You know, I had to think about it quite a while to figure out how the Unicode extended control characters "START OF SELECTED AREA" () and the unmarked control character U+0099 ((TM)) were related to your joke, until I tried to decode their byte values with the Windows CP1252 character set. While I might think that using the Windows character set goes well in line with your joke, it was quite some bit of work to find out what they really meant.
For anyone else left wondering, codepoint 134 in CP1252 is U+2020 and 153 is U+2122. I would, however, suggest using U+271D instead of U+2020.
I can't verify if there is any other argument, but what you are describing is definitely not true. In current Unices, mmap can map the same file with different permissions from process to process.
If anything, I would guess that a large part of MULTICS is simply written in assembler which makes it hard to port, but I doubt it. I don't really know that much about MULTICS, but I've gotten the idea that PL/1 is to MULTICS as C is to Unix.
Did you actually read the Wikipedia article you linked to? It says the following about/dev/urandom:
A counterpart to/dev/random is/dev/urandom ("unlimited" random source) which reuses the internal pool to produce more pseudo-random bits. This means that the call will not block, but the output may contain less entropy than the corresponding read from/dev/random.
Indeed, it is a PRNG, but it uses ("reuses") the actual entropy pool to seed the algorithm. In other words, it is still random, only less so than/dev/random, if entropy is not generated fast enough. Indeed, the quote explicitly says that it "may contain less entropy" (emphasis mine).
In other words, random and urandom are exactly what the GGP suggested: one actually secure, where every bit is guaranteed a certain amount of entropy, and one less secure, where entropy is compromised for speed.
I don't see a good way out of this. Who can provide leadership? I'm not usually a proponent of Java (quite the opposite, rather), but in this particular case, I cannot see why people would even think twice about adopting Java as the solution to these problems.
We already have a hypertext web that works very well with XHTML and CSS (not that they don't have their flaws, as you rightly point out, but they certainly work). What people are looking for with AJAX and Silverlight and what not is ways of delivering programs over the Internet in a secure manner, and Java already has that problem solved with both applets and Java Web Start. Java is also both an open specification and open source and it has a number of interpreters for almost any platform you can beg for, it has been around for far over a decade, and is very mature by now.
I don't see why people are not using Java. What's the problem? There are the obvious problems with Java being a horrible language to work in, but even so, it's probably still better than AJAX, Silverlight and Flash.
That is not necessarily true. First of all, 3rd party hardware certainly does come with a CD with drivers, but when that CD has been "lying around" for half a year or so, how many do you think are able to find it? I've reinstalled several computers for people who have certainly had no idea where to find all the CDs associated with their machines.
Second, it can often be very hard to find stand-alone drivers for the built-in hardware in OEM computers. All too often, the drivers are only available as part of the restoration CD that you really don't want to use, thanks to all the craplets that it installs as well.
[...]will continue to be until it works properly out the box. It might not matter much to the discussion at hand, but nonetheless, I wanted to add that I have yet to come across a single computer where Windows works better or even close to as good as Linux out of the box. When installing Windows and a computer (which I do every now and then when helping friends), one always has to hunt around for quite some time on 3rd party websites to find drivers for a lot of hardware. It is usually the most tedious process of installing Windows, and to be honest, I don't understand how it would be done if I hadn't also had a computer with Linux on it on the side. I, for one, have never found a way to make Windows tell me the actual manufacturer of a PCI device that it doesn't have drivers for, so I always have to look up the PCI vendor ID of it and grep through/usr/share/misc/pci.ids on my Linux box for it.
Of course, the difference is also that there always is a 3rd party driver for Windows for almost any piece of hardware (though it may be hard to find), whereas there is often no 3rd party drivers at all for Linux, but Linux certainly works better out of the box thanks to the availability of 1st party drivers.
Although it didn't suspend when I close the laptop lid (I don't know whether it's supposed to; this is my first laptop) Yes, that is the single most stupid thing with gnome-power-manager. It is actually set up by default to not suspend your laptop when you close the lid. Of course, it's easy to fix -- just edit the power manager properties using g-p-m's GUI and set it to suspend when closing the lid -- but I cannot for the life of me understand who would not want to have that as the default setting.
If you want to install Subversion, you are obviously a developer, and in that case I don't really understand your complaints. If you weren't, it would be one thing, but for someone who is obviously computer literate, is it really so hard to run./configure && make && sudo make install (or./configure --prefix=$HOME/sys && make && make install)?
Now as I'm saying, please don't extrapolate this to Joe Average, but for someone who don't shun a shell out of fear of "the DOS text", I honestly can't say that I think it is any harder than double-clicking a "setup.exe".
More effects means more CPU cycles (or GPU cycles, either way you're using more power). Actually, I've been wondering about that, myself. I mean, we all know that modern CPUs have rather sophisticated power saving mechanisms, but how is it with GPUs? At the very least, I've never seen any software controlling the power saving mechanics of a video card (but that's not to say that it cannot have power saving built into the hardware).
Is there anyone who knows how GPUs fare when it comes to power saving? What mechanisms do they have, how are they activated, and how much power does a 3D desktop when compared to e.g. games or CAD visualization?
I don't know what it is there for, but according to this description, it doesn't sound like it is something that a vanilla, desktop installation would want on there. That's not the trackerd you're looking for, though (for future record: You may want to try dpkg -S/usr/bin/trackerd, followed by dpkg -s $PACKAGENAME to find out what it is). Trackerd in the latest Ubuntu is a desktop search thingie, similar to Spotlight or whatever the Vista thing is called. I'd imagine that the load you were seing after about ½-1 hour of use was that it was still busy indexing your preexisting files. Once it gets past that, it gets quite calm in my admittedly limited experience.
The approach to background processes should be the KISS. On a vanilla desktop installation, only the barest set of such thing should be on there. If that's what you want, maybe you shouldn't be using Ubuntu?
By turn the country around did you mean to say that the natural resources in that country would be profitably exploited by big businesses? I sure hope so, because a country is not a piece of land, it is the people that live in it, and they cant(shouldn't) be bought. Yeah, I'm sure that people would love to eat gold and oil rather than be able to buy actual food for the money they might get from being employed by big business.
In all seriousness, if this big business of yours manages to keep the natural resources from being used solely by a greedy oligarchy, it would almost be their moral obligation to buy the country.
Why do you have to install e.g. the USB mass storage driver that comes with Windows the first time you insert a memory stick? You dont. The only Windows OS that doesnt support the vast majority of usb memory sticks (as mass storage) out of the box is win98 and previous.
Some specialized memory sticks, with security features, come with extra software, that can 'auto-run' when you install it, but thats just a security nightmare, and wont work for a non-admin anyway. I suspect that you must have misunderstood me, because I've definitely seen that Windows XP needs to install USB-MS drivers when you plug in such a device the first time (same thing for USB-HID and others). Not that you have to install them from an external medium or something, but the "New hardware detected" tray icon shows up and tells the user that new drivers are being installed. All subsequent times that a USB-MS device is plugged in, it just shows up as a new drive immediately, without any such procedure being gone through. I can't say I know exactly what Windows is doing with the drivers at that point, but I guess it needs to "register" them or something.
Sure, it's not as if it requires any user interaction or anything, so it isn't terribly annoying, but it does require extra time the first time a device of a new class is connected, and I've just never understood why it should be necessary at all. If the drivers are installed on the disk along with the Windows installation (as they obviously are), then why aren't they registered by default? Could it be that some parts of Windows scale badly with the number of registered drivers?
One specific instance that we encountered when someone in our office used nLite was the inability for anyone who was not an administrator to use USB devices. None. The only way Windows would recognize and install the drivers for things like mice, keyboards, and flash drives was if you were an administrator. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but that sounds completely the way it should be. I've never used Windows XP very much, but I wouldn't imagine that it would normally allow a user without administrative privileges to load arbitrary code (like drivers) into the kernel, right? Or are normal users allowed to do that if the code is signed or something?
I never really did understand why Windows doesn't come with all its own drivers installed by default, though. Why do you have to install e.g. the USB mass storage driver that comes with Windows the first time you insert a memory stick?
Meanwhile, who really cares. If _XXXX_ does what you want, use it. Normally, I would agree with you. It's not really my problem if people want to use Windows (I would rather consider it their problem), but it's not really just that simple.
The problem is that Windows has made the entire segment too homogenous. People are expected to be able to read MS Office documents, visit IE-only websites and install programs (particularly drivers) that only work under Windows, and that is troubling me in my usage of Linux and FreeBSD. Maybe not in my everyday usage, but certainly far from never.
Therefore, I don't really care if people start using my operating system(s) of choice, but I do rather much care that they stop using Windows. I couldn't really care less if what they switch is Linux, Solaris, AIX, OSX, Plan9 or Unununium, all I care about is that Windows usage drops to, say, 50% or so, where not only other people, but even Microsoft themselves will recognize that it is important to start following standards for information exchange, and for hardware developers to recognize that it is important to release specifications rather than just Windows-only drivers (anyone remember the days of old when you'd always get a protocol reference with a printer or modem?).
I have no doubt that Microsoft will last for at least a decade, and I don't really care if they stay in the market forever, but I really don't think it is impossible to achieve heterogeneity within a year or two.
I don't know about others, but I'm constantly seeing attempts to brute-force passwords via SSH in my syslog. At one time, they actually found a user with a weak password and broke that account, but since they didn't attempt (or attempted and failed at) some local privilege escalation exploit, everything was still running as that user, so it was easily cleaned up.
Actually, I was quite surprised when I installed Debian Etch in a VM the other day, and found gst-plugins-ugly installed by default -- including, of course, MP3 support. I know that Debian has a non-US repository, but I cannot remember choosing to download an explicit non-US DVD.
"We market CDs to allow the consumer to sample the music. Every additional time the consumer listens to the CD translates to lost sales for us. We will make sure that legislation exists to charge the consumer to prevent people from stealing and unfairly gaining from our copyrights." There, fixed that for you.
One of them has a router that reads the type of data(email, video, etc) and then sets aside bandwith for it. Admittedly, I haven't RTFA:d, but I really doubt that is what he wants to do. I would much rather think that he would like for the Internet to work more like the telephone network, so that once a virtual circuit is connected, its bandwidth is guaranteed along the entire route by means of having pre-allocated timeslots. If there isn't enough bandwidth at the time of connection setup, the connection is denied by the network.
Not that that means that I would necessarily agree with him, but it's not as if it doesn't make any sense at all.
I dunno... the only person I know who is using Skype, my father (who isn't non-technical by any means, but definitely not much into computers), uses it only for Skype-out, since he is often overseas and wants to call back home without paying a fortune.
But yeah, I agree it was quite obvious that Skype oughtn't be worth that much. However, even more than that, I am quite impressed at the fact that they actually admitted their error. All too few companies seem to be able to do that (SCO springs to mind;).
stuff it in a laptop, the thinness, lightness and power consumption is a sure winner there. I'm not sure about that; 45 W seems rather much. My current laptop normally draws a total of ~20 W, and that includes any power used by the rest of the system as well (not just the display).
In my mind, it's great that Sony has finally managed to get an OLED TV to the market at all. Because of that, efficiency in production and display specifications will hopefully increase faster than before, when it was mostly a product under research. Well, you can't blame me for hoping, at least.:)
Ban Roland I've seen this sentiment on numerous occasions, but I don't quite understand it. What is wrong about him? I can't say that I can see anything obviously suspicious about this story.
[...]no one, not even the "non-technical people" don't like Vista and its showing. Yeah, personally I dislike the Vista's showing even more than Vista itself.
I'm not sure if I agree with you, but that is a different story[1]. What would be truly interesting is if it were possible to get some real sales figures plotted over time, so that one actually could compare if Windows ME or Windows Vista had the worst start.
It would also be probably even more interesting to compare Vista with XP. I wasn't following Windows sales as closely back then, but I get the feeling the XP wasn't exactly considered the shiznit either when it first came out, so it would be tremendously interesting to see which one has been selling the best from the time they were released. Only then could one obtain an informed opinion of whether Vista actually is a failure.
I've been googling[2] around, but I haven't been able to find any real sales figures. Does anyone know where they might be located?
[1]. It is besides my main point, but I don't really think that ME can be faithfully compared to Vista. I really get the feeling that Microsoft just quickly threw together ME as a last release of the 95 line, so that people still using it would have something to ride on while the world converted to NT around them. In retrospect, of course, it can well be argued that it would have been better to go on selling the crap that was Windows 98 than releasing the utter sewage that was Windows ME, but it could actually be considered a (failed) good intention (although I guess that gives Microsoft too much credit).
[2]. I can hardly believe Firefox's spell checker still does not contain the word "googling".;)
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For anyone else left wondering, codepoint 134 in CP1252 is U+2020 and 153 is U+2122. I would, however, suggest using U+271D instead of U+2020.
If anything, I would guess that a large part of MULTICS is simply written in assembler which makes it hard to port, but I doubt it. I don't really know that much about MULTICS, but I've gotten the idea that PL/1 is to MULTICS as C is to Unix.
In other words, random and urandom are exactly what the GGP suggested: one actually secure, where every bit is guaranteed a certain amount of entropy, and one less secure, where entropy is compromised for speed.
We already have a hypertext web that works very well with XHTML and CSS (not that they don't have their flaws, as you rightly point out, but they certainly work). What people are looking for with AJAX and Silverlight and what not is ways of delivering programs over the Internet in a secure manner, and Java already has that problem solved with both applets and Java Web Start. Java is also both an open specification and open source and it has a number of interpreters for almost any platform you can beg for, it has been around for far over a decade, and is very mature by now.
I don't see why people are not using Java. What's the problem? There are the obvious problems with Java being a horrible language to work in, but even so, it's probably still better than AJAX, Silverlight and Flash.
Second, it can often be very hard to find stand-alone drivers for the built-in hardware in OEM computers. All too often, the drivers are only available as part of the restoration CD that you really don't want to use, thanks to all the craplets that it installs as well.
Of course, the difference is also that there always is a 3rd party driver for Windows for almost any piece of hardware (though it may be hard to find), whereas there is often no 3rd party drivers at all for Linux, but Linux certainly works better out of the box thanks to the availability of 1st party drivers.
Now as I'm saying, please don't extrapolate this to Joe Average, but for someone who don't shun a shell out of fear of "the DOS text", I honestly can't say that I think it is any harder than double-clicking a "setup.exe".
Is there anyone who knows how GPUs fare when it comes to power saving? What mechanisms do they have, how are they activated, and how much power does a 3D desktop when compared to e.g. games or CAD visualization?
In all seriousness, if this big business of yours manages to keep the natural resources from being used solely by a greedy oligarchy, it would almost be their moral obligation to buy the country.
Some specialized memory sticks, with security features, come with extra software, that can 'auto-run' when you install it, but thats just a security nightmare, and wont work for a non-admin anyway.
I suspect that you must have misunderstood me, because I've definitely seen that Windows XP needs to install USB-MS drivers when you plug in such a device the first time (same thing for USB-HID and others). Not that you have to install them from an external medium or something, but the "New hardware detected" tray icon shows up and tells the user that new drivers are being installed. All subsequent times that a USB-MS device is plugged in, it just shows up as a new drive immediately, without any such procedure being gone through. I can't say I know exactly what Windows is doing with the drivers at that point, but I guess it needs to "register" them or something.
Sure, it's not as if it requires any user interaction or anything, so it isn't terribly annoying, but it does require extra time the first time a device of a new class is connected, and I've just never understood why it should be necessary at all. If the drivers are installed on the disk along with the Windows installation (as they obviously are), then why aren't they registered by default? Could it be that some parts of Windows scale badly with the number of registered drivers?
I never really did understand why Windows doesn't come with all its own drivers installed by default, though. Why do you have to install e.g. the USB mass storage driver that comes with Windows the first time you insert a memory stick?
The problem is that Windows has made the entire segment too homogenous. People are expected to be able to read MS Office documents, visit IE-only websites and install programs (particularly drivers) that only work under Windows, and that is troubling me in my usage of Linux and FreeBSD. Maybe not in my everyday usage, but certainly far from never.
Therefore, I don't really care if people start using my operating system(s) of choice, but I do rather much care that they stop using Windows. I couldn't really care less if what they switch is Linux, Solaris, AIX, OSX, Plan9 or Unununium, all I care about is that Windows usage drops to, say, 50% or so, where not only other people, but even Microsoft themselves will recognize that it is important to start following standards for information exchange, and for hardware developers to recognize that it is important to release specifications rather than just Windows-only drivers (anyone remember the days of old when you'd always get a protocol reference with a printer or modem?).
I have no doubt that Microsoft will last for at least a decade, and I don't really care if they stay in the market forever, but I really don't think it is impossible to achieve heterogeneity within a year or two.
I don't know about others, but I'm constantly seeing attempts to brute-force passwords via SSH in my syslog. At one time, they actually found a user with a weak password and broke that account, but since they didn't attempt (or attempted and failed at) some local privilege escalation exploit, everything was still running as that user, so it was easily cleaned up.
I've no idea how it works legally, though.
There, fixed that for you.
Not that that means that I would necessarily agree with him, but it's not as if it doesn't make any sense at all.
But yeah, I agree it was quite obvious that Skype oughtn't be worth that much. However, even more than that, I am quite impressed at the fact that they actually admitted their error. All too few companies seem to be able to do that (SCO springs to mind ;).
In my mind, it's great that Sony has finally managed to get an OLED TV to the market at all. Because of that, efficiency in production and display specifications will hopefully increase faster than before, when it was mostly a product under research. Well, you can't blame me for hoping, at least. :)
It would also be probably even more interesting to compare Vista with XP. I wasn't following Windows sales as closely back then, but I get the feeling the XP wasn't exactly considered the shiznit either when it first came out, so it would be tremendously interesting to see which one has been selling the best from the time they were released. Only then could one obtain an informed opinion of whether Vista actually is a failure.
I've been googling[2] around, but I haven't been able to find any real sales figures. Does anyone know where they might be located?
[1]. It is besides my main point, but I don't really think that ME can be faithfully compared to Vista. I really get the feeling that Microsoft just quickly threw together ME as a last release of the 95 line, so that people still using it would have something to ride on while the world converted to NT around them. In retrospect, of course, it can well be argued that it would have been better to go on selling the crap that was Windows 98 than releasing the utter sewage that was Windows ME, but it could actually be considered a (failed) good intention (although I guess that gives Microsoft too much credit).
[2]. I can hardly believe Firefox's spell checker still does not contain the word "googling". ;)