The cynical side of me says, "Wow, it's like they've re-invented TeX!"
But I know that TeX isn't always very easy to understand. And many people are more comfortable with CSS/*ML. I've worked a bit more with CSS/HTML (I use LyX for most things I write so I'm hidden from TeX), and I think I'd have more control as a result of having a better idea which knobs to twist in CSS. A few issues, though: first, compared to TeX equations MathML is a pain in the ass. Second, I don't know whether Prince would do a good job of formatting my equation-heavy documents if I made them.
Other than that, it looks like a pretty good system. Not going to pull me away from LyX, which is quite streamlined for what it's good at, but it does look like it fulfills the promise of CSS for print stylesheets.
You know, when the OpenSPARC article came around I didn't think there would be an entity able to directly take advantage of a processor design like that. Companies in China probably could. There still is a lot of work to do, and fabrication is expensive, which is why it's primarily deemed useful for research, but it probably could be used in the industry in China if the license allows (oh, hell, even if it doesn't...)
Ah, but don't most Universities with wifi force you to VPN before you can access anything? You'd have to be a student to do it and you'd be logged anyway. At least my University is this way.
On the other hand, there are various places around said University where you can plug in your cat5 and get to the Internet without VPN. Not the places where it's marked as OK to do so, mind you, mostly extra jacks in computer labs. I have a laptop but no wifi, and though I have no intention of doing anything illegal I'd never plug in in one of the general purpose University labs because they have lab monitors that would look at you funny. Same goes for the College of Engineering's workstation labs. But in the ECE department labs I do it all the time because: (1) no lab monitors, at most professors that you probably know (2) those labs are already a mess of cables anyway, so it doesn't stand out (3) relatedly, everyone re- and mis-configures the equipment constantly anyway for their projects.
Yeah, but aren't Libertarians also the strongest believers in property rights?
*laugh*
Though, honestly, this is somewhat a laugh of ignorance. Any Libertarians 'round these parts (and I know y'all are!) care to explain Good Libertarian (tm) position on which side to take when the Free Market and Property Rights aren't on the same team?
(For my money (karma?) I'd guess that it's something like, "Without property rights there can be no free market because without ownership there's nothing to sell; if your car is taken it's not part of a free market because you had no choice in the matter." At least that makes sense to me. But I'm not really a Libertarian.)
Just as it's only by convention that computers use binary (they could use any imaginable base representation)
Not so fast there. If you tried to build a base-3 computer you'd have some much more difficult problems on your hands in terms of the actual hardware, which would have to deal with three possible levels instead of two. Needless to say, that would complicate things tremendously and probably lead to more error as devices had to deal with three input/output signal ranges. Yeah, it's a convention that computers use binary but it's a convention with a good reason (a stronger reason, certainly, than that of the arabic base-10 number system, though that's not a bad reason at all).
If you're talking about software's use of binary, I think that makes a lot of sense too. The only time you really commonly see binary or hexidecimal these days is when you're working with memory addresses. In a 32-bit address space, it's nice to know that any number that fits in 8 hex digits is within the range of addresses (which is much easier than remembering some number that's approximately 4 billion but a little more), and using binary or hex makes bitwise operations like masking much easier (i.e. 0x00FF AND 0x1189 is 0x0089; in decimal that's 255 AND 4489 is 137). The reason it's easier is that each hex digit always represents exactly 4 binary digits, while a given decimal digit's value can depend on every binary digit in the number. So as long as we're on binary hardware, we're going to have lots of use for binary and hex in software.
As far as number of processors go... there's really no reason that three processors wouldn't work. Things like processors are typically added in powers of two, however... one reason is probably that it takes 2 bits to address 3 processors, and also 2 bits to address 4 processors. That is, that it often takes a much bigger architectural change to cross a power-of-two boundary (2 to 3, or 8 to 9) than to fill up to a power of two (3 to 4, or 9 to 16).
And as for the computer being tested, many dual-CPU setups like to have the exact same processor in both slots. I would go so far as to say that the vast majority of dual-CPU systems are this way, whether the motherboard likes it or not. This system uses two CPUs with 3 total cores; to the board and to the software this looks like two different types of CPUs, a setup that it might not handle so well. In this sense, it is that this particular test computer doesn't deal with the asymmetry well.
Just imagine yourself if you were able to be removed from your physical body. You wouldn't have urges to mate, eat, wouldn't get up on the wrong side of the bed, etc. You'd still have intelligence, but your motives would be different and you wouldn't be subject to so much outside interference.
I've gotta disagree with this one. It's not your stomach that decides that you're hungry, and it's not your penis/clitoris that decides whether you're horny. The brain does these things based on "inputs" from nerves in various areas. Depending on how you simulated those inputs you could have very different results. This new bodyless mind also would need various other inputs, relating to the senses. My incredibly unqualified impression is that the brain is pretty adaptable and could figure out ways to perceive what's going on even with pretty strange inputs. I'm not sure that it would really have any urges at all, though, if it was kept well-fed; it might just want to be lazy all day.
Um, you could stand to re-RTFA too. According to aformentioned TFA all of Google's pages take an extra measure that prevents this from working, but on Google News it's broken.
Nah, he's using vim: he just put himself into visual block mode, then canceled it. The *click* was a middle click, to paste into wherever he was pasting into. At least on this here funky laptop, that actually does a copy-paste, but unfortunately it only copies the first character of the line you're on; if you select more than one line in visual block mode it selects the first character of each line, separated by returns. What he probably wanted was Shift-V, Control-C, *click*; that would have put him in visual line mode and thus grabbed the whole line.
You're absolutely right. Nobody stopped DVD playback on Linux, or on any other particular OS. Of course, if you're running, say, Linux on ARM or NetBSD on the brand-new toaster64 architecture, it's not terribly likely that anyone has put together a legal player there, despite the fact that there are open-source players that would otherwise work fine on those architectures.
The problem, of course, is not that they want to stop playback on Linux, it's that DVDs use a "secret" format to hide their data. Whether you choose to buy DVDs and support secret formats is up to you. All I know is I don't buy DVDs and I do everything I can to support open and legal standards. Like DRM-free CDs, though I doubt that's something the media cartels will ever attempt again. Maybe I'll just buy a turntable and build a record collection.
(As an aside, who actually pays for a DVD player program for Windows or Mac OS? Usually a DVD drive or video card will come bundled with a DVD player for Windows. Shit if I'm going to pay 40 bucks and switch to Linspire so I can watch DVDs (although I'm pretty sure there are other ones out there) when I've already payed twice for the CSS license with my video card and DVD player. The solution: *shrug* just don't bother watching DVDs on your computer.)
It's not just that you don't need an "extra" username and password. It's that you don't need root's password. Users can do the things that are set out for them in the sudoers file without the admin giving them the root password and thus absolute control of the system. I believe that by default in OS X (and in some GNU/Linux distros as well) it is impossible to log in as root, and this is enabled by the sudo-style system.
RunAs, as far as I know, is much more like su than sudo, and no UNIX admin in hir right mind would give users a root password and tell 'em to use su.
The distinction is, of course, very important on multi-user systems, and less important on a desktop that is intended to be pretty much single-user. Today we largely don't walk up to a terminal/thin client and run programs on a mainframe, we all have fat client PCs that hit up servers for all the important data. The server should be able to handle file permissions for multiple users but it's unlikely that it will be running programs on behalf of those users. So a lot of people never run up against this RunAs limitation in their lives because they're effectively using Windows as a single-user system; therefore it never gets fixed. Sudo on UNIX systems came about at a time when many users on a system at once was a common mode of operation.
Re:There are several competing systems like this
on
High-Tech RepoMan
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
> You know what? A lot of poor people deserve it, so fuck 'em.
Now I take it you're not poor at the moment. I'm not poor at the moment. I'm in college, as it happens. If I walk around campus on a Friday (or even Thursday or Wednesday these days) night, what do I see? Hundreds of spoiled rich frat boys partying it up and basically trashing the campus area, leaving garbage all over the place, vandalizing property (I've had the side mirrors kicked off my car, and someone attempted to steal my bike, which was locked to itself because there was no space in the rack; this attempt apparently led to the lock getting stuck in the spokes, hopefully throwing the would-be thief painfully to the ground). When I arrive at class, these people walk in and talk through the lecture about how they're going to spend the evening at bar crawls, or how they need to restore the prestige of their fraternity by increasing the level of hazing (I literally heard this conversation directly behind me in an engineering class, it was surreal). They pass their classes because they have files at the frat of old homework assignments that they copy. They get their college degree and get well-paying jobs, even if they slacked their way through; nobody cares because the jobs don't really require much intelligence anyway. They might get promoted into management through some kind of good-old-boy-ish network that they're in because they have a college degree and fit into the culture (where "the culture" == "yay conspicuous consumption" + "yay to sexism and classism with a subtle hint of racism sometimes" + "yay manipulative personalities and objectification"). These kids are quite rich; they wear the latest fashionable clothing and clearly they aren't paying a cent towards their education (if they were they wouldn't have time for all the barcrawls and hazing).
What I said is not true of everyone in any particular situation; there are plenty of good people with money, there are plenty of good people in the Greek system. But if a lot of poor people deserve to be poor, then there are also a lot of rich people that deserve it just as much. They're just lucky enough to have their future well-being handed to them no matter how much they choose to screw around.
In software all you really need is trade secret protection for the source code and your build process, and copyright protection for the binaries. Unless you have a license like the GPL that explicitly spells it out I don't think there's any legal connection between binaries and source.
IIRC the Sony CDs have perfectly valid audio tracks plus a data track (is this correct terminology?). The data track contains some stuff that takes advantage of Windows autorun to install the rootkit. I'm pretty sure that since everything in the audio tracks is completely uncorrupted CD Audio it meets the Red Book standard.
I may be in the minority of/. readers: I don't really know the story of Mitnik. But if GP is accurate, he spent time in jail. You can't put a corporation in jail. $100,000 is a slap on the wrist; probably any fine that will be assessed is a slap on the wrist and probably is just a drop in the bucket of all the money that Sony will spend on legal matters in any given year. But if you fine a corporation enough to actually hurt it, a lot of innocent people lose jobs. So what's the solution to this?
The actual people that did the hacking were working for this "First4Internet" company. Anyone that designed, wrote or approved a part of the software deemed to be inappropriate could face jail time. There were people at Sony that approved this technology for use on CDs; they could face jail time. There were people at Sony that knew that their software included a rootkit and insecure kernel modifications, and yet claimed otherwise; they could face fraud charges (for an individual to say, "I am not a crook," is legal, but to knowingly lie about a product offered for sale is fraud). Anyone with much knowledge of the workings of this product should have known that it was illegal, just as Kevin Mitnik or any other cracker surely knows that whatever he does (like I said, I have no idea what it was that he did) is illegal. That would be equal justice.
I think Opera makes headlines not necessarily because lots of people use it but because people writing articles about web browsers care about web browsing and thus are quite likely to have tried Opera. Most people I know that have tried Opera are quite impressed by it, even if they don't use it every day. I use Firefox on the machine I'm posting from (a GNU/Linux box with a GB of RAM) but on machines without the RAM or processing power I almost always install Opera instead. There are a few things I prefer about the look'n'feel of FF, and how much it can be customized, but Opera's performance on otherwise slow computers is really impressive.
So I guess it's kind of like why many web sites discussing operating systems discuss desktop Unixes when for most people their OS decision is "XP Home or XP Pro?" More that the author is interested than the readers.
Well, it's not exactly too healthy to spend an excessive amount of your energy on sex, regardless of what your particular tastes are. Deviant is almost certainly the wrong word, because "excess heterosexuality" in the form of frequent, random, casual sexual encounters, is accepted and even celebrated by large parts of the population, even those that don't participate in it (in my particular location, at least, which is a large USian college campus). But if not deviant, certainly unhealthy.
Compiler optimizations don't create faster code than a decent human coder, even for, say, x86. They just do it much quicker and make the code easier to debug/reuse. On most big systems (say, a 3D game on a PC or game console) the complexity of the programs makes using an optimizing compiler an acceptable tradeoff (and thus people have invested much work in making good compilers); on smaller embedded systems like DSPs in cell phones, it still makes sense to have hand-optimized code because it can save the company money if the code requires less expensive hardware. Now I'm sure the gap isn't nearly as large on x86, but hand-optimized assembler on DSPs can sometimes be up to ten times faster than the output from a good optimizing compiler. If you can save more money on slower (and less power-hungry) chips than you would save from your programmers working fewer hours on the code, then assembler is the way to go.
Still, it might make sense to code particularly performance-intensive and frequently run routines in assembler for big programs if you're not getting adequate performance. Such a thing could even be applied to the Linux kernel, if someone wanted to put in the time: take frequently-run routines and code them up in assembler for a few common architectures. They'd have to be re-coded every time the C code changed, so it would be hard to maintain... and I don't really know if the performance increase would be worth the effort (or the complication of the build process) in that case.
I think it's pretty widely accepted that it was on a page he made as a joke making fun of some similarly-worded actual manifesto whose name I can't recall.
Because this whole problem is about what the human observes. You could choose some other human standing outside of the room in which this takes place, who would walk into this room eventually and either: a human that has opened the box and seen a dead cat and an ant that has seen a dead cat; or a human that has opened the box and seen a live cat and an ant that has seen a live cat.
And that room could be inside a much larger house, and that house inside one of those pretentious "gated communities", which is inside a country which will be observed by some foreigner passing through customs as either (a) mourning or (b) not mourning the death of its most beloved catizen.
I'm not sure you understand what a "standard XML file" is; an XML file is just meaningless (but nicely organized) data if it doesn't have some kind of "schema" associated with it, telling what that data means. XML office formats use a schema that gives the data meaning in terms of word processing or spreadsheet documents. If you can't write files using that schema without violating a patent, and if you can't obtain a patent license for some reason, then you're pretty much stuck if you try to write out compatible files. There's no "standard" definition of XML for word processing or spreadsheet documents; there's OpenDocument and there are the MS Office formats.
80 may be obsolete, historical and arbitrary, but it's something that will work for just about everyone. Few people have terminals narrower than 80, and most editors default to start up at 80. If I write my code at 80, anyone that wants to read it can without having to mess with anything.
Besides, how often do you write code with nothing else on the screen? If one window of code takes only half the screen, the other half can be used on another window full of code (which is often very useful, and a much more efficeint use of space than showing the ends of a few long lines) or documentation. 80 works nicely for this on most systems with decent monitors and reasonable font sizes (i.e. not the gvim default on Windows... yuck...)
User mopes around for a bit, reformats his hard drive, downloads the security updates and cuts down on the shady fetish pornsites for a week or so. You can really mess with people in more subtle ways... delete sections of random files, insert naughty words into important documents... leave hints around the filesystem that the user's significant other is cheating (for even better effect, include references to e-mail addresses of other pwn3d users).
We can't call people morons just because they don't have an excess of money, didn't grow up in front of a computer monitor and want to use their computers as training tools for work rather than as a means to recreate on Slashdot like you and I.
I love messing with my system, and I run Gentoo at home. I can handle going from Fluxbox to Explorer, or from bash to cmd.exe. A lot of people don't have the patience in that particular realm, and many of them are even quite smart.
Slashdot Mirror
The cynical side of me says, "Wow, it's like they've re-invented TeX!"
But I know that TeX isn't always very easy to understand. And many people are more comfortable with CSS/*ML. I've worked a bit more with CSS/HTML (I use LyX for most things I write so I'm hidden from TeX), and I think I'd have more control as a result of having a better idea which knobs to twist in CSS. A few issues, though: first, compared to TeX equations MathML is a pain in the ass. Second, I don't know whether Prince would do a good job of formatting my equation-heavy documents if I made them.
Other than that, it looks like a pretty good system. Not going to pull me away from LyX, which is quite streamlined for what it's good at, but it does look like it fulfills the promise of CSS for print stylesheets.
You know, when the OpenSPARC article came around I didn't think there would be an entity able to directly take advantage of a processor design like that. Companies in China probably could. There still is a lot of work to do, and fabrication is expensive, which is why it's primarily deemed useful for research, but it probably could be used in the industry in China if the license allows (oh, hell, even if it doesn't...)
Ah, but don't most Universities with wifi force you to VPN before you can access anything? You'd have to be a student to do it and you'd be logged anyway. At least my University is this way.
On the other hand, there are various places around said University where you can plug in your cat5 and get to the Internet without VPN. Not the places where it's marked as OK to do so, mind you, mostly extra jacks in computer labs. I have a laptop but no wifi, and though I have no intention of doing anything illegal I'd never plug in in one of the general purpose University labs because they have lab monitors that would look at you funny. Same goes for the College of Engineering's workstation labs. But in the ECE department labs I do it all the time because: (1) no lab monitors, at most professors that you probably know (2) those labs are already a mess of cables anyway, so it doesn't stand out (3) relatedly, everyone re- and mis-configures the equipment constantly anyway for their projects.
Yeah, but aren't Libertarians also the strongest believers in property rights?
*laugh*
Though, honestly, this is somewhat a laugh of ignorance. Any Libertarians 'round these parts (and I know y'all are!) care to explain Good Libertarian (tm) position on which side to take when the Free Market and Property Rights aren't on the same team?
(For my money (karma?) I'd guess that it's something like, "Without property rights there can be no free market because without ownership there's nothing to sell; if your car is taken it's not part of a free market because you had no choice in the matter." At least that makes sense to me. But I'm not really a Libertarian.)
Just as it's only by convention that computers use binary (they could use any imaginable base representation)
Not so fast there. If you tried to build a base-3 computer you'd have some much more difficult problems on your hands in terms of the actual hardware, which would have to deal with three possible levels instead of two. Needless to say, that would complicate things tremendously and probably lead to more error as devices had to deal with three input/output signal ranges. Yeah, it's a convention that computers use binary but it's a convention with a good reason (a stronger reason, certainly, than that of the arabic base-10 number system, though that's not a bad reason at all).
If you're talking about software's use of binary, I think that makes a lot of sense too. The only time you really commonly see binary or hexidecimal these days is when you're working with memory addresses. In a 32-bit address space, it's nice to know that any number that fits in 8 hex digits is within the range of addresses (which is much easier than remembering some number that's approximately 4 billion but a little more), and using binary or hex makes bitwise operations like masking much easier (i.e. 0x00FF AND 0x1189 is 0x0089; in decimal that's 255 AND 4489 is 137). The reason it's easier is that each hex digit always represents exactly 4 binary digits, while a given decimal digit's value can depend on every binary digit in the number. So as long as we're on binary hardware, we're going to have lots of use for binary and hex in software.
As far as number of processors go... there's really no reason that three processors wouldn't work. Things like processors are typically added in powers of two, however... one reason is probably that it takes 2 bits to address 3 processors, and also 2 bits to address 4 processors. That is, that it often takes a much bigger architectural change to cross a power-of-two boundary (2 to 3, or 8 to 9) than to fill up to a power of two (3 to 4, or 9 to 16).
And as for the computer being tested, many dual-CPU setups like to have the exact same processor in both slots. I would go so far as to say that the vast majority of dual-CPU systems are this way, whether the motherboard likes it or not. This system uses two CPUs with 3 total cores; to the board and to the software this looks like two different types of CPUs, a setup that it might not handle so well. In this sense, it is that this particular test computer doesn't deal with the asymmetry well.
Just imagine yourself if you were able to be removed from your physical body. You wouldn't have urges to mate, eat, wouldn't get up on the wrong side of the bed, etc. You'd still have intelligence, but your motives would be different and you wouldn't be subject to so much outside interference.
I've gotta disagree with this one. It's not your stomach that decides that you're hungry, and it's not your penis/clitoris that decides whether you're horny. The brain does these things based on "inputs" from nerves in various areas. Depending on how you simulated those inputs you could have very different results. This new bodyless mind also would need various other inputs, relating to the senses. My incredibly unqualified impression is that the brain is pretty adaptable and could figure out ways to perceive what's going on even with pretty strange inputs. I'm not sure that it would really have any urges at all, though, if it was kept well-fed; it might just want to be lazy all day.
Um, you could stand to re-RTFA too. According to aformentioned TFA all of Google's pages take an extra measure that prevents this from working, but on Google News it's broken.
The more TLDs there are, the more money someone can make selling companies the same names they already have under other TLDs.
That's my impression at least; I don't really know much about DNS.
Nah, he's using vim: he just put himself into visual block mode, then canceled it. The *click* was a middle click, to paste into wherever he was pasting into. At least on this here funky laptop, that actually does a copy-paste, but unfortunately it only copies the first character of the line you're on; if you select more than one line in visual block mode it selects the first character of each line, separated by returns. What he probably wanted was Shift-V, Control-C, *click*; that would have put him in visual line mode and thus grabbed the whole line.
You're absolutely right. Nobody stopped DVD playback on Linux, or on any other particular OS. Of course, if you're running, say, Linux on ARM or NetBSD on the brand-new toaster64 architecture, it's not terribly likely that anyone has put together a legal player there, despite the fact that there are open-source players that would otherwise work fine on those architectures.
The problem, of course, is not that they want to stop playback on Linux, it's that DVDs use a "secret" format to hide their data. Whether you choose to buy DVDs and support secret formats is up to you. All I know is I don't buy DVDs and I do everything I can to support open and legal standards. Like DRM-free CDs, though I doubt that's something the media cartels will ever attempt again. Maybe I'll just buy a turntable and build a record collection.
(As an aside, who actually pays for a DVD player program for Windows or Mac OS? Usually a DVD drive or video card will come bundled with a DVD player for Windows. Shit if I'm going to pay 40 bucks and switch to Linspire so I can watch DVDs (although I'm pretty sure there are other ones out there) when I've already payed twice for the CSS license with my video card and DVD player. The solution: *shrug* just don't bother watching DVDs on your computer.)
It's not just that you don't need an "extra" username and password. It's that you don't need root's password. Users can do the things that are set out for them in the sudoers file without the admin giving them the root password and thus absolute control of the system. I believe that by default in OS X (and in some GNU/Linux distros as well) it is impossible to log in as root, and this is enabled by the sudo-style system.
RunAs, as far as I know, is much more like su than sudo, and no UNIX admin in hir right mind would give users a root password and tell 'em to use su.
The distinction is, of course, very important on multi-user systems, and less important on a desktop that is intended to be pretty much single-user. Today we largely don't walk up to a terminal/thin client and run programs on a mainframe, we all have fat client PCs that hit up servers for all the important data. The server should be able to handle file permissions for multiple users but it's unlikely that it will be running programs on behalf of those users. So a lot of people never run up against this RunAs limitation in their lives because they're effectively using Windows as a single-user system; therefore it never gets fixed. Sudo on UNIX systems came about at a time when many users on a system at once was a common mode of operation.
> You know what? A lot of poor people deserve it, so fuck 'em.
Now I take it you're not poor at the moment. I'm not poor at the moment. I'm in college, as it happens. If I walk around campus on a Friday (or even Thursday or Wednesday these days) night, what do I see? Hundreds of spoiled rich frat boys partying it up and basically trashing the campus area, leaving garbage all over the place, vandalizing property (I've had the side mirrors kicked off my car, and someone attempted to steal my bike, which was locked to itself because there was no space in the rack; this attempt apparently led to the lock getting stuck in the spokes, hopefully throwing the would-be thief painfully to the ground). When I arrive at class, these people walk in and talk through the lecture about how they're going to spend the evening at bar crawls, or how they need to restore the prestige of their fraternity by increasing the level of hazing (I literally heard this conversation directly behind me in an engineering class, it was surreal). They pass their classes because they have files at the frat of old homework assignments that they copy. They get their college degree and get well-paying jobs, even if they slacked their way through; nobody cares because the jobs don't really require much intelligence anyway. They might get promoted into management through some kind of good-old-boy-ish network that they're in because they have a college degree and fit into the culture (where "the culture" == "yay conspicuous consumption" + "yay to sexism and classism with a subtle hint of racism sometimes" + "yay manipulative personalities and objectification"). These kids are quite rich; they wear the latest fashionable clothing and clearly they aren't paying a cent towards their education (if they were they wouldn't have time for all the barcrawls and hazing).
What I said is not true of everyone in any particular situation; there are plenty of good people with money, there are plenty of good people in the Greek system. But if a lot of poor people deserve to be poor, then there are also a lot of rich people that deserve it just as much. They're just lucky enough to have their future well-being handed to them no matter how much they choose to screw around.
Yes. That's kind of what I'd always thought about RSS, and if it's integrated into an e-mail client it's even more so.
In software all you really need is trade secret protection for the source code and your build process, and copyright protection for the binaries. Unless you have a license like the GPL that explicitly spells it out I don't think there's any legal connection between binaries and source.
IIRC the Sony CDs have perfectly valid audio tracks plus a data track (is this correct terminology?). The data track contains some stuff that takes advantage of Windows autorun to install the rootkit. I'm pretty sure that since everything in the audio tracks is completely uncorrupted CD Audio it meets the Red Book standard.
I may be in the minority of /. readers: I don't really know the story of Mitnik. But if GP is accurate, he spent time in jail. You can't put a corporation in jail. $100,000 is a slap on the wrist; probably any fine that will be assessed is a slap on the wrist and probably is just a drop in the bucket of all the money that Sony will spend on legal matters in any given year. But if you fine a corporation enough to actually hurt it, a lot of innocent people lose jobs. So what's the solution to this?
The actual people that did the hacking were working for this "First4Internet" company. Anyone that designed, wrote or approved a part of the software deemed to be inappropriate could face jail time. There were people at Sony that approved this technology for use on CDs; they could face jail time. There were people at Sony that knew that their software included a rootkit and insecure kernel modifications, and yet claimed otherwise; they could face fraud charges (for an individual to say, "I am not a crook," is legal, but to knowingly lie about a product offered for sale is fraud). Anyone with much knowledge of the workings of this product should have known that it was illegal, just as Kevin Mitnik or any other cracker surely knows that whatever he does (like I said, I have no idea what it was that he did) is illegal. That would be equal justice.
I think Opera makes headlines not necessarily because lots of people use it but because people writing articles about web browsers care about web browsing and thus are quite likely to have tried Opera. Most people I know that have tried Opera are quite impressed by it, even if they don't use it every day. I use Firefox on the machine I'm posting from (a GNU/Linux box with a GB of RAM) but on machines without the RAM or processing power I almost always install Opera instead. There are a few things I prefer about the look'n'feel of FF, and how much it can be customized, but Opera's performance on otherwise slow computers is really impressive.
So I guess it's kind of like why many web sites discussing operating systems discuss desktop Unixes when for most people their OS decision is "XP Home or XP Pro?" More that the author is interested than the readers.
Well, it's not exactly too healthy to spend an excessive amount of your energy on sex, regardless of what your particular tastes are. Deviant is almost certainly the wrong word, because "excess heterosexuality" in the form of frequent, random, casual sexual encounters, is accepted and even celebrated by large parts of the population, even those that don't participate in it (in my particular location, at least, which is a large USian college campus). But if not deviant, certainly unhealthy.
Compiler optimizations don't create faster code than a decent human coder, even for, say, x86. They just do it much quicker and make the code easier to debug/reuse. On most big systems (say, a 3D game on a PC or game console) the complexity of the programs makes using an optimizing compiler an acceptable tradeoff (and thus people have invested much work in making good compilers); on smaller embedded systems like DSPs in cell phones, it still makes sense to have hand-optimized code because it can save the company money if the code requires less expensive hardware. Now I'm sure the gap isn't nearly as large on x86, but hand-optimized assembler on DSPs can sometimes be up to ten times faster than the output from a good optimizing compiler. If you can save more money on slower (and less power-hungry) chips than you would save from your programmers working fewer hours on the code, then assembler is the way to go.
Still, it might make sense to code particularly performance-intensive and frequently run routines in assembler for big programs if you're not getting adequate performance. Such a thing could even be applied to the Linux kernel, if someone wanted to put in the time: take frequently-run routines and code them up in assembler for a few common architectures. They'd have to be re-coded every time the C code changed, so it would be hard to maintain... and I don't really know if the performance increase would be worth the effort (or the complication of the build process) in that case.
There was already an article about this quote on /.
3 55234&tid=123&tid=95&tid=155
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/01/1
I think it's pretty widely accepted that it was on a page he made as a joke making fun of some similarly-worded actual manifesto whose name I can't recall.
Because this whole problem is about what the human observes. You could choose some other human standing outside of the room in which this takes place, who would walk into this room eventually and either: a human that has opened the box and seen a dead cat and an ant that has seen a dead cat; or a human that has opened the box and seen a live cat and an ant that has seen a live cat.
And that room could be inside a much larger house, and that house inside one of those pretentious "gated communities", which is inside a country which will be observed by some foreigner passing through customs as either (a) mourning or (b) not mourning the death of its most beloved catizen.
woooooooo!
I'm not sure you understand what a "standard XML file" is; an XML file is just meaningless (but nicely organized) data if it doesn't have some kind of "schema" associated with it, telling what that data means. XML office formats use a schema that gives the data meaning in terms of word processing or spreadsheet documents. If you can't write files using that schema without violating a patent, and if you can't obtain a patent license for some reason, then you're pretty much stuck if you try to write out compatible files. There's no "standard" definition of XML for word processing or spreadsheet documents; there's OpenDocument and there are the MS Office formats.
80 may be obsolete, historical and arbitrary, but it's something that will work for just about everyone. Few people have terminals narrower than 80, and most editors default to start up at 80. If I write my code at 80, anyone that wants to read it can without having to mess with anything.
Besides, how often do you write code with nothing else on the screen? If one window of code takes only half the screen, the other half can be used on another window full of code (which is often very useful, and a much more efficeint use of space than showing the ends of a few long lines) or documentation. 80 works nicely for this on most systems with decent monitors and reasonable font sizes (i.e. not the gvim default on Windows... yuck...)
Come on, what's the fun in that?
User mopes around for a bit, reformats his hard drive, downloads the security updates and cuts down on the shady fetish pornsites for a week or so. You can really mess with people in more subtle ways... delete sections of random files, insert naughty words into important documents... leave hints around the filesystem that the user's significant other is cheating (for even better effect, include references to e-mail addresses of other pwn3d users).
We can't call people morons just because they don't have an excess of money, didn't grow up in front of a computer monitor and want to use their computers as training tools for work rather than as a means to recreate on Slashdot like you and I.
I love messing with my system, and I run Gentoo at home. I can handle going from Fluxbox to Explorer, or from bash to cmd.exe. A lot of people don't have the patience in that particular realm, and many of them are even quite smart.
Grow up.