Under fire for his company's suit, Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos has proposed a sharp reduction in the duration of Internet-related patent rights, which, like all other patents, are good for 20 years from application.
I'd like to see patents for anything involving computers to last 3 or 5 years from the time the patent is granted. It's just totally unreasonable that someone can patent something, and basically prevent it's use forever, since by the time 20 years rolls around, the technique is almost certainly completely obsolete (replaced by new patented technology, etc etc). Not to mention all the bogus patents (sliding year windows for Y2K fixes, one click shopping, etc) that have been floating around lately. Well, here's hopin...
Yes, exactly the same people who won't upgrade a browser when someone finds a security hole in it, because they don't read Bugtraq. Personally I have no patience with such people.:)
I found these rather fun constant definitions in BarApp.h (part of the open source deskbar). They are used for the hidden menu that allows one to select the style of the windows border.
Be does that sometimes. Here's the enum they use for platforms (read through them!):
I would recommend that all open source projects do the same. If you spot a security bug in the Linux kernel, or Apache, or sendmail or whatever, let the maintainers know quietly and give them a chance to announce and fix in good order; tell the world only if this procedure doesn't seem to work.
This is generally what happens on mailing lists like Bugtraq. However, often it's better to just post to Bugtraq first off and let people confirm/analyze it, then figure out how to fix it (usually easy when you know what's wrong). For instance, over the weekend someone posted something that crashed his Slackware 7 / 2.2.14 machine - he thought it was a kernel bug. I tried it on my RH 6.1 / 2.2.14 machine (who needs uptime?), but nothing happened. So maybe it's a problem with PAM? Maybe something else? Probably it'll be figured out in a few days, and a fix will be applied. But it wasn't a kernel bug: he would have just been bothering the wrong people.
Note this is not the case if you know what the problem is (ie, there is a buffer overflow in line xx in somefile.c in Apache, or whatever). In that case the right thing to do is to let the proper people know, then post to Bugtraq and/or other appropriate mailing list(s) after a week or two has passed and a fix is available.
It's generally considered good etiquette on mailing lists like Bugtraq to give the vendor at least a week advance notice before posting, to give them time to at least start working on a fix. However, if Mozilla is going to take bug reports and "cover them up" for an extended time, I can certainly see people posting exploits without bothering to let Mozilla know: why bother?
In some situations, this method is acceptable (for instance, some security holes in DNS and Kerberos were hidden for years to allow fixes to be implemented). However, Mozilla (however over-hyped it is) will never have the wide spread adoption of DNS or Kerberos - if it's lucky and well managed it may become popular in the *nix/BeOS/MacOS/etc world, but I can't see it going much anywhere on Windows. It's not, and never will be, wide spread enough or important enough to hide security bugs.
Stuff compiled on 6.2 is supposed to run on prior 6.x releases, which is not the case if we had updated gcc (c++ changes). gcc 2.95.3 (or whatever is current by then, maybe 2.96, maybe 3.0) will be in 7.0.
gcc 3 will probably be the next gcc release - even if not gcc 3 will certainly be out by next fall. It was scheduled for Q1 2000, now looking that will be late, but in any case it should be out by this summer (oh, I'm looking forward to that!)
BTW, I hope you're planning on getting rid of the compat libs in 7. If people need to run their stuff on 5* or 6*, they can download the fscking sources and compile them. Or put it in powertools or something. It just seems to be a really stupid thing to put into the main distribution (especially considering things like Mesa weren't in 6.1)
Well, I'm looking forward to 7. The RSA patent will have expired, so you can ship OpenSSH, OpenSSL, and psst, along with XFree4, 2.4 kernel, gcc3... yum.
you can still use the text install... just type "text" when the cd first boots (like it says to)
In text 6.1 installs you can't see the package summaries. I was glad I had been using Redhat for a while when I went to install 6.1 on an old Pentium and for some reason the installer didn't see the S3 ViRGE card on the box and went into text mode. Someone who hasn't installed Redhat before would have no idea what some of the packages do without a summary. I installed Mandrake on a machine a while back, and I had to look at dozens of packages summaries trying to figure out what I needed.
What's wrong with the D&D book? I'm taking Comp Sci II right now, and we're using the D&D book. I suppose I should know about the shortcomings of the book, but then again, I *am* jawad....
I can't remember details (this was a year ago, and hell, I have problems remember what happened last week), but my impression of it was that it was:
a) Incomplete (as to with the latest ISO drafts and etc)
b) Didn't talk to much about design or technique (which is one of the reasons I like Stroustrup).
As someone pointed out below, Stroustrup is probably pretty bad if you are just starting programming. About the same as learning Perl from Programming Perl alone (though I did that, so maybe I'm just a masochist). I had already been programming C and C++ for maybe 1.5 years before that, and I was able to basically read right through.
I'm probably one of the many orphans picked up by the Deitel Bros. at the CS/EE Orphanage.:-)
People actually like their books? This isn't a troll (at least not intentionally), I really am shocked that someone (mutiple someones?) actually liked the Deitel and Deitel books. I took intermediate C++ last year (kind of a mistake, I knew more that the lecturer), the main book was D & D C++. I flipped through it in the bookstore and put it back in utter disgust. Then I got Stroustrup and all was good in the world - except that we had to code in VC++ for the final project.:)
but since he helped create Doom, he still has a certain level of respect from me, I suppose.
The Commander Keen series still has a small but hard-core fanbase as well.:) I'm actually dissapointed that the commanderkeen.com domain is taken (I just looked), but I suppose it's just as well.
C++ has the STL vector types (also a matrix type, right?)
C++ has a vector, in the sense of a variable size array, and also a valarray, which acts like a mathematical vector. But valarray sucks hard (the design is based on F77 and gives quite poor performance on modern CPUs). There is not matrix type in the ISO libraries, however, Blitz++ is a (big complex) math library in C++ - it does matrix and vector operations, all kinds of weird functions that I don't want to know about, etc, etc. You can find in on Google, it's very well known (it's GPL/Articstic, BTW).
I'm sure that if this became well known and popular, the libstdc++ and Blitz++ people would add support for it in their code.
Damn - 32 128 bit registers! I fscking hate x86!! I'm so jealous!:(
The spokeswoman said the computer's data was encrypted and confirmed that any information held on it would be very difficult to retrieve. She would not disclose what type of encryption was in place or how strong it is.
I suspect that unless he snuck the laptop out (bad spy!), either the data is not that sensitive, or the entire hard drive was encrypted (or both).
Though actually, I'll bet there are a lot of people who would like to get ahold of the encryption software or hardware (probably hardware), in order to reverse engineer it. Not neccesarily for any bad purposes, mind you, I supsect that people such as Ross Anderson or Lars Knudsen (a couple of cryptographers, for those not in the know) would love to get ahold of something like that and be able to say that they broke a cipher used by MI5.
Also, I doubt this guy is actually a spy of any sort: more likely a desk worker of some sort.
I can see it now. All the hardcore gangsta' rappers touting GnuPG as the only way to keep your dope deals secret. Hells yeah.
'course the govt has been claiming stuff like that is happening all the time now (in yet another effort to put the crypto genie back in the bottle).
Actually, I'd like to see your scenario happen, maybe we could make crypto "cool". I already thinks it's cool but then I'm a geek.:) Maybe one of those "enhanced CDs" (you know, the ones with video and crap like that on them) with GPG for a half-a-dozen different platforms.
I've been wondering for a while, but haven't seen anything posted one way or another...
Will there be a Linux port?
It uses DirectX instead of OpenGL, but Loki does have those porting libraries.
My brother talks to John Romero fairly regularly (yes, that sounds like bullshit but I've read email from him that my brother has gotten and the headers looked legit), and when he asked about a Linux port of Daikatana, Romero refused to answer.
That, of course, is a very speculative, almost-on-the-edge-of-pure-rumor kind of answer, and personally I wouldn't put much faith in someone on/. who claims that they know someone who talks to Romero. Anyway, I don't have much hope.
And I'm still going to buy it, a lot of the ideas behind it are (IMHO), damn cool.
Even if Bob didn't exist,Stang would have created him.
Hail Eris!:)
I wonder what the religious makeup of/. is? Hmmm... now that would be an interesting poll (though perhaps it's already been done).
Remember everybody: make sure you don't commit the ultimate sin*!
* For the uninitiated, that would be eating a hot dog bun.
Re:Perl is obsolete, among other things
on
Perl 5.6.0 Out
·
· Score: 1
Note the space between the two >'s in the last example. Without this space, the compiler would see a >> (right-shift) token instead of two >'s.
And this is just one of MANY reasons why C++ SUCKS TOTALLY.
Because you actually have to write code that parses unambigiously? Oh, poor baby! Of course, I'm sure you don't actually write code, you've just decided that C++ must suck (because don't all the other ACs say so?), and then you alternate between posting this opinion on slashdot and surfing for porn.
They make her 21 or something, and have her played by someone who looks more like an ass-kicking cyber-ninja than teenage jailbait.
Yeah, but I think that would take away a LOT of the character of the relationship between Hiro and YT. Not to mention the fact that a large portion of the plot relies on her being a teenage skateboard courier (for instance, when she's sent to deliver packages to Uncle Enzo, the US government, and L. Bob Rife's church). Also that's how she manages to save herself from L. Bob Rife. It would be a lot better for the plot if they just incapacitated Raven in some other way.
This is reminding me I need to go get that new book of his, too.
What do _you_ think the Metaverse looks like? How about the Ringworld? Rama?
The Shire/Smaug/The Balrog of Moria? Dune and/or a mile long Sandworm? (Yes, there was a Dune movie (maybe two?) and I didn't think it was very good (though also not terrible)).
Rama... if done correctly, that would be a movie to rival the original Star Wars (at least IMHO). Especially if they did the whole set of books as a series of movies. Doing the stuff where they're floating in zero G along the axis when all of a sudden the lights come on would be at least several million dollars in SX though...
If there was a movie adaptation of Snow Crash, I'd almost be afraid to see it. I'd be horribly scared to think of how much it would be butchered to fit the constraints of time and money...
That's how I felt about the Dune movie. I mean, it's wasn't bad or anything, but Dune (the book) works on such a huge scale that it would be impossible to do a faithful translation of the book in less that 6 hours.
Jursasic Park + Lost World, when compared to the books, were crap (of course the only thing the book the Lost World had with the movie was the name...). Seems like all of Michael Chriton's (sp?) books attract people who like to make crappy movies (except The Andromeda Strain, that was OK). Did anyone see the movie that was based on Eaters of the Dead? I don't think the movie was called that though. It had Antonio Banderas, came out last fall or so?
How is this a security risk in a UNIX-ish environment? Can't processes talk to each other as much as they want anyway??
Yup. IPC and all that (not to mention just leaving a file with any kind of data you want in/tmp). If you have a program that reads important data, and it is set up so that it passes data around in some covert way, you're screwed anyway. It doesn't matter if it's one of these things or a/bin/login that mails passwords to a remote host.
The using a GUI over a network is neat stuff, but it's useless for most people. I've yet to find a use for it.
Yeah, you're probably right. I'm in college and work in the Physics department here, it's nice to be able to call up programs that are crashing over the network, versus walking half a mile to where the problem is.
It's a design issue, I'm assuming functionality over usabilty, relying upon the actual application people to create a *usable* interface.
X is generally like that, from the perspective of both users and programmers. X, for the most part, is just a network protocol. Everything else is done by higher level libraries (or the applications themselves).
As an example, Netscape crashes on me in both Linux and on NT.
You might try downloading tarballs from Netscape directly, versus using the one shipped with the distro. I use Redhat, and after I upgraded Netscape (mostly because I wanted 128 bit SSL), it stopped crashing for the most part (maybe it'll crash once or twice a week at most now).
I get this creepy feeling that many of the so-called Linux programmers are only in it because they absolutely can't stand to see other people get paid to do what they like doing (coding). I wonder if it's a "Dammit, I know I can do that! And better! But he's getting paid to do it! and on MS products! I've got to do something about that.. I know! I can write a "free" clone and try to erode their customer base, so we can all be poor together!" mentality. Personally, I find that mentality irrational, if it indeed exists.
Or maybe they just like coding? Microsoft does a lot of things, and it stands to reason that there will be OSS programmers who will be interested in some of the same things as Microsoft does. Hell, you could claim that just about any OSS project out there is trying to "compete" with MS because similiar functionality can be provided with a program from MS. In fact, Apple and Be are just cheap ripoffs of Microsoft, they're both trying to make OSes, when everyone knows Microsoft makes one (well, more like half-a-dozen) as well. (OK, that's a little extreme, but hopefully you see my point).
The themeability of most WM's allows for a custom look, now how about an X (which I suspect is the culprit) overhaul? Has anyone successfully installed Xfree86 4.0? Any reviews forthcoming for it? The feeling that you're using yesterday's software. I mean, it's as if people writing the stuff are waiting for a commercial Win32 product to come out, then trying to copy it feature for feature. I'd like to see some innovation every once in awhile.
Well, quite literally X is "yesterday's software". Can't remember exactly, but I'm pretty sure it was created in the early 80s (maybe even earlier). XFree86 is much more recent but still based on the same stuff. And X-Windows is in some ways way beyond the abilities of any Windows GUI. GUI programs over a network? Multiple people using a GUI interface on a single machine?
but there needs to be some work done in the standardization of interfaces
Yeah, right. That would be an awful lot of cats to try herding. And what do you think we should all standardize on? I mean, not like the GNOME people, the KDE people, and the people using neither haven't been fighting about this for months now. The only thing that might cause any sort of standardization would be if some GUI toolkit came along that was so good everyone used it (and even then it would take years for people to switch).
I really enjoyed using NT4sp6 (contrary to popular opinion, I found NT to be *very* stable. It took me a month of heavy usage to get to the point of a reboot).
Yeah, NT really isn't that bad. I've been using Workstation inside VMware on Linux for the last while, and it's only crashed once. Were you running Workstation or Server? The reason I ask is, I have a friend who's a pretty serious NT freak (he also runs Linux and OpenBSD, but anyway...), he's got a big machine [well, big for a personal machine], 2xPIII-550s, 256M RAM, 6 SCSI drives with Hardware RAID, etc, etc, running Server, and he can only keep it up for about two weeks at a time before he has to reboot.
Something interesting I heard from a guy I know running 2000: when he first installed it it was very stable, could stay up for several weeks at a time. However, lately it's been bluescreening every day or so. Personally, I'll probably get Windows 2000 eventually, but only after I'm sure that the most outstanding "issues" have been worked out (not to mention driver support!!!). And it damn well better interoperate with my Linux and FreeBSD boxen.
Slashdot Mirror
Under fire for his company's suit, Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos has proposed a sharp reduction in the duration of Internet-related patent rights, which, like all other patents, are good for 20 years from application.
I'd like to see patents for anything involving computers to last 3 or 5 years from the time the patent is granted. It's just totally unreasonable that someone can patent something, and basically prevent it's use forever, since by the time 20 years rolls around, the technique is almost certainly completely obsolete (replaced by new patented technology, etc etc). Not to mention all the bogus patents (sliding year windows for Y2K fixes, one click shopping, etc) that have been floating around lately. Well, here's hopin...
is_computer_on_fire has got to be my favorite function of all time. I've actually seen Linux logs with:
lpr: Printer on fire?
I hadn't seen is_computer_on before, though. I love an OS with a sense of humor.
AOL is a BIG chunkc of the newbie market.
:)
Yes, exactly the same people who won't upgrade a browser when someone finds a security hole in it, because they don't read Bugtraq. Personally I have no patience with such people.
I found these rather fun constant definitions in BarApp.h (part of the open source deskbar). They are used for the hidden menu that allows one to select the style of the windows border.
Be does that sometimes. Here's the enum they use for platforms (read through them!):
typedef enum {
B_BEBOX_PLATFORM = 0,
B_MAC_PLATFORM,
B_AT_CLONE_PLATFORM,
B_ENIAC_PLATFORM,
B_APPLE_II_PLATFORM,
B_CRAY_PLATFORM,
B_LISA_PLATFORM,
B_TI_994A_PLATFORM,
B_TIMEX_SINCLAIR_PLATFORM,
B_ORAC_1_PLATFORM,
B_HAL_PLATFORM
} platform_type;
I would recommend that all open source projects do the same. If you spot a security bug in the Linux kernel, or Apache, or sendmail or whatever, let the maintainers know quietly and give them a chance to announce and fix in good order; tell the world only if this procedure doesn't seem to work.
This is generally what happens on mailing lists like Bugtraq. However, often it's better to just post to Bugtraq first off and let people confirm/analyze it, then figure out how to fix it (usually easy when you know what's wrong). For instance, over the weekend someone posted something that crashed his Slackware 7 / 2.2.14 machine - he thought it was a kernel bug. I tried it on my RH 6.1 / 2.2.14 machine (who needs uptime?), but nothing happened. So maybe it's a problem with PAM? Maybe something else? Probably it'll be figured out in a few days, and a fix will be applied. But it wasn't a kernel bug: he would have just been bothering the wrong people.
Note this is not the case if you know what the problem is (ie, there is a buffer overflow in line xx in somefile.c in Apache, or whatever). In that case the right thing to do is to let the proper people know, then post to Bugtraq and/or other appropriate mailing list(s) after a week or two has passed and a fix is available.
It's generally considered good etiquette on mailing lists like Bugtraq to give the vendor at least a week advance notice before posting, to give them time to at least start working on a fix. However, if Mozilla is going to take bug reports and "cover them up" for an extended time, I can certainly see people posting exploits without bothering to let Mozilla know: why bother?
In some situations, this method is acceptable (for instance, some security holes in DNS and Kerberos were hidden for years to allow fixes to be implemented). However, Mozilla (however over-hyped it is) will never have the wide spread adoption of DNS or Kerberos - if it's lucky and well managed it may become popular in the *nix/BeOS/MacOS/etc world, but I can't see it going much anywhere on Windows. It's not, and never will be, wide spread enough or important enough to hide security bugs.
Stuff compiled on 6.2 is supposed to run on prior 6.x releases, which is not the case if we had updated gcc (c++ changes). gcc 2.95.3 (or whatever is current by then, maybe 2.96, maybe 3.0) will be in 7.0.
gcc 3 will probably be the next gcc release - even if not gcc 3 will certainly be out by next fall. It was scheduled for Q1 2000, now looking that will be late, but in any case it should be out by this summer (oh, I'm looking forward to that!)
BTW, I hope you're planning on getting rid of the compat libs in 7. If people need to run their stuff on 5* or 6*, they can download the fscking sources and compile them. Or put it in powertools or something. It just seems to be a really stupid thing to put into the main distribution (especially considering things like Mesa weren't in 6.1)
Well, I'm looking forward to 7. The RSA patent will have expired, so you can ship OpenSSH, OpenSSL, and psst, along with XFree4, 2.4 kernel, gcc3... yum.
you can still use the text install ... just type "text" when the cd first boots (like it says to)
In text 6.1 installs you can't see the package summaries. I was glad I had been using Redhat for a while when I went to install 6.1 on an old Pentium and for some reason the installer didn't see the S3 ViRGE card on the box and went into text mode. Someone who hasn't installed Redhat before would have no idea what some of the packages do without a summary. I installed Mandrake on a machine a while back, and I had to look at dozens of packages summaries trying to figure out what I needed.
What's wrong with the D&D book? I'm taking Comp Sci II right now, and we're using the D&D book. I suppose I should know about the shortcomings of the book, but then again, I *am* jawad....
I can't remember details (this was a year ago, and hell, I have problems remember what happened last week), but my impression of it was that it was:
a) Incomplete (as to with the latest ISO drafts and etc)
b) Didn't talk to much about design or technique (which is one of the reasons I like Stroustrup).
As someone pointed out below, Stroustrup is probably pretty bad if you are just starting programming. About the same as learning Perl from Programming Perl alone (though I did that, so maybe I'm just a masochist). I had already been programming C and C++ for maybe 1.5 years before that, and I was able to basically read right through.
I'm probably one of the many orphans picked up by the Deitel Bros. at the CS/EE Orphanage. :-)
:)
People actually like their books? This isn't a troll (at least not intentionally), I really am shocked that someone (mutiple someones?) actually liked the Deitel and Deitel books. I took intermediate C++ last year (kind of a mistake, I knew more that the lecturer), the main book was D & D C++. I flipped through it in the bookstore and put it back in utter disgust. Then I got Stroustrup and all was good in the world - except that we had to code in VC++ for the final project.
but since he helped create Doom, he still has a certain level of respect from me, I suppose.
:) I'm actually dissapointed that the commanderkeen.com domain is taken (I just looked), but I suppose it's just as well.
The Commander Keen series still has a small but hard-core fanbase as well.
C++ has the STL vector types (also a matrix type, right?)
:(
C++ has a vector, in the sense of a variable size array, and also a valarray, which acts like a mathematical vector. But valarray sucks hard (the design is based on F77 and gives quite poor performance on modern CPUs). There is not matrix type in the ISO libraries, however, Blitz++ is a (big complex) math library in C++ - it does matrix and vector operations, all kinds of weird functions that I don't want to know about, etc, etc. You can find in on Google, it's very well known (it's GPL/Articstic, BTW).
I'm sure that if this became well known and popular, the libstdc++ and Blitz++ people would add support for it in their code.
Damn - 32 128 bit registers! I fscking hate x86!! I'm so jealous!
The spokeswoman said the computer's data was encrypted and confirmed that any information held on it would be very difficult to retrieve. She would not disclose what type of encryption was in place or how strong it is.
:)
Every byte was xored with 'A'.
I suspect that unless he snuck the laptop out (bad spy!), either the data is not that sensitive, or the entire hard drive was encrypted (or both).
Though actually, I'll bet there are a lot of people who would like to get ahold of the encryption software or hardware (probably hardware), in order to reverse engineer it. Not neccesarily for any bad purposes, mind you, I supsect that people such as Ross Anderson or Lars Knudsen (a couple of cryptographers, for those not in the know) would love to get ahold of something like that and be able to say that they broke a cipher used by MI5.
Also, I doubt this guy is actually a spy of any sort: more likely a desk worker of some sort.
I can see it now. All the hardcore gangsta' rappers touting GnuPG as the only way to keep your dope deals secret. Hells yeah.
:) Maybe one of those "enhanced CDs" (you know, the ones with video and crap like that on them) with GPG for a half-a-dozen different platforms.
'course the govt has been claiming stuff like that is happening all the time now (in yet another effort to put the crypto genie back in the bottle).
Actually, I'd like to see your scenario happen, maybe we could make crypto "cool". I already thinks it's cool but then I'm a geek.
I've been wondering for a while, but haven't seen anything posted one way or another...
/. who claims that they know someone who talks to Romero. Anyway, I don't have much hope.
Will there be a Linux port?
It uses DirectX instead of OpenGL, but Loki does have those porting libraries.
My brother talks to John Romero fairly regularly (yes, that sounds like bullshit but I've read email from him that my brother has gotten and the headers looked legit), and when he asked about a Linux port of Daikatana, Romero refused to answer.
That, of course, is a very speculative, almost-on-the-edge-of-pure-rumor kind of answer, and personally I wouldn't put much faith in someone on
And I'm still going to buy it, a lot of the ideas behind it are (IMHO), damn cool.
Even if Bob didn't exist,Stang would have created him.
:)
/. is? Hmmm... now that would be an interesting poll (though perhaps it's already been done).
Hail Eris!
I wonder what the religious makeup of
Remember everybody: make sure you don't commit the ultimate sin*!
* For the uninitiated, that would be eating a hot dog bun.
Note the space between the two >'s in the last example. Without this space, the compiler would see a >> (right-shift) token instead of two >'s.
And this is just one of MANY reasons why C++ SUCKS TOTALLY.
Because you actually have to write code that parses unambigiously? Oh, poor baby! Of course, I'm sure you don't actually write code, you've just decided that C++ must suck (because don't all the other ACs say so?), and then you alternate between posting this opinion on slashdot and surfing for porn.
They're doing a Dune miniseries right now here in Europe. Running time: 6 hours....
:)
Hey, cool. Hopefully us here in the US will get to see it.
They make her 21 or something, and have her played by someone who looks more like an ass-kicking cyber-ninja than teenage jailbait.
Yeah, but I think that would take away a LOT of the character of the relationship between Hiro and YT. Not to mention the fact that a large portion of the plot relies on her being a teenage skateboard courier (for instance, when she's sent to deliver packages to Uncle Enzo, the US government, and L. Bob Rife's church). Also that's how she manages to save herself from L. Bob Rife. It would be a lot better for the plot if they just incapacitated Raven in some other way.
This is reminding me I need to go get that new book of his, too.
What do _you_ think the Metaverse looks like? How about the Ringworld? Rama?
The Shire/Smaug/The Balrog of Moria? Dune and/or a mile long Sandworm? (Yes, there was a Dune movie (maybe two?) and I didn't think it was very good (though also not terrible)).
Rama... if done correctly, that would be a movie to rival the original Star Wars (at least IMHO). Especially if they did the whole set of books as a series of movies. Doing the stuff where they're floating in zero G along the axis when all of a sudden the lights come on would be at least several million dollars in SX though...
If there was a movie adaptation of Snow Crash, I'd almost be afraid to see it. I'd be horribly scared to think of how much it would be butchered to fit the constraints of time and money...
That's how I felt about the Dune movie. I mean, it's wasn't bad or anything, but Dune (the book) works on such a huge scale that it would be impossible to do a faithful translation of the book in less that 6 hours.
Jursasic Park + Lost World, when compared to the books, were crap (of course the only thing the book the Lost World had with the movie was the name...). Seems like all of Michael Chriton's (sp?) books attract people who like to make crappy movies (except The Andromeda Strain, that was OK). Did anyone see the movie that was based on Eaters of the Dead? I don't think the movie was called that though. It had Antonio Banderas, came out last fall or so?
How is this a security risk in a UNIX-ish environment? Can't processes talk to each other as much as they want anyway??
/tmp). If you have a program that reads important data, and it is set up so that it passes data around in some covert way, you're screwed anyway. It doesn't matter if it's one of these things or a /bin/login that mails passwords to a remote host.
Yup. IPC and all that (not to mention just leaving a file with any kind of data you want in
The using a GUI over a network is neat stuff, but it's useless for most people. I've yet to find a use for it.
Yeah, you're probably right. I'm in college and work in the Physics department here, it's nice to be able to call up programs that are crashing over the network, versus walking half a mile to where the problem is.
It's a design issue, I'm assuming functionality over usabilty, relying upon the actual application people to create a *usable* interface.
X is generally like that, from the perspective of both users and programmers. X, for the most part, is just a network protocol. Everything else is done by higher level libraries (or the applications themselves).
As an example, Netscape crashes on me in both Linux and on NT.
You might try downloading tarballs from Netscape directly, versus using the one shipped with the distro. I use Redhat, and after I upgraded Netscape (mostly because I wanted 128 bit SSL), it stopped crashing for the most part (maybe it'll crash once or twice a week at most now).
I get this creepy feeling that many of the so-called Linux programmers are only in it because they absolutely can't stand to see other people get paid to do what they like doing (coding). I wonder if it's a "Dammit, I know I can do that! And better! But he's getting paid to do it! and on MS products! I've got to do something about that.. I know! I can write a "free" clone and try to erode their customer base, so we can all be poor together!" mentality. Personally, I find that mentality irrational, if it indeed exists.
Or maybe they just like coding? Microsoft does a lot of things, and it stands to reason that there will be OSS programmers who will be interested in some of the same things as Microsoft does. Hell, you could claim that just about any OSS project out there is trying to "compete" with MS because similiar functionality can be provided with a program from MS. In fact, Apple and Be are just cheap ripoffs of Microsoft, they're both trying to make OSes, when everyone knows Microsoft makes one (well, more like half-a-dozen) as well. (OK, that's a little extreme, but hopefully you see my point).
The themeability of most WM's allows for a custom look, now how about an X (which I suspect is the culprit) overhaul? Has anyone successfully installed Xfree86 4.0? Any reviews forthcoming for it? The feeling that you're using yesterday's software. I mean, it's as if people writing the stuff are waiting for a commercial Win32 product to come out, then trying to copy it feature for feature. I'd like to see some innovation every once in awhile.
Well, quite literally X is "yesterday's software". Can't remember exactly, but I'm pretty sure it was created in the early 80s (maybe even earlier). XFree86 is much more recent but still based on the same stuff. And X-Windows is in some ways way beyond the abilities of any Windows GUI. GUI programs over a network? Multiple people using a GUI interface on a single machine?
but there needs to be some work done in the standardization of interfaces
Yeah, right. That would be an awful lot of cats to try herding. And what do you think we should all standardize on? I mean, not like the GNOME people, the KDE people, and the people using neither haven't been fighting about this for months now. The only thing that might cause any sort of standardization would be if some GUI toolkit came along that was so good everyone used it (and even then it would take years for people to switch).
I really enjoyed using NT4sp6 (contrary to popular opinion, I found NT to be *very* stable. It took me a month of heavy usage to get to the point of a reboot).
Yeah, NT really isn't that bad. I've been using Workstation inside VMware on Linux for the last while, and it's only crashed once. Were you running Workstation or Server? The reason I ask is, I have a friend who's a pretty serious NT freak (he also runs Linux and OpenBSD, but anyway...), he's got a big machine [well, big for a personal machine], 2xPIII-550s, 256M RAM, 6 SCSI drives with Hardware RAID, etc, etc, running Server, and he can only keep it up for about two weeks at a time before he has to reboot.
Something interesting I heard from a guy I know running 2000: when he first installed it it was very stable, could stay up for several weeks at a time. However, lately it's been bluescreening every day or so. Personally, I'll probably get Windows 2000 eventually, but only after I'm sure that the most outstanding "issues" have been worked out (not to mention driver support!!!). And it damn well better interoperate with my Linux and FreeBSD boxen.
Damn, this has turned into a pretty long post.