How would IBM for example prevent all it's employees from leaking the information, if they forked a few 100000 Power processors for NSA?...
They would need to develop it in the open, perhaps as part of some major popular platform. They'd need to achieve at least 2.2 teraflops per node to make it worth their while and make it feasible.. but where on earth could they develop that kind of platform in the open and not have people question it? Perhaps some kind of gaming system!
I'm not so much thinking of a recompile, since for closed binary drivers you won't have source, but of a layer between the drivers and the kernel....
Sure you could. And I believe people are already doing this in a project with some Windows drivers. The trouble is it will never get official support from the Linux kernel development community because they're against binary drivers of any sort. If you even bring it up you'll get a bunch of elitists coming in here and yelling at you that if you want that then nothing is stopping you from forking off your own kernel and doing it that way. The sad part of open source developers is that most of the time they fail to listen to reason when it involves a shift in their entrenched ideology. "Binary kernel modules are bad, therefore we don't even talk about it and if you want to then to hell with you." Ever loaded a binary-only module like the one from Nvidia for the graphics in Linux recently? You get this big ugly scary warning about "tainting" the kernel. *sigh*
What planet do you live on where school textbooks cost $100? During any given semester, I think it is reasonable to expect to pay between $300 and 500 classes.
If I had to pay more than $150 for a textbook I would drop the class immediately. The most expensive textbook I ever had to buy was $120 and that was a complete ripoff. Most of my textbooks were in the $50-$75 range and I buy them used on top of that so it's usually 10-20% cheaper.
Ah, these installer screenshots bring back memories... of RedHat's installer... from 8 years ago.
Spoken like someone who hasn't installed Red Hat in 8 years. Red Hat's Anaconda installer looks a lot like that even today in text mode. Unlike Debian, Red Hat doesn't care if their distribution runs on anything other than x86 so they can target making an X11 install that looks pretty. Debian on the other hand has to get the most bang-for-the-buck on all their supported platforms so they felt a text installer would work best. After installing 5 systems with sarge on them from scratch I haven't had any issues. All my hardware was auto-detected and it grabbed an address via DHCP automatically. I installed Debian doing nothing but hitting the enter key on each screen to accept the defaults to show someone how easy it was. The only one I think I had to move the arrow key over was the partitioning part of it. All in all, the Debian text installer is as easy, if not easier, than installing Windows 2000/XP/2003 or Red Hat.
My only qualm with it is I would've liked to have the option of assigning the install a static address rather than having it grab one automatically from my DHCP server, but that was easily remedied after the install was finished. It's probably even a configurable option but Debian Sarge was so easy to install I didn't see much point in even looking at the release notes unless I had a problem.
Read Mike Griffin's "internal memo" to NASA posted on spaceref.com or nasawatch.com. He (rightly so) believes that private industry does not have the resources or drive to implement the kinds of multigenerational missions that space exploration requires. Getting to Mars will take decades (not the trip itself, but the planning, building the vehicles, and implementation). When was the last time you saw any corporation plan more than 10 years out? How about 20 or 30? Now, take all profit motivation out of that equation and how many of them are left... purely scientific and research oriented undertakings by a corporation that took decades to bring to fruition. A government organization is the only kind of organization that will be able to span that timeframe without breaking apart.
This makes me wonder why the upgrade process is being run under the target installation in the first place. How about upgrading the system off-line through a live-cd of some sort?
Because only extremely limited distributions would require you to take the machine offline to upgrade it. The Linux you're looking for is Red Hat or Mandrake. I need to be able to upgrade my Debian box from thousands of miles away... I'm sure as hell not going to fly out to a datacenter somewhere and reboot my box onto a bootable CD and run the upgrade. That's just silly.
I must admit, I really like Tiger's Spotlight. It has improved file management on my machine considerably.
Can I pipe up and say I hate Spotlight? It slowed my machine down to a crawl so I tried disabling it only to find I couldn't search my mail with Apple's Mail anymore. I eventually turned it back on and it seems to have settled down, but for a while there it was seriously bogging down my dual 2GHz G5 box.
What's more hip than a postfix-notation calculator?
They can take my reverse-polish-notation HP48GX from my cold dead hands. Sure it was slow as hell compared to the TI92 my friends had, but I dropped it down two flights of stairs and it didn't have a scratch on it. The TI92 would've asploded.
I've got this thing called a spiral bound notebook...
Then just lock it in a safe. The problem with that is I wrote the combination on a sticky note somewhere and I can't find it. As a backup I copied it into a text file and uploaded it to a remote server with a non-obvious name but unfortunately I forgot what I called it.:-( Next time I'm just going to keep the combination taped to the front of the safe.
Since I'm definately not a monk, I'm sure that others must be experiencing this symptom as well.
You must be a PC gamer... Strong is the Force in you. I didn't have any problem at all keeping all three dots in my vision either when focusing on one of them. Is this some kind of joke?
Given that OS X has shown us the power of this method, why haven't any distros latched onto it? Yes, it means that the OS must promise a base set of shared libraries, but the user experience is so much better!
Well, you can get a similar experience by using static binaries. They have the libraries compiled into the binary and have no other dependencies. The downside is increased disk and memory footprint. Also if there is a vulnerability in the library it uses the entire binary must be recompiled. Personally I like the way the.APP structure works and it's easy to backup programs that use that structure. I remember having some program though that didn't and insisted on installing thousands of files from a sit archive or something. I think it was Windows Media Player.. the version before the current one for MacOS X. Seems much more efficient to distribute a single.dmg file with your APP binary directory structure in that.
I wonder how much of their corporate culture has survived from the old days? To what degree is "McAfee" just a brand name?
Absolutely none. Network Associates decimated many good products until they could do nothing but sell them off or spin them off into other companies at a substantial loss. TIS was absorbed into the NAI collective and they promptly ran Gauntlet into the ground as a firewall and then sold off the pieces to Secure Computing. They bought PGP, made a bunch of crappy releases and then spun it off into a separate company after they proved incompetent at marketing it. They bought Network General's Sniffer product line, ran that into the ground and promptly sold it off to a company who I believe now is named Network General. The McAfee virus scanning crap is the only original thing NAI has left I believe. To top it all off, McAfee is the absolute worst piece of shit out there. If you want a virus scanner run far away from McAfee and Symantec and just pick up AVG. It is by far the best antivirus solution out there.. and free for personal use on top of it!
IIRC, Win2K didn't have too many vulnerabilities, mostly they were just in IE and Outlook Express.
Microsoft can't have it both ways. If they want to say IE, Outlook Express, and Windows Media Player are vital integrated parts of the OS then they're going to count against the OS when it comes to bugs and security issues IMHO.
You don't understand his point. Open Office hasn't been ported to Cocoa or Carbon.
Actually it has been. Check out NeoOffice. It looks like the same old crappy OpenOffice interface without the need for X11. I don't really care though since I have a copy of Office X which works fine.:-)
What's the point of better architectures when Apple is moving to the brain-fucked x86 ISA? It's hard to be enthusiastic about computing when you know the beast just got a new lease on life.
Not to turn this into a Mac thread, but it is kind of disappointing they didn't go with AMD64. I thought that the Hypertransport AMD used was more in line with how the PowerMac G5 system worked, but maybe not. It would've been a native 64-bit platform like the G5, but now we're stepping back into a 32-bit world. A sad day for computing when they can't let go of that crutch. I guess I'll eventually be able to run Debian 3.2 on my new IBM Cell Processor Workstation in 3 or 4 years.:-)
..everyone knows that unless the Beatles continue to make money from recordings made fifty years ago, they'll have to quit music and get day jobs. Then society won't get any new Beatles music, and then where will we be?
Yea, this is one area where I think we've gone totally wrong. Copyright should last at most 10-20 years. Works that persist longer in the spotlight become more a part of the culture than a creation of the artist. For example, I doubt many people here know who actually wrote the "Happy Birthday" song, but everyone knows it, everyone sings it at a birthday party, and yet it's still under copyright.
Imagine a society where an orchestra couldn't play any classical music without acquiring the rights to that performance from a copyright holder that has been passed down through the centuries by inane copyright law and they end up paying a large amount of money for you to enjoy their performance. When a work of art persists for decades in the hearts and minds of a large group of people it becomes part of our unique culture and our government has the obligation to help protect that cultural identity IMHO.
As an artist there seems to be two camps, those who do it for the money and those who do it for the art. For the latter I would imagine they enjoy making money off something they love as a side effect, but if they couldn't sell a single song or book I'm sure they'd continue writing or singing. For the former group they'll wither away and leave us with less bubble gum pop bands, manufactured grunge groups, and corporate "gangsta" rappers, but in the end our cultural identity will thrive as a result. We'd be cutting out the crap and keeping the true art made by people who love their work for the sake of making it and not for the money it brings them... I guess it'd result in a situation like we have with open source programmers in the end.
Aw screw it, I guess I'm sounding like a big old commie now, but I had to get that off my chest. The fact that Mickey Mouse is still under the iron thumb of Walt Disney Corporation so long after Walt's death just annoys the hell out of me.
Yeah, use it all the time when I can't get a real wired/wireless connection. It is as fast as DSL if your DSL service sucks, which in the U.S. it basically does.
DSL in the U.S. sucks? I get 6Mbps/768Kbps all the time with under 50ms latency via Speakeasy. If that's your definition of "sucks" I'd hate to see what's good. On the flip side, I recently had to setup a Verizon Wireless card for a project and it gets 128Kbps on a good day, but the latency is always more than 500ms and usually bounces between 500ms and 1500ms so it's very impractical to use for interactive sessions. It seems to work fine in the role it plays (fairly remote isolated data collection device where we couldn't get fiber or telephone lines to it), but I wouldn't want to have to use it as my only means of Internet access. I also personally have Sprint's PCS Vision service and use that once in a blue moon and experience basically similar results, high latency, low throughput. It's acceptable in a pinch to check mail when it works and doesn't die out, but again, I wouldn't rely on it as my only means of Internet access. Frankly, I'm addicted enough to the Internet that I'd sell my house and move closer to a city before this even became and issue. I chose my current home based on the fact that it was 5000 feet from a DSL-wired CO.;-)
Hey, remember that Pegasus was in the last Season of TNG - 93/94 (right?). It's more like ten than twenty years ago.
Good point, but I will stand by my point that the years have not been well to Commander Riker.:-) If they had a little more budget they could've CGI'd out the bags under his eyes at least. Ah well, RIP TNG crew. I have been enjoying the TNG episodes in reruns and now I remember why I used to love them so much. They are by far the best of the series.
Brent Spiner is far too old to play Data anymore unless they came up with some stupid excuse for modifying B-4's features to make him look older. (BTW, his name was B-4, not B-9. I guess that's Prince-speak for before). The saddest part of the Enterprise finale was Riker's massive drooping bags under his eyes. He definitely looked 50+ years old rather than the 30+ he was in The Pegasus.
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They would need to develop it in the open, perhaps as part of some major popular platform. They'd need to achieve at least 2.2 teraflops per node to make it worth their while and make it feasible.. but where on earth could they develop that kind of platform in the open and not have people question it? Perhaps some kind of gaming system!
Sure you could. And I believe people are already doing this in a project with some Windows drivers. The trouble is it will never get official support from the Linux kernel development community because they're against binary drivers of any sort. If you even bring it up you'll get a bunch of elitists coming in here and yelling at you that if you want that then nothing is stopping you from forking off your own kernel and doing it that way. The sad part of open source developers is that most of the time they fail to listen to reason when it involves a shift in their entrenched ideology. "Binary kernel modules are bad, therefore we don't even talk about it and if you want to then to hell with you." Ever loaded a binary-only module like the one from Nvidia for the graphics in Linux recently? You get this big ugly scary warning about "tainting" the kernel. *sigh*
If I had to pay more than $150 for a textbook I would drop the class immediately. The most expensive textbook I ever had to buy was $120 and that was a complete ripoff. Most of my textbooks were in the $50-$75 range and I buy them used on top of that so it's usually 10-20% cheaper.
You should've ripped your music collection into mp3's. You could've taken your pick among dozens of mp3 players on the market.
Throw Linux on it. It's not as good as MacOS X, but it's better than Windows.
Spoken like someone who hasn't installed Red Hat in 8 years. Red Hat's Anaconda installer looks a lot like that even today in text mode. Unlike Debian, Red Hat doesn't care if their distribution runs on anything other than x86 so they can target making an X11 install that looks pretty. Debian on the other hand has to get the most bang-for-the-buck on all their supported platforms so they felt a text installer would work best. After installing 5 systems with sarge on them from scratch I haven't had any issues. All my hardware was auto-detected and it grabbed an address via DHCP automatically. I installed Debian doing nothing but hitting the enter key on each screen to accept the defaults to show someone how easy it was. The only one I think I had to move the arrow key over was the partitioning part of it. All in all, the Debian text installer is as easy, if not easier, than installing Windows 2000/XP/2003 or Red Hat.
My only qualm with it is I would've liked to have the option of assigning the install a static address rather than having it grab one automatically from my DHCP server, but that was easily remedied after the install was finished. It's probably even a configurable option but Debian Sarge was so easy to install I didn't see much point in even looking at the release notes unless I had a problem.
Read Mike Griffin's "internal memo" to NASA posted on spaceref.com or nasawatch.com. He (rightly so) believes that private industry does not have the resources or drive to implement the kinds of multigenerational missions that space exploration requires. Getting to Mars will take decades (not the trip itself, but the planning, building the vehicles, and implementation). When was the last time you saw any corporation plan more than 10 years out? How about 20 or 30? Now, take all profit motivation out of that equation and how many of them are left... purely scientific and research oriented undertakings by a corporation that took decades to bring to fruition. A government organization is the only kind of organization that will be able to span that timeframe without breaking apart.
Because only extremely limited distributions would require you to take the machine offline to upgrade it. The Linux you're looking for is Red Hat or Mandrake. I need to be able to upgrade my Debian box from thousands of miles away... I'm sure as hell not going to fly out to a datacenter somewhere and reboot my box onto a bootable CD and run the upgrade. That's just silly.
Don't forget we're more efficient so sexual intercourse only takes a minute or two and then we can go back to work. Oh wait, better for the WOMAN?
Can I pipe up and say I hate Spotlight? It slowed my machine down to a crawl so I tried disabling it only to find I couldn't search my mail with Apple's Mail anymore. I eventually turned it back on and it seems to have settled down, but for a while there it was seriously bogging down my dual 2GHz G5 box.
They can take my reverse-polish-notation HP48GX from my cold dead hands. Sure it was slow as hell compared to the TI92 my friends had, but I dropped it down two flights of stairs and it didn't have a scratch on it. The TI92 would've asploded.
Then just lock it in a safe. The problem with that is I wrote the combination on a sticky note somewhere and I can't find it. As a backup I copied it into a text file and uploaded it to a remote server with a non-obvious name but unfortunately I forgot what I called it. :-( Next time I'm just going to keep the combination taped to the front of the safe.
Oh, well that makes more sense then. I swear to god I couldn't see the god damn sailboat!
You must be a PC gamer... Strong is the Force in you. I didn't have any problem at all keeping all three dots in my vision either when focusing on one of them. Is this some kind of joke?
Well, you can get a similar experience by using static binaries. They have the libraries compiled into the binary and have no other dependencies. The downside is increased disk and memory footprint. Also if there is a vulnerability in the library it uses the entire binary must be recompiled. Personally I like the way the .APP structure works and it's easy to backup programs that use that structure. I remember having some program though that didn't and insisted on installing thousands of files from a sit archive or something. I think it was Windows Media Player.. the version before the current one for MacOS X. Seems much more efficient to distribute a single .dmg file with your APP binary directory structure in that.
Absolutely none. Network Associates decimated many good products until they could do nothing but sell them off or spin them off into other companies at a substantial loss. TIS was absorbed into the NAI collective and they promptly ran Gauntlet into the ground as a firewall and then sold off the pieces to Secure Computing. They bought PGP, made a bunch of crappy releases and then spun it off into a separate company after they proved incompetent at marketing it. They bought Network General's Sniffer product line, ran that into the ground and promptly sold it off to a company who I believe now is named Network General. The McAfee virus scanning crap is the only original thing NAI has left I believe. To top it all off, McAfee is the absolute worst piece of shit out there. If you want a virus scanner run far away from McAfee and Symantec and just pick up AVG. It is by far the best antivirus solution out there.. and free for personal use on top of it!
Microsoft can't have it both ways. If they want to say IE, Outlook Express, and Windows Media Player are vital integrated parts of the OS then they're going to count against the OS when it comes to bugs and security issues IMHO.
Actually it has been. Check out NeoOffice. It looks like the same old crappy OpenOffice interface without the need for X11. I don't really care though since I have a copy of Office X which works fine. :-)
Not to turn this into a Mac thread, but it is kind of disappointing they didn't go with AMD64. I thought that the Hypertransport AMD used was more in line with how the PowerMac G5 system worked, but maybe not. It would've been a native 64-bit platform like the G5, but now we're stepping back into a 32-bit world. A sad day for computing when they can't let go of that crutch. I guess I'll eventually be able to run Debian 3.2 on my new IBM Cell Processor Workstation in 3 or 4 years. :-)
Yea, this is one area where I think we've gone totally wrong. Copyright should last at most 10-20 years. Works that persist longer in the spotlight become more a part of the culture than a creation of the artist. For example, I doubt many people here know who actually wrote the "Happy Birthday" song, but everyone knows it, everyone sings it at a birthday party, and yet it's still under copyright.
Imagine a society where an orchestra couldn't play any classical music without acquiring the rights to that performance from a copyright holder that has been passed down through the centuries by inane copyright law and they end up paying a large amount of money for you to enjoy their performance. When a work of art persists for decades in the hearts and minds of a large group of people it becomes part of our unique culture and our government has the obligation to help protect that cultural identity IMHO.
As an artist there seems to be two camps, those who do it for the money and those who do it for the art. For the latter I would imagine they enjoy making money off something they love as a side effect, but if they couldn't sell a single song or book I'm sure they'd continue writing or singing. For the former group they'll wither away and leave us with less bubble gum pop bands, manufactured grunge groups, and corporate "gangsta" rappers, but in the end our cultural identity will thrive as a result. We'd be cutting out the crap and keeping the true art made by people who love their work for the sake of making it and not for the money it brings them... I guess it'd result in a situation like we have with open source programmers in the end.
Aw screw it, I guess I'm sounding like a big old commie now, but I had to get that off my chest. The fact that Mickey Mouse is still under the iron thumb of Walt Disney Corporation so long after Walt's death just annoys the hell out of me.
I thought the taste was me throwing up a little in my mouth. :-( I'm glad to know my brand new week-old Powerbook is now obsolete.
It's not very stylish, but it certainly is more accurate than a Rolex... but then again so is my $5 Casio wristwatch.
DSL in the U.S. sucks? I get 6Mbps/768Kbps all the time with under 50ms latency via Speakeasy. If that's your definition of "sucks" I'd hate to see what's good. On the flip side, I recently had to setup a Verizon Wireless card for a project and it gets 128Kbps on a good day, but the latency is always more than 500ms and usually bounces between 500ms and 1500ms so it's very impractical to use for interactive sessions. It seems to work fine in the role it plays (fairly remote isolated data collection device where we couldn't get fiber or telephone lines to it), but I wouldn't want to have to use it as my only means of Internet access. I also personally have Sprint's PCS Vision service and use that once in a blue moon and experience basically similar results, high latency, low throughput. It's acceptable in a pinch to check mail when it works and doesn't die out, but again, I wouldn't rely on it as my only means of Internet access. Frankly, I'm addicted enough to the Internet that I'd sell my house and move closer to a city before this even became and issue. I chose my current home based on the fact that it was 5000 feet from a DSL-wired CO. ;-)
Good point, but I will stand by my point that the years have not been well to Commander Riker. :-) If they had a little more budget they could've CGI'd out the bags under his eyes at least. Ah well, RIP TNG crew. I have been enjoying the TNG episodes in reruns and now I remember why I used to love them so much. They are by far the best of the series.
Brent Spiner is far too old to play Data anymore unless they came up with some stupid excuse for modifying B-4's features to make him look older. (BTW, his name was B-4, not B-9. I guess that's Prince-speak for before). The saddest part of the Enterprise finale was Riker's massive drooping bags under his eyes. He definitely looked 50+ years old rather than the 30+ he was in The Pegasus.