I'd be more worried about the tendency of some universities to build strong firewalls around their networks that filter out all incoming traffic, thus preventing the use of any private servers and peer-to-peer clients of students as well as researchers.
Our university did this, which has annoyed especially many computer science students. For me, it closed down my largeish website, together with many CGI programs for research (such as a data equalizer for neural net research) and personal purposes.
I wrote a long complaint (in Finnish sorry) about the problem, but since most people don't need (or don't know they need) the service, they don't care. The students still can put up their web page to a poorly administered and always outdated main server, which doesn't have any DB or other softwares, and has very severe restrictions on disk space (on the order of 10 megs while I'd need some 10 gigs).
I see this also as a serious threat to the development of new Internet services. If you look at most of the existing Internet technologies (http, nntp, smtp, bind...), they were all created in universities as "gray research", often by students. In a tightly firewalled Internet, they might never have made it out.
Sure, researchers and deparments of our university can theoretically have their own servers, if the department's head takes personal official responsibility and the department officially allocates money for the upkeep. This means absolute ban for almost all "gray research" projects (often part of larger projects.)
In our case, firewalling was explained with need for tighter security. However, an easy-to-use unofficial port registration would have solved most of the security problems. It's difficult to say what's the real reason; perhaps over-enthusiasm for "high-end security tech", or perhaps just low interest to administer the system - if the net isn't used it doesn't cause so much work, right?
Oh, and we pay for our connections, although they are partly subvented. Well, it might even be profitable for the university. (Note that studying doesn't cost anything here.)
Different countries have different laws for handling this sort of situations. Here in Finland, the state quarantees the salary of workers, if the employer is unable to pay it. I think this requires that the company has been filed for bankruptcy.
Future Tech seems to be an Italian company, with a branch in US, and Mosfet appears to live in US too, so I guess this would be handled according to US law (read the work contract and check the employment and contract laws). Somehow I doubt that US government would quarantee salaries in bankruptcy situations.
I don't have a faintest idea about Italian law, and I don't think there's an EU directive for this situation.
I found a "CFS", but the version was just for kernel 2.2.x. I didn't find a 2.4 port.
SuSE 7.3 ads say it has a "CryptoFS". Does it work well? Where can I get it, if I don't want to install SuSE?
An easy-to-use crypto fs would be enormously important especially for laptops in corporate world. I think W2k or XP have some kind of encryption options, and if Linux can't provide a good alternative, it may be a problem in more paranoid companies.
Of normal filesystems, I've found ReiserFS stable on my two machines during my 6 months of use. I converted from ext2 after it corrupted mysteriously. Unfortunately, RH still doesn't support ReiserFS, even optionally, which I think is really silly. SuSE and Mandrake do.
Yeah, yeah... bunch of outside consultants will determine that switching to Linux would be more costly.
So true. For example, the government of Denmark used an analysis from the Gartner consultancy, which said that transition to Linux would not be profitable.
Also my city, Turku (in South-West Finland) is seriously considering switching all city computers to Linux and OpenOffice. This would mean about 3000 computers. The topic has been discussed in manynews.
The simple reason is that with new Windows and Office licensing, the software costs would be about 1-2 million euros per year.
"The Microsoft has changed its licensing policy from stealing to plain robbing. Cities simply can't afford to make such contracts," says the information management officer of the city.
"Finland is nowadays a Microsoft nation. This sort of changes would create certain kinds of problems."
Turku will not pay any licensing fees to Microsoft before the examination about Linux is finished before the end of this year.
At least 20 other cities are waiting for the City of Turku decision, and will follow its strategy. Turku has about 160,000 citizens.
Atheist: You take a definite position that there is no God (which ironically is actually a position of faith, but that's another debate).
This is unfortunately common view of atheism, and is mostly just a strawman usually used only by non-atheists. Atheism simply means that an atheist does not have a belief in any (supernatural or personal) god.
That doesn't imply that an atheist believes that there is no god. That view is called "dogmatic apriori atheism", which though probably exists, is not very common. The distinction in not, however, always so clear, depending on what viewpoint you take.
Atheism definitely is not a religion, as religion is much more that belief in something. Am I a Seventh Day Slashdottist, just because I believe that Slashdot exists? Atheism is just a non-belief, it doesn't have rituals, holy texts, or other institutions of religions. Not that religion is easy to define (there is no perfect definition for it).
Agnosticism means, as you said, that existence of gods is not knowable. This is a more general and epistemological issue, while atheism deals with a more specific and ontological issue. Therefore, most atheists are agnostics, and vice versa.
European spamming laws would not be very useful as such, as most world-wide spammers are Americans. But, I have a plan.
We could arrange a "conference for spamming professionals" in Europe and call spammers from all over the world. When they arrive at the conference location, we would arrest them.
I doubt Americans could complain about the immorality of the procedure...
I'll buy an iPaq on the day it has Linux (or just the bootloader) preinstalled, and none of my money goes to a criminal organization. Even if that wasn't relevant, there's absolutely no sense in paying for software that you don't use and actually remove on the first day.
Well, I might try the Agenda while waiting for the windowless iPaq. It's much cheaper, too.
I remember that the iPaq Linux port had some problems with the deep sleep mode (APM stuff) earlier. I guess those have been corrected by now? It would be kind of silly to have a PDA which batteries only last 2 hours or so.
I've had a lot of bad experiences with Mandrake 8.0 (as with most other Linux distros I've tried). Well, some good experiences too, but the bad ones are more annoying. Most problems are with the package tool that tries to imitate APT's functionality, but fails miserably.
For example, you type "urpmi kdebase" (or something like that), then it suggests about 50 additional packages, as it should, and starts downloading them. After downloading for half an hour, it tries to install them, but runs into RPM dependency problems or file conflicts. Installation fails. Ok, you resolve the conflicts manually, and try to "urpmi kdebase" again. It removes all the packages from local "cache" and downloads them all again for half an hour. Aaaaagh.
The software manager GUI totally sucks. It can perform operations for half an hour, but doesn't display a progress meter of any kind (just a "busy" indicator that flashes sometimes even when the program is not busy). The only way to get some status output is to run it from command line and watch the output of wget that the software manager uses internally... If the transfer gets stuck, you won't know about it. All operations take an eternity, and usually end up in conflicts, especially with the Cooker RPM repository. It's really frustrating.
It has dozens of other small problems. Most of them are just annoying, some are really confusing, some are just broken. For example, it uses the framebuffer console driver by default. Well, when I type "startx", it gets jammed, and only *reset* helps.
When I installed 8.0, I had to re-install it three times, I think. Once because in the last installation phase, it tested X, and it was ok, but when the test exited, my screen went blank. *sigh* I also noticed - too late - that installing the 2nd CD later with the software manager simply doesn't work. Takes eternity, produces conflicts, and all installation operations all slow as hell. I found it much much easier to re-install everything again than to struggle with the software manager.
Most other issues were mostly GUI-related useability problems. Many things are just confusing, not simple enough, or don't work as smoothly as they should.
Not that other Linux distros are much nicer. RedHat still misses ReiserFS, getting updates (such as KDE) takes quite long, and it's up2date sucks even more than Mandrake's urpmi. Debian might be nice, but its installation is hell. The APT-system seems to work much better than other package systems, but using it is everything but easy (and I'm not really a computer newbie). I'd rather do something productive than use days just learning how to use a package system. Corel Linux's installation was great, but it didn't have updates, and couldn't really be upgraded with Debian packages safely. SuSE...well, miscellaneous problems, but not terribly bad, about equal to Mandrake. The control center program...what was it again...oh, the "YAST2" (can't you just call it "control center"???) was rather bad - sluggish, couldn't configure my SB AWE32 sound card in any way, etc, etc.
Yeah, I reported some of the Mandrake 8.0 problems, but not all (writing even a few reports takes quite many hours).
Overall steganography applications might arise, this harms especially United States' international status considering other matters in neareast geopolitical future or relations you ought understand, really unwanted now!
PS. If you're a terrorist, read the first letters of my above paragraph.
If they manage to get quantum computing working soon, and working well, we can forget these planned anti-crypto laws. Most crypto algorithms would go useless.
With quantum computers, the only way to do crypto would be transferring huge XOR mask keys physically (or possibly with quantum encryption channels). Pretty hard.
I guess it would be rather easy to define an open and distributed authentication protocol that uses open encryption algorithms and protocols. Just use PGP/GPG or even SSH as the basis for the protocol.
I guess there might already be such software?
You could hold your "PassPouch" on a single client machine, but you could add a possibility to give a "PassPouch" to a centralized server. Then use a trivial negotiation. I guess it wouldn't take too many days (hours?) to implement a simple prototype.
Or use public key crypto the way PGP or SSH does, and simply give a public key to the sites that need authentication, and implement a trivial negotiation.
I guess the biggest problem is finding trusted servers for storing the pass pouches. The servers can also be hacked easily, in which case someone could steal your passpouch (which is useless without a password though) and then sniff your password. I think there might be some cryptographic solutions for this. In some earlier Slashdot article someone mentioned that computing in a hostile environment might be possible with some cryptographic solution. It might then be possible to run the authentication code in a secure virtual computer.
You could also have a number of different pouches for different tasks, if you want to have more security.
I have always found the web interface awfully awkward to use. Are there any frontend client applications for it?
While web interfaces are easy to make and maintain, client apps are usually much more user friendly. Most importantly, they make it possible to add features on the client side without need to modify the web service. That's why we have mail and news clients - web email systems generally suck and are difficult to improve without the involvement of the provider of the server software.
I would imagine that a GUI would be especially useful for the developers, as it could update the bug lists without having to refresh web pages, etc. It could also hold a local copy of the database, for doing searches, etc. Well, on small databases at least.
The GUI could also be integrated to the apps. For example, KDE already has some nice support for sending bug reports from applications, but it could be improved, especially for searching existing bugs. Eliminating the use of web browser entirely would be a great improvement for making bug reports.
NEW YORK (Reuters) -- This morning, on the September 12th, just when the dust had settled in the downtown of Manhattan, a helicopter launched from a helipad near the apparently collapsed World Trade Center.
Moments later, the helicopter circled the missing towers three times counterclockwise, and *POOF* a huge smoke cloud appeared, covering the entire downtown area.
As the smoke faded, the two World Trace Center buildings emerged from the midst of the cloud, just as they were two days ago!
People couldn't believe their eyes. The multitude of TV helicopters patrolling the area immediately pointed their cameras at the strange helicopter.
On the landing rack of the helicopter, there was posing, in a tailcoat, who else but David Copperfield!
The city of New York sighed and applauded, and applauded, and applauded. Everyone rejoiced. The world had been saved.
Then, David Copperfield bowed for the ninth time, waved his wand, and *POOF* the helicopter disappeared in a huge explosion and a smoke cloud.
Americans probably won't find this very comforting right now, but I'll give a short newsbreak: Unless you haven't noticed, you are in war, have been for a long time!
Look, for the last 50 years, Americans have been bombing cities here and there all over the world, leaving hundreds of thousands if not millions people dead, charred, mothers and brothers wailing over their graves. Sure, Americans were always the good guys, and sure, American bombs only killed soldiers. But hey, even innocent people do die in wars. America just got it first civilian casualties in 50 years!
So, we can now wait to see how the American reaction will be different from the reaction of those rag-head mad-dog arabs, who cry for eternal revenge after their relatives have been killed and homes bombed to ground.
I guess there must be dozens of distributed alternatives to this centralized Passport system. It would be interesting to find a nice short overview about them.
I think a nice solution would be a kind of "PassPouch", based on public-key crypto, etc. A pouch would contain arbitrary number of passwords. To authenticate a user, a service would need your pouch password to open the pouch, and then use its site-password to authenticate a security cookie in the pouch. Well, something like this. You could have multiple pouches, and a pouch could be stored in your personal computer, or in any "PouchServer", based on for example LDAP. There probably already are such systems, but I haven't noticed any so far (I don't know much about the topic).
Computers hate me. Software hates me. Gods of Information must be angry at me, for some unknown reason. This kind of challenges are just made for me.
But really. I haven't seen a mail client better than Pine so far. Pine is small on the screen (80x25 or whatever you like). It reuses the entire view area in all different views. It's fast to use with keys, and keyboard control of most Linux/KDE/Gnome software is next to nothing. One of the best features of Pine is saving messages by the username of the sender (in incoming mail), and by the username of the receiver (in outgoing mail). 10x faster than moving messages to a long folder list with mouse. Yack, I hate (computer) mice (furry ones are ok though).
Just a small scratch on the touchscreen plastic can ruin a Palm totally. And the repairs to replace the entire screen cost something like...$100?
It's rather silly that the plastic plates are not available separately. But I guess they have calculated that they make more money selling entire new screens or even new PDAs...
I'd call that level of repairability as useless. People really should pay more attention to this kind of problems.
I'm myself not that convinced about the stability of Mozilla. For me,
0.9.1 worked just fine,
0.9.2 usually crashed within a minute, and
0.9.3 always jammed when starting and didn't even show up.
(Sorry for not filing bug reports this time.) This was also in RH 7.1. Ok, it probably works for most people, but for a few it doesn't, and the reasons don't appear to be obvious.
Besides, it's still rather slow in Linux, compared to Konqueror, and especially to old Njetscape 4.7x. I mean the GUI; the rendering is rather quick.
It's pretty damn hard to think of how you could disprove evolution.
Just look at the creationist sites and you'll find hundreds of attempts to disprove evolution, usually by demonstrating apparent impossibilities. For example, a whale buried vertically through several geological strata would be kind of impossible according to standard theories of stratification. Of course, the only instance the creationists have given, is a false one. However, were the case really what they claim it is, it would give a heavy blow to geology (and therefore to evolutionary theory). Similar claims would include combined dinosaur and human fossils, etc, etc.
Just about anything you find, the biologists will make up an explanation for. Evolutionary theory also doesn't really make testable predictions.
It does. Just consider the basic idea that all species have begun from a single cell. Therefore, a raise in complexity over time would be required. We can therefore predict, that the organisms in young strata are, on average, more complex than the ones in much older strata. This is, in fact, what we have observed. There are, for example, no complex animals (such as mammals) in 3 billion years old strata, and the fossils actually have a very rough ascending trend in complexity. (Assuming that fossilised skeletal complexity correlates with genetic complexity.) We can also roughly observe the birth of radically new features, which the older fossils didn't have, such as wings.
Actually, the creationist hypothesis also makes a similar prediction; there would be no observable trend in the fossil record through the "apparent time". However, this hypothesis is in disagreement with the observations. Nevertheless, it's also testable in this way.
I guess it's often though that evolutionary theory can't make predictions because we can't observe large-scale evolution right now. But that's not at all necessary. We don't have to do it right now. To give an analogy, we can't "test" a murder after it has happened. However, we can prove it with evidence. For example, we can have theories about the murder of JFK, but can't "test" it. However, if we found out that there had been a surveillance camera filming the apartment where the killer would have been according to a theory, we could make a prediction that the film shows him, and the film could provide the observation. So the idea is that historical events can be observed through the record of evidence they leave, just as a nuclear physics experiment might be analyzed from film plates later. Similarly, to test the astrophysical prediction that some stars blow up at some time in their life, we don't actually have to test it with our Sun, but we can observe the explosions that happened thousands or millions years ago.
Well, I guess it would be "kind of unusual" to file IPO just after a "Chapter 11", but it might be a good way to try to get funding.
I believe Loki is really important for the future of Linux, and supporting it means supporting all Linux. It's just that buying game packages might not be the most efficient way to support it. It is also a company, and I would feel quite uneasy making donations to a company. However, buying stock would be a great way to "donate", while still getting at least something back. If not any actual dividend for years if ever, at least a feeling of owning something useful.;-)
However, Loki's company FAQ page says:
Our stock is not publicly traded, and it is unlikely this will change any time soon. While we are interested in hearing from qualified investors, we are sadly unable to entertain any small investments. This is primarily a result of U.S. federal and California state securities regulations, which make it prohibitively difficult to sell unregistered securities to most private investors.
Perhaps Nokia might want to go for rescue, if they're really serious about the MediaTerminal. If Loki goes down, Nokia loses all the best games for the MT. That solution might create some problems though, if Nokia at some point wants Loki to give MT a priority over the general Linux platform. That would be very harmful to everyone, including MT on longer run. Thus, if Loki would get support from Nokia, they should also make sure that they keep their independency.
Re:Is Windows security full of holes?
on
Windows in 2020
·
· Score: 1, Troll
Yeah, there's a security alert list on Debian's main page. So? Doesn't that just prove that they're really serious about informing security problems? So serious, that they care less about the risk for reputation than for actual insecurity.
Take a look at Microsoft's page, are there any security alerts? No. What are the most often compromized OSes, Debian (or Linux generally) or Windows (ME/NT/2k/XP)?
Besides, I guess most of the Debian Security Alerts are about vulnerabilities. They might be used for breaking in, but have not necessarely been used.
I downloaded and played the demo yesterday. It was great.
It has some nice new concepts which I haven't seen in RTS games so far. There are unit ZOCs (Zones of Control), and Zones of Supply. The supply concept seems to work quite nicely; units automatically regenerate when in supply zone. This makes defense somewhat easier. However, the supply zone disappears when the city is attacked, so it also makes a kind of siege possible.
The game is based on building cities. The cities automatically have a number of militia units, which is nice. The units can have four formations, each having different combat and movement penalty. That's very nice. However, some common aspects are missing, such as different ground elevations, etc.
Some of the fantasy elements such as "the leaders are immortals" feel rather silly.
The mouse was very sluggish on my screen, but I got it changed to hardware cursor with flags "-x -f".
The demo seems to have a multiplay, but it was empty of players. Actually, there was some player, but he was using a Korean version of the game, which was incompatible with mine. I'm not sure if the multiplay worked properly, because I tried to host a game, but when I opened a second Kohan window, my hosted game wasn't in the list.
The user interface is nice, but somewhat slow, especially the cursor. Even with hardware cursor, it occasionally uses software cursor, which is awful. It would also be nice to have more keyboard shortcuts to various unit functions, for example when you want to build an outpost with an engineer company.
Also, it would be nice to have a bit better UI documentation for the demo. There were many things which I didn't fully understand, such as the meaning of the various resources and trading. Units obviously require certain resources, but it doesn't seem to bother the units if the resources go negative. Well, I guess that it just means that you can't sell those negative resources, and thus can't get money, but how that works is not very clear.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be more worried about the tendency of some universities to build strong firewalls around their networks that filter out all incoming traffic, thus preventing the use of any private servers and peer-to-peer clients of students as well as researchers.
Our university did this, which has annoyed especially many computer science students. For me, it closed down my largeish website, together with many CGI programs for research (such as a data equalizer for neural net research) and personal purposes.
I wrote a long complaint (in Finnish sorry) about the problem, but since most people don't need (or don't know they need) the service, they don't care. The students still can put up their web page to a poorly administered and always outdated main server, which doesn't have any DB or other softwares, and has very severe restrictions on disk space (on the order of 10 megs while I'd need some 10 gigs).
I see this also as a serious threat to the development of new Internet services. If you look at most of the existing Internet technologies (http, nntp, smtp, bind...), they were all created in universities as "gray research", often by students. In a tightly firewalled Internet, they might never have made it out.
Sure, researchers and deparments of our university can theoretically have their own servers, if the department's head takes personal official responsibility and the department officially allocates money for the upkeep. This means absolute ban for almost all "gray research" projects (often part of larger projects.)
In our case, firewalling was explained with need for tighter security. However, an easy-to-use unofficial port registration would have solved most of the security problems. It's difficult to say what's the real reason; perhaps over-enthusiasm for "high-end security tech", or perhaps just low interest to administer the system - if the net isn't used it doesn't cause so much work, right?
Oh, and we pay for our connections, although they are partly subvented. Well, it might even be profitable for the university. (Note that studying doesn't cost anything here.)
Different countries have different laws for handling this sort of situations. Here in Finland, the state quarantees the salary of workers, if the employer is unable to pay it. I think this requires that the company has been filed for bankruptcy.
Future Tech seems to be an Italian company, with a branch in US, and Mosfet appears to live in US too, so I guess this would be handled according to US law (read the work contract and check the employment and contract laws). Somehow I doubt that US government would quarantee salaries in bankruptcy situations.
I don't have a faintest idea about Italian law, and I don't think there's an EU directive for this situation.
IANAL
Is there any stable crypto filesystem for Linux?
I found a "CFS", but the version was just for kernel 2.2.x. I didn't find a 2.4 port.
SuSE 7.3 ads say it has a "CryptoFS". Does it work well? Where can I get it, if I don't want to install SuSE?
An easy-to-use crypto fs would be enormously important especially for laptops in corporate world. I think W2k or XP have some kind of encryption options, and if Linux can't provide a good alternative, it may be a problem in more paranoid companies.
Of normal filesystems, I've found ReiserFS stable on my two machines during my 6 months of use. I converted from ext2 after it corrupted mysteriously. Unfortunately, RH still doesn't support ReiserFS, even optionally, which I think is really silly. SuSE and Mandrake do.
Yeah, yeah ... bunch of outside consultants will determine that switching to Linux would be more costly.
So true. For example, the government of Denmark used an analysis from the Gartner consultancy, which said that transition to Linux would not be profitable.
Also my city, Turku (in South-West Finland) is seriously considering switching all city computers to Linux and OpenOffice. This would mean about 3000 computers. The topic has been discussed in many news.
The simple reason is that with new Windows and Office licensing, the software costs would be about 1-2 million euros per year.
"The Microsoft has changed its licensing policy from stealing to plain robbing. Cities simply can't afford to make such contracts," says the information management officer of the city.
"Finland is nowadays a Microsoft nation. This sort of changes would create certain kinds of problems."
Turku will not pay any licensing fees to Microsoft before the examination about Linux is finished before the end of this year.
At least 20 other cities are waiting for the City of Turku decision, and will follow its strategy. Turku has about 160,000 citizens.
Atheist: You take a definite position that there is no God (which ironically is actually a position of faith, but that's another debate).
This is unfortunately common view of atheism, and is mostly just a strawman usually used only by non-atheists. Atheism simply means that an atheist does not have a belief in any (supernatural or personal) god.
That doesn't imply that an atheist believes that there is no god. That view is called "dogmatic apriori atheism", which though probably exists, is not very common. The distinction in not, however, always so clear, depending on what viewpoint you take.
Atheism definitely is not a religion, as religion is much more that belief in something. Am I a Seventh Day Slashdottist, just because I believe that Slashdot exists? Atheism is just a non-belief, it doesn't have rituals, holy texts, or other institutions of religions. Not that religion is easy to define (there is no perfect definition for it).
Agnosticism means, as you said, that existence of gods is not knowable. This is a more general and epistemological issue, while atheism deals with a more specific and ontological issue. Therefore, most atheists are agnostics, and vice versa.
European spamming laws would not be very useful as such, as most world-wide spammers are Americans. But, I have a plan.
We could arrange a "conference for spamming professionals" in Europe and call spammers from all over the world. When they arrive at the conference location, we would arrest them.
I doubt Americans could complain about the immorality of the procedure...
A cool idea, not?
I'll buy an iPaq on the day it has Linux (or just the bootloader) preinstalled, and none of my money goes to a criminal organization. Even if that wasn't relevant, there's absolutely no sense in paying for software that you don't use and actually remove on the first day.
Well, I might try the Agenda while waiting for the windowless iPaq. It's much cheaper, too.
I remember that the iPaq Linux port had some problems with the deep sleep mode (APM stuff) earlier. I guess those have been corrected by now? It would be kind of silly to have a PDA which batteries only last 2 hours or so.
I've had a lot of bad experiences with Mandrake 8.0 (as with most other Linux distros I've tried). Well, some good experiences too, but the bad ones are more annoying. Most problems are with the package tool that tries to imitate APT's functionality, but fails miserably.
For example, you type "urpmi kdebase" (or something like that), then it suggests about 50 additional packages, as it should, and starts downloading them. After downloading for half an hour, it tries to install them, but runs into RPM dependency problems or file conflicts. Installation fails. Ok, you resolve the conflicts manually, and try to "urpmi kdebase" again. It removes all the packages from local "cache" and downloads them all again for half an hour. Aaaaagh.
The software manager GUI totally sucks. It can perform operations for half an hour, but doesn't display a progress meter of any kind (just a "busy" indicator that flashes sometimes even when the program is not busy). The only way to get some status output is to run it from command line and watch the output of wget that the software manager uses internally... If the transfer gets stuck, you won't know about it. All operations take an eternity, and usually end up in conflicts, especially with the Cooker RPM repository. It's really frustrating.
It has dozens of other small problems. Most of them are just annoying, some are really confusing, some are just broken. For example, it uses the framebuffer console driver by default. Well, when I type "startx", it gets jammed, and only *reset* helps.
When I installed 8.0, I had to re-install it three times, I think. Once because in the last installation phase, it tested X, and it was ok, but when the test exited, my screen went blank. *sigh* I also noticed - too late - that installing the 2nd CD later with the software manager simply doesn't work. Takes eternity, produces conflicts, and all installation operations all slow as hell. I found it much much easier to re-install everything again than to struggle with the software manager.
Most other issues were mostly GUI-related useability problems. Many things are just confusing, not simple enough, or don't work as smoothly as they should.
Not that other Linux distros are much nicer. RedHat still misses ReiserFS, getting updates (such as KDE) takes quite long, and it's up2date sucks even more than Mandrake's urpmi. Debian might be nice, but its installation is hell. The APT-system seems to work much better than other package systems, but using it is everything but easy (and I'm not really a computer newbie). I'd rather do something productive than use days just learning how to use a package system. Corel Linux's installation was great, but it didn't have updates, and couldn't really be upgraded with Debian packages safely. SuSE...well, miscellaneous problems, but not terribly bad, about equal to Mandrake. The control center program...what was it again...oh, the "YAST2" (can't you just call it "control center"???) was rather bad - sluggish, couldn't configure my SB AWE32 sound card in any way, etc, etc.
Yeah, I reported some of the Mandrake 8.0 problems, but not all (writing even a few reports takes quite many hours).
Overall steganography applications might arise, this harms especially United States' international status considering other matters in neareast geopolitical future or relations you ought understand, really unwanted now!
PS. If you're a terrorist, read the first letters of my above paragraph.
If they manage to get quantum computing working soon, and working well, we can forget these planned anti-crypto laws. Most crypto algorithms would go useless.
With quantum computers, the only way to do crypto would be transferring huge XOR mask keys physically (or possibly with quantum encryption channels). Pretty hard.
I guess it would be rather easy to define an open and distributed authentication protocol that uses open encryption algorithms and protocols. Just use PGP/GPG or even SSH as the basis for the protocol.
I guess there might already be such software?
You could hold your "PassPouch" on a single client machine, but you could add a possibility to give a "PassPouch" to a centralized server. Then use a trivial negotiation. I guess it wouldn't take too many days (hours?) to implement a simple prototype.
Or use public key crypto the way PGP or SSH does, and simply give a public key to the sites that need authentication, and implement a trivial negotiation.
I guess the biggest problem is finding trusted servers for storing the pass pouches. The servers can also be hacked easily, in which case someone could steal your passpouch (which is useless without a password though) and then sniff your password. I think there might be some cryptographic solutions for this. In some earlier Slashdot article someone mentioned that computing in a hostile environment might be possible with some cryptographic solution. It might then be possible to run the authentication code in a secure virtual computer.
You could also have a number of different pouches for different tasks, if you want to have more security.
IANACE.
I have always found the web interface awfully awkward to use. Are there any frontend client applications for it?
While web interfaces are easy to make and maintain, client apps are usually much more user friendly. Most importantly, they make it possible to add features on the client side without need to modify the web service. That's why we have mail and news clients - web email systems generally suck and are difficult to improve without the involvement of the provider of the server software.
I would imagine that a GUI would be especially useful for the developers, as it could update the bug lists without having to refresh web pages, etc. It could also hold a local copy of the database, for doing searches, etc. Well, on small databases at least.
The GUI could also be integrated to the apps. For example, KDE already has some nice support for sending bug reports from applications, but it could be improved, especially for searching existing bugs. Eliminating the use of web browser entirely would be a great improvement for making bug reports.
Somehow I can't share your view that US had been just reluctantly obeying UN's orders to attack various countries.
NEW YORK (Reuters) -- This morning, on the September 12th, just when the dust had settled in the downtown of Manhattan, a helicopter launched from a helipad near the apparently collapsed World Trade Center.
Moments later, the helicopter circled the missing towers three times counterclockwise, and *POOF* a huge smoke cloud appeared, covering the entire downtown area.
As the smoke faded, the two World Trace Center buildings emerged from the midst of the cloud, just as they were two days ago!
People couldn't believe their eyes. The multitude of TV helicopters patrolling the area immediately pointed their cameras at the strange helicopter.
On the landing rack of the helicopter, there was posing, in a tailcoat, who else but David Copperfield!
The city of New York sighed and applauded, and applauded, and applauded. Everyone rejoiced. The world had been saved.
Then, David Copperfield bowed for the ninth time, waved his wand, and *POOF* the helicopter disappeared in a huge explosion and a smoke cloud.
No shit?
Americans probably won't find this very comforting right now, but I'll give a short newsbreak: Unless you haven't noticed, you are in war, have been for a long time!
Look, for the last 50 years, Americans have been bombing cities here and there all over the world, leaving hundreds of thousands if not millions people dead, charred, mothers and brothers wailing over their graves. Sure, Americans were always the good guys, and sure, American bombs only killed soldiers. But hey, even innocent people do die in wars. America just got it first civilian casualties in 50 years!
So, we can now wait to see how the American reaction will be different from the reaction of those rag-head mad-dog arabs, who cry for eternal revenge after their relatives have been killed and homes bombed to ground.
Really, get over it.
I guess there must be dozens of distributed alternatives to this centralized Passport system. It would be interesting to find a nice short overview about them.
I think a nice solution would be a kind of "PassPouch", based on public-key crypto, etc. A pouch would contain arbitrary number of passwords. To authenticate a user, a service would need your pouch password to open the pouch, and then use its site-password to authenticate a security cookie in the pouch. Well, something like this. You could have multiple pouches, and a pouch could be stored in your personal computer, or in any "PouchServer", based on for example LDAP. There probably already are such systems, but I haven't noticed any so far (I don't know much about the topic).
But really. I haven't seen a mail client better than Pine so far. Pine is small on the screen (80x25 or whatever you like). It reuses the entire view area in all different views. It's fast to use with keys, and keyboard control of most Linux/KDE/Gnome software is next to nothing. One of the best features of Pine is saving messages by the username of the sender (in incoming mail), and by the username of the receiver (in outgoing mail). 10x faster than moving messages to a long folder list with mouse. Yack, I hate (computer) mice (furry ones are ok though).
It's rather silly that the plastic plates are not available separately. But I guess they have calculated that they make more money selling entire new screens or even new PDAs...
I'd call that level of repairability as useless. People really should pay more attention to this kind of problems.
- 0.9.1 worked just fine,
- 0.9.2 usually crashed within a minute, and
- 0.9.3 always jammed when starting and didn't even show up.
(Sorry for not filing bug reports this time.) This was also in RH 7.1. Ok, it probably works for most people, but for a few it doesn't, and the reasons don't appear to be obvious.Besides, it's still rather slow in Linux, compared to Konqueror, and especially to old Njetscape 4.7x. I mean the GUI; the rendering is rather quick.
Will they now set up a Closed Source Developer Notwork?
Just look at the creationist sites and you'll find hundreds of attempts to disprove evolution, usually by demonstrating apparent impossibilities. For example, a whale buried vertically through several geological strata would be kind of impossible according to standard theories of stratification. Of course, the only instance the creationists have given, is a false one. However, were the case really what they claim it is, it would give a heavy blow to geology (and therefore to evolutionary theory). Similar claims would include combined dinosaur and human fossils, etc, etc.
It does. Just consider the basic idea that all species have begun from a single cell. Therefore, a raise in complexity over time would be required. We can therefore predict, that the organisms in young strata are, on average, more complex than the ones in much older strata. This is, in fact, what we have observed. There are, for example, no complex animals (such as mammals) in 3 billion years old strata, and the fossils actually have a very rough ascending trend in complexity. (Assuming that fossilised skeletal complexity correlates with genetic complexity.) We can also roughly observe the birth of radically new features, which the older fossils didn't have, such as wings.
Actually, the creationist hypothesis also makes a similar prediction; there would be no observable trend in the fossil record through the "apparent time". However, this hypothesis is in disagreement with the observations. Nevertheless, it's also testable in this way.
I guess it's often though that evolutionary theory can't make predictions because we can't observe large-scale evolution right now. But that's not at all necessary. We don't have to do it right now. To give an analogy, we can't "test" a murder after it has happened. However, we can prove it with evidence. For example, we can have theories about the murder of JFK, but can't "test" it. However, if we found out that there had been a surveillance camera filming the apartment where the killer would have been according to a theory, we could make a prediction that the film shows him, and the film could provide the observation. So the idea is that historical events can be observed through the record of evidence they leave, just as a nuclear physics experiment might be analyzed from film plates later. Similarly, to test the astrophysical prediction that some stars blow up at some time in their life, we don't actually have to test it with our Sun, but we can observe the explosions that happened thousands or millions years ago.
I believe Loki is really important for the future of Linux, and supporting it means supporting all Linux. It's just that buying game packages might not be the most efficient way to support it. It is also a company, and I would feel quite uneasy making donations to a company. However, buying stock would be a great way to "donate", while still getting at least something back. If not any actual dividend for years if ever, at least a feeling of owning something useful. ;-)
However, Loki's company FAQ page says:
Perhaps Nokia might want to go for rescue, if they're really serious about the MediaTerminal. If Loki goes down, Nokia loses all the best games for the MT. That solution might create some problems though, if Nokia at some point wants Loki to give MT a priority over the general Linux platform. That would be very harmful to everyone, including MT on longer run. Thus, if Loki would get support from Nokia, they should also make sure that they keep their independency.
Take a look at Microsoft's page, are there any security alerts? No. What are the most often compromized OSes, Debian (or Linux generally) or Windows (ME/NT/2k/XP)?
Besides, I guess most of the Debian Security Alerts are about vulnerabilities. They might be used for breaking in, but have not necessarely been used.
It has some nice new concepts which I haven't seen in RTS games so far. There are unit ZOCs (Zones of Control), and Zones of Supply. The supply concept seems to work quite nicely; units automatically regenerate when in supply zone. This makes defense somewhat easier. However, the supply zone disappears when the city is attacked, so it also makes a kind of siege possible.
The game is based on building cities. The cities automatically have a number of militia units, which is nice. The units can have four formations, each having different combat and movement penalty. That's very nice. However, some common aspects are missing, such as different ground elevations, etc.
Some of the fantasy elements such as "the leaders are immortals" feel rather silly.
The mouse was very sluggish on my screen, but I got it changed to hardware cursor with flags "-x -f".
The demo seems to have a multiplay, but it was empty of players. Actually, there was some player, but he was using a Korean version of the game, which was incompatible with mine. I'm not sure if the multiplay worked properly, because I tried to host a game, but when I opened a second Kohan window, my hosted game wasn't in the list.
The user interface is nice, but somewhat slow, especially the cursor. Even with hardware cursor, it occasionally uses software cursor, which is awful. It would also be nice to have more keyboard shortcuts to various unit functions, for example when you want to build an outpost with an engineer company.
Also, it would be nice to have a bit better UI documentation for the demo. There were many things which I didn't fully understand, such as the meaning of the various resources and trading. Units obviously require certain resources, but it doesn't seem to bother the units if the resources go negative. Well, I guess that it just means that you can't sell those negative resources, and thus can't get money, but how that works is not very clear.