Login with username and password (forgot your password?)

[CrunchBang Linux]

We haven't discussed any Linux stuff much lately...

That's because f0dder won't allow it!

Ok. Lets get more serious now.

Can't say much about LXLE. It's not tracked by Distrowatch.com (which is unusual) and there doesn't seem to be much information or specs posted on their website - although I do appreciate the little essay the builder wrote about the motivation and goals behind creating it. Something I wish more distros would do.

For lightweight feel and a solid build (with no weirdness or oddball glitches) I'd have to hand the job to  CrunchBang Linux. That's my current go-to distro for most laptops or older desktops. Really like that Ninja-charcoal-zero-bling look too! (And the chicks love it! ) But don't let it fool you. Beneath that austere desktop (with a nice mix of Conky monitors sitting in the upper right corner) lurks all the usual penguin goodness found in any Linux distro. It's all just a click away courtesy of the OpenBox desktop manager. A right-click anywhere brings up the menu wherever your mouse pointer is. Very old-school Smalltalk style that is! And addictive once you start using it.

[attachthumb=#]

If you like light but still powerful, be sure to take CrunchBang for a 'live spin." Installs like a dream too.  

[Foolproof]

I very briefly mentioned this little gem of a movie from 2003 earlier. If you like caper films (I'm addicted to them) it's one of the better ones. It's called Foolproof.

[attach]

It's the story of three twenty-somethings living in Toronto who have formed a very unique club.  One that is dedicated to meticulously planning "foolproof" high-stakes robberies. The club has  four rules:

• Style, finesse and brains are everything. No guns, violence or use of force allowed.
• Whatever skills are required to commit the heist must be real skills at least one member of the club actually has
• The research and planning must be complete enough that the robbery could have actually been committed if they so chose.
• The planned crime is never to be carried out. It's purely an artistic and intellectual exercise.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3qndVGGsM4" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3qndVGGsM4</a>

All goes well until one of the members accidentally loses his copy of one of their heist plans. A short time later, the club members are shocked to see the jewel warehouse robbery they so meticulously planned had been successfully carried out. And from the details the police released to the evening news, it was very clear that whoever had pulled it off used their plan. Shortly afterwards they receive a phone call. Whoever had used their plan admired their expertise - and also knew their identities. He now wanted them to work with him on stealing something even bigger. And just in case they didn't want to help him, he pointed out that he still had the copy of their plan. A plan with enough in it for the police to be able to trace it back to the club should someone ever decide to send it to them."

Neat little film with some extremely clever plot twists and surprises. Recommended!

-----

Note: last I looked the full movie is up on YouTube. Watch it here.

I'd give the edge to the Dell for what you're doing. The Radeon is definitely the better graphics choice. And unless you're doing something processor intensive (like heavy video transcoding or CGI) the differences in performance between an i7 running at 2.0Ghz and 2.4Ghz won't be material. Probably wouldn't be material even if you were. The i7 is a beast! Especially with 8Gb of RAM at its disposal.

+1 w/f0dder's note about power consumption. And don't forget about heat. Maybe they've since fixed it, but in the past. some Inspirons seemed to run very hot. So if you go with Dell please be aware of it. FWIW, if heat buildup is going to be a problem for your laptop,  my experience has always been it happens very early on. If it doesn't manifest in the first two or three months of use it usually won't happen.

re: 5400rpm  drive speed. It's fine. Faster drives just run hotter and use more battery power. Not worth it for the small amount of increased performance you'd get. If you need really fast disk access, bite the bullet and get an SSD. Don't bother installing a faster standard disk drive. I have a WD Scorpio Black 750 (WD7500BPKT-6) running at 7200 in the laptop I'm using right now. It runs noticeably hotter than the failed 5400rpm Hitachi it replaced. And its real world performance isn't that much better that I'd buy this same drive again if I were shopping for a replacement disk today.

Also, one other thing to consider is where and how any warranty service will get done.

I've generally been unimpressed with Toshi's service options. YMMV. Dell is a lot easier (at least where I am) to get repaired. Something to think about since fixing a laptop usually involves more trouble and expense than fixing a desktop would.

 

@f0dder - maybe you should ask the guys over at Cisco that question?

Yeah, saw that yesterday - efiin' insane.

Oh, and nice pic you chose to go along with the story

Did the wording myself. Glad you liked it!

(Also spent a while yesterday checking HW inventory lists to see which of my clients might be affected by it so I could put an advisory out.  )

[GParted]

Sounds like the controller has mostly failed and the drive is not far behind.

You might try GParted and attempt a data rescue since you have nothing to lose at this point.

Sorry the outcome hasn't been better so far.

[@eleman]

^ +1 for what @eleman said.

Agree.

I'm no longer interested in using Google for anything that involves hosted data storage in any way shape or form.

"Burn me once - shame on you. Burn me twice - shame on me." 

the action scenes, specifically with regard to combat, are good. I may cease and desist if it gets too lurid. then again, I may increase my reading pace  

Well, a faster pace might explain the heavier breathing...

^I have all of them   . No, they're out of print.

Well...the books did come out starting in the late 60s, which were a little more, shall we say..."receptive" to some notions than they are today? Annnnnd the social mores of Gor didn't exactly "fit in" with the cultural memes and moral climate even back in those considerably more liberal times. So I guess I'm not surprised they've since gone out of print.  

 

Too bad in a way. Once you got past, or maybe just stopped drooling over (if that's your thing), the...um...kinky stuff, there were some very good ideas and storylines in some of the Gor books. Mostly the earlier ones since Norman started to go off the deep end a bit starting with installment #10: Tribesmen of Gor. At least in IMHO.

[once they're found]

Linux does have the advantage of getting bugs patched faster once they're found - but there's also been reeeeal oopsies like Debian getting rid of proper SSH randomization because a developer didn't understand Valgrind properly (why does a person like that deal with security-crucial code?)

@f0dder - maybe you should ask the guys over at Cisco that question?

This from The Register

Cisco slip puts hardware at risk
Borg announces weak password feature

By Richard Chirgwin
Posted in Security, 20th March 2013 22:46 GMT

Cisco has issued a security advisory revealing that it mis-coded the implementation of a new password hashing algorithm.

Its “Type 4” password implementation was supposed to salt passwords and then run them through 1,000 iterations of SHA-256 for storage, following the Password-Based Key Derivation Function (PBKDF) version 2 described in RFC 2898.

In what Cisco calls an “implementation issue”, its engineers forgot to salt passwords, and set the SHA-256 iteration count to 1. As its advisory states: “This approach causes a Type 4 password to be less resilient to brute-force attacks than a Type 5 password of equivalent complexity.”

The problem was discovered by Philipp Schmidt and Jens Steube from the Hashcat project. Because of the weak protection, they were able to decode a hash that had been posted to inetpro.org, and as noted by Ars, enough information has leaked to permit “millions” of hashes to be cracked in hours, if anyone gets their hands on the stored hashes.

The vulnerability affects kit running Cisco IOS and Cisco IOS XE releases based on the Cisco IOS 15 code base, the advisory says, along with instructions for determining whether a user is running vulnerable code.

Adding insult to injury, the implementation of the broken Type 4 password also disabled the Type 5 hashing it replaced...

[attachthumb=#]

That said, I don't know that this model would work for the kind of books that people read once and discard, like popular fiction titles.

My GF is a big reader. She does the exact opposite. She bought herself a Nook about a year ago and has been quite happy with it. She tends to read things on her Nook first. Then, if she really likes the title, she'll buy a paper copy. Which unfortunately is the exact thing the big booksellers seem to want her to stop doing.

  Basically it just comes down to who codes the best and without shortcuts.  I've owned a lot of commercial programs that were very poorly coded and have some awesome open source programs....

+1. That's been my experience too.

(Trivia: Anyone know how long it took them to get the copyright terms extended as soon as Disney wailed about the Mouse?)

The first rumblings to extend started in 1995 IIRC with Disney lobbying everybody who would listen. Then Congressman Sonny Bono introduced the bill. The copyright term extension got passed in early 1998. So I'd say it was a little less than three years.

Like the Sonny & Cher song said: I got YOU babe!"

Actually, you may have stumbled on a post-modern flaw of the "checks and balances" that the framers never intended - pure malice in Congress.

Interestingly, that actually was something the Founding Fathers had anticipated and attempted to plan for.

Unfortunately, the system of checks and balances has been steadily eroded over the years such that we now find ourselves in an era where all real power and authority has been centralized in the executive. And what's so disturbing is that this change was largely engineered without the consent (and largely outside the notice) of most of the general public. So I guess you could say that it basically took about 40 years to pull off what, for all intents and purposes, was a silent coup d'état.

Those who did most of their growing up in the late 80s and early 90s probably aren't aware of just how different a country the United States now is from what it was less than 40 years ago.

The Al Stewart song On the Border has a section that sums up much of how it feels for many of us who date back before our system of government was overthrown by our very own government.

In the village where I grew up
Nothing seems the same
Still you never see the change from day to day
And no-one notices the customs slip away

Late last night the rain was knocking at my window
I moved across the darkened room and in the lampglow
I thought I saw down in the street
The spirit of the century
Telling us that we're all standing on the border

In the islands where I grew up
Nothing seems the same
It's just the patterns that remain
An empty shell
But there's a strangeness in the air you feel too well

So be it. This too shall pass.

Well what a surprise! Can you believe it?

(@app - Seriously...thx for finding that. I was hoping somebody directly involved in the standard itself would stand up to Tim Berners-Lee's earlier endorsement for incorporating DRM capabilities into HTML5.)

[here]

Now for some cynicism....  If congress ever even looks at it, whatever good idea's she has will be immediately ignored, whatever is troubling will be approved, and whatever requires more thought and study will automatically be included.  This seems to be the norm for our government(s), which is how we got the old saying "it's good enough for government work", and is why we're in such a pickle that we find ourselves.

Now I would absolutely LOVE IT if they prove me wrong.  Hell, I would stand on my head in the corner of the room and chant the Pledge of Allegiance until I passed out!  But as I fear, I won't be doing that....

Nope. You won't.

Lookee here courtesy of TechDirt's Mike Masnick:

Congressman Already Claims That He Needs To Overturn Supreme Court Ruling In Kirtsaeng
from the and-off-we-go dept

We fully expected efforts in Congress to look to overturn the strong and important "first sale" ruling by the Supreme Court, and it looks like they're not wasting any time. Rep. Doug Collins has already put out a statement about how awful the ruling in Kirtsaeng is and how he'll look to remedy it.

    “The Supreme Court's ruling in Kirtsaeng v. Wiley raises concerning questions about the future of U.S. copyright law,” Collins said. “Many industries and businesses in Georgia rely on strong copyright protections to create jobs and invest in our local economies, including the established and exclusive right to import in to the United States. When a U.S. business harnesses innovation and creativity to develop a product, they should have certainty their copyrighted work will be protected against unauthorized importation of foreign products.

    “As a Member of the House Judiciary Committee, I look forward to discussing the need for strong copyright protections with the Register of Copyrights at a subcommittee hearing tomorrow afternoon.”

No, actually, it doesn't raise any serious questions. It confirms a basic principle that "you own what you've purchased." It's amazing that a Representative who claims that he wants government to get out of the way and and that "the private sector is best at generating economic growth" would suddenly pipe up in favor of centralized monopolies handed out by the federal government. Furthermore, it's ridiculous, wrong and misleading to argue that Kirtsaeng is somehow antithetical to "strong copyright protections." The first sale doctrine has existed in the US for ages and nothing in it goes against "strong copyright protections." The Supreme Court decision standing up for first sale is hardly an attack on copyright. Even the claim about "being protected against unauthorized importation of foreign products." That's not a copyright issue, but an import issue. Here, again, Collins, who pretends to be for free trade, appears to be arguing that the US should have tariffs. It's funny what copyright will do to politicians -- including highlighting their own hypocrisies.

Now that didn't take very long at all did it?

It would be "like what Jim Morrison did with the Doors," he said. (Forgetting that Jim Morrison actually wrote all the lyrics and some of the music the Doors performed. Oh yeah...another minor detail...Jim could also sing a little. )

That's just details.

Yup. And we all know how some seemingly tiny details are more important than others!

[attach]

 

In any case, there is no doubt that O'Reilly's anti-DRM policy has really paid off for them.

Well it certainly has in my case. I don't willingly buy any media with DRM on it. And I have often declined to get e-books from some sources because of it. (That is also the main reason why I still have so much 'paper' in my tech library.) On the other hand I currently own at least a couple dozen O'Reilly e-titles. And I generally make it a point to always get the new editions whenever they come out (even if I don't really need them) precisely for that reason.

Desired behaviors need to be rewarded if we want them to continue, right?

@Deo - exactly right!

What you don't want to run into is somebody like the well-dressed guy who came up to my godson following a gig in NYC and wanted to "partner" with him artistically. His pitch was as follows: My godson was a superb guitarist, and obviously a very well-trained and professional musician. He, for his part, had "these incredible ideas" for "hundreds of hit songs."

Now this guy, by his own admission, wasn't a musician.

He said he knew "very little" about music per se.

He almost boasted how he couldn't sing, play an instrument, read music, or write lyrics.

But he had ideas - hundreds and hundreds of ideas. For songs. Hit songs no less!

And all he needed was somebody who knew (and could do) all this stuff to work out songs using "his ideas" and then play them.

For which he'd be willing to split 50-50.

It would be "like what Jim Morrison did with the Doors," he said. (Forgetting that Jim Morrison actually wrote all the lyrics and some of the music the Doors performed. Oh yeah...another minor detail...Jim could also sing a little. )

When my godson (politely) turned him down, he didn't seem overly surprised. His parting comment was that the problem with people like my godson and his fellow musicians was that they were envious and afraid of real talent. Sure they knew "all that technical stuff." And they could play. But he was a guy that had ideas. Hundreds and hundreds of them...

I'm sure we've all run into a variation of that same guy in the tech world. Even if it wasn't somebody quite so full of himself. Or half so crazy.

Then again, when you think about guys like Steve Jobs or Mark Shuttleworth...

Also, Tim O'Reilly claims that removing DRM from their ebooks greatly increased sales.

I'd be very interested is seeing how they established that correlation. Is there a link to any of that?

I'll have to become a more advanced being now...
 (see attachment in previous post)
http://www.dieselsweeties.com/archive/3282

Kind of reminds me of an IM I received from a friend once, where she was in a state of panic over wikipedia being down, which she claimed was causing her a temporary loss of 50+ IQ points. 

It does. Even Randall Monroe says so, and he's a minor deity so you can't contradict him.
http://xkcd.com/903/

"Bloody thanks for posting that xkcd link!" sez 40hz as he wipes half a mouthful of coffee off his desk, keyboard and monitor.

 Does anybody really miss the early 60s?

[attach]

[this bit of news]

Still no word yet on what is being done re the apparent perjury by police.

It all depends on how high up the food chain the shared culpability goes. The higher the level of power implicated, the greater the incentive to "let bygones be bygones." At least from my experience with government wrongdoings.

In the end I'm guessing there will be little more than some very public hand-wringing and fervent apologies - possibly even coupled with a few additional resignations and/or firings of low to mid-level scapegoats (who were nearing retirement anyway) - followed by a spate of new directives and departmental policies that will apply to all future police actions. This will guarantee the NZ public that such an outrage will never happen again.

I had a fair degree of confidence that judicial and legal sanity would ultimately prevail in NZ. Then I saw this bit of news  and started to worry all over again.

BTW - I sincerely hope I'm wrong about the above...but I somehow doubt I will be.

Wonder if they get streaming video and free second day shipping with that?

+1 w/Shades!  BartPE is also a very good alternative.

About the only real advantage a Linux approach has over BartPE (besides it being much easier to create the requisite CD as Shades already mentioned) is that it ignores several file 'error' issues that can stop Windows in its tracks. Especially handy if you somehow got a garbage character inserted in a file or directory name that's a character not allowed under Windows. You can just rename those files in Linux and all is soon well.

Another (less common) advantage is that, should there be any malware gremlins loose on the disk causing problems, they won't go active under Linux.

----------------------------------------

@td - don't forget to let us know how you make out with this.

[How do you know how many copies were actually "pirated?"]

I'm one of those people who does not condone digital piracy. Period. But by the same token, I'm smart enough to realize that attempting to "combat" it through digital rights management schemes is never going to work. Not because of technical reasons (even if that technology has so far proven itself to be ineffective at best even when not flat out broken) so much as it is for social reasons.

And because of that, the questionable claims made by frustrated digital property producers as to the calculated magnitude of their financial losses becomes all the more specious. Most of these claims seem to state (without any proof) that every copy obtained illegally directly translates to the actual loss of a sale. This is a presumption which neatly ignores the fact that many of the people who do pirate something would never buy a licensed copy - even if they had the money to do so.

But that doesn't stop companies from making projections based on that presumption. Usually it goes something like this: Well...if you take a given number of copies pirated times our MSRP, then our losses due to piracy are...

There are a couple of problems with this methodology. Lets ask a few questions:

Q: How do you know how many copies were actually "pirated?"

A: Well...if you look at the number of torrents in a given month... (translation: We pulled a number out of our ass)

Q: How do you know everybody who pirated a copy would have actually bought it had they not been able to download it for free?

A: We just know. (translation: We're so full of ourselves that we've come to believe everybody wants to own our products. So piss off!))

Q: Why do you always calculate the alleged loss using your obviously inflated MSRP?

A: Hey! That's what we charge for it on our website. And it's a fair price! If Amazon wants to cut it's own throat, who are we to tell them how to run their business? (translation: Umm...next question please?)

Q: Do you actually sell many copies on you website that way? I mean, y'know...at full list price?

A: I'm sorry. Our sales figures are proprietary information. (translation: And you can expect your ISP to get served with a DMCA takedown notice the minute your article mentioning any of this appears!)

And so it goes. It's mostly accounting projections done using questionable assumptions and methods. And as somebody with a degree in accounting, all I can say is FUBAR! I'd love to see them attempt to convince the IRS they should be allowed to claim losses on their taxes using this same logic. You'll need something much better than a hunch plus some grade school math to convince those guys you experienced a business loss that merits your being able to take a deduction for it. The IRS is a stickler for actual and provable when claiming an expense for tax purposes.

But I'm talking as a businessman with an accounting background. What would a software game developer have to say about all this voodoo? Read on.

[attach]

Super Meat Boy game developer Tommy Refenes has put his tuppence in on the topic and produced one of the best articles on what the real problem is with attempting to combat digital piracy with DRM. His conclusion: You can't prevent the loss of sales when there are no real 'lost' sales to begin with.

Some highlights:

Apathy and refunds are more dangerous than Piracy.

I think I can safely say that Super Meat Boy has been pirated at least 200,000 times. We are closing in on 2 million sales and assuming a 10% piracy to sales ratio does not seem unreasonable. As a forward thinking developer who exists in the present, I realize and accept that a pirated copy of a digital game does not equate to money being taken out of my pocket. Team Meat shows no loss in our year end totals due to piracy and neither should any other developer.

For the sake of argument, some of those people that did pirate Super Meat Boy could have bought the game if piracy didn’t exist but there is no actual way to calculate that lost revenue. It is impossible to know with certainty the intentions of people. With the SimCity fiasco and several companies trying to find new ways to combat piracy and stating piracy has negatively affected their bottom line I wonder if they’ve taken the time to accurately try to determine what their losses are due to piracy.

All loss in a retail setting is calculable because items to be sold are physical objects that come from manufacturers that have to be placed on shelves by employees. You have a chain of inventory numbers, money spent and labor spent that goes from the consumer all the way to the manufacturer. A stolen, broken, or lost item is an item that you cannot sell. In the retail world your stock is worth money.

In the digital world, you don’t have a set inventory. Your game is infinitely replicable at a negligible or zero cost (the cost bandwidth off your own site or nothing if you’re on a portal like Steam, eShop, etc). Digital inventory has no value. Your company isn’t worth an infinite amount because you have infinite copies of your game. As such, calculating worth and loss based on infinite inventory is impossible. If you have infinite stock, and someone steals one unit from that stock, you still have infinite stock. If you have infinite stock and someone steals 1 trillion units from that stock , you still have infinite stock. There is no loss of stock when you have an infinite amount.

Consumer confidence plays a very important role in how customers spend money. I think its safe to say that EA and Maxis do not have a lot of consumer confidence at this point. I think its also safe to say that the next EA/Maxis game is going to be a tough sell to people who experienced or were turned away by talk of frustration regarding SimCity.

As a result of piracy developers feel their hand is forced to implement measures to stop piracy. Often, these efforts to combat piracy only result in frustration for paying customers. I challenge a developer to show evidence that accurately shows implementation of DRM is a return on investment and that losses due to piracy can be calculated. I do not believe this is possible.

The reality is the fight against piracy equates to spending time and money combating a loss that cannot be quantified. Everyone needs to accept that piracy cannot be stopped and loss prevention is not a concept that can be applied to the digital world. Developers should focus on their paying customers and stop wasting time and money on non-paying customers. Respect your customers and they may in turn respect your efforts enough to purchase your game instead of pirating it.

Great article. Read the rest of it here.

(With a tip of the hat to TechDirt  for posting a link to Mr. Refenes' blog post.  )

[The Question]

I don't know about the rest of you, but barely a month goes by without me bumping into somebody who is eager to bend my ear about their latest brainstorm for a web-based business, service, or app that they "believe" will someday become (and here their voice drops to a confidential hushed sort of tone as they glance around quickly) "as big as Google...or even Facebook!!!"

Eventually, they'll realize (usually when I yawn for the third or fourth time) that I'm not interested in putting any of my money or time into this "incredible opportunity" they're presenting. That's when they inevitably ask me (drumroll) The Question: Do you know anybody who would be interested in "cofounding a start-up" or "partnering in" with me on this?

[attach]

I'll bet many people here have had one of these conversations too. Hopefully you were on the receiving end rather than the other way around. However, if you were the party doing the pitch, I heartily recommend you read the following article posted over at Svbtle. (full article here)

Stop creepy cofounder ‘dating’ and start convincing someone you are awesome enough to work with

I had a phone call a couple weeks back with someone who was looking for a cofounder (not an uncommon thing, right?) I asked what he's been doing to find a cofounder and his response nearly made me spit out my coffee.

“I posted a few ads on job sites,” he said. “Then I'm interviewing the people who reply to see if they'd be a good cofounder.”

What? Are you serious? Like seriously serious? WTF?
.
.
.