Of course Knoppix is far and away the best Live CD in this area. But it's not great if you want something that can boot from a (reasonably sized) USB drive. Let me explain. I am a "Residential Computing Consultant" at the school I go to, which means that I troubleshoot student's computers, clean up after spyware and viruses, etc. At my job we are issued a 512 MB flash drive. The programs that we are _required_ to have on there (i.e. all the anti spyware, networking diagnostic, and especially Windows patches and hot fixes) take up at least 300 MB. With the remaining space I was able to install Slax and still have ~50 MB left to spare.
I went with Slax rather than something like DSL for a number of reasons. But the main one is that of all the really small live distros, it was the only one I could find with a 2.6 kernel, which translates to better hardware support for all of the weird computers I have to work on (they are mostly one or at most two years old).
We are encouraged to carry Knoppix CDs as well, and they are available in the office, but it's really, really nice to be able to have a live USB drive. Plus only a relatively small amount of the total software on a Knoppix CD is for data recovery and so forth, and all of the essential tools in this area are present in most of the small distros like Slax or DSL.
The amount of things that we take for granted is just enormous. Let me explain. Right now you are undoubtedly using a multitasking operating system, meaning that you can run more than one process at once. It is really non-obvious that such a thing is even possible, let alone can be done efficiently. For those of you who don't know how it is done (and I bet even on Slashdot, most people do not), how would you overcome this problem? How are you going to make sure that once the kernel gives a time slice to an application, the application will give it back? How are you going to make sure the application doesn't corrupt the location in memory the kernel resides on?
Here is another, more basic example: writing. Homo sapiens existed for tens of thousands of years all over the globe, and only a handful independently discovered written language. To us it seems perfectly obvious that you can express spoken words in some sort of symbolic form and preserve it as writing, but this is not an obvious concept.
Let me take the writing example one step further: what is the most obvious way to write a language? With pictographs/ideographs. Each word is its own character. The idea that you can express this written language purely with phonetic components is really a novel concept, even to me, a native English speaker.
I am a math major, so my final example will be from that realm. Think about high school algebra. What does f(x) = x^2 look like? A parabola, right? That idea is a very recent development in mathematics (within the past few hundred years). The idea that you can do the opposite -- express geometric relations in algebraic terms -- was equally as innovative. To us it is obvious that you can interpret algebraic functions as curves or lines, that you can write a formula to express the area of something, and that you can draw mathematical structures. But these things are *not* obvious!
The idea that I am driving at here is that there are many, many things that we consider obvious that clearly aren't. While I feel that many patents clearly are obvious, and that there is a considerable amount of patent abuse in the system at the present with respect to obvious patents (my current employer comes to mind...), it is really, really hard to say what is obvious and what is not when you have hindsight. If you were a programmer and only coded in C your whole career, do you really think that you would be able to come up with the idea of an object oriented language? Or the idea of automatic garbage collection? When someone comes up with a truly novel idea they deserve to be able to patent it. And while there is a lot of abuse in the patent system, I suspect that in many, many cases things that are now considered obvious were considered revolutionary at the time of their invention.
Much of the GNOME development is heavily funded by Novell. As we now see, Novell is heavily funded by Microsoft. Unfortunately, GNOME is also the default Ubuntu desktop environment. So in a way, Ubuntu is directly using software developed by Microsoft.
For better or for worse, GTK is a very attractive GUI toolkit for commercial developers to code with. Hence, Sun, Redhat, and (recently) Novell all write their apps in GTK and use Gnome for the desktop environment. In fact, until very recently Suse was a holdout to this rule, and was very KDE and Qt centric. I would wager that Gnome has seen much more code from Redhat (and Sun) than it has from Novell. And Gnome is still very much a free desktop environment.
As an aside, I would like to point out that despite great protest from KDE fans, it looks like Gnome is winning the desktop wars. Trolltech aside, Gnome and GTK have the most commercial support behind them, and that support is really translating into a huge amount of momentum for Gnome. I have long been a Gnome user, and I remember just a few years ago when the number of KDE users vastly outweighed the number of Gnome users, and now it seems just the opposite. Given this trend, and they heavy investment that Canonical has made in Gnome, it really doesn't make sense for them to switch desktop environments.
There are ways to virtualize an operating system, even without its cooperation. For example, if you have a newer Intel processor with VT extensions, you can run any version of Windows inside of a Xen virtual machine.
As a Ruby fan (and someone intensely hating the Python indentation stuff), I question the choice of Python
To the other good comments about this issue, I would like to add that a fairly common error in programming is having unmatched tokens. Unbalanced parentheses are pretty annoying, but mismatched curly braces in C (and other languages that use them) are particularly insidious, because normally braces that are in the wrong place are dozens or hundreds of lines apart. When I program in Python I never have this problem, because things are nested exactly how I think they are.
The real problem with the PS3 was that Sony underpriced them. Yes, I meant to say underpriced. With the pent-up demand, they should have slapped a "First Edition" sticker on the initial shipment and sold them for $1200. They still would have sold out, but people would be much less upset at not getting one if they could never had afforded them anyway.
This would not have worked out well. The harm to the PS3's reputation would be enormous if Sony jacked up the initial pricing. Even if the increased price was only for the first couple of weeks launch time, people would see this as greed, and a lot of people would be turned off by that. Even worse, most casual gamers would assume that the PS3 was exorbitantly more expensive than the other consoles for a long time to come afterwards, even if this was not the case.
The Prius owers of Silicon Valley have one problem: it takes oil to make new cars.
What's your point? It takes oil to build any new car. Since we only have a limited amount of oil, and we're going to use a lot of it up to make new cars, we might as well be making fuel efficient ones.
Please don't use the word FUD if you don't know what it means. Because you obviously don't.
And who gives a shit about the Linux sociopaths? Seriously. I am a Linux sysadmin, and I can't stand the them either. They're the ones who abbreviate Microsoft as M$, call Windows "Windoze", and generally do other things that give Linux a bad name. Stay off of the IRC channels, avoid the trolls on Linux forums, and use Mono and whatever else you damn well please and you'll be a happy user:-)
(By the way, if anyone reading this is interested in using Linux... try the distribution specific mailing lists. They are much more helpful than forums or IRC, have more competent people on them, and you will learn a *lot* from them).
The issue would be specifically with the Windows compatibility layer (i.e. ASP.net, Windows.Forms, etc.), not in C# or even.NET. For more information about this issue, see the Mono Licensing FAQ.
Not all vegans are animal rights activists or work for PETA.
I have been vegetarian for many years. I used to be vegan. It was a personal choice that I made that had nothing to do wtih animal rights/cruelty or religion. To this day, I use a leather wallet.
Assuming that everyone who is vegan or vegetarian does so because they want to save the animals is ignorant. While many people do it for just that reason, everyone has their own reasons. For example, my girlfriend is also vegetarian, but doesn't have any problem eating meat when she visits China (where she is from), because she sees eating traditional Chinese food as an integral part of Chinese culture.
Um, I'm not sure what your comment had to do with the article.
Also, you generally cannot download scientific/mathematical papers free of charge. Yes, the papers on arxiv.org are free, but most journal published papers are not, and in fact subscription to mathematical/scientific/technical journals tend to be very expensive. To put this in perspective, an electronic subscription to the 2007 AMS journal will set you back $155 (link).
I just turned 20. I am an undergraduate in college (at UC Berkeley) where I am studying math.
The previous two summers I had crappy jobs working at retail stores. This summer I wanted to do something more fulfilling. So I wrote an email to a local LUG describing my Linux experience and an informal sort of resume. A Linux sysadmin at a startup saw my email and got in touch with me. I did some interviews, and got the job, even though I don't have any previous job experience with Linux, am not a CS major, etc. Now thaqt school is in session I am still woring for them, connecting to work though a VPN when I have spare time and coming in on Fridays.
The lesson I got from this is that if you are a student and don't have any work experience, you need to get in touch with the people you want to work for directly. In my case, it was by emailing a list that I know sysadmins would be reading. My boss knew what kind of work he wanted to hand off to someone else, saw that I was capable of doing it, and got in touch with me. If I had sent a resume to this company, there is no way that he would have seen it.
Like it or not, the fact remains: if you can cause someone's application to crash, it is a denial of service. Treating it as a security flaw is completely justified.
I couldn't agree with you more. While I do recommend Firefox to my friends, I am personally very unhappy with it.
The memory issues are very real and are there. Anyone who thinks that it should take hundreds of megabytes of RAM to cache a few dozen pages is insane. The fact of the matter is that no other app could get away with using this much memory. Toggling options in about:config is a major PITA, not to mention that most of the options are poorly documented, if at all. I would much rather the Mozilla developers just make the default settings more sane, and get rid of that interface entirely.
I think web browsers are a really sore spot in the software world right now. As one of the largest and most prominently funded open source projects, Mozilla has a lot of potential to come up with a truly world class product. But increasingly it seems that the developers are ignoring their userbase, and focusing on implementing new features instead of fixing the problems that they have. If you spend the time to wade through the Firefox bugzilla, you will find serious bugs that are years old and will probably never be fixed.
Frankly, I use Firefox because it sucks less than the other products out there. But I am extremely unhappy with the Firefox track record, especially with respect to Linux bugs and the Windows centric attitude of the Mozilla developers, and I sincerely hope that the Mozilla developers either change the path they are going down, or a better alternative shows up soon.
I am an Ubuntu user, and would continue to be so even if I had a Mac. I really like OS X -- I use it at work -- but it just doesn't provide the features that I need.
The things that I really need are: latex, python, a terminal emulator, and vim. It is possible to install all of these things on a Mac, but they just aren't integrated very tightly. I like that I can install a full Latex distribution with all of the common latex style files and add on packages, and update it through a package manager. With respect to Python, it's really nice that not only does it come with the operating system, it's tightly integrated -- python bindings for nearly everything are available. The terminal emulator in OS X is really just not up to snuff compared to what is available in the Linux world (especially now that vte/gnome terminal has 256 color support).
If you want a desktop environment, OS X is fine. If you want a Unix environment, then the half-baked "Unix" called OS X will not cut it for you. And for me at least, the package management aspect of Linux distributions is a big win too.
Fingerprinting Firefox 1.5 based on favicon fetching? Sure, I guess that's possible, but since the browser includes a User-agent string in every HTTP request it seems kind of ridiculous.
OpenBSD is the most secure operating system? Definitely not. OpenBSD would probably merit no more than a C2 Rating. In reality, most highly secure government computers are running Trusted Solaris.
I say give them linux. It doesn't run anything that teens like without major hacking work (don't get all/. huffy about it - yu know it's true).
The problem with that is that it is a lot harder to lock down Linux/Unix unless you are a very competent Sysadmin. Kids are smart -- they will learn how to use sendmail, compile programs in their home directories, etc. Linux is a good solution, but not because of the reasons you outlined.
Of course not -- you can only use the GPU on motherboards that support it, namely those with an Intel chipset. But since the hardware specs and drivers have been released under a free license, you are more than welcome to try to get the GPU to run on any hardware that you can dream of.
But when I question further about asking Linux coders to help with the conversion, the major of companies that have shown an interest in a Linux port say that they've attempted to do so, but the programmers that they approached expect the software to be open-sourced if the company is to get their help. I've even had some developers of software that's geared more towards a particular science admit that they think there would be a huge demand on their software for Linux, but the "requirement" by Linux coders that the software is open-sourced killed the prospect of releasing a Linux version.
What, exactly, is wrong with this? If a company asks a coder to write a port of their code, the coder is under no obligation to do so. The company can go find another programmer willing to write the code, or delegate that task to their in house staff. I don't understand how you can fault a third party for doing something they have a moral objection to.
The obvious alternative is to completely disable password based ssh authentication, and force everyone to use public/private key authentication. That way you don't have to worry about the strength of your users passwords.
I'm pretty sure the word "bubble" is just figurative. In other words, if any missiles got too close, a laser would fire at them, presumably disabling the missile. I *highly* doubt that it is, literally, a laser bubble.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course Knoppix is far and away the best Live CD in this area. But it's not great if you want something that can boot from a (reasonably sized) USB drive. Let me explain. I am a "Residential Computing Consultant" at the school I go to, which means that I troubleshoot student's computers, clean up after spyware and viruses, etc. At my job we are issued a 512 MB flash drive. The programs that we are _required_ to have on there (i.e. all the anti spyware, networking diagnostic, and especially Windows patches and hot fixes) take up at least 300 MB. With the remaining space I was able to install Slax and still have ~50 MB left to spare.
I went with Slax rather than something like DSL for a number of reasons. But the main one is that of all the really small live distros, it was the only one I could find with a 2.6 kernel, which translates to better hardware support for all of the weird computers I have to work on (they are mostly one or at most two years old).
We are encouraged to carry Knoppix CDs as well, and they are available in the office, but it's really, really nice to be able to have a live USB drive. Plus only a relatively small amount of the total software on a Knoppix CD is for data recovery and so forth, and all of the essential tools in this area are present in most of the small distros like Slax or DSL.
I agree with you completely.
The amount of things that we take for granted is just enormous. Let me explain. Right now you are undoubtedly using a multitasking operating system, meaning that you can run more than one process at once. It is really non-obvious that such a thing is even possible, let alone can be done efficiently. For those of you who don't know how it is done (and I bet even on Slashdot, most people do not), how would you overcome this problem? How are you going to make sure that once the kernel gives a time slice to an application, the application will give it back? How are you going to make sure the application doesn't corrupt the location in memory the kernel resides on?
Here is another, more basic example: writing. Homo sapiens existed for tens of thousands of years all over the globe, and only a handful independently discovered written language. To us it seems perfectly obvious that you can express spoken words in some sort of symbolic form and preserve it as writing, but this is not an obvious concept.
Let me take the writing example one step further: what is the most obvious way to write a language? With pictographs/ideographs. Each word is its own character. The idea that you can express this written language purely with phonetic components is really a novel concept, even to me, a native English speaker.
I am a math major, so my final example will be from that realm. Think about high school algebra. What does f(x) = x^2 look like? A parabola, right? That idea is a very recent development in mathematics (within the past few hundred years). The idea that you can do the opposite -- express geometric relations in algebraic terms -- was equally as innovative. To us it is obvious that you can interpret algebraic functions as curves or lines, that you can write a formula to express the area of something, and that you can draw mathematical structures. But these things are *not* obvious!
The idea that I am driving at here is that there are many, many things that we consider obvious that clearly aren't. While I feel that many patents clearly are obvious, and that there is a considerable amount of patent abuse in the system at the present with respect to obvious patents (my current employer comes to mind...), it is really, really hard to say what is obvious and what is not when you have hindsight. If you were a programmer and only coded in C your whole career, do you really think that you would be able to come up with the idea of an object oriented language? Or the idea of automatic garbage collection? When someone comes up with a truly novel idea they deserve to be able to patent it. And while there is a lot of abuse in the patent system, I suspect that in many, many cases things that are now considered obvious were considered revolutionary at the time of their invention.
For better or for worse, GTK is a very attractive GUI toolkit for commercial developers to code with. Hence, Sun, Redhat, and (recently) Novell all write their apps in GTK and use Gnome for the desktop environment. In fact, until very recently Suse was a holdout to this rule, and was very KDE and Qt centric. I would wager that Gnome has seen much more code from Redhat (and Sun) than it has from Novell. And Gnome is still very much a free desktop environment.
As an aside, I would like to point out that despite great protest from KDE fans, it looks like Gnome is winning the desktop wars. Trolltech aside, Gnome and GTK have the most commercial support behind them, and that support is really translating into a huge amount of momentum for Gnome. I have long been a Gnome user, and I remember just a few years ago when the number of KDE users vastly outweighed the number of Gnome users, and now it seems just the opposite. Given this trend, and they heavy investment that Canonical has made in Gnome, it really doesn't make sense for them to switch desktop environments.
There are ways to virtualize an operating system, even without its cooperation. For example, if you have a newer Intel processor with VT extensions, you can run any version of Windows inside of a Xen virtual machine.
Please don't use the word FUD if you don't know what it means. Because you obviously don't. And who gives a shit about the Linux sociopaths? Seriously. I am a Linux sysadmin, and I can't stand the them either. They're the ones who abbreviate Microsoft as M$, call Windows "Windoze", and generally do other things that give Linux a bad name. Stay off of the IRC channels, avoid the trolls on Linux forums, and use Mono and whatever else you damn well please and you'll be a happy user :-)
(By the way, if anyone reading this is interested in using Linux... try the distribution specific mailing lists. They are much more helpful than forums or IRC, have more competent people on them, and you will learn a *lot* from them).
The issue would be specifically with the Windows compatibility layer (i.e. ASP.net, Windows.Forms, etc.), not in C# or even .NET. For more information about this issue, see the Mono Licensing FAQ.
Not all vegans are animal rights activists or work for PETA.
I have been vegetarian for many years. I used to be vegan. It was a personal choice that I made that had nothing to do wtih animal rights/cruelty or religion. To this day, I use a leather wallet.
Assuming that everyone who is vegan or vegetarian does so because they want to save the animals is ignorant. While many people do it for just that reason, everyone has their own reasons. For example, my girlfriend is also vegetarian, but doesn't have any problem eating meat when she visits China (where she is from), because she sees eating traditional Chinese food as an integral part of Chinese culture.
Um, I'm not sure what your comment had to do with the article.
Also, you generally cannot download scientific/mathematical papers free of charge. Yes, the papers on arxiv.org are free, but most journal published papers are not, and in fact subscription to mathematical/scientific/technical journals tend to be very expensive. To put this in perspective, an electronic subscription to the 2007 AMS journal will set you back $155 (link).
I just turned 20. I am an undergraduate in college (at UC Berkeley) where I am studying math.
The previous two summers I had crappy jobs working at retail stores. This summer I wanted to do something more fulfilling. So I wrote an email to a local LUG describing my Linux experience and an informal sort of resume. A Linux sysadmin at a startup saw my email and got in touch with me. I did some interviews, and got the job, even though I don't have any previous job experience with Linux, am not a CS major, etc. Now thaqt school is in session I am still woring for them, connecting to work though a VPN when I have spare time and coming in on Fridays.
The lesson I got from this is that if you are a student and don't have any work experience, you need to get in touch with the people you want to work for directly. In my case, it was by emailing a list that I know sysadmins would be reading. My boss knew what kind of work he wanted to hand off to someone else, saw that I was capable of doing it, and got in touch with me. If I had sent a resume to this company, there is no way that he would have seen it.
Like it or not, the fact remains: if you can cause someone's application to crash, it is a denial of service. Treating it as a security flaw is completely justified.
I couldn't agree with you more. While I do recommend Firefox to my friends, I am personally very unhappy with it.
The memory issues are very real and are there. Anyone who thinks that it should take hundreds of megabytes of RAM to cache a few dozen pages is insane. The fact of the matter is that no other app could get away with using this much memory. Toggling options in about:config is a major PITA, not to mention that most of the options are poorly documented, if at all. I would much rather the Mozilla developers just make the default settings more sane, and get rid of that interface entirely.
I think web browsers are a really sore spot in the software world right now. As one of the largest and most prominently funded open source projects, Mozilla has a lot of potential to come up with a truly world class product. But increasingly it seems that the developers are ignoring their userbase, and focusing on implementing new features instead of fixing the problems that they have. If you spend the time to wade through the Firefox bugzilla, you will find serious bugs that are years old and will probably never be fixed.
Frankly, I use Firefox because it sucks less than the other products out there. But I am extremely unhappy with the Firefox track record, especially with respect to Linux bugs and the Windows centric attitude of the Mozilla developers, and I sincerely hope that the Mozilla developers either change the path they are going down, or a better alternative shows up soon.
I am an Ubuntu user, and would continue to be so even if I had a Mac. I really like OS X -- I use it at work -- but it just doesn't provide the features that I need.
The things that I really need are: latex, python, a terminal emulator, and vim. It is possible to install all of these things on a Mac, but they just aren't integrated very tightly. I like that I can install a full Latex distribution with all of the common latex style files and add on packages, and update it through a package manager. With respect to Python, it's really nice that not only does it come with the operating system, it's tightly integrated -- python bindings for nearly everything are available. The terminal emulator in OS X is really just not up to snuff compared to what is available in the Linux world (especially now that vte/gnome terminal has 256 color support).
If you want a desktop environment, OS X is fine. If you want a Unix environment, then the half-baked "Unix" called OS X will not cut it for you. And for me at least, the package management aspect of Linux distributions is a big win too.
Fingerprinting Firefox 1.5 based on favicon fetching? Sure, I guess that's possible, but since the browser includes a User-agent string in every HTTP request it seems kind of ridiculous.
OpenBSD is the most secure operating system? Definitely not. OpenBSD would probably merit no more than a C2 Rating. In reality, most highly secure government computers are running Trusted Solaris.
The problem with that is that it is a lot harder to lock down Linux/Unix unless you are a very competent Sysadmin. Kids are smart -- they will learn how to use sendmail, compile programs in their home directories, etc. Linux is a good solution, but not because of the reasons you outlined.
https just encrypts the data on its way between you and the host. The hypothetical https search engine would still have access to all your queries.
Of course not -- you can only use the GPU on motherboards that support it, namely those with an Intel chipset. But since the hardware specs and drivers have been released under a free license, you are more than welcome to try to get the GPU to run on any hardware that you can dream of.
What, exactly, is wrong with this? If a company asks a coder to write a port of their code, the coder is under no obligation to do so. The company can go find another programmer willing to write the code, or delegate that task to their in house staff. I don't understand how you can fault a third party for doing something they have a moral objection to.
The obvious alternative is to completely disable password based ssh authentication, and force everyone to use public/private key authentication. That way you don't have to worry about the strength of your users passwords.
I'm pretty sure the word "bubble" is just figurative. In other words, if any missiles got too close, a laser would fire at them, presumably disabling the missile. I *highly* doubt that it is, literally, a laser bubble.
Because division by zero is undefined, not infinite.
The most common problem in their database -- PEBKAC.