Slashdot Mirror

Now if you'd like to license it, here are the terms (pdf).

Note: By looking at the moon(tm), using it as a source of nocturnal illumination, or using its gravitational field for any purpose (e.g. use of tides and tidal forces) then you agree to the terms in the EULA.

The SafeIC achieves this by making it impossible for malware to affect modifications to the system. Every time you restart your Safe Internet Computer, it is wiped clean of any malware and reset to factory settings. A clean slate, every day.

http://www.cyber.com.au/cyber/product/safe_interne t_computer/

1998 - Finished high school. Was career-minded kinda guy. Decided I'd rather get an exciting job than go to University (I'd done some tertiary stuff in year 12, but three years of Uni just wasn't my thing).

1999 - I'd already had a lot of experience playing with Windows NT out of interest, so I got an MCSE to try and prove my skills to potential employers. Volunteered to assist my local 1300-member LUG at an IT show. Met my future boss, Con Zymaris from Cybersource *. Ended up being the 'Windows guy' at a Linux / Unix / BSD shop. Spent most of my time learning Linux.

1999 - Began career as Linux journo - was initially asked to do Linux software for APC magazine's CD ROM, but I went beyong the brief and wrote a 2 page article on Linux gaming. They liked it and put it in the mag. I then worked on Linux workshop, a couple of Linux features, wrote a little under half of the Linux Pocketbook Third Edition, more than half of the Advanced Linux Pocketbook, became PC Authority magazine's Linux columnist, and then was poached back to APC briefly before the editor that got me there left and mag and me went in different directions. **

During this time, I still got half my income from Linux consulting for Cybersource.

2002 - Wrote and began teaching a Linux training course for Advanced Training, Melbourne. Again, still worked consulting for Cyber.

2003 - Got poached by Red Hat Asia Pacific. Teach RHCE courses, and the nifty new RHCA type courses (which cover clustering, packaging, cross platform authentication, etc).

Spending the weekend learning about Kerberos, LDAP and Active Directory to teach the 423 course.

* Yes, the current Cyber web site looks terrible in Moz. It used to work ok in every browser - then Moz changed its rendering technique. Since I was respomsible for the original non-standard code, there's a fully XHTML version I templated just before I left here. Hopefully Cyber wil start using that one soon.

** I've been told that APC's readers want to do 'the hard stuff'. I disagree - people want to do interesting, useful cool things, regardless of whether they're hard or not. These guys are mbasically Windows power users, who want the basic stuff (installing, setting up a web server) to be easy, so they can focus on doing the cool stuff - anything that's cool or easier / cheaper / better than Windows. I reckon showing people how to do practical stuff with cool apps like QEmu, MythTV, Liferea, etc. is more interesting than yet another guide to installing Apache (including a page of how to compile it, for no other reason than Compiling Makes You Leet).

If I was gonna wrote about Apache, I'd write about creating a blog or CMS using Movabletype, or show people how to get Apache serving ASP 1.1 with mod_mono.

I had a great time at APC, and met some cool people, including Ashton Mills (who's now the editor of Atomic) and David Flynn (an editor who's simply damn good at his job). But the mag's editors don't want what I have to offer anymore, and I don't want to write what they offer me. Pity.

1998 - Finished high school. Was career-minded kinda guy. Decided I'd rather get an exciting job than go to University (I'd done some tertiary stuff in year 12, but three years of Uni just wasn't my thing).

1999 - I'd already had a lot of experience playing with Windows NT out of interest, so I got an MCSE to try and prove my skills to potential employers. Volunteered to assist my local 1300-member LUG at an IT show. Met my future boss, Con Zymaris from Cybersource *. Ended up being the 'Windows guy' at a Linux / Unix / BSD shop. Spent most of my time learning Linux.

1999 - Began career as Linux journo - was initially asked to do Linux software for APC magazine's CD ROM, but I went beyong the brief and wrote a 2 page article on Linux gaming. They liked it and put it in the mag. I then worked on Linux workshop, a couple of Linux features, wrote a little under half of the Linux Pocketbook Third Edition, more than half of the Advanced Linux Pocketbook, became PC Authority magazine's Linux columnist, and then was poached back to APC briefly before the editor that got me there left and mag and me went in different directions. **

During this time, I still got half my income from Linux consulting for Cybersource.

2002 - Wrote and began teaching a Linux training course for Advanced Training, Melbourne. Again, still worked consulting for Cyber.

2003 - Got poached by Red Hat Asia Pacific. Teach RHCE courses, and the nifty new RHCA type courses (which cover clustering, packaging, cross platform authentication, etc).

Spending the weekend learning about Kerberos, LDAP and Active Directory to teach the 423 course.

* Yes, the current Cyber web site looks terrible in Moz. It used to work ok in every browser - then Moz changed its rendering technique. Since I was respomsible for the original non-standard code, there's a fully XHTML version I templated just before I left here. Hopefully Cyber wil start using that one soon.

** I've been told that APC's readers want to do 'the hard stuff'. I disagree - people want to do interesting, useful cool things, regardless of whether they're hard or not. These guys are mbasically Windows power users, who want the basic stuff (installing, setting up a web server) to be easy, so they can focus on doing the cool stuff - anything that's cool or easier / cheaper / better than Windows. I reckon showing people how to do practical stuff with cool apps like QEmu, MythTV, Liferea, etc. is more interesting than yet another guide to installing Apache (including a page of how to compile it, for no other reason than Compiling Makes You Leet).

If I was gonna wrote about Apache, I'd write about creating a blog or CMS using Movabletype, or show people how to get Apache serving ASP 1.1 with mod_mono.

I had a great time at APC, and met some cool people, including Ashton Mills (who's now the editor of Atomic) and David Flynn (an editor who's simply damn good at his job). But the mag's editors don't want what I have to offer anymore, and I don't want to write what they offer me. Pity.

Heya guys,

I work for Red Hat teaching their stuff now, but before that I wrote and taught my own training course.

All of the training materials, including the full courseware, is available free from here (burn the contents of the whole lna4 dir to a CD).

I own copyright for it, you're licensed to use it under the FDL.

Mike MacCana

A really good troll makes every word in his sentence a link so that his point seems valid.

You don't even have to visit the sites, just google something like "linux vs windows", grab relevent links and include then in your post. No one will read them anyways, and believe you because you provided plenty of background Info and reputable sources (computing.net included!). They will have to believe your Pro-Windows rant.

Linux isn't a Toy OS. it's used by google. Who provided you this Informative post :)

He reported on the iTMS exploit by DVD Jon, for example, and he threw in this:

"Apple's primary competitor, Microsoft, created its own DRM scheme for its popular Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Windows Media Video (WMV) formats but built renewing capabilities into the technology, which helps Microsoft survive security exploits."

Not sure I agree that MS is the main competitor in online music sales (yet), and if you're talking about the two of them you might want to acknowledge that one reason Apple's DRM took off was because it wasn't perceived as being as odious as MS's. Still, he did at least close with: "...Apple has worked hard to strike deals with the recording industry and did a fantastic job of jump-starting the concept of inexpensive, downloadable, legitimate music. Let's hope that this DRM breach won't cause record companies to reverse their decisions to work with online music services."

Not a troll, just a big bad bias? He seems to have said basically positive stuff about Mozilla, too. Still, there are more than enough statements like:

"When you aggregate all the Linux distributions, Linux, not Windows, has had the most security vulnerabilities, year after year."

• Went to the Helixplayer site
  
• Worked out which version was right for me
  
• Agree to both the GPL license (for the player) and the proprietary real license
  
• Decided I'd rather have RPMs, so spent a couple of minutes packaging it
  

• Provide packages
  
• Pick an extension other than .rpm for their Linux files
  

• Went to the Helixplayer site
  
• Worked out which version was right for me
  
• Agree to both the GPL license (for the player) and the proprietary real license
  
• Decided I'd rather have RPMs, so spent a couple of minutes packaging it
  

• Provide packages
  
• Pick an extension other than .rpm for their Linux files
  

I wanted to save some time documenting servers, so I wrote Accudoc to automatically generate server documentation for (currently Red Hat) Linux systems.

Its written in shell, and just uses a bunch of shell functions I made to create the documents.

You can download a copy here if you want. It's open source, and if you're a SysAdmin you might find it useful to produce written reports of servers you manage.

In comparing the Microsoft EULA to the GPL, Microsoft's EULAs are pretty uniform when it come to exluding themselves from liability...

http://www.cyber.com.au/cyber/about/comparing_the_ gpl_to_eula.pdf

ALSO, THERE IS NO WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF TITLE, QUIET ENJOYMENT, QUIET POSSESSION, CORRESPONDENCE TO DESCRIPTION OR NON-INFRINGEMENT WITH REGARD TO THE PRODUCT.

Analysis
....

Also, Microsoft disclaims that this software will not infringe on the intellectual property rights of others. This is a potentially serious issue, as has been recently shown through the legal dispute between Timeline Inc. and Microsoft. Timeline has won a recent ruling which exposes all Microsoft SQL Server developers to a serious patent encumbrance.

The Timeline Inc case bring up an important issue; while no vendor can expected to identify all potential patent violation when developing software, when the vendor does purchase and license technology from a third party, the vendor should insure that the end user/develop is not put at further risk.

Even Microsoft's May 27th changes which apply only to customers under enterprise licensing contracts, which Microsoft claims grants greater immunity, contains loop holes which greatly negate Microsoft's liability.

https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/programs/contr actupdates.asp
https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/downloads/mba. doc

The new section 6 clause contain exceptions

Our obligations will not apply to the extent that the claim or adverse final judgment is based on (i) specifications you provide to us for the service deliverables; (ii) code or materials provided by you as part of service deliverables; (iii) your running of the product, fix or service deliverables after we notify you to discontinue running due to such a claim; (iv) your combining the product, fix or service deliverables with a non-Microsoft product, data or business process; (v) damages attributable to the value of the use of a non-Microsoft product, data or business process; (vi) your altering the product, fix or service deliverables; (vii) your distribution of the product, fix or services deliverable to, or its use for the benefit of, any third party; (viii) your use of our trademark(s) without express written consent to do so; or (ix) for any trade secret claim, your acquiring a trade secret (a) through improper means; (b) under circumstances giving rise to a duty to maintain its secrecy or limit its use; or (c) from a person (other than us or our affiliates) who owed to the party asserting the claim a duty to maintain the secrecy or limit the use of the trade secret. You will reimburse us for any costs or damages that result from these actions.

Loophole #1
"(ii) code or materials provided by you as part of service deliverables"

This would effectively still indemnify Microsoft against most of the Timeline Inc patent claims, as it is the developer/end user's code ( even visual basic code ) which would be in violation of Timeline's patent claims.

Microsoft has a history of licensing third party code and patents in such a manner that still leaves developers and users exposed to IP threats. Even going back to the LZH/GIF Unisys patents,

http://www.unisys.com/about__unisys/lzw/

"Microsoft Corporation obtained a license under the above Unisys LZW patents in September, 1996. Microsoft's license does NOT extend to software developers or third parties

EULA Vs GPL

Troll???????????????

I should not feed the Trolls.
I should not feed the Trolls
I should not feed thr trolls.

I will burn my karma anyway, feeding this troll.

How do you figure?

A nice little thing known as a EULA.

• microsoft enforcing a EULA on a Linux system.
• A legal opinion on that story.
• The microsoft EULA vs the GNU GPL.
• one of the Linux Media News stories.
• a doctor asks questions about its effects on his medical treatment.
• The microsoft faq on their EULA.
• etc, etc, etc.
• Let us not forget the microsoft hardware tax.
• Nor the fact that for a business to prove it has a legit licence usually requires it to pay for the software three times:
  
  1. When they buy the pre-configured hardware;
  2. when they negotiate their site licence with microsoft
  3. When they buy the actual software.

Does Microsoft have exhorbatant fees on the licenses?

Do you consider giving a third party blanket permission to delete any and all software on your system to be be something other than exhorbatant? Especially if you only find out about it, after the fact.

Wind under Thy Wings

Amber

The study itself seems to be unaccessable, but you can find a html version in Google's cache.

IBM thinks differently in this paper and so does CyberSource here.

Summary of the CyberSource comparison study (all $ in US):

Scenario
245 workstations
5 file/print servers
3 developer workstations
1 each mail server, proxy firewall server, intranet/SQL server, e-commerce server
3-year usage period

Caveats
Assume all hardware costs are equal (that MS costs are not already applied to each box)
Assume all server and infrastructure costs are equal
Assume all connectivity costs, consultancy fees, and miscellaneous costs are equal

Windows costs
Norton Antivirus: $49.95
MS IIS 5.0: free (bundled with NT and 2000 Server)
MS Windows 2000 Advanced Server: $3,999 per 25 licenses (extra licenses $67 ea.)
MS Commerce Server: $12,999 per processor
MS ISA Standard Server: $1,499 per processor
MS SQL Server: $4,999 per processor
MS Exchange Server 2000: $1,299 per 5 licenses (extra licenses $67 ea.)
MS Windows 2000 Professional full version: $299 per user
MS Visual Studio 6.0: $1,079
MS Office Standard Edition $479 per user

Total software cost, Windows: $282,973.50

Linux costs
Choice of Red Hat 7.2: $59.95; Mandrake 8.1: $55.00; SuSE 7.3: $79.95
Apache (web server): included or free
Squid (proxy server): included or free
PostgreSQL (database): included or free
Iptables (firewall): included or free
Sendmail or Postfix (mail server): included or free
KDevelop (development): included or free
Gimp (graphics): included or free
OpenOffice (office suite): included or free
The Exchange Project (e-commerce): included or free

Total software cost, Linux: $79.95

Conclusion
Linux software savings: $282,893.55
Translation: More than $1,000 savings per workstation. The only other applicable difference is in administration costs. Just for Windows to draw even, it would have to cost an extra $1,000 per workstation to administrate Linux across 250 workstations. That's a lot of extra money available to spend on competent Linux administration.

IBM thinks differently in this paper and so does CyberSource here.

As a technologist I'm very sceptical to economic calculations. I believe that they can be twisted in any direction.

There is a principle of uncertanty. Of the three items cost, time and product you can only know one. So if you want to know what product you'll end up with, you can't know the price or time...

Anyway, it is good to point out that Linux systems has problems in the management area. But still, people are working on it.

I posted anonymous to save moderators from wasting points on something so trivial, but if you insist....
ok, non-anonymous, with karma bonus.
here's a study
here's another one just to make sure.

both are google caches of the pdf's (1,2)

the bit about the windows admins is my own 2 cents- that's completely based on my biased opinion.

I have a fairly comprehensive article detailing what's been changed, with possible motivations for doing so, my own impressions, screenshots, and bug reports.

Read it here

Most people have heard a lot on this topic, but mostly from people who haven't actually used 8.0 or Null. In fact, a good deal of the information that has been touted about the web is provably false. Some of the changes have had negative side effects that are in bugzilla, but, in my opinion as a KDE user, overall they've increased the usability of Linux desktops.

I've written a fairly comprehensive summary of what exactly Red Hat have modified about their KDE setup, and what I believe to be the rationale behind those changes. If you've read it before, it might eb worth a visit as I've made a few correctiosn and additiosn since then.

Cheers,

Mike

Fixes to QT to improve font rendering and have apparently already been included in the upcoming QT 3.1

You can read a users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE here/ I'll update it soon with screenshots and soem more info on the services bug.

I have written instructions on setting up Postfix to work with Sophos Mailmonitor. I like this solution because the API between MailMonitor and Postfix is pure, regular SMTP, not some vendor unsupported addon. I can telnet to the port the Mailmonitor SMTP server runs on and troubleshoot, knowing that any errors in this part of the operation are the responsibility of Sophos, or alternatively that if the SMTP server on this port is fine, my postfix config is at fault.

Scanning for and removing mail viruses should be handled by your mail gateway (as well as your desktops for the following reasons).
1) This way viruses are removed from your network at first opportunity
2) You can bounce messages and let the sender / recipient / admin know the sender has a potential virus problem
3) One server is easier to maintain than a few hundred desktops
3) 2 layers provide more protection than one
4) Why waste resources getting virus laden enail to desktops? A mail gateway provides a convenient choke point to get this stuff out of your network ASAP.

With that in mind here's a guide I wrote for my employer for doing so at clients, using Red Hat Linux, Postfix, and Sophos MailMonitor.

In the setup outlined below,
1) Postfix accepts incoming mails on port 25 and leads them to a content_filter.
2) The content_filter is Sophos MailMonitor, which takes over the mails on port 10025. After the mails have been scanned, they are placed back to postfix on port 10026.
3) Finally postfix delivers the mails.

Anyway, you should be able to read the guide at my rather unfinished website in a short while. If it isn't there yet, it will be soon.

Scanning for and removing mail viruses should be handled by your mail gateway (as well as your desktops for the following reasons).
1) This way viruses are removed from your network at first opportunity
2) You can bounce messages and let the sender / recipient / admin know the sender has a potential virus problem
3) One server is easier to maintain than a few hundred desktops
3) 2 layers provide more protection than one
4) Why waste resources getting virus laden enail to desktops? A mail gateway provides a convenient choke point to get this stuff out of your network ASAP.

With that in mind here's a guide I wrote for my employer for doing so at clients, using Red Hat Linux, Postfix, and Sophos MailMonitor.

In the setup outlined below,
1) Postfix accepts incoming mails on port 25 and leads them to a content_filter.
2) The content_filter is Sophos MailMonitor, which takes over the mails on port 10025. After the mails have been scanned, they are placed back to postfix on port 10026.
3) Finally postfix delivers the mails.

Anyway, you should be able to read the guide at my rather unfinished website in a short while. If it isn't there yet, it will be soon.

...but as for XFree86, I definitely don't think it's as easy as the other two. Cygwin runs under an internet "stub" installer, whereas ith XF you download about eighty packages, then navigate through the directory structure...... blah blah.

I think Xfree has changed since you last looked at it. I installed 4.1 the other day and it was about fifteen or so binary packages, many of which were unecessary. Installation involved launching Cygwin's shell and running ./Xinstall.sh. This was extremely easy to do, and the defaults were all fine, albeit nongraphical.

If you're interested, check out the
screenshot of my Linux box accessing my Windows box via RDP, accessing my Linux box via Xfree86.

Yes it's true - now you can have all the power of Linux, on Linux!
:)

Can I use WINE to emulate win32 in Linux and run KDE with it?

Well actually....

Runs on a commodity Pentium-class or higher (assume approximately ~166 MHz or higher) x86 hardware, 32 MB of RAM, preferably within 16 MB of RAM.

Sounds reasionable. Use Keith Ps TinyX X server, which is used on Microwindows any many oother embedded Linux systems.

Is very barebones - I do not need a full distro. Under ~128 MB in size would be great.

My work does embedded Linux consumer devices for Large Unnamed Japanese Electronics Company. 128MB is doable.

Pico or VIM is okay for a default editor.

They're unecessary too. Obviously the end user won't modify text files. Keep the whole development on a seperate OC and cross compile - this keeps the shit off the small box and means you can compile things faster.

Requires no user intervention to boot, get a DHCP lease, load X-Windows, start the rdesktop client, and connect to a machine with the DNS name of "termserver" or other similiar handy name.

Cool. Autologin to X by a particular user is supported by most display managers. Then in whatever users .xinitrc or .xsession (I can never remember which is which) put:

START

#!/bin/bash

# Change the background color and cursor
xsetroot -solid rgb:39/6d/a4 -cursor /terminal/cursor.xpm /terminal/mask.xpm

# Set the variable lasthost to the content of the .rdplasthost file
lasthost=`cat .rdplasthost`

# Set the variable host to the stdout of Xdialog
host=`Xdialog --stdout --icon rdesktop.xpm --no-cancel --ok-label "Connect" --inputbox "" 400x200 $lasthost`

# If we can ping the host, continue. If not, fuck off :)

# Seems good. Lets remember it for next time.
rm -rf .rdplasthost
touch .rdplasthost
echo $host >> .rdplasthost

# Run an rdesktop session on the host
rdesktop -g 1152x864 -f $host

END

Provides a clean, friendly method of powering off the machine without causing data corruption on the file-system level (ie, after disconnected, will prompt for re-connection or shutdown).

Have the button on the front force a shutdown. This is easy with most embedded hardware. You'd also use a journalling filesystem.

Supports at least three commodity network cards

Linux can do that if you want, but I don't think you want that. Buy an untra tiny embedded box from Advantech that fits in the back on an PCD display. This way the hardware is a `known quantity' and problems are a lot easier to troubleshoot - less variables equals less things to go wrong, which is important to anyone making embedded boxes. How often do you change the hardware on your NCD thinterm RDP terminals? That's right - not very often.

Supports a VESA standard SVGA video card, with X-Windows running in 800x600 @ 8 bit color (256 colours). The Windows 2000 Terminal Server will not support anything higher than 256 colours so its not needed to support high/true color modes.

Cool. But fuck 800 x 600. Give them 1024 LCDs. You know you want to, and you'll sell more boxes.

Hides all boot messages from the kernel etc, and instead replaces them with a friendly "Please Wait" message.

Linux Progress Patch will do exactly that.

Is distributed to me in the form of a ghost-compatible image that when restored to disk is ready to run as described above.

Ghost is a waste of money unless your doing multicast installs. For the rest of us, PartImage will perform the same function more reliably with
far less expense.

Testing under VMware shouldn't be a problem, but again, I'd test on the actual device.

Everything I've mentioned is BSD / GPL license compatible (including PartImage).