Fortran has been dead for ages but we still use it everyday on a variety of architectures. I know we're not the only ones. Many scientists still use it. Yeah, but modern Fortran (2003) is a world away from the good old days. I know most scientists etc. are probably still on Fortran 90/95 rather than 2003, but even so that's still a lot better than the FORTRAN 77 most people think of as Fortran.
Powershell != VBscript. VBscript is one of the Windows Script Host languages. Powershell is a scripting front-end to the.NET CLI. Very different beasts.
I had to install it through the alt CD, and had to completely reconfigure X, and now GTK won't start up. If you mean you can't get past the login screen, I've had that happen before: quick fix -- at the login screen, press ctrl+alt+F1, and login at the text prompt; then type "sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg". Then press ctrl+alt+F7 and you should be able to login. Then take a few years to track down whoever invented xorg.conf and shout at them.
I can't believe I'm reading this. You're arguing that because you can name diseases that haven't yet been cured, therefore there's no point to modern, research-based medicine?
I suppose you would prefer living in Medieval times. After all, their medicine didn't involve medical research using "expensive toys" like electron microscopes. And they didn't have pharmacutical companies which make "Bizarre drugs with side effects that kill you".
What they did have was a life expectancy of 20 to 30 years...
Tip for upgrading unusual X setups
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Ubuntu 8.04 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
One tip: if you use any kind of even slightly unusual X setup (such as dual monitors with Xinerama), back up your old xorg.conf and generate a fresh one with "sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg" before you upgrade. When you've upgraded, use new X.org 7.3 tools like xrandr to do whatever it is you're aiming for.
The easy answer these days: Microsoft is EOLing XP The "EOL" of XP means that they're not selling it any more. No-one's going to switch OSes because their current one isn't being actively sold; if they're running it, they already have a licence. If it wasn't being supported any more, that would be different; but it's still actively supported (they've just released SP3), and will be until 2014. So if there are any people still using XP come 2014, you can use its lack of support to try and convert them over to Ubuntu 14.04 Terrific Tyrannosaurus...
Restarting X: you lose your unsaved work anyway...
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Ubuntu 8.04 Released
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· Score: 1
The worst problem I've ever had was X locking up, and I can X and restart it without rebooting. I'd be a bit wary about trumpeting that as an advantage. By far the biggest reason that people don't like it when the computer crashes and they have to reboot is that they lose all unsaved work. And proclaiming that, "If X crashes you can restart it independently without restarting the computer!"; only to have to later (probably after the user installed the horrible ati binary drivers that Ubuntu bugs you to get) sheepishly explain that, actually, yes, all their applications will be killed when they restart X and they have lost their unsaved work, may be a bit embarrasing.
I'm not sure if "being supported by giant corporations" was such a good idea for the so called "linux movement". The percentage of code contributions to the Linux kernel from individuals and volunteers working in their spare time is now down to 13.9%, and still falling. The vast majority of work is now done by companies (mostly Red Hat, Novell, and IBM). To quote directly from that Linux Foundation's April 2008 Kernel Development Report, "Even if one assumes that all of the 'unknown' [and untracable] contributors were working on their own time, over 70% of all kernel development is demonstrably done by developers who are being paid for their work" (source).
Or take distros. Look at the well-put-together and widely used distributions, and they all have one thing in common: whilst being community efforts, they are usually sponsored by or affiliated with a corporation. Ubuntu - Canonical; Fedora - Red Hat; Madriva - Mandrakesoft, etc. The only major exception I can think of is Debian.
The fact is that without the support of corporations, following from the efforts of people like Bruce Perens to persuade companies of the benefits of following an open-source business model, Linux would be vastly behind where it is today.
There are alternatives... SHA-1, SHA-2, HMAC,... Technology doesn't stand still You apparently missed the last two paragraphs of my post. If you didn't see them, I'll quote them for you here:
Yes, there are newer hashes that don't currently have any known vulnerability. But none of which you can be confident that they'll still have no vulnerability in half a decade's time.
And if Microsoft do what you've suggested and build such a system into Windows, what would happen if a vulnerability is discovered in the hash they used? How could Microsoft possibly fix it? Distribute a patch to change the hash used -- over the compromised patch distribution network...?
But hold on...who says they're going to MAKE any viewers for the new version of Office. 10 seconds of Googling would have shown you that they've already made them.
Anyone have a link, or know off-hand, the major differences between this and the latest Ubuntu release? KDE 4, among other things. Both Kubuntu 8.04 RC and Fedora 9 Preview are available with KDE4.
however if you use bittorrent or a similar system everyone downloading at the same moment would work better and faster. And how would you secure such a system? The only way would be to do something like compare the MD5 hash of the patch you've downloaded over the p2p network with an MD5 supplied directly from Microsoft.
Except that MD5 has been cracked. That is to say, there are known methods of creating a file with a high probability of having the same MD5 as some original file.
Yes, there are newer hashes that don't currently have any known vulnerability. But none of which you can be confident that they'll still have no vulnerability in half a decade's time.
And if Microsoft do what you've suggested and build such a system into Windows, what would happen if a vulnerability is discovered in the hash they used? How could Microsoft possibly fix it? Distribute a patch to change the hash used -- over the compromised patch distribution network...?
If you find a way to connect to your peers and ask them for some footprint of their patch (MD5, CRC, whatever), you can validate whether the fix you get is good or bad. MD5 has been cracked. That is to say, there are known methods of creating a file with a high probability of having the same MD5 as some original file.
And CRC was never designed to be in the least secure against that sort of thing in the first place. It's a good error checker, but it's not secure.
Yes, there are newer hashes that don't currently have any known vulnerability. But none of which you can be confident that they'll still have no vulnerability in half a decade's time. And if Microsoft were to build what you're suggesting into Windows, a vulnerability beign discovered in whatever hash they used would be a death-knell. How could Microsoft possibly fix it? Distribute a patch to change the hash -- over the compromised patch distribution network?
Human oversight would, indeed, solve all these problems. But the only things that are having problems are free email services. And once you introduce an element of ongoing human oversight into a free service, you're losing money on it. Free services are a very low-margin-per-instance business.
Sessions are, indeed, tracked by cookies. I most sincerely doubt whether any cracker skilled enough to break some of the best CAPTCHAs in the industry will have much trouble writing a script to delete a cookie.
And Microsoft simply allow a new account to be registered every single minute of the day from a single IP address? Even when you cater to multiple users behind proxies you don't have to let that many through. I suspect the 1400 estimate is the theoretical maximum Well, you might think so; but you'd be wrong. For example, the population of the country of Quatar is around 907,000, all of whom share the same IP address (82.148.97.69). (Wikipedia ran into this problem when an admin blocked that IP address for a month for vandalism and caused a minor diplomatic incident...)
The manufacturer quoted contrast ratio will be measured in a completely dark environment. The point is to measure the ratio of light emitted from a while pixel to a black pixel; not the amount of ambient light around the measuring equipment.
Does Windows have an answer yet to fakeroot + chroot for this? (Any app which thinks it needs root access, rare as such apps are, can be sandboxed on Linux without resorting to a full virtual machine.) There's file & registry virualisation, which is part of UAC. It's not quite the same thing, but the general purpose is the same: if an app (not running as admin) tries to write to some folders that it doesn't have permissions to write to, e.g. the app's folder in Program Files (where lots of old apps keep a settings file) or HKEY_Local_Machine, that write is redirected to an application-specific folder in the current user's home folder; and the contents of that folder from then on is shown to the app as if it were a part of the folder the app tried to write to.
I note you're still refusing to tell anyone your source for your figures.
The reason I was looking at usage share rather than unit sales is because there is no way of reliable measuring unit sale percentages. Heck, "unit sale figures" isn't even a well-defined concept with Linux: the number of new PCs with Linux preloaded is tiny compared to the number that get Linux loaded on after purchase. Download figures of Linux iso's is well-known to be only very, very loosely correlated indeed with number of installs. And whilst Microsoft and Apple do occasionally release press-releases with supposed numbers of unit sales on, these have been noted many times to be grossly inflated, in both cases. In short, "Windows market share on new machines" based on unit sales is so ill-defined as to be meaningless. The only reasonable way to measure usage is though... Usage share figures, usually thorugh browser user agent strings.
So, just to make sure I understand your logic: because it's working for you, anyone who claims it doesn't work for them must be lying?
(I'm sure someone, somewhere, has had Ubuntu's "Screens and Graphics" utility work for them when setting up dual screens; doesn't change the fact that it's a horribly buggy xorg.conf-trashing front end for a decade-old long-deprecated X extension (Xinerama) that never worked properly anyway. Thank god for xrandr...)
Windows NT was developed by Dave Cuttler (of DEC VMS team)... The fact is that Microsoft has never developed a commercial operating system from scratch!!! Yeah. Dave Cutler (one 't') certainly did lead the development of the NT kernel. While he was employed by Microsoft. I notice you carefully phrased your sentence to imply that he somehow developed it on his own as a hobby and sold it to Microsoft or something in order to back up your conclusion that "Microsoft has never developed a commercial operating system from scratch"; so you clearly realise that your conclusion is, at best, disingenuous. What exactly are you trying to acheive?
Also, as other people have pointed out, NT was in no way "based on OS/2". In fact, it was originally intended to replace the OS/2 kernel, because the OS/2 2.0 kernel was considered to be so behind (among other things, it was hybrid 16/32-bit)! It also inherited its LAN manager, and implemented part of its API; but it was written from scratch: the architecture of the kernel is fundamentally different.
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Powershell != VBscript. VBscript is one of the Windows Script Host languages. Powershell is a scripting front-end to the .NET CLI. Very different beasts.
I can't believe I'm reading this. You're arguing that because you can name diseases that haven't yet been cured, therefore there's no point to modern, research-based medicine?
I suppose you would prefer living in Medieval times. After all, their medicine didn't involve medical research using "expensive toys" like electron microscopes. And they didn't have pharmacutical companies which make "Bizarre drugs with side effects that kill you".
What they did have was a life expectancy of 20 to 30 years...
One tip: if you use any kind of even slightly unusual X setup (such as dual monitors with Xinerama), back up your old xorg.conf and generate a fresh one with "sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg" before you upgrade. When you've upgraded, use new X.org 7.3 tools like xrandr to do whatever it is you're aiming for.
The native Gnome music organiser is Rhythmbox. If you do literally want a GTK Amarok clone, there's one called Exaile (currently beta).
Or take distros. Look at the well-put-together and widely used distributions, and they all have one thing in common: whilst being community efforts, they are usually sponsored by or affiliated with a corporation. Ubuntu - Canonical; Fedora - Red Hat; Madriva - Mandrakesoft, etc. The only major exception I can think of is Debian.
The fact is that without the support of corporations, following from the efforts of people like Bruce Perens to persuade companies of the benefits of following an open-source business model, Linux would be vastly behind where it is today.
And if Microsoft do what you've suggested and build such a system into Windows, what would happen if a vulnerability is discovered in the hash they used? How could Microsoft possibly fix it? Distribute a patch to change the hash used -- over the compromised patch distribution network...?
Word viewer, Excel viewer, Powerpoint viewer.
Except that MD5 has been cracked. That is to say, there are known methods of creating a file with a high probability of having the same MD5 as some original file.
Yes, there are newer hashes that don't currently have any known vulnerability. But none of which you can be confident that they'll still have no vulnerability in half a decade's time.
And if Microsoft do what you've suggested and build such a system into Windows, what would happen if a vulnerability is discovered in the hash they used? How could Microsoft possibly fix it? Distribute a patch to change the hash used -- over the compromised patch distribution network...?
And CRC was never designed to be in the least secure against that sort of thing in the first place. It's a good error checker, but it's not secure.
Yes, there are newer hashes that don't currently have any known vulnerability. But none of which you can be confident that they'll still have no vulnerability in half a decade's time. And if Microsoft were to build what you're suggesting into Windows, a vulnerability beign discovered in whatever hash they used would be a death-knell. How could Microsoft possibly fix it? Distribute a patch to change the hash -- over the compromised patch distribution network?
Human oversight would, indeed, solve all these problems. But the only things that are having problems are free email services. And once you introduce an element of ongoing human oversight into a free service, you're losing money on it. Free services are a very low-margin-per-instance business.
Sessions are, indeed, tracked by cookies. I most sincerely doubt whether any cracker skilled enough to break some of the best CAPTCHAs in the industry will have much trouble writing a script to delete a cookie.
How can they tell that all the accounts share the same computer?
Before you answer, bear in mind that the whole of the country of Quatar shares one IP address; as do most business, Universities, schools etc.
The manufacturer quoted contrast ratio will be measured in a completely dark environment. The point is to measure the ratio of light emitted from a while pixel to a black pixel; not the amount of ambient light around the measuring equipment.
I note you're still refusing to tell anyone your source for your figures.
The reason I was looking at usage share rather than unit sales is because there is no way of reliable measuring unit sale percentages. Heck, "unit sale figures" isn't even a well-defined concept with Linux: the number of new PCs with Linux preloaded is tiny compared to the number that get Linux loaded on after purchase. Download figures of Linux iso's is well-known to be only very, very loosely correlated indeed with number of installs. And whilst Microsoft and Apple do occasionally release press-releases with supposed numbers of unit sales on, these have been noted many times to be grossly inflated, in both cases. In short, "Windows market share on new machines" based on unit sales is so ill-defined as to be meaningless. The only reasonable way to measure usage is though... Usage share figures, usually thorugh browser user agent strings.
Apologies; turns out that the default user type for new users, "Desktop User", which I assumed had sudo privileges; actually doesn't after all.
Apologies; you're right: the default user type is "Desktop User", which I assumed had sudo privileges; turns out it doesn't. Thanks for correcting me.
So, just to make sure I understand your logic: because it's working for you, anyone who claims it doesn't work for them must be lying?
(I'm sure someone, somewhere, has had Ubuntu's "Screens and Graphics" utility work for them when setting up dual screens; doesn't change the fact that it's a horribly buggy xorg.conf-trashing front end for a decade-old long-deprecated X extension (Xinerama) that never worked properly anyway. Thank god for xrandr...)
Also, as other people have pointed out, NT was in no way "based on OS/2". In fact, it was originally intended to replace the OS/2 kernel, because the OS/2 2.0 kernel was considered to be so behind (among other things, it was hybrid 16/32-bit)! It also inherited its LAN manager, and implemented part of its API; but it was written from scratch: the architecture of the kernel is fundamentally different.