qt.)
Why would that be a bad thing? Instead, let's continue to wrap around a kludge.
I think difference between Gnome and KDE is bit deeper.
Pure technically, Gnome supports C (not only C++) and allows for some backward compatibility what is generally regarded as a better fit for commercial binary-only applications.
And compatibility with commercial binary-only applications (and licensing, Qt in past was GPLed) played one of the first roles in past why Gnome was picked by many vendors as their primary desktop.
The choice of Gnome over KDE sounds laughable now - and was so in past since Qt quite quickly gained the ground as strong multi-platform GUI library and is (and was for quite some time) one of the most popular among ISVs.
Now for many (RedHat, Ubuntu) it is simply way too complicated to change all that overnight. RedHat in particular has the pathological case of NIH syndrome (not that desktop played any role in RedHat's business plan) and Ubuntu is simply too small to manage such task on its own.
But even then, the simpler and more primitive Gnome desktop is easier for companies like RedHat to support commercially, what is a prerequisite for any large workstation deal.
GNOME has stagnated, and is on its deathbed. I mean, they're at release 2.28 for fuck's sake, and they only release every March and September. GNOME 2.0 was released in 2002! That was nearly 10 years ago! It's not an active project. It's just barely maintained.
Ubuntu crowd would disagree. Project can only be declared dead if it has no users.
Slow release cycles are fine - as long as software delivers what users do expect. Though I'm personally Gnome hater, some folks are pretty happy about Ubuntu and its default UI.
On the other hand, the KDE devs have shown that they're willing to innovate and provide a much richer and useful desktop environment. Even if there are bumps along the way, it's clear that they're lightyears ahead of GNOME. And at this point, it doesn't look like GNOME has any chance of catching up.
"Much richer" in what way? And how do you define "useful desktop environment?"
Those are silly questions to ask of "desktop environment" whose sole purpose in life is to allow its user to browse for a file and to start application. Applications are the meat of the desktop, not the desktop environment.
N.B. Likewise most of early complains about KDE4 were "where the hell the applications for it?" - KDE4 might have been ready already in KDE 4.0 times, yet applications using KDE 4.0 were few and unstable.
I've been expecting something like that from the beginning. MS is quite strong in Russia, has numerous R&D centers, etc.
Maybe, just maybe... Linux is an awful desktop environment to work in and the community that surrounds it doesn't want to accept any responsibility or settle on standards.
You apparently have no clue what you are talking about. The Russian Linux/BSD community would strongly disagree. And they are setting standards perfectly fine as Arch Linux can be easily called national Russian distro. And it it quite close to the top on list of best desktop Linux distros. (Many Russians ISPs were BSD/Linux based from day one - amount of *NIX expertise in Russia is not to be underestimated.)
Especially considering that we are talking about educational sector, all the "Linux is hard" excuses are inapplicable, as thanks to LTSP it is much much more manageable and easier (compared to Windows) to use, monitor and deploy in environments such as school is. And there are literally piles of the educational software for Linux.
Though as I said above, it was obvious that MS would do something about it. It was more question of price, as highly corrupt Russian politicians probably weren't satisfied with initial size of bribes offered by MS. Or probably they were not pro-Putin enough but now amended their ways.
Sure - call me a troll, but it's also an observation. Time to market is more important than quality.
If I had mod points, I would have modded you down. In context of Linux, or any software which wants to give you a choice, you point is largely misplaced and wrong.
Personally, I'm tired of the overrated excuse - to shuffle half-baked software on users. "Time to market" is a great metric - if you also cut on features. (E.g. what Debian does by excluding from releases software which cannot be stabilized in timely manner.)
But no commercial company would *ever* do it - because software is sold (or rather it is purchased) based on feature list, not on stability. Stability and security are not features which you can market with a straight face. And that is only when "time to market" excuse is applicable.
From number of deals I had chance to observe, it never really mattered to end customer. (1) If company spend more time on development and testing (being late to market), generally it would also enjoy faster deployment times (and happy customers). (2) If company pushed on customer long feature list which wasn't even seen once working, then all the time/money saved on development and testing would be wasted during deployment phase - to tie all loose ends. And it might cost more, because during deployment one can't enjoy stability of environment generally found in test labs.
Now the problem with human nature, that companies which opt for plan (2) earn more money. People still buy software based on length of feature list and few can afford changing software at later date when it was found that it doesn't function as advertised.
And that is why it is not applicable to software like Linux. First of all, Linux (say Debian) magnitudes more stable and reliable than commercial software. (Because Debian has literally unlimited budget of person/years - commercial companies simply can't afford it.) Second, in the end you still get the choice: commercial software comes with lots of strings attach of how and what you can and cannot do, while with free software many pieces are standard-based and replaceable. Third, if you get to the level of national software, volumes are so high and budgets are so huge that it is not unacceptable idea anymore to actually hire or buy completely a dedicated F/LOSS company to handle the technical side of the project.
Debian is server-centric. (Though also hihgly-usable as workstation too.) Long release/support cycles there is the feature, because stability is the priority.
On other side, I have used for about two+ years Debian Sid as desktop at home. I had only three major breakages in all the time which required me too boot system in single user mode to repair it. And that is unstable branch which is literally "just compiled software". That easily compares to rate of reinstalls I had to do on my Windows workstation, which despite being touted as stable by MS, still breaks very easily and breaks quite often.
+1. No. +100. +1000 mod points, if I only had them.
I'm obese. I do not have regime nor can I afford one at the moment. I do exercises solely for the purpose to feel better. Because it is otherwise stupid when I break into sweat - after walking a couple of miles down to my apartment.
And I also can confirm the all said above: occasional exercises only lead to gaining weight. Even when done properly - weekly or daily - exercises themselves do not affect weight directly, but they rather simply make one eat less since s/he feels power in the muscles to do the things.
IIRC, Plan9 file system did something similar. The end I heard was rather sorry: corruptions were reported at rate of once or twice per year. People had to migrate to something else because such file system couldn't be trusted.
This is rather unacceptable feature for anything what's job is information storage.
Steam and Impulse both had showed that provided a bit of price flexibility many people choose to buy instead of pirating. (And the billions of iTMS downloads also count for something.)
I don't get to taste the food in my local restaurant before ordering either.
Because there are laws which make restaurant responsible in case if you get e.g. food poisoning after eating their stuff.
I yet to hear about a law which makes publishers and game developers responsible for releasing thowaway crap. (Or for that matter a law penalizing retailers for refusing to accept the return.)
I have seen number of studies which had showed that people who pirate more also buy more.
And IMO lost sale due to acquisition problems is much worse than lost sale due to piracy. Former never tried software in first place - later got a taste of the software and might actually buy it to get access to support, updates and on-line features.
On Ubuntu 8.04, VirtualBox scripts screwed up X completely. I have tried twice and twice was left with defunct X (and no, I had enough of xorg.conf editing in this life).
What I have actually meant that Ubuntu should recognize VirtualBox as a H/W system and configure itself accordingly. After all they already dynamically install drivers and programs for the hardware you have.
ZFS is more or less a direct competitor to Veritas (VxFS).
If you know what later is, then you know where ZFS belongs.
ZFS is so much hyped mainly for two reasons: (1st) Veritas is f***ing expensive and (2nd) all Solaris file system(s) before sucked terribly. (Think of Win7 type of hype: it is so much better than Vista!)
It doesn't make sense to you. But it does to every other business.
Free, open source software != costs nothing. (*)
Sun wanted Apple to share development and maintenance costs. Apple wanted some long-term guarantees that Sun wouldn't stop development and would also help Apple to solve problems of ZFS under Mac OS X.
Similar deals happen all the time.
It's just this time the companies couldn't agree on price and/or terms. Obviously acquisition by Oracle contributed to the volatility of situation.
(*) File system as file system is a rather trivial thing with well defined interface. ZFS is not only a file system, but also volume manager and network service. And long list of management tools for all that. Those are big money involved in development, maintenance and support of all that stuff.
After reading an opinion piece of one of the ZFS authors about Btrfs, I stopped thinking that ZFS deserves to have the momentum.
Can't find the link, but ZFS (as first Sun's take on files system) has made several design mistakes which cannot be fixed without redesign. Developed later Btrfs learned on that and avoided the mistakes.
IOW, ZFS might have had a very short momentum, but thanks to the licensing + general insanity of Sun management (which managed in past decade to lose all talented people) I'd say in long term it never had a chance to become ubiquitous to begin with.
Probably because Apple hadn't felt like supporting an FS on its own?
Mac OS X already includes pile of licensed technologies. The sole purpose of that is to offload work from R&D so that they can do something more useful than reinventing a wheel.
Licensing deal likely would have been needed so that if Sun/whatever goes tits up, Apple would retain all rights to the code so that they can develop and maintain it further on their own - without being in mercy of whoever buys Sun after that.
Does Ubuntu already properly recognizes VMware/VirtualBox and installs all required packages for them?
Because in past, 8.x/earlier, it was always a PITA to setup Ubuntu (install manually extra modules/daemons) for it to run smoothly under VMware/VirtalBox.
Why is it so damn huge? My 2nd computer ran Windows 95 on 16 RAM, a 100 mb HDD, and a pentium 100 (IIRC). People ran Windows 95 on 486 machines, with 8 mb ram.
Core Debian packages take about 70-90MB. They are ~250-300MB fully installed but most of that is (multilingual) documentation and whatnot.
I once was evaluating whether it is possible to trim Debian 3.0 to fit on 128MB compact flash. Yes, it is possible. Outside of embedded space - is rather useless.
For RAM, normal Linux kernel 2.6 expects IIRC minimum 16MB - it might not boot on less. (Nor you'd find now a PC with so little memory to test and fix that.) Depending on what you do with the Linux, 32-64MB might be a plenty - even for simple GUI (though yes, X is a memory hog, but the memory consumption depends on what your applications do with X, X it self needs only some megs of RAM, mostly for the interface with video card).
The irony is that Linux is "useful to most people".
But as usual minority of technically advanced -and vocal- users are influencing the buying decisions of the majority.
And when you get to the requirement of the influential minority - yes, Linux doesn't always cut it in.
Otherwise it is good enough for your mom to surf web, check email, do bookkeeping and print photos. And that's about what 80% of people do 80% of time with their home PCs.
Slashdot Mirror
But I'm grateful to experts exchange for at least one laugh. Hint: the hyphen in their domain name appeared some relatively long time after site launched.
some obfuscation video sequence
Or better yet the voting machine might emulate on the auxiliary displays the process of user voting for a random option.
Even if information can be still gathered, it would be heavily watered down by the fake voting information from the extra displays.
emission from many voting machines would mix making it hard to differentiate a vote on a single machine.
Stupid idea #523: equip the voting machine with say two extra displays on the back and make them show some obfuscation video sequence so that it would be hard (if feasible at all) to tell what the hell is going on on the first main screen.
Reading through the comments, it stroke me the same. Van Eck phreaking can't be a problem because it provides literally the same information as exit polls.
What again is not a problem if one votes in densely populated area: emission from many voting machines would mix making it hard to differentiate a vote on a single machine.
It might be the problem with VIPs. But for the case one can really go extra mile and install proper shielding.
And older GTK+ apps wouldn't be forced to jump over to Qt and newer Gnome libraries because you can still run both side-by-side.
One can think about it, but generally mixing two different message dispatching systems (and both GTK and Qt have their own: no standard of sorts exists) would be hard as hell... That's I'm telling you as software developer.
Also in GTK many things happen in global context. Message handlers (targets for message dispatching) are in global context. In Qt - global context doesn't exist and everything is tied to an object.
Yes, rewrite from ground zero is possible. No, highly likely no backward compatibility of any sort would be possible. And that is a barrier.
Do not forget, GTK implements in C its own OO system (even inheritance), completely orthogonal to C++: in GTK you can send a random message to a random object (or from higher level: call a method, identified by name on a random object). And all that in C. Qt uses and heavily extends C++'s OO system to achieve similar effect, but in a different manner. And some things GTK does and relies upon simply not present in C++. Conceptually, it is easier to rewrite Qt in GTK, than other way round: in GTK implements and manages OO system on its own - in Qt it is predefined by C++. (And the flexibility is one of the reasons why writing applications in GTK is magnitudes more complicated compared to Qt.)
Why would that be a bad thing? Instead, let's continue to wrap around a kludge.
I think difference between Gnome and KDE is bit deeper.
Pure technically, Gnome supports C (not only C++) and allows for some backward compatibility what is generally regarded as a better fit for commercial binary-only applications.
And compatibility with commercial binary-only applications (and licensing, Qt in past was GPLed) played one of the first roles in past why Gnome was picked by many vendors as their primary desktop.
The choice of Gnome over KDE sounds laughable now - and was so in past since Qt quite quickly gained the ground as strong multi-platform GUI library and is (and was for quite some time) one of the most popular among ISVs.
Now for many (RedHat, Ubuntu) it is simply way too complicated to change all that overnight. RedHat in particular has the pathological case of NIH syndrome (not that desktop played any role in RedHat's business plan) and Ubuntu is simply too small to manage such task on its own.
But even then, the simpler and more primitive Gnome desktop is easier for companies like RedHat to support commercially, what is a prerequisite for any large workstation deal.
GNOME has stagnated, and is on its deathbed. I mean, they're at release 2.28 for fuck's sake, and they only release every March and September. GNOME 2.0 was released in 2002! That was nearly 10 years ago! It's not an active project. It's just barely maintained.
Ubuntu crowd would disagree. Project can only be declared dead if it has no users.
Slow release cycles are fine - as long as software delivers what users do expect. Though I'm personally Gnome hater, some folks are pretty happy about Ubuntu and its default UI.
On the other hand, the KDE devs have shown that they're willing to innovate and provide a much richer and useful desktop environment. Even if there are bumps along the way, it's clear that they're lightyears ahead of GNOME. And at this point, it doesn't look like GNOME has any chance of catching up.
"Much richer" in what way? And how do you define "useful desktop environment?"
Those are silly questions to ask of "desktop environment" whose sole purpose in life is to allow its user to browse for a file and to start application. Applications are the meat of the desktop, not the desktop environment.
N.B. Likewise most of early complains about KDE4 were "where the hell the applications for it?" - KDE4 might have been ready already in KDE 4.0 times, yet applications using KDE 4.0 were few and unstable.
B.S.
I've been expecting something like that from the beginning. MS is quite strong in Russia, has numerous R&D centers, etc.
Maybe, just maybe... Linux is an awful desktop environment to work in and the community that surrounds it doesn't want to accept any responsibility or settle on standards.
You apparently have no clue what you are talking about. The Russian Linux/BSD community would strongly disagree. And they are setting standards perfectly fine as Arch Linux can be easily called national Russian distro. And it it quite close to the top on list of best desktop Linux distros. (Many Russians ISPs were BSD/Linux based from day one - amount of *NIX expertise in Russia is not to be underestimated.)
Especially considering that we are talking about educational sector, all the "Linux is hard" excuses are inapplicable, as thanks to LTSP it is much much more manageable and easier (compared to Windows) to use, monitor and deploy in environments such as school is. And there are literally piles of the educational software for Linux.
Though as I said above, it was obvious that MS would do something about it. It was more question of price, as highly corrupt Russian politicians probably weren't satisfied with initial size of bribes offered by MS. Or probably they were not pro-Putin enough but now amended their ways.
Sure - call me a troll, but it's also an observation. Time to market is more important than quality.
If I had mod points, I would have modded you down. In context of Linux, or any software which wants to give you a choice, you point is largely misplaced and wrong.
Personally, I'm tired of the overrated excuse - to shuffle half-baked software on users. "Time to market" is a great metric - if you also cut on features. (E.g. what Debian does by excluding from releases software which cannot be stabilized in timely manner.)
But no commercial company would *ever* do it - because software is sold (or rather it is purchased) based on feature list, not on stability. Stability and security are not features which you can market with a straight face. And that is only when "time to market" excuse is applicable.
From number of deals I had chance to observe, it never really mattered to end customer. (1) If company spend more time on development and testing (being late to market), generally it would also enjoy faster deployment times (and happy customers). (2) If company pushed on customer long feature list which wasn't even seen once working, then all the time/money saved on development and testing would be wasted during deployment phase - to tie all loose ends. And it might cost more, because during deployment one can't enjoy stability of environment generally found in test labs.
Now the problem with human nature, that companies which opt for plan (2) earn more money. People still buy software based on length of feature list and few can afford changing software at later date when it was found that it doesn't function as advertised.
And that is why it is not applicable to software like Linux. First of all, Linux (say Debian) magnitudes more stable and reliable than commercial software. (Because Debian has literally unlimited budget of person/years - commercial companies simply can't afford it.) Second, in the end you still get the choice: commercial software comes with lots of strings attach of how and what you can and cannot do, while with free software many pieces are standard-based and replaceable. Third, if you get to the level of national software, volumes are so high and budgets are so huge that it is not unacceptable idea anymore to actually hire or buy completely a dedicated F/LOSS company to handle the technical side of the project.
Debian is server-centric. (Though also hihgly-usable as workstation too.) Long release/support cycles there is the feature, because stability is the priority.
On other side, I have used for about two+ years Debian Sid as desktop at home. I had only three major breakages in all the time which required me too boot system in single user mode to repair it. And that is unstable branch which is literally "just compiled software". That easily compares to rate of reinstalls I had to do on my Windows workstation, which despite being touted as stable by MS, still breaks very easily and breaks quite often.
+1. No. +100. +1000 mod points, if I only had them.
I'm obese. I do not have regime nor can I afford one at the moment. I do exercises solely for the purpose to feel better. Because it is otherwise stupid when I break into sweat - after walking a couple of miles down to my apartment.
And I also can confirm the all said above: occasional exercises only lead to gaining weight. Even when done properly - weekly or daily - exercises themselves do not affect weight directly, but they rather simply make one eat less since s/he feels power in the muscles to do the things.
IIRC, Plan9 file system did something similar. The end I heard was rather sorry: corruptions were reported at rate of once or twice per year. People had to migrate to something else because such file system couldn't be trusted.
This is rather unacceptable feature for anything what's job is information storage.
LOL. And 15 years ago people like you have been complaining about how expensive Compuserve is...
+5, True
Well, apparently, some developers felt like their "time and effort is worthless" and put free apps there.
I'm developer and often do stuff just for fun part of doing it.
Or maybe people are just thieving scum?
Steam and Impulse both had showed that provided a bit of price flexibility many people choose to buy instead of pirating. (And the billions of iTMS downloads also count for something.)
I don't get to taste the food in my local restaurant before ordering either.
Because there are laws which make restaurant responsible in case if you get e.g. food poisoning after eating their stuff.
I yet to hear about a law which makes publishers and game developers responsible for releasing thowaway crap. (Or for that matter a law penalizing retailers for refusing to accept the return.)
And that is also lost sale.
I have seen number of studies which had showed that people who pirate more also buy more.
And IMO lost sale due to acquisition problems is much worse than lost sale due to piracy. Former never tried software in first place - later got a taste of the software and might actually buy it to get access to support, updates and on-line features.
On Ubuntu 8.04, VirtualBox scripts screwed up X completely. I have tried twice and twice was left with defunct X (and no, I had enough of xorg.conf editing in this life).
What I have actually meant that Ubuntu should recognize VirtualBox as a H/W system and configure itself accordingly. After all they already dynamically install drivers and programs for the hardware you have.
ZFS is a solution in search of a problem
ZFS is more or less a direct competitor to Veritas (VxFS).
If you know what later is, then you know where ZFS belongs.
ZFS is so much hyped mainly for two reasons: (1st) Veritas is f***ing expensive and (2nd) all Solaris file system(s) before sucked terribly. (Think of Win7 type of hype: it is so much better than Vista!)
It doesn't make sense to you. But it does to every other business.
Free, open source software != costs nothing. (*)
Sun wanted Apple to share development and maintenance costs. Apple wanted some long-term guarantees that Sun wouldn't stop development and would also help Apple to solve problems of ZFS under Mac OS X.
Similar deals happen all the time.
It's just this time the companies couldn't agree on price and/or terms. Obviously acquisition by Oracle contributed to the volatility of situation.
(*) File system as file system is a rather trivial thing with well defined interface. ZFS is not only a file system, but also volume manager and network service. And long list of management tools for all that. Those are big money involved in development, maintenance and support of all that stuff.
After reading an opinion piece of one of the ZFS authors about Btrfs, I stopped thinking that ZFS deserves to have the momentum.
Can't find the link, but ZFS (as first Sun's take on files system) has made several design mistakes which cannot be fixed without redesign. Developed later Btrfs learned on that and avoided the mistakes.
IOW, ZFS might have had a very short momentum, but thanks to the licensing + general insanity of Sun management (which managed in past decade to lose all talented people) I'd say in long term it never had a chance to become ubiquitous to begin with.
Probably because Apple hadn't felt like supporting an FS on its own?
Mac OS X already includes pile of licensed technologies. The sole purpose of that is to offload work from R&D so that they can do something more useful than reinventing a wheel.
Licensing deal likely would have been needed so that if Sun/whatever goes tits up, Apple would retain all rights to the code so that they can develop and maintain it further on their own - without being in mercy of whoever buys Sun after that.
Does Ubuntu already properly recognizes VMware/VirtualBox and installs all required packages for them?
Because in past, 8.x/earlier, it was always a PITA to setup Ubuntu (install manually extra modules/daemons) for it to run smoothly under VMware/VirtalBox.
Why is it so damn huge? My 2nd computer ran Windows 95 on 16 RAM, a 100 mb HDD, and a pentium 100 (IIRC). People ran Windows 95 on 486 machines, with 8 mb ram.
Core Debian packages take about 70-90MB. They are ~250-300MB fully installed but most of that is (multilingual) documentation and whatnot.
I once was evaluating whether it is possible to trim Debian 3.0 to fit on 128MB compact flash. Yes, it is possible. Outside of embedded space - is rather useless.
For RAM, normal Linux kernel 2.6 expects IIRC minimum 16MB - it might not boot on less. (Nor you'd find now a PC with so little memory to test and fix that.) Depending on what you do with the Linux, 32-64MB might be a plenty - even for simple GUI (though yes, X is a memory hog, but the memory consumption depends on what your applications do with X, X it self needs only some megs of RAM, mostly for the interface with video card).
It's not useful to most people
The irony is that Linux is "useful to most people".
But as usual minority of technically advanced -and vocal- users are influencing the buying decisions of the majority.
And when you get to the requirement of the influential minority - yes, Linux doesn't always cut it in.
Otherwise it is good enough for your mom to surf web, check email, do bookkeeping and print photos. And that's about what 80% of people do 80% of time with their home PCs.