Of Microsoft doing the sensible thing and setting up a Bittorrent tracker? I wouldn't trust anything unofficial, given the problems they've had with the thing in development, and I don't fancy spending a fortnight downloading it.
...Except that if anybody knows the system you use to assign passwords, all they need to do is perform a brute-force attack throwing whole phrases from the Constitution at the system one at a time. And it's not really that long a text, so all of a sudden there's only a few hundred possible passwords for your system and it's as insecure as hell.
I've worked in some places in my time with passwords which were actually fiendishly difficult to even come up with in the first place. You know the sort of thing - nothing under eight characters, must contain at least one capital letter, one punctuation mark and one digit, no more than two of the same character in the string, no consecutive sequences of this, that and the other thing... It can take dozens of attempts to come up with it.
The boffins will tell you that this is so that you come up with a password that's harder to crack because it doesn't contain dictionary words or common number sequences or whatever. But surely when you're coming up with such restrictive rules on how to come up with a password, all you're doing is constraining the size of the set of all possible passwords, thus making a brute-force attack much easier? I mean, if I'm a cracker and I know that there's absolutely no point searching for anything less than eight digits, or all lower case, or all upper case, or all alphabetic characters, or anything in the dictionary, I'm off to a flyer, am I not?
I'm saying that that's the sort of thing Tolkein set out to achieve. I certainly wouldn't say he achieved it. I could be wrong, but I don't think people will still be reading Tolkein in two thousand years.
Oh, do me a favour. Most influential book of the century? Come on. Even if you exclude non-fiction, this claim is utter tosh. I could reel off a list of a hundred and one fiction authors of the 20th century whose work has had a vastly more profound effect on the world - Joyce, Camus, Orwell, Kerouac, Nabokov, Plath, Marquez, Kafka, Heller, and on and on and on ad fucking infinitum.
Furthermore, to suggest that Tolkein invented anything is entirely ridiculous. All he was trying to do was come up with a British mythology which could look the likes of the Icelandic sagas and the Odyssey in the eye. What he came up with was no different to Virgil being commissioned by Augustus Caesar to spin a yarn about the origins of the Roman Empire, and coming up with the Aeneid. Hardly a ground-breaking idea.
Oh, and I'm not trying to troll here, but let's be honest, Tolkein was full of great ideas, but he wasn't actually any good at writing. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is some of the most turgid prose this side of Thomas Hardy, with dialogue that in places makes Star Wars look like Shakespeare. If it stands head and shoulders above other work in the same genre, it's only because most fantasy literature is utter shite. Great stories told by a man who can't actually write.
And what if you think they're ALL idiots? Why vote for somebody who doesn't deserve it? You're only giving them a mandate to do things you don't agree with, which is madness. Don't you have more of a right to complain if no candidate represents you well enough to have earned your vote? Sometimes not voting makes as much of a statement as voting.
Erm, they're from the Republic of Ireland. Look at their passports and their nationality will be stated as Irish. People from the United Kingdom (including Northern Ireland, of course) are considered British. People from Ireland (the country, not the island) aren't.
It's the playlist thing mainly, but it's other things too. I just think it's really thin on features for an application with pretensions to be the only thing you'll need. I really hate Winamp/XMMS-type players because of how bad they are at coping with big record collections. All I want is something which can organise my music library in an easily searchable way, categorising things by album, artist, or any other field I choose, such as record label or year of release, and which has an integrated player rather than exporting playlists to something like XMMS. Oh yeah, and I want it to recognise every format going, and provide gapless playback. There's several apps which fit the bill on Windows - is just one that runs on Linux so much to ask for?
Organise your menus correctly and fiddle around with your config files and I'm sure you could make many a windowing environment behave like this. Why not give it a try and share whatever you come up with?
Amarok's all right and all, but it has one serious failing - it doesn't seem able to do gapless playback. Given that Ogg Vorbis is the geek audio format of choice, and that its biggest USP (for me, anyway) is proper gapless playback, why hasn't it been implemented in Amarok from the beginning? Or am I just stupid and missing something, and it's somwhere that I haven't managed to find?
Also, it needs work on its playlist manager. The simple drag-and-drop interface is nice, but it shouldn't go by how you organise your music files on your hard disk. It should sort your music by the tags on the songs. That's what they're for.
Why isn't there a really competent all-in-one media player/ripper/organiser out there? There seems to be nothing that gets anywhere near something like Media Jukebox for functionality. SnackAmp is decent, but its user interface is messy (and it doesn't seem to know what FLAC is, nor in fact do many others). Rhythmbox and JuK are just rotten. It's a bit frustrating, really.
RCs are broken? Releases are broken too? Need the updates just to get a usable system? Sounds to me like they're taking the whole just-like-Windows thing too far...
Pah. I recently read about a Mercedes-Benz owner who clocked up about 200,000km (120,000 miles) a year, and consequrntly was forever leaving his car in to be serviced. He got fed up with doing this, and approached fettlers extraordinaire Brabus to ask them if they could come up with a modified engine which could go three years from one service to the next. They duly obliged, and when the car was left in for a check-up at the end of the time, it was still fighting fit, but the Brabus engineers were a bit disappointed that it had "only" done 570,000km...
Bloat, same as your computer. If I remember rightly, the latest VW Golf GTI weighs over 50% more than the original. It's much more powerful, yet I wouldn't be at all surprised if the old one in the right hands could show it a clean pair of heels round a racetrack. Fuel economy's gone nowhere in all that time thanks to the addition of no end of additional equipment, some of which, such as safety equipment, is a welcome improvement, but much of which is just flab, such as electric wing mirrors and the like.
I don't understand why this would be a problem. Diesel has contained additives to improve the operating temperature range for a long time now, and as I understand it it has to get below -30C or maybe even lower for it even to be an issue. Nowadays you just jump in and start them up, same as petrol. Diesel engines are commonplace in many parts of the world where it gets really cold, and it doesn't seem to stop them getting along all right.
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Er, how? What does this mean? Cold's just the absence of heat, the only way to "extract" it is to heat something up.
Yeah, and apparently Doom 3 doesn't run all that well on Windows 3.11. What are you trying to get at here?
Of Microsoft doing the sensible thing and setting up a Bittorrent tracker? I wouldn't trust anything unofficial, given the problems they've had with the thing in development, and I don't fancy spending a fortnight downloading it.
...Except that if anybody knows the system you use to assign passwords, all they need to do is perform a brute-force attack throwing whole phrases from the Constitution at the system one at a time. And it's not really that long a text, so all of a sudden there's only a few hundred possible passwords for your system and it's as insecure as hell.
I've worked in some places in my time with passwords which were actually fiendishly difficult to even come up with in the first place. You know the sort of thing - nothing under eight characters, must contain at least one capital letter, one punctuation mark and one digit, no more than two of the same character in the string, no consecutive sequences of this, that and the other thing... It can take dozens of attempts to come up with it.
The boffins will tell you that this is so that you come up with a password that's harder to crack because it doesn't contain dictionary words or common number sequences or whatever. But surely when you're coming up with such restrictive rules on how to come up with a password, all you're doing is constraining the size of the set of all possible passwords, thus making a brute-force attack much easier? I mean, if I'm a cracker and I know that there's absolutely no point searching for anything less than eight digits, or all lower case, or all upper case, or all alphabetic characters, or anything in the dictionary, I'm off to a flyer, am I not?
Offtopic? Has Bill Gates got his mod points through again?
I'm saying that that's the sort of thing Tolkein set out to achieve. I certainly wouldn't say he achieved it. I could be wrong, but I don't think people will still be reading Tolkein in two thousand years.
Oh, do me a favour. Most influential book of the century? Come on. Even if you exclude non-fiction, this claim is utter tosh. I could reel off a list of a hundred and one fiction authors of the 20th century whose work has had a vastly more profound effect on the world - Joyce, Camus, Orwell, Kerouac, Nabokov, Plath, Marquez, Kafka, Heller, and on and on and on ad fucking infinitum.
Furthermore, to suggest that Tolkein invented anything is entirely ridiculous. All he was trying to do was come up with a British mythology which could look the likes of the Icelandic sagas and the Odyssey in the eye. What he came up with was no different to Virgil being commissioned by Augustus Caesar to spin a yarn about the origins of the Roman Empire, and coming up with the Aeneid. Hardly a ground-breaking idea.
Oh, and I'm not trying to troll here, but let's be honest, Tolkein was full of great ideas, but he wasn't actually any good at writing. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is some of the most turgid prose this side of Thomas Hardy, with dialogue that in places makes Star Wars look like Shakespeare. If it stands head and shoulders above other work in the same genre, it's only because most fantasy literature is utter shite. Great stories told by a man who can't actually write.
Oh, do shut up.
It's how Dubya refers to members of the international community when he's not calling them turrsts.
And what if you think they're ALL idiots? Why vote for somebody who doesn't deserve it? You're only giving them a mandate to do things you don't agree with, which is madness. Don't you have more of a right to complain if no candidate represents you well enough to have earned your vote? Sometimes not voting makes as much of a statement as voting.
Maybe if you had some history you'd understand.
Erm, they're from the Republic of Ireland. Look at their passports and their nationality will be stated as Irish. People from the United Kingdom (including Northern Ireland, of course) are considered British. People from Ireland (the country, not the island) aren't.
Depends on how fast the market grows, doesn't it? You don't have to grow your market share to grow your sales, y'know.
It's the playlist thing mainly, but it's other things too. I just think it's really thin on features for an application with pretensions to be the only thing you'll need. I really hate Winamp/XMMS-type players because of how bad they are at coping with big record collections. All I want is something which can organise my music library in an easily searchable way, categorising things by album, artist, or any other field I choose, such as record label or year of release, and which has an integrated player rather than exporting playlists to something like XMMS. Oh yeah, and I want it to recognise every format going, and provide gapless playback. There's several apps which fit the bill on Windows - is just one that runs on Linux so much to ask for?
Organise your menus correctly and fiddle around with your config files and I'm sure you could make many a windowing environment behave like this. Why not give it a try and share whatever you come up with?
Amarok's all right and all, but it has one serious failing - it doesn't seem able to do gapless playback. Given that Ogg Vorbis is the geek audio format of choice, and that its biggest USP (for me, anyway) is proper gapless playback, why hasn't it been implemented in Amarok from the beginning? Or am I just stupid and missing something, and it's somwhere that I haven't managed to find?
Also, it needs work on its playlist manager. The simple drag-and-drop interface is nice, but it shouldn't go by how you organise your music files on your hard disk. It should sort your music by the tags on the songs. That's what they're for.
Why isn't there a really competent all-in-one media player/ripper/organiser out there? There seems to be nothing that gets anywhere near something like Media Jukebox for functionality. SnackAmp is decent, but its user interface is messy (and it doesn't seem to know what FLAC is, nor in fact do many others). Rhythmbox and JuK are just rotten. It's a bit frustrating, really.
RCs are broken? Releases are broken too? Need the updates just to get a usable system? Sounds to me like they're taking the whole just-like-Windows thing too far...
(Obligatory)
Is it finished yet?
Ho ho.
(Incidentally, I'm typing this on a Gentoo machine. It's the daddy, it really is)
Erm, Safari's based on the same open-source KHTML engine as Konqueror, is it not?
Lordy. What do you drive, an M1A1 Abrams?
Pah. I recently read about a Mercedes-Benz owner who clocked up about 200,000km (120,000 miles) a year, and consequrntly was forever leaving his car in to be serviced. He got fed up with doing this, and approached fettlers extraordinaire Brabus to ask them if they could come up with a modified engine which could go three years from one service to the next. They duly obliged, and when the car was left in for a check-up at the end of the time, it was still fighting fit, but the Brabus engineers were a bit disappointed that it had "only" done 570,000km...
Bloat, same as your computer. If I remember rightly, the latest VW Golf GTI weighs over 50% more than the original. It's much more powerful, yet I wouldn't be at all surprised if the old one in the right hands could show it a clean pair of heels round a racetrack. Fuel economy's gone nowhere in all that time thanks to the addition of no end of additional equipment, some of which, such as safety equipment, is a welcome improvement, but much of which is just flab, such as electric wing mirrors and the like.
Not really. All that matters is that it's consistent with itself. You're not doing this to compare with other people, just for your own reference.
I don't understand why this would be a problem. Diesel has contained additives to improve the operating temperature range for a long time now, and as I understand it it has to get below -30C or maybe even lower for it even to be an issue. Nowadays you just jump in and start them up, same as petrol. Diesel engines are commonplace in many parts of the world where it gets really cold, and it doesn't seem to stop them getting along all right.