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Not 100% effective but so effective that 100% is a very reasonable approximation. Source Cellular and Molecular Immunology -- Abul K. Abbas MBBS (Author), Andrew H. H. Lichtman MD PhD (Author), Shiv Pillai MBBS PhD (Author) . They are in fact the greatest medicine ever invented. No other drugs even come close to the effectiveness of the vaccine.

If you don"t vaccinate without a very good reason, you are a murderer by proxy plain and simple.

See: http://linuxfr.org/nodes/88229...
"LinuxFr.org : MINIX received a [Euro]2.5 million grant from the European Research Council. Does it mean MINIX is still geared more for academic purposes than for production in the real world?
Andrew Tanenbaum : No, not at all. The ERC very much wants the results to be commercialized. In fact, I just received a second ERC grant solely for the purposes of commercializing MINIX 3. We are going to port it to the ARM and do that starting in January."

Also from there, which disagrees with my comment on the license -- although I think Tanenbaum remains unable to admit the license issue there, if he could see it, which maybe he can't, even if the rest may show why the BSDs lost momentum to Linux:
"LinuxFr.org : If you could return in the past to change the MINIX original proprietary licence to the GPL licence, do you think your system might have become the dominant free OS today?
Andrew Tanenbaum : Never. The reason MINIX 3 didn't dominate the world has to do with one mistake I made about 1992. At that time I thought BSD was going to take over the world. It was a mature and stable system. I didn't see any point in competing with it, so I focused MINIX on education. Four of the BSD guys had just formed a company to sell BSD commercially. They even had a nice phone number: 1-800-ITS-UNIX. That phone number did them and me in. AT&T sued them over the phone number and the lawsuit took 3 years to settle. That was precisely the period Linux was launched and BSD was frozen due to the lawsuit. By the time it was settled, Linux had taken off. My mistake was not to realize the lawsuit would take so long and cripple BSD. If AT&T had not brought suit (or better yet, bought BSDI), Linux would never have become popular at all and BSD would dominate the world.
Now as we are starting to go commercial, we are realizing the value of the BSD license. Many companies refuse to make major investments in modifying Linux to suit their needs if they have to give the code to their competitors. We think that the BSD license alone will be a great help to us, as well as the small size, reliability, and modularity."

Also from there:
"LinuxFr.org : Why porting the userland utilities from NetBSD? Is the goal to become a BSD-like system?
Andrew Tanenbaum : We think NetBSD is a mature stable system. Linux is not nearly as well written and is changing all the time. NetBSD has something like 8000 packages. That is enough for us."

Seems like another vote for BSD. :-)

BTW, maybe GNU Hurd has not gone that far for whatever reasons, but, QNX is a very successful example of a microkernel OS (mostly in the embedded space).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q...
"As a microkernel-based OS, QNX is based on the idea of running most of the operating system kernel in the form of a number of small tasks, known as servers. This differs from the more traditional monolithic kernel, in which the operating system kernel is a single very large program composed of a huge number of "parts" with special abilities. In the case of QNX, the use of a microkernel allows users (developers) to turn off any functionality they do not require without having to change the OS itself; instead, those servers will simply not run.
The system is quite small, with earlier versions fitting on a single floppy disk.[3]
QNX Neutrino (2001) has been ported to a number of platforms and now runs on practically any modern CPU that is used in the embedded market. This includes the PowerPC, x86 family, MIPS, SH-4, and the closely inter-related family of ARM, StrongARM and XScale CPUs."

L4 is also a success according to the Tanenbaum and the LinuxFr article:
"LinuxFr.org : The two most famous microkernels nowadays are MINIX and L4. What are the differences between these two systems?

and bouml vs wiki (in French)

A lot of french sysadmin dislike Asterix name. Mobilix a french IT company was sued by the Asterix editor for IP infringement about the name of the company. http://linuxfr.org/2003/02/21/11436.html

For those who can't read French, the Ubuntu forum is just a posting of a link to another forum where it was noticed. The posting, along with the interesting source can be found at http://linuxfr.org/forums/15/22562.html The interesting parts are:

wrap_setuid_third_party_application xsane
wrap_setuid_third_party_application xscanimage

wrap_setuid_ooo_application soffice
wrap_setuid_ooo_application swriter
wrap_setuid_ooo_application simpress
wrap_setuid_ooo_application scalc

The script copies the affected application's executable to one with a .bin extension, and replaces it with an suid wrapper script. This is undoable, but god, what a mess!

Okay, I couldn't overcome the lameness filter, go to the source to see for yourselves...

Since you mention it, and while not strictly on the developpement side, french 'gendarmerie nationale' (a kind of police, but under military status) is switching to FF, thunderbird and Openoffice.org as main computer programs. And they're seriously considering Linux as the next move for their 80.000 computers. http://linuxfr.org/2006/01/04/20155.html

http://linuxfr.org/ is such a beast. Posted stories are voted for by readers, and it has a Slashdot like moderation system. I don't really think that the result is that much better than Slashdot, quite the contrary in my opinion, maybe because it has less readership than Slashdot, so some stories take way too long to make it to the main page, although this has improved recently.

Note that it's in french.

SF is the most important one for me, but it is not an information or reference site. So here is my list: freshmeat, slashdot, linuxfr, gnu.org, java.net, osnews, jesuislibre.
Now let's not forget music: Jamendo.

To add to this two website : http://linuxfr.org/ webzine rock metal indus : http://www.w-fenec.org/

In most cases they would be more grateful for a neat patch with some feature, for some words of praise, and especially with success stories of their software.
I wrote this little piece of crap. Okay, it got obsoleted really fast, it does the job but isn't anything great and there's practically no audience. But then I found this blog entry (fish link) and felt really special :) It's what makes such projects great, people's gratitude. Not money. Just the fact that you're the hero.

> Is having a whole distro built from source a good enough specific reason to still build from source?

Yes, of course. As is the need to have different compile-time settings than the maintainer, or merging additional/different patches. I keep building two dozens Debian packages locally for exactly these reasons. But let's not fool ourselves : by the time we get there, we're no longer the ``n00bs'' the original poster was referring to. I think most novices will just take binary packages, at least for a while.

> But hey, to each their own. Which is why I love Linux. You may love Debian, I love Gentoo...it's still Linux.

I couldn't have said it better ! It's in my opinion a very good selling point for Linux : there is no one-size-fits-all solution that's shoehorned on you like on proprietary systems. You get to choose what's best, or even create your own custom solution. I think that's why I decided to stick with Linux in the first place.

> I also wonder why people always throw out the "Linux on the desktop just isn't here yet". How "here" does it have to get?

Let's face it : this will never stop. Linux (and free software in general) faces an uphill battle on all fronts. Hardware support is hindered by manufacturers not releasing drivers or even specifications, yet people will bitch and moan at Linux for not supporting their latest gizmo. Compatibility with popular software like Office is difficult to attain, primarily because Microsoft uses obscure, undocumented formats. Yet people will bitch and moan at OpenOffice.org/Gnome Office/KOffice for misaligning their twisted tables, or adding too much space (and forgetting compatibility can even be haphazard between Office releases). Educational software, encyclopedias, etc. are nearly never released on Linux (one recent exception. Warning : non-english text, you can try the Fish). Yet people will bitch and moan at Linux for not running their software, not at the publishers who don't write portable code while portable toolkits already exist.

All these problems have solutions. WINE, for instance, can help people run their proprietary applications, but then, they just bitch about it being hard to configure. The latest versions work nearly out-of-the-box, but people will then bitch about imperfect emulation, or slow performance. There is no way to avoid that. Users just like to vent their frustration (sometimes I even do, too, although on a different kind of problems). All this is not important. We'll know when Linux is ready for the mythical desktop when we'll see lots of Linux boxes everywhere we go instead of the odd one here and there. Then, the endless bitching will be irrelevant.

Oh, and BTW, all this applies for the personal/SOHO desktop. I very much think the corporate desktop will be attained a lot faster, especially with big names like IBM and Sun now touting FOSS openly.

Server doesn't seem to be back yet. You can still get source here . Possibly more info later today here (in French).

Why should I program in Parrot Assembly language?
[...]
You get all the pleasure of programming in assembly language without any of the requisite system crashes.

What language is Parrot written in?

C.

For the love of God, man, why?!?!?!?

Because it's the best we've got.

That's sad.

So true. Regardless, C's available pretty much everywhere.

DLFP: What do you think of the Parrot project (http://www.parrotcode.org/), which aim is to develop a common virtual machine for interpreted languages, such as Perl 6, Python, Ruby and Tcl ? [Jean-michel Fayard]

Guido: I wish them well, but I don't think they will succeed. They are vastly underestimating the effort that goes into a virtual machine for any specific programming language. Even languages as similar as Ruby and Python have fundamentally different runtime abstractions, and the difference between Python and Perl is much greater still. (For example, the concepts of strings and numbers are entirely different in these two languages: in Python, numbers and strings are different immutable types, while in Perl they are the same type and are mutable.) I expect Parrot will do a great job of running Perl 6, but a relatively poor job of running other languages. Of course, I'd be happy if I were wrong (except for the brief moment of receiving a pie in the face at OSCON 2004), but I don't expect that to happen.

In another news, MS corps sues a french reseller and asks for 150,000 euros see (in french) this linuxfr article.

Actually I can understand a bit more this procedure in non-english speaking countries where "windows" is more a brand name than a common word.

--
Go Debian!

Where the heck did that come from?

I have no idea. I seems to run on a personal DSL line in the U.S..

Did you register that just for a Slashdot joke?

Nope. There was a thread on LinuxFr about google-watch.org, and someone also mentioned google-watch-watch.org, and joked about a need for the third level. As soon as I read it, I checked if the domain existed, and it did! Now, I hope the owner will do something funny with it. I'm contemplating creating google-watch-watch-watch-watch to check on his progress. ;-)

EMI has just lost a trial about copy-protected CD's in France too (and the consumer association behind it is now suing Sony and BMG).

you can read the complete article at : http://linuxfr.org/2003/06/26/13036.html/ (in french)

According to linuxfr the vote has been definitly delayed to september.

This week, Steve Ballmer donated 25 million euros on licenses to Spanish govt to put Windows in schools (English ) (French), one of the places in which Linux is spreding more thanks to Linex and other projects that other places here in Spain are starting.

But as I see it, this is positive. This means they're afraid anough of Free Software that they have to give for free Windows licenses.

Why? Are they called Frenchgnomes right now?

And where's freedomdot?

It's Slashdot, not Frenchdot.

I tells ya, it's all freedomin' wrong!

Now I understand. Freedom is not supposed to replace French. Now, do you want some f*ing fries with your bloody steak?

Freedom. The new Marklar.

Cocorico!

See a recent interview about Guido from Python. check here, english version is just after the french one.

yeah, but it has strings attached such as making ISP responsible for policing user web sites (hell, think about censorship coming). more info here (in French, but you can have a good laugh using google translation services ;-) )

> but you guys should at least have removed the [...] tags from his document. It is extremely bad form to insert a whole html document inside another one.

Huuuuhhh... You're talking about Slashdot, the website for standards-loving geeks and nerds who doesn't even validate (and note that they've forbidden entry to validator.w3.org to hide the fact). In comparison, another site where I dwell, LinuxFR; not only validates but doesn't use old-fashioned table-based layouts, ditched in favor of more modern and user-customisable floating layers. To this day, I'm still ashamed at the sheer number of sites (even Linux/OSS/Free Software ones) that don't even do the minimum to be good netizens : provide an error-free site with a DOCTYPE that triggers standards-compliance mode in browsers. I shouldn't maybe draw conclusions too fast (some of these sites could still use non-standards-compliant middleware like ad banners generators and the like. I believe I remember Wired's Douglas Bowman said this were the major cause hampering efforts towards compliance) but I think the main problem lies with the laziness and the usual if it works with IE, it works nearly everywhere state of mind. And you can throw all the blows and whistles you want into your new shiny standards to attract followers, you cannot overcome laziness... *sigh*

A great technical achievement? I don't think so. Virus writing does not strike me as being all that hard.

Please read Alan Solomon's comment. And what seems to be the headers of twoancestors of this virus.

Of course, most viruses are created by taking existing code and changing a few lines, mostly the messages the virus emits, and (re)releasing it. But there also seems to be a few bright people there, sadly.

all the programmers with that kind of skill are mature and ethical

You are so optimistic.

The reason Linux doesn't have any viruses is because nobody is trying to write any.

In case you didn't notice, this whole discussion is about the fact that this is happening. Now.

A great technical achievement? I don't think so. Virus writing does not strike me as being all that hard.

Please read Alan Solomon's comment. And what seems to be the headers of twoancestors of this virus.

Of course, most viruses are created by taking existing code and changing a few lines, mostly the messages the virus emits, and (re)releasing it. But there also seems to be a few bright people there, sadly.

all the programmers with that kind of skill are mature and ethical

You are so optimistic.

The reason Linux doesn't have any viruses is because nobody is trying to write any.

In case you didn't notice, this whole discussion is about the fact that this is happening. Now.

You might want to take a look at LinuxFr which talks about the same story. You will then have an European (french) point of view.

Just check this pointer.
Almost 20% of readers of this site are using mozilla.
These statistics are extract from a panel of 15000 visits a day.
If you have other statistics, just post a response...

Second, it is practically impossible to maintain a list of more than a tiny number of only good guys. If there is any real incentive, the bad guys will get on the list with as many aliases as they need to skew the system. You must either keep the list tiny enough that all members are known to all other members, or you must assume that bad guys are present. Voting or trust schemes can ensure that no more than 5% or perhaps even 1% of members are secret bad guys, but that's not good enough for an anti-spam system that hopes to have a false negative rate lower than 40% and a false positive rate of less than 1%.

As I understand it, this Razor can be used with spam traps (addresses that get no legitimate mail) to largely avoid the first problem. If you are extremely careful and lucky about keeping secrets, spam traps can fix the second problem. The need for lucky secrecy comes in keeping the bad guys from knowing about any of your spam traps lest they send them legitimate mail (e.g. CERT advisories).

A major problem with spam traps is getting the bad guys to spam them. It is easy to build a spam trap that receives some spam, but if you want to reject more than 10-20% of spam, you need more. For example, you need to get the big commercial and political outfits to send their wonderful news to your traps, but they're not going to scrape domain contacts or netnews or use the standard dictionary attack list. (My copy of the standard dictionary attack list is fairly complete. Used with a DCC client, it collects a lot of spam.)

All of that is why I believe in automated checksum reporting without any humans in the loop. I think you must start rejecting copies of a spew within minutes and ideally seconds of its start. That's why one of the design criteria of the DCC is that servers should send the checksums of a message to their peers within seconds of when its receipient count reaches "bulk."

There is a third problem with Fabien Penso's system as I understand it. That is that none of the SMTP envelope or headers are reliable indications of spam, if you want a low false negative rate. If there is one thing that spammers can invent, it is new usernames.

You also can check this idea which works also.

Basicly you have a bunch of trusted people which can add entries to the spam list. When they receive a spam they do forward it to a list, signing the message with pgp/gnupg. A perl engine will then verify the sign to know if the person is allowed to add/remove entries. Then it will fetch the From: header from the forwarded email, and add it to a file which is available on the net. You just have to write your script to fetch the file every 10min and add the content to your access list (postfix, sendmail, etc) with REJECT.

Scripts are available also for Gnus/Emacs so you hit F1 and it will send the mail the way it should, so announcing spam is one key away. It's important announcing spam doesn't take time, or you won't do it as you probably receive many per day.

You also can add [domain] in the subject line which will add the whole domain from the From: header. The [rbl:IP] will add it to a rbl table.

Take a look, it's cool.

Why the fuck does this appear on /.? EVERYBODY with half a clue in computer stuff laughed at these guys here in France, and cursed the journalists who gave this losers such exposure.

They are just a bunch of lame'o script kiddies wannabe.

Just to give you an idea of their stupidity, their publication (Hacker'Z voice) has been repeatedly caught publishing others' articles (see for example this article at linuxfr.org) calling it their own work.

The most striking example of their kiddie-ness is probably their spelling (both in French and English); I know, I know, flaming someone on spelling isn't exactly glorious, but when the ratio goes above one spelling error per word (and I'm not making this up), you've seriously got to wonder.

Oh, but wait! They're even more sorry fucks than you'd think. Look at their über-zekure registration form for their university: yoohoo, ACTION="mailto:...". Those guys can't even get fucked to install SSL!

Couple links for completeness:

Hacker Z Voice site

Hacker U site

Missing links, sorry: Gael's article and the press release.

Yahoo news about this, found on LinuxFR. (article in french)

just do what I do for my German (I'm French) : just browse web pages in French to have some material. For example computer related pages: often written with simple grammar, full of words you already know or that you would easily guess by the context. try linuxfr for example, or do a reearch for your favorite topic on Yahoo! France

>It kind of makes sense [...] Now imagine if our country had been taken over by Hitler about 50 years ago; I think the government wouldn't be too fond of Nazi memorabilia.
In fact, this law isn't a follow-up of WW2. It has been voted in 1937, after a failed coup d'état by fascist leagues, to prevent fascist and nazi propaganda.

For french speaking people out there, you could look at what we think of it here, on a french Slashdot-like forum. The main feeling is that this ruling is stupid.

according to this interview of Mandrakesoft people, they're on the works for a ppc release too.
And of course, don't forget potato was released for ppc too. Very nice turn of events. Hum, relief...
If only Macromedia could also please release their fscking Flash plugin for ppc ! (now that RealPlayer for ppc is there;)
It's [was] a x86 world. *gasp* I guess alpha people is going to complain right ahead.

Ok I forgot I could have put a mirror before to put the news here :) So here it is: DeCSS Mirror on LinuxFR

• Linux Internationalisation Initiative
• Linux i18n Project, which is at least loosely affiliated with Mandrake since one of their employees is the contact for the project
• Free Mulitilingual Platforms
• Gnome and KDE have also both been actively pursuing internationalization