Have you ever tried to get a true PHP withing HTML mode working. Perl mode is fine but gets screwed up by the HTML. HTML mode doesn't work well at all. Yea, yea, I know you shouldn't mix the two anyway but sometimes it happens and it really screws up highlighting and indenting.
I too have looked into eDirectory but have yet to implement anything. I have a friend who has worked at Novell for years and is a key developer of the NDS repair utilities. Anyway, I keep asking him why this is so hard to get. I had to spend way too much time researching this. I keep asking why I can't buy an inexpensive package that is designed for small to mid sized corporations running Windows and Linux. There has to be thousands admins out there running Linux and Windows who would prefer not to have a MS solution. NDS is very mature and secure and has ports to everything. I assume Novell still has big plans for NDS. Why can't I get it?
At first I thought this might work out well. Being one of the only towns to make this rule stick would certainly draw people to that location. Then I thought about it... The town will be consumed with hypochondriacs, will cease to function and require a bailout from the state of California.
At first glance this seems aimed at Microsoft but it could have severe impacts on free software unless liability is limited to the price of the software for example. I think an argument for an exemption of open source could be made based on complete disclosure. This could have an interesting impact on free (as in beer) software though.
Seems that this is rather easy to fix compared to changing distros, since you compile your own vim anyway. A couple/usr/local directories and a couple alias commands...
I want to try the preempt patch but I finally got a kernel from my favorite distribution that works for me right out of the box. To get a raw kernel with all the stuff that I want plus the preempt patch I'll have to spend more time than I have patching and compiling. I hear how great this patch is about once a month. Why isn't it included in the major distros? Would it "harm" in any way my desktop/server running X, KDE, FreesWan, Apache, Samba, etc?
if it's driverless, why list the three(Win32, MacOS, and Linux) OS's they "support" at all?
I see what you're getting at but if I made a device that is "driverless" I would still put icons on my site for every major OS that works with it - that I can support. You may know that your OS works with any generic USB device but my customer base does not. Plus my device may work with xyzOS but that doesn't mean I have someone in tech support who knows how to get USB working under xyzOS.
I'm glad someone was paying attention in biology class. I couldn't believe someone hadn't chimed in with this earlier and I also thought it would be moderated up a little higher. Anyway, plants absorb CO2 during photosynthise but they also respire in the process of converting these newly formed sugars into usable energy. This likely makes sleeping in a room full of plants less desireable than most people think as they respire all the time but photosynthise only when there is enough light to do so.
I heard the same story on NPR and couldn't help but think that the Intel PR firm knew it needed some shiny new thing to wave in front of investors. I guess they figured most people wouldn't hear the part about it not being all that viable for production or that Intel didn't really develop it first. It's a pretty good trick. I think I'll request a raise telling my boss that I should be able to increase my productivity 100 fold and then cloud the conversation with details concerning the technical and political hurdles associated with cloning.
Is this comment based on what you have read in reviews or based on experience? If you ever tried Mandrake on a server I think you would be pleasantly surprised. Mandrake gets alot of desktop glory but not because it sucks as a server.
You're acting myopic. Get away from it for a while. There's a big world out there. Start thinking differently about things. Let go of your previous expectations and find something new that's interesting. The skills that you have developed will not be valuable no matter what you do.
Take a trip. Visit friends somewhere else. See some movies - anything to get your mind out of it's current space and into a new mode of thinking.
Finally, quit your whining. Life can be hard. Accept that and move on.
Yes, yes, yes. I know about the Quake/Quack thing.
What I should have stated is that detecting the executable isn't necessarily bad. If I know what is running then I can optomize for that target. It's not irrational to treat one game one way and another game another way. ATI more than likely did this for the wrong reasons. However, they could argue that trading image quality for frame rate is a good trade. Should this be documanted? Yea. It should even be an option. But do we know that ATI isn't doing something else too - maybe some other tweak that squeezes a little more speed out of the card that's safe for Quake3 but maybe not for some other game. Now offering that option isn't such a good idea. The "Check here for faster rendering but poorer image quality but only for Quake3." option seems a bit contrived.
Anyway, to say that Quake and Quack should turn out the same benchmarks isn't correct.
I think you better reread this if you have read it already.
It is our opinion that ATi has written their driver to identify when you are running Quake 3 Arena and give you better frame rates when benchmarking and playing the game.
Read it again. "Better frame rates when...playing the game." Also Quake3 IS the benchmark in this case.
Finally this is a Win2K driver. There may be source but I doubt it.
The more you know about how a tool is going to be used the more you can optomize it for that purpose. Adding Quake optomizations doesn't necessarily introduce any instability or speed penalty. In fact it could add stability to Quake since it's a known target for the driver.
The other thing this test doesn't do is rule out the possibility that some other games aren't optomized - unless there is a popular game named Quack.
Is it wrong to optomize a game to particular hardware? I didn't think so. Why then is it wronfg to go the other way around? If this was an open source driver would it be such a conspiracy?
What I wouldn't give to see the look on my bosses face when I show up with a truckload of PS2s and hand one to each employee as they arrive at work. Give me an X environment and a fast NIC and I'm there. I can see the new employee manual now... "No playing --insert your favorite game here-- during business hours." And yes I would prefer to navigate my spreadsheets with a joystick.
This is like forcing everyone to buy glass houses and then making voyarism a wildly serious crime. You can put more cops on the street. The bulk of the population won't look (not much anyway) but are you still safe to take a shower? Just build a better house...
Actually viruses are expensive and this crime should be prosecuted like any other. I just don't think that paying the federal government lots of money to invade our privacy so that Microsoft doesn't have to rethink their software is stupid.
Your comparison of this situation to the spread and risks of a deadly human virus is ridiculous.
It's not as silly as you might think. You're only half right. Your extension of my analogy is incomplete. The situation is really more like this:
A flaw exists in the population that is easily exploitable by a small quantity (maybe quarantined) of pathogen. It's small but it does already exist. The medical community has the power to eliminate this flaw through immunization, education, diet or whatever. By the way, it's easy to prevent this disease and if caught early it's almost always curable. The cost of prevention is not zero but it's not severe either.
So, should this pathogen be blown through the ventilation system at my work?... Maybe. It sounds crazy at first but it's not at all. In this case prevention and diligence is expensive but what is the cost of the alternative? The alternative is that you have a system that can be cracked at will by any serious pathogen without any chance of detection.
So, is it better to live life with a weakened immune system or is it better to survive the barrage of colds and flus while being less vulnerable to the silent killers simply because the most obvious exploits are eliminated?
Let's consider your terrorist comment. How hard is it to recruit a cracker that can discover the simplest of exploits? How hard is it to recruit a cracker that can find a hole in a well hardened system?
Yes, this crap is a pain and a waste of time but so is war and competition and illness. It exists and ignoring it won't make it go away. Lots of software is like the US airline industry prior to September 11th - vulnerable and waiting for a malicious entity to arrive.
Look at Sklyarov. He's in jail because he and his employer were showing the world how to break the silly protection on Adobe eBook files - indeed profiting from it (how American is that?). Adobe should be paying them a finders fee but instead they're punishing a promising young programmer and making their customers more vulnerable.
I didn't have troubles with _my_ router (Cisco 675). Qwest seemed to have problems on their network all the time. I would have troubles reaching Slashdot and I would call Qwest support telling them that I was logged into my router and I could trace route up to xxx.xxx.xxx and they would usually tell me to click my Start Button...
As much as this sucks keep in mind that there are alternatives. I have a Qwest DSL line but it goes to a different Internet provider. I have a reliable DSL line from Qwest and a great Internet connection from XMission. Most locations have _many_ alternatives to MSN for the Internet portion of the service.
I was a Qwest DSL customer but switched to XMission after having way too many problems with their Megabit service. DNS was a problem but routing was the biggest issue.
Keep in mind that Qwest has to offer alternatives for the Internet connection. Most locations have _many_ alternatives. Some, like XMission, are excellent.
I'm not certain what MSN will do with Linux but anything is better than the Qwest response - unsupported. It was one step above disallowed. I had to lie to tech support about my OS simply to get help with routing issues. "I am logged into my router and I can traceroute up to xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx." I still was instructed to click my Start Button...
Many diseases are deadly if untreated. Often the scarriest ones are those that kill silently over time. This is what MS is asking for. Security holes can be an obvious pain or a silent killer. If exploits are not made popular and fixed then the exploit will be available to those who know the most and can potentially do the most harm. Once again this is a plead for a solution that will benefit MS and nobody else.
This could be a step forward but I doubt it. The problem is that patents are necessary but the implementation of the patent system is broken. They cover things that shouldn't be covered. They are often too broad and often cover areas that restrict development in areas where the patent holder did very little work. Face it, patents to the greatest degree serve the law profession and big corporations with big law budgets.
If the W3C wants to include some obscure technology that for example helps handicapped people communicate and there is no clear alternative then this may be an area where patents in standards are a good idea but I am too synical to think that this is the only time this rule would be applied. I think that a lesser technology that is free of patent entanglements is always better.
Mandrake improves at an alarming rate...
on
Mandrake 8.1 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I keep seeing complaints like:
"Mandrake is too bloated and I'm a linux expert so I should know."
Actually if you're a Linux expert, especially a lazy Linux expert then Mandrake is quite nice. It ships with a lot of nice stuff and it's highly configurable at inatall and after. The kernal is very modular. The install is very tweekable. In fact Mandrake 8.1 is the only distro that I have been able to get to work correctly with ReiserFS as root on an ATA100 drive along side another ATA66 along side a SCSI software raid along side a SCSI CD writer and an IDE CDROM. All that with pmfirewall and freeswan working fine INSTALLED AS AN UPGRADE. Yes I had to tweek a few things but they were fairly minor.
Considering that I got to choose what I wanted to install, what services I wanted to run at boot, what runlevel I wanted to start at and what window manager I wanted to use (each preconfigured with menus for my installed components) Mandrake 8.1 is a dream. Plus Mandrake ships with some nice config tools and MandrakeUpdate so that I can easily update over the net. I admit that I edit config files by hand on occasion. This is not MacOS by any means. I also use webmin for some tasks and tweeks. That aside I think Mandrake 8.1 is a very friendly but powerful distro. It's not just for the desktop and never really was.
If you don't have the patience to roll your own distro (the only true way to escape Linux lib dependancy hell) and you don't have time for something like Rock Linux then I think that Mandrake should be considered along with Debian as the Lazy Linux Expert Distro TM.
Oh, and BTW, those complaining about Mandrake not running well on Pentium 120s with 64 MB of RAM... Why bother leaving the Linux 2.0 or 2.2 world at all? You don't see Win95 users complaining that they can't run WinXP - OK maybe you do. Anyway these people fall in that category and should actually use one of the many mini distros that are perfect for such a machine.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever tried to get a true PHP withing HTML mode working. Perl mode is fine but gets screwed up by the HTML. HTML mode doesn't work well at all. Yea, yea, I know you shouldn't mix the two anyway but sometimes it happens and it really screws up highlighting and indenting.
I too have looked into eDirectory but have yet to implement anything. I have a friend who has worked at Novell for years and is a key developer of the NDS repair utilities. Anyway, I keep asking him why this is so hard to get. I had to spend way too much time researching this. I keep asking why I can't buy an inexpensive package that is designed for small to mid sized corporations running Windows and Linux. There has to be thousands admins out there running Linux and Windows who would prefer not to have a MS solution. NDS is very mature and secure and has ports to everything. I assume Novell still has big plans for NDS. Why can't I get it?
At first I thought this might work out well. Being one of the only towns to make this rule stick would certainly draw people to that location. Then I thought about it... The town will be consumed with hypochondriacs, will cease to function and require a bailout from the state of California.
At first glance this seems aimed at Microsoft but it could have severe impacts on free software unless liability is limited to the price of the software for example. I think an argument for an exemption of open source could be made based on complete disclosure. This could have an interesting impact on free (as in beer) software though.
I just downloaded the ISO image and will soon install. At first glance this does look nice. Do you remember what the "rough edges" were?
Seems that this is rather easy to fix compared to changing distros, since you compile your own vim anyway. A couple /usr/local directories and a couple alias commands...
I want to try the preempt patch but I finally got a kernel from my favorite distribution that works for me right out of the box. To get a raw kernel with all the stuff that I want plus the preempt patch I'll have to spend more time than I have patching and compiling. I hear how great this patch is about once a month. Why isn't it included in the major distros? Would it "harm" in any way my desktop/server running X, KDE, FreesWan, Apache, Samba, etc?
I see what you're getting at but if I made a device that is "driverless" I would still put icons on my site for every major OS that works with it - that I can support. You may know that your OS works with any generic USB device but my customer base does not. Plus my device may work with xyzOS but that doesn't mean I have someone in tech support who knows how to get USB working under xyzOS.
I'm glad someone was paying attention in biology class. I couldn't believe someone hadn't chimed in with this earlier and I also thought it would be moderated up a little higher. Anyway, plants absorb CO2 during photosynthise but they also respire in the process of converting these newly formed sugars into usable energy. This likely makes sleeping in a room full of plants less desireable than most people think as they respire all the time but photosynthise only when there is enough light to do so.
Hmmm, let's take a common marketing technique and call it punishment. How can anyone think this a remedy?
I heard the same story on NPR and couldn't help but think that the Intel PR firm knew it needed some shiny new thing to wave in front of investors. I guess they figured most people wouldn't hear the part about it not being all that viable for production or that Intel didn't really develop it first. It's a pretty good trick. I think I'll request a raise telling my boss that I should be able to increase my productivity 100 fold and then cloud the conversation with details concerning the technical and political hurdles associated with cloning.
Is this comment based on what you have read in reviews or based on experience? If you ever tried Mandrake on a server I think you would be pleasantly surprised. Mandrake gets alot of desktop glory but not because it sucks as a server.
You're acting myopic. Get away from it for a while. There's a big world out there. Start thinking differently about things. Let go of your previous expectations and find something new that's interesting. The skills that you have developed will not be valuable no matter what you do.
Take a trip. Visit friends somewhere else. See some movies - anything to get your mind out of it's current space and into a new mode of thinking.
Finally, quit your whining. Life can be hard. Accept that and move on.
What I should have stated is that detecting the executable isn't necessarily bad. If I know what is running then I can optomize for that target. It's not irrational to treat one game one way and another game another way. ATI more than likely did this for the wrong reasons. However, they could argue that trading image quality for frame rate is a good trade. Should this be documanted? Yea. It should even be an option. But do we know that ATI isn't doing something else too - maybe some other tweak that squeezes a little more speed out of the card that's safe for Quake3 but maybe not for some other game. Now offering that option isn't such a good idea. The "Check here for faster rendering but poorer image quality but only for Quake3." option seems a bit contrived.
Anyway, to say that Quake and Quack should turn out the same benchmarks isn't correct.
It is our opinion that ATi has written their driver to identify when you are running Quake 3 Arena and give you better frame rates when benchmarking and playing the game.
Read it again. "Better frame rates when ...playing the game." Also Quake3 IS the benchmark in this case.
Finally this is a Win2K driver. There may be source but I doubt it.
The more you know about how a tool is going to be used the more you can optomize it for that purpose. Adding Quake optomizations doesn't necessarily introduce any instability or speed penalty. In fact it could add stability to Quake since it's a known target for the driver.
The other thing this test doesn't do is rule out the possibility that some other games aren't optomized - unless there is a popular game named Quack.
Is it wrong to optomize a game to particular hardware? I didn't think so. Why then is it wronfg to go the other way around? If this was an open source driver would it be such a conspiracy?
What I wouldn't give to see the look on my bosses face when I show up with a truckload of PS2s and hand one to each employee as they arrive at work. Give me an X environment and a fast NIC and I'm there. I can see the new employee manual now... "No playing --insert your favorite game here-- during business hours." And yes I would prefer to navigate my spreadsheets with a joystick.
This is like forcing everyone to buy glass houses and then making voyarism a wildly serious crime. You can put more cops on the street. The bulk of the population won't look (not much anyway) but are you still safe to take a shower? Just build a better house...
Actually viruses are expensive and this crime should be prosecuted like any other. I just don't think that paying the federal government lots of money to invade our privacy so that Microsoft doesn't have to rethink their software is stupid.
It's not as silly as you might think. You're only half right. Your extension of my analogy is incomplete. The situation is really more like this:
A flaw exists in the population that is easily exploitable by a small quantity (maybe quarantined) of pathogen. It's small but it does already exist. The medical community has the power to eliminate this flaw through immunization, education, diet or whatever. By the way, it's easy to prevent this disease and if caught early it's almost always curable. The cost of prevention is not zero but it's not severe either.
So, should this pathogen be blown through the ventilation system at my work?... Maybe. It sounds crazy at first but it's not at all. In this case prevention and diligence is expensive but what is the cost of the alternative? The alternative is that you have a system that can be cracked at will by any serious pathogen without any chance of detection.
So, is it better to live life with a weakened immune system or is it better to survive the barrage of colds and flus while being less vulnerable to the silent killers simply because the most obvious exploits are eliminated?
Let's consider your terrorist comment. How hard is it to recruit a cracker that can discover the simplest of exploits? How hard is it to recruit a cracker that can find a hole in a well hardened system?
Yes, this crap is a pain and a waste of time but so is war and competition and illness. It exists and ignoring it won't make it go away. Lots of software is like the US airline industry prior to September 11th - vulnerable and waiting for a malicious entity to arrive.
Look at Sklyarov. He's in jail because he and his employer were showing the world how to break the silly protection on Adobe eBook files - indeed profiting from it (how American is that?). Adobe should be paying them a finders fee but instead they're punishing a promising young programmer and making their customers more vulnerable.
I didn't have troubles with _my_ router (Cisco 675). Qwest seemed to have problems on their network all the time. I would have troubles reaching Slashdot and I would call Qwest support telling them that I was logged into my router and I could trace route up to xxx.xxx.xxx and they would usually tell me to click my Start Button...
As much as this sucks keep in mind that there are alternatives. I have a Qwest DSL line but it goes to a different Internet provider. I have a reliable DSL line from Qwest and a great Internet connection from XMission. Most locations have _many_ alternatives to MSN for the Internet portion of the service.
I was a Qwest DSL customer but switched to XMission after having way too many problems with their Megabit service. DNS was a problem but routing was the biggest issue.
Keep in mind that Qwest has to offer alternatives for the Internet connection. Most locations have _many_ alternatives. Some, like XMission, are excellent.
I'm not certain what MSN will do with Linux but anything is better than the Qwest response - unsupported. It was one step above disallowed. I had to lie to tech support about my OS simply to get help with routing issues. "I am logged into my router and I can traceroute up to xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx." I still was instructed to click my Start Button...
It's silent for years...
Many diseases are deadly if untreated. Often the scarriest ones are those that kill silently over time. This is what MS is asking for. Security holes can be an obvious pain or a silent killer. If exploits are not made popular and fixed then the exploit will be available to those who know the most and can potentially do the most harm. Once again this is a plead for a solution that will benefit MS and nobody else.
This could be a step forward but I doubt it. The problem is that patents are necessary but the implementation of the patent system is broken. They cover things that shouldn't be covered. They are often too broad and often cover areas that restrict development in areas where the patent holder did very little work. Face it, patents to the greatest degree serve the law profession and big corporations with big law budgets.
If the W3C wants to include some obscure technology that for example helps handicapped people communicate and there is no clear alternative then this may be an area where patents in standards are a good idea but I am too synical to think that this is the only time this rule would be applied. I think that a lesser technology that is free of patent entanglements is always better.
I keep seeing complaints like:
"Mandrake is too bloated and I'm a linux expert so I should know."
Actually if you're a Linux expert, especially a lazy Linux expert then Mandrake is quite nice. It ships with a lot of nice stuff and it's highly configurable at inatall and after. The kernal is very modular. The install is very tweekable. In fact Mandrake 8.1 is the only distro that I have been able to get to work correctly with ReiserFS as root on an ATA100 drive along side another ATA66 along side a SCSI software raid along side a SCSI CD writer and an IDE CDROM. All that with pmfirewall and freeswan working fine INSTALLED AS AN UPGRADE. Yes I had to tweek a few things but they were fairly minor.
Considering that I got to choose what I wanted to install, what services I wanted to run at boot, what runlevel I wanted to start at and what window manager I wanted to use (each preconfigured with menus for my installed components) Mandrake 8.1 is a dream. Plus Mandrake ships with some nice config tools and MandrakeUpdate so that I can easily update over the net. I admit that I edit config files by hand on occasion. This is not MacOS by any means. I also use webmin for some tasks and tweeks. That aside I think Mandrake 8.1 is a very friendly but powerful distro. It's not just for the desktop and never really was.
If you don't have the patience to roll your own distro (the only true way to escape Linux lib dependancy hell) and you don't have time for something like Rock Linux then I think that Mandrake should be considered along with Debian as the Lazy Linux Expert Distro TM.
Oh, and BTW, those complaining about Mandrake not running well on Pentium 120s with 64 MB of RAM... Why bother leaving the Linux 2.0 or 2.2 world at all? You don't see Win95 users complaining that they can't run WinXP - OK maybe you do. Anyway these people fall in that category and should actually use one of the many mini distros that are perfect for such a machine.