I have only ever once actually see the magnetic layer flake off.
A friend of mine, a long time ago, decided to run Norton Disk Doctor for DOS on a 3 1/2" floppy disk. However, he let it run for _several_ _days_. By the time I'd gone over to visit, it'd lost a decent chunk of it; the media's container was transparent in many spots.
... since I was able to play MP3 audio files with zero slowdown on a 486 system with a properly built (read: built specifically for the 486) mpg123 binary.
I could even encode such audio from an outside source without any visible impact on the system. That was... oh, hell, I don't remember what *year* that was, but it was way before Windows Vista.
If a 486 could do the work and not flinch, what in the world could Vista be doing that is so detrimental to system performance, given that we know that both tasks can be done without any real major impact on the CPU? Maybe they decided to implement the antithesis of CFS...
I purchased a machine with Windows Vista installed on it (an HP Slimline s7700n computer), and I attempted to play Guild Wars on it right after I bought it. It didn't work. My girlfriend tried all sorts of other things on it, which also did not work. I then took my old copy of XP Retail and put it on here, installed drivers, updated the entire mess, and whatnot just to see how well Guild Wars would work under Windows XP on this system, and I was disappointed.
Windows is not a very good operating system for running games on at all it would seem. My girlfriend still uses her Windows 2000 for playing Guild Wars and the other things that she runs, for example, and even that pushes her relatively new system to the limit. On my HP s7700n, I run Ubuntu Feisty and play Guild Wars at a far faster rate than with either XP or Vista on this system. I do use Cedega (and not Wine) for this, so I am not sure what the performance of Guild Wars under Wine is. But I *do* know that besides my other reasons for not using Windows, I won't be using it for games, either; if it won't run on my system currently, it's not a game that I need to be playing.
Not to mention that RPM is horribly broken, and has been such for years.
To be sure, there are some pretty ugly hacks that are out there (yum, etc) that try (and largely fail) to address the problems of the RPM package format. Now, if RH would either reinvent the wheel (why?) or use an already stable package management solution (e.g., the.deb/APT package management system), they would probably be just fine. But RPM is broken in the same large way as it was in 1996 when I first tried it: It doesn't handle complex setups very well at all.
Case in point: I went to work on someone's computer a couple of months ago, and what they were running into was a problem updating. So I tried to update their system for them (they were disabled and not able to read the screen). After 90 minutes of attempting to update, it finally bombed out on a failure to resolve a dependency for GNU coreutils. Which is part of the core distribution. Everything was configured correctly, but it couldn't resolve a simplistic dependency.
I moved them to Ubuntu, and they've been happy ever since. I was honestly hoping that RPM would have been fixed by now... I like the fact that there is choice in distributions, because each distribution targets a different audience. But it seems that the RPM-based distributions seem to target "people who like stress in their lives." Or is it that RH and its spin-offs want to ensure that IT people can keep their jobs by still having the occasional thing that breaks?
The GPL is about *granting* choices in the marketplace. One must really hide under a rock pretty hard to see that. Through the power of the GPL, I am able to play certain games that I really like, on Linux. Incidentally, these games are about the only proprietary software I use other than some things that are (currently) necessary for browsing on the web. And believe you me, when free implementations of all of those things are available, I will switch to them.
You seem to forget that many users are not like Richard Stallman. While I admire his conviction, he has little choice of his own at this point. He is such a die-hard for free software that there are many things that he will simply not use. I do not share his strict code, but I do share his ideas. That said, I won't shun a piece of software because it is proprietary--I will only shun a piece of proprietary software that I don't need, or that there is a free replacement for. And I dislike OS X for being proprietary just as much as Windows.
Steve Jobs, if I recall correctly, said that he wants things like DRM to go away. Well, that's pretty cool. Why not increase the available choices for everyone else and make it such that OS X becomes free? Many of Apple's customers will still pay for the operating system, I'm sure. If it were free software, I'd pay for it in one way or another. You see, it's not about screwing people like Apple or Microsoft, though compatibility layers can sometimes have that effect on a company if they are good enough.
Not really. While ext2/3 are, as I understand it, not *completely* cross-platform (I don't think the Mac can read ext2/3 drives, but I could be mistaken), between Windows and Linux it works just fine. Google for "ext2ifs", which I have used with high degrees of success in the past. The way that I keep my data on USB drives, I make a small FAT partition to house the ext2ifs installer for Windows systems, and the remainder of the device formatted as ext3. ext2ifs doesn't do journaling, but when the FS is attached to a Linux box it'll take advantage of ext3 features on the drive.
Unfortunately, even their in-house people have issues with computing.
Businesses like ComCast will eventually die off. The world of Microsoft is a world that the sun is soon to set on; companies that do not see this coming will get left behind... including Comcast and many other places that seem to think that antiquated, non-standards compliant, user-restricting technology is what's good for this world. If Comcast weren't the only provider of 8 Mbit access in my area, I wouldn't use them, that is for sure: I would use something else. But they are the only broadband option here (no DSL, either), and so I am kinda stuck (and no, I am not using dialup. I wouldn't even think of it).
As for what they do about Linux? I tell them that I have Windows. I lie my ass off to them. Why? If I tell them that I have a Linux router, a FreeBSD server, and four Linux workstations, they assume that the problem is with me. If I am calling because the modem has block sync, and is connected just fine, and that I can ping everything up to their gateway, which is (maybe) responding to one ping packet every *minute* or so, they still say "Well, it must be your problem." They know *nothing* about networking, which is something that you would think would be required for someone that, well, supports a network.
On the other hand, if I call back and tell them that I have Windows and say "I can't get online," they seem to know what to do with that. My theory? They just can't handle it when people smarter than them call in. Most technical support places can't.
Perhaps you ought to give GNU/Linux systems another try. Perhaps Ubuntu would be your forté, simply because the "esoteric command line stuff," as you put it, isn't really required. There may be some situations wherein a little bit of command line stuff might be required, but these situations are typically more rare than you would think, at least in my experience. It just seems that people that run into these situations are quite loud and rampant with it.
There are many systems that are more tailored for geeks, and then you have Ubuntu and some other systems that are really tailored to end-users. Overall, they're doing a great job with it, and it is getting to be better as time goes on.
Having run both Windows Vista (both the 32-bit and the 64-bit, beta and release versions), I must say that there really is no comparison to Ubuntu. Windows still has many problems that it hasn't really gotten over yet, mostly due to problems that still haunt them from the past, but also because when you install a retail version of Vista, the drivers that you need have to be sought and everything else. Contrasted with Ubuntu, which has drivers for everything on all of the PCs that I manage on my own personal network, and on other systems that I have installed it onto (which at this point exceeds 100). Other distributions of GNU/Linux are more lightweight, but you don't really need to be <em>that</em> lightweight on today's PCs, either: Windows Vista seems to require way more resources than an updated and heavily customized Ubuntu Feisty box running an up-to-date version of Compiz and Emerald.
Here's an experiment for you to run on your own, if you are able to do so: Take a relatively modern PC and a Windows Vista Retail disc and an Ubuntu Feisty disc. Have someone install both of them. To be fair, make sure that it is a computer that has hardware that is supported under both operating systems by either a third party driver or the operating system itself. See which one is easier (and takes less time and black magic) to get working. I'm willing to bet that the outcome will surprise you. I know for sure that the outcome will surprise you on the machine that I have as my primary workstation (a HP Pavilion Slimline s7700n PC). Ubuntu supports the hardware in this system even better than Vista does pre-installed, and runs quite a bit faster (one such example: <em>Guild Wars</em> runs like utter crud on this system under Vista, but runs perfectly under Cedega on Ubuntu. Windows XP runs it better than Vista on this PC, but not as well as I can run it under Ubuntu.
It might be pertinent to do some fact-checking before spouting off next time... but then again, this <em>is</em> Slashdot.
Hrm. I suppose that you're right. But then again, the C library is just a library that fulfills an interface definition, too. Parts of it or the entire thing can be reimplemented at will. I don't quite get, though, where you mean that the GPL would be the same as the LGPL in terms of the GNU Classpath system--The LGPL says that you must release the source to that which you *use* in your application, with certain restrictions. It can never grow to be beyond what it is, and the GPL itself is a forced-openware license. One can rewrite the needed portions of the GNU Classpath, for example, without ever looking at the GNU software, and comply with the licenses by avoiding them entirely. (Of course, proving that one did not look at GNU code is hard to do.)
The in-kernel vs userland distinction has always struck me as quite arbitrary. So in one case you're linked at compile time and in another case you compile them separately and go through system calls. Why should that make one of them a derivative work and the other not? In either case the file system can be taken out and you still have a perfectly functional kernel that can run other file systems. Same goes for graphics drivers.
The idea that I have always used has been something along the lines of "if the source code is <em>required</em> to build it, then it must be part of the source tree and thus creates a derivative work."
However, this means that if you have a program that permits plugins that can be called in ("linked") at build-time, and you do not need any of the program source to make said plugins (e.g., you can make the plugins using only an interface spec and none of the headers or implementation files from the program in question) then it is not something that is a derived work. However, if you have compile-time dependencies on the headers or the program itself, that means that the program is a part of the larger work, by the very requirement that it has a hard technical dependency on it.
This also means that the NVIDIA drivers are not likely to be considered infringing, at least by me, because there is a source part that gets built, and it pulls NVIDIA's universal binary blob from there. IIRC, the source part is open/free, and their binary blob is an operating system-independent blob that has entry points that the user-built portion calls into. I would say that this makes the user-compiled portion part of the kernel (because it depends on the kernel source to properly build, and is linked to the kernel by stubs that are put in place by the compiler, which insmod uses to perform the insertion into the running kernel), but not the blob, since the blob does not depend on Linux (e.g., that blob also runs on 32-bit FreeBSD, with a little help from a piece of "glue code" similar to what is present in the Linux system from the user-compiled piece of the module).
It is still definitely a gray area, and at least to my knowledge at present there is no tested hard-core definition of this aspect of the GPL. However, it seems like it is a safe test to use: Does the code require the source of the GPL'd program to build? Yes = creates a derivative work, no = independent program (even if there is a non-theoretical dependency on the larger work in question). It all comes down to a question of what type of dependency relationship exists between the "module" and the application. A good example is Flash for Firefox/Konqueror/etc.--Adobe does not need all of those browsers to link the plugin together. The plugin conforms to an interface standard, and is just linked in at runtime using the <a href="http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/00969539 9/functions/dlopen.html" title="dlopen() definition at Open Group">dlopen()</a> system call. Yet another example might be the telephone--I don't need to know the internals of the phone system to know how to use the interface that the phone plugs into, and how to send DTMF signals and the like. I send signals, and the rest of the system handles the switching and routing and the phone just sends/receives electrical impulses that correspond to sound waves when put through the rest of the phone's devices. The telephone is not a derivative work of a phone network switch, but it is dependent on its functionality.
The reason that "wins" for GNU/Linux systems are something that makes news--and not just here, but in many places--is because it is a good thing. It is a sign that people are beginning to see the alternatives, assess them, and use them on merit more than on "that's all we know". Of course, there are Windows trolls that will argue the points of merit until the cows come home, and then continue even after that; for fun on that one, why not head over to comp.os.linux.advocacy and see what trolls really do. You'll also see lots more in the way of what Linux does, that is not posted on/..
Honestly, whatever makes you comfortable is the best editor. If you feel that you have hit some wall with 'vi' that you cannot surpass, then it is time to try something new. Personally, I have tried many GUI editors under Linux (and Windows, for that matter), and I think that many of them do not get it right. For that reason, I do use GNU Emacs. It supports nearly everything you can think of, and if it does not yet support it, you can concieve of it supporting it by writing support for it in Lisp. I use Emacs to work on C, C++, PHP/XHTML/CSS/JS, Shell scripts, SQL, and more, keeping many of my projects in a Subversion repository. I am currently using "emacs-snapshot-gtk" on Ubuntu, with is a version of Emacs compiled with GTK+ support (though, still using the perfect "fixed" font that I prefer so much).
In any case, if Emacs makes you unhappy, try gedit or another simple editor that has some support for programming. You can also try the IDEs that are available, but I have felt that they try to take too much of the process away from me, especially for GUI projects, particularly in the case where they have been established already. I think that Emacs really is the best bet. Do beware the learning curve, though.
I just (this week) purchased a Toshiba Satellite from Wal*Mart -- model A55-S1064. I installed Kubuntu on it (Dapper Drake, Flight 7) and it detected everything out-of-the box without any problems or hassle.
Essentially, out of the box, Kubuntu supports the WiFi card, the video hardware (with 3D acceleration), the network, sound, and so forth. The HDD is SATA, and the system is wonderful. It's not going to break the bank, and it works wonderfully well. I haven't tried Ubuntu on it -- just the Kubuntu distribution -- but since they share the same base, I would make the assumption that they should work just fine. To be honest, Kubuntu supports this laptop better then it supports the hardware that was in my desktop workstation -- I was quite surprised when I found that out.
The A55-S1064 has 512 MB of RAM, 16 MB of which are shared with the video board. It comes with a CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive, and has a 1.6 GHz Intel Celeron M. For a Celeron, it's not bad.
Feel free to get in touch with me if you want the details from/proc on the system -- but I highly recommend it for general purpose use, especially with Kubuntu because it got everything right the first time, and I did not have to do any manual configuration on the hardware at *all*.
That's not exactly true. Think about the people that run Corporate America. They all have gone through college and yet you don't see people being smart and implementing Linux to replace Windows.
I find it kinda funny since in a few environments I have been in, in the past, have required me to have a copy of X.org or XFree86 running on Windows to run the Unix apps that I need to run... *shakes head*.
If Unix is the back and and works to present the front end through a thin client, why are the workstations running Windows?! *sigh*
Of course, IAOAP.:-P
These are people who are too lazy and don't care to maintain systems and support users. "Oh, yes, page X requires that you use Internet Explorer because of _insert problem here_. Yes, I know that the rest of the world doesn't like IE... But just use it here, m'kay?"
And within a few days, that admin has got tons of crap on their hands - and it *can't* be IE's fault, damn those stupid users.
There are people who just don't see the worth in switching away from Microsoft's product, which is a shame, because there are some pages that users will go to that do not work with Firefox/Mozilla/anything else (because of ActiveX). I don't quite know why people are such MS zealots, but it seems that they cannot see the amount of proof that, well, Microsoft sucks.
Nobody said that I had a vandalism proof car... I find it very interesting that you would liken the electronic, non-physical world to a physical one. While the two are interdependant on each other nowadays, that does not mean that the rules are the same.
That having been said, however, people attempt to break into my server all the time. People do not attempt to break into my car all the time.
It stands to reason that if you run weak software with no monitoring (or poor monitoring), and without the ability to find/discover things easier then by trying to break them, you're going to have problems and issues. It also makes sense, following that, IMHO, that you should maintain a properly secure network with ways to keep people out, even being paranoid even.
Not to mention that the legal liability on protection of some data (credit card numbers for example) rests with the agency holding the numbers. If the servers are compromised, the law in many locations holds the agency running the server at fault, for negligence.
If people were not so neglegent in the world of the vast network known as the Internet, perhaps it would be a more secure place. If people made better choices about their software decisions on Internet-reachable hosts, perhaps we wouldn't even be having a conversation - because there would be no need... it would be quite pointless. Now, as to whatever you may be running on hosts not on the Internet, that's your own choice. Make it insecure as hell if you want, but if you're going to put an insecure front on the outside, don't be shocked when something breaks it.
You've conveniently ignored my other point. What if someone truly thinks that household security is important, and that the only way to improve it is to make sure that everyone uses tempered glass windows. No theft on his part, no... he just breaks windows to show how cheap and poorly chosen they are.
No, I wasn't ignoring it. That's destruction of property. Re-read what I typed. I covered that. Same for the vandalism.
And, if the business is going to use software that isn't properly secure, they are, in my humble opinion, not in a position to be shocked when it breaks - regardless of why. The people in charge of security on those networks should *not* have their jobs if that's what is going to happen. There is a large difference between the physical world and the logical one, and in more then just this particular issue.
And you're telling me that you can submit a patch or help to fix it with any closed company, without making a scene that embarasses them?
I think that if the damage could be done in the first place, it's the fault of the software producer. Especially in the case of something such as Microsoft software, where people PAY for it and expect it to work as advertised. It's not advertised to have several breaches, it's advertised to be speedy and reliable.
Destroying property, and showing a flaw in logic, are two *entirely* different things.
The point is that you should protect what you can, and what you have the power to. Sure, you can break in, but you will in fact be taken away if you do, breaking and entering is the destruction if property. It's against the law, and has been for years.
OTOH, it should be against the law to prosecute people smart enough to point out the dumbassness of others. It shouldn't be legal to prosecute someone for showing a flaw in someone's thinking. What is programming? What is code? It's logic. And if your logic is flawed... and you're going to say it's okay to punish someone for showing you what's flawed?
Well, if you don't lock your doors, you're asking for someone to come in and take things. And, your insurance won't foot the bill for that, either, really... most insurance companies require that the doors be locked to protect loss from it.
If I have to force your door (like police do when breaking in), then I've done something that I shouldn't, and we know that gets to be punished, especially if coupled with theft or something else. However, when you have a product that *can* be hacker-proof (or at the VERY least, script-kiddie proof), and you don't make it such, who's wrong?
Why would you pay for something that's inherantly flawed, anyway? That's like saying, "That's alright. You keep making that crap. I'll keep buying it. And as more people keep breaking in, you go right ahead and keep using money to go after them, and raising the price of my product."
Why not ask for some better development? Or, if you REALLY want it to be not broken into, keep working on it YOURSELF? It's not terribly hard... and people should work alongside these kiddies and crackers, not otherwise. We would more likely then not have better product that way.
While a seventeen year old should be able to understand things like what you mentioned above, wouldn't you think that it's pretty bad that we're relying on things (as a society, really) that are weak and feable?
Why do we permit it?
Honestly, because the masses really don't know any better. I don't personally think that the kid should be jailed.
So many people have done things like this to try to enlighten, and they become suppressed, and the world takes a reactive approach to security, instead of a proactive one.
The people that are writing these things to get into networks and such are the people that should get jobs testing networks, programs, implementations. These are the people that should assist the world in creating so-called "bulletproof" systems.
And yet we throw them away, and these dolts that write software with holes large enough to drive a Mack truck through, go on making their large amounts of pay from wherever they work, able to hide behind the excuse that it works, or someone shouldn't have attempted the break-in/malicious code, to begin with.
Is it just me, or is this COMPLETELY the wrong way?
Eh.
"The unfinished pyramid means that the United States will always grow, improve, and build. In addition, the 'All-Seeing Eye' located above the pyramid suggests the importance of divine guidance in favor of the American cause."
I personally think that's a load of crap, but that's what Ask Yahoo found. Check that page and you'll see where they found it from.
Slashdot Mirror
I have only ever once actually see the magnetic layer flake off.
A friend of mine, a long time ago, decided to run Norton Disk Doctor for DOS on a 3 1/2" floppy disk. However, he let it run for _several_ _days_. By the time I'd gone over to visit, it'd lost a decent chunk of it; the media's container was transparent in many spots.
Oh, really?
Did you forget about assignment versus equality, perhaps? http://kerneltrap.org/node/1584
... since I was able to play MP3 audio files with zero slowdown on a 486 system with a properly built (read: built specifically for the 486) mpg123 binary.
I could even encode such audio from an outside source without any visible impact on the system. That was... oh, hell, I don't remember what *year* that was, but it was way before Windows Vista.
If a 486 could do the work and not flinch, what in the world could Vista be doing that is so detrimental to system performance, given that we know that both tasks can be done without any real major impact on the CPU? Maybe they decided to implement the antithesis of CFS...
I purchased a machine with Windows Vista installed on it (an HP Slimline s7700n computer), and I attempted to play Guild Wars on it right after I bought it. It didn't work. My girlfriend tried all sorts of other things on it, which also did not work. I then took my old copy of XP Retail and put it on here, installed drivers, updated the entire mess, and whatnot just to see how well Guild Wars would work under Windows XP on this system, and I was disappointed.
Windows is not a very good operating system for running games on at all it would seem. My girlfriend still uses her Windows 2000 for playing Guild Wars and the other things that she runs, for example, and even that pushes her relatively new system to the limit. On my HP s7700n, I run Ubuntu Feisty and play Guild Wars at a far faster rate than with either XP or Vista on this system. I do use Cedega (and not Wine) for this, so I am not sure what the performance of Guild Wars under Wine is. But I *do* know that besides my other reasons for not using Windows, I won't be using it for games, either; if it won't run on my system currently, it's not a game that I need to be playing.
Not to mention that RPM is horribly broken, and has been such for years.
.deb/APT package management system), they would probably be just fine. But RPM is broken in the same large way as it was in 1996 when I first tried it: It doesn't handle complex setups very well at all.
To be sure, there are some pretty ugly hacks that are out there (yum, etc) that try (and largely fail) to address the problems of the RPM package format. Now, if RH would either reinvent the wheel (why?) or use an already stable package management solution (e.g., the
Case in point: I went to work on someone's computer a couple of months ago, and what they were running into was a problem updating. So I tried to update their system for them (they were disabled and not able to read the screen). After 90 minutes of attempting to update, it finally bombed out on a failure to resolve a dependency for GNU coreutils. Which is part of the core distribution. Everything was configured correctly, but it couldn't resolve a simplistic dependency.
I moved them to Ubuntu, and they've been happy ever since. I was honestly hoping that RPM would have been fixed by now... I like the fact that there is choice in distributions, because each distribution targets a different audience. But it seems that the RPM-based distributions seem to target "people who like stress in their lives." Or is it that RH and its spin-offs want to ensure that IT people can keep their jobs by still having the occasional thing that breaks?
The GPL is about *granting* choices in the marketplace. One must really hide under a rock pretty hard to see that. Through the power of the GPL, I am able to play certain games that I really like, on Linux. Incidentally, these games are about the only proprietary software I use other than some things that are (currently) necessary for browsing on the web. And believe you me, when free implementations of all of those things are available, I will switch to them.
You seem to forget that many users are not like Richard Stallman. While I admire his conviction, he has little choice of his own at this point. He is such a die-hard for free software that there are many things that he will simply not use. I do not share his strict code, but I do share his ideas. That said, I won't shun a piece of software because it is proprietary--I will only shun a piece of proprietary software that I don't need, or that there is a free replacement for. And I dislike OS X for being proprietary just as much as Windows.
Steve Jobs, if I recall correctly, said that he wants things like DRM to go away. Well, that's pretty cool. Why not increase the available choices for everyone else and make it such that OS X becomes free? Many of Apple's customers will still pay for the operating system, I'm sure. If it were free software, I'd pay for it in one way or another. You see, it's not about screwing people like Apple or Microsoft, though compatibility layers can sometimes have that effect on a company if they are good enough.
Not really. While ext2/3 are, as I understand it, not *completely* cross-platform (I don't think the Mac can read ext2/3 drives, but I could be mistaken), between Windows and Linux it works just fine. Google for "ext2ifs", which I have used with high degrees of success in the past. The way that I keep my data on USB drives, I make a small FAT partition to house the ext2ifs installer for Windows systems, and the remainder of the device formatted as ext3. ext2ifs doesn't do journaling, but when the FS is attached to a Linux box it'll take advantage of ext3 features on the drive.
Unfortunately, even their in-house people have issues with computing.
Businesses like ComCast will eventually die off. The world of Microsoft is a world that the sun is soon to set on; companies that do not see this coming will get left behind... including Comcast and many other places that seem to think that antiquated, non-standards compliant, user-restricting technology is what's good for this world. If Comcast weren't the only provider of 8 Mbit access in my area, I wouldn't use them, that is for sure: I would use something else. But they are the only broadband option here (no DSL, either), and so I am kinda stuck (and no, I am not using dialup. I wouldn't even think of it).
As for what they do about Linux? I tell them that I have Windows. I lie my ass off to them. Why? If I tell them that I have a Linux router, a FreeBSD server, and four Linux workstations, they assume that the problem is with me. If I am calling because the modem has block sync, and is connected just fine, and that I can ping everything up to their gateway, which is (maybe) responding to one ping packet every *minute* or so, they still say "Well, it must be your problem." They know *nothing* about networking, which is something that you would think would be required for someone that, well, supports a network.
On the other hand, if I call back and tell them that I have Windows and say "I can't get online," they seem to know what to do with that. My theory? They just can't handle it when people smarter than them call in. Most technical support places can't.
Perhaps you ought to give GNU/Linux systems another try. Perhaps Ubuntu would be your forté, simply because the "esoteric command line stuff," as you put it, isn't really required. There may be some situations wherein a little bit of command line stuff might be required, but these situations are typically more rare than you would think, at least in my experience. It just seems that people that run into these situations are quite loud and rampant with it.
There are many systems that are more tailored for geeks, and then you have Ubuntu and some other systems that are really tailored to end-users. Overall, they're doing a great job with it, and it is getting to be better as time goes on.
Having run both Windows Vista (both the 32-bit and the 64-bit, beta and release versions), I must say that there really is no comparison to Ubuntu. Windows still has many problems that it hasn't really gotten over yet, mostly due to problems that still haunt them from the past, but also because when you install a retail version of Vista, the drivers that you need have to be sought and everything else. Contrasted with Ubuntu, which has drivers for everything on all of the PCs that I manage on my own personal network, and on other systems that I have installed it onto (which at this point exceeds 100). Other distributions of GNU/Linux are more lightweight, but you don't really need to be <em>that</em> lightweight on today's PCs, either: Windows Vista seems to require way more resources than an updated and heavily customized Ubuntu Feisty box running an up-to-date version of Compiz and Emerald.
Here's an experiment for you to run on your own, if you are able to do so: Take a relatively modern PC and a Windows Vista Retail disc and an Ubuntu Feisty disc. Have someone install both of them. To be fair, make sure that it is a computer that has hardware that is supported under both operating systems by either a third party driver or the operating system itself. See which one is easier (and takes less time and black magic) to get working. I'm willing to bet that the outcome will surprise you. I know for sure that the outcome will surprise you on the machine that I have as my primary workstation (a HP Pavilion Slimline s7700n PC). Ubuntu supports the hardware in this system even better than Vista does pre-installed, and runs quite a bit faster (one such example: <em>Guild Wars</em> runs like utter crud on this system under Vista, but runs perfectly under Cedega on Ubuntu. Windows XP runs it better than Vista on this PC, but not as well as I can run it under Ubuntu.
It might be pertinent to do some fact-checking before spouting off next time... but then again, this <em>is</em> Slashdot.
Hrm. I suppose that you're right. But then again, the C library is just a library that fulfills an interface definition, too. Parts of it or the entire thing can be reimplemented at will. I don't quite get, though, where you mean that the GPL would be the same as the LGPL in terms of the GNU Classpath system--The LGPL says that you must release the source to that which you *use* in your application, with certain restrictions. It can never grow to be beyond what it is, and the GPL itself is a forced-openware license. One can rewrite the needed portions of the GNU Classpath, for example, without ever looking at the GNU software, and comply with the licenses by avoiding them entirely. (Of course, proving that one did not look at GNU code is hard to do.)
The idea that I have always used has been something along the lines of "if the source code is <em>required</em> to build it, then it must be part of the source tree and thus creates a derivative work."
However, this means that if you have a program that permits plugins that can be called in ("linked") at build-time, and you do not need any of the program source to make said plugins (e.g., you can make the plugins using only an interface spec and none of the headers or implementation files from the program in question) then it is not something that is a derived work. However, if you have compile-time dependencies on the headers or the program itself, that means that the program is a part of the larger work, by the very requirement that it has a hard technical dependency on it.
This also means that the NVIDIA drivers are not likely to be considered infringing, at least by me, because there is a source part that gets built, and it pulls NVIDIA's universal binary blob from there. IIRC, the source part is open/free, and their binary blob is an operating system-independent blob that has entry points that the user-built portion calls into. I would say that this makes the user-compiled portion part of the kernel (because it depends on the kernel source to properly build, and is linked to the kernel by stubs that are put in place by the compiler, which insmod uses to perform the insertion into the running kernel), but not the blob, since the blob does not depend on Linux (e.g., that blob also runs on 32-bit FreeBSD, with a little help from a piece of "glue code" similar to what is present in the Linux system from the user-compiled piece of the module).
It is still definitely a gray area, and at least to my knowledge at present there is no tested hard-core definition of this aspect of the GPL. However, it seems like it is a safe test to use: Does the code require the source of the GPL'd program to build? Yes = creates a derivative work, no = independent program (even if there is a non-theoretical dependency on the larger work in question). It all comes down to a question of what type of dependency relationship exists between the "module" and the application. A good example is Flash for Firefox/Konqueror/etc.--Adobe does not need all of those browsers to link the plugin together. The plugin conforms to an interface standard, and is just linked in at runtime using the <a href="http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/0096953
The reason that "wins" for GNU/Linux systems are something that makes news--and not just here, but in many places--is because it is a good thing. It is a sign that people are beginning to see the alternatives, assess them, and use them on merit more than on "that's all we know". Of course, there are Windows trolls that will argue the points of merit until the cows come home, and then continue even after that; for fun on that one, why not head over to comp.os.linux.advocacy and see what trolls really do. You'll also see lots more in the way of what Linux does, that is not posted on /..
Honestly, whatever makes you comfortable is the best editor. If you feel that you have hit some wall with 'vi' that you cannot surpass, then it is time to try something new. Personally, I have tried many GUI editors under Linux (and Windows, for that matter), and I think that many of them do not get it right. For that reason, I do use GNU Emacs. It supports nearly everything you can think of, and if it does not yet support it, you can concieve of it supporting it by writing support for it in Lisp. I use Emacs to work on C, C++, PHP/XHTML/CSS/JS, Shell scripts, SQL, and more, keeping many of my projects in a Subversion repository. I am currently using "emacs-snapshot-gtk" on Ubuntu, with is a version of Emacs compiled with GTK+ support (though, still using the perfect "fixed" font that I prefer so much). In any case, if Emacs makes you unhappy, try gedit or another simple editor that has some support for programming. You can also try the IDEs that are available, but I have felt that they try to take too much of the process away from me, especially for GUI projects, particularly in the case where they have been established already. I think that Emacs really is the best bet. Do beware the learning curve, though.
I just (this week) purchased a Toshiba Satellite from Wal*Mart -- model A55-S1064. I installed Kubuntu on it (Dapper Drake, Flight 7) and it detected everything out-of-the box without any problems or hassle.
/proc on the system -- but I highly recommend it for general purpose use, especially with Kubuntu because it got everything right the first time, and I did not have to do any manual configuration on the hardware at *all*.
Essentially, out of the box, Kubuntu supports the WiFi card, the video hardware (with 3D acceleration), the network, sound, and so forth. The HDD is SATA, and the system is wonderful. It's not going to break the bank, and it works wonderfully well. I haven't tried Ubuntu on it -- just the Kubuntu distribution -- but since they share the same base, I would make the assumption that they should work just fine. To be honest, Kubuntu supports this laptop better then it supports the hardware that was in my desktop workstation -- I was quite surprised when I found that out.
The A55-S1064 has 512 MB of RAM, 16 MB of which are shared with the video board. It comes with a CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive, and has a 1.6 GHz Intel Celeron M. For a Celeron, it's not bad.
Feel free to get in touch with me if you want the details from
kplzthx is worse. I think that's the worst I've seen. *shrugs*
That's not exactly true. Think about the people that run Corporate America. They all have gone through college and yet you don't see people being smart and implementing Linux to replace Windows. I find it kinda funny since in a few environments I have been in, in the past, have required me to have a copy of X.org or XFree86 running on Windows to run the Unix apps that I need to run... *shakes head*. If Unix is the back and and works to present the front end through a thin client, why are the workstations running Windows?! *sigh* Of course, IAOAP. :-P
These are people who are too lazy and don't care to maintain systems and support users. "Oh, yes, page X requires that you use Internet Explorer because of _insert problem here_. Yes, I know that the rest of the world doesn't like IE... But just use it here, m'kay?"
And within a few days, that admin has got tons of crap on their hands - and it *can't* be IE's fault, damn those stupid users.
There are people who just don't see the worth in switching away from Microsoft's product, which is a shame, because there are some pages that users will go to that do not work with Firefox/Mozilla/anything else (because of ActiveX). I don't quite know why people are such MS zealots, but it seems that they cannot see the amount of proof that, well, Microsoft sucks.
Nobody said that I had a vandalism proof car... I find it very interesting that you would liken the electronic, non-physical world to a physical one. While the two are interdependant on each other nowadays, that does not mean that the rules are the same.
That having been said, however, people attempt to break into my server all the time. People do not attempt to break into my car all the time.
It stands to reason that if you run weak software with no monitoring (or poor monitoring), and without the ability to find/discover things easier then by trying to break them, you're going to have problems and issues. It also makes sense, following that, IMHO, that you should maintain a properly secure network with ways to keep people out, even being paranoid even.
Not to mention that the legal liability on protection of some data (credit card numbers for example) rests with the agency holding the numbers. If the servers are compromised, the law in many locations holds the agency running the server at fault, for negligence.
If people were not so neglegent in the world of the vast network known as the Internet, perhaps it would be a more secure place. If people made better choices about their software decisions on Internet-reachable hosts, perhaps we wouldn't even be having a conversation - because there would be no need... it would be quite pointless. Now, as to whatever you may be running on hosts not on the Internet, that's your own choice. Make it insecure as hell if you want, but if you're going to put an insecure front on the outside, don't be shocked when something breaks it.
No, I wasn't ignoring it. That's destruction of property. Re-read what I typed. I covered that. Same for the vandalism.
And, if the business is going to use software that isn't properly secure, they are, in my humble opinion, not in a position to be shocked when it breaks - regardless of why. The people in charge of security on those networks should *not* have their jobs if that's what is going to happen. There is a large difference between the physical world and the logical one, and in more then just this particular issue.
And you're telling me that you can submit a patch or help to fix it with any closed company, without making a scene that embarasses them?
I think that if the damage could be done in the first place, it's the fault of the software producer. Especially in the case of something such as Microsoft software, where people PAY for it and expect it to work as advertised. It's not advertised to have several breaches, it's advertised to be speedy and reliable.
Destroying property, and showing a flaw in logic, are two *entirely* different things.
The point is that you should protect what you can, and what you have the power to. Sure, you can break in, but you will in fact be taken away if you do, breaking and entering is the destruction if property. It's against the law, and has been for years.
OTOH, it should be against the law to prosecute people smart enough to point out the dumbassness of others. It shouldn't be legal to prosecute someone for showing a flaw in someone's thinking. What is programming? What is code? It's logic. And if your logic is flawed... and you're going to say it's okay to punish someone for showing you what's flawed?
Well, if you don't lock your doors, you're asking for someone to come in and take things. And, your insurance won't foot the bill for that, either, really... most insurance companies require that the doors be locked to protect loss from it.
If I have to force your door (like police do when breaking in), then I've done something that I shouldn't, and we know that gets to be punished, especially if coupled with theft or something else. However, when you have a product that *can* be hacker-proof (or at the VERY least, script-kiddie proof), and you don't make it such, who's wrong?
Why would you pay for something that's inherantly flawed, anyway? That's like saying, "That's alright. You keep making that crap. I'll keep buying it. And as more people keep breaking in, you go right ahead and keep using money to go after them, and raising the price of my product."
Why not ask for some better development? Or, if you REALLY want it to be not broken into, keep working on it YOURSELF? It's not terribly hard... and people should work alongside these kiddies and crackers, not otherwise. We would more likely then not have better product that way.
While a seventeen year old should be able to understand things like what you mentioned above, wouldn't you think that it's pretty bad that we're relying on things (as a society, really) that are weak and feable?
Why do we permit it?
Honestly, because the masses really don't know any better. I don't personally think that the kid should be jailed.
So many people have done things like this to try to enlighten, and they become suppressed, and the world takes a reactive approach to security, instead of a proactive one.
The people that are writing these things to get into networks and such are the people that should get jobs testing networks, programs, implementations. These are the people that should assist the world in creating so-called "bulletproof" systems.
And yet we throw them away, and these dolts that write software with holes large enough to drive a Mack truck through, go on making their large amounts of pay from wherever they work, able to hide behind the excuse that it works, or someone shouldn't have attempted the break-in/malicious code, to begin with.
Is it just me, or is this COMPLETELY the wrong way?
Eh. "The unfinished pyramid means that the United States will always grow, improve, and build. In addition, the 'All-Seeing Eye' located above the pyramid suggests the importance of divine guidance in favor of the American cause." I personally think that's a load of crap, but that's what Ask Yahoo found. Check that page and you'll see where they found it from.