Debian, plus the pretty-ness of Anaconda. I think the others distros could learn a lot from this.
While I first thought "bah, repackaged RedHat" from looking at the screens, I quickly realized it had a crucial difference (aside from being Debian) -- it actually looked good. Looks like they spent plenty of time choosing replacement graphics, as it looks quite stunning for a default installation.
I can speak neither Spanish nor about the Spanish-specific aspect, but it sounds good. I'm thinking the advantage here is that it's completely localized -- that is, if Spanish ports of AppX exist, they'll use it instead. Not entirely sure. Also, if anyone knows, are they using a UTF-8 locale by default?
When large numbers of people deliberately break the law using some technology that tech has the potential to be made illegal.
Great idea. Let's ban guns. And cars. Oh, and airplanes. How about forks, knives, and those plastic sporks that can poke your eye out? Ouch.
The point being -- these crimes would exist with or without these technologies. Things that popularize them, should they really be automatically deemed illegal? JimmyBob learned how to kill people from watching TV; let's ban it! Or should the fault lie in those who actually carry out the crimes?
Well, to get code into most OSS projects, it has to checked in. They usually use CVS to do this. Someone submits a patch and a dev or two does a once over on it.
If it looks good, it goes in. If it's bad, or blatantly obvious malware, it won't.
In theory you might be able to run across a rogue dev with enough access to bypass this process -- yet OSS is based on trust; unlike getting your product out quickly to keep your job, it's done by people who love the project or cause.
Could it be a problem? Yeah, in theory. But without the source, how would we ever know how many times this has gone on at MSFT, signed code or not?
On that note, I don't think it won the popular vote. Last I had checked, which was probably a day before the polls closed, it was behind by at least 50.
The clever phrasing on the judging site reads: The following splash was picked as the winner by the panel of judges.
So take that for what you will. I thought there were plenty of better entries, but oh well. If it annoys me too much, I suppose I can roll it with what was my own entry.
Dreamcast discs? 5 1/2" floppies? Insert technology that user may not be able to access without spending a boatload in money and knowledge to archive.
It's many times faster and easier to download yourself a backup for perfectly legit purposes. One could claim that if the user isn't able to achieve backup, he has no use for the backup itself -- yet that's not always the case. Dreamcast is the perfect example of this. You may not end up with a perfect backup (ie, GD-ROM), but a CD-ROM with the exact same data works just as well.
In 50 years from now, what will become of our old physical formats? Will digitized images of them be easier to access than the old counterparts? Of course.
Just because something can be used for criminal purposes does not mean it will be. We should always take that into consideration, and plan accordingly for the future.:)
An indexer has no way to know if you own a legit copy of what you wish to download; in fact, it's not their place to ask.
The bartender, however, does. He has the capacity to do so, and the law to demand this of him.
Until there's a law that comes about demanding the legitimacy of all internet downloads, and it's technically enforcable, indexers should receive no legal blame for misconduct of the users.
Does this remind you anything of the Betamax defense?
A big point many people miss -- trackers are what keep the torrents together. Indexers like SuprNova, although highly popular, do nothing but point people where to go.
It's like asking a bartender about the street corners where the girls hang out late at night. If he responsible for how you use the information; ie, if you engage in prostition?
It's a sad, sad day when information is made the scapegoat. If anything, they should be applauded, and kept as a means for getting to the real criminals.
You're right -- they're not stupid, they're ignorant. However, through their ignorance, they stupidly try to do things they shouldn't.
Would you try do-it-yourself brain surgery? Or even think of it?
Yet how many people do you know that will do the same with computers? "It won't harm anything!" and end up calling you 20 minutes later?
The difference is that most users don't understand just how "dangerous" computing really is. Be it stupidity or ignorance, that's highly debatable; yet until they realize it's kind of like sticking your finger in an electric socket and learn not to do it again, this is going to continue. Forever.
Perhaps it's the whole "lack of personal responsibility" trend at play, and they blame it on the software vendor, etc. Yet that's a post for another day, mind you.
Quite true. This is often the fault more knowledgeable fans have with nowaday's commercially translated Japanese media -- the localization of important cultural aspects.
I've been self-studying Japanese for a few years now, and I still learn new cultural tidbits on a near daily basis.
I don't mean that watching anime is the key, mind you; I'm sure others will try to suggest that. But live action and dramas work wonders on both the cultural aspect, and introduce the viewer to the vastly different landscape of Japan.:)
While you do have a valid point, if you're one to play multiple online games at any given point in time, the monthly costs can sure add up.
It would be great, really really really really great, if a single entity came along and provided hosting. I'm thinking something like what SourceForge does for OSS, only with some money changing hands.
Let's set they charge five bucks a month for developers to host their games. It's more of a commitment thing, than anything else; to keep the cheapwards off.
Now, let's assume they host, say, 50 different games. You now have to shell out, ohh, let's say a buck a month and get access to all of the hosted games. Since you commonly have a few hundred to a few thousand players at any given time per game, and most games aren't that bandwidth intensive, the hosting company now makes enough to pay their costs.
If they're feeling nice, they could even give any extra money back to the developers.
Ah, if only I had some money, I would love to start something like this myself. Yet initial costs would be an issue, until they managed to convince the popular games to switch over.
It allows you to "start" while still in the process of loading things. Depending upon the speeds of certain components in your box, you may or may not notice this. Most of us do, and scratch our heads why.
The boot -> login time is quite low, but "usability" time still quite high; especially on slower boxes that don't do well multi-tasking. It's more or less to present the impression of speed that isn't actually there. If you don't login right away, it looks all that much better.
As Linux is often known for being the poor man's *NIX, I don't see how any type of parallel loading like XP uses would solve anything. High end usually goes with gaming, which (sadly) goes with Windows. Maybe it's just me, though. Like always.
You're not alone. With all of these stupid domains from ICANN popping up, you would expect the "competition" to get it right.
Yet what do we run across?.fur,.geek,.oss..indy,.null,.parody, etc.
Is this really any better? Instead of making up new TLD for a quick buck, it seems to me it's for the personal amusement of the maintainers. How is this any better?!
Can we just magically revert back to the country domains, plus.com/net/org? Please?
I'd love to buy one, actually. Well, except for the fact that they've been promising Ogg Vorbis and FLAC since at least a year ago, and more recently Musepack; alas, they've yet to deliver on any of them. For the price, I need to know it's actually going to happen first.
At least they're giving some thought to those of us who don't want to transcode our entire collection to MP3 (quality loss), or spend weeks re-ripping our CDs all over again.
Someone wake me up when you can plug one of these drives into a PDA with enough juice to last a week or more, and has a player that supports more oddball formats than you can shake a stick at....
Heh. We often make fun of Windows users for being disorganized, but when you take a look at the actual OS, it's fairly organized.
On the other hand, *NIX crowd, perhaps from working with the command line, has learned to organize their spaces into neat, tidy messes. And then take a look at/usr/bin or/usr/lib. Ouch.
Just a slightly off-topic, random thought.
Oh, and personally, I'm waiting for the SCO Desktop Search tool, to help me find all of my e-mails with legal threats attached.;)
Been there, done that. And I still miss my indexer.
Let's make a little example:
An author uses someone's licensed content, say a picture, in their book.
The publisher prints the book, and a bunch of copies end up at your local library.
Your library freely loans the book with infringing content to all to see.
Now, in torrent terms:
The author is the creator of the torrent. They are, originally, at fault for the incident.
The publisher is the tracker. Their only job is to distribute content, not check for validity.
Finally, the library, is the tracker; they freely make content available to the general public.
BigCorporation1267 comes along and sees the library has InfringingBook612. What do they do?
Instead of going to the source (author), or having the distribution of the book pulled (publisher), they go to the library (tracker). "You're aiding in the distribution of infringing materials! Stop or we'll sue!"
The library itself has neither the funds nor manpower to take this to court; if anything, they would likely win a case. Yet, they have to roll over to the big guys.
It's a great plot, at that. Make the library the scapegoat when the book publisher is truly at fault for distributing infringing materials. Of course, the blame should really go to the author, but it's quite hard on the internet. So, take down the library, annoy a bunch of people, and the corporations win. In their own minds, of course; they're not stopping the content, so they can still play victim later. Marketing brilliance, really.
..except once they have two of your passwords, they've figured out your pattern.
Perhaps a better way would be to take the ASCII value of the first letter and tack it on to the end as well. Even better if you were to square it, or something. Or is it just me?
I have two different sets. One specifically for online site like PayPal, my bank, etc. The other is for generic internet thing.
The important stuff set is then further split into one of two passwords, chosen depending upon how "important" the site is. So my Amazon account won't use the same as my bank, and such.
The generic set is split into three, or occassionally four, also based on importance.
The rare fourth is my root password, the third my normal login, second for general web usage, and last for throw away usage.
I tend to use the throwaway one a lot./., IRC, Gmail. In fact, all my friends know it, and I'd yet to have them play around with my stuff. YMMV, and you should still rotate passwords every so often . . . or so I'm told.
The glare on the screen from the sun tends to make the display quite difficult to see. Unless you have some clever way to block out natural lighting in your car, they're often quite useless.
Then again, the newer units should be backlit. So I suppose throwing a blanket over the kids in the back would be quite effective. Plus it acts as a sound buffer. Instant winner.
To some extent, this could be blamed on the feed itself. Ideally, it works like this..
When you request the feed, you first get sent your normal HTTP header. If properly configured, it will return a 304 if you have the most recent version -- however, as many feeds are generated in PHP[1], this header is defaulted off, and you'll end up with your standard 200, or go ahead, code. This single handedly wastes a metric tonne of bandwidth needlessly.
Even if you're trying to rape a feed, you'll only be wasting a few hundred bytes at most every half hour, than the whole 50K or whatnot size it is.
[1] This is not a PHP specific issue; a lot of dynamic content, and even static content, fails to do this properly. But this is what it's there for, after all.
Slashdot Mirror
Debian, plus the pretty-ness of Anaconda. I think the others distros could learn a lot from this.
While I first thought "bah, repackaged RedHat" from looking at the screens, I quickly realized it had a crucial difference (aside from being Debian) -- it actually looked good. Looks like they spent plenty of time choosing replacement graphics, as it looks quite stunning for a default installation.
I can speak neither Spanish nor about the Spanish-specific aspect, but it sounds good. I'm thinking the advantage here is that it's completely localized -- that is, if Spanish ports of AppX exist, they'll use it instead. Not entirely sure. Also, if anyone knows, are they using a UTF-8 locale by default?
When large numbers of people deliberately break the law using some technology that tech has the potential to be made illegal.
Great idea. Let's ban guns. And cars. Oh, and airplanes. How about forks, knives, and those plastic sporks that can poke your eye out? Ouch.
The point being -- these crimes would exist with or without these technologies. Things that popularize them, should they really be automatically deemed illegal? JimmyBob learned how to kill people from watching TV; let's ban it! Or should the fault lie in those who actually carry out the crimes?
Oh my!
Well, to get code into most OSS projects, it has to checked in. They usually use CVS to do this. Someone submits a patch and a dev or two does a once over on it.
If it looks good, it goes in. If it's bad, or blatantly obvious malware, it won't.
In theory you might be able to run across a rogue dev with enough access to bypass this process -- yet OSS is based on trust; unlike getting your product out quickly to keep your job, it's done by people who love the project or cause.
Could it be a problem? Yeah, in theory. But without the source, how would we ever know how many times this has gone on at MSFT, signed code or not?
Our support equipment, namely laptops and diagnostic hardware, is falling dangerously behind the times
Just what are you trying to do? Play Doom 3 on these things?
More seriously, though. Are they allowing you to do your job? If so, I don't see what the issue is.
On that note, I don't think it won the popular vote. Last I had checked, which was probably a day before the polls closed, it was behind by at least 50.
The clever phrasing on the judging site reads:
The following splash was picked as the winner by the panel of judges.
So take that for what you will. I thought there were plenty of better entries, but oh well. If it annoys me too much, I suppose I can roll it with what was my own entry.
Dreamcast discs? 5 1/2" floppies? Insert technology that user may not be able to access without spending a boatload in money and knowledge to archive.
:)
It's many times faster and easier to download yourself a backup for perfectly legit purposes. One could claim that if the user isn't able to achieve backup, he has no use for the backup itself -- yet that's not always the case. Dreamcast is the perfect example of this. You may not end up with a perfect backup (ie, GD-ROM), but a CD-ROM with the exact same data works just as well.
In 50 years from now, what will become of our old physical formats? Will digitized images of them be easier to access than the old counterparts? Of course.
Just because something can be used for criminal purposes does not mean it will be. We should always take that into consideration, and plan accordingly for the future.
Err.. How?
An indexer has no way to know if you own a legit copy of what you wish to download; in fact, it's not their place to ask.
The bartender, however, does. He has the capacity to do so, and the law to demand this of him.
Until there's a law that comes about demanding the legitimacy of all internet downloads, and it's technically enforcable, indexers should receive no legal blame for misconduct of the users.
Does this remind you anything of the Betamax defense?
A big point many people miss -- trackers are what keep the torrents together. Indexers like SuprNova, although highly popular, do nothing but point people where to go.
It's like asking a bartender about the street corners where the girls hang out late at night. If he responsible for how you use the information; ie, if you engage in prostition?
It's a sad, sad day when information is made the scapegoat. If anything, they should be applauded, and kept as a means for getting to the real criminals.
You're right -- they're not stupid, they're ignorant. However, through their ignorance, they stupidly try to do things they shouldn't.
Would you try do-it-yourself brain surgery? Or even think of it?
Yet how many people do you know that will do the same with computers? "It won't harm anything!" and end up calling you 20 minutes later?
The difference is that most users don't understand just how "dangerous" computing really is. Be it stupidity or ignorance, that's highly debatable; yet until they realize it's kind of like sticking your finger in an electric socket and learn not to do it again, this is going to continue. Forever.
Perhaps it's the whole "lack of personal responsibility" trend at play, and they blame it on the software vendor, etc. Yet that's a post for another day, mind you.
I was actually just taking a guess as to what I'd be modded as, and it turned out to be pretty accurate. ;)
[T]hey also present Microsoft's solution to security problems
What? Blame the user when SP2 fails them? User error! Woo!
And yes, I am trolling. But you know it's true.
Quite true. This is often the fault more knowledgeable fans have with nowaday's commercially translated Japanese media -- the localization of important cultural aspects.
:)
I've been self-studying Japanese for a few years now, and I still learn new cultural tidbits on a near daily basis.
I don't mean that watching anime is the key, mind you; I'm sure others will try to suggest that. But live action and dramas work wonders on both the cultural aspect, and introduce the viewer to the vastly different landscape of Japan.
While you do have a valid point, if you're one to play multiple online games at any given point in time, the monthly costs can sure add up.
It would be great, really really really really great, if a single entity came along and provided hosting. I'm thinking something like what SourceForge does for OSS, only with some money changing hands.
Let's set they charge five bucks a month for developers to host their games. It's more of a commitment thing, than anything else; to keep the cheapwards off.
Now, let's assume they host, say, 50 different games. You now have to shell out, ohh, let's say a buck a month and get access to all of the hosted games. Since you commonly have a few hundred to a few thousand players at any given time per game, and most games aren't that bandwidth intensive, the hosting company now makes enough to pay their costs.
If they're feeling nice, they could even give any extra money back to the developers.
Ah, if only I had some money, I would love to start something like this myself. Yet initial costs would be an issue, until they managed to convince the popular games to switch over.
Yep. That's exactly what XP does.
It allows you to "start" while still in the process of loading things. Depending upon the speeds of certain components in your box, you may or may not notice this. Most of us do, and scratch our heads why.
The boot -> login time is quite low, but "usability" time still quite high; especially on slower boxes that don't do well multi-tasking. It's more or less to present the impression of speed that isn't actually there. If you don't login right away, it looks all that much better.
As Linux is often known for being the poor man's *NIX, I don't see how any type of parallel loading like XP uses would solve anything. High end usually goes with gaming, which (sadly) goes with Windows. Maybe it's just me, though. Like always.
You're not alone. With all of these stupid domains from ICANN popping up, you would expect the "competition" to get it right.
.fur, .geek, .oss. .indy, .null, .parody, etc.
.com/net/org? Please?
Yet what do we run across?
Is this really any better? Instead of making up new TLD for a quick buck, it seems to me it's for the personal amusement of the maintainers. How is this any better?!
Can we just magically revert back to the country domains, plus
Aha. I was looking at their site just yesterday, and looked no further than their FAQ entry that still says it's coming in 2003.
I guess they should update that, one day.
I'd love to buy one, actually. Well, except for the fact that they've been promising Ogg Vorbis and FLAC since at least a year ago, and more recently Musepack; alas, they've yet to deliver on any of them. For the price, I need to know it's actually going to happen first.
At least they're giving some thought to those of us who don't want to transcode our entire collection to MP3 (quality loss), or spend weeks re-ripping our CDs all over again.
Someone wake me up when you can plug one of these drives into a PDA with enough juice to last a week or more, and has a player that supports more oddball formats than you can shake a stick at....
ZZZZZzzzzz
Yeah? Sounds like a great idea. How about when your friends stop by and switch you over to Litestep or Enlightenment?
;)
I'm sure you'll love it -- after all, because they hate the interface you use, it should be changed!
The better advice being, buy a cheap laptop and hate away; but only change your own stuff.
Mind you, I may just be bitter from having people install stuff on my boxes. Now I don't let anyone near 'em. Problem resolved.
Heh. We often make fun of Windows users for being disorganized, but when you take a look at the actual OS, it's fairly organized.
/usr/bin or /usr/lib. Ouch.
;)
On the other hand, *NIX crowd, perhaps from working with the command line, has learned to organize their spaces into neat, tidy messes. And then take a look at
Just a slightly off-topic, random thought.
Oh, and personally, I'm waiting for the SCO Desktop Search tool, to help me find all of my e-mails with legal threats attached.
Let's make a little example:
Now, in torrent terms:
BigCorporation1267 comes along and sees the library has InfringingBook612. What do they do?
Instead of going to the source (author), or having the distribution of the book pulled (publisher), they go to the library (tracker). "You're aiding in the distribution of infringing materials! Stop or we'll sue!"
The library itself has neither the funds nor manpower to take this to court; if anything, they would likely win a case. Yet, they have to roll over to the big guys.
It's a great plot, at that. Make the library the scapegoat when the book publisher is truly at fault for distributing infringing materials. Of course, the blame should really go to the author, but it's quite hard on the internet. So, take down the library, annoy a bunch of people, and the corporations win. In their own minds, of course; they're not stopping the content, so they can still play victim later. Marketing brilliance, really.
..except once they have two of your passwords, they've figured out your pattern.
Perhaps a better way would be to take the ASCII value of the first letter and tack it on to the end as well. Even better if you were to square it, or something. Or is it just me?
Pfft.
;)
We all know "real" men just kick down the door after they lock themselves outside.
And real geeks lock themselves inside.
Yes. :)
/., IRC, Gmail. In fact, all my friends know it, and I'd yet to have them play around with my stuff. YMMV, and you should still rotate passwords every so often . . . or so I'm told.
I have two different sets. One specifically for online site like PayPal, my bank, etc. The other is for generic internet thing.
The important stuff set is then further split into one of two passwords, chosen depending upon how "important" the site is. So my Amazon account won't use the same as my bank, and such.
The generic set is split into three, or occassionally four, also based on importance.
The rare fourth is my root password, the third my normal login, second for general web usage, and last for throw away usage.
I tend to use the throwaway one a lot.
The glare on the screen from the sun tends to make the display quite difficult to see. Unless you have some clever way to block out natural lighting in your car, they're often quite useless.
Then again, the newer units should be backlit. So I suppose throwing a blanket over the kids in the back would be quite effective. Plus it acts as a sound buffer. Instant winner.
To some extent, this could be blamed on the feed itself. Ideally, it works like this..
When you request the feed, you first get sent your normal HTTP header. If properly configured, it will return a 304 if you have the most recent version -- however, as many feeds are generated in PHP[1], this header is defaulted off, and you'll end up with your standard 200, or go ahead, code. This single handedly wastes a metric tonne of bandwidth needlessly.
Even if you're trying to rape a feed, you'll only be wasting a few hundred bytes at most every half hour, than the whole 50K or whatnot size it is.
See here for a more detailed explanation.
[1] This is not a PHP specific issue; a lot of dynamic content, and even static content, fails to do this properly. But this is what it's there for, after all.