The majority of people do not fully understand what Firefox is. There reason IE remains so popular is that most home computer users think their computer is just another appliance, and they want it to work out of the box like a VCR. So they just start it up for the first time, click "start," see something labelled "internet" and just use it, never even realizing what they are using or what they are doing. It has nothing to do with the technical merits of the web browser, it has to do with people who are not interested in computing beyond the on/off switch.
First of all, there is no archaic tool chain. The GNU tool chain is widely used, by serious computer users, on a variety of platforms, including Windows and Mac OS X.
Now, as for releasing specs/source. With specialized hardware, that has niche uses, it is sometimes hard to find a driver even when the specs are released, but for mainstream hardware, yes, we demand specs in order to write drivers. Of course we would like the company to just release the driver source, but I have yet to come across a situation when the specs are released, in full, without royalty, NDA, patent, etc. problems, and then have the community continue to push for an open source driver. I have seen companies release limited specs for one of their products, and no updated specs for future products in that line, and then have developers get pissed and demand source code.
Demands to have something ported for us usually come from novice users who are not able to port software themselves, and are not aware of the extent to which software is ported by others.
That much is certainly true, although when I use the word "pædophile," I am referring to people who are attracted to non-sexually mature children. My point was that, when it comes to those people, we tend to characterize them as people who "look creepy," drive around in unmarked white vans, and live on the fringes of society, when the reality is that most of them are people one would never suspect. While I think it is sad that such people exist, and that psychologists/psychiatrists need to research the phenomenon more and find ways of treating it, there is no reason to try to characterize them as "underpeople" with absolutely no resemblance to any normal person.
Keep in mind that pædophilia does not imply a lack of intelligence or a lack of knowledge. We like to think of pædophiles as these sad, sick men who look creepy and go around unshaven, but the reality is that a lot of them appear perfectly normal, and some hold jobs in the computer industry. Such people would very quickly realize that they could defeat a system based on hash signatures by merely modifying a single low-order bit in some random position in the image. Worse, if the people at the production and distribution levels realize this, it will not take a long time before the process is automated and a pædophile looking for images has images with random low-order bits changed.
An open source frequency analysis project would be pretty cool, and it would probably have applications beyond simple police work.
This sounds like the worse possible way to search for kiddie porn, because a suspect who wanted to conceal his activities could just change a single pixel, and the entire hash would change. They would need a signature method that doesn't change dramatically when a single bit changes, like something based on a frequency analysis.
Teenagers are not doing "more of everything" these days. The media is just reporting more, because people are more likely to watch news that scares them, and everyone is scared about the impending downfall of our civilization because of out of control youth. Why do you think so many talk shows during the 90s were on the topic of teenagers running around having sex, smoking pot, and joining gangs? It was not because the phenomenon was new, it was because people are more likely to watch that than shows that do not scare them.
Talented teenagers with computer access have been around for a while, and have been hacking for a while. I did a bit of hacking myself when I was a teenager, nothing major just toying with some systems at my high school. Sometimes, teenagers neglect to think things through, and start using their skills stupidly (stealing credit card numbers, for example), but again, that is not something new.
It was common to have multiple editors in proprietary Unix: ed, ex, vi, pico, etc. In fact, the SUS defines some redundancy, for example, including both sed and awk, when awk could do everything that sed does. When the value of those systems is calculated, they don't reduce the number to account for that redundancy.
Sort of. If you have good will among your friends, they might just cover some food for you, pick up your bar tabs, etc. How this is relevant to a large corporation, I do not know, and even less so for Fedora 9.
No, ethernet itself is the reason that those packets are dropped. It is possible to have IP on some other network, like token ring or FDDI, bother of which actually achieves higher throughput than ethernet for a given bandwidth. IP is known to be "unreliable" because there is nothing in IP that corrects for dropped packets, but those packets are dropped because of the network type that is used (or because of physical considerations on that networking, like a disconnected cable or radio interference).
I would argue that copyright and trademark infringement (which have nothing to do with seagoing vessels, usually) do not really hurt Microsoft's bottom line. In fact, they probably help, by ensuring the free-libre software never gets a good hold on the market, and that home computer users are rarely if ever exposed to it. I have some serious doubts that the people who download illegal copies of Windows would suddenly start paying for legal copies if cracking efforts would suddenly stop. They would probably just find some other free-gratis OS that they could download, and in all likelihood, it would be a free-libre system.
I'm not sure who modded you funny, or why, because you make a very good point. Actually, in the absence of piracy, Windows would have a substantially smaller market share, especially in emerging economies. Microsoft has actually admitted this in the past, and made a pathetic attempt at releasing a shareware version of Windows that could run 3 processes at a time in order to compete with the pirates. Microsoft has to tread very carefully when they try to combat piracy, because the fewer pirated copies of Windows and Office people use, the more copies of Linux/BSD and OpenOffice.org/Google Docs people will use. On the other hand, if Microsoft does not make sufficient efforts to protect its trademarks (and to some degree, copyrights), it could lose them, and that would spell trouble for them too.
RHEL is also substantially more reliable than Windows, and requires fewer personnel to support (per server). For most businesses, a RHEL/JBOSS subscription will cost less in a given year than what it would cost to maintain a Windows Server/.NET IIS stack. In terms of other proprietary systems like AIX/Websphere, a RHEL/JBOSS subscription is substantially less expensive, in plain dollar amounts. Also, because of the staff that Red Hat can provide, some businesses actually switch from a community supported system like CentOS or Debian to RHEL, because it is cheaper than hiring another full time Linux admin as their business needs grow.
The 9/11 hijackers were not dressed in traditional middle eastern clothing. They were wearing run-of-the-mill business-casual clothing, which is why they were so successful -- they looked like normal travelers, and drew no attention to themselves at the airport.
"Like what? And why should customers care about it?"
Well, let's see...there is the ability to set a window as "always on top" (did they add this to Vista yet?), the ability to have window focus follow the mouse cursor, X forwarding, multiple workspaces, and for customers with a higher degree of technical sophistication, there is the entire SUS userland, which is superior to the Windows shell by leaps and bounds. Before you go and try to claim that these features may be added to Windows by downloading other packages, may I remind you that only those users with a very good understanding of what they are doing could be expected to do that without mucking up the entire system.
"* Drivers - Add all the drivers to the kernel?"
Kernel modules? I have seen manufacturers destribute their drivers as separate kernel modules, to get around the GPL or to simplify the task of distribution.
"* Applications - All the software in the world at a single spot. i.e. Google for applications. Who addresses commercial software?"
First of all, there is no requirement that you only install software from the repositories. It is more secure to do so, since there is a team of people somewhere whose job it is to review all that software and ensure that it will not do something nasty to your system, but you do not actually need to do this. I can think of many software packages that are not distributed via repositories -- Xilinx ISE, Matlab, HSPICE, etc.
Basically, what your post demonstrates is an utter failure to understand how people are using their Linux systems in the real world. It sounds like you played with Linux for 10 minutes, noticed a few things that you thought were odd but did not bother to research any of them, and then threw your hands in the air and ran back to Windows, where you are more comfortable. I could be wrong, but that is what it sounds like.
Yes, quoting random verses with no context is certainly enough to convince anyone of your point! It's not like, you know, taking passages out of context from the Christian bible could ever make that religion appear to condemn adulterers to death by stoning, demand that an enemy army be mutilated, encourage slavery, encourage incest...
How many devices do you typically connect to your system at a time? If you are connecting multiple hard drives at the same time, why are you wasting your money on external drives?
If IO latency is so important to you, why are you using a notebook? You can get a workstation with much higher IO throughput for the same price, with faster SATA disk drives.
Good, people shouldn't be upgrading their computers until their previous system stops working. Have any of these people given any thought to the resources required to build a computer? Oil, minerals, etc., vastly more than is necessary for most of the other things we need (like food), and very much non-renewable. I have a functional system from 2002 that is still chugging away and still serves my needs just fine -- more so, in fact, as my load averages rarely go about 0.6.
Maybe there is something about Mac fans that causes them to be excessively wasteful?
Yes but remember, the west is doing it in the name of "protecting freedom and fighting terror," whereas the Chinese are doing it in the name of suppressing their citizens.
Governments have a long history of portraying their actions as justified, but those same actions by other governments as being evil.
But I can think of plenty of reasons to turn a notebook off. For example, a kernel update (we get those a lot in Fedora). Or a hardware upgrade. Or a low battery. Or extended storage. Or, if you are using a dual-boot system, to switch OSes.
Really, they aren't talking about turning over your private key ring -- that's easy to get with a warrant. But what about the symmetric encryption on that private key? Only you know the passphrase, in theory, and if you give it to them, they will have access to incriminating evidence.
Suppose a murderer buried a corpse somewhere secret. Should he be required to disclose the location of that corpse?
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Firefox vs. Female:
Can a woman block popups? No. Can Firefox show you a naked woman? Yes.
The majority of people do not fully understand what Firefox is. There reason IE remains so popular is that most home computer users think their computer is just another appliance, and they want it to work out of the box like a VCR. So they just start it up for the first time, click "start," see something labelled "internet" and just use it, never even realizing what they are using or what they are doing. It has nothing to do with the technical merits of the web browser, it has to do with people who are not interested in computing beyond the on/off switch.
First of all, there is no archaic tool chain. The GNU tool chain is widely used, by serious computer users, on a variety of platforms, including Windows and Mac OS X.
Now, as for releasing specs/source. With specialized hardware, that has niche uses, it is sometimes hard to find a driver even when the specs are released, but for mainstream hardware, yes, we demand specs in order to write drivers. Of course we would like the company to just release the driver source, but I have yet to come across a situation when the specs are released, in full, without royalty, NDA, patent, etc. problems, and then have the community continue to push for an open source driver. I have seen companies release limited specs for one of their products, and no updated specs for future products in that line, and then have developers get pissed and demand source code.
Demands to have something ported for us usually come from novice users who are not able to port software themselves, and are not aware of the extent to which software is ported by others.
That much is certainly true, although when I use the word "pædophile," I am referring to people who are attracted to non-sexually mature children. My point was that, when it comes to those people, we tend to characterize them as people who "look creepy," drive around in unmarked white vans, and live on the fringes of society, when the reality is that most of them are people one would never suspect. While I think it is sad that such people exist, and that psychologists/psychiatrists need to research the phenomenon more and find ways of treating it, there is no reason to try to characterize them as "underpeople" with absolutely no resemblance to any normal person.
Keep in mind that pædophilia does not imply a lack of intelligence or a lack of knowledge. We like to think of pædophiles as these sad, sick men who look creepy and go around unshaven, but the reality is that a lot of them appear perfectly normal, and some hold jobs in the computer industry. Such people would very quickly realize that they could defeat a system based on hash signatures by merely modifying a single low-order bit in some random position in the image. Worse, if the people at the production and distribution levels realize this, it will not take a long time before the process is automated and a pædophile looking for images has images with random low-order bits changed.
An open source frequency analysis project would be pretty cool, and it would probably have applications beyond simple police work.
This sounds like the worse possible way to search for kiddie porn, because a suspect who wanted to conceal his activities could just change a single pixel, and the entire hash would change. They would need a signature method that doesn't change dramatically when a single bit changes, like something based on a frequency analysis.
Teenagers are not doing "more of everything" these days. The media is just reporting more, because people are more likely to watch news that scares them, and everyone is scared about the impending downfall of our civilization because of out of control youth. Why do you think so many talk shows during the 90s were on the topic of teenagers running around having sex, smoking pot, and joining gangs? It was not because the phenomenon was new, it was because people are more likely to watch that than shows that do not scare them.
Talented teenagers with computer access have been around for a while, and have been hacking for a while. I did a bit of hacking myself when I was a teenager, nothing major just toying with some systems at my high school. Sometimes, teenagers neglect to think things through, and start using their skills stupidly (stealing credit card numbers, for example), but again, that is not something new.
Fedora 9 boots up in less than 30 seconds; granted, I use fluxbox as my window manager, but still.
It was common to have multiple editors in proprietary Unix: ed, ex, vi, pico, etc. In fact, the SUS defines some redundancy, for example, including both sed and awk, when awk could do everything that sed does. When the value of those systems is calculated, they don't reduce the number to account for that redundancy.
Sort of. If you have good will among your friends, they might just cover some food for you, pick up your bar tabs, etc. How this is relevant to a large corporation, I do not know, and even less so for Fedora 9.
No, ethernet itself is the reason that those packets are dropped. It is possible to have IP on some other network, like token ring or FDDI, bother of which actually achieves higher throughput than ethernet for a given bandwidth. IP is known to be "unreliable" because there is nothing in IP that corrects for dropped packets, but those packets are dropped because of the network type that is used (or because of physical considerations on that networking, like a disconnected cable or radio interference).
I would argue that copyright and trademark infringement (which have nothing to do with seagoing vessels, usually) do not really hurt Microsoft's bottom line. In fact, they probably help, by ensuring the free-libre software never gets a good hold on the market, and that home computer users are rarely if ever exposed to it. I have some serious doubts that the people who download illegal copies of Windows would suddenly start paying for legal copies if cracking efforts would suddenly stop. They would probably just find some other free-gratis OS that they could download, and in all likelihood, it would be a free-libre system.
I'm not sure who modded you funny, or why, because you make a very good point. Actually, in the absence of piracy, Windows would have a substantially smaller market share, especially in emerging economies. Microsoft has actually admitted this in the past, and made a pathetic attempt at releasing a shareware version of Windows that could run 3 processes at a time in order to compete with the pirates. Microsoft has to tread very carefully when they try to combat piracy, because the fewer pirated copies of Windows and Office people use, the more copies of Linux/BSD and OpenOffice.org/Google Docs people will use. On the other hand, if Microsoft does not make sufficient efforts to protect its trademarks (and to some degree, copyrights), it could lose them, and that would spell trouble for them too.
RHEL is also substantially more reliable than Windows, and requires fewer personnel to support (per server). For most businesses, a RHEL/JBOSS subscription will cost less in a given year than what it would cost to maintain a Windows Server/.NET IIS stack. In terms of other proprietary systems like AIX/Websphere, a RHEL/JBOSS subscription is substantially less expensive, in plain dollar amounts. Also, because of the staff that Red Hat can provide, some businesses actually switch from a community supported system like CentOS or Debian to RHEL, because it is cheaper than hiring another full time Linux admin as their business needs grow.
The 9/11 hijackers were not dressed in traditional middle eastern clothing. They were wearing run-of-the-mill business-casual clothing, which is why they were so successful -- they looked like normal travelers, and drew no attention to themselves at the airport.
Surveillance is a slippery slope.
"Like what? And why should customers care about it?"
Well, let's see...there is the ability to set a window as "always on top" (did they add this to Vista yet?), the ability to have window focus follow the mouse cursor, X forwarding, multiple workspaces, and for customers with a higher degree of technical sophistication, there is the entire SUS userland, which is superior to the Windows shell by leaps and bounds. Before you go and try to claim that these features may be added to Windows by downloading other packages, may I remind you that only those users with a very good understanding of what they are doing could be expected to do that without mucking up the entire system.
"* Drivers - Add all the drivers to the kernel?"
Kernel modules? I have seen manufacturers destribute their drivers as separate kernel modules, to get around the GPL or to simplify the task of distribution.
"* Applications - All the software in the world at a single spot. i.e. Google for applications. Who addresses commercial software?"
First of all, there is no requirement that you only install software from the repositories. It is more secure to do so, since there is a team of people somewhere whose job it is to review all that software and ensure that it will not do something nasty to your system, but you do not actually need to do this. I can think of many software packages that are not distributed via repositories -- Xilinx ISE, Matlab, HSPICE, etc.
Basically, what your post demonstrates is an utter failure to understand how people are using their Linux systems in the real world. It sounds like you played with Linux for 10 minutes, noticed a few things that you thought were odd but did not bother to research any of them, and then threw your hands in the air and ran back to Windows, where you are more comfortable. I could be wrong, but that is what it sounds like.
Yes, quoting random verses with no context is certainly enough to convince anyone of your point! It's not like, you know, taking passages out of context from the Christian bible could ever make that religion appear to condemn adulterers to death by stoning, demand that an enemy army be mutilated, encourage slavery, encourage incest...
Uhm, good? Don't buy a new computer until your old one stops working?
Thank you. Why people throw down thousands of dollars to get a new computer when they already have a working computer is a mystery to me.
[Cynical alert]
Good, people shouldn't be upgrading their computers until their previous system stops working. Have any of these people given any thought to the resources required to build a computer? Oil, minerals, etc., vastly more than is necessary for most of the other things we need (like food), and very much non-renewable. I have a functional system from 2002 that is still chugging away and still serves my needs just fine -- more so, in fact, as my load averages rarely go about 0.6.
Maybe there is something about Mac fans that causes them to be excessively wasteful?
Yes but remember, the west is doing it in the name of "protecting freedom and fighting terror," whereas the Chinese are doing it in the name of suppressing their citizens.
Governments have a long history of portraying their actions as justified, but those same actions by other governments as being evil.
But I can think of plenty of reasons to turn a notebook off. For example, a kernel update (we get those a lot in Fedora). Or a hardware upgrade. Or a low battery. Or extended storage. Or, if you are using a dual-boot system, to switch OSes.
Really, they aren't talking about turning over your private key ring -- that's easy to get with a warrant. But what about the symmetric encryption on that private key? Only you know the passphrase, in theory, and if you give it to them, they will have access to incriminating evidence.
Suppose a murderer buried a corpse somewhere secret. Should he be required to disclose the location of that corpse?