That could be an addressing nightmare. Everyone with a wireless card turned on would take an address out of the pile. The private spaces would be absorbed within a couple of seconds, and the public ones within a couple of seconds of that...
Massive blocks of private addresses in IPv6 could potentially resolve it, I guess. If, say, half the address space there was made private, then we'd be fine and dandy.
WHat? Maybe this happens in your browser, but in mine freebsd.org loads up freebsd.org and nothing but.
To answer the OP, if you're running gentoo then the package administration features of FreeBSD don't really do anything for you, though you'll be pleased to know that once you've learned one or two different commands then you'll be running quick sharp. And the linux compatability layer means you don't have to throw out a lot of the applications you're used to just working.
A lot of FreeBSD's features come about in the network environment. It tends to serve large amounts of data faster than linux. FreeBSD also has, in my opinion, a nicer design than linux on the kernel security level.
When I used FreeBSD for a while, essentially I noticed that most of the time it was familiar, with just a few commands that I needed to learn again. It felt kind of weird because things are done differently to debian, which was what I was using beforehand, but you can surmount the differences pretty rapidly. I moved back over to the penguin side of things because it was what I had learned first and because it seemed that development was going on quicker, but if I need to run a server under heavy load I'll probably throw FreeBSD on there to handle it.
I've recently been reading a great book called The Google Story (amazon link here) which states plainly that google stole the idea of text based, inconspicuous advertising from another company called GoTo.com (which was apparently later renamed overture inc.).
It says that google stripped out the idea of paying someone else to do their advertising, and apparently goto also did things like ensure that certain sites were placed higher in relevant search results rather than just displaying them in a side bar, but I figured you'd appreciate the info.
Agreed. It's more depressing when I hear people who are reasonably knowledgeable about computers use this terminology just to get the idea across. I figure we're not doing ourselves any favours.
If you read the article before posting, you notice it says "Such components include central processing units -- the brain of the computer that powers its basic functions -- as well as monitors, keyboards and mice that customers can combine to create customized packages they can load in a shopping cart and take home right away."
THe fact that CPUs are mentioned as separate components to be purchased has me thinking that they're talking about being able to purchase separate parts as well as towers etc.
Apple's bittorrent will, apparently, run on non-standard ports. I don't imagine that what'll happen is they'll interface with your copy of Azureus or whatever client you like to use. Instead, you agree to let Apple use your bandwidth; their AppleTorrent client will run on its ports and its stuff and never interface with YOUR torrent client.
As so many have already pointed out, the reason for this is to distribute things like software updates and the like. You tell apple "You may use my upload bandwidth, sure", they encrypt the shit out of something and send it to your hard drive, from there it can be uploaded multiple times while the bandwidth cost to apple was that of uploading it once.
In return for this defraying of costs, apple gives you a personal credit for a song at Itunes or some other incentive.
As posted elsewhere, you might want to read this: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/04/30/587373 .aspx
The most relevant part is:
"The Default: The typical default when users install IE7 on their Windows XP machines will most likely be their usual search engine. Despite claims from some people around the web, MSN is not "The Default." The search box in IE7 uses IE6's AutoSearch setting because we think this setting is the best indication IE has of the user's preference. I do web searches every day to find feedback about IE7, and have read some positive feedback to date on this. IE6's AutoSearch setting today reflects the other software (e.g. Yahoo, Google, or Windows Live toolbar) that the user has installed. Of course, if you buy a new machine from an OEM after we release the final IE7, that OEM can (and will probably) choose a search engine for you."
So it bases its default upon the default you already had in the previous version of their browser. That's not bad behaviour per se. However, given that IE6 had MSN search as ITS default, there is some measure of abuse here.
A high up Sun representative was interviewed on LugRadio a few months back (I'm pretty sure it's this episode but I'm not one hundred percent certain) in which he categorically stated that everything Sun owns software-wise will be open sourced eventually, including Java.
I teach a bunch of computer classes as part of my job. When I start talking about browsers, so many people start looking confused. I have to explain that Internet Explorer is one application used to surf the internet but there are others with different features.
It never even crosses the minds of the majority of people to think that there can exist any other interface to the internet. The see internet explorer and have seen it always and assume it's the only interface possible.
Because most people using computers aren't computer-literate. A big thing I emphasise is that these people are using computers, so they need to become literate in computer culture and start actually paying attention to geekdom, not because it interests them but because they NEED to know what a computer is and how to use it and that involves a lot more than just point and click.
Presumably, by insular you're punning on the idea of someone living in the UK, i.e. an island.
If not, you're not taking into account that there's a global community that accesses slashdot on a daily (hourly, minutely...) basis. As such, your postulate is incompatible with the relevant data source. Most of the non-brick houses I can think of (though not necessarily a majority of the actual amount) in the U.K. are older than the United States.
Certainly that's true in the short term, but you're overooking the fact that for OSX to be useful and functional for you, you have to purchased a computer from Apple at some point in history. Otherwise, you're really just buying a plastic disc in a box that looks pretty.
Apple doesn't seem to make much money on its OS. Think about it: Microsoft Windows ships for about 25 cents a copy. They have the code ready after all the R&D, it just gets burned to a CD and has a huge price tag to offset the massive amounts of cash spent developing the OS. But that price tag is enough to earn a lot of money, eventually.
Mac OS, on the other hand, ships on media that costs something approaching a thousand dollars in some cases, as you can only buy it on a computer. And the hardware that comes with that OS cost apple money. This is one of the reasons, I believe, that Mac OS is based upon Free/Net/Open BSD; to help offset R&D costs becuase the OS itself isn't that profitable. SO this would make sense as a revenue stream.
But the reason why Apple has such a great reputation for a solid OS that crashes considerably less than average is twofold:
1) It's based on other OSes that have a sane drivers/program space implementation, such that a single bad driver or program doesn't collapse the system 2) It only supports around ten computers.
The latter is very important. The real reason why Windows XP has retained the nastiness of BSOD is third party drivers being pieces of shit.
It's tempting to say that Apple would want to make a shitload of cash on their OS, but at the same time I don't think they want to have to surmount the drivers issue and start getting a piece of shit reputation.
Reading about p2v here: http://www.vmware.com/products/p2v/ it doesn't sound like it could perform what you are talking about without a lot of processor work and a lot of time. It "transforms an image of an existing physical system into a VMware virtual machine." So you need to have an image of the computer first.
If you had a hypothetical application that could look at someone's computer, transform the contents to an image and then deploy that image, it'd be amazingly processor intensive. Moore's law doesn't even assist, as operating systems are becoming weightier to fill in the power being supplied, and even if they weren't, applications certainly are. A few years back I would have been surprised when a game advertised itself as filling several DVDs, for example. Now, I wouldn't blink.
In short, it's a neat idea, and if you were patient enough to implement a script or something to detect when the processor was idle and run only then it might work over the course of several months, but I'm sure it'd only work on a user with little/no knowledge.
Precisely.
I suspect that in the "what if" future being posited in the original post that it'll become easier to create a virtual OS that looks and behaves very similar to the original, but it'll never be perfect.
I believe what the grandparent (or great great grandparent, or however it's best to refer to the poster) was trying to say was that if you were to boot up the original OS and do a format: C then you would only erase the virtual OS, because that's all you have access to. Because of this, you would retain your malware.
Having used many virtual machines, I can honestly say there are a couple of major flaws:
1) Booting up from, in this case a DOS disk, would mean you were booting up into a separate environment that would truly erase the hard drive. If you are familiar with live CDs and the like you'll know how relatively trivial it is to get out of your original OS and then play with it. THe most common example I can think of offhand is to get the SAM file out of windows XP.
2) The virtual machine simply would not look like your home machine. If I have OpenOffice installed and am using Opera as my browser, the odds that the virtual machine would have these preinstalled so that I wouldn't notice the difference are slim to none. Now trivial things like backgrounds etc could probably be reproduced with a few scripts, but nontrivial things like entire appliation suites would be challenging.
3) I have yet to see a virtual machine that doesn't have a significant boot time which is completely separate from the boot up time of your computer. Maybe you'd write it off as a side effect of the virus, though, if you were just a plain old non-geek user.
There are a few other things that strike me as reasonable problems with the scenario, such as the fact that you would suddenly have lost a half gig of RAM or however much your original OS has for itself, but some of them would probably be things you could deal with ultimately.
Anyway, in short I don't think it's a realistic scenario that this would ever occur, and if it did I think there are ways to recover from it.
I'm paying for high speed access that's around 500K/S downstream and 75k/S upstream.
Note that that's not unlimited speed up and down, it's capped. The reason that the article states that there's an issue is that they don't expect anyone to ever use all that bandwidth all the time, so they oversell the lines. Then the torrents came along, making it easy to max out your bandwidth all the time and suddenly the overloaded pipes can't handle it any more.
A police officer stealing medicine he cannot afford to give to his dying wife and save her life would be morally correct but would be behaving non-ethically.
I want to acknowledge what you've said here, because this was an interesting little discussion, but I'm not going to be able to respond honestly without saying things that are akin to political flamebait, and slashdot isn't here for that. I do want to say thanks for dialoguing with me and you did give me some information I hadn't been aware of.
What I understand you to be arguing is that there has been enough pressure from the Bush administration in recent years upon Al-Qaeda as a whole that they are offering truces as a chance to rebuild. Is that correct?
Either way, judging the means that have been used to achieve this is difficult and enormous. I mean, one the one hand the killing of civilians is despicable; the Bush adminsitration should be ashamed for every report of an Iraqi civilian death. And the fact is that this type of encountering of the enemy is going to breed more and more resentment against the US and may well have the paradoxical effect of only increasing the number of terrorists the US will face in the long run. However, the cynic in me wants to ask what other means would be effective in combating this type of opponent.
Slashdot Mirror
That could be an addressing nightmare. Everyone with a wireless card turned on would take an address out of the pile. The private spaces would be absorbed within a couple of seconds, and the public ones within a couple of seconds of that...
Massive blocks of private addresses in IPv6 could potentially resolve it, I guess. If, say, half the address space there was made private, then we'd be fine and dandy.
WHat? Maybe this happens in your browser, but in mine freebsd.org loads up freebsd.org and nothing but.
To answer the OP, if you're running gentoo then the package administration features of FreeBSD don't really do anything for you, though you'll be pleased to know that once you've learned one or two different commands then you'll be running quick sharp. And the linux compatability layer means you don't have to throw out a lot of the applications you're used to just working.
A lot of FreeBSD's features come about in the network environment. It tends to serve large amounts of data faster than linux. FreeBSD also has, in my opinion, a nicer design than linux on the kernel security level.
When I used FreeBSD for a while, essentially I noticed that most of the time it was familiar, with just a few commands that I needed to learn again. It felt kind of weird because things are done differently to debian, which was what I was using beforehand, but you can surmount the differences pretty rapidly. I moved back over to the penguin side of things because it was what I had learned first and because it seemed that development was going on quicker, but if I need to run a server under heavy load I'll probably throw FreeBSD on there to handle it.
I've recently been reading a great book called The Google Story (amazon link here) which states plainly that google stole the idea of text based, inconspicuous advertising from another company called GoTo.com (which was apparently later renamed overture inc.).
It says that google stripped out the idea of paying someone else to do their advertising, and apparently goto also did things like ensure that certain sites were placed higher in relevant search results rather than just displaying them in a side bar, but I figured you'd appreciate the info.
Agreed. It's more depressing when I hear people who are reasonably knowledgeable about computers use this terminology just to get the idea across. I figure we're not doing ourselves any favours.
If you read the article before posting, you notice it says "Such components include central processing units -- the brain of the computer that powers its basic functions -- as well as monitors, keyboards and mice that customers can combine to create customized packages they can load in a shopping cart and take home right away."
THe fact that CPUs are mentioned as separate components to be purchased has me thinking that they're talking about being able to purchase separate parts as well as towers etc.
Apple's bittorrent will, apparently, run on non-standard ports. I don't imagine that what'll happen is they'll interface with your copy of Azureus or whatever client you like to use. Instead, you agree to let Apple use your bandwidth; their AppleTorrent client will run on its ports and its stuff and never interface with YOUR torrent client.
As so many have already pointed out, the reason for this is to distribute things like software updates and the like. You tell apple "You may use my upload bandwidth, sure", they encrypt the shit out of something and send it to your hard drive, from there it can be uploaded multiple times while the bandwidth cost to apple was that of uploading it once.
In return for this defraying of costs, apple gives you a personal credit for a song at Itunes or some other incentive.
As posted elsewhere, you might want to read this: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/04/30/587373 .aspx
The most relevant part is:
"The Default: The typical default when users install IE7 on their Windows XP machines will most likely be their usual search engine. Despite claims from some people around the web, MSN is not "The Default." The search box in IE7 uses IE6's AutoSearch setting because we think this setting is the best indication IE has of the user's preference. I do web searches every day to find feedback about IE7, and have read some positive feedback to date on this. IE6's AutoSearch setting today reflects the other software (e.g. Yahoo, Google, or Windows Live toolbar) that the user has installed. Of course, if you buy a new machine from an OEM after we release the final IE7, that OEM can (and will probably) choose a search engine for you."
So it bases its default upon the default you already had in the previous version of their browser. That's not bad behaviour per se. However, given that IE6 had MSN search as ITS default, there is some measure of abuse here.
A high up Sun representative was interviewed on LugRadio a few months back (I'm pretty sure it's this episode but I'm not one hundred percent certain) in which he categorically stated that everything Sun owns software-wise will be open sourced eventually, including Java.
I teach a bunch of computer classes as part of my job. When I start talking about browsers, so many people start looking confused. I have to explain that Internet Explorer is one application used to surf the internet but there are others with different features. It never even crosses the minds of the majority of people to think that there can exist any other interface to the internet. The see internet explorer and have seen it always and assume it's the only interface possible. Because most people using computers aren't computer-literate. A big thing I emphasise is that these people are using computers, so they need to become literate in computer culture and start actually paying attention to geekdom, not because it interests them but because they NEED to know what a computer is and how to use it and that involves a lot more than just point and click.
Presumably, by insular you're punning on the idea of someone living in the UK, i.e. an island. If not, you're not taking into account that there's a global community that accesses slashdot on a daily (hourly, minutely...) basis. As such, your postulate is incompatible with the relevant data source. Most of the non-brick houses I can think of (though not necessarily a majority of the actual amount) in the U.K. are older than the United States.
Certainly that's true in the short term, but you're overooking the fact that for OSX to be useful and functional for you, you have to purchased a computer from Apple at some point in history. Otherwise, you're really just buying a plastic disc in a box that looks pretty.
Apple doesn't seem to make much money on its OS. Think about it: Microsoft Windows ships for about 25 cents a copy. They have the code ready after all the R&D, it just gets burned to a CD and has a huge price tag to offset the massive amounts of cash spent developing the OS. But that price tag is enough to earn a lot of money, eventually.
Mac OS, on the other hand, ships on media that costs something approaching a thousand dollars in some cases, as you can only buy it on a computer. And the hardware that comes with that OS cost apple money. This is one of the reasons, I believe, that Mac OS is based upon Free/Net/Open BSD; to help offset R&D costs becuase the OS itself isn't that profitable. SO this would make sense as a revenue stream.
But the reason why Apple has such a great reputation for a solid OS that crashes considerably less than average is twofold:
1) It's based on other OSes that have a sane drivers/program space implementation, such that a single bad driver or program doesn't collapse the system
2) It only supports around ten computers.
The latter is very important. The real reason why Windows XP has retained the nastiness of BSOD is third party drivers being pieces of shit.
It's tempting to say that Apple would want to make a shitload of cash on their OS, but at the same time I don't think they want to have to surmount the drivers issue and start getting a piece of shit reputation.
Reading about p2v here: http://www.vmware.com/products/p2v/ it doesn't sound like it could perform what you are talking about without a lot of processor work and a lot of time. It "transforms an image of an existing physical system into a VMware virtual machine." So you need to have an image of the computer first. If you had a hypothetical application that could look at someone's computer, transform the contents to an image and then deploy that image, it'd be amazingly processor intensive. Moore's law doesn't even assist, as operating systems are becoming weightier to fill in the power being supplied, and even if they weren't, applications certainly are. A few years back I would have been surprised when a game advertised itself as filling several DVDs, for example. Now, I wouldn't blink. In short, it's a neat idea, and if you were patient enough to implement a script or something to detect when the processor was idle and run only then it might work over the course of several months, but I'm sure it'd only work on a user with little/no knowledge.
Precisely. I suspect that in the "what if" future being posited in the original post that it'll become easier to create a virtual OS that looks and behaves very similar to the original, but it'll never be perfect.
It would still look nothing at all like the original OS, though.
I believe what the grandparent (or great great grandparent, or however it's best to refer to the poster) was trying to say was that if you were to boot up the original OS and do a format: C then you would only erase the virtual OS, because that's all you have access to. Because of this, you would retain your malware.
Having used many virtual machines, I can honestly say there are a couple of major flaws:
1) Booting up from, in this case a DOS disk, would mean you were booting up into a separate environment that would truly erase the hard drive. If you are familiar with live CDs and the like you'll know how relatively trivial it is to get out of your original OS and then play with it. THe most common example I can think of offhand is to get the SAM file out of windows XP.
2) The virtual machine simply would not look like your home machine. If I have OpenOffice installed and am using Opera as my browser, the odds that the virtual machine would have these preinstalled so that I wouldn't notice the difference are slim to none. Now trivial things like backgrounds etc could probably be reproduced with a few scripts, but nontrivial things like entire appliation suites would be challenging.
3) I have yet to see a virtual machine that doesn't have a significant boot time which is completely separate from the boot up time of your computer. Maybe you'd write it off as a side effect of the virus, though, if you were just a plain old non-geek user.
There are a few other things that strike me as reasonable problems with the scenario, such as the fact that you would suddenly have lost a half gig of RAM or however much your original OS has for itself, but some of them would probably be things you could deal with ultimately.
Anyway, in short I don't think it's a realistic scenario that this would ever occur, and if it did I think there are ways to recover from it.
What else is funny is that I've been using the service for weeks now and people have been visiting my website.
I'm paying for high speed access that's around 500K/S downstream and 75k/S upstream.
Note that that's not unlimited speed up and down, it's capped. The reason that the article states that there's an issue is that they don't expect anyone to ever use all that bandwidth all the time, so they oversell the lines. Then the torrents came along, making it easy to max out your bandwidth all the time and suddenly the overloaded pipes can't handle it any more.
Not to want to burst too many bubbles, but I suspect you mean a googol bytes.
A police officer stealing medicine he cannot afford to give to his dying wife and save her life would be morally correct but would be behaving non-ethically.
Who would have thought it would take Google of all companies to finally take Linux out of Beta?
I want to acknowledge what you've said here, because this was an interesting little discussion, but I'm not going to be able to respond honestly without saying things that are akin to political flamebait, and slashdot isn't here for that. I do want to say thanks for dialoguing with me and you did give me some information I hadn't been aware of.
Wouldn't that actually make it a good example of what he's saying?
What I understand you to be arguing is that there has been enough pressure from the Bush administration in recent years upon Al-Qaeda as a whole that they are offering truces as a chance to rebuild. Is that correct?
Either way, judging the means that have been used to achieve this is difficult and enormous. I mean, one the one hand the killing of civilians is despicable; the Bush adminsitration should be ashamed for every report of an Iraqi civilian death. And the fact is that this type of encountering of the enemy is going to breed more and more resentment against the US and may well have the paradoxical effect of only increasing the number of terrorists the US will face in the long run. However, the cynic in me wants to ask what other means would be effective in combating this type of opponent.