I have developped several open source programs. Most of them very small tools, none of them over 3000 lines as much. From those, only one has a number of users in the thousands and can be considered a "winner". However, I use two more of them _daily_. One of those two doesn't even have 50 users if any. There's another one which I don't know how many people use but probably almost none, but I did it for my father, and he uses it from time to time with great results. And, finally, I did another one for an online friend that, as far as I know, has used it successfully many many times.
So, are they losers really? If I use them, I don't care how many more people use them. They fill my needs. If I create a program for another person or group of people and they use it frequently because it fullfills their needs, how can it be a loser?
The only losers are the programs that aren't used by anyone, the people that asked for it or their creators. And how much of those are there? I don't think many.
I also use the MIT license for my programs. However, I include some extra text at the end. I took that text from the Wikipedia article. The text reads:
Except as contained in this notice, the name(s) of the above copyright holders shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior written authorization.
As you can read, it mentions "as contained in this notice". I think that implies that "the notice" is the full license text, including the last paragraph. However, as I said, that happens when you include that extra text. Maybe you are right when you don't include it, as it can be interpreted that the permission notice is comprised of the first two paragraphs only.
Apparently, glibc handles DST using some data files that describe the time changes depending on the time zone you select. They are usually located at/usr/share/zoneinfo, and they are also usually provided by a package. In my Slackware system, the package that provides, essentially, those data files is called glibc-zoneinfo. A quick search on packages.ubuntu.com reveals that the equivalent Ubuntu package, for example, is tzdata. So I would say that a simple update in the relevant data files and packages should do the job.
That happens in other countries too. I now own an Acer Aspire 3003WLMi I bought in Spain. Before buying it, I searched for a way to get a laptop warranted to work with Linux, given that it's usually harder to run Linux on a desktop. Side note: I got everything working in the end. It turned out the only options available at that time were online shops, and the minimum price for one of those laptops was about 1100 euros, plus shipping. However, every week I receive advertisements in my physical mailbox about special offers in nearby markets, selling Acer, Fujitsu-Siemens and other laptop brands for less than 1000 euros. This one cost me 900 when I bought it. And all of them have Windows preinstalled. As you said, it's actually cheaper to get it with a Windows license. Last week I received one avertisement about a Christmas special offer laptop, which looked good, for 700 euros.
The problem is that it requires binaries of dubious legality.
This is not exactly true. MPlayer or VLC, both using ffmpeg, can play those WMV streams without needing the popular w32codecs package. So they do not requiere binaries of dubious legality, unless you consider writting a decoder for those formats is illegal. Software patents are still not allowed in the EU, so I would discard that. However, if you have more detailed information about it, I'd like to hear it.
Someone has already replied this can be done under KDE (kwin to be precise). The specific procedure follows:
* Click on the application icon in the title bar and select "Configure window behaviour", OR * Go to the control center or KDE settings and the same options can be found under Desktop, Window behaviour. * There, go to the "Titlebar actions" tab. * Change the action of "Titlebar double-click" to "Maximize (vertical only)".
Reading some of the comments in here and from people chatting in the IRC channels linked from a previous comment, I see many people are worried about this. In one corner we have Bram Cohen, a man which designed the bittorrent protocol and provided an open source, multiplatform, reference implementation of it. He also has a website that linked to illegal content, apparently, and made a deal with the MPAA so it would comply with the law (DMCA). Else, he could have been sued and lose a lot of money, I understand. On the opposite corner we have the utorrent author, someone who is apparently a good programmer that provided a free, non open source client, which is tiny, featureful and runs very well under its platform, which is Windows.
Now, when I read people saying they don't trust (sic) Bram Cohen and that they will no longer update utorrent, or that this will be a bad thing, I don't really understand why they are worried. Is it for technical reasons? Do you fear utorrent will stop being tiny _if_ it's made multiplatform? What motivates that fear? Something from the past that I missed? Or is it because of the deal between Cohen and the MPAA? If so, why do you consider it bad? Do you fear the bittorrent protocol and official implementation will suffer because of that deal and that same situation will extend to utorrent? Honest questions, really. Please, englighten me.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I heard that SQLite becomes very slow if the database grows too much. This comes from Amarok users. Amarok may store its song database (and playlists?) using SQLite, and people with a big song database have reported it can become very slow, and the issue is apparently solved if you run MySQL and tell Amarok to use the MySQL backend instead of SQLite. So, basically, you may need a dumb data store as you say, but being dumb doesn't exclude being big, and with big databases SQLite is not apropiate.
The word "inverse" has several uses in mathematics. One of them is the one you mentioned, which is to say "inverse function". In that sense, working with positive numbers, the inverse function of the square root is the square, yes. However, there is also the concept of "inverse element" for sets and operations. It's a very generic concept that relates to an operation and the identity element for that operation. For the sum, the identify element is 0, given that x + 0 = x. The inverse element of another element regarding a given operation (and it's usually written x^(-1) for the element x), is one such that x op. x^(-1) = i, being i the identity element.
Again, going back to the addition operation, the identity element is 0, x + x^(-1) = 0. In this case, x^(-1) is -x. For the multiplication operation, the identify element is 1 and the inverse element x^(-1) of any x is 1/x. In my math classes in high school, the teacher always called -x "opposite x" and 1/x "inverse x". So, basically, if you read "square root" not as a function, but as a number, the "inverse square root" is 1/sqrt(x), and the "inverse function for the square root function", x^2.
All of this to say what? That it's not that easy and it can be discussed.
I'd buy a steering wheel and play racing games. That can be very fun and does not require precise finger movements or anything. Step on the pedals, grab the wheel and change gears with rough finger movements... or use automatic transmission;).
In theory, the so-called NVIDIA binary blob used by the Linux driver is not platform specific and is used across several operating systems. This means that when that blob supports the new cards, any future driver releases should support them. AFAIK NVIDIA has been pretty fast at introducing drivers for new cards, so I would expect the next driver release to support these cards. Whenever that is, I'm not sure. Maybe 15 days?
It must be noted that, while the sentence mentions "sharing", it doesn't mention P2P networks or anything. Moreover, what this guy did was to contact other people on "chats" (I don't know if he was using MSN or IRC or some other thing) and he was exchanging files with other people he met through email messages and normal mail (yes, they were sending CD copies to each other). This might have affected, I suppose, the outcome of the case.
In the newspapers yesterday they mentioned what's described in TFA, but today we were delivered the other side of the story, with the RIAA-equivalent organizations saying this doesn't set a precedent and that it was not very important due to the facts mentioned above. Nor that I agree with them or something, but it's nice to have both sides of the story and full information about what the guy was actually doing.
It's interesting that you mention that. Some time ago, I used ReiserFS as the filesystem on my laptop computer (I only have one partition, not counting swap). The performance was alright and it always took some seconds to mount the partition (this is a known thing for ReiserFS). So, more or less, my experience had been fine. One day, I was trying to view one JPG file and the program was unable to open it, so I wondered why. After examining the file, I found out that while the file size was alright, its contents were all binary zeros. I discovered similar things for a handful of files in my system, many of them in my home directory, I supposed because that's where the biggest part of the disk data is located and if a problem arose, it's probably going to be there.
At the beginning I suspected something had gone wrong while copying the data to an external USB hard drive and back to the newly formatted ReiserFS partition. But, some weeks later, I discovered a similar situation in a file I had created recently (after the data move), and that had been available there for many days. I am only a desktop user and I lack evidence on what caused this, but I tested my harddrive to see if it had bad sectors or behaved poorly for some reason, and nothing turned up. I fsck'ed the partition and everything was alright. I suspected this problem was due to ReiserFS, so I took the decision of switching back to ext3 with dir_index activated, and the problem hasn't reappeared again. I suspect I hit a bug in the ReiserFS code, and I lost my data in one or several of those ocasions when I left my laptop alone for some time and it powered off suddenly when it ran out of battery. This happened more times since the switch to ext3, but I haven't lost any more files since then.
I know this can be a particular case which may not represent the behaviour of ReiserFS, but as I read your comment I thought I had to share my experience too.
As I'm reading the comments in this article I detect an optimistic view in many comments that suppose that this is, somehow, going to integrate Gnome and KDE so they have the same programs, appearance or even, from the programmer point of view, that you will be writing applications for either KDE and Gnome without having to choose a specific environment. I think this is far away from reality. freedesktop.org has been very active and successful in providing specifications (and now libraries and command-line tools, it seems) about the location and format of different desktop resources. I think the goal here is that, for example, if a given desktop environment has an applications menu, it can go to a known place and display, add or remove items there, and the changes will be reflected in any other desktop environment you use, so all environments "share" the same menu.
As the article mentions, the desktop resources it tries to unify are the applications menu, the icons and icon themes, the mime types (that is, which application to be used for opening this type of file) and several other aspects or "concepts", if you want to use that word, shared among desktop environments. This is far away from a merge in desktops or desktop APIs. First off, Gnome is written in C and KDE is written in object-oriented C++. For that to happen, you either would have to start writing Gnome apps in C++ or convert KDE to plain C (ha! good luck on that!). I suppose now the Gnome people will proceeed to update/rewrite the relevant parts in the Gnome libraries and apps so that when they need to add a new icon set, they will use this new interface and the icon set will be installed "across desktop environments". The KDE people will probably proceed to either update the relevant apps to use the new API or maybe integrate the API using an object-oriented inside the KDE libraries. Or, if something similar is already abstracted in one or more classes (I suppose it probably is), refactor (reimplement, replace the internal workings) those classes and recompile. But, in any case, KDE will be KDE and Gnome will be Gnome, and each one will continue to work its own way and have its own libraries. The difference will be that they will now share another small library to allow desktop resources to be shared. And this can be extended for any other desktop environment using the new API, like it could be XFCE4 or Enlightenment or whatever. The new API is probably in C, so it will have bindings or wrappers for many other languages.
The grand parent may be trolling or mixing the idea of freedom of the program source code with trademarks. The Mozilla Foundation simply don't want you to patch their product and still distribute it under the same name and using the same artwork and logos. That looks OK to me. The source code is completely free as in free speech, and Debian is free to apply their own patches and distribute the resulting program under a different name and using different logos. As some people already said, Debian themselves follow a similar policy regarding their name and logos.
I'm not an expert so don't take me seriously about it, but: I think hash algorithms are very important when signing things. For example, SHA-1 is the default hash algorithm used in GPG to sign messages. When the first attacks were mentioned I changed that to use RIPEMD-160. If you download something that has a SHA-1 sum to check both correctness and autenticity, it's a problem. Someone could modify the original tarball, for example, introducing a trojan horse, and append some other not useful data to it so the sum matches. I don't know if that's technically feasible as I say, but I imagine the possibilities are not so far. And, furthermore, for me this is another important warning that we should move out of SHA-1 ASAP. BTW, if I recall correctly BitTorrent uses SHA-1 to verify the 256KB chunks. There, having a fixed-size chunk is an advantage for this case, but, as I said, I wouldn't trust SHA-1 much longer. A further step and people could build evil BitTorrent clients that, at least, could corrupt your downloads introducing noise chunks.
Apart from being quite trollish and unrelistic by today's Linux distributions standards, it seems the post is like a joke somebody writes each time we have a thread having to do with making Linux even more user friendly. The problem it's that it's not funny anymore.
Yes, he did something which was wrong by US law. This would've been legal in other countries, like Spain for example.
Take this with a grain of salt, because I'm not a lawyer and I'm not sure. I'm Spanish and, if I recall correctly, having sex with a minor, you being an adult, is simply illegal. It doesn't really matter if both of you agree to have sex. If she later says "I had sex with this man when I was 17 and he was 19", you can be arrested. I could be wrong, though. Please post a link and/or quote if you find out anything about this.
>...and you need to read it again and realize that if there are two alternatively theories presented (hence the words "rival explanation" in your quote), then arbitrarily picking one of them and presenting it as fact, makes you look like an idiot.
I agree partly. My intention was to mention both theories and strongly stating the one I think is right, for the reasons stated in the external link and all the information we have at hand. I don't think that makes me look like an idiot. I didn't hide any information, by quoting some sentences and linking you to both articles. The grandparent went on a rant with inaccurate information and still got modded "Insightful". Our discussion thread is already there, so you can get the picture and see what (s?)he is about.
> It was calle RUGBY FOOTBALL because kicking or moving the ball with your feet was some kind of hability demonsatrtions, and it was completely legal.
Sure, because you said it. And I already know you take your sources seriously.
> Asociation football? Yeah, maybe you forgot that the game is played by teams, an association of players. And also the football clubs are named after that so? maybe I can't read between of the lines of what you're saying because English ain't my main language. Anyway, if I'm wrong you'll keep playing american football, meanwhile soccer is a passion who runs worldwide. Oh, wait, north americans find it boring; they also find acceptable invading 3rd world countries. I won't expect anything reasonable from your country. HAHAHA, you even voted Bush twice!!! LOL!!!
I find this hilarious, but let me make one more comment. English isn't my main language either. I'm a Spanish football fan. And you still keep putting words in my mouth. I never said football was boring. IMHO, it's not. I haven't watched or played American football in my life, so I won't comment on that sport either. Oh yeah, and *I* didn't vote for Bush. You know, being Spanish and such... just in case you can't read between lines...
Did I say that about handball? Don't put words in my mouth. You then suggest visiting the FIFA homepage and ditching Wikipedia. That sounds like a joke. The FIFA homepage has a section about the sport history. Nowhere in that section an explanation on the name origin is to be found. In fact, we can find an amazing piece of text in it. Let's quote it:
The contemporary history of football spans more than 100 years. It all began in 1863 in England, when rugby football and association football branched off on their different courses and the world's first football association was founded - The Football Association in England.
Read that? RUGBY FOOTBALL. Amazing. A sport _mainly_ played carrying the ball with your hands. If you are going to ignore the fact that many sports have "football" in its name, that football as we know it (or soccer in some countries) is actually named "Association football", etc, you may want to go to the FIFA webpage directly and ignore the discussion about the name origins, forgetting about the rest of the sports out there which have "football" in their names. Oh, yeah, and never try to get a more general view and background information about the topic, by reading some sort of encyclopedia either. Get a clue.
You need to realize the name "football" doesn't stem from the fact that you play the ball with your feet, but from the fact that players play on foot rather than on a horse or anything else. You should read the Wikipedia article about Football (in general) and Association Football.
While it is widely believed that the word football, or "foot ball", originated in reference to the action of a foot kicking a ball, there is a rival explanation, which has it that football originally referred to a variety of games in medieval Europe, which were played on foot.[1] These games were usually played by peasants, as opposed to the horse-riding sports often played by aristocrats.
Slashdot Mirror
The ping of death made a brief comeback in Solaris 10. I find both vulnerabilities funny. Don't ask why.
I have developped several open source programs. Most of them very small tools, none of them over 3000 lines as much. From those, only one has a number of users in the thousands and can be considered a "winner". However, I use two more of them _daily_. One of those two doesn't even have 50 users if any. There's another one which I don't know how many people use but probably almost none, but I did it for my father, and he uses it from time to time with great results. And, finally, I did another one for an online friend that, as far as I know, has used it successfully many many times.
So, are they losers really? If I use them, I don't care how many more people use them. They fill my needs. If I create a program for another person or group of people and they use it frequently because it fullfills their needs, how can it be a loser?
The only losers are the programs that aren't used by anyone, the people that asked for it or their creators. And how much of those are there? I don't think many.
Something like...
MY OTHER GIANT SIGN IS SPELLED CORECTLY
This sentence serves the purpose of disabling the lameness filter that would prevent me from posting the above message due to caps usage.
As you can read, it mentions "as contained in this notice". I think that implies that "the notice" is the full license text, including the last paragraph. However, as I said, that happens when you include that extra text. Maybe you are right when you don't include it, as it can be interpreted that the permission notice is comprised of the first two paragraphs only.
Apparently, glibc handles DST using some data files that describe the time changes depending on the time zone you select. They are usually located at /usr/share/zoneinfo, and they are also usually provided by a package. In my Slackware system, the package that provides, essentially, those data files is called glibc-zoneinfo. A quick search on packages.ubuntu.com reveals that the equivalent Ubuntu package, for example, is tzdata. So I would say that a simple update in the relevant data files and packages should do the job.
That happens in other countries too. I now own an Acer Aspire 3003WLMi I bought in Spain. Before buying it, I searched for a way to get a laptop warranted to work with Linux, given that it's usually harder to run Linux on a desktop. Side note: I got everything working in the end. It turned out the only options available at that time were online shops, and the minimum price for one of those laptops was about 1100 euros, plus shipping. However, every week I receive advertisements in my physical mailbox about special offers in nearby markets, selling Acer, Fujitsu-Siemens and other laptop brands for less than 1000 euros. This one cost me 900 when I bought it. And all of them have Windows preinstalled. As you said, it's actually cheaper to get it with a Windows license. Last week I received one avertisement about a Christmas special offer laptop, which looked good, for 700 euros.
This is not exactly true. MPlayer or VLC, both using ffmpeg, can play those WMV streams without needing the popular w32codecs package. So they do not requiere binaries of dubious legality, unless you consider writting a decoder for those formats is illegal. Software patents are still not allowed in the EU, so I would discard that. However, if you have more detailed information about it, I'd like to hear it.
Someone has already replied this can be done under KDE (kwin to be precise). The specific procedure follows:
* Click on the application icon in the title bar and select "Configure window behaviour", OR
* Go to the control center or KDE settings and the same options can be found under Desktop, Window behaviour.
* There, go to the "Titlebar actions" tab.
* Change the action of "Titlebar double-click" to "Maximize (vertical only)".
Reading some of the comments in here and from people chatting in the IRC channels linked from a previous comment, I see many people are worried about this. In one corner we have Bram Cohen, a man which designed the bittorrent protocol and provided an open source, multiplatform, reference implementation of it. He also has a website that linked to illegal content, apparently, and made a deal with the MPAA so it would comply with the law (DMCA). Else, he could have been sued and lose a lot of money, I understand. On the opposite corner we have the utorrent author, someone who is apparently a good programmer that provided a free, non open source client, which is tiny, featureful and runs very well under its platform, which is Windows.
Now, when I read people saying they don't trust (sic) Bram Cohen and that they will no longer update utorrent, or that this will be a bad thing, I don't really understand why they are worried. Is it for technical reasons? Do you fear utorrent will stop being tiny _if_ it's made multiplatform? What motivates that fear? Something from the past that I missed? Or is it because of the deal between Cohen and the MPAA? If so, why do you consider it bad? Do you fear the bittorrent protocol and official implementation will suffer because of that deal and that same situation will extend to utorrent? Honest questions, really. Please, englighten me.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I heard that SQLite becomes very slow if the database grows too much. This comes from Amarok users. Amarok may store its song database (and playlists?) using SQLite, and people with a big song database have reported it can become very slow, and the issue is apparently solved if you run MySQL and tell Amarok to use the MySQL backend instead of SQLite. So, basically, you may need a dumb data store as you say, but being dumb doesn't exclude being big, and with big databases SQLite is not apropiate.
The word "inverse" has several uses in mathematics. One of them is the one you mentioned, which is to say "inverse function". In that sense, working with positive numbers, the inverse function of the square root is the square, yes. However, there is also the concept of "inverse element" for sets and operations. It's a very generic concept that relates to an operation and the identity element for that operation. For the sum, the identify element is 0, given that x + 0 = x. The inverse element of another element regarding a given operation (and it's usually written x^(-1) for the element x), is one such that x op. x^(-1) = i, being i the identity element.
Again, going back to the addition operation, the identity element is 0, x + x^(-1) = 0. In this case, x^(-1) is -x. For the multiplication operation, the identify element is 1 and the inverse element x^(-1) of any x is 1/x. In my math classes in high school, the teacher always called -x "opposite x" and 1/x "inverse x". So, basically, if you read "square root" not as a function, but as a number, the "inverse square root" is 1/sqrt(x), and the "inverse function for the square root function", x^2.
All of this to say what? That it's not that easy and it can be discussed.
I'd buy a steering wheel and play racing games. That can be very fun and does not require precise finger movements or anything. Step on the pedals, grab the wheel and change gears with rough finger movements... or use automatic transmission ;).
Can't he create a pine-patches project at Sourceforge.net and put the patches there? That's what I'd do.
In theory, the so-called NVIDIA binary blob used by the Linux driver is not platform specific and is used across several operating systems. This means that when that blob supports the new cards, any future driver releases should support them. AFAIK NVIDIA has been pretty fast at introducing drivers for new cards, so I would expect the next driver release to support these cards. Whenever that is, I'm not sure. Maybe 15 days?
It must be noted that, while the sentence mentions "sharing", it doesn't mention P2P networks or anything. Moreover, what this guy did was to contact other people on "chats" (I don't know if he was using MSN or IRC or some other thing) and he was exchanging files with other people he met through email messages and normal mail (yes, they were sending CD copies to each other). This might have affected, I suppose, the outcome of the case.
In the newspapers yesterday they mentioned what's described in TFA, but today we were delivered the other side of the story, with the RIAA-equivalent organizations saying this doesn't set a precedent and that it was not very important due to the facts mentioned above. Nor that I agree with them or something, but it's nice to have both sides of the story and full information about what the guy was actually doing.
It's interesting that you mention that. Some time ago, I used ReiserFS as the filesystem on my laptop computer (I only have one partition, not counting swap). The performance was alright and it always took some seconds to mount the partition (this is a known thing for ReiserFS). So, more or less, my experience had been fine. One day, I was trying to view one JPG file and the program was unable to open it, so I wondered why. After examining the file, I found out that while the file size was alright, its contents were all binary zeros. I discovered similar things for a handful of files in my system, many of them in my home directory, I supposed because that's where the biggest part of the disk data is located and if a problem arose, it's probably going to be there.
At the beginning I suspected something had gone wrong while copying the data to an external USB hard drive and back to the newly formatted ReiserFS partition. But, some weeks later, I discovered a similar situation in a file I had created recently (after the data move), and that had been available there for many days. I am only a desktop user and I lack evidence on what caused this, but I tested my harddrive to see if it had bad sectors or behaved poorly for some reason, and nothing turned up. I fsck'ed the partition and everything was alright. I suspected this problem was due to ReiserFS, so I took the decision of switching back to ext3 with dir_index activated, and the problem hasn't reappeared again. I suspect I hit a bug in the ReiserFS code, and I lost my data in one or several of those ocasions when I left my laptop alone for some time and it powered off suddenly when it ran out of battery. This happened more times since the switch to ext3, but I haven't lost any more files since then.
I know this can be a particular case which may not represent the behaviour of ReiserFS, but as I read your comment I thought I had to share my experience too.
As I'm reading the comments in this article I detect an optimistic view in many comments that suppose that this is, somehow, going to integrate Gnome and KDE so they have the same programs, appearance or even, from the programmer point of view, that you will be writing applications for either KDE and Gnome without having to choose a specific environment. I think this is far away from reality. freedesktop.org has been very active and successful in providing specifications (and now libraries and command-line tools, it seems) about the location and format of different desktop resources. I think the goal here is that, for example, if a given desktop environment has an applications menu, it can go to a known place and display, add or remove items there, and the changes will be reflected in any other desktop environment you use, so all environments "share" the same menu.
As the article mentions, the desktop resources it tries to unify are the applications menu, the icons and icon themes, the mime types (that is, which application to be used for opening this type of file) and several other aspects or "concepts", if you want to use that word, shared among desktop environments. This is far away from a merge in desktops or desktop APIs. First off, Gnome is written in C and KDE is written in object-oriented C++. For that to happen, you either would have to start writing Gnome apps in C++ or convert KDE to plain C (ha! good luck on that!). I suppose now the Gnome people will proceeed to update/rewrite the relevant parts in the Gnome libraries and apps so that when they need to add a new icon set, they will use this new interface and the icon set will be installed "across desktop environments". The KDE people will probably proceed to either update the relevant apps to use the new API or maybe integrate the API using an object-oriented inside the KDE libraries. Or, if something similar is already abstracted in one or more classes (I suppose it probably is), refactor (reimplement, replace the internal workings) those classes and recompile. But, in any case, KDE will be KDE and Gnome will be Gnome, and each one will continue to work its own way and have its own libraries. The difference will be that they will now share another small library to allow desktop resources to be shared. And this can be extended for any other desktop environment using the new API, like it could be XFCE4 or Enlightenment or whatever. The new API is probably in C, so it will have bindings or wrappers for many other languages.
The grand parent may be trolling or mixing the idea of freedom of the program source code with trademarks. The Mozilla Foundation simply don't want you to patch their product and still distribute it under the same name and using the same artwork and logos. That looks OK to me. The source code is completely free as in free speech, and Debian is free to apply their own patches and distribute the resulting program under a different name and using different logos. As some people already said, Debian themselves follow a similar policy regarding their name and logos.
I'm not an expert so don't take me seriously about it, but: I think hash algorithms are very important when signing things. For example, SHA-1 is the default hash algorithm used in GPG to sign messages. When the first attacks were mentioned I changed that to use RIPEMD-160. If you download something that has a SHA-1 sum to check both correctness and autenticity, it's a problem. Someone could modify the original tarball, for example, introducing a trojan horse, and append some other not useful data to it so the sum matches. I don't know if that's technically feasible as I say, but I imagine the possibilities are not so far. And, furthermore, for me this is another important warning that we should move out of SHA-1 ASAP. BTW, if I recall correctly BitTorrent uses SHA-1 to verify the 256KB chunks. There, having a fixed-size chunk is an advantage for this case, but, as I said, I wouldn't trust SHA-1 much longer. A further step and people could build evil BitTorrent clients that, at least, could corrupt your downloads introducing noise chunks.
Apart from being quite trollish and unrelistic by today's Linux distributions standards, it seems the post is like a joke somebody writes each time we have a thread having to do with making Linux even more user friendly. The problem it's that it's not funny anymore.
Yes, he did something which was wrong by US law. This would've been legal in other countries, like Spain for example.
Take this with a grain of salt, because I'm not a lawyer and I'm not sure. I'm Spanish and, if I recall correctly, having sex with a minor, you being an adult, is simply illegal. It doesn't really matter if both of you agree to have sex. If she later says "I had sex with this man when I was 17 and he was 19", you can be arrested. I could be wrong, though. Please post a link and/or quote if you find out anything about this.
> ...and you need to read it again and realize that if there are two alternatively theories presented (hence the words "rival explanation" in your quote), then arbitrarily picking one of them and presenting it as fact, makes you look like an idiot.
I agree partly. My intention was to mention both theories and strongly stating the one I think is right, for the reasons stated in the external link and all the information we have at hand. I don't think that makes me look like an idiot. I didn't hide any information, by quoting some sentences and linking you to both articles. The grandparent went on a rant with inaccurate information and still got modded "Insightful". Our discussion thread is already there, so you can get the picture and see what (s?)he is about.
> It was calle RUGBY FOOTBALL because kicking or moving the ball with your feet was some kind of hability demonsatrtions, and it was completely legal.
Sure, because you said it. And I already know you take your sources seriously.
> Asociation football? Yeah, maybe you forgot that the game is played by teams, an association of players. And also the football clubs are named after that so? maybe I can't read between of the lines of what you're saying because English ain't my main language. Anyway, if I'm wrong you'll keep playing american football, meanwhile soccer is a passion who runs worldwide.
Oh, wait, north americans find it boring; they also find acceptable invading 3rd world countries. I won't expect anything reasonable from your country. HAHAHA, you even voted Bush twice!!! LOL!!!
I find this hilarious, but let me make one more comment. English isn't my main language either. I'm a Spanish football fan. And you still keep putting words in my mouth. I never said football was boring. IMHO, it's not. I haven't watched or played American football in my life, so I won't comment on that sport either. Oh yeah, and *I* didn't vote for Bush. You know, being Spanish and such... just in case you can't read between lines...
Read that? RUGBY FOOTBALL. Amazing. A sport _mainly_ played carrying the ball with your hands. If you are going to ignore the fact that many sports have "football" in its name, that football as we know it (or soccer in some countries) is actually named "Association football", etc, you may want to go to the FIFA webpage directly and ignore the discussion about the name origins, forgetting about the rest of the sports out there which have "football" in their names. Oh, yeah, and never try to get a more general view and background information about the topic, by reading some sort of encyclopedia either. Get a clue.
*PLONK*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_(soccer)