*** It's really not hard to select 'Save in Office 97-2003 format' from a drop down menu on the save dialogue.***
I don't know from personal experience because I reckon free trials of new software are entirely too much like a free bag of white powder from a scruffy looking character who hangs out on a street corner. But I'd guess that 'Save in Office 97-2003 Format' may be harder to select when there is a modal dialog box on the screen that says in effect "Your Free Trial is over Dude. Pay up if you ever want to see your data again."
I do know from personal experience that Microsoft's constant file format changes are a real drag on productivity if people need to exchange files and your operation's budget isn't large enough to turn over all the hardware and software every two or three years. Your users have the choice of not being able to work with some folks files or of dealing with software that demands more resources than the older machines have and writing files that some folks outside the organization can't read.
Fortunately, I'm retired and don't have to worry about that any more. But it's one of several reasons that I'm not a Microsoft fan. Things didn't HAVE to be this way. Microsoft chose to make them that way through some blend of greed and incompetence.
I lack the energy to go on with this one, but I can summarize the principle gripes:
Update from XP is not reliable
Resource usage is high (compared to XP)
User Access Controls are pretty much unusable.
Hardware support is mediocre compared to Windows XP (looks ot me to be about equivalent to Linux)
Support for legacy software is not great
***Why are the good points about Vista never mentioned on Slashdot?***
Probably because -- with the exception of Direct X 10 -- hardly anyone cares about the new features in Vista. A summary of the features is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windo ws_Vista. Read through it an tell us what
Matters
Works right
Is available in the basic version of Vista which is what most Vista users presumably have -- because it came on their new PC
The article title "Japan Bans Use of Web Sites in Elections" is unusually inaccurate even for Slashdot. If one actually reads the article, they find that what is banned isn't having a web site. It is changing the content or putting up a new site in the final few weeks before an election.
If I recall correctly, this isn't even a new policy. I think Japan does it for every election.
Japan has no shortage of cultural excesses. (e.g. the sound trucks). They probably are addressing some real, and hopefully unique to Japan, problem with these rules.
***After swearing it off since my disaster with RedHat 4, I now know I am going to make the effort to explore Linux again.***
You'll find things have changed a lot. For the better. Printer support is still a bit iffy for some models, and WINE is pretty much a crapshoot. But overall Linux really is a viable option for many people. You'll be hard put to tell whether programs like Firefox are running under Windows or Linux.
One thing you can try without tinkering with your disk is to download the free VMware player and a couple of the Linux VMs. That'll give you a feel as to whether you can live with Linux in one of its 2007 incarnations. You won't want to run that way permanently I expect, but you'll probably know if you can't live with Linux yet before you put your Windows installation at risk.
***Smells like a simple money-grab to me. Those devices are low power and thus only locally change the radio spectrum significantly. Licensed radio was implemented to keep the long range spectrum usable.***
You could be right, but Japanese cities are very densely populated compared to most Western cities -- even New York. 'Local' can involve a lot more people than in typical US or European environments. Also, the culture is loaded with alternate ways of doing things that are not necessarily illogical, just different. This tax may, and I emphasize MAY make sense in terms of Japan. e.g., they may figure that a tax will discourage unlicensed spectrum slices with so much interference that no one can get their stuff to work except in the middle of the night. Or not. With Japan, you rarely know exactly what is going on.
***As I understood it, postscript is fully documented and open standard (as is pdf for the most part). Ghostview is a very old free interpreter for it and they don't need anything funny to avoid royalties. Just like C or FORTRAN, you can go out and buy a postscript book and write postscript programs (or a postscript interpreter like ghostview). Not sure why you would want to, but you can***
It took a while, but I finally found what was confusing me. It's ghostscript. As I sort of vaguely recalled, ghostscript is not initially a GPL product. Instead, new releases are released under something called the AFPL which constrains commercial use. Later -- one release behind -- they are released under GPL. I don't know whether the link to Adobe is only in my imagination. Probably it is. Maybe it's not. I'm not sure that I care very much.
CUPS used to have its very own version of ghostscript. I recall it to have some monumentally confusing (to me anyway) licensing verbiage. I think they now use the GPL version
If memory serves me right, that's only partly true. As I recall, a lot of CUPS is built around Postscript (Yech) handling software. Postscript is a proprietary protocol/format owned lock stock and barrel by Adobe. There was some sort of odd arrangement that allowed CUPS users to get around having to pay royalties on Postscript as used in Linux. Am I imaging all this?
***I thought our officials cannot be as incompetent as this...or is it the system? ***
You really need to read the article. The nuclear device in question is a slightly dirty bomb that probably would do way less overall damage than McVey and Nichols accomplished in Oklahoma City. Nichols and McVey used a van full of diesel fuel and fertilizer. You can buy those just about anywhere for less money and with less hassle than you can small amounts of radioactives.
The radioactive materials involved are small amounts used in instrumentation, and the idea was to buy a bunch of instruments and rip them up to get enough material to contaminate an area maybe the size of a city block.
The nuclear materials license these guys got doesn't appear to have involved any investigation to determine if their company was real, but if they'd needed to slap together a store front office, incorporation papers, etc instead of just renting a Post Office Box, I doubt that would cost very much or required much effort.
They had to alter the license in order to buy enough materials for a bomb. And it isn't clear how they could extract the ratioactives without becoming the first victims of the plot.
The government probably could do better. But really what this probably establishes is that protecting Americans from terrorism is impossible.
***Is there any (operating) system out there with some sensible, security-aware data flow tracking? Such as 'when you copy something from a classified document into a non-classified document the non-classified one becomes classified'?***
I doubt such an OS exists in any usable form. The problem is that not all the information in a document that is classified SECRET is in fact secret. Some is probably CONFIDENTIAL (A much lower level that does not require a full background check for access). Some is unclassified. If you start arbitrarily classifying every document with the level of the most highly classified data in the source documents, it will not be long before everything including the address of the White House, Paris Hilton's cell-phone number, and the Chemical formula for water is classified TOP SECRET.
It may be that someone has dealt with this problem intelligently since I first saw it in the 1960s, but I wouldn't bet on it.
***This is a pretty misleading headline. U.S. Military? These are government contractors, civilians that do not have a clue about IT security and have not even considered what their actions can result in!***
Excuse me. Between 1961 and 1990, I worked on a lot of military and government contracts as a contractor. We worked under rigorous security rules defined by the contracting agency -- the government and in most cases the military. The rules weren't always the same as those applying to military personnel. Sometimes they were tighter. I can't recall a single case where they were looser for contractors than for the military.
If today's contractors are not under control, that is a problem with the military or the executive. It's not something that just happens. Are there not supposed to be government guys who monitor contract performance, and raise holy hell if security rules are not followed?
***...but this is proof that Vista is more secure. Aero alone will use up most of your resources, therefore, you cant have a program monopolize the CPU more then the host OS. Just more proof those M$ guys know security ***
Your logic is fine. But alas... reality....
Vista won't know that the cheating task is stealing cycles. In practice, the program probably can "monopolize the CPU more than the host OS" -- notwithstanding that OS tasks look on the surface to have higher overall priority. Perhaps we should consider the possibility that Vista is more secure against what the user desires to do than against well targeted attacks.
I know that you are being sarcastic, but it's interesting (to me anyway) that 'Knowing Security' and actually building a usable secure system may not be the same thing.
***Does it work on Solaris? If so I can run my sparse distributed memory simulator on the comp sci depts main server without waiting hours to get results!***
According to the article, it'll work on Solaris because the Solaris scheduler works on time ticks. However, they say Solaris actually has accurate timing information available, so the system administrators may be able to see that you are the guy stealing cycles. If you do come to their attention, they probably will not be pleased.
***I seem to recall usenet discussions about this circa the time of !uucp!newsglop!..... Not exactly smokin' hot off the press.***
Not exactly. This is a technique that will, in prinicple, work with any scheduler that prioritizes tasks on the basis of time ticks previously used by the task. That turns out to be most of them. The technique does not require being an I/O driver, other special task, or having unusual user priviliges.
***that others are starting to look after the *nix world for weaknesses? Once windows is equal or better than *nix in terms of security, then all the security and malware people will start looking at us.***
Of course not. It shows that OS research work is likely to be done on a Unix of some sort where the source code is available for anaylsis
TFA points out that Windows is just as vulnerable to these cheats as BSD, Linux and Solaris. The cheat works by releasing the CPU just before the end of a time tick there by allowing the whole tick to be charged to whatever task gets the rest of the tick. Windows, like Solaris, has accurate job accounting information available, but choses not to use it for scheduling. In addition, like the Linux 2.6 kernel, Windows will actually artificially raise the priority of a cheating task under the misaprehension that the job is interactive.
***What I would like to know, is how reliable this can be when only surveying 61 people***
It can be pretty good. IF the 61 people are truly representative of the larger population. If they had a list of every "IT professional" in the world with Microsoft Software Assurance contracts; picked 61 names at random; and made sure that they talked to each and every one of the 61, they'd probably get a pretty good number. But that's likely not what they did.
I'm not an expert, but I believe that it's pretty well established both in theory and practice, that using large samples is not a very effective way to improve accuracy. What you want to do is eliminate bias. But that is more easily said than done.
EVERTHING -- including water -- is toxic in sufficiently large doses.. Since real, prescribed, medications generally are filled out with inert buffer, one prescription nicotine pill is not going to be enough to exterminate an entire community. What probably matters more is the ratio between the medically effective dose and the lethal dose. We don't know what the medically effective dose for Nicotine is likely to be, so we probably don't know enough to worry about toxicity... yet. What is more worrisome (to me) anyway is the fact that Nicotine is probably addictive and almost certainly somewhat psychoactive. I fear that it might be yet another substance for the War on Drugs people to waste their energy and my money on.
BTW, folks should be more concerned than they are about minimum lethal doses. If you want something to worry about, look up the difference between recommended and lethal doses of Acetaminophen (the active agent inTylenol). For a couple of bucks anyone in the US can buy this over the counter medication that, if taken in not all that much more than recommended amounts, can put their liver into orbit around Neptune. Headache isn't going away? Take a few more pills. Probably won't do much harm with Aspirin. Not a good idea at all with Acetaminophen.
*** Anyways, I was thinking of adding one of these USB wireless accessories.. could anybody here recommend one that has a good track record of working in linux ?***
I'd be careful about anything with a Broadcom chip. There is a Broadcom driver for Linux, but it doesn't always work. The alternative is ndiswrapper which can somehow make a Windows driver work under Linux. My experience was that setting up ndiswrapper was not much fun. Not knocking ndiswrapper -- I'm utterly astounded that it works at all
***Most of them place the ideal width of text for maximum comprehension at 30-60 characters. Notice how this is done with newspapers. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to read a newspaper that spanned articles across the entire page?***
I dunno, I've always found the narrow columns in newspapers to be kind of annoying. IMO, books with 60-80 characters per line are much easier to read. I figured the narrow columns in newspapers were there for ease in manual layout and fitting in small advertisements.
***Despite the arbitrariness of "80 characters," , it does seem to be about the maximum width that's comfortable to read in one go. (Take an un-hardwrapped text file and open it in a very wide editor and try to read it; it's a PITA compared to reading a narrow column.)***
I just grabbed the nearest book -- Michael Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" and counted the characters in a randomly selected line -- 76. It's a perfectly ordinary book. Designed -- as far as I can see -- for comfortable reading. I think you're right. 80 characters is a convenient reading length.
As others have told you, 80 characters are used because the cards punched by the then ubiquitous IBM026 and 029 keypunches were 80 columns. Much of the early work done on terminals was on programs originally punched into cards.
===
And no, wider terminals probably are NOT an especially good idea. When someone comes up with a programming language that is readable, maybe a wider screen will be appropriate. But for the incomprehensible chicken scratchings that are used today, 80 column screens mildly limit the madness. I, for one, would prefer not to routinely encounter complex programs written on a single line (probably without comments).
***The reason we have an FBI to begin with is that organized crime doesn't respect state lines.***
Uh, yeah... If you will recall that national embarassment J Edgar Hoover denied for decades that organized crime existed. The FBI finally did take significant action against organized crime. But only after 60 unpleasant gentlemen were arrested at a raid on an underwold summit at Apalachin NY in 1957. That raid was conducted by New York state and local officials after they became curious what large numbers of fancy cars were doing at Joe Barbara's place. The FBI apparently was unaware that the meeting was going on. (Why would they know about it, after all, in their universe there was no mafia?)
AFAICS, what we have here is a 'security' organization that has never actually demonstrated much integrity, accountability, or ability at anything other than garneing favorable publicity.
I suspect that there are things that the FBI does that are valuble and useful. It's lab for example. But overall, I think this is an organization may not be an asset to the United States. I don't know about you, but I think that the US is spending a fair amount of money on organizations like the FBI, TSA, etc that are intrusive, questionably necessary, seem to blunder from mistep to mistep, and certainly do not seem to be run very well.
***Imagine a government agency, in a bureaucratic foul-up, accidentally gives you a copy of a document marked "top secret." And it contains a log of some of your private phone calls. You read it and ponder it and wonder what it all means. Then, two months later, the FBI shows up at your door, demands the document back and orders you to forget you ever saw it.'***
Why the hell is the FBI tapping lawyers phone calls? And how can they possibly turn a paper marked Top Secret over to someone without a clearance? Do they have classified document tracking, document receipting, materials accountability procedures?
May I suggest that it is long past time to consider turning law enforcement back to the state and local governments. Many of them may not be much good at it, but Americans can choose to live in places where they are. It's hard to get away from the FBI without emigrating. The US got by pretty well with minimal federal criminal laws and not a lot of federal law enforcement in the 19th Century and it may be time to think about trying that approach again.
It's tempting to blame this on the Bush administration -- which certainly has demonstrated rather remarkable incompetence at a wide variety of things. But my impression is that the FBI has a long, long record of doing stupid, ill-advised, and (especially under Hoover) outright illegal things. Exactly what are these folks actually doing for us? Could their valuble contributions (if any) be done by the states or by a vastly scaled back organization?
***I don't believe they actually captured an Enigma device itself.***
" On 9 May 1941, three British destroyers, HMS Bulldog, HMS Broadway, and HMS Aubrietia, attacked U-110. When the German crew abandoned their damaged submarine, a boarding party from Bulldog got on board and recovered a working Enigma machine, its cipher keys, keybooks and other cryptological records. Although taken under tow by the British, U-110 flooded and sank about 100 hundred miles from Iceland.,,,
source: http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq97-1.htm
***I don't think that is a big enough incentive, people that have been brainwashed by M$'s propaganda about how great Vista is aren't going to suddenly turn and say "ZoMG! This OS is $50 cheaper! Forget Vista!"***
Well... really, no. Joe and Gini Sixpack really don't have much idea what Vista is. I don't know what the hell Microsoft did with that 90 million that was supposed to launch Vista, but if they spent it, it seems to have vanished down some sort of rathole. And in my experience the few non-geek users who know the difference between XP and Vista more often than not are not Microsoft fans.
There are two problems. The first is that the semi-knowledgable sales folks in the big box stores tend to push Vista... hard... almost as hard as they push extended warranties.
The second problem is that many people really do need Windows software. My wife would probably never notice whether Firefox was running under Windows or a Unix of some sort. And I don't think that switching her from Eudora to something else would be a big problem. For all I know Eudora has a Linux version or runs under WINE. As long as her desktop icons are there and Freecell works (it runs fine under WINE btw) Linux would be fine.
The problem is the proprietary support software for her $7000 sewing machine. There is no Linux support. It barely runs under Windows. I suspect the chances of it running under WINE are somewhere between slim and none.. And even if it did run, I'd surely end up spending even more time debugging and tweaking than I do removing malware. So, that machine is staying on Windows -- probably forever. Maybe someday, I'll look at running the support crud in a VM, but not this year... or next.
***Just tried to install the Fiesty Fawn thingy. It goes in alright but I need to be root to set the puppy up. I refuse to be crippled by some piece of.... that wants to protect me from myself. I refuse to put in my user password every damn time I want to do anything.***
You can set up a root user and log into it on a real console -- or at least you can in kubuntu. It'll be just like Slackware -- sort of. I think there is a way to do a semipermanent sudo, but I don't remember what it is. In any case, I don't really see how this nonsense makes ME any more secure. All it does is impede my use of the PC. Whose computer is this, anyway?
Pretty much, I agree with you. Kubuntu lasted about two weeks before I muttered 'screw this' and installed Slackware. Particularly aggravating is that if you forget to sudo things, the programs don't necessarily tell you that they didn't do what you asked them to do. Many of them simply ignore part or all of your command.
I'm sure that there are all sorts of things wrong with Slack, but the only one that has caused me any aggravation so far is that Kcron is included in the distribution. It appears to run, but the tasks it schedules never get executed. That's because of the way Slackware schedules periodic tasks.
***Some bright company will come up with the innovative idea of charging real prices for the printers and real prices for the ink***
Kodak -- a new name in the inkjet printer business -- is claiming to do something along that line. Their printers are a bit more than the competition. Their ink is a lot cheaper. They don't make a lot of models, and it's not clear that their printers are any damn good. (Like any consumer inkjet printer is). But at least they may be trying.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know from personal experience because I reckon free trials of new software are entirely too much like a free bag of white powder from a scruffy looking character who hangs out on a street corner. But I'd guess that 'Save in Office 97-2003 Format' may be harder to select when there is a modal dialog box on the screen that says in effect "Your Free Trial is over Dude. Pay up if you ever want to see your data again."
I do know from personal experience that Microsoft's constant file format changes are a real drag on productivity if people need to exchange files and your operation's budget isn't large enough to turn over all the hardware and software every two or three years. Your users have the choice of not being able to work with some folks files or of dealing with software that demands more resources than the older machines have and writing files that some folks outside the organization can't read.
Fortunately, I'm retired and don't have to worry about that any more. But it's one of several reasons that I'm not a Microsoft fan. Things didn't HAVE to be this way. Microsoft chose to make them that way through some blend of greed and incompetence.
Unlikely. Even if people liked Vista -- and many don't -- you'd be hearing some complaints. These users are human, right?
A few folks who don't like Vista
***Why are the good points about Vista never mentioned on Slashdot?***
Probably because -- with the exception of Direct X 10 -- hardly anyone cares about the new features in Vista. A summary of the features is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windo ws_Vista. Read through it an tell us what
If I recall correctly, this isn't even a new policy. I think Japan does it for every election.
Japan has no shortage of cultural excesses. (e.g. the sound trucks). They probably are addressing some real, and hopefully unique to Japan, problem with these rules.
You'll find things have changed a lot. For the better. Printer support is still a bit iffy for some models, and WINE is pretty much a crapshoot. But overall Linux really is a viable option for many people. You'll be hard put to tell whether programs like Firefox are running under Windows or Linux.
One thing you can try without tinkering with your disk is to download the free VMware player and a couple of the Linux VMs. That'll give you a feel as to whether you can live with Linux in one of its 2007 incarnations. You won't want to run that way permanently I expect, but you'll probably know if you can't live with Linux yet before you put your Windows installation at risk.
You could be right, but Japanese cities are very densely populated compared to most Western cities -- even New York. 'Local' can involve a lot more people than in typical US or European environments. Also, the culture is loaded with alternate ways of doing things that are not necessarily illogical, just different. This tax may, and I emphasize MAY make sense in terms of Japan. e.g., they may figure that a tax will discourage unlicensed spectrum slices with so much interference that no one can get their stuff to work except in the middle of the night. Or not. With Japan, you rarely know exactly what is going on.
It took a while, but I finally found what was confusing me. It's ghostscript. As I sort of vaguely recalled, ghostscript is not initially a GPL product. Instead, new releases are released under something called the AFPL which constrains commercial use. Later -- one release behind -- they are released under GPL. I don't know whether the link to Adobe is only in my imagination. Probably it is. Maybe it's not. I'm not sure that I care very much.
CUPS used to have its very own version of ghostscript. I recall it to have some monumentally confusing (to me anyway) licensing verbiage. I think they now use the GPL version
See http://www.artifex.com/licensing/index.htm
If memory serves me right, that's only partly true. As I recall, a lot of CUPS is built around Postscript (Yech) handling software. Postscript is a proprietary protocol/format owned lock stock and barrel by Adobe. There was some sort of odd arrangement that allowed CUPS users to get around having to pay royalties on Postscript as used in Linux. Am I imaging all this?
You really need to read the article. The nuclear device in question is a slightly dirty bomb that probably would do way less overall damage than McVey and Nichols accomplished in Oklahoma City. Nichols and McVey used a van full of diesel fuel and fertilizer. You can buy those just about anywhere for less money and with less hassle than you can small amounts of radioactives.
The radioactive materials involved are small amounts used in instrumentation, and the idea was to buy a bunch of instruments and rip them up to get enough material to contaminate an area maybe the size of a city block.
The nuclear materials license these guys got doesn't appear to have involved any investigation to determine if their company was real, but if they'd needed to slap together a store front office, incorporation papers, etc instead of just renting a Post Office Box, I doubt that would cost very much or required much effort.
They had to alter the license in order to buy enough materials for a bomb. And it isn't clear how they could extract the ratioactives without becoming the first victims of the plot.
The government probably could do better. But really what this probably establishes is that protecting Americans from terrorism is impossible.
I doubt such an OS exists in any usable form. The problem is that not all the information in a document that is classified SECRET is in fact secret. Some is probably CONFIDENTIAL (A much lower level that does not require a full background check for access). Some is unclassified. If you start arbitrarily classifying every document with the level of the most highly classified data in the source documents, it will not be long before everything including the address of the White House, Paris Hilton's cell-phone number, and the Chemical formula for water is classified TOP SECRET.
It may be that someone has dealt with this problem intelligently since I first saw it in the 1960s, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Excuse me. Between 1961 and 1990, I worked on a lot of military and government contracts as a contractor. We worked under rigorous security rules defined by the contracting agency -- the government and in most cases the military. The rules weren't always the same as those applying to military personnel. Sometimes they were tighter. I can't recall a single case where they were looser for contractors than for the military.
If today's contractors are not under control, that is a problem with the military or the executive. It's not something that just happens. Are there not supposed to be government guys who monitor contract performance, and raise holy hell if security rules are not followed?
Your logic is fine. But alas ... reality ....
Vista won't know that the cheating task is stealing cycles. In practice, the program probably can "monopolize the CPU more than the host OS" -- notwithstanding that OS tasks look on the surface to have higher overall priority. Perhaps we should consider the possibility that Vista is more secure against what the user desires to do than against well targeted attacks.
I know that you are being sarcastic, but it's interesting (to me anyway) that 'Knowing Security' and actually building a usable secure system may not be the same thing.
According to the article, it'll work on Solaris because the Solaris scheduler works on time ticks. However, they say Solaris actually has accurate timing information available, so the system administrators may be able to see that you are the guy stealing cycles. If you do come to their attention, they probably will not be pleased.
Not exactly. This is a technique that will, in prinicple, work with any scheduler that prioritizes tasks on the basis of time ticks previously used by the task. That turns out to be most of them. The technique does not require being an I/O driver, other special task, or having unusual user priviliges.
So yes, it IS news.
Of course not. It shows that OS research work is likely to be done on a Unix of some sort where the source code is available for anaylsis
TFA points out that Windows is just as vulnerable to these cheats as BSD, Linux and Solaris. The cheat works by releasing the CPU just before the end of a time tick there by allowing the whole tick to be charged to whatever task gets the rest of the tick. Windows, like Solaris, has accurate job accounting information available, but choses not to use it for scheduling. In addition, like the Linux 2.6 kernel, Windows will actually artificially raise the priority of a cheating task under the misaprehension that the job is interactive.
It can be pretty good. IF the 61 people are truly representative of the larger population. If they had a list of every "IT professional" in the world with Microsoft Software Assurance contracts; picked 61 names at random; and made sure that they talked to each and every one of the 61, they'd probably get a pretty good number. But that's likely not what they did.
I'm not an expert, but I believe that it's pretty well established both in theory and practice, that using large samples is not a very effective way to improve accuracy. What you want to do is eliminate bias. But that is more easily said than done.
BTW, folks should be more concerned than they are about minimum lethal doses. If you want something to worry about, look up the difference between recommended and lethal doses of Acetaminophen (the active agent inTylenol). For a couple of bucks anyone in the US can buy this over the counter medication that, if taken in not all that much more than recommended amounts, can put their liver into orbit around Neptune. Headache isn't going away? Take a few more pills. Probably won't do much harm with Aspirin. Not a good idea at all with Acetaminophen.
I'd be careful about anything with a Broadcom chip. There is a Broadcom driver for Linux, but it doesn't always work. The alternative is ndiswrapper which can somehow make a Windows driver work under Linux. My experience was that setting up ndiswrapper was not much fun. Not knocking ndiswrapper -- I'm utterly astounded that it works at all
I dunno, I've always found the narrow columns in newspapers to be kind of annoying. IMO, books with 60-80 characters per line are much easier to read. I figured the narrow columns in newspapers were there for ease in manual layout and fitting in small advertisements.
I just grabbed the nearest book -- Michael Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" and counted the characters in a randomly selected line -- 76. It's a perfectly ordinary book. Designed -- as far as I can see -- for comfortable reading. I think you're right. 80 characters is a convenient reading length.
As others have told you, 80 characters are used because the cards punched by the then ubiquitous IBM026 and 029 keypunches were 80 columns. Much of the early work done on terminals was on programs originally punched into cards. ===
And no, wider terminals probably are NOT an especially good idea. When someone comes up with a programming language that is readable, maybe a wider screen will be appropriate. But for the incomprehensible chicken scratchings that are used today, 80 column screens mildly limit the madness. I, for one, would prefer not to routinely encounter complex programs written on a single line (probably without comments).
Uh, yeah ... If you will recall that national embarassment J Edgar Hoover denied for decades that organized crime existed. The FBI finally did take significant action against organized crime. But only after 60 unpleasant gentlemen were arrested at a raid on an underwold summit at Apalachin NY in 1957. That raid was conducted by New York state and local officials after they became curious what large numbers of fancy cars were doing at Joe Barbara's place. The FBI apparently was unaware that the meeting was going on. (Why would they know about it, after all, in their universe there was no mafia?)
AFAICS, what we have here is a 'security' organization that has never actually demonstrated much integrity, accountability, or ability at anything other than garneing favorable publicity.
I suspect that there are things that the FBI does that are valuble and useful. It's lab for example. But overall, I think this is an organization may not be an asset to the United States. I don't know about you, but I think that the US is spending a fair amount of money on organizations like the FBI, TSA, etc that are intrusive, questionably necessary, seem to blunder from mistep to mistep, and certainly do not seem to be run very well.
Why the hell is the FBI tapping lawyers phone calls? And how can they possibly turn a paper marked Top Secret over to someone without a clearance? Do they have classified document tracking, document receipting, materials accountability procedures?
May I suggest that it is long past time to consider turning law enforcement back to the state and local governments. Many of them may not be much good at it, but Americans can choose to live in places where they are. It's hard to get away from the FBI without emigrating. The US got by pretty well with minimal federal criminal laws and not a lot of federal law enforcement in the 19th Century and it may be time to think about trying that approach again.
It's tempting to blame this on the Bush administration -- which certainly has demonstrated rather remarkable incompetence at a wide variety of things. But my impression is that the FBI has a long, long record of doing stupid, ill-advised, and (especially under Hoover) outright illegal things. Exactly what are these folks actually doing for us? Could their valuble contributions (if any) be done by the states or by a vastly scaled back organization?
" On 9 May 1941, three British destroyers, HMS Bulldog, HMS Broadway, and HMS Aubrietia, attacked U-110. When the German crew abandoned their damaged submarine, a boarding party from Bulldog got on board and recovered a working Enigma machine, its cipher keys, keybooks and other cryptological records. Although taken under tow by the British, U-110 flooded and sank about 100 hundred miles from Iceland. ,,,
source: http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq97-1.htm
Well ... really, no. Joe and Gini Sixpack really don't have much idea what Vista is. I don't know what the hell Microsoft did with that 90 million that was supposed to launch Vista, but if they spent it, it seems to have vanished down some sort of rathole. And in my experience the few non-geek users who know the difference between XP and Vista more often than not are not Microsoft fans.
There are two problems. The first is that the semi-knowledgable sales folks in the big box stores tend to push Vista ... hard ... almost as hard as they push extended warranties.
The second problem is that many people really do need Windows software. My wife would probably never notice whether Firefox was running under Windows or a Unix of some sort. And I don't think that switching her from Eudora to something else would be a big problem. For all I know Eudora has a Linux version or runs under WINE. As long as her desktop icons are there and Freecell works (it runs fine under WINE btw) Linux would be fine.
The problem is the proprietary support software for her $7000 sewing machine. There is no Linux support. It barely runs under Windows. I suspect the chances of it running under WINE are somewhere between slim and none.. And even if it did run, I'd surely end up spending even more time debugging and tweaking than I do removing malware. So, that machine is staying on Windows -- probably forever. Maybe someday, I'll look at running the support crud in a VM, but not this year ... or next.
You can set up a root user and log into it on a real console -- or at least you can in kubuntu. It'll be just like Slackware -- sort of. I think there is a way to do a semipermanent sudo, but I don't remember what it is. In any case, I don't really see how this nonsense makes ME any more secure. All it does is impede my use of the PC. Whose computer is this, anyway?
Pretty much, I agree with you. Kubuntu lasted about two weeks before I muttered 'screw this' and installed Slackware. Particularly aggravating is that if you forget to sudo things, the programs don't necessarily tell you that they didn't do what you asked them to do. Many of them simply ignore part or all of your command.
I'm sure that there are all sorts of things wrong with Slack, but the only one that has caused me any aggravation so far is that Kcron is included in the distribution. It appears to run, but the tasks it schedules never get executed. That's because of the way Slackware schedules periodic tasks.
Kodak -- a new name in the inkjet printer business -- is claiming to do something along that line. Their printers are a bit more than the competition. Their ink is a lot cheaper. They don't make a lot of models, and it's not clear that their printers are any damn good. (Like any consumer inkjet printer is). But at least they may be trying.