Virus scanners aren't magical, and they cannot prevent you from running all kinds of malicious executable code. Neither can they prevent applications with remote security holes from exposing you to risk.
Wow. Could everyone here cut Marcelo a little slack and be nice, if only for a little while? I just don't see the point of making hurtful remarks like that about a complete stranger, especially one that young. He's obviously talented or he wouldn't have been chosen, and I'm sure he's going to do the best he can with his new responsibilities if people let him. And, really, why are you assuming that he's not "a balanced human being?" What a lousy stereotype.
Yes. Grown adults do enjoy playing Mario, Zelda, and other "kids" games because they're fun, challenging, brilliantly designed, and imaginative. Grown adults also enjoy playing Monopoly, chess, cards, RPGs, soccer/football, and basketball, despite the fact that these games are equally enjoyable for kids.
Please explain to us how violence makes a game "adult" or mature. Seriously, I truly want to know. I suppose that if you're with the MPAA or ESRB, then violence makes a work of entertainment mature, but otherwise I don't get it. To me, the "adult gamer" brand of bloodthirstiness is a mark of the kind of "maturity" that begins and ends at age 14.
Huh? That "Hall of Shame" is a list of packages that failed to build on a version of Linux for a particular architecture, some of which happen to be non-free. What does this have to do with GNOME? With just a cursory glance at the list, I spotted a few free GNOME applications (Balsa, Skipstone, etc.).
Not to be nitpicky, but I believe that Kant died in the early 19th century. Let's not even get into the fact that he's no fun to read at all!
As far as 20th century intellectuals go, Noam Chomsky will be up there for his linguistics work, at least. Bertrand Russell also springs to mind. I wonder if Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, et al, will stand the test of time, though.
Has anyone read Samuel Delany? I haven't, but I'm very curious. I was browsing the book Dhalgren the other day at a bookstore, and it looked quite fascinating. I don't have time right now to read an 800-page sci-fi novel that is billed on its back cover as "Joycean," but I put it on my mental wish list.
p.s. - Two up and coming authors that still fall roughly under the sci-fi rubric and that I can recommend are Jonathan Lethem and Ken McLeod. Check them out.
I agree wholeheartedly about Stanislaw Lem, and you win points for mentioning one of my other favorite authors, Jorge Luis Borges.
For those who are unfamiliar with Lem, I'd recommend starting with the Cyberiad, which is a collection of fables involving two robot builders. It's whimsical, witty, and accessible. My favorite, though, is the vastly different Solaris, which in some ways reminds me of Borges. For those unfamiliar with Borges, perhaps Labyrinths or Dreamtigers would be good starts. Borges' prose and poetry are dense, compact, and carefully wrought; fascinating as his themes are, it's his style that is most distinctive.
I don't have the spare brain cycles at the moment to talk much about either author, but you can find some decent Borges resources at Booklist.com.
A google search should net some good Lem sites.
Mainly, I just wanted to chime in my agreement with the parent post.
Maybe you're just unlucky? I haven't had any of the problems you've described, either with the Red Hat 7.0 & 7.1 default GNOME installs or with Ximian GNOME. I've actually gotten to the point where I prefer using GNOME over Windows. (And I prefer anything over CDE)
I do agree that GNOME is still very much a work in progress, and that there are still loose ends, but it is shaping up very nicely.
That's not going to happen in the 2.4 series. The kernel hackers think that making the VM policy configurable would be a nightmare:
Michael T. Babcock asked how ugly it would be to make Rik van Riel's and Andrea Arcangeli's Virtual Memory subsystem code into a compile-time option, so folks could try each one out as they pleased. Alan Cox replied simply, "Too ugly for words." Mike Fedyk suggested that it might be feasible in 2.5, and asked if there were a way to make it non-ugly. Marcelo Tosatti replied, "Even if its non-ugly, its non-easy. Way too much overhead. For 2.5 we'll probably be able to get people working together."
This isn't an "open source version of the FBI's Carnivore," and it's not a "GNU Carnivore." It's an art project inspired by the FBI's Carnivore, and it has nothing to do with monitoring internet usage or violating anyone's privacy. Basically, this Carnivore project serves up data culled from tcpdump, and then clients use the data to generate intriguing and sometimes beautiful audio or visual art. Go check it out; it's very cool.
Re:Ximian GNOME for Red Hat Linux 7.2 is out!
on
Red Hat 7.2 Released
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· Score: 2
I use Ximian GNOME and like it, but wouldn't this be something of a downgrade (at least partially), since the current Ximian release is not up to date in every respect? Particularly I'm thinking of Nautilus, but also Gnucash and Abiword, etc.
Actually, the U.S. Justice Dept. is trying to establish that precedent; that's why they arrested Dmitri Sklyarov, a Russian programmer, for violating a U.S. law. Alan is making a point by taking this reasoning to its absurd extreme.
Sure does suck for those of us in the U.S., but last time I checked our government was ostensibly a democracy, so I guess we better get our laws changed.
not true at all. polaroid instant cameras take beautiful photographs. the color is rich and oversaturated, the look is simply unlike any other. not to mention that you could do some weird tricks with polaroids, such as emulsion transfers or scratching the photograph as it developed. anyone with a serious interest in photography and an open mind will mourn the loss of polaroid. both their consumer products and their higher end products will be sorely missed in any photography artist's bag of tools.
on top of all that, the polaroid was more than anything a nifty gadget -- a digital camera is not as fun or instantly gratifying as a polaroid camera. i would think that the gearheads here could at least appreciate that.
i can't tell you how sad this announcement makes me.
Don't troll. Capitalism can stuff it -- plenty of amazing and valuable things would vanish completely if left to fend for themselves in the free market. The community does value LWN greatly. However, LWN has been supporting itself on ad revenue, so the community has not been aware of a need to support the site financially. Now that we know it is in trouble, I'm sure we will do what we can to help.
I feel like this is my fault.
on
LWN in Trouble
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· Score: 3, Funny
A few issues after I started reading the Perl Journal, it temporarily went under (and now it's back and much smaller). A few months ago, I started reading LWN. And now it's on the ropes. I must have hexed it. Go figure.
Excellent analogy! You're right, the only sane reaction to a punch in the face is to return it. Hell, it's probably the Christian thing to do!
I was thinking, though, to extend your analogy so that it fits current events, it might go look this: The protester is punched in the face by an assailant who promptly disappears. The protesters head for the neighborhood where the assailant comes from, demand that the neighborhood association hand over the assailant so they can beat the crap out of him, and when their demands aren't met, proceed to beat the crap out of everyone in the neighborhood.
And way to bolster your argument by dropping a reference to the Vietnam War. Now there's an example of a morally justified military venture. Yeah, when I want to puff my chest with pride for Old Glory and Uncle Sam, I just run through the following list:
- free-fire zones
- defoliation
- cluster bombs
- napalm
- strategic hamlets (look it up, you'll love it)
- civilian massacres
- the Plain of Jars
- Ngo Dinh Diem, cancelled elections, and military coups
And so on.
I am thankful that I live in a country where criticism is permitted. A true patriot is thankful as well.
The cynical take on this, one that I don't necessarily agree with, goes like this:
1) The U.S./NATO coalition announces humanitarian food drops to pacify critics of the war. Glosses over potential distribution difficulties once the supplies are actually dropped.
2) Aid planes are endangered by Afghan anti-aircraft defenses (U.S.-supplied), so it is necessary to destroy Afghan defenses.
3) Afghan anti-aircraft defenses may not all be in fixed positions, therefore we have carte blanche for a sustained bombing of Afghanistan.
Personally, I think that the aid effort is sincere, though I have doubts about its efficacy. Still, as a gesture of humanitarianism, I'm pleased and even surprised.
Thank you for posting the bug numbers. I'm going to vote for some of these, because these are major bugs, and I'm experiencing them, too. Hopefully other readers will do the same.
Good point. I've been bitten by that sort of thing myself before -- needing a password I didn't even know I had.
In fairness to mailman, though, if you send a message with the body "unsubscribe" to foo-request, it will respond with a usage statement for the unsubscribe command. But then you're back to needing to know your password.:)
I imagine that the password feature is an attempt to cut down on unsolicited/unintended subscriptions and unsubscriptions. I've never been the victim of a prank unsubscription myself, though.:)
Nevertheless, I still like mailman's web interface. I manage a few majordomo mailing lists, and I ended up rolling a crude web interface because ordinary joes don't grok the e-mail interface and would constantly send admin requests to the mailing list itself. If you tell them just to go to http://blah.com/list.cgi, they usually can deal with that just fine.
Slashdot Mirror
Virus scanners aren't magical, and they cannot prevent you from running all kinds of malicious executable code. Neither can they prevent applications with remote security holes from exposing you to risk.
Wow. Could everyone here cut Marcelo a little slack and be nice, if only for a little while? I just don't see the point of making hurtful remarks like that about a complete stranger, especially one that young. He's obviously talented or he wouldn't have been chosen, and I'm sure he's going to do the best he can with his new responsibilities if people let him. And, really, why are you assuming that he's not "a balanced human being?" What a lousy stereotype.
Like you said, give him a chance.
Nintendo makes brilliant, well-crafted, and (above all) extremely fun games, and that makes people want to buy Nintendo consoles.
Just a thought.
Please explain to us how violence makes a game "adult" or mature. Seriously, I truly want to know. I suppose that if you're with the MPAA or ESRB, then violence makes a work of entertainment mature, but otherwise I don't get it. To me, the "adult gamer" brand of bloodthirstiness is a mark of the kind of "maturity" that begins and ends at age 14.
-jacob
Huh? That "Hall of Shame" is a list of packages that failed to build on a version of Linux for a particular architecture, some of which happen to be non-free. What does this have to do with GNOME? With just a cursory glance at the list, I spotted a few free GNOME applications (Balsa, Skipstone, etc.).
Why do people insist on posting bug reports to slashdot? If you want your issue to be addressed, there's a proper forum for that.
As far as 20th century intellectuals go, Noam Chomsky will be up there for his linguistics work, at least. Bertrand Russell also springs to mind. I wonder if Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, et al, will stand the test of time, though.
p.s. - Two up and coming authors that still fall roughly under the sci-fi rubric and that I can recommend are Jonathan Lethem and Ken McLeod. Check them out.
For those who are unfamiliar with Lem, I'd recommend starting with the Cyberiad, which is a collection of fables involving two robot builders. It's whimsical, witty, and accessible. My favorite, though, is the vastly different Solaris, which in some ways reminds me of Borges. For those unfamiliar with Borges, perhaps Labyrinths or Dreamtigers would be good starts. Borges' prose and poetry are dense, compact, and carefully wrought; fascinating as his themes are, it's his style that is most distinctive.
I don't have the spare brain cycles at the moment to talk much about either author, but you can find some decent Borges resources at Booklist.com. A google search should net some good Lem sites. Mainly, I just wanted to chime in my agreement with the parent post.
From the post I was responding to:
Maybe you're just unlucky? I haven't had any of the problems you've described, either with the Red Hat 7.0 & 7.1 default GNOME installs or with Ximian GNOME. I've actually gotten to the point where I prefer using GNOME over Windows. (And I prefer anything over CDE)
I do agree that GNOME is still very much a work in progress, and that there are still loose ends, but it is shaping up very nicely.
Hacker's wet dream? The XBox is just a PC in an ugly case! Wouldn't it be more fun to hack something else?
This isn't an "open source version of the FBI's Carnivore," and it's not a "GNU Carnivore." It's an art project inspired by the FBI's Carnivore, and it has nothing to do with monitoring internet usage or violating anyone's privacy. Basically, this Carnivore project serves up data culled from tcpdump, and then clients use the data to generate intriguing and sometimes beautiful audio or visual art. Go check it out; it's very cool.
I use Ximian GNOME and like it, but wouldn't this be something of a downgrade (at least partially), since the current Ximian release is not up to date in every respect? Particularly I'm thinking of Nautilus, but also Gnucash and Abiword, etc.
Actually, the U.S. Justice Dept. is trying to establish that precedent; that's why they arrested Dmitri Sklyarov, a Russian programmer, for violating a U.S. law. Alan is making a point by taking this reasoning to its absurd extreme.
Sure does suck for those of us in the U.S., but last time I checked our government was ostensibly a democracy, so I guess we better get our laws changed.
not true at all. polaroid instant cameras take beautiful photographs. the color is rich and oversaturated, the look is simply unlike any other. not to mention that you could do some weird tricks with polaroids, such as emulsion transfers or scratching the photograph as it developed. anyone with a serious interest in photography and an open mind will mourn the loss of polaroid. both their consumer products and their higher end products will be sorely missed in any photography artist's bag of tools.
on top of all that, the polaroid was more than anything a nifty gadget -- a digital camera is not as fun or instantly gratifying as a polaroid camera. i would think that the gearheads here could at least appreciate that.
i can't tell you how sad this announcement makes me.
Don't troll. Capitalism can stuff it -- plenty of amazing and valuable things would vanish completely if left to fend for themselves in the free market. The community does value LWN greatly. However, LWN has been supporting itself on ad revenue, so the community has not been aware of a need to support the site financially. Now that we know it is in trouble, I'm sure we will do what we can to help.
A few issues after I started reading the Perl Journal, it temporarily went under (and now it's back and much smaller). A few months ago, I started reading LWN. And now it's on the ropes. I must have hexed it. Go figure.
Yeah, well, I'll freely admit that my analogy was stupid. :)
Excellent analogy! You're right, the only sane reaction to a punch in the face is to return it. Hell, it's probably the Christian thing to do!
I was thinking, though, to extend your analogy so that it fits current events, it might go look this: The protester is punched in the face by an assailant who promptly disappears. The protesters head for the neighborhood where the assailant comes from, demand that the neighborhood association hand over the assailant so they can beat the crap out of him, and when their demands aren't met, proceed to beat the crap out of everyone in the neighborhood.
I think you meant 'Hanoi,' wise guy.
And way to bolster your argument by dropping a reference to the Vietnam War. Now there's an example of a morally justified military venture. Yeah, when I want to puff my chest with pride for Old Glory and Uncle Sam, I just run through the following list:
- free-fire zones
- defoliation
- cluster bombs
- napalm
- strategic hamlets (look it up, you'll love it)
- civilian massacres
- the Plain of Jars
- Ngo Dinh Diem, cancelled elections, and military coups
And so on.
I am thankful that I live in a country where criticism is permitted. A true patriot is thankful as well.
The cynical take on this, one that I don't necessarily agree with, goes like this:
1) The U.S./NATO coalition announces humanitarian food drops to pacify critics of the war. Glosses over potential distribution difficulties once the supplies are actually dropped.
2) Aid planes are endangered by Afghan anti-aircraft defenses (U.S.-supplied), so it is necessary to destroy Afghan defenses.
3) Afghan anti-aircraft defenses may not all be in fixed positions, therefore we have carte blanche for a sustained bombing of Afghanistan.
Personally, I think that the aid effort is sincere, though I have doubts about its efficacy. Still, as a gesture of humanitarianism, I'm pleased and even surprised.
Thank you for posting the bug numbers. I'm going to vote for some of these, because these are major bugs, and I'm experiencing them, too. Hopefully other readers will do the same.
In fairness to mailman, though, if you send a message with the body "unsubscribe" to foo-request, it will respond with a usage statement for the unsubscribe command. But then you're back to needing to know your password. :)
I imagine that the password feature is an attempt to cut down on unsolicited/unintended subscriptions and unsubscriptions. I've never been the victim of a prank unsubscription myself, though. :)
Nevertheless, I still like mailman's web interface. I manage a few majordomo mailing lists, and I ended up rolling a crude web interface because ordinary joes don't grok the e-mail interface and would constantly send admin requests to the mailing list itself. If you tell them just to go to http://blah.com/list.cgi, they usually can deal with that just fine.
Anyway, to each his own...