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If one is considering a live CD in a situation such as this then let me suggest Polippix, which is a live CD which uses TOR by default and offers encrypted VOIP and other privacy-protecting goodies.

Main site (in Danish):
http://www.prosa.dk/om_prosa/polippix.shtml

Review (in English):
http://www.madpenguin.org/cms/?m=show&id=7822

"GPLv3 Enforcement: This Could Become a Bumpy Road"

"Working Together As a Community to Leave Behind Microsoft Media Formats"

"Separating the Weak From the Strong"

"No matter how hard we try to down play it, the patent threats and deals that are being made because of them are hurting the community - it's a simple fact. The real trick will be to see who sticks this out and who falls back to closed source alternatives, as we see Linux getting split with IP politics"

From his article, "The Coming Divide"
"There is in fact a coming divide that will hit the Linux community like a freight train. The battle lines have already been drawn, and companies that support Linux, such as Canonical, will eventually find themselves fiercely pitted against companies like Linspire, who only a short time ago, entered into an agreement of cooperation."
http://www.madpenguin.org/cms/?m=show&id=7988

From my article, "The Coming Linux Storm"
"The Linux community is heading for a clash between three disparate groups with very different goals and agendas. We've already seen some light skirmishes between them already. Sometimes these groups will align for the purposes of advancing their own views, but for the most part, these three groups will either destroy Linux as we know it or have to learn how to get along."
http://www.openaddict.com/the_three_types_of_linux _users.html

I dunno.. just smacks of something I wrote 5 months ago...

I agree, but for those that wish to avoid the ads/links and still RTFA, here's the clean version.

• LG has signed up to Microsoft's licensing scheme.
• Microsoft's plethora of patents and licence deals (whatever the opinions of PHB's or suits, and let's not get into APIs yet) mean that it's difficult (maybe illegal if you're not careful) to be non-MS in corporate America (they'll get bulk licenses for their own products and patent license money for competitors')
• Microsoft doesn't care if people aren't running Windows at home (this is the bit that people didn't get - because the author didn't quite put it like that. He focussed on MS's grip on American business and vaguely talked about home users becoming empowered)

• People can now do many of the things they could only do on PC on other devices
• Microsoft have been promising - and working on - other devices for years
• And have begun selling hardware
• The next cool thing probably won't be by Microsoft either
• But even if it runs Linux, they'll get their tax
• At least, within "those unfortunate countries where software is patentable"
• The US Government will go to great lengths to support Microsoft's efforts in the other countries; its citizens' pension funds depend on it
• What Microsoft has best succeeded at is amassing money. It hse been able to make vast profits through its bulk deals and is ubiquitous in offices.
• Microsoft realise that home users need to be treated differently to businesses; it's expensive to collect money from individuals
• Technology is a more efficient instrument for collecting money from individuals than law ;-)

A couple of years ago TurboLinux 10F was being sold for $69.00 in the U.S. and came with the Cyberlink's PowerDVD software for Linux with support for most Windows Media codecs up to version 9. According to this review, it does it does so in way that was legal and completely licensed.

TurboLinux 10F Review

Codeweavers sells a slightly enhanced version of WINE called Crossover Linux which, among other things, allows Linux users to run various Windows plugins. It allows Linux users to run Windows Media Player 6.4, although I am not sure just how well it does that. If a Linux user is using Windows Media Player 6.4 under Crossover Linux, they should be allowed to view the EU's streaming service.

To be equally fair to all voters, they should also offer their streaming audios or videos in an alternative format such as Ogg Theora. Here is an example of a web page that offers the choice of viewing some videos in either Flash or Ogg. I am using Linux and when I clicked on one of the Ogg links the video began to play perfectly. On most Linux computers the Flash version would also probably work, although the 64-bit version of Macromedia Flash for Linux has not yet been released. I am using the AMD-64 version of Kubunutu Linux without Flash, so I watched the Ogg video instead. If the EU included an Ogg version of their videos, they would then definitely be able to support Linux in a legal way. In a democracy, all voters should be given equal access to public government information. To achieve equal access for all voters, they should make the slight extra effort to include a version of their streaming audios or videos in some other format such as something like Ogg.

True enough. He covered XGL in his 10.1 review (linked here), so that might be why. Perhaps a link to the old review might have been in order at least. I will email him. Adam is generally very responsive, as I've contacted him once before and he was very fast and kind in his response. I noticed on here some of you don't get him, but if you've read his material before, trust me when I say you do not need take offense to his style. It's not meant to be dead serious :-)

It was written by someone who has no hopes of ever being a journalist and should stop writing to try to convince people.

You can point out people use Macs without calling them all dirty hippies.

Mad Penguin's Adam Doxtater did a review recently and is a much better read. Find it here.

hi SwiftKick, thanks for doing a critical reading of my review. Seriously. Who wants someone to say only good things about their work? You never learn anything that way.

Okay, now having said that, put up your dukes, dude, because you are WRONG! ;-) and here's why.

How does it merit 9/10 stars when it has so many drawbacks (which you listed on the last page) that could be considered pretty serious? Good question. Answer: because of the Pepper Pad's POTENTIAL!! Sure, there are problems, which I outlined in the article, but look at what the PP can be in the future. Please re-read the section entitled the ghost of Mark Andreeson returns:

"Marc Andreeson once boasted that Netscape would reduce Microsoft Windows to a slightly buggy set of drivers, and with the Pepper Pad, you can see a tiny microcosm of how that could yet come true."

http://madpenguin.org/cms/index.php/?m=show&id=682 7&page=3

If you look at the Pepper Pad only as a toy, which is its selling point to individual consumers, you are not seeing the big picture. IMHO, the Pepper Pad deserves a 9/10 because it is one small additional voice toward emphasizing that the "Network is the Computer", and the operating system is less relevant. Please read "Seeing What's Next" by Clayton Christensen, Erik Roth, and Scott Anthony. There, they talk in depth about how disruptive innovations such as the Pepper Pad could be the undoing of Microsoft's monopoly. Here, in summary, is what Christensen thinks of web applications and Microsoft:

"Where Linux takes root is in new applications, like Web servers and handheld devices. As those get better, applications will get sucked off the desktop onto the Internet, and that's what will undo Microsoft," he [Christensen] said. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/windows/0,3902039 6,39170562,00.htm

Remember, SwiftKick, Sony unseated then-market leader RCA by using underpowered transistors in handeheld radios that, at first, underperformed RCA's desktop radios' sound quality. RCA, like Microsoft, had lots, lots more money and market power, but those virtues were eroded rapidly as RCA abandoned transistors to Sony's tiny, weak radios. RCA spent lots on R & D, but concluded that they 1) transistors had no place in RCA's high margin, vacuum tube desktop radios, which emphasized good volume and good sound; 2) RCA had no business case for selling low-margin transistor radios. You can read more about that history in my article here http://linux.sys-con.com/read/46891.htm?CFID=37723 &CFTOKEN=8D2FC61E-57CA-1091-4E26E06B45B1DB04

If you look only at what the Pepper Pad is today, you're not seeing its importance, IMHO.

Mad Penguin ran a preview of the upcoming 6.06 Dapper release this past week called " Looking Ahead: Ubuntu Linux 6.06 ". A good read with plenty of screenshots and Flash videos of the install and desktop.

Mad Penguin ran a preview of the upcoming 6.06 Dapper release this past week called " Looking Ahead: Ubuntu Linux 6.06 ". A good read with plenty of screenshots and Flash videos of the install and desktop.

http://madpenguin.org/cms/index.php/?m=show&id=669 9

Go get your pagehits somewhere else.

hi kz45, No, you can't get almost every commercial Linux distro in most computer stores. Check out the videos that I took while in the CompUSA store, for example. They offer ONLY two commercial Linux distros: Linspire and SuSE. Mepis Linux is not there, nor is Xandros Linux. The videos are found on page two of my article here: http://madpenguin.org/cms/index.php/?m=show&id=652 1&page=2 [madpenguin.org]


hi christian.

what the hell is mepis linux?

most stores will only carry well-known distros (that have the money to put them there)). I have about 5 or 6 computer stores in my area, and almost all of them carry redhat,xandros,linspire and suse (I can't remember the names at the moment). They are also right alongside microsoft products. You can even get computers with linspire on them instead of windows.

Remember BeOS it went into the grave for this very reason. No larger distributor would touch it because MS threatened to remove any discount if they did. Wow that is freedom of the market in action! hmmm..is that why I can get almost every commercial linux distro available alongside windows in Best buy, Microcenter, (insert your local computer store here)?

hi kz45, No, you can't get almost every commercial Linux distro in most computer stores. Check out the videos that I took while in the CompUSA store, for example. They offer ONLY two commercial Linux distros: Linspire and SuSE. Mepis Linux is not there, nor is Xandros Linux. The videos are found on page two of my article here: http://madpenguin.org/cms/index.php/?m=show&id=652 1&page=2

That link will take you to page two of the RA, and scroll down to the bottom to see the videos and to play them.

Not only are there only a few packages of Linux available, but they are on the bottom at the end of the row. The lighting is so dark down there, that it is difficult to see those boxes. Placement is everything in retail. Your point is not well made.

Licensing costs for 14 copies of XP Pro Academic Upgrade would run just under a grand.

If the school has around 250 kids grade k-6, it's most likely that the community the school is in has no more than a couple thousand people. Most of those people also probably don't make very much, and probably require travelling 20-30 miles one way to work everyday, meaning the money they make goes to supporting the family. They can't afford to spare any money anywhere else. Also, I can guarantee you'd need more than 14 copies of WinXP. Most computer labs have around 30 computers in them ($2000), if the district wants a computer in every classroom, or even half the classrooms, there's another 10 or so machines (we're up to almost $3000 now, just for the OS, that's not including hardware upgrades and licensing for other software).

Then, what about educational software, office suites, etc? That stuff's not cheap by any means. Granted, some may have deals where you can have 5 or 10 licenses for about $400, but you still need to outfit at least 30 computers.

MS Windows XP Pro upgrades for 30 computers: $2000
MS Office 2003 Student and Teacher Edition Suite for 30 computers: $4500
Educational Software such as Encarta, for 30 computers: $1500/title
Total for OS, Office, and one educational software title: $8000

That's not including harware/computer upgrades, printer upgrades (if applicable), and additional software. A project like this can easily reach $10,000-$15,000. Keep in mind, as well, that something like this would need to be done every 5-7 years. In that span of time, the OS will become outdated and no longer be supported, the hardware will once again be too outdated for the new OS, and the additional software will be too outdated for the new OS to run cleanly. These costs can be cut dramatically if they only thing they would need to worry about paying for is new hardware, and even that could have a donation system set in place.

If the machines are running 95 and 98, I'd bet more then a few are old enough that they probably shouldn't be running XP so the actual cost likely is less.

You're backwards on your thinking here. If the machines are too old to be upgraded to the new OS, that means you'll either have to upgrade the hardware, or get new machines to have enough computers for a typical 15-35 student class. More upgrading equals more money.

Obviously running 95, 98, and XP Home may not be the best solution overall, but it apparently seems to work for the time being

That's what my school district said about our G2 Apple workstations that were running Mac OS9 and had a habit of crashing at least once a week, oftentimes taking the whole network down with it. We were the only school with such outdated machines in the district, and this was between 1999 and 2002.

What you are proposing is installing an operating system that is completely foreign to them.

Yes, it may be foreign to the teachers, but the students are young enough that they'll learn their way around the OS rather quickly. Think of the geeks whose first computer was a Commodore64 or a DOS-based machine. They had to convert from a command-line interface to a GUI.

Make the conversion over the summer or some other long break so that you have time to train the teachers on the basics of using the Linux OS. They don't need to know how to read the binary files and convert them to another language, they just need to know how to install necessary programs and do basic troubleshooting steps for when, say a program locks up. Remember, these are elementary school students learning computer basics, not college graduates working with .NET or Quartus.

I would also like to point out this little article that I found a while back. It basically takes the "I'm used to Windows, so Linux is like a foreign country to me" and flips it upside down.

The

Why do you (slashdot reader) attack article by Preston, who claims: "the author of Linux was not Linus Torvalds, but me." http://www.madpenguin.org/cms/?m=show&id=1800

And at the same time you make fun of us, when we disagree with opinions like those: "the Da Vinci Code is absorbing -- perfect for history buffs (New York Times Book Review Fall 2003)" and "readers have finally found a book that combines historic fact with a contemporary story line (New York Times Book Review Fall 2003)." Even Brown claims in the introduction to the novel that "all descriptions of documents and secret rituals are accurate (Brown, Dan The Da Vinci Code., Acknowledgements)."

You are so smart! Wow! And do you actualy believe in every shit someone write without any respect to facts? Have you ever read any of the articles criticizing the book? Such as:
'The Da Vinci Code': Exciting New Novel, Tired Old Conspiracy Theories.

Mad Penguin reviewed a migration tool not too long ago that helps make migration from Windows to Linux almost seamless. It's a commercial product, but foolproof from what it looks like. Also the licensing cost is pretty low.

I have a celeron 300Mhz laptop with memory maxed out to 160Mb. I tried xubuntu out about 2 weeks ago because I fell in love with apt after using my p200 debian server. I wasn't really impressed with its speed (it swapped out alot, which was a dog on my 4200rpm HD). To be fair, I didn't give it a fair chance of trimming it down. But overall, when I ever get a computer with more memory, I guess xubuntu is the distro I'm gonna use. For now I installed vector linux. It *flies* right out of the box. I use xfce on it and I get 118 mb free memory on startup. It never hits Virtual Memory for normal use. Fluxbox or icewm are a bit lighter, but I shamefully admit I like the xfce eyecandy and the gperfection gtk theme. Also vector uses slapt-get. It doesn't compare to debian repositories, but vector or slackware ones aren't too shabby! They're actually quite good. Here's a good review.

Ok, just ran a few quick tests:

Basically, there's a server on my local network that's routed via two different machines and going over a VPN (our WAN has about 2500 customers on it..). With VNC, it's not too bad. If I grab a window and yank it around the screen, there are some redraw issues and it basically looks like a slideshow.

So, I decided to give FreeNX a try.

I'm using FC4 on both client and server. I simply grabbed some RPMS (easy to follow instructions) here, loaded them up and I was off and running.

First impressions: wow! holy crap! I can now grab a window and yank it around the desktop with near fluid speed. Everything is highly responsive. I'm a big fan of VNC and have used it for many years now, but I think it's time to switch.

Keep in mind that this test was made over a low latent connection and with decent throughput.

But for those of us who are running on modern hardware KDE runs quite well and is far more robust than GNOME.

Some people might object to that. While there's a distinction between window managers and desktop environments, it's also true that you still need a window manager, and whether it's slow or fast will affect your entire desktop experience.

Let's look at some cold fact figures, shell we: Test 1, Test 2. I guess they answer why Gnome seems to have the snappier response.

This article was posted a little while ago about a user who used Ubuntu in a completly MS environment without his boss noticing for a few months. (linked article from the story)

My experience with it is that it's one of the most mature Desktop distributions, coming complete with most of the tools one would need to perform most jobs. Easy install, and you can use Syntaptic/apt-get for upgrades and additional installation since it's Debian based. You should check it out.

And for everybody else who has better uses for their cash (like groceries):
http://www.linuxlookup.com/html/main/iso.html Get Linux.
http://www.linuxiso.org/ Get Linux.
http://distrowatch.com/ Get Linux (or BSD).
http://www.livingwithoutmicrosoft.org/ Learn more about alternatives.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/ Ask a Linux pro.
http://madpenguin.org/cms/ Read reviews of Linux.

I've never seen a Flash movie of a Linux distro install before! Nice.

I tested the boot.iso on an XP box, until it failed to detect that I was using a MN-510 (a usb wireless networking adapter made by Microsoft.)

So thumb's up on this review -- but the distro is not a smashing success, because it fails to properly embrace the MS switcher. The test is not can we install it--it's "can the previous generation..."

What happens when you submit a review with screenshots and Flash movies? Is it worse than just screenshots? LOL Slashdot rocks!

Directly after the release this morning, Mad Penguin published a lengthy interview with OOo's Lois Suarez-Potts which represents part 3 of their OpenOffice.org interview series (part 1 and 2 were covered previously on Slashdot). The article is 3 pages long but an excellent read all the same.

Once you get on the Microsoft treadmill, it's very hard to get off.

The sure do have a lot of control over you, don't they....

FR: If you have a Word document in .doc or .rtf or Word ML, and you use the current filter, and something goes wrong, even something not very noticeable, please submit the document as a bug document to OpenOffice.org, so that we can get a critical mass of documents that we can look at.

PublicWebStations.com was doing something (including live Linux CD webstations, PC donations, manpower, etc) with MadPenguin.org and TechnologyRescue.com a while back to help Katrina victims. I don't have a direct link but either site will have the info. Good effort to be inolved in either way.

Perhaps you need to pick up a dictionary and look up the term "DUPLICATE". You might be amazed at what you find. Sure, there has been alot of coverage on /. of Zeta, but no duplicates of this story. You posted articles with links to OSNews and NewsForge. The current Slashdot posting is linked to Mad Penguin. See what I'm getting at here? If you RTFA on any of them you'd know enough to realize none of them are dupes of the others. Enough said.

Oooh, just like you've been able to do in fvwm for 10+ years now.

The E pager is very nice and I hope everything is just as good. It's been a long time since I've used fvwm, just as it had been a long time since I used E. I like E's real division between virtual desktops and screens, so you can have multiple pagers in E each with it's own desktop with multiple screens. I also like being able to drag and drop between the different pagers.

E also gets minimized viewers right too. It draws a thumbnail or an icon and grows to accommodate what you have open or scrolls, your choice. You can also turn off the borders, so nothing but the icon or thumbnail gets in front of your background image.

Theme transparency already rocks. Add that to animated backgrounds and you have something unmatched in the commercial world.

Oh, and if you look at his benchmark results, fvwm is faster than E17 out of the box, too.

Like this benchmark?

It looks a little funny to me to, but it's a benchmark with both window managers on it.

Here.

- but where's the review now? Did you wonder this too? Well, here it is! VectorLinux 5.1 Deluxe Review

BTW, I officially take back my statement regarding multimedia support in SuSE, it looks like it's a pretty big pain in the arse (For your typical user who couldn't care less) to get things setup for something as simple as mp3 playback. To quote the review from MadPenguin:

From what it looks like, GStreamer, Arts, and aKode (the latter two are both included in the kdemultimedia packages) were all compiled without MP3 support. Unlike Red Hat, where all you need to do is install a single file to resolve, SUSE has crippled their distro in such a way that it's extremely difficult to fix. Considering the main components are part of a larger package set, you'd need to recompile KDE's multimedia section in order to properly right the situation. The problem with this would be that you're throwing off the balance of package management at that point, so future upgrades might have unpredictable results. It's also a nightmare to recompile these packages on SUSE, as you'll end up installing many development packages for the likes of KDE, Xorg, etc... not to mention the need to grab source code for other key pieces such as lame, flac, and taglib. The fastest way I was able to cure the problem was to grab the SUSE 9.2 kdemultimedia packages from a reliable KDE mirror. While this cured the problem temporarily, the next time I installed something from YaST, it reinstalled its multimedia packages. Frustrating.

*sigh* I really hope SuSE/Novell fix this up by the time the next release hits the mirrors. If RedHat/Fedora's stance on mp3 support should've taught distributors anything, it should've taught them that even the small inconvenience those two distributions provide is more than a lot of users are willing to put up with.

A bit dated I suppose, but still relevant: http://madpenguin.org/cms/?m=show&id=4419

This may, overall, be good.

The Madpenguin interview TFA starts by pointing out a study that indicates Copyright infringement may be good for Microsoft.

.... We found that in countries where piracy is highest, Linux has the lowest penetration rate. The model shows that Microsoft can use piracy as an effective tool to price discriminate, and that piracy may even result in higher profits to Microsoft!....

If you want to hurt the copyright cartels, obviously the best thing to do is discourage your friends from comitting copyright infringement and encourage them to by local and independently sourced music. and/or music or software that is under an open license. This also tends to result in more money staying in the local economy (good for you in the long run).

Just like Linux has forced Microsoft to produce better software, lower their pricing and even give at least lip service to 'open' (cough cough) standards, if your friends start ignoring content that is copy protected and going for stuff with permissive customer rights, then those companies are going to have to respond in kind to keep their market share.

What I liked about grokster was the peer-to-peer distribution network. What I disliked about it is that they openly encouraged copyright violation that effectively supported the mega-corps. This Supreme Court decision seems to open up the possibility of a peer to peer company that actually promotes independent music over the mass market pablum.

Mad Penguin is running an interview with EFF attorney Wendy Seltzer. Good read.

Which reminds me, they did a good audio interview with the founder of DIYParts.org, Christian Einfeldt. Funny thing is he credits Adam Doxtater (the "Mouth of Mad Penguin") as being one of the top four people we'll be talking about in years to come. Did I fall of the train somewhere and bump my head?

Mad Penguin published a "progress" review of FC4 not too long ago and it was a pretty good read.

Mad Penguin has added an update to the review explaining that since the writing of the review, SUSE has made four patches available for the release which fix media support. They are apparently only on the EU mirrors though. They also made available a listing of the packages SUSE has patched, which is pretty extensive. You can find that list here. The final score was bumped up to 4/5 stars as well.

Mad Penguin has added an update to the review explaining that since the writing of the review, SUSE has made four patches available for the release which fix media support. They are apparently only on the EU mirrors though. They also made available a listing of the packages SUSE has patched, which is pretty extensive. You can find that list here. The final score was bumped up to 4/5 stars as well.

Thanks for the hint on where to get extra software not packaged on the CDs for 'licensing reasons'.

Check out the bottom of the this screenshot in the taskbar:
http://madpenguin.org/images/reviews/suse93/help.p ng
and you can see the reviewer has been browsing the alt.binaries.warez.linux news groups while writing the review!

Good review though ;-)

Seriously. I had envisioned something similar last year but this really takes the cake, or so to speak. I have yet to try Autopackage, but after seeing this, I'm sold. Especially if it works as intended. Cross-distro package management is what we need. Sure, DEB, RPM, TGZ, etc etc are all excellent in their own right, but being able to install packages across multiple distros is what we really need. I for one am impressed. Of course there are a few technical details that I need to learn about as far as cross-distro packaging goes, but it's a step in the right direction in any event.

Yep, this fool did an interview on The Linux Show. You can find it in the archives for 13 July 2004: Announcement | Ogg Audio Quite a heated debate in the latter half. -- jhansonxi of MadPenguin.Org

MadPenguin has an interview with Josh Berkus, one of the core team members of PostgreSQL.

All I now need is the Postgres-R (replication) stuff to work out of the box (like it does for mysql). I don't know if transaction speeds might be hit by replication or not.

From the interview:

One other question that I would like to answer is replication, because I get this question all the time: unlike some other database systems within PostgreSQL, replication is an add-in. It's a separate application. That isn't an accident. It's done on purpose.

There are several reasons for that. One is that replication is actually not a single feature. It is a set of four or five different related implementations, which serve four or five different needs. As a result, we don't want to bundle one particular kind of replication with the main database, because that's not suitable to all users. Our leading replication project, in terms of popularity, is something called Slony-I, lead by Jan Wieck, who is also on the Core Team. That has actually been quite popular as one of the leading master-slave high availability replication systems of any kind. Jan is currently working on Slony-II, which will be synchronous multi-master replication for database server clusters. Based on the pace of his past work, I would anticipate that it would be available in about a year or so. But don't look for that information in the main release notes for PostgreSQL, because it will always be a separate parallel project. [emphasis added]

In other words, just use Slony-I. From the overview:

Slony-I was born from an idea to create a replication system that was not tied to a specific version of PostgreSQL, and allowed to be started and stopped on an existing database with out the need for a dump/reload cycle.

Slony-I is a "master to multiple slaves" replication system with cascading and slave promotion. The big picture for the development of Slony-I is a master-slave system that includes all features and capabilities needed to replicate large databases to a reasonably limited number of slave systems. Slony-I is a system for data centers and backup sites, where the normal mode of operation is that all nodes are available.

See also the basic documentation. For more technical details dewnload the design document (PDF). For an excellent introduction make sure to read Introducing Slony by A. Elein Mustain on ONLamp:

Slony-I, the first iteration of the project, is an asynchronous replicator of a single master database to multiple replicas, which in turn may have cascaded replicas. It will include all features required to replicate large databases with a reasonable number of replicas. Jan has targeted Slony-I toward data centers and backup sites, implying that all nodes in the network are always available.

The master is the primary database with which the applications interact. Replicas are replications, or copies of the primary database. Since the master database is always changing, data replication is the system that enables the updates of secondary, or replica, databases as the master database updates. In synchronous replication systems, the master and the replica are consistent exact copies. The client does not receive a commit until all replicas have the transaction in question. Asynchronous replication loosens that binding and allows the replica to copy transactions from the master, rolling forward, at its own pace. The server issues a commit to the master client based on the state of the master database tra

Mad Penguin> has announced their Slackware Handbook Project which aims to recreate the FreeBSD Handbook... but for Slackware. And they are keeping it totally open for anyone to add/edit content (peer moderated by other users). Pretty good stuff...

Following up some of the links, I came across this post (scroll to the 7th post on that page, by 'madadmin'.)

The administrator of that forum is claiming that, based on their server logs, they have reason to believe that the person responsible for the attacks may be the same person who's recently posted a message to comp.lang.php that's titled 'eScrew OWNS YO!!!'. (See the posting for more details.)

From further posts, it looks as if the association has been made by looking at where the worms are coneverging. Can anyone who's currently dealing with this elaborate?

Mad Penguin was one of the sites nailed by it. They use phpBB for their forums. Sad state of affairs. They were down for a while, but were one of the first to announce the phpBB2 exploit and fix it. This kinda thing is totally uncalled for....

Mad Penguin basically said the same thing in this article, and it's true.

Here's a small clip from the article:
"The simple fact is that not enough people really know about Firefox, and this advertising campaign is one of the best ideas I've seen come out of the Open Source community in quite some time. We all know that no matter how compelling our software may be, the majority of the world's population doesn't even know it exists. It's not from lack of effort on our behalf, either. We spend much of our time promoting free software, as I'm sure most of you reading this do, but the one thing we lack is real visibility. We can eat, sleep, and sweat Firefox, but in reality, we are up against a large company with tons of money being dumped into their image... a very difficult proposition wouldn't you say? If you look at it for what it is, you'll see it for what it is. When a company can produce software which crashes constantly, allows strangers to steal personal information with little to no real effort, and then to top it off with the 'we'll patch it when we get around to it' attitude and it still controls 95+% of the market, anything less than a miracle is going to crumble from the weight. It's an odd thing isn't it? The fact is that Internet Explorer is harmful to the people who use it. But the truth is, people don't really pay attention to the facts. If they did, that 95+% of the world would all be running OS X right now wouldn't they?"