You are absolutely right that it is possible to make excellent movies for cheap. Statistically though, you are wrong.
Believe me, there are many *very* ingenious people out there trying to make good movies for as cheap as they can. The fact that they don't succeed as well as big studio movies is not because studios shut them down. Of course from time to time sometimes it is because the studios don't have the proper vision. But on average, statistically, it is because the movies that are independently produced generally aren't good, and once you've made a couple of narrative movies you will understand money has often a lot to do with it. It won't buy talent, but talent without the means won't work.
I'm not even talking big VFX stuff. People want entertainment that doesn't make them wince because sound is bad. Or a picture that is hard to get into because you keep being distracted by lighting discontinuities.
As to the "classics" that you emphasize, which supposedly cost less money back then, you are so wrong. In spite of all the hardships I mentioned, it is still a heck of a lot cheaper today to make an independent movie than it was back then.
Put those budgets in today's dollars: Casablanca, $15.2m in 1942 dollars = at least $162m of today's dollar according to http://www.measuringworth.com/. Citizen Kane (a 1941 release) would cost more than $100m in today's dollars.
"The Wizard of Oz" cost more than $500 million in today's dollars. That is more than 3x as much as "Transformers" which you apparently despise but which a lot of people--and not just children--have actually enjoyed paying a ticket for (I am not one of them).
The amount of work put in those masterpieces required huge amounts of resources, because technology wasn't as good as it is now. Without studios willing to bet such huge amounts at the time you would most certainly not get to have enjoyed any of the classics.
Go make a movie, face an audience with it, and then we'll talk. Till then, show some respect to the people who work their asses off, and pay for your content.
If your taste is more towards the independent, you might want to consider this list of Sony Pictures Classics movies, which does include some pretty good stuff like "Capote", "City of Lost Children", "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon", "House of Flying Daggers", "Kung Fu Hustle", "Persepolis", "Sweet and Lowdown", "The Fog of War", "The Triplets of Belleville", "Who Killed the Electric Car".
Whatever your taste, chances are the movies you've enjoyed in the past year -- legally or not -- include some film that was at least partly sponsored by a studio.
It's like confusing the right to make free software, which is good, and the right to warez, which is debatable.
As an independent producer myself, I know that people do not always realize the brutal amount of work required to make a movie. It doesn't all go to the stars. People work their ass off and deserve a pay. Take a documentary like Who Killed the Electric Car, which IMDB estimates to have cost circa $1m. I am ready to believe that estimate.
Equipment rental needs to be paid. Basic light & electric gear for a day: in the thousands of dollars. Not counting the trucks. Camera need to be rented. Most high-end camera need a technician who will get paid. Most film camera optics need an assistant camera to manually pull focus and that is a very difficult skill that gets paid for. You need someone to hold the boom and man, the cramps are not fun enough that a lot of people would want to do it for free. Some people will work for free on sets ("for the benefit of experience") but they do need to be fed because shooting a picture is more physical work than most slashdotters will ever get to doing in their comfy Aeron-chair bound lives. Think moving truckloads of heavy-duty lighting gear. You need people to push dollies, makeup artists, props, etc. and as soon as you add a person, you need to transport them, pay them, feed them, and with the complexity of the set you end up needing to pay somebody to manage the complexity of it all.
And that's just shoot. A competent editor will normally get paid $500 a day and post production can take months. Many take cuts to work on projects that they love, but at some point they have to put bread on the table as well. Sound edit, sound design, sound mix and color correction are steps that are crucial to the production value of a picture yet hardly anybody knows what they're about. They're hard to master and they're not very fun to make, since pretty much nobody notices. So you need to pay for that.
Then comes distribution. Let's not mention advertising. Prints need to be paid. Yes, prints that are projected are still physical prints and no, digital production is still a thing of the future for most movie exhibition companies. In an age of cheap DVDs, people don't realize the costs of printing. For a 90-min film, each roll you make for each theater that you exhibit in will run you at least $10k. If you thought going all-digital was going to save you money and you did all your movie in HD video, the day you want to show it in a real theater the first filmout is going to run you more than $1 a *frame*. 24 frames per second.
Let's put it this way, some guy comes to you and says he wants to make a documentary about the electric car. You don't know the guy. Says he needs a million bucks. I'm sure you wouldn't give him even one hundred bucks.
So blast the guy for movies you don't like, but the studio's got fucking balls for making movies like that, and I fucking hate it that the folks who enjoy all the stuff for free find solace in such self-justifying sophisms.
I do think region codes are stupid. I also think that Slashdotters truly do not understand the grueling amount of work and money required to make movies and that if content producers cannot expect a return, they simply will not make it.
[It's] nearly impossible to argue that free software is a detriment to society as a whole, because it drastically lowers the cost of doing other things with that software, thus creating wealth. I agree with your point in general; but it only works when free software is used as a building block to "doing other things" that are productive and "create wealth".
I'm not so sure that this reasoning applies to games: what wealth can you create using Tetris as a building block?
I guess it could be argued that playing Tetris enhances one's ability to stack luggage in the trunk of a car, therefore enhancing the capacity and productivity of transportation infrastructure... but I'm not so sure that it would be more than very marginal...
That is the "funniest" thing indeed... Schools are supposed to use this spectrum for educational purposes. Churches also get some. It was supposed to be "for Instructional and Educational purposes", distance learning, etc.
But every school or church can't have a full TV production studio, so they can't be broadcasting permanently... And when they are not broadcasting, wouldn't it be a shame to let this good spectrum sit unused?
So the FCC allowed these licensees to lease out up to 95% of their capacity to third-party entities, who may be profit-making entities (two-way radio systems, pay-TV operators...).
In fact what happens in the vast majority of the cases is that schools and churches who have no serious intention of engaging into distance learning do something like this:
* Claim free spectrum from the FCC (hey it's free!) * Shoot 72 minutes of class with a crappy camcorder (72 min = 5% of one day) * In order to claim educational status, put up a transmitter that broadcasts that crappy video every day from 2am to 3.12am. * Find a commercial partner to pay for the abovementioned transmitter, and to pay you a multi-year lease to get access to the spectrum every day from 3.13am to 1.59am the next day. * Get a few thousands of dollars a year from the lease. * Out of that money, pay a fee to the consultants who helped you put it together.
In other words, the whole thing is just a nice financial windfall to schools and churches, who are usually quick to put forward the argument that they would never be able to "broadcast education to the masses" if the spectrum that they were given wasn't free... Which is a real joke.
Methinks, if a school isn't even able to use part of the windfall to pay for somebody to put up with the meager paperwork required to maintain that windfall, who cares if they are denied spectrum license renewals? It doesn't benefit society to give free spectrum to schools if they are only interested in leasing it back out to commercial entities. The government might as well cut the middlemen and all the pantomime by auctioning spectrum licenses right out to commercial entities.
It's also possible that you are wrong. Every one of those structures could be private.
I'd say it's also possible that you didn't read the linked release, which mentions these as "community assets"... I take it as meaning that the county has actual jurisdiction on who gets to use it.
Requiring money to access real estate property is usually not considered a tax, even when said property belongs to a municipality or government. It's just rent!
Obviously the ability to use existing poles has great value to the operators. Putting up money to buy land, erect structures, bring electricity to them, repair them after a thunderstorm etc. would cost them a lot more money, as it sure does the county already. So, they barter: you give us free rent, we give everybody within range free access. Maybe a good deal for the county, but a subsidy for sure.
I actually think subsidized network infrastructure is a great thing. What I don't like is the misleading sentence "without taxpayer dollars": rent not collected is a liability.
Consider that, according to the release, the community will let the operator install 6000 radios on "water towers, buildings, light poles and other structures". In New York City, operators have to pay to get access to such valuable real estate. Providing access to community real estate free of charge is definitely a form of subsidy.
* for security flaws, as has been noted, you don't want stale processes running weeks at all.
* what you say doesn't work at all with kernel modules which you do need to unload before reloading.
* while this may work at the basic executable level, a service is usually not just one executable but is usually realized by using many files including executables, dlls, scripts and configuration files. The fact is, many servers will indeed continue to run but will break at some point, for example:
- if the server process is compiled against a library, and if that library is upgraded to a new, non-backwards-compatible version during the upgrade process, then when the old server tries to load that library dynamically after the upgrade, it won't find the old library version and will fail.
- if the old server process tries to open a config file whose format has been changed with the upgrade, then it will fail as well.
nfs/smbfs/cifs & cups: sure there's file sharing and printing in Unix
my point was that it just won't work out of the box in a way that's integrated with the remoting tool. i say "connect to machine X", i dont just want it to bring the display here but also set up filesharing the other way around, printing, and sound. it does work in a controlled environment where you control very well each endpoint and make sure that both ends support whatever filesharing protocol you want. but setting it up is a pain especially when you have to cross NAT firewalls.
as to fast user switching, i know very well you can open multiple desktops on multiple consoles. but a common requirement in places where multiple users actually share a machine is that when you want to switch to a new console, it asks for your password. It doesn't work that way in linux.
finally i do know there's module autoloading. my point again was that there's no automatic UNloading to help with updates. if you've ever tried to change a module with multiple dependencies in linux you know what i'm talking about.
unix tools get the work done if you spend the time to set up things properly. so you have a whole bunch of very powerful tools that you can basically do rapid application development with (using scripts etc.). but the whole point of software is just to make one's life simpler and automate things as much as possible.
The Nomachine bit is informative, although I wonder if it does work so easily as it says "out of the box." It seems that at least you need to use ssh if you want any encryption, which means in turn that it probably doesn't work very well with a Kerberos security architecture if that's what you happen to be using...
As to switching virtual consoles, maybe your distribution does it but it's certainly not a standard feature in all distributions. In all of those I've used, if you forget an open shell or screen on a virtual console, anybody can go to it without security which ruins the purpose of fast user switching (shared machine).
Finally for the core issue in this article, hotplug daemons do autoload kernel modules, but they won't tell you which processes you need to stop before unloading them, check to see if the processes can be stopped without breaking your system, stop the processes, unload the modules, change the modules, and start the services back up all in one click.
I mentioned kernel modules because they're an important part of the OS in Linux specifically due to its monolithic architecture. You don't need to be compiling a new kernel, you could be fixing a security flaw with a patch.
That's exactly what I'm saying! Even if it's just "half hours of shell scripting" (and for emulating a full desktop remoting protocol, I think you're more looking at a couple of weeks minimum), all these scripts piled up on top of one another end up like a whole lot of scripts that, basically, you're on your own to maintain as your system evolves.
Have you never found a script to be broken after you updated one of the executables that it was using? Better yet, have you never found an old script not to work at one point, without a clue to the reason why, because you never bothered to re-test it after each of the 100+ patches that you've applied since the last time it worked for you? If you have not experienced those situations, then you probably just haven't spend long enough time working with Unix.
Of course the end-user is not going to write scripts. And in an enterprise setting, the admin that writes any meaningful custom script just ends up causing more long-term problems for the company because any new / replacement employee has to spend additional time for training to be able to work with the enterprise's custom kludges.
You are right though in saying that distro maintainers could do this. That would be good. In fact that would kick ass. But the painful point is that they don't!
As to the policy vs. mechanism debate, I don't buy much in the theoretical debate here. You use a tool for a purpose, period; if it suits your purpose, good, if not, it just sucks. Unix OS's are better at some stuff, I use them too; but also sometimes it does happen that Microsoft innovates in a way that is in fact ahead of the Unix game.
If you really support open source, it's better to recognize the strengths in your competitors and try to catch up, rather than having this attitude of firmly asserting that their products are always inferior.
Yes, well, with today's Unix infrastructure you can do remote server access, but can you do remote *desktop* access?
Sure you can adapt server tools like X11 to do remote access, but then remote desktop involves more: can you see your local hard drive from the applications on the desktop machine that you're remoting into? Can you see your local printer, so the printouts come where you are by default and not on the printer that is connected to the remote PC? Can you hear sounds played by applications when you remote into a PC?
Same thing with fast user switching... many people said, on Linux you have long been able to open many virtual consoles under different identities... Just Ctrl+Fn between them... Ah yes but what happens when you switch consoles? Notice how it doesn't ask for your password? Which makes it applicable in many settings, contrary to the Mac or Windows versions of fast user switching which do ask for password. Feature comes in late, but right.
As to changing OS components while running... Sure, Linux has had kernel modules, FreeBSD has had a microkernel... but is there a tool to automate dependency checking, to see which services need to be shut down, to actually shut them down / unload modules, and then relaunch services?
Unix OS's "can do" a lot of things, if you accept that many of the capabilities are pushed out of the OS onto the end-user. Actually if you start thinking this way, coding pure assembly in kernel mode actually has the most features!!
Imagine if you could just plug that USB card into your PC, log on to your manufacturers' website and check your mileage, view where your car is or has been, order duplicate keys...
Public key cryptographic security would probably be overkill for a simple one-to-one transaction like this one.
What is likely to have been engineered, rather, is that a short secret (~128 bits) has been stored on the key and on the car, both with physical security (as in a smartcard). Then, the car can authenticate the key using a simple challenge / response protocol based on secret key cryptography.
The short secret itself is probably generated from a master secret, a key derivation algorithm and the car's serial number.
Price: 4x iPod mini Battery life: listen to 2hrs of music at lunch, can't make calls at night
Yarright!
Meanwhile, I've met fashion victims ready to spend $$$ on a phone, as long as it's small and the battery lasts for 5 days--oh but Nokia doesn't make those anymore...
Why does every decently designed model out there has to have a damn camera and color screen and a camera and games and a hard drive and make coffee too?!?
I think there is a misunderstanding over what exactly the European Parliament is. The group has no real political power.
Now this isn't exactly a problem of democracy. It's just that the favored scale of democracy in Europe is national, not European. Europe is not a federation like the US, where States really have not much power compared to the federal power, for "macro" policy matters (including intellectual property).
Thus the important decisions are always taken by mutual agreement of the governments of the countries themselves. It used to be that unanimous agreement was required, but now with the extension to more countries I think the requirement has been relaxed to a "qualified majority" for some issues.
Getting a vote at the European Parliament brings in little more than publicity.
The right place to petition against software patent would not be the European Parliament, whose advice gets routinely ignored anyway, but the *individual governments of each country*.
They keep the real power, and even though they usually say "it's been decided by the Commission in Brussels" to avoid getting the heat when the shit hits the fan a few years later in each country, the truth is that *they* have been deciding it in Brussels.
The respective place of national and European government is something that Europeans have really struggled with since the earliest days of reconstruction following WW2. Even in some States, some contend that the federal govt is taking away too much... picture what would happen if each State in the US spoke a different language and had had a distinctive political history dating back to the Middle Ages...
Some background
on
SHA-1 Broken
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· Score: 2, Informative
Applications that would be broken by this are long-lived cryptographic signatures. Indeed, when a document is "signed", usually only a hash of the document is signed. Finding collisions means one can find two different documents with the same signature.
This affects all applications using SHA-1 for signature, that is signed email (whether PKIX or PGP), server certificates (which are signed documents). This should be mitigated by the fact that in order to be really usable in some cases, the collision must also be meaningful. That is if you find a collision to a signed email but if it is meaningless, you won't really be able to use it to spoof an email. It depends on the attack quality whether collisions are "meaningful" or not.
Some applications that should not be broken are the use of SHA-1 for key derivation, i.e. where one uses SHA-1 essentially as the basis of a random function to generate deterministic new keys from a pre-shared key. (I think that's what Schneier meant by HMAC applications.)
Also, some short-lived signatures should still not be realistically breakable in the time that they would need to be for an attack to be successful; short-lived signatures are typically used in protocols such as IPsec or SSL for authentication. Additionally, to mount an attack on some of these protocols an attacker would need to generate a collision involving "unpredictable" data coming from another party, which the attack may or may not allow.
Google being purely a "being in written" doesn't have an identity (yet?) that "speaks" to TV and radio audiences. I for one couldn't imagine what kind of TV ad would Google set up...
I understand the point of the article. But the report in question also urges G8 countries to use renewable energies. I feel like the reason we can't do that is that we crave energy beyond what renewable energies can practically provide us.
Nuclear technology can provide a much needed interim solution between fossil energy and renewable energy. Not renewable, but doesn't contribute to CO2 emissions!
Slashdot Mirror
You are absolutely right that it is possible to make excellent movies for cheap. Statistically though, you are wrong.
Believe me, there are many *very* ingenious people out there trying to make good movies for as cheap as they can. The fact that they don't succeed as well as big studio movies is not because studios shut them down. Of course from time to time sometimes it is because the studios don't have the proper vision. But on average, statistically, it is because the movies that are independently produced generally aren't good, and once you've made a couple of narrative movies you will understand money has often a lot to do with it. It won't buy talent, but talent without the means won't work.
I'm not even talking big VFX stuff. People want entertainment that doesn't make them wince because sound is bad. Or a picture that is hard to get into because you keep being distracted by lighting discontinuities.
As to the "classics" that you emphasize, which supposedly cost less money back then, you are so wrong. In spite of all the hardships I mentioned, it is still a heck of a lot cheaper today to make an independent movie than it was back then.
Put those budgets in today's dollars: Casablanca, $15.2m in 1942 dollars = at least $162m of today's dollar according to http://www.measuringworth.com/. Citizen Kane (a 1941 release) would cost more than $100m in today's dollars.
"The Wizard of Oz" cost more than $500 million in today's dollars. That is more than 3x as much as "Transformers" which you apparently despise but which a lot of people--and not just children--have actually enjoyed paying a ticket for (I am not one of them).
The amount of work put in those masterpieces required huge amounts of resources, because technology wasn't as good as it is now. Without studios willing to bet such huge amounts at the time you would most certainly not get to have enjoyed any of the classics.
Go make a movie, face an audience with it, and then we'll talk. Till then, show some respect to the people who work their asses off, and pay for your content.
Let's talk about making movies that way in 3 years' time then... and then releasing only at AMC...
If your taste is more towards the independent, you might want to consider this list of Sony Pictures Classics movies, which does include some pretty good stuff like "Capote", "City of Lost Children", "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon", "House of Flying Daggers", "Kung Fu Hustle", "Persepolis", "Sweet and Lowdown", "The Fog of War", "The Triplets of Belleville", "Who Killed the Electric Car".
Whatever your taste, chances are the movies you've enjoyed in the past year -- legally or not -- include some film that was at least partly sponsored by a studio.
It's like confusing the right to make free software, which is good, and the right to warez, which is debatable.
As an independent producer myself, I know that people do not always realize the brutal amount of work required to make a movie. It doesn't all go to the stars. People work their ass off and deserve a pay. Take a documentary like Who Killed the Electric Car, which IMDB estimates to have cost circa $1m. I am ready to believe that estimate.
Equipment rental needs to be paid. Basic light & electric gear for a day: in the thousands of dollars. Not counting the trucks. Camera need to be rented. Most high-end camera need a technician who will get paid. Most film camera optics need an assistant camera to manually pull focus and that is a very difficult skill that gets paid for. You need someone to hold the boom and man, the cramps are not fun enough that a lot of people would want to do it for free. Some people will work for free on sets ("for the benefit of experience") but they do need to be fed because shooting a picture is more physical work than most slashdotters will ever get to doing in their comfy Aeron-chair bound lives. Think moving truckloads of heavy-duty lighting gear. You need people to push dollies, makeup artists, props, etc. and as soon as you add a person, you need to transport them, pay them, feed them, and with the complexity of the set you end up needing to pay somebody to manage the complexity of it all.
And that's just shoot. A competent editor will normally get paid $500 a day and post production can take months. Many take cuts to work on projects that they love, but at some point they have to put bread on the table as well. Sound edit, sound design, sound mix and color correction are steps that are crucial to the production value of a picture yet hardly anybody knows what they're about. They're hard to master and they're not very fun to make, since pretty much nobody notices. So you need to pay for that.
Then comes distribution. Let's not mention advertising. Prints need to be paid. Yes, prints that are projected are still physical prints and no, digital production is still a thing of the future for most movie exhibition companies. In an age of cheap DVDs, people don't realize the costs of printing. For a 90-min film, each roll you make for each theater that you exhibit in will run you at least $10k. If you thought going all-digital was going to save you money and you did all your movie in HD video, the day you want to show it in a real theater the first filmout is going to run you more than $1 a *frame*. 24 frames per second.
Let's put it this way, some guy comes to you and says he wants to make a documentary about the electric car. You don't know the guy. Says he needs a million bucks. I'm sure you wouldn't give him even one hundred bucks.
So blast the guy for movies you don't like, but the studio's got fucking balls for making movies like that, and I fucking hate it that the folks who enjoy all the stuff for free find solace in such self-justifying sophisms.
I do think region codes are stupid. I also think that Slashdotters truly do not understand the grueling amount of work and money required to make movies and that if content producers cannot expect a return, they simply will not make it.
I'm not so sure that this reasoning applies to games: what wealth can you create using Tetris as a building block?
I guess it could be argued that playing Tetris enhances one's ability to stack luggage in the trunk of a car, therefore enhancing the capacity and productivity of transportation infrastructure... but I'm not so sure that it would be more than very marginal...
As an "alien" living in the US for more than 3 years, I would care too!
That is the "funniest" thing indeed... Schools are supposed to use this spectrum for educational purposes. Churches also get some. It was supposed to be "for Instructional and Educational purposes", distance learning, etc.
But every school or church can't have a full TV production studio, so they can't be broadcasting permanently... And when they are not broadcasting, wouldn't it be a shame to let this good spectrum sit unused?
So the FCC allowed these licensees to lease out up to 95% of their capacity to third-party entities, who may be profit-making entities (two-way radio systems, pay-TV operators...).
In fact what happens in the vast majority of the cases is that schools and churches who have no serious intention of engaging into distance learning do something like this:
* Claim free spectrum from the FCC (hey it's free!)
* Shoot 72 minutes of class with a crappy camcorder (72 min = 5% of one day)
* In order to claim educational status, put up a transmitter that broadcasts that crappy video every day from 2am to 3.12am.
* Find a commercial partner to pay for the abovementioned transmitter, and to pay you a multi-year lease to get access to the spectrum every day from 3.13am to 1.59am the next day.
* Get a few thousands of dollars a year from the lease.
* Out of that money, pay a fee to the consultants who helped you put it together.
In other words, the whole thing is just a nice financial windfall to schools and churches, who are usually quick to put forward the argument that they would never be able to "broadcast education to the masses" if the spectrum that they were given wasn't free... Which is a real joke.
Methinks, if a school isn't even able to use part of the windfall to pay for somebody to put up with the meager paperwork required to maintain that windfall, who cares if they are denied spectrum license renewals? It doesn't benefit society to give free spectrum to schools if they are only interested in leasing it back out to commercial entities. The government might as well cut the middlemen and all the pantomime by auctioning spectrum licenses right out to commercial entities.
...about making many many copies of my Mac OS X Leopard OS update DVD!
It's also possible that you are wrong. Every one of those structures could be private.
I'd say it's also possible that you didn't read the linked release, which mentions these as "community assets"... I take it as meaning that the county has actual jurisdiction on who gets to use it.
Requiring money to access real estate property is usually not considered a tax, even when said property belongs to a municipality or government. It's just rent!
Obviously the ability to use existing poles has great value to the operators. Putting up money to buy land, erect structures, bring electricity to them, repair them after a thunderstorm etc. would cost them a lot more money, as it sure does the county already. So, they barter: you give us free rent, we give everybody within range free access. Maybe a good deal for the county, but a subsidy for sure.
I actually think subsidized network infrastructure is a great thing. What I don't like is the misleading sentence "without taxpayer dollars": rent not collected is a liability.
Consider that, according to the release, the community will let the operator install 6000 radios on "water towers, buildings, light poles and other structures". In New York City, operators have to pay to get access to such valuable real estate. Providing access to community real estate free of charge is definitely a form of subsidy.
I thought Slashdotters would know about VoIP!
* for security flaws, as has been noted, you don't want stale processes running weeks at all.
* what you say doesn't work at all with kernel modules which you do need to unload before reloading.
* while this may work at the basic executable level, a service is usually not just one executable but is usually realized by using many files including executables, dlls, scripts and configuration files. The fact is, many servers will indeed continue to run but will break at some point, for example:
- if the server process is compiled against a library, and if that library is upgraded to a new, non-backwards-compatible version during the upgrade process, then when the old server tries to load that library dynamically after the upgrade, it won't find the old library version and will fail.
- if the old server process tries to open a config file whose format has been changed with the upgrade, then it will fail as well.
nfs/smbfs/cifs & cups: sure there's file sharing and printing in Unix
my point was that it just won't work out of the box in a way that's integrated with the remoting tool. i say "connect to machine X", i dont just want it to bring the display here but also set up filesharing the other way around, printing, and sound. it does work in a controlled environment where you control very well each endpoint and make sure that both ends support whatever filesharing protocol you want. but setting it up is a pain especially when you have to cross NAT firewalls.
as to fast user switching, i know very well you can open multiple desktops on multiple consoles. but a common requirement in places where multiple users actually share a machine is that when you want to switch to a new console, it asks for your password. It doesn't work that way in linux.
finally i do know there's module autoloading. my point again was that there's no automatic UNloading to help with updates. if you've ever tried to change a module with multiple dependencies in linux you know what i'm talking about.
unix tools get the work done if you spend the time to set up things properly. so you have a whole bunch of very powerful tools that you can basically do rapid application development with (using scripts etc.). but the whole point of software is just to make one's life simpler and automate things as much as possible.
The Nomachine bit is informative, although I wonder if it does work so easily as it says "out of the box." It seems that at least you need to use ssh if you want any encryption, which means in turn that it probably doesn't work very well with a Kerberos security architecture if that's what you happen to be using...
As to switching virtual consoles, maybe your distribution does it but it's certainly not a standard feature in all distributions. In all of those I've used, if you forget an open shell or screen on a virtual console, anybody can go to it without security which ruins the purpose of fast user switching (shared machine).
Finally for the core issue in this article, hotplug daemons do autoload kernel modules, but they won't tell you which processes you need to stop before unloading them, check to see if the processes can be stopped without breaking your system, stop the processes, unload the modules, change the modules, and start the services back up all in one click.
I mentioned kernel modules because they're an important part of the OS in Linux specifically due to its monolithic architecture. You don't need to be compiling a new kernel, you could be fixing a security flaw with a patch.
That's exactly what I'm saying! Even if it's just "half hours of shell scripting" (and for emulating a full desktop remoting protocol, I think you're more looking at a couple of weeks minimum), all these scripts piled up on top of one another end up like a whole lot of scripts that, basically, you're on your own to maintain as your system evolves.
Have you never found a script to be broken after you updated one of the executables that it was using? Better yet, have you never found an old script not to work at one point, without a clue to the reason why, because you never bothered to re-test it after each of the 100+ patches that you've applied since the last time it worked for you? If you have not experienced those situations, then you probably just haven't spend long enough time working with Unix.
Of course the end-user is not going to write scripts. And in an enterprise setting, the admin that writes any meaningful custom script just ends up causing more long-term problems for the company because any new / replacement employee has to spend additional time for training to be able to work with the enterprise's custom kludges.
You are right though in saying that distro maintainers could do this. That would be good. In fact that would kick ass. But the painful point is that they don't!
As to the policy vs. mechanism debate, I don't buy much in the theoretical debate here. You use a tool for a purpose, period; if it suits your purpose, good, if not, it just sucks. Unix OS's are better at some stuff, I use them too; but also sometimes it does happen that Microsoft innovates in a way that is in fact ahead of the Unix game.
If you really support open source, it's better to recognize the strengths in your competitors and try to catch up, rather than having this attitude of firmly asserting that their products are always inferior.
Yes, well, with today's Unix infrastructure you can do remote server access, but can you do remote *desktop* access?
Sure you can adapt server tools like X11 to do remote access, but then remote desktop involves more: can you see your local hard drive from the applications on the desktop machine that you're remoting into? Can you see your local printer, so the printouts come where you are by default and not on the printer that is connected to the remote PC? Can you hear sounds played by applications when you remote into a PC?
Same thing with fast user switching... many people said, on Linux you have long been able to open many virtual consoles under different identities... Just Ctrl+Fn between them... Ah yes but what happens when you switch consoles? Notice how it doesn't ask for your password? Which makes it applicable in many settings, contrary to the Mac or Windows versions of fast user switching which do ask for password. Feature comes in late, but right.
As to changing OS components while running... Sure, Linux has had kernel modules, FreeBSD has had a microkernel... but is there a tool to automate dependency checking, to see which services need to be shut down, to actually shut them down / unload modules, and then relaunch services?
Unix OS's "can do" a lot of things, if you accept that many of the capabilities are pushed out of the OS onto the end-user. Actually if you start thinking this way, coding pure assembly in kernel mode actually has the most features!!
Imagine if you could just plug that USB card into your PC, log on to your manufacturers' website and check your mileage, view where your car is or has been, order duplicate keys...
Public key cryptographic security would probably be overkill for a simple one-to-one transaction like this one.
What is likely to have been engineered, rather, is that a short secret (~128 bits) has been stored on the key and on the car, both with physical security (as in a smartcard). Then, the car can authenticate the key using a simple challenge / response protocol based on secret key cryptography.
The short secret itself is probably generated from a master secret, a key derivation algorithm and the car's serial number.
iPod killer?
Price: 4x iPod mini
Battery life: listen to 2hrs of music at lunch, can't make calls at night
Yarright!
Meanwhile, I've met fashion victims ready to spend $$$ on a phone, as long as it's small and the battery lasts for 5 days--oh but Nokia doesn't make those anymore...
Why does every decently designed model out there has to have a damn camera and color screen and a camera and games and a hard drive and make coffee too?!?
Pokia gets it!
I think there is a misunderstanding over what exactly the European Parliament is. The group has no real political power.
Now this isn't exactly a problem of democracy. It's just that the favored scale of democracy in Europe is national, not European. Europe is not a federation like the US, where States really have not much power compared to the federal power, for "macro" policy matters (including intellectual property).
Thus the important decisions are always taken by mutual agreement of the governments of the countries themselves. It used to be that unanimous agreement was required, but now with the extension to more countries I think the requirement has been relaxed to a "qualified majority" for some issues.
Getting a vote at the European Parliament brings in little more than publicity.
The right place to petition against software patent would not be the European Parliament, whose advice gets routinely ignored anyway, but the *individual governments of each country*.
They keep the real power, and even though they usually say "it's been decided by the Commission in Brussels" to avoid getting the heat when the shit hits the fan a few years later in each country, the truth is that *they* have been deciding it in Brussels.
The respective place of national and European government is something that Europeans have really struggled with since the earliest days of reconstruction following WW2. Even in some States, some contend that the federal govt is taking away too much... picture what would happen if each State in the US spoke a different language and had had a distinctive political history dating back to the Middle Ages...
Applications that would be broken by this are long-lived cryptographic signatures. Indeed, when a document is "signed", usually only a hash of the document is signed. Finding collisions means one can find two different documents with the same signature.
This affects all applications using SHA-1 for signature, that is signed email (whether PKIX or PGP), server certificates (which are signed documents). This should be mitigated by the fact that in order to be really usable in some cases, the collision must also be meaningful. That is if you find a collision to a signed email but if it is meaningless, you won't really be able to use it to spoof an email. It depends on the attack quality whether collisions are "meaningful" or not.
Some applications that should not be broken are the use of SHA-1 for key derivation, i.e. where one uses SHA-1 essentially as the basis of a random function to generate deterministic new keys from a pre-shared key. (I think that's what Schneier meant by HMAC applications.)
Also, some short-lived signatures should still not be realistically breakable in the time that they would need to be for an attack to be successful; short-lived signatures are typically used in protocols such as IPsec or SSL for authentication. Additionally, to mount an attack on some of these protocols an attacker would need to generate a collision involving "unpredictable" data coming from another party, which the attack may or may not allow.
TV ads
Google being purely a "being in written" doesn't have an identity (yet?) that "speaks" to TV and radio audiences. I for one couldn't imagine what kind of TV ad would Google set up...
Click here
A new Open Source platform... doesn't the community stretch out its efforts a bit?
Imagine these developers working instead on bringing to life open-source products that are really lacking. Like a good Exchange substitute.
I understand the point of the article. But the report in question also urges G8 countries to use renewable energies. I feel like the reason we can't do that is that we crave energy beyond what renewable energies can practically provide us.
Nuclear technology can provide a much needed interim solution between fossil energy and renewable energy. Not renewable, but doesn't contribute to CO2 emissions!
This is very, very, very cool for designers of complex web applications. But is this the real thing that Google uses?