not every distro of linux uses shadow passwords (think debian or netbsd)
First: NetBSD isn't a Linux distro.
Second: Debian uses shadow passwords.
Third: There's nothing wrong with reading/etc/passwd. POSIX even has an API for accessing it in user code. See the man pages for getpwuid, getpwnam, getpwent, setpwent and endpwent. For example, everytime you do "ls -l", it uses information from/etc/passwd.
In any case, there's really no excuse for not using shadow passwords.
Without arguing your point, I would simply like to know how you can reconcile that statement with the fact that an atheistic ideology (communism) was responsible for the death of 60M-100M in the last century and the enslavement of nearly half the world's population.
Communist societies forced atheism to get rid of competition for "the party". Their killing lots of people had nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with their leaders being power hungry asshats.
Various choices I've recently made (like using amd64, and dumping Firefox for Konqueror) mean that I've not been using a Flash player at all. So far, I've missed out on things like:
* The BMW website
* Countless links to clips on Youtube
* Advertising banners
* Homestar runner
I'm running 64-bit Linux, and I have Flash working in Konqueror just fine.
Install NSPluginWrapper, konqueror-nsplugins, and the Flash plugin, then go into the "Plugins" section of Konqueror's preferences, and click "Scan for new Plugins".
Once it's setup, it's trivial to disable it on most sites. Also, Konqueror has a builtin ad-blocker that works a lot better than just turning off Flash.
Some of these things might have been mildly useful, but I can't say I really miss any of it. I'm not sure having the Flash player installed is worth the annoyance and distraction it usually ends up driving me to. If I'm honest, Flash player has seen the most use when I've been bored, depressed, procrastinating or similar.
I agree that the benefit of Flash is questionable, but there's no technical reason you can't use it if you want to.
I'm quite enjoying being Flash-free.
Great, but don't make it sound like software limits are preventing you from using it.
The majority of open source development *IS* done by volunteers. Firefox is a little unusual, having originally come from Netscape, but 99% of projects wouldn't have paid developers if a lot of volunteers hadn't put in their time first.
I like MDIs. More precisely, if I can have more than one "thing" open in one instance of a program, I like being able to look at more than one of them at a time. Sometimes it's just nice to be able to look at two things side by side.
I'd say it's probably one of the top 10 reasons I use Opera over Konqueror or Firefox. And one of the top five reasons I despise Eclipse.
I mean who the hell was actually willing to use an operating system with adware built into it (or spend 30 dollars)? Not trying to troll, just stating that Opera started off with a terrible strategy, and they are paying for it now in the desktop market.
I don't know if you've noticed, but Opera isn't going for a massive userbase on PCs. Unlike Firefox, they actually have to pay their developers. And unlike Internet Explorer, they don't have a huge operating system and office suite monopoly to subsidize browser development. Opera making a huge push for PC market share wouldn't make sense, and they'd go out of business.
Their cash cow is mobile and embedded browsers, and that's what they focus on. Fortunately for those of us who use the PC version of Opera, their code is portable enough to run on desktops also.
Making their desktop browser available for free probably had more to do with publicizing the Opera name than it did with competing with Firefox and IE.
The problem with those examples isn't strncat. It's that whoever wrote them had a very poor understanding of C.
Tards who don't learn the language they're writing in are going to write buggy code no matter what language they use. You're complaining about the wrong thing.
Folks, I never cease to be amazed how many people tell me what I'm 'thinking' or what I've 'blindly accepted' without ever having really discussed it with me at any length...
Um, yeah. As long as you identify with a bunch of people who say the universe is 6k years old and the bible is without a doubt 100% true, I don't really need to discuss anything with you to know you're a moron.
Also, I apologize in advance for posting while drunk. I'm probably being unnecessarily harsh, and/or not quite grasping the point you're trying to convey;-)
...and this is the kind of argument that makes it harder for you to prove your point. Someone examined the same evidence and worked out another solution that you disagree with, and they're instantly "idiots" without the "capacity for critical thinking."
But creationists didn't examine the evidence and work out another solution. They read their bible and blindly accepted the creation story written by people who thought that the universe revolved around the earth, that people could rise from the dead, and that people could walk on water.
I think this whole thing is going to turn out like the earth revolving around the sun. In a couple hundred years, Christians will be laughing at themselves, saying "Gee, we sure were primitive back then", and they're going to believe in evolution just like everyone else.
Don't be an ass. My sister bought a new Dell recently. Why the hell would it even occur to her, a non-geek, to look into Vista's artificial limitations? You're begging the question by assuming that people should expect their computer to have those limitations in the first place.
It's not about the artificial limitations. It's about doing some simple, very basic research before spending a lot of money. Thanks to the Internet, information is easier to find than ever before. It's a little disappointing that so few people have thought to use it for something actually worthwhile.
Requisite automotive analogy: you go out and buy a new car. When you try to drive it to your mom's house in the next town, it breaks down at your city limit sign. Your mechanic laughs his ass off; all of them know that your model of car doesn't support inter-city driving. Didn't you research that before you bought it? Idiot!
I wouldn't have that problem, because I would have spent 30 seconds on Google doing some basic research, *BEFORE* shelling out tens of thousands of dollars on a new car.
Seriously, I'm waiting for a legitimate answer: why should customers expect products to be deliberately defective?
I'm not saying they should expect that at all. I'm saying that if people don't research their purchases, they shouldn't get much sympathy when they complain about known defects, intentional or not.
Wow, your argument holds SO MUCH water for John Q. Consumer, who bought a computer with Vista on it. He doesn't read Slashdot, he may not even understand DRM at all. All he knows is that the stuff he wants (possibly, maybe he doesn't care about this either) to play won't play like it's supposed to. That's his fault somehow? Thanks for enlightening me to that fact.
Look, I feel about as sorry for these people as I do for people who complain that their Hummers get shitty gas mileage. All it would take is a few minutes research, and they couldn't even be bothered to do that.
I'm glad we have people like you looking out for other people, dude.
I'm not a baby sitter. In any case, what exactly do you want people to do? I know! Maybe the geeks of the world can start going house to house, knocking on people's doors and telling them about the evils of DRM?
Seriously, the information was out there, all they had to do was spend 30 seconds on a search engine. There's really not much more anyone can do for these people.
The whole "Oh gee! Computers and technology are so complicated! LOLZ!!1! I'm such an idiot about computers!" thing is getting old. You're technologically incompetent. Wonderful. Either start learning, or stop complaining when it bites you in the ass.
I can confirm it is most certainly not true - I've been playing downloaded HD movies (mostly game trailers) with no issues whatsoever on Vista. It does degrade quality on Blu-Ray/HD-DVD discs, but I have no intention of buying one for exactly that reason.
Hell, I'd say that's even worse. Game trailers are free. You have to pay to watch degraded Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.
Why even bother with HD disks when you can download full movies off bit-torrent for free and play them at full-quality?
Of course! They agreed to the EULA, so they have no right to complain whatsoever!
They can complain all they want. But I hope they don't expect anybody to feel sorry for them. It wasn't like Vista's DRM was a big secret or anything. There are hundreds of sites all over the internet that have been pointing out for years how Vista was going to be a DRM laden piece of crap.
You can counter that the general public doesn't read sites like Slashdot, but who's fault is that? There's nobody stopping them. They could have researched their purchase, but they didn't.
So they can complain all they want while I sit here and play the world's smallest violin, extra special for all the idiots getting exactly what they paid for. Boo hoo.
Uh, no. Google pack appears to be very much targeted at home users.
Unless you get to spend all your time at work playing with Google Earth, fucking around with RealPlayer, using Skype, IMing your friends, and playing with photos.
I think the parent's point was that SCO lost because they were wrong *AND* because they decided to jump right in and go for the big money. There are hundreds of companies that distribute Linux, and most of them never would have been able to afford a legal team as good as Novel's, IBM's, or Redhat's.
If SCO went for smaller companies first, there's a chance some of the big players would have stepped in and helped out, but you never really know.
I may be way off base on this, but if I remember correctly, this is starting to sound like free market economics (supply and demand). As demand increases, so does price. In this case, supply for each individual song for practical purposes is infinite, so they will have to use an *adjusting* system to manage price. It solves several problems if done correctly.
Yeah. A bit off base. First of all, demand by itself does *NOT* determine price. There's a huge demand for water, and yet it's not very expensive. In an ideal free market price is determined by the equilibrium between supply and demand.
Having said that, now I'm going to explain why normal supply and demand applies very, very poorly to the music industry:
The supply of any particular song is infinite once that song is created. The marginal cost of one more copy is $0. It's an economy of scale gone mad.
Personal preference plays a *huge* roll in people's decisions. Several orders of magnitude more than in other industries. To illustrate: I'd pay $5 a song for some genres long before I paid $0.01 for any "gangster" rap song. Contrast that to buying most other items, like toothpaste, or a bookshelf.
There's only one supplier for any particular song. If I really like the Eagles' "Hotel California", my choices are "buy it" or "don't buy it". In a "normal" industry, I'd also have the choice "Buy this other one that's practically the same thing but cheaper."
By "specialist" I wasn't talking about idiots who specialize in one part of a particular programming language. I was talking about the people who specialize in writing software for one part of a particular industry and know that part of their industry very, very well.
For example, people who specialize in industrial robotic systems, telecom systems, automotive computer systems, avionics systems, etc.
To put it another way: Do you want the avionics in the plane your flying in to be written by 10 specialists with 200 years combined experience writing avionics systems, or by 50 general programmers with 5 years combined experience writing avionics systems?
But the advantage of being a talented generalist is you have a N+1 higher chance of remaining employed then someone that can only do one thing, no matter how well.
That's an interesting idea, but it doesn't work like that.
If you're a "generalist", it usually means you do a lot of stuff but don't do any of it very well.
But if you're very specialized and good at your job, it might take N+1 people just to replace you, and they still won't do the job as well. You can't just replace a guy with 15-20 years experience in a specialized field and expect a few "general" guys to take over. A decent employer will know that.
Bah. A hosts file is okay when you don't have a regular ad-blocker, but it really loses out by not being able to block stuff like "www.example.com/ads/*".
The filter list I use in Konqueror and Opera has over 700 things in it. Along with an ad-blocking stylesheet, I don't even see text ads in Google search results anymore.
I listen to music constantly while on my computer. It took me several hours to figure out how to install MP3 support when I first tried Linux. Even then, I couldn't play my videos either, which annoyed me. I dropped it because i had no reason to switch yet. My sister was forced to use linux when I lost my windows disks. The only reason she gave me for not wanting to keep it? She couldn't use flash on 64bit linux, which prevented her from listening to music on Purevolume. She even told me today that she misses the OS, but wished she could use flash. Music means a lot to some people.
To get Flash working on 64-bit Linux, try searching your distro's software repository for "nspluginwrapper". Technically it's a bit of a hack, but from a user's perspective it's fairly transparent at getting 32-bit browser plugins to work on 64-bit platforms.
Debian, at least, has it.
Also on Debian, to get MP3 and video codecs add http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ to your list of repositories, either in the Synaptic GUI, or in/etc/apt/sources.list. It's been a while since I first started using it, and I think you might have to reinstall or upgrade some packages that depends on the codecs, but after it's setup it works just like the official repositories.
Slashdot Mirror
Linking to the original article isn't done for quality. It's done because blogging tards don't deserve credit for ripping off other people's work.
First: NetBSD isn't a Linux distro.
Second: Debian uses shadow passwords.
Third: There's nothing wrong with reading /etc/passwd. POSIX even has an API for accessing it in user code. See the man pages for getpwuid, getpwnam, getpwent, setpwent and endpwent. For example, everytime you do "ls -l", it uses information from /etc/passwd.
In any case, there's really no excuse for not using shadow passwords.
Communist societies forced atheism to get rid of competition for "the party". Their killing lots of people had nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with their leaders being power hungry asshats.
I'm running 64-bit Linux, and I have Flash working in Konqueror just fine.
Install NSPluginWrapper, konqueror-nsplugins, and the Flash plugin, then go into the "Plugins" section of Konqueror's preferences, and click "Scan for new Plugins".
Once it's setup, it's trivial to disable it on most sites. Also, Konqueror has a builtin ad-blocker that works a lot better than just turning off Flash.
I agree that the benefit of Flash is questionable, but there's no technical reason you can't use it if you want to.
Great, but don't make it sound like software limits are preventing you from using it.
The majority of open source development *IS* done by volunteers. Firefox is a little unusual, having originally come from Netscape, but 99% of projects wouldn't have paid developers if a lot of volunteers hadn't put in their time first.
I like MDIs. More precisely, if I can have more than one "thing" open in one instance of a program, I like being able to look at more than one of them at a time. Sometimes it's just nice to be able to look at two things side by side.
I'd say it's probably one of the top 10 reasons I use Opera over Konqueror or Firefox. And one of the top five reasons I despise Eclipse.
Personal preference, I guess.
I don't know if you've noticed, but Opera isn't going for a massive userbase on PCs. Unlike Firefox, they actually have to pay their developers. And unlike Internet Explorer, they don't have a huge operating system and office suite monopoly to subsidize browser development. Opera making a huge push for PC market share wouldn't make sense, and they'd go out of business.
Their cash cow is mobile and embedded browsers, and that's what they focus on. Fortunately for those of us who use the PC version of Opera, their code is portable enough to run on desktops also.
Making their desktop browser available for free probably had more to do with publicizing the Opera name than it did with competing with Firefox and IE.
The problem with those examples isn't strncat. It's that whoever wrote them had a very poor understanding of C.
Tards who don't learn the language they're writing in are going to write buggy code no matter what language they use. You're complaining about the wrong thing.
Um, yeah. As long as you identify with a bunch of people who say the universe is 6k years old and the bible is without a doubt 100% true, I don't really need to discuss anything with you to know you're a moron.
Also, I apologize in advance for posting while drunk. I'm probably being unnecessarily harsh, and/or not quite grasping the point you're trying to convey ;-)
But creationists didn't examine the evidence and work out another solution. They read their bible and blindly accepted the creation story written by people who thought that the universe revolved around the earth, that people could rise from the dead, and that people could walk on water.
I think this whole thing is going to turn out like the earth revolving around the sun. In a couple hundred years, Christians will be laughing at themselves, saying "Gee, we sure were primitive back then", and they're going to believe in evolution just like everyone else.
It's not about the artificial limitations. It's about doing some simple, very basic research before spending a lot of money. Thanks to the Internet, information is easier to find than ever before. It's a little disappointing that so few people have thought to use it for something actually worthwhile.
I wouldn't have that problem, because I would have spent 30 seconds on Google doing some basic research, *BEFORE* shelling out tens of thousands of dollars on a new car.
I'm not saying they should expect that at all. I'm saying that if people don't research their purchases, they shouldn't get much sympathy when they complain about known defects, intentional or not.
Look, I feel about as sorry for these people as I do for people who complain that their Hummers get shitty gas mileage. All it would take is a few minutes research, and they couldn't even be bothered to do that.
I'm not a baby sitter. In any case, what exactly do you want people to do? I know! Maybe the geeks of the world can start going house to house, knocking on people's doors and telling them about the evils of DRM?
Seriously, the information was out there, all they had to do was spend 30 seconds on a search engine. There's really not much more anyone can do for these people.
The whole "Oh gee! Computers and technology are so complicated! LOLZ!!1! I'm such an idiot about computers!" thing is getting old. You're technologically incompetent. Wonderful. Either start learning, or stop complaining when it bites you in the ass.
Hell, I'd say that's even worse. Game trailers are free. You have to pay to watch degraded Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.
Why even bother with HD disks when you can download full movies off bit-torrent for free and play them at full-quality?
They can complain all they want. But I hope they don't expect anybody to feel sorry for them. It wasn't like Vista's DRM was a big secret or anything. There are hundreds of sites all over the internet that have been pointing out for years how Vista was going to be a DRM laden piece of crap.
You can counter that the general public doesn't read sites like Slashdot, but who's fault is that? There's nobody stopping them. They could have researched their purchase, but they didn't.
So they can complain all they want while I sit here and play the world's smallest violin, extra special for all the idiots getting exactly what they paid for. Boo hoo.
Uh, no. Google pack appears to be very much targeted at home users.
Unless you get to spend all your time at work playing with Google Earth, fucking around with RealPlayer, using Skype, IMing your friends, and playing with photos.
In which case, I want to work with you.
For home users? All they'd really need is "Save in Word format", and OpenOffice has that.
I do agree that the proprietary components probably tipped the scale towards StarOffice, just not the one you pointed out.
I think the parent's point was that SCO lost because they were wrong *AND* because they decided to jump right in and go for the big money. There are hundreds of companies that distribute Linux, and most of them never would have been able to afford a legal team as good as Novel's, IBM's, or Redhat's.
If SCO went for smaller companies first, there's a chance some of the big players would have stepped in and helped out, but you never really know.
True, but that really doesn't the GP's point. Unless he has more money than Novell. And I kinda it.
Yeah. A bit off base. First of all, demand by itself does *NOT* determine price. There's a huge demand for water, and yet it's not very expensive. In an ideal free market price is determined by the equilibrium between supply and demand.
Having said that, now I'm going to explain why normal supply and demand applies very, very poorly to the music industry:
What are you, a lemming or something?
I think we're talking about two different things.
By "specialist" I wasn't talking about idiots who specialize in one part of a particular programming language. I was talking about the people who specialize in writing software for one part of a particular industry and know that part of their industry very, very well.
For example, people who specialize in industrial robotic systems, telecom systems, automotive computer systems, avionics systems, etc.
To put it another way: Do you want the avionics in the plane your flying in to be written by 10 specialists with 200 years combined experience writing avionics systems, or by 50 general programmers with 5 years combined experience writing avionics systems?
That's an interesting idea, but it doesn't work like that.
If you're a "generalist", it usually means you do a lot of stuff but don't do any of it very well.
But if you're very specialized and good at your job, it might take N+1 people just to replace you, and they still won't do the job as well. You can't just replace a guy with 15-20 years experience in a specialized field and expect a few "general" guys to take over. A decent employer will know that.
Bah. A hosts file is okay when you don't have a regular ad-blocker, but it really loses out by not being able to block stuff like "www.example.com/ads/*".
The filter list I use in Konqueror and Opera has over 700 things in it. Along with an ad-blocking stylesheet, I don't even see text ads in Google search results anymore.
That article is terrible. It reads like a 9 year old trying to explain something he doesn't understand.
To get Flash working on 64-bit Linux, try searching your distro's software repository for "nspluginwrapper". Technically it's a bit of a hack, but from a user's perspective it's fairly transparent at getting 32-bit browser plugins to work on 64-bit platforms.
Debian, at least, has it.
Also on Debian, to get MP3 and video codecs add http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ to your list of repositories, either in the Synaptic GUI, or in /etc/apt/sources.list. It's been a while since I first started using it, and I think you might have to reinstall or upgrade some packages that depends on the codecs, but after it's setup it works just like the official repositories.