Love and hate are usually considered to be the polar opposite powerful forces that drive humanity in both religious and non-religious circles. Look at the good side and the dark side of the Force from Star Wars.
One is entirely selfless, the other is entirely selfish. If you pay attention, I think you'll find that although hate seems rewarding, it's not a lasting reward.
'Love' is defined as only those parts of love which are positive, uplifting, and nuturative, and the potentially nasty baggage (possessiveness, obsession, etc) are wtritten off as something separate.
Love, as I see it, is selfless and reaches out to other people to lift them up and help them. Possessiveness, obsession and lust are all about self gratification.
That's my opinion, and based on that, I'd say the so-called negative aspects of love are an entirely different thing than "positive love". It's not that we separate them based on positive and negative connotations, it's just that they come from separate motivations, and are therefore different things.
Re:Will it fix the most notorious Linux bug??
on
Fedora 10 Released
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Linux will never be ready for the desktop (or server) if you can't move it from one building to another without rebooting!
Or Intrepid. Not that it's hard to do, but someone who doesn't know anything about partitioning will just use the automatic partitioning, so they won't get a separate/boot partition.
I could understand where you're coming from if you were talking about video, but for music? 160,000,000 kB (1,280,000,000 kb) of storage at 128kb/s works out to 10 million seconds, which is almost 116 days of straight music 24 hours a day, every day, if you never listen to the same song twice. If you figure 3 minutes per song, it's nearly 56,000 songs, or over 4600 albums.
The funny thing is that I wouldn't think that people who brag bout their ginormous music collection would be able to stand listening to music at 128 kbps, since they're so into music and everything. I'm stuck in the logical paradox of how much you love music, yet you listen to it in really crappy quality, all the time.
Also, where did you find the time to rip 4600 CDs?
I should also mention that once those.conf files are all in place (although they don't actually have a.conf extension), you don't have to do anything at all to make them work right. That is to say, when you go into MythVideo and select a file to play and mplayer is launched, mplayer then responds to the button presses as per the mappings in the mplayer conf file, and mythtv stop responding to them. Once you hit 'stop' to exit mplayer, you're back in control of mythtv. Those auto-generated mappings are there for mythtv, mplayer, xine, vlc, xmame, and a couple of others. It makes the user experience very smooth.
Because after all, my wife shouldn't have to know that recorded programs are playing with myth's internal player and MythVideo files are played with mplayer, and MythDVD launches xine, or however it's configured. She should only have to know that the buttons do what they're supposed to -- every time.
Why install an X server on a machine that'll never use it?
I think that was his point.
And forwarding X over ssh is alright if you're working from a linux box, but if you're coming from a Windows desktop you have to install Xming before you can do it. X Forwarding is also a little slow, especially if you're trying to do it remotely.
You'd think there could be an easier way. Some of the config stuff you can do via mythweb, but not all (or enough) of it. Sometimes you can find the settings you need via phpmyadmin as well, but I always wonder how likely it is that I'll pooch the entire myth install by entering a bad value for a setting.
Having a text file that you can edit using your favorite non-GUI editor via ssh would be nice. I realize that there would be people complaining about that situation, too, but at least you could get in and edit it from a Windows box with nothing more than putty.
My mythbox was running on gentoo for a while. But eventually I started having problems with upgrades... Compile errors or dependency problems. For a long time, the errors were for less important packages, so they weren't show stoppers. Then for some reason, it wanted to upgrade the main myth package from.21 to.22, but it couldn't actually do it... I think it had to do with all of the myth plugin packages being at.21 still. Then one day it wanted to take myth back to.20, but again, it wouldn't actually do it because of dependency problems (and I didn't want to go back to.20).
I backed up my database and redid the box with Ubuntu, and it's been great ever since. It even handled the 8.04 - 8.10 distro upgrade without any issues at all.
As a relatively long-time linux user, my only Gentoo experience was that myth box. It worked fine for a while, but after a couple of years, all hell broke loose. I think I would need a better understanding of how portage works, and of all of the configuration files involved. USE flags and package masks get to be more than a little confusing for anyone who isn't willing to dedicate their life to Gentoo.
In summary, gentoo may make it relatively simple to install mythtv (although Ubuntu deals with more of the initial configration for you), it's the long-term maintenance that really kills it.
If I understand correctly, the frustration with the remote is more about how the same keyboard keypresses do different things in mplayer or xine than they do in the actual myth UI/player, is that the case?
If so, then I used to be frustrated by the same thing. But now that I've done a frontend using Mythbuntu, they have different conf files for each app (mythtv/mplayer/xine/etc), all automatically setup when you select your remote from a pull-down menu. That way you don't have to remember different remote buttons for the same functionality in different programs. It makes things very nice.
In my case, things got a little more complicated, because I had a receiver that wasn't tied to any particular remote, and a Harmony remote that I could program with any set of codes I wanted. I tried to set up lirc from the Mythbuntu Control Center to use the Windows Media Center remote codes, but then it set up the hardware.conf file to use the driver for the MCE receiver, instead of the one I had, so I did have to do some hand-editing of that conf file, but it ended up being not too bad, once I figured out a little bit about how lirc works.
I'm also looking forward to a much improved Myth Music. I just got my hands on a new box that makes a great frontend piece, while the backend has been down in the basement and I've been stuck using the web interface from my desktop PC.
Now that I have a dedicated frontend at the TV, I'm finding that MythVideo isn't as useless as I had remembered it being (although it could use some polish), but MythMusic is still pretty painful to use. I'm also really liking the functionality of the MythStream plugin included with Mythbuntu, although the UI for it is terrible, and the setup screen for it is ridiculously lousy.
Using WEP at work and WPA2-AES at home on my Ubuntu laptop, I haven't had to use the console at all to enter SSIDs or passkeys, NetworkManager makes it simpler than it is on Windows XP.
Sure a one-time pad can be secure, but as you mentioned, you still have to transfer or at least store the pad, which means that you have to encrypt the pad. If you have quantum crypto available to you to begin with, then why not use that to encrypt the original data to begin with, instead of using the pad?
And even with quantum crypto, I doubt it will be the magic bullet it's hyped to be. I'm sure applications will be limited, and we'll all still keep trying to stay one step ahead of the attackers.
One-way hash functions are supposed to have two properties. One, they're one way. This means that it is easy to take a message and compute the hash value, but it's impossible to take a hash value and recreate the original message. (By "impossible" I mean "can't be done in any reasonable amount of time.") Two, they're collision free. This means that it is impossible to find two messages that hash to the same hash value.
This is funny. These two properties, discounting the redefinition of impossible, are mutually exclusive. If each message hashes to a unique value, and there are no collisions, then recreating the original message from the hash is as simple as putting a million monkeys to work writing a million works of gibberish and store the hash and gibberish in a dictionary. If you instructed your monkeys to start from the smallest works of gibberish and work towards the longer works, your dictionary would be complete for any message whose length is equal to or less than the longest message in the dictionary.
Hence Schneier's explanation of the word "impossible", which was "can't be done in a reasonable amount of time". The criteria for grading pretty much all encryption is whether it costs more in resources to break the encryption than what the decrypted information would be worth. Truly "impossible" encryption is an impossibility in and of itself. All you can do is make it not worth someone's time and effort to try to break it.
So you're right, that the goal of cryptography (including hash functions) is contradictory, which means that some compromises must be made. The trick is finding how to make reasonable compromises so that you have a useable system that's still relatively secure (and Schneier is always the first to say that 'secure' is always relative).
That's why Joe Schmoe can't just make up his own encryption schemes and expect it to be secure, because it's hard work and takes a lot of understanding. That's why MD5 and SHA can't last forever. That's why they're taking proposals from smart people (excuse me, teams of people) like Schneier to come up with new hash methods, which will also have a limited lifespan as people find ways to break them.
All we can do is to come up with the best solution we can for now, and in a few years, we'll need something better.
But a greater part is that Ubuntu is just plain faster. It uses less RAM, it hits the disk less, and it just runs faster.
I'm not sure about that claim of hitting the disk less. At home I dual boot my P4 3.4 GHz (with HT) machine between XP/Ubuntu 8.04 (actually 8.10 as of this morning, but I haven't really used 8.10 yet on it). Granted, I only have 512 MB of RAM, but the old 20 GB IDE hard drive in there is always clicking and grinding away whenever I do anything. XP on that system is using a newer, larger SATA drive, so I can't really compare that directly, but previously I used the same 20GB hdd in a P3/600MHz machine running XP with less RAM, and the hard drive was still not nearly as noisy as it is now in Ubuntu.
The other annoying thing is that if I'm trying to do 2 things at once, especially if I'm using Firefox while updating my system with apt-get or Synaptic, then Firefox will periodically stop responding and get all grayed out. After an inconvenient wait time, it comes back and I can use it a little, but in the case of apt updates, Firefox is non-responsive much more than it is responsive. If there's any tuning I can do to fix that, I'd love to know.
Looking around at newegg and tigerdirect, I only see microSD cards up to 8GB, and the cheapest price I saw on those was about $35. This means that there's no really direct comparison with the 16GB iPhone (until 16GB microSD cards become more readily available), and makes it $15 more expensive than the 8GB iPhone.
That said, microSD cards will continue to be availabe in larger sizes and for smaller prices, and that will probably happen more quickly than Apple will be adjusting their prices/storage capacities. No to mention that T-Mobile's unlimited data plan for the G1 is $5 cheaper than AT&T's plan for the iPhone 3G, and the T-Mobile plan includes 400 SMS messages, whereas you have to add those in separately with the AT&T plan, so in the long run, the G1 is most certainly less expensive than the iPhone.
Obviously the G1 isn't going to be as good of a media player as the iPhone, since it doesn't even have any built-in video player, and audio only works through the weird headphone jack which requires an adapter if you want to use your own headphones. I guess the value in it really depends on how you're going to use it.
That was going to be my original nitpick, which is why I bolded US (and forgot to unbold it before I changed and submitted the comment), but then I figured that since the documentary in question is probably from the US, Lennon did actually live in the US for part of his life (at least at the time of his death, I don't know about when the song was released), and the song, along with everything else JohnLennon/Beatles-related has been integrated into the culture of the United States, I'd switch to a different nitpick.
Well sure, pretty much all mice sold now use optical/laser tech to track movement, but not all optical mice are wireless. The post that I was responding to specifically made it sound as if the Qantas folks were blaming the optical tech for the incidents, not the RF communications tech.
Also not all RF wireless is Bluetooth. It may or may not be the most common wireless tech for mice nowadays, but for a long time mice were using proprietary RF connections.
The newsworthy part to me is that they had a hodge-podge of distros on a large number of servers, and they standardized on one distro which most people don't usually consider first when they think of a server distro.
Also, it's nice to know about what a large project like WikiMedia is using.
I second your comments on Gentoo. I had originally thought it would be a good choice for my MythTV box on older hardware... and it was fine, at first. After about two years of occasional updates, the updates got really painful. Updating config files sucked, and often packages wouldn't compile, I spent hours googling various compiler messages. At one point the mythtv package got upgraded to version 0.22, then it wanted to backdate it to 0.20. Unfortunately the desktop system I was using as a frontend was running Ubuntu, and I had version 0.21 on there, so things were all screwed up. I finally went to Ubuntu server, and it's been smooth sailing ever since.
If someone has the time to invest in understanding the whole portage system and knowing how to get exactly what they want out of it, and if they don't mind managing all of their config files after each update, then Gentoo is probably fine, and I'm sure it is ideal in soe situations. But it's definitely not for most people.
[standard Gentoo complaint]
Also, it takes a long time to compile stuff.
[/standard Gentoo complaint]
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Love and hate are usually considered to be the polar opposite powerful forces that drive humanity in both religious and non-religious circles. Look at the good side and the dark side of the Force from Star Wars.
One is entirely selfless, the other is entirely selfish. If you pay attention, I think you'll find that although hate seems rewarding, it's not a lasting reward.
'Love' is defined as only those parts of love which are positive, uplifting, and nuturative, and the potentially nasty baggage (possessiveness, obsession, etc) are wtritten off as something separate.
Love, as I see it, is selfless and reaches out to other people to lift them up and help them. Possessiveness, obsession and lust are all about self gratification.
That's my opinion, and based on that, I'd say the so-called negative aspects of love are an entirely different thing than "positive love". It's not that we separate them based on positive and negative connotations, it's just that they come from separate motivations, and are therefore different things.
Linux will never be ready for the desktop (or server) if you can't move it from one building to another without rebooting!
Viva Vista!
;)
Or Intrepid. Not that it's hard to do, but someone who doesn't know anything about partitioning will just use the automatic partitioning, so they won't get a separate /boot partition.
I could understand where you're coming from if you were talking about video, but for music? 160,000,000 kB (1,280,000,000 kb) of storage at 128kb/s works out to 10 million seconds, which is almost 116 days of straight music 24 hours a day, every day, if you never listen to the same song twice. If you figure 3 minutes per song, it's nearly 56,000 songs, or over 4600 albums.
The funny thing is that I wouldn't think that people who brag bout their ginormous music collection would be able to stand listening to music at 128 kbps, since they're so into music and everything. I'm stuck in the logical paradox of how much you love music, yet you listen to it in really crappy quality, all the time.
Also, where did you find the time to rip 4600 CDs?
I think you're looking for this
I should also mention that once those .conf files are all in place (although they don't actually have a .conf extension), you don't have to do anything at all to make them work right. That is to say, when you go into MythVideo and select a file to play and mplayer is launched, mplayer then responds to the button presses as per the mappings in the mplayer conf file, and mythtv stop responding to them. Once you hit 'stop' to exit mplayer, you're back in control of mythtv. Those auto-generated mappings are there for mythtv, mplayer, xine, vlc, xmame, and a couple of others. It makes the user experience very smooth.
Because after all, my wife shouldn't have to know that recorded programs are playing with myth's internal player and MythVideo files are played with mplayer, and MythDVD launches xine, or however it's configured. She should only have to know that the buttons do what they're supposed to -- every time.
Why install an X server on a machine that'll never use it?
I think that was his point.
And forwarding X over ssh is alright if you're working from a linux box, but if you're coming from a Windows desktop you have to install Xming before you can do it. X Forwarding is also a little slow, especially if you're trying to do it remotely.
You'd think there could be an easier way. Some of the config stuff you can do via mythweb, but not all (or enough) of it. Sometimes you can find the settings you need via phpmyadmin as well, but I always wonder how likely it is that I'll pooch the entire myth install by entering a bad value for a setting. Having a text file that you can edit using your favorite non-GUI editor via ssh would be nice. I realize that there would be people complaining about that situation, too, but at least you could get in and edit it from a Windows box with nothing more than putty.
My mythbox was running on gentoo for a while. But eventually I started having problems with upgrades... Compile errors or dependency problems. For a long time, the errors were for less important packages, so they weren't show stoppers. Then for some reason, it wanted to upgrade the main myth package from .21 to .22, but it couldn't actually do it... I think it had to do with all of the myth plugin packages being at .21 still. Then one day it wanted to take myth back to .20, but again, it wouldn't actually do it because of dependency problems (and I didn't want to go back to .20).
I backed up my database and redid the box with Ubuntu, and it's been great ever since. It even handled the 8.04 - 8.10 distro upgrade without any issues at all.
As a relatively long-time linux user, my only Gentoo experience was that myth box. It worked fine for a while, but after a couple of years, all hell broke loose. I think I would need a better understanding of how portage works, and of all of the configuration files involved. USE flags and package masks get to be more than a little confusing for anyone who isn't willing to dedicate their life to Gentoo.
In summary, gentoo may make it relatively simple to install mythtv (although Ubuntu deals with more of the initial configration for you), it's the long-term maintenance that really kills it.
If I understand correctly, the frustration with the remote is more about how the same keyboard keypresses do different things in mplayer or xine than they do in the actual myth UI/player, is that the case?
If so, then I used to be frustrated by the same thing. But now that I've done a frontend using Mythbuntu, they have different conf files for each app (mythtv/mplayer/xine/etc), all automatically setup when you select your remote from a pull-down menu. That way you don't have to remember different remote buttons for the same functionality in different programs. It makes things very nice.
In my case, things got a little more complicated, because I had a receiver that wasn't tied to any particular remote, and a Harmony remote that I could program with any set of codes I wanted. I tried to set up lirc from the Mythbuntu Control Center to use the Windows Media Center remote codes, but then it set up the hardware.conf file to use the driver for the MCE receiver, instead of the one I had, so I did have to do some hand-editing of that conf file, but it ended up being not too bad, once I figured out a little bit about how lirc works.
I'm also looking forward to a much improved Myth Music. I just got my hands on a new box that makes a great frontend piece, while the backend has been down in the basement and I've been stuck using the web interface from my desktop PC.
Now that I have a dedicated frontend at the TV, I'm finding that MythVideo isn't as useless as I had remembered it being (although it could use some polish), but MythMusic is still pretty painful to use. I'm also really liking the functionality of the MythStream plugin included with Mythbuntu, although the UI for it is terrible, and the setup screen for it is ridiculously lousy.
Using WEP at work and WPA2-AES at home on my Ubuntu laptop, I haven't had to use the console at all to enter SSIDs or passkeys, NetworkManager makes it simpler than it is on Windows XP.
Although, if you really have data you're concerned about keeping safe, you should not use computers at all.
There, now I fixed that for you... no wait a minute...
Although, if you really have data you're concerned about keeping safe, you should not use data at all.
OK, it's good now.
Sure a one-time pad can be secure, but as you mentioned, you still have to transfer or at least store the pad, which means that you have to encrypt the pad. If you have quantum crypto available to you to begin with, then why not use that to encrypt the original data to begin with, instead of using the pad?
And even with quantum crypto, I doubt it will be the magic bullet it's hyped to be. I'm sure applications will be limited, and we'll all still keep trying to stay one step ahead of the attackers.
One-way hash functions are supposed to have two properties. One, they're one way. This means that it is easy to take a message and compute the hash value, but it's impossible to take a hash value and recreate the original message. (By "impossible" I mean "can't be done in any reasonable amount of time.") Two, they're collision free. This means that it is impossible to find two messages that hash to the same hash value.
This is funny. These two properties, discounting the redefinition of impossible, are mutually exclusive. If each message hashes to a unique value, and there are no collisions, then recreating the original message from the hash is as simple as putting a million monkeys to work writing a million works of gibberish and store the hash and gibberish in a dictionary. If you instructed your monkeys to start from the smallest works of gibberish and work towards the longer works, your dictionary would be complete for any message whose length is equal to or less than the longest message in the dictionary.
Hence Schneier's explanation of the word "impossible", which was "can't be done in a reasonable amount of time". The criteria for grading pretty much all encryption is whether it costs more in resources to break the encryption than what the decrypted information would be worth. Truly "impossible" encryption is an impossibility in and of itself. All you can do is make it not worth someone's time and effort to try to break it.
So you're right, that the goal of cryptography (including hash functions) is contradictory, which means that some compromises must be made. The trick is finding how to make reasonable compromises so that you have a useable system that's still relatively secure (and Schneier is always the first to say that 'secure' is always relative).
That's why Joe Schmoe can't just make up his own encryption schemes and expect it to be secure, because it's hard work and takes a lot of understanding. That's why MD5 and SHA can't last forever. That's why they're taking proposals from smart people (excuse me, teams of people) like Schneier to come up with new hash methods, which will also have a limited lifespan as people find ways to break them.
All we can do is to come up with the best solution we can for now, and in a few years, we'll need something better.
But a greater part is that Ubuntu is just plain faster. It uses less RAM, it hits the disk less, and it just runs faster.
I'm not sure about that claim of hitting the disk less. At home I dual boot my P4 3.4 GHz (with HT) machine between XP/Ubuntu 8.04 (actually 8.10 as of this morning, but I haven't really used 8.10 yet on it). Granted, I only have 512 MB of RAM, but the old 20 GB IDE hard drive in there is always clicking and grinding away whenever I do anything. XP on that system is using a newer, larger SATA drive, so I can't really compare that directly, but previously I used the same 20GB hdd in a P3/600MHz machine running XP with less RAM, and the hard drive was still not nearly as noisy as it is now in Ubuntu.
The other annoying thing is that if I'm trying to do 2 things at once, especially if I'm using Firefox while updating my system with apt-get or Synaptic, then Firefox will periodically stop responding and get all grayed out. After an inconvenient wait time, it comes back and I can use it a little, but in the case of apt updates, Firefox is non-responsive much more than it is responsive. If there's any tuning I can do to fix that, I'd love to know.
Looking around at newegg and tigerdirect, I only see microSD cards up to 8GB, and the cheapest price I saw on those was about $35. This means that there's no really direct comparison with the 16GB iPhone (until 16GB microSD cards become more readily available), and makes it $15 more expensive than the 8GB iPhone.
That said, microSD cards will continue to be availabe in larger sizes and for smaller prices, and that will probably happen more quickly than Apple will be adjusting their prices/storage capacities. No to mention that T-Mobile's unlimited data plan for the G1 is $5 cheaper than AT&T's plan for the iPhone 3G, and the T-Mobile plan includes 400 SMS messages, whereas you have to add those in separately with the AT&T plan, so in the long run, the G1 is most certainly less expensive than the iPhone.
Obviously the G1 isn't going to be as good of a media player as the iPhone, since it doesn't even have any built-in video player, and audio only works through the weird headphone jack which requires an adapter if you want to use your own headphones. I guess the value in it really depends on how you're going to use it.
Flash 10 is supported for Opera on Windows. Not for other Operating Systems, though (apparently).
It looks like hulu still has all of the previous debates up, so presumably you could go to hulu to watch it live and/or after the fact.
...plus we're really interesting to boot.
And that's where you lose them. Mad CLI skills and a working knowledge of BSD doesn't count as interesting to most of the ladies out there.
I am not an economist (IANAE), but shouldn't that be sell on rumor (when it's high), and buy on fact (when it's low)?
That was going to be my original nitpick, which is why I bolded US (and forgot to unbold it before I changed and submitted the comment), but then I figured that since the documentary in question is probably from the US, Lennon did actually live in the US for part of his life (at least at the time of his death, I don't know about when the song was released), and the song, along with everything else JohnLennon/Beatles-related has been integrated into the culture of the United States, I'd switch to a different nitpick.
Well sure, pretty much all mice sold now use optical/laser tech to track movement, but not all optical mice are wireless. The post that I was responding to specifically made it sound as if the Qantas folks were blaming the optical tech for the incidents, not the RF communications tech.
Also not all RF wireless is Bluetooth. It may or may not be the most common wireless tech for mice nowadays, but for a long time mice were using proprietary RF connections.
The newsworthy part to me is that they had a hodge-podge of distros on a large number of servers, and they standardized on one distro which most people don't usually consider first when they think of a server distro.
Also, it's nice to know about what a large project like WikiMedia is using.
I second your comments on Gentoo. I had originally thought it would be a good choice for my MythTV box on older hardware... and it was fine, at first. After about two years of occasional updates, the updates got really painful. Updating config files sucked, and often packages wouldn't compile, I spent hours googling various compiler messages. At one point the mythtv package got upgraded to version 0.22, then it wanted to backdate it to 0.20. Unfortunately the desktop system I was using as a frontend was running Ubuntu, and I had version 0.21 on there, so things were all screwed up. I finally went to Ubuntu server, and it's been smooth sailing ever since.
If someone has the time to invest in understanding the whole portage system and knowing how to get exactly what they want out of it, and if they don't mind managing all of their config files after each update, then Gentoo is probably fine, and I'm sure it is ideal in soe situations. But it's definitely not for most people.
[standard Gentoo complaint]
Also, it takes a long time to compile stuff.
[/standard Gentoo complaint]