...why add the extra complication and expense that developing this technology must surely add?
Because it's an almost perfect way to save users the time of entering their password, the effort of locking their phone all the time, and/or the expense of having some steal and use their phone. Most phones won't let you enter more than a handful of password tries anyway.
Hmm... someone should do a statistical study to see what numbers (birthdates/years, phone numbers, etc...) people are most likely to use for their PIN's, and see if it's possible to guess like 80% within 3 tries. I bet it is possible.
This seems like a better choice of biometric than most, because unlike a finger, it can't be cut off or "cloned" using gelatin or another way of transferring the fingerprint. Now, it might be possible to invent a "bug" that records someone's gait and feeds it to a set of servo motors that convince the phone you're them, but that's beyond what most people's resources and significantly harder than picking up a latent fingerprint.
I R'dTFA, and they said that one of the things that alters the user's gait "code" is when they're drunk. If you paired a Bluetooth phone with a car, and added this, it could be a biometric way of making sure someone doesn't drive drunk. Just a thought.
And it's true. I live in Massachusetts, and all cellular phones have horrible coverage in many parts of Brookline but decent coverage everywhere else. This is because nobody in Brookline wants cell towers disrupting or uglifying their neighborhood. There are times when the cell provider doesn't want to expand coverage but the neighborhood does, and there are times when the provider wants to expand coverage but the neighborhood won't let them. It happens both ways.
First, I didn't RTFA yet, but I'm just wondering aloud...
I seem to remember in their presentation showing a prototype doing software-radio at a data rate usable for 802.11.
So, eventually, would it be possible to build an 802.11[abg] software-defined radio that can sniff (using Kismet of course) all 11 802.11[bg] channels and all however-many-there-are 802.11a channels, all at once? You could scan for all AP's in about 1/10 of a second! If software-defined radio hardware (e.g. receivers, DSP chips, maybe even this chip) become cheap, will we have AP's that communicate on 11 channels at once? (Yeah I know they have MIMO but that's only 3 channels, IIRC, and it doesn't use an uber-l33t software defined radio chip!)
Here is a transcript of the first part of it. There are a few blanks where I couldn't hear names or something happened, like a cell phone went off.:-\ That'll teach you to leave your phone ringing during a presentation! The rest will come later.
This is unusual; normally when you go to speak at a conference, it's some city in the middle of the United States that's exactly like 50 other cities and you're at some hotel that's exactly like 50 other hotels, and if you want to eat, you go to some restaurant, it's a member of a restaurant chain exactly like 5000 other restaurants. But none of that is true here! This is really quite different...if you go to most businesses, it feels like going to ___: everybody's using the same software, the same monopoly software. What we're trying to do is give the business desktop a little bit of a different flavor, a better flavor. So let's hope that using the nice analogy between the location of this talk ___ and making the ordinary business desktop a little more interesting and varied place.
So, do we have somebody to do slides? Okay. (laughs) My computer's up there, so if somebody could find my computer and press the down arrow button... Okay, good job.
So, on the program, it says I'm going to talk about the future of office suites. And I will talk about the future of office suites a little bit, but I think that, you know, we should pay attention to the news that's going on in the world. Recently there's been some tremendously interesting news come out of the state of Massachusetts. I'm sure some of you followed that story, but I thought I would invest a little bit of time talking about what actually happened in Massachusetts, and what I think it might mean for OpenOffice, open source software, and office software in general.
Before I do that, I'll take your picture, so (laughs) would everybody please wave? Thank you. __
So Massachusetts is a state that has about three times as many people as Lavinia (?), and I think in terms of money they probably have more than three times the money of Lavinia. It's a small American state, but it's a very rich one. It's formally called the "Commonwealth of Massachusetts", so if you are reading the correspondence you will see a lot of references to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Really, it's just a state.
So the end of the story happened--what is it today? the 28th? the 29th. So the end of the story happened eight days ago. __ So this is hard to read, but it's a slide from the Massachusetts government Information Technology division. I would have put the URL up there, but it's one of these __ URL's that go off to three lines, and it's actually pretty easy to find. You just go to mass.gov. At the end of the long, long evaluation, study, work, or process, they came up with this thing: the ETRM--I forget what ETRM stands for... E is "electronic", anyhow. And notice that this is available in two formats, PDF and OpenDocument, so that's nice. And the interesting part is actually down here at the bottom, where it talks about data interoperability, data management, data formats, records management... it's the third point that's all abuzz (?). The objective is to establish some rules for what the employees and __ of the state government are allowed to use for data formats. And it's important to note that in this whole process, they never mentioned Microsoft Office, they never mentioned OpenOffice, they never mentioned any other office suite. All they ever talked about was data formats. And that is actually, I think, the correct way forward.
So let's take a small poll here. How many people here in the audience __ think that you'll be using, five years from now, the same office software? __ I see one or two hands. You're using vi, right? (laughs) Okay, so how many of you think that, in five years from now, some of the data you have today will still be interesting, or at least legally required to be preserved? Okay, I see a lot of hands. This is not a new lesson, and it's an old lesson
But I agree, 3-5 buttons is plenty; beyond that you run out of fingers and forget what the buttons do.
High-level VFS does *not* belong in the kernel!
on
GNOME 2.12 Released
·
· Score: 1
I'll bite...
Have GnomeVFS built into the underlying OS and not as a IO library wrapper/hack
Let's clarify what the "underlying OS" is... Are you considering the Finder to be part of it? Last time I checked, Mac OS didn't have the ability to treat URL's as filenames. Its VFS layer is a combination of an automounter and the Finder displaying network shares and volumes. What do you want, a kernel-level HTTP client? <sarcasm>There's a good way to enhance security!</sarcasm>
The kernel should handle filesystems, and a well-written, thin-as-possible VFS layer should handle the VFS stuff. It's much less prone to security flaws, easier to debug, and easier to modify--imagine having to patch your kernel when someone comes out with a new video streaming format, HTTP extension, or file-sharing protocol you want to add to your VFS layer! That would be a pain!
A good compromise, I think is LUFS (Linux Userland File System--I'll leave the link whoring to someone else, use Google to find it). It is essentially a filesystem in the Linux kernel that, when used, sends requests back to userspace programs. There are plugins (?) for it that implement HTTP and FTP (with write access--the Finder can't do that!), as well as exotic protocols like Gnutella and Freenet. By using userspace daemons to access the actual files, it puts network stuff where it can't do a lot of damage and has more flexibility.
Applications stop steaking focus a minute after I told them to start, gave up, and went on to do something else
I will admit, window focus under X is not always very refined. But, frankly, I find GNOME's window handling, in general, to be better than Mac OS X's. Two reasons:
Although Mac OS X simplifies application launching by rigging the Dock to either open or switch to an application, I prefer individually manipulating windows.
Although Mac OS X simplifies digging through windows with Expose, I prefer to be able to click one button (on the panel) to switch windows. This is the equivalent of, given a binder full of papers, spreading them out all over your desk to find the one you want instead of putting tabs in your binder. It's easy, but encourages you to be sloppy.
Maybe I am just saying these because I'm an experienced user, but there's a middle ground between underpowered toaster simplicity and confusing Unix efficiency.
Icons and windowing theme are standardized. By standardized, i mean "ship with clearlooks or don't call it Gnome"
Just because Mac OS X doesn't have themes doesn't mean every copy of GNOME has to look identical. In most cases, a distribution is pushing their entire distribution, and they theme the entire thing together: boot loader background, framebuffer splash background, login manager background/controls, GNOME theme, etc... I disagree that every desktop should look identical. As long as it is clear where and what everything is, and it is consistent throughout the theme and among GNOME apps, the exact size, shape, and color of, e.g., a button doesn't matter.
are possible for users to use, including installing and removing commercial applications, without learning such concepts as "compilers" or "administrative users"
You don't need to know what a compiler is unless you're running Gentoo or another source-based distro, and if you're already running it, you're already smart enough to do wget http://site/package-1.2.3.tar.bz2; tar -xvjf package-1.2.3.tar.bz2; cd package-1.2.3;./configure; make; sudo make install; cd..; rm -rf package-1-2-3*; package.
I can't speak authoritatively, but Ubuntu appears to solve this problem. At least on the LiveCD, everything works. It may ask for the root p
I've given up on Lexmark completely. I had a Lexmark 5700, and every now and then it would stop printing and flash its light (the single, "guess what it means" light) 12 times. I looked this up, and it means "cartridge overcurrent condition." In other words, "our shitty patented evil cartridge level sensor shorted out, but no worries! just buy another cartridge!" I got sick of replacing cartridges because they "shorted out", so I bought an hp LaserJet 1320 instead. It's quicker, it looks like a printer instead of a piece of sculpture, and it prints much better. (Albeit only black and white, but photos are cheaper to print at CVS with their kiosks anyway.) Cheap inkjet printers are the spawn of the devil.
(By the way, although we would go through maybe 3-6 sets of cartridges on the Lexmark in a year, the toner cartridge that came with the hp isn't even half empty yet, and it's only the "standard capacity" one. Granted, the high-capacity cartridge costs $130, but the standard-capacity one costs $70, which is only marginally more than a pair of Lexmark B&W and Color ones, and still lasts much longer.)
There are two choices for upgrading the kernel on Slackware. You can either find a 2.6 kernel package already built in/testing on your install CD's (I don't remember which disc). This would be the easiest way, but you might also get an older kernel like 2.6.9 instead of the latest 2.6.13. To install it, just use installpkg. It should install the kernel in/boot, and then you can specify it in/etc/lilo.conf. (I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, I haven't used Slackware in a while.)
The other way is to compile your own kernel. Despite what everyone says, it's pretty simple once you've done it once. The hard part is making sure you have all the right drivers in it. To start, go to kernel.org and download the latest full kernel tarball (it will be named something like linux-2.6.12.tar.bz2). Put it somewhere, open a terminal, cd to that directory, and type tar -xvjf linux-2.6.x.tar.bz2 (replacing x with whichever version you get). This will unpack the tarball into a subdirectory named linux-2.6.x. cd into that subdirectory and type make menuconfig. This will bring up a menu of configuration options. It's a bit complicated, I admit, but you should go through it step by step and answer "Y" to all the hardware you have. In particular, you need to check off IDE DISK support (assuming you have an IDE hard drive--most are these days) and check off whichever filesystem you use (probably ext2, ext3, or [my personal favorite] reiserfs). Make sure you have your network card, your graphics card, drivers for any ports (serial, parallel, USB, firewire, etc...) and other devices you use. If you need help, you can ask in #slackware on irc.freenode.net, or email me at thinkinginbinary(at)gmail(dot)com. You should probably go through the config, picking out what you can, and writing down a list of questions to get answered.
Once you've finished configuring the kernel, exit the configuration screen (answer "Yes" to the save prompt). Then, type make -j2. This will build the kernel. (The -j2 tells it to compile two files at once, which can be slightly more efficient.) Once that finishes, type make modules_install and make install. This should install your kernel in/boot and symlink vmlinuz to the new kernel. Make sure you keep a copy of your old kernel in/boot as well, because there is a decent chance that your first kernel will be missing something important, and you should always have a backup one to use.
Reboot, and see if it works. If it does, congratulations. If it doesn't, email me and I'll try to help.
Am I the only one who thinks this is way too specific a question for Ask Slashdot, and that the subject at hand is not one that most people would know offhand? This seems much more appropriate to a topic-specific newsgroup or mailing list, not the general tech community.
Oh, of course I'm using suspend2-sources. I was delighted when I found out that someone made a version of gentoo-sources with suspend2. It's perfect for my laptop. I'm running suspend2-sources-2.6.13-r1 right now, and it works great!
I've been using the latest 2.6 kernel, patched with Gentoo and Suspend2 patches. I started with 2.6.9, and it had some ACPI problems, but once I upgraded my BIOS to the latest version and upgraded the kernel to 2.6.10, everything worked well. Other than those specific ACPI issues, I've had no general stability problems. Everything works well.
I used to run Slackware, and I have to say that when I upgraded it from a 2.4 kernel to 2.6, the system did perform better. I think that if people just upgrade cautiously, it's fine to have the current kernel in development. Frankly, I appreciate the increases in responsiveness that the newer kernels have, and I like seeing cool new features appear in each kernel version. Why, just this version, they added support for my laptop's temperature sensor chip, which gave me access to the motherboard sensor in addition to the CPU one which is accessible via ACPI.
I don't know what all the fuss is about, but 2.6 has been great for me.
I don't know what kind of system you're running, but on my laptop, every 2.6 kernel has worked, and everything since 2.6.10 has had perfect ACPI support!
And I run a gentoo- and swsusp2-patched kernel, so it's even stable when patched. (I don't know how much of the stability comes from the patches, but normally patched kernels are considered another source of instability.)
I don't think there's anything wrong with how Linus develops the kernel. I do get tired with all the 2.6.12.x versions, but they're usually a diff of literally 5-10 lines.
Um... from the looks of all the articles I've been seeing on Slashdot, the media is starting to pick up on the fact that unsecured WiFi can be used for nefarious things. I mean, look at the whole Lowe's ordeal. What more do we need to happen?
It's not widespread yet, but there have been crimes committed by using people's unsecured connections. IIRC, there was the Lowe's thing, and a handful each of cases of spammers and child porno creators using WiFi to upload their stuff untraced (or so they thought).
Sure, it's not a daily occurence yet, but it's common enough that you'd think at least the more anxious people would have their networks secured. But they don't, because nobody's told them they need to.
To use your analogy, I'm suggesting that the people who don't want others wandering around their house lock their doors, so when I see an unlocked door, I know I am welcome.
I guess it does seem suspicious, but what I'm afraid is that, although you and I would take "Oh, I'm just a curious hacker who wants to map out networks" as a valid answer, most cops, as we've seen, are totally, completely clueless as to computer activities. I don't want it to get to the point where wardriving itself is considered illegal. I wouldn't mind if the cop just walked by and asked me a few questions--it's one of best things cops can do. It shows people that they're aware of the neighborhood and are proactively keeping an eye out instead of waiting for things to go wrong. But if it reached the point where people wardriving were automatically dragged down to the police station for questioning, and the cops asked "How do we know you *weren't* stealing people's credit card numbers and uploading kiddie porn, huh? Huh?!", then I would be worried. Like what's-his-name from Sacramento, I don't care if using WiFi in connection with another crime is considered wrong, but I don't want it to be a crime in and of itself.
If everyone has their networks unsecured, crackers start using them for nefarious purposes. If crackers start using them, wardriving and the like will become suspicious, pseudo-illegal activities. I don't want wardriving to be considered suspicious, because it isn't illegal. I don't want my neighbors' naïvete in setting up their networks and some crackers' stupid identity theft/etc... exploits to make my harmless activities suspicious to law enforcement. I want people to understand how to secure their stuff so when I see an open network, I know it's really open and not just badly maintained.
I was thinking of more, how can I phrase a flyer to put in people's mailboxen (God, am I a geek...) and on bulletin boards. I'm not really comfortable sending stuff to people's computers, because, although the threshold of legal/illegal use of someone's WiFi is fuzzy, I would consider that past it, or at least quite suspicious.
Slashdot Mirror
In Scotland you can just train it when you're drunk, and you'll be fine most of the time!
/me ducks.
Because it's an almost perfect way to save users the time of entering their password, the effort of locking their phone all the time, and/or the expense of having some steal and use their phone. Most phones won't let you enter more than a handful of password tries anyway.
Hmm... someone should do a statistical study to see what numbers (birthdates/years, phone numbers, etc...) people are most likely to use for their PIN's, and see if it's possible to guess like 80% within 3 tries. I bet it is possible.
This seems like a better choice of biometric than most, because unlike a finger, it can't be cut off or "cloned" using gelatin or another way of transferring the fingerprint. Now, it might be possible to invent a "bug" that records someone's gait and feeds it to a set of servo motors that convince the phone you're them, but that's beyond what most people's resources and significantly harder than picking up a latent fingerprint.
I R'dTFA, and they said that one of the things that alters the user's gait "code" is when they're drunk. If you paired a Bluetooth phone with a car, and added this, it could be a biometric way of making sure someone doesn't drive drunk. Just a thought.
And it's true. I live in Massachusetts, and all cellular phones have horrible coverage in many parts of Brookline but decent coverage everywhere else. This is because nobody in Brookline wants cell towers disrupting or uglifying their neighborhood. There are times when the cell provider doesn't want to expand coverage but the neighborhood does, and there are times when the provider wants to expand coverage but the neighborhood won't let them. It happens both ways.
First, I didn't RTFA yet, but I'm just wondering aloud...
So, eventually, would it be possible to build an 802.11[abg] software-defined radio that can sniff (using Kismet of course) all 11 802.11[bg] channels and all however-many-there-are 802.11a channels, all at once? You could scan for all AP's in about 1/10 of a second! If software-defined radio hardware (e.g. receivers, DSP chips, maybe even this chip) become cheap, will we have AP's that communicate on 11 channels at once? (Yeah I know they have MIMO but that's only 3 channels, IIRC, and it doesn't use an uber-l33t software defined radio chip!)
I finished the audio file, which unfortunately doesn't contain the entire keynote. You can get it here.
I have transcribed the portion of the keynote that is contained in the audio file listed above. You can get it here.
Here is a transcript of the first part of it. There are a few blanks where I couldn't hear names or something happened, like a cell phone went off. :-\ That'll teach you to leave your phone ringing during a presentation! The rest will come later.
This is unusual; normally when you go to speak at a conference, it's some city in the middle of the United States that's exactly like 50 other cities and you're at some hotel that's exactly like 50 other hotels, and if you want to eat, you go to some restaurant, it's a member of a restaurant chain exactly like 5000 other restaurants. But none of that is true here! This is really quite different...if you go to most businesses, it feels like going to ___: everybody's using the same software, the same monopoly software. What we're trying to do is give the business desktop a little bit of a different flavor, a better flavor. So let's hope that using the nice analogy between the location of this talk ___ and making the ordinary business desktop a little more interesting and varied place. So, do we have somebody to do slides? Okay. (laughs) My computer's up there, so if somebody could find my computer and press the down arrow button... Okay, good job. So, on the program, it says I'm going to talk about the future of office suites. And I will talk about the future of office suites a little bit, but I think that, you know, we should pay attention to the news that's going on in the world. Recently there's been some tremendously interesting news come out of the state of Massachusetts. I'm sure some of you followed that story, but I thought I would invest a little bit of time talking about what actually happened in Massachusetts, and what I think it might mean for OpenOffice, open source software, and office software in general. Before I do that, I'll take your picture, so (laughs) would everybody please wave? Thank you. __ So Massachusetts is a state that has about three times as many people as Lavinia (?), and I think in terms of money they probably have more than three times the money of Lavinia. It's a small American state, but it's a very rich one. It's formally called the "Commonwealth of Massachusetts", so if you are reading the correspondence you will see a lot of references to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Really, it's just a state. So the end of the story happened--what is it today? the 28th? the 29th. So the end of the story happened eight days ago. __ So this is hard to read, but it's a slide from the Massachusetts government Information Technology division. I would have put the URL up there, but it's one of these __ URL's that go off to three lines, and it's actually pretty easy to find. You just go to mass.gov. At the end of the long, long evaluation, study, work, or process, they came up with this thing: the ETRM--I forget what ETRM stands for... E is "electronic", anyhow. And notice that this is available in two formats, PDF and OpenDocument, so that's nice. And the interesting part is actually down here at the bottom, where it talks about data interoperability, data management, data formats, records management... it's the third point that's all abuzz (?). The objective is to establish some rules for what the employees and __ of the state government are allowed to use for data formats. And it's important to note that in this whole process, they never mentioned Microsoft Office, they never mentioned OpenOffice, they never mentioned any other office suite. All they ever talked about was data formats. And that is actually, I think, the correct way forward. So let's take a small poll here. How many people here in the audience __ think that you'll be using, five years from now, the same office software? __ I see one or two hands. You're using vi, right? (laughs) Okay, so how many of you think that, in five years from now, some of the data you have today will still be interesting, or at least legally required to be preserved? Okay, I see a lot of hands. This is not a new lesson, and it's an old lesson
Those are nothing! You should see the Gigabit Ethernet hurricanes!
We don't want it in minutes / War and Peace, we want it in Libraries of Congress / fortnight! Jeez, get with the times!
But I agree, 3-5 buttons is plenty; beyond that you run out of fingers and forget what the buttons do.
I'll bite...
Let's clarify what the "underlying OS" is... Are you considering the Finder to be part of it? Last time I checked, Mac OS didn't have the ability to treat URL's as filenames. Its VFS layer is a combination of an automounter and the Finder displaying network shares and volumes. What do you want, a kernel-level HTTP client? <sarcasm> There's a good way to enhance security! </sarcasm>
The kernel should handle filesystems, and a well-written, thin-as-possible VFS layer should handle the VFS stuff. It's much less prone to security flaws, easier to debug, and easier to modify--imagine having to patch your kernel when someone comes out with a new video streaming format, HTTP extension, or file-sharing protocol you want to add to your VFS layer! That would be a pain!
A good compromise, I think is LUFS (Linux Userland File System--I'll leave the link whoring to someone else, use Google to find it). It is essentially a filesystem in the Linux kernel that, when used, sends requests back to userspace programs. There are plugins (?) for it that implement HTTP and FTP (with write access--the Finder can't do that!), as well as exotic protocols like Gnutella and Freenet. By using userspace daemons to access the actual files, it puts network stuff where it can't do a lot of damage and has more flexibility.
I will admit, window focus under X is not always very refined. But, frankly, I find GNOME's window handling, in general, to be better than Mac OS X's. Two reasons:
Maybe I am just saying these because I'm an experienced user, but there's a middle ground between underpowered toaster simplicity and confusing Unix efficiency.
Just because Mac OS X doesn't have themes doesn't mean every copy of GNOME has to look identical. In most cases, a distribution is pushing their entire distribution, and they theme the entire thing together: boot loader background, framebuffer splash background, login manager background/controls, GNOME theme, etc... I disagree that every desktop should look identical. As long as it is clear where and what everything is, and it is consistent throughout the theme and among GNOME apps, the exact size, shape, and color of, e.g., a button doesn't matter.
You don't need to know what a compiler is unless you're running Gentoo or another source-based distro, and if you're already running it, you're already smart enough to do wget http://site/package-1.2.3.tar.bz2; tar -xvjf package-1.2.3.tar.bz2; cd package-1.2.3; ./configure; make; sudo make install; cd ..; rm -rf package-1-2-3*; package.
I can't speak authoritatively, but Ubuntu appears to solve this problem. At least on the LiveCD, everything works. It may ask for the root p
I've given up on Lexmark completely. I had a Lexmark 5700, and every now and then it would stop printing and flash its light (the single, "guess what it means" light) 12 times. I looked this up, and it means "cartridge overcurrent condition." In other words, "our shitty patented evil cartridge level sensor shorted out, but no worries! just buy another cartridge!" I got sick of replacing cartridges because they "shorted out", so I bought an hp LaserJet 1320 instead. It's quicker, it looks like a printer instead of a piece of sculpture, and it prints much better. (Albeit only black and white, but photos are cheaper to print at CVS with their kiosks anyway.) Cheap inkjet printers are the spawn of the devil.
(By the way, although we would go through maybe 3-6 sets of cartridges on the Lexmark in a year, the toner cartridge that came with the hp isn't even half empty yet, and it's only the "standard capacity" one. Granted, the high-capacity cartridge costs $130, but the standard-capacity one costs $70, which is only marginally more than a pair of Lexmark B&W and Color ones, and still lasts much longer.)
There are two choices for upgrading the kernel on Slackware. You can either find a 2.6 kernel package already built in /testing on your install CD's (I don't remember which disc). This would be the easiest way, but you might also get an older kernel like 2.6.9 instead of the latest 2.6.13. To install it, just use installpkg. It should install the kernel in /boot, and then you can specify it in /etc/lilo.conf. (I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, I haven't used Slackware in a while.)
The other way is to compile your own kernel. Despite what everyone says, it's pretty simple once you've done it once. The hard part is making sure you have all the right drivers in it. To start, go to kernel.org and download the latest full kernel tarball (it will be named something like linux-2.6.12.tar.bz2). Put it somewhere, open a terminal, cd to that directory, and type tar -xvjf linux-2.6.x.tar.bz2 (replacing x with whichever version you get). This will unpack the tarball into a subdirectory named linux-2.6.x . cd into that subdirectory and type make menuconfig. This will bring up a menu of configuration options. It's a bit complicated, I admit, but you should go through it step by step and answer "Y" to all the hardware you have. In particular, you need to check off IDE DISK support (assuming you have an IDE hard drive--most are these days) and check off whichever filesystem you use (probably ext2, ext3, or [my personal favorite] reiserfs). Make sure you have your network card, your graphics card, drivers for any ports (serial, parallel, USB, firewire, etc...) and other devices you use. If you need help, you can ask in #slackware on irc.freenode.net, or email me at thinkinginbinary(at)gmail(dot)com. You should probably go through the config, picking out what you can, and writing down a list of questions to get answered.
Once you've finished configuring the kernel, exit the configuration screen (answer "Yes" to the save prompt). Then, type make -j2. This will build the kernel. (The -j2 tells it to compile two files at once, which can be slightly more efficient.) Once that finishes, type make modules_install and make install. This should install your kernel in /boot and symlink vmlinuz to the new kernel. Make sure you keep a copy of your old kernel in /boot as well, because there is a decent chance that your first kernel will be missing something important, and you should always have a backup one to use.
Reboot, and see if it works. If it does, congratulations. If it doesn't, email me and I'll try to help.
If you're going to say it, you might as well turn the words convicted monopolist into a link to help the Google-bombing efforts!
Am I the only one who thinks this is way too specific a question for Ask Slashdot, and that the subject at hand is not one that most people would know offhand? This seems much more appropriate to a topic-specific newsgroup or mailing list, not the general tech community.
Oh, of course I'm using suspend2-sources. I was delighted when I found out that someone made a version of gentoo-sources with suspend2. It's perfect for my laptop. I'm running suspend2-sources-2.6.13-r1 right now, and it works great!
I've been using the latest 2.6 kernel, patched with Gentoo and Suspend2 patches. I started with 2.6.9, and it had some ACPI problems, but once I upgraded my BIOS to the latest version and upgraded the kernel to 2.6.10, everything worked well. Other than those specific ACPI issues, I've had no general stability problems. Everything works well.
I used to run Slackware, and I have to say that when I upgraded it from a 2.4 kernel to 2.6, the system did perform better. I think that if people just upgrade cautiously, it's fine to have the current kernel in development. Frankly, I appreciate the increases in responsiveness that the newer kernels have, and I like seeing cool new features appear in each kernel version. Why, just this version, they added support for my laptop's temperature sensor chip, which gave me access to the motherboard sensor in addition to the CPU one which is accessible via ACPI.
I don't know what all the fuss is about, but 2.6 has been great for me.
I don't know what kind of system you're running, but on my laptop, every 2.6 kernel has worked, and everything since 2.6.10 has had perfect ACPI support!
And I run a gentoo- and swsusp2-patched kernel, so it's even stable when patched. (I don't know how much of the stability comes from the patches, but normally patched kernels are considered another source of instability.)
I don't think there's anything wrong with how Linus develops the kernel. I do get tired with all the 2.6.12.x versions, but they're usually a diff of literally 5-10 lines.
I really don't see what's so bad here.
dragorn's looked into those "ways". They don't really exist, AFAIK.
Um... from the looks of all the articles I've been seeing on Slashdot, the media is starting to pick up on the fact that unsecured WiFi can be used for nefarious things. I mean, look at the whole Lowe's ordeal. What more do we need to happen?
It's not widespread yet, but there have been crimes committed by using people's unsecured connections. IIRC, there was the Lowe's thing, and a handful each of cases of spammers and child porno creators using WiFi to upload their stuff untraced (or so they thought).
Sure, it's not a daily occurence yet, but it's common enough that you'd think at least the more anxious people would have their networks secured. But they don't, because nobody's told them they need to.
To use your analogy, I'm suggesting that the people who don't want others wandering around their house lock their doors, so when I see an unlocked door, I know I am welcome.
I guess it does seem suspicious, but what I'm afraid is that, although you and I would take "Oh, I'm just a curious hacker who wants to map out networks" as a valid answer, most cops, as we've seen, are totally, completely clueless as to computer activities. I don't want it to get to the point where wardriving itself is considered illegal. I wouldn't mind if the cop just walked by and asked me a few questions--it's one of best things cops can do. It shows people that they're aware of the neighborhood and are proactively keeping an eye out instead of waiting for things to go wrong. But if it reached the point where people wardriving were automatically dragged down to the police station for questioning, and the cops asked "How do we know you *weren't* stealing people's credit card numbers and uploading kiddie porn, huh? Huh?!", then I would be worried. Like what's-his-name from Sacramento, I don't care if using WiFi in connection with another crime is considered wrong, but I don't want it to be a crime in and of itself.
It is my business.
If everyone has their networks unsecured, crackers start using them for nefarious purposes. If crackers start using them, wardriving and the like will become suspicious, pseudo-illegal activities. I don't want wardriving to be considered suspicious, because it isn't illegal. I don't want my neighbors' naïvete in setting up their networks and some crackers' stupid identity theft/etc... exploits to make my harmless activities suspicious to law enforcement. I want people to understand how to secure their stuff so when I see an open network, I know it's really open and not just badly maintained.
I was thinking of more, how can I phrase a flyer to put in people's mailboxen (God, am I a geek...) and on bulletin boards. I'm not really comfortable sending stuff to people's computers, because, although the threshold of legal/illegal use of someone's WiFi is fuzzy, I would consider that past it, or at least quite suspicious.