... does not surprise me. Galveston is a small island which seems to be single-handedly controlled by one person. From what I heard, he is controlling 70% of the jobs on the island. People I talked to also described Galveston as a "very different place" than the rest of Texas.
Now please do not sue me... what I said here is only opinion and unsubstantiated facts : )
Yes, it needs more drivers... yes... it needs to have the DRM ripped out of it... but give it a try before you hate it.
Let me see... you suggest I plunk my hard-earned dollars to TRY OUT a piece of OS that everyone is saying is crap JUST FOR THE SLIGHT POSSIBILITY that I might like it? Thanks, but I'll pass:)
In a closed system, it always increases, it can never decrease.
If this is true, how did the stars and planets form, from a uniform high entropy primordial soup into something as ordered as stars and planet systems? Or would it be that a gas cloud is more ordered than a planet?
This allows from freedom of choice because you can move all over the realm of time.
But you'd have no control over where in the realm of time you choose to move any more than you have control where in space you choose to move.
But how is this different from now? Every moment we are aware of the 'past' but we are in the present. We cannot surely say that we've been just this second ago here because that second has passed. We cannot prove our continuous movement through time.
Imagine that you were randomly bouncing through the timeline of your being. At each point you would be having the memories prior to that moment in time, and you would be sure that you were in fact moving in a straight line, since you remember the 'past' but have no idea of the 'future'.
You would not be aware of the fact that you are bouncing through time, even if you were actually jumping up/down the timeline. One moment you are 3 year old, next you are 50, with memories of a 50yr old...
What does that mean? why would/tmp be a mount. And if it's a directory it has to be executable right?
Many simple exploits that are used against machines, (via vulnerable PHP applications or local users, etc), rely upon being able to execute commands in/tmp. You can set up a partition to be non-executable meaning every file on it does not have execution permissions.
F-Spot is one example... a rather shiny and feature-rich photo album application. With time, expect more stuff like, as developers find it easier to focus on features than code optimization.
Being a C geek, I do not know whether I like this or not. Features and shine are good for linux users but it comes with a free topping containing potassium benzoate... which is bad...
I do not understand this fixation with CPU speed. Isn't the bottleneck in memory speed and throughput nowadays? Why pay through the nose when the CPU is more than adequate for 99% of the users out there?
Bah, I am writing this on a 3-yr old machine and it is running fine, so I reasonably expect that a new low-end CPU would be just great for a new machine.
Perhaps they would trade their packet sniffers for some "MMIO snoopers" and dig into Nouveau?
Seriously, there is plenty of stuff out there that needs improvement. And if Microsoft eventually is out of the picture, imagine all those poor people who reverse-engineer Microsoft products, focusing on really interesting things in the next 10 years. It could be a new golden age...
And the truth then comes out in Shuttleworth's article. MS tried tying, and was told to stop. So they tried cliff pricing and were told to stop. Now it's giving vendors advertising money on a per-box basis.
And when that is not possible anymore, Microsoft will bribe^H^H^H^Hgently persuade Dell to subtly break the linux it installs on the computers it sells, just to make users unhappy and point a finger on how bad Linux *REALLY* is.:D
I don't see why it matters so much WHICH distro there is. I think the question is a red herring. I will wipe the existing OS and install my own anyway, so I am happy as soon as I don't pay the Microsoft tax.
As for the average Joe buying a Linux box, he/she will use what is given. I doubt they care much what distro they get, or if they even know what "distro" means. If it breaks, they will ask their friendly neighbour (who used to help them out with the windows machine) anyway, not go to Dell.
So, again, how difficult is to choose one distro that will work with the peripherals and get done with it? All I see is excuses.
Take Eclipse as your starting point. Or Mozilla, or any other large software project licensed via BSD/GPL/MIT license. The amount of time it will take you to understand the codebase and extend it in a radically new direction, will nullify any "head start" you got by using the code.
I think you picked the wrong projects as examples. I am not familiar with either Eclipse or Mozilla, but Mozilla is quite modular, and Eclipse has a plugin system.
Mozilla roughly consists of gecko and XUL. An HTML rendering engine is an HTML rendering engine, you cannot extend it into a radically new direction, IMHO. No, I really do not think you would have to understand the codebase of Gecko and XUL if you wanted to write a more usable browser, or a better browser. The hardest part would be understanding what you want the radical extensions to be.
And you can do wonders by customizing eclipse with plugins, which I don't think would take too long to get used to. And if it is that difficult, you can hire a couple of programmers who are.
In short, both Mozilla and Eclipse are modular and extensible systems with well defined APIs, and would be very easy to drastically alter their functionality without having to understand the millions of code therein.
Maybe if you consider that Microsoft is forced to be compliant with software that is 10 year old, then perhaps you would find the grandparent post at least logical, no?
I would point you to Microsoft programmer blogs where they state the very fact, but I am too lazy to do that. You can google it yourself. Microsoft has an entire department concerned with backwards compatibility.
In fact, Vista has a vulnerability inuser32.dll caused by some old code that used to work but does not work anymore, code that was probably written in the 3.1 era. Just try the following code:
char bug [] = "\\??\\C:\\"; for(int i = 0; i 10; i ++) {::MessageBox(0, bug, bug, MB_SERVICE_NOTIFICATION); }
This causes system instability to the point of crashes or just erratic behaviour. It is caused by some legacy code that checks for magic header in the message and does a strcpy with overlapping memory if it matches. Probably this code is no longer used, but can still be exploited. You'd think this kind of bug would have been found by now...
The point is, old code, cruft, compatibility code is at least potentially unsafe. And such code exists in Windows.
I think you're right... on the side of Russia, it was a political attempt to force M$ to acknowledge and accept pirated use of its copyrighted assets in Russia. I mean, let's find a guy and threaten to send him to Gulag to show how bad Microsoft is, and maybe they will turn soft on us.
The fact that one guy will be sent to prison seems of little importance to Russia's current regime.
Seems this guy's fate is of little importance to BillG as well. I guess Microsoft saw through the bluff and called upon it. It's basically a game of chess with humans as pawns.
It's a pity that simple people have to suffer like this.
I did. And he makes a very good effort to downplay the objections to the OOXML proposal, hiding behind technicalities. Still, his arguments are weak and read like spin.
Linux would be so much better if there were a single de-facto package management system, and vastly fewer dependencies between packages. The license is free! If you want to depend on something, just dump the code into your package. The few megabytes of drive space conserved isn't even nearly worth the hours of hunting for packages and resolving dependencies between them.
And what happens when (if) a critical bug is found in library X which is used and incorporated into 283 applications? Who will track them all down and fix the bug? With the library approach, at least the user can update the library and be done. If the library is written well and the API stable, it should be a simple task.
And Microsoft [...] have no regards for standards and make life unduly difficult for a great deal of people. Sometimes it doesn't even serve a financial purpose.
I think history is full of examples where big fortunes are amassed at the cost of hundreds of thousands of people either becoming slightly poorer, being pissed off, having miserable times etc. It is a funny trade-off that never made sense to me.
I guess I just do not like greedy corporations that do not care about people, and Microsoft is a very shining example in this regard. They proved, time and time again, they would stomp anyone in their path to (what exactly? money? control? fame?).
I still cannot upgrade my system because (guess what) the binary blob driver from ATI does not work with Xorg.7.
There goes your 'Plain work' argument. Proprietary drivers DO NOT WORK because they place too high a burden on the manufacturer. Open sourcing the driver would take that work off their shoulders and make it work for multiple kernel versions/X versions. Which is the definition of 'Plain work' in my book.
My guess it is because azureus is written to be a huge memory hog. There are other torrent clients written in C/C++ and they behave well and do not starve my system of resources like azureus does.
You conveniently forgot that most C applications use stack allocated variables which hugely outperforms ANY heap allocation. Moreover, C and does not wrap low-level data into objects like Java does, thus there is another huge boost.
Slashdot Mirror
I am sorry, that should have read "unsubstantiated allegations, not facts"
... does not surprise me. Galveston is a small island which seems to be single-handedly controlled by one person. From what I heard, he is controlling 70% of the jobs on the island. People I talked to also described Galveston as a "very different place" than the rest of Texas.
Now please do not sue me... what I said here is only opinion and unsubstantiated facts : )
Yes, it needs more drivers... yes... it needs to have the DRM ripped out of it... but give it a try before you hate it.
:)
Let me see... you suggest I plunk my hard-earned dollars to TRY OUT a piece of OS that everyone is saying is crap JUST FOR THE SLIGHT POSSIBILITY that I might like it? Thanks, but I'll pass
In a closed system, it always increases, it can never decrease.
If this is true, how did the stars and planets form, from a uniform high entropy primordial soup into something as ordered as stars and planet systems? Or would it be that a gas cloud is more ordered than a planet?
This allows from freedom of choice because you can move all over the realm of time.
But you'd have no control over where in the realm of time you choose to move any more than you have control where in space you choose to move.
But how is this different from now?
Every moment we are aware of the 'past' but we are in the present. We cannot surely say that we've been just this second ago here because that second has passed. We cannot prove our continuous movement through time.
Imagine that you were randomly bouncing through the timeline of your being. At each point you would be having the memories prior to that moment in time, and you would be sure that you were in fact moving in a straight line, since you remember the 'past' but have no idea of the 'future'.
You would not be aware of the fact that you are bouncing through time, even if you were actually jumping up/down the timeline. One moment you are 3 year old, next you are 50, with memories of a 50yr old...
What does that mean? why would /tmp be a mount. And if it's a directory it has to be executable right?
/tmp. You can set up a partition to be non-executable meaning every file on it does not have execution permissions.
Many simple exploits that are used against machines, (via vulnerable PHP applications or local users, etc), rely upon being able to execute commands in
More info here:
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/57
The long and short answer is: Times change. we do not live in the United States of the 1780s. We should not act like it.
Funny. I find that the more times change, the more they stay the same.
F-Spot is one example... a rather shiny and feature-rich photo album application. With time, expect more stuff like, as developers find it easier to focus on features than code optimization.
Being a C geek, I do not know whether I like this or not. Features and shine are good for linux users but it comes with a free topping containing potassium benzoate... which is bad...
I do not understand this fixation with CPU speed. Isn't the bottleneck in memory speed and throughput nowadays? Why pay through the nose when the CPU is more than adequate for 99% of the users out there?
Bah, I am writing this on a 3-yr old machine and it is running fine, so I reasonably expect that a new low-end CPU would be just great for a new machine.
n/a. I accidentally modded parent down, posting here to undo.
sorry.
If you continue to post this comment, all moderations done to this discussion will be undone! Are you sure you want to post?
Perhaps they would trade their packet sniffers for some "MMIO snoopers" and dig into Nouveau?
Seriously, there is plenty of stuff out there that needs improvement. And if Microsoft eventually is out of the picture, imagine all those poor people who reverse-engineer Microsoft products, focusing on really interesting things in the next 10 years. It could be a new golden age...
And the truth then comes out in Shuttleworth's article. MS tried tying, and was told to stop. So they tried cliff pricing and were told to stop. Now it's giving vendors advertising money on a per-box basis.
:D
And when that is not possible anymore, Microsoft will bribe^H^H^H^Hgently persuade Dell to subtly break the linux it installs on the computers it sells, just to make users unhappy and point a finger on how bad Linux *REALLY* is.
Thank you, I read this story as a kid, but could not remember the author or the name. Now I found it. Great story : ))
I don't see why it matters so much WHICH distro there is. I think the question is a red herring. I will wipe the existing OS and install my own anyway, so I am happy as soon as I don't pay the Microsoft tax.
As for the average Joe buying a Linux box, he/she will use what is given. I doubt they care much what distro they get, or if they even know what "distro" means. If it breaks, they will ask their friendly neighbour (who used to help them out with the windows machine) anyway, not go to Dell.
So, again, how difficult is to choose one distro that will work with the peripherals and get done with it? All I see is excuses.
That would be Idiocracy, http://imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
While not very deep or phylosophical (as mentioned in a few posts above), it is quite good satire and fun for 1 hour of watching.
Take Eclipse as your starting point. Or Mozilla, or any other
large software project licensed via BSD/GPL/MIT license. The amount
of time it will take you to understand the codebase and extend it in
a radically new direction, will nullify any "head start" you got
by using the code.
I think you picked the wrong projects as examples.
I am not familiar with either Eclipse or Mozilla, but Mozilla is quite modular, and Eclipse has a plugin system.
Mozilla roughly consists of gecko and XUL. An HTML rendering engine is an HTML rendering engine, you cannot extend it into a radically new direction, IMHO. No, I really do not think you would have to understand the codebase of Gecko and XUL if you wanted to write a more usable browser, or a better browser. The hardest part would be understanding what you want the radical extensions to be.
And you can do wonders by customizing eclipse with plugins, which I don't think would take too long to get used to. And if it is that difficult, you can hire a couple of programmers who are.
In short, both Mozilla and Eclipse are modular and extensible systems with well defined APIs, and would be very easy to drastically alter their functionality without having to understand the millions of code therein.
Maybe if you consider that Microsoft is forced to be compliant with software that is 10 year old, then perhaps you would find the grandparent post at least logical, no?
::MessageBox(0, bug, bug, MB_SERVICE_NOTIFICATION);
I would point you to Microsoft programmer blogs where they state the very fact, but I am too lazy to do that. You can google it yourself. Microsoft has an entire department concerned with backwards compatibility.
In fact, Vista has a vulnerability inuser32.dll caused by some old code that used to work but does not work anymore, code that was probably written in the 3.1 era. Just try the following code:
char bug [] = "\\??\\C:\\";
for(int i = 0; i 10; i ++)
{
}
This causes system instability to the point of crashes or just erratic behaviour. It is caused by some legacy code that checks for magic header in the message and does a strcpy with overlapping memory if it matches. Probably this code is no longer used, but can still be exploited. You'd think this kind of bug would have been found by now...
The point is, old code, cruft, compatibility code is at least potentially unsafe. And such code exists in Windows.
Cheers.
I think you're right... on the side of Russia, it was a political attempt to force M$ to acknowledge and accept pirated use of its copyrighted assets in Russia. I mean, let's find a guy and threaten to send him to Gulag to show how bad Microsoft is, and maybe they will turn soft on us.
The fact that one guy will be sent to prison seems of little importance to Russia's current regime.
Seems this guy's fate is of little importance to BillG as well. I guess Microsoft saw through the bluff and called upon it. It's basically a game of chess with humans as pawns.
It's a pity that simple people have to suffer like this.
You did read the link, right?
I did. And he makes a very good effort to downplay the objections to the OOXML proposal, hiding behind technicalities. Still, his arguments are weak and read like spin.
Just my 2 cents.
Linux would be so much better if there were a single de-facto package management system, and vastly fewer dependencies between packages. The license is free! If you want to depend on something, just dump the code into your package. The few megabytes of drive space conserved isn't even nearly worth the hours of hunting for packages and resolving dependencies between them.
And what happens when (if) a critical bug is found in library X which is used and incorporated into 283 applications? Who will track them all down and fix the bug? With the library approach, at least the user can update the library and be done. If the library is written well and the API stable, it should be a simple task.
And this happened, I remember recently with libz.
I think history is full of examples where big fortunes are amassed at the cost of hundreds of thousands of people either becoming slightly poorer, being pissed off, having miserable times etc. It is a funny trade-off that never made sense to me.
I guess I just do not like greedy corporations that do not care about people, and Microsoft is a very shining example in this regard. They proved, time and time again, they would stomp anyone in their path to (what exactly? money? control? fame?).
If Linux is to displace Microsoft then it needs exposure exposure exposure.
And I am sure, that's exactly what Microsoft executives thought when they entered this deal. Riiiiight.
So where is my ATI driver for Xorg.7?
I still cannot upgrade my system because (guess what) the binary blob driver from ATI does not work with Xorg.7.
There goes your 'Plain work' argument. Proprietary drivers DO NOT WORK because they place too high a burden on the manufacturer. Open sourcing the driver would take that work off their shoulders and make it work for multiple kernel versions/X versions. Which is the definition of 'Plain work' in my book.
My guess it is because azureus is written to be a huge memory hog. There are other torrent clients written in C/C++ and they behave well and do not starve my system of resources like azureus does.
You conveniently forgot that most C applications use stack allocated variables which hugely outperforms ANY heap allocation. Moreover, C and does not wrap low-level data into objects like Java does, thus there is another huge boost.