(And yeah, chalk up another brickbat for the Awfulbar. Spent the better part of the first day disabling it to restore most of the old bar's functionality. I remember URLs, not "title" elements. Please, for the love of Dobbs, if you're not going to back out this monstrosity, at least give users the option to ignore the title element while "searching" the URL history. The web is not AOL, and some of us do not navigate by keywords.
You're probably in the minority on this one. Firefox is targeting normal people, not nerds, and normal folks don't remember URLs particularly well.
What's the new location bar? Is it something like the old location bar, aka the UnAwesomeBar? I'm pretty much sick to death of the awesomeness of the present location bar, what with Slashdot being listed as "Server 500: Internal Error" in the dropdown because about 4 months ago I got a 500 error message?
It's more a general sense of cruft than anything else though. I like knowing that every piece of software on my machine is there by my choice, not by fiat.
Yet he's running Ubuntu?
I'm not saying that installed programs make it slow. Reading comprehension FUCKING FAIL. Again--back to Digg.
Are you saying that unnecessarily-installed programs are not "cruft"? Because that was the definition that both I and the person I replied to were using.
Why don't you toddle back off to Digg, where your levels of comprehension are more the norm?
Leaves a boatload of ubuntu-desktop around on the system. You should be removing by metapackage.
You'll note that I didn't say that cruft was bad. I have no problem with them adding crap that 10% of users will use. But as distros go, Ubuntu is among the most heavyweight (right up there with OpenSuSE). Incidentally, I use both of those distros exclusively. But I don't call either lean, and I recognize that both are pretty crufty.
I don't suppose you've noticed the scads of packages installed in ubuntu-desktop that most folks will never use?
(Note that bloat is not an intrinsic negative quality. I did not say nor imply that, which is what makes that flamebait mod amusing. When I use a Linux desktop, I use OpenSuSE or Ubuntu, and I'm one of those people who uses those additional packages. But I also don't pretend it's terribly svelte.)
Windows "scales" only if you define scaling as "spending three or four times more money than necessary". Wide experience has proven that you need three or four Windws machines to do the same job that a single Linux box, no more expensive than any of the Windows boxes, can do.
2002 called, they want their rapidly aging truth back. Modern Windows Server environments can function just fine with multiple services running and if you think that one needs "three or four" times as many Windows machines to do a single service, you're simply out of your fucking tree.
You also spend much more on administration, as the Windows systems need much more babysitting.
Um...no. Clearly you haven't used Server 2008. Or, I expect, Server 2003. Because both are very much set-up-and-forget. (You do need to reboot for some patches, yes, but that's relatively rare and a monkey can do a rolling restart.)
And as I said in my original posting, Windows cannot be relied upon to keep your data safe -- that's why E-Bay uses Unix machines to do the important work.
Patent bullshit. Go on--find the last time there was a significant data-loss error in Windows or, since I'm feeling generous, in SQL Server (since eBay uses Unix solely because it's where Oracle runs best, not because of some intrinsic value to Unix).
Is it still FUD when it's being flung against Microsoft, or do people being intentionally wrong about Microsoft get a pass?
I'd like to clarify something: in this particular case, I think that offering links to video files is a good idea. I don't mean to imply that. Flash video is a bad mechanism for this for other reasons than "the poor widdle Gnash users can't use it," namely that something like Youtube may not exist five, ten years down the line.
But my point is that arguing against a de facto standard is just stupid. Unseat the standard by doing something better and better marketed, or get in line. Other choices are a tacit acceptance of being irrelevant.
However, those restrictions are actually intended to preserve certain freedoms, namely the freedom to retain access to the code even if it's modified by someone.
By doing so, they make it non-free. It's not a hard concept.
Countries work the same way; they restrict, for instance, someone's freedom to sue you for things you say in order to protect your freedom to voice your opinions.
Precsely. And that is why I laugh at the idea of a "free country."
Whether the GPL actually works as well as intended can be debated but it certainly isn't some kind of oppressive regime intended to give Richard Stallman control over the world's software.
Really? That's not a troll, that's an honest question. Stallman quite clearly believes that all software must be free. What makes you so certain that Stallman doesn't view the GPL as a method as a way to push for this (and yes, I do consider his stated aims oppressive, as I write CDDL and BSD code).
For that matter, all computers are not trustworthy and should not be entrusted with anything important like money transfers. Anything not EAL 7 certified is not formally proven to be correct and non-malicious and thus not really trustworthy.
Of course you can say that as long as there is one possible attack vector it makes no sense to avoid other attack vectors as your BIOS or CPU might be malicious anyway, so making sure anything beyond it is non-malicious is a moot proposition. However, others might not work under the assumption that their computer is automatically compromised and actually care about what the OS and userland do.
Bullshit, sir. If you're going to make one comment of security, you'd better be ready to own the security argument the whole way down. "Having the source code" isn't an indicator of security--especially as I'd be quite comfortable betting that the original poster sure as hell isn't going over the source code for his applications and, if he's not, there's only an illusion of security relying on the idea that the developers are trustworthy, at which point he's gained nothing. Personally, I assume nothing is secure, open-source or closed, and don't do anything on a computer without being willing to accept the consequences of it not being secure.
To use an analogy: Why do they print the contents of processed food on the packaging? There's no proof that your specific box actually contains exactly what they wrote and even if they did an analysis, someone could have injected something nasty while it's on the shelf so you can't really tell what's in there anyway. Still, working under the assumption that the package is labeled correctly you can, for instance, avoid ingredients you're allergic to with high confidence.
This analogy would be much stronger if not for the whole "oh my god, peanuts will kill you" scare of the last couple months, where the source of the upstream product was dirty.
The poster didn't brag about anything; they just remarked that they wouldn't use nonfree software.
Which is why I said it was implicit. If you intentionally choose to make things more difficult, fuck off, you're an irrelevant segment. There are implicit standards in play, and Flash is one of them. (Open, too, aside from their codecs, which IIRC are documented by others.) It isn't the rest of the world's fault that Gnash sucks (and it does).
There is an argument against Flash video there: Flash video doesn't work everywhere, Gnash users just being one example. It's a fairly ubiquitous platform but shouldn't solely be relied upon.
When it successfully targets more or less everyone, use it.
Another example would be people using recent versions of Firefox under OS X as Flash video tends to have issues with weird flickering artifacts there.
I think "free" as the adjective to "freedom" has been around longer than "free" as a synonym for "gratis".
Yes...but Stallman is attempting, just like George W. Bush and most American politicians I can remember, to redefine "free" to mean "restricted in the ways I want it restricted." Stallman's "free" is not free; it is just as encumbered as some piece of proprietary code, just in a different way. BSD/MIT is arguably "free" in the actual sense of the word. I'd almost say that MPL/CDDL is "free", and where it's not is a lot more reasonable than the GPL.
That being said, there is one reason to reject non-open source software: Lack of trust. Due to the code not being publicly accessible you have no way to tell what the software might do and no way to tell it doesn't damage your system except by trusting the company that made it.
Open source is trustworthy? There is no such thing as trustworthy code. Even some Gentoo ricer depends on a compiler somebody else built. The only way to verify that that bootstrapping compiler doesn't do something nasty, as in kt's case, is to rely on the goodwill of others.
You know, just like you do with proprietary software.
The idea of open source being intrinsically more trustworthy is a sham. Open source has tons of advantages in certain situations--but "trust" is not one.
Some decide it's not worth it and stick to F/OSS for their private use.
Seriously, though, I don't really care if people insist on being stupid and just using open source. But it's when they fucking brag about it, hurf-durfing that the rest of the world should twist to their personal corner-case choices (and he was doing that by implication if nothing else), they need to be backhanded once in a while.
And yet they're still getting hammered constantly on the web end, and their infrastructure scales just fine. Their database system uses Oracle, yeah, but that's still a lot of stuff to be handling with Windows, especially if it "doesn't scale".
Yes, because you lose freedom by using a freely usable (yes, freely,, fuck Stallman, fuck Bush, and fuck anybody else who wants to co-opt the word to means something that it does not mean) plugin that works just fine. OH NO I CANNOT RECOMPILE IT WHATEVER IS THE WORLD COMING TO
When Ogg Theora stops sucking, they can entertain the idea of using it.
(I'm sure a mod's already going for "Troll", but keep in mind that Theora really does suck, on many technical levels. Start with being about half as efficient as H.264 and move on from there. It's bad. Vorbis, on the other hand, is quite nice.)
I laughed. Hard. If you don't think ASP.NET (or, rather, Windows Server, which is a better thing to look at) scales, I direct you to the Alexa ratings. In the top 10, MySpace (#5), Live.com (#6), and MSN (#7) all run Windows Server. eBay (#9) also runs on Windows Server. Do those sites not scale?
ASP.NET, when properly configured, scales considerably better than a LAMP solution. I've had the displeasure of dealing with both in an environment where rapid scaling became necessary. NLB lets a Windows server network very easily balance traffic (it's pretty much just press-the-button-and-it-works, which is nice), and the system automatically supports session affinity in a seamless manner. It's not perfect for everything, and there are cases where I vastly prefer PHP--most of them, really, as the ASP.NET system kind of sucks, though ASP.NET MVC is a huge improvement--but saying that ASP.NET doesn't scale is preposterous. Even if you're biased toward your tools of choice, it's important to know what other tools do well...and ASP.NET certainly scales well.
Your experience would be average--for low-end stuff. Generally, if you have the money to be leveraging a lot of Windows Server, you have the money (and often need) your own DC, or a sizable chunk of one.
Anybody whose cup of tea is ASP.NET should be running, not walking, to Server 2008. IIS7 is so much more useful and performant it's not even funny.
Graphics means using a well supported library, so Perl/Tk is the better choice than Java/Swing.
Um...I do not think "well supported library" means what you think it means. Tk is old and crufty. Swing isn't much better, but if you're doing graphics you're almost certainly doing it with SDL or some other accelerated system, and you wouldn't use Swing for that either.
I know people who work in computer forensics and contract to police departments. I guarantee, without even knowing who you are, that they have a far greater mastery of *nix than you do.
Slashdot Mirror
(And yeah, chalk up another brickbat for the Awfulbar. Spent the better part of the first day disabling it to restore most of the old bar's functionality. I remember URLs, not "title" elements. Please, for the love of Dobbs, if you're not going to back out this monstrosity, at least give users the option to ignore the title element while "searching" the URL history. The web is not AOL, and some of us do not navigate by keywords.
You're probably in the minority on this one. Firefox is targeting normal people, not nerds, and normal folks don't remember URLs particularly well.
What's the new location bar? Is it something like the old location bar, aka the UnAwesomeBar? I'm pretty much sick to death of the awesomeness of the present location bar, what with Slashdot being listed as "Server 500: Internal Error" in the dropdown because about 4 months ago I got a 500 error message?
Highlight in bar. Press delete.
Read the original post, tard.
It's more a general sense of cruft than anything else though. I like knowing that every piece of software on my machine is there by my choice, not by fiat.
Yet he's running Ubuntu?
I'm not saying that installed programs make it slow. Reading comprehension FUCKING FAIL. Again--back to Digg.
# Get Guitar Pro 5 [guitar-pro.com] with it's "Realistic Sound Engine" or use TuxGuitar [tuxguitar.com.ar] on Linux.
RealStrat and RealGuitar are better for synthesis. But are good for what you're suggesting.
pdf is unsearchable
Wrong.
Are you saying that unnecessarily-installed programs are not "cruft"? Because that was the definition that both I and the person I replied to were using.
Why don't you toddle back off to Digg, where your levels of comprehension are more the norm?
apt-get install xdm && apt-get remove gdm && apt-get install fluxbox && apt-get remove metacity
Leaves a boatload of ubuntu-desktop around on the system. You should be removing by metapackage.
You'll note that I didn't say that cruft was bad. I have no problem with them adding crap that 10% of users will use. But as distros go, Ubuntu is among the most heavyweight (right up there with OpenSuSE). Incidentally, I use both of those distros exclusively. But I don't call either lean, and I recognize that both are pretty crufty.
I don't suppose you've noticed the scads of packages installed in ubuntu-desktop that most folks will never use?
(Note that bloat is not an intrinsic negative quality. I did not say nor imply that, which is what makes that flamebait mod amusing. When I use a Linux desktop, I use OpenSuSE or Ubuntu, and I'm one of those people who uses those additional packages. But I also don't pretend it's terribly svelte.)
You don't want cruft, but you installed Ubuntu? Please.
Bullshit. And that's coming from an atheist.
You'd better be ready to tell me how and why Kenneth Miller, just to name one, is "incapable of thinking for himself" due to his religions belief.
Windows "scales" only if you define scaling as "spending three or four times more money than necessary". Wide experience has proven that you need three or four Windws machines to do the same job that a single Linux box, no more expensive than any of the Windows boxes, can do.
2002 called, they want their rapidly aging truth back. Modern Windows Server environments can function just fine with multiple services running and if you think that one needs "three or four" times as many Windows machines to do a single service, you're simply out of your fucking tree.
You also spend much more on administration, as the Windows systems need much more babysitting.
Um...no. Clearly you haven't used Server 2008. Or, I expect, Server 2003. Because both are very much set-up-and-forget. (You do need to reboot for some patches, yes, but that's relatively rare and a monkey can do a rolling restart.)
And as I said in my original posting, Windows cannot be relied upon to keep your data safe -- that's why E-Bay uses Unix machines to do the important work.
Patent bullshit. Go on--find the last time there was a significant data-loss error in Windows or, since I'm feeling generous, in SQL Server (since eBay uses Unix solely because it's where Oracle runs best, not because of some intrinsic value to Unix).
Is it still FUD when it's being flung against Microsoft, or do people being intentionally wrong about Microsoft get a pass?
I'd like to clarify something: in this particular case, I think that offering links to video files is a good idea. I don't mean to imply that. Flash video is a bad mechanism for this for other reasons than "the poor widdle Gnash users can't use it," namely that something like Youtube may not exist five, ten years down the line.
But my point is that arguing against a de facto standard is just stupid. Unseat the standard by doing something better and better marketed, or get in line. Other choices are a tacit acceptance of being irrelevant.
However, those restrictions are actually intended to preserve certain freedoms, namely the freedom to retain access to the code even if it's modified by someone.
By doing so, they make it non-free. It's not a hard concept.
Countries work the same way; they restrict, for instance, someone's freedom to sue you for things you say in order to protect your freedom to voice your opinions.
Precsely. And that is why I laugh at the idea of a "free country."
Whether the GPL actually works as well as intended can be debated but it certainly isn't some kind of oppressive regime intended to give Richard Stallman control over the world's software.
Really? That's not a troll, that's an honest question. Stallman quite clearly believes that all software must be free. What makes you so certain that Stallman doesn't view the GPL as a method as a way to push for this (and yes, I do consider his stated aims oppressive, as I write CDDL and BSD code).
For that matter, all computers are not trustworthy and should not be entrusted with anything important like money transfers. Anything not EAL 7 certified is not formally proven to be correct and non-malicious and thus not really trustworthy.
Of course you can say that as long as there is one possible attack vector it makes no sense to avoid other attack vectors as your BIOS or CPU might be malicious anyway, so making sure anything beyond it is non-malicious is a moot proposition. However, others might not work under the assumption that their computer is automatically compromised and actually care about what the OS and userland do.
Bullshit, sir. If you're going to make one comment of security, you'd better be ready to own the security argument the whole way down. "Having the source code" isn't an indicator of security--especially as I'd be quite comfortable betting that the original poster sure as hell isn't going over the source code for his applications and, if he's not, there's only an illusion of security relying on the idea that the developers are trustworthy, at which point he's gained nothing. Personally, I assume nothing is secure, open-source or closed, and don't do anything on a computer without being willing to accept the consequences of it not being secure.
To use an analogy: Why do they print the contents of processed food on the packaging? There's no proof that your specific box actually contains exactly what they wrote and even if they did an analysis, someone could have injected something nasty while it's on the shelf so you can't really tell what's in there anyway. Still, working under the assumption that the package is labeled correctly you can, for instance, avoid ingredients you're allergic to with high confidence.
This analogy would be much stronger if not for the whole "oh my god, peanuts will kill you" scare of the last couple months, where the source of the upstream product was dirty.
The poster didn't brag about anything; they just remarked that they wouldn't use nonfree software.
Which is why I said it was implicit. If you intentionally choose to make things more difficult, fuck off, you're an irrelevant segment. There are implicit standards in play, and Flash is one of them. (Open, too, aside from their codecs, which IIRC are documented by others.) It isn't the rest of the world's fault that Gnash sucks (and it does).
There is an argument against Flash video there: Flash video doesn't work everywhere, Gnash users just being one example. It's a fairly ubiquitous platform but shouldn't solely be relied upon.
When it successfully targets more or less everyone, use it.
Another example would be people using recent versions of Firefox under OS X as Flash video tends to have issues with weird flickering artifacts there.
This is a m
I think "free" as the adjective to "freedom" has been around longer than "free" as a synonym for "gratis".
Yes...but Stallman is attempting, just like George W. Bush and most American politicians I can remember, to redefine "free" to mean "restricted in the ways I want it restricted." Stallman's "free" is not free; it is just as encumbered as some piece of proprietary code, just in a different way. BSD/MIT is arguably "free" in the actual sense of the word. I'd almost say that MPL/CDDL is "free", and where it's not is a lot more reasonable than the GPL.
That being said, there is one reason to reject non-open source software: Lack of trust. Due to the code not being publicly accessible you have no way to tell what the software might do and no way to tell it doesn't damage your system except by trusting the company that made it.
Open source is trustworthy? There is no such thing as trustworthy code. Even some Gentoo ricer depends on a compiler somebody else built. The only way to verify that that bootstrapping compiler doesn't do something nasty, as in kt's case, is to rely on the goodwill of others.
You know, just like you do with proprietary software.
The idea of open source being intrinsically more trustworthy is a sham. Open source has tons of advantages in certain situations--but "trust" is not one.
Some decide it's not worth it and stick to F/OSS for their private use.
Seriously, though, I don't really care if people insist on being stupid and just using open source. But it's when they fucking brag about it, hurf-durfing that the rest of the world should twist to their personal corner-case choices (and he was doing that by implication if nothing else), they need to be backhanded once in a while.
Ken Thompson is calling on line two!
And yet they're still getting hammered constantly on the web end, and their infrastructure scales just fine. Their database system uses Oracle, yeah, but that's still a lot of stuff to be handling with Windows, especially if it "doesn't scale".
Yes, because you lose freedom by using a freely usable (yes, freely,, fuck Stallman, fuck Bush, and fuck anybody else who wants to co-opt the word to means something that it does not mean) plugin that works just fine. OH NO I CANNOT RECOMPILE IT WHATEVER IS THE WORLD COMING TO
Zealots of all stripes are equally heinous.
When Ogg Theora stops sucking, they can entertain the idea of using it.
(I'm sure a mod's already going for "Troll", but keep in mind that Theora really does suck, on many technical levels. Start with being about half as efficient as H.264 and move on from there. It's bad. Vorbis, on the other hand, is quite nice.)
I laughed. Hard. If you don't think ASP.NET (or, rather, Windows Server, which is a better thing to look at) scales, I direct you to the Alexa ratings. In the top 10, MySpace (#5), Live.com (#6), and MSN (#7) all run Windows Server. eBay (#9) also runs on Windows Server. Do those sites not scale?
ASP.NET, when properly configured, scales considerably better than a LAMP solution. I've had the displeasure of dealing with both in an environment where rapid scaling became necessary. NLB lets a Windows server network very easily balance traffic (it's pretty much just press-the-button-and-it-works, which is nice), and the system automatically supports session affinity in a seamless manner. It's not perfect for everything, and there are cases where I vastly prefer PHP--most of them, really, as the ASP.NET system kind of sucks, though ASP.NET MVC is a huge improvement--but saying that ASP.NET doesn't scale is preposterous. Even if you're biased toward your tools of choice, it's important to know what other tools do well...and ASP.NET certainly scales well.
Your experience would be average--for low-end stuff. Generally, if you have the money to be leveraging a lot of Windows Server, you have the money (and often need) your own DC, or a sizable chunk of one.
Anybody whose cup of tea is ASP.NET should be running, not walking, to Server 2008. IIS7 is so much more useful and performant it's not even funny.
Graphics means using a well supported library, so Perl/Tk is the better choice than Java/Swing.
Um...I do not think "well supported library" means what you think it means. Tk is old and crufty. Swing isn't much better, but if you're doing graphics you're almost certainly doing it with SDL or some other accelerated system, and you wouldn't use Swing for that either.
If you aren't pounding the pavement and making the search for the job a full-time job...you're doing it wrong.
As I understand it, he had the folder unlocked. Having a destruct password won't help when you leave the thing open.
You're a fucking moron, aren't you?
I know people who work in computer forensics and contract to police departments. I guarantee, without even knowing who you are, that they have a far greater mastery of *nix than you do.
Fucking reprobate shitmonger.
We're animals. We are at the top of the food chain. If other species cannot adapt to survive, they won't.
I'm interested in how to protect us, not endangered animal species.