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I really wonder if MS would so have such a lax attitude towards piracy if GNU/Linux wasn't around? I'm guessing no. To many, an easily obtained, free pirated copy of XP is better than a truly free copy of GNU/Linux. Something MS is banking on since they are better off keeping eveyone possible away from GNU/Linux even if it digs into the short term bottom line.

General Linux Your Mileage May Vary, but I've heard a lot of people talk about it. You never specified usable.

Pretty much any program that can run setuid root will get lots of scrutiny from the security guys at every major distro (rhat, novl, debian). Pretty much any user-space program does what the package manager programs it to do. No one ever blames perl for its ability to system("rm -rf /"). Well, ok, they did when taintperl was considered a good idea; but once that idea was gone, sanity returned.

Plenty of other guys in the email space, DJB and Witese have truely excellent security records with even more popular packages. And these packages were popular enough that they did have many qualified eyes inspecting them.

According to Red Hat

Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS
$1,499 for standard edition or $2,499 for premium edition which has the 24/7 1 hour response support while the standard edition has 12/7 4 hour response support.

Windows 2000 Advanced Server (With 25 Client Access Licenses) costs $3,999 and _only_ has 25 CAL's.

MS Windows Server 2003 std with _only_ 5 CAL's is $999, while the comparable version for Red Hat is Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES and costs $349. Even though Red Hat may be the most expensive Enterprise Linux offering, they are still close to 25% - 50% less (depending on support hours) then the MS Server offerings.

According to Red Hat

Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS
$1,499 for standard edition or $2,499 for premium edition which has the 24/7 1 hour response support while the standard edition has 12/7 4 hour response support.

Windows 2000 Advanced Server (With 25 Client Access Licenses) costs $3,999 and _only_ has 25 CAL's.

MS Windows Server 2003 std with _only_ 5 CAL's is $999, while the comparable version for Red Hat is Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES and costs $349. Even though Red Hat may be the most expensive Enterprise Linux offering, they are still close to 25% - 50% less (depending on support hours) then the MS Server offerings.

According to Red Hat

Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS
$1,499 for standard edition or $2,499 for premium edition which has the 24/7 1 hour response support while the standard edition has 12/7 4 hour response support.

Windows 2000 Advanced Server (With 25 Client Access Licenses) costs $3,999 and _only_ has 25 CAL's.

MS Windows Server 2003 std with _only_ 5 CAL's is $999, while the comparable version for Red Hat is Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES and costs $349. Even though Red Hat may be the most expensive Enterprise Linux offering, they are still close to 25% - 50% less (depending on support hours) then the MS Server offerings.

If I understand things correctly, you shouldn't be hit by this bug any more especially with a new distro like the new Mandrake.

Read more about this here, especially about resolving this when you have been hit (you won't lose any data):

Fedora Mailing List post

Bye egghat.

Right now there are a lot of file systems that do somehing not all that different than what Sun is proposing. The project I am on is evaluating them as we speak for a center wide filesystem. I've had the fun (no sarcasm, honestly) of setting up a number of different onces and helping to run benchmarks and tests against each. All of them have strengths. Every single one of them has some nasty weaknesses.

If you are looking for an open source based cluster file system, Lustre is what you want. It's supported by LLNL, PNNL, and the main writers at ClusterFS Inc. It's a network based cluster FS. We've been using it over GigE. However, we've found that there needs to be a ratio of 3:1 for data server:clients for a ratio. Wehave only used one metadata server. Failover isn't the greatest. Quotas don't exist. it also makes kernel mods (some good and bad) to do a mild fork of the linux kernel (they put them into the newer kernels every so often). It only runs on Linux. Getting it to run on anything else looks...scary.

GPFS runs on AIX and Linux. Even sharing the same storage. It runs and is pretty stable. it has the option to run in a SAN mode or network based FS. In the latter form, it even does local discovery of disks via labels so that if a client can see the disks locally it will read and write to them via FC rather than to the server. It, however, is a balkanized mess. It requires a lot more work to bring up and run: there is an awful lot of software to configure to get it to run (re: RSCT. If you haven't had the joys of HATS and HAGS, count yourself very, very lucky).

ADIC's StorNext software is another option. This one is good if you are interested in ease of installation, maintanence, and very, very fast speeds (damn near line speed on Fibre channel). I have set this one up for sharing disks in less than two hours from first install to getting numerous assorted nodes of different OS's to play together (Solaris, AIX, Linux). It freakin on virtually everything from Crays to Linux to Windows. It's issues seem to be scaling (right now doesn't go past 256 clients) and it has some nontrivial locking issues (righting to the same block from multiple clients, and parallel I/O to the same file from multiple clients if you change the file size).

There are some others that are not as mature. Among them are Ibrix, Panasas, GFS, and IBM's SANFS. All of them are interesting or promising. Only SANF looks like it runs on more than Linux though at this point. Our requirements for the project I am on are to share the same FS and storage instance among disparate client OSes simultaneously. This might not be the same for others though and these might be worth a look. Lustre dodges this because its open source and they're interested in porting.

There's talk on the Fedora-devel list of getting Gnome 2.8 final into the already slightly delayed FC3 T2... Here's to hoping....

The study I referred to measures total number of days of recess over all each OS for the year of 1999. That's where I got my ratios of 1:2:3 for Linux:Windows:Solaris. Go read the link, and you'll see what I mean.

and impact of each vulnerability (that is, num of setups a vuln actually affects, plus total num of vulns - if it takes them 1 hour to patch a vuln, but they get 24 vuln's a day, but it takes someone else 4 hours to patch, but only get one vuln a day, which is better?).

I think we can probably say that the difficulty-to-exploit will be approximately equal between all remotely-exploitable vulnerabilities (regardless of platform or package, assuming similarly-configured defensive features), and likewise between all locally-exploitable vulnerabilites regardless of platform. So the only thing that would really matter is the ratio of locally-exploitable to remotely-exploitable vulnerabilities and the total number. Sun did better on the latter than both Red Hat and Microsoft but, Linux ships a greater range of software in the standard distro than both and did better than Microsoft.

As it happens, I think it's pretty hard to say which of Solaris or Red Hat Linux is more secure based on the numbers in this study (and it was the assertion that "Solaris is more secure than Linux" that I was refuting). But I think it's fair to say that whichever way you cut it, both are more secure than Windows, and have numbers to back that assertion up.

Second b/c you're only measuring what's known, but there are a sizeable number of vulnerabilities that are not known. Is it possible to measure this?

I'm happy to work on the basis that until someone knows about a vulnerability it doesn't exist. In effect, the period of recess in the study is the minimal period of recess (since it's safest to assume that some blackhat discovered each vulnerability and started exploiting it some time before it ended up up Bugtraq or even full-disclosure).

Third b/c you're not at all measuring an OS's ability to be secured, that is, what secure features come built-in to the OS versus what have to be compiled as an addon or what has to be coded from scratch or what exists as someone's untested code. But what features does the OS come with to provide ACL's, resource exhaustion protection, etc?

Apart from filesystem ACLs (which I think are over-complex bunk in the most common scenarios), I'd say that Windows is the poorest of the three for every category you've mentioned. Between Solaris and Red Hat Linux, it's harder to say - Sun have Trusted Solaris, whereas SELinux has only gone into FC2 and RHEL3 has recently gotten exec-shield, support for hardware No eXecute pages in Update 3 and is under evaluation for EAL3+/CAPP. Historically, Solaris has certainly provided more options for securing machines, but RHL is catching up fast and implementing things that Solaris probably won't have for quite some time.

Fourth, well i'm bored with this now, but don't forget hardware's impact on security.

No eXecute pages? In RHEL3u3 now if it's running pm an AMD64 or newer Pentium 4 CPU. If you're referring to something else, please elaborate. Remember that RHEL3 is available and supported on IBM S/390 and zSeries hardware as well as bog-standard x86.

--

I've skimmed over the Stateless Linux HOWTO, and it doesn't seem to be all that different from NFSRoot.

Stateless Linux might be a bit broader -- NFSRoot as I have seen it deployed seems to match only the case of, as the HOWTO puts it, "caching clients, which boot from a copy of a snapshot, cached locally on a hard drive", rather than the other three scenarios described under "stateless Linux clients" in the HOWTO -- but that's splitting hairs over what seems to be, in most ways, the same basic idea.

So -- how is Stateless Linux a radically new thing? There are documents for NFSRoot going back to 1997 and maybe earlier, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if people were doing things like this on platforms like Sun & SGI well over a decade ago. So -- what exactly is it that's new here ?

I'm still waiting for a worm that installs Linux on the infected computer.

Propogation:
Scan random IP addresses, use multiple Windows exploits, etc. This part has been done a thousand times before, no need to reinvent the wheel.

Payload:
1. The worm itself
2. Grub for Dos
3. The contents of a network install disk

Behavior:
1. Upon infection, the worm will install Grub for Dos, and copy the contents of the network boot disk into c:\boot, but will not modify the boot.ini file.
2. The worm process will run in the background, and attempt to propogate itself.
3. At a predefined interval, the worm will pop up a window that says: "Your computer has been infected by the so-and-so worm. To install Linux and prevent this from ever happening again, click OK." (This worm should be socially responsible. We don't want to force Linux on the masses, just gently persuade them using Windows lack of security as a tool.)
4. Continue to propogate as long as the user clicks "Cancel".
5. When the user clicks "OK":
5a. ping a mirror list to find the fastest mirror
5b. write a kickstart to the boot directory to use that mirror.
5c. modify the boot.ini file to boot Grub.
5d. Reboot the machine, and it shall be cleansed!

I'm still waiting for a worm that installs Linux on the infected computer.

Propogation:
Scan random IP addresses, use multiple Windows exploits, etc. This part has been done a thousand times before, no need to reinvent the wheel.

Payload:
1. The worm itself
2. Grub for Dos
3. The contents of a network install disk

Behavior:
1. Upon infection, the worm will install Grub for Dos, and copy the contents of the network boot disk into c:\boot, but will not modify the boot.ini file.
2. The worm process will run in the background, and attempt to propogate itself.
3. At a predefined interval, the worm will pop up a window that says: "Your computer has been infected by the so-and-so worm. To install Linux and prevent this from ever happening again, click OK." (This worm should be socially responsible. We don't want to force Linux on the masses, just gently persuade them using Windows lack of security as a tool.)
4. Continue to propogate as long as the user clicks "Cancel".
5. When the user clicks "OK":
5a. ping a mirror list to find the fastest mirror
5b. write a kickstart to the boot directory to use that mirror.
5c. modify the boot.ini file to boot Grub.
5d. Reboot the machine, and it shall be cleansed!

I'm still waiting for a worm that installs Linux on the infected computer.

Propogation:
Scan random IP addresses, use multiple Windows exploits, etc. This part has been done a thousand times before, no need to reinvent the wheel.

Payload:
1. The worm itself
2. Grub for Dos
3. The contents of a network install disk

Behavior:
1. Upon infection, the worm will install Grub for Dos, and copy the contents of the network boot disk into c:\boot, but will not modify the boot.ini file.
2. The worm process will run in the background, and attempt to propogate itself.
3. At a predefined interval, the worm will pop up a window that says: "Your computer has been infected by the so-and-so worm. To install Linux and prevent this from ever happening again, click OK." (This worm should be socially responsible. We don't want to force Linux on the masses, just gently persuade them using Windows lack of security as a tool.)
4. Continue to propogate as long as the user clicks "Cancel".
5. When the user clicks "OK":
5a. ping a mirror list to find the fastest mirror
5b. write a kickstart to the boot directory to use that mirror.
5c. modify the boot.ini file to boot Grub.
5d. reboot the machine, and it shall be cleansed!

I'm still waiting for a worm that installs Linux on the infected computer.

Propogation:
Scan random IP addresses, use multiple Windows exploits, etc. This part has been done a thousand times before, no need to reinvent the wheel.

Payload:
1. The worm itself
2. Grub for Dos
3. The contents of a network install disk

Behavior:
1. Upon infection, the worm will install Grub for Dos, and copy the contents of the network boot disk into c:\boot, but will not modify the boot.ini file.
2. The worm process will run in the background, and attempt to propogate itself.
3. At a predefined interval, the worm will pop up a window that says: "Your computer has been infected by the so-and-so worm. To install Linux and prevent this from ever happening again, click OK." (This worm should be socially responsible. We don't want to force Linux on the masses, just gently persuade them using Windows lack of security as a tool.)
4. Continue to propogate as long as the user clicks "Cancel".
5. When the user clicks "OK":
5a. ping a mirror list to find the fastest mirror
5b. write a kickstart to the boot directory to use that mirror.
5c. modify the boot.ini file to boot Grub.
5d. reboot the machine, and it shall be cleansed!

Because they aren't building their own prelinking software. They're just running prelink on the binaries before distributing them.

Here's the "homepage" according to Gentoo

Here's the Debian package page

You can run prelink on Gentoo or any other distribution, too. Just install it, tell it where to look for your binaries, and do soemthing like 'prelink -amfR'

You won't get a general 50% performance boost though, no matter what anyone says.

As to why the prelink people don't improve gnu ld, you've got me.

2. A consistent filesystem hierarchy is followed from distribution to distribution...

Actually all distributions should be following the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.

If yours isn't, then you need to get them to follow it, or find another distribution that does.

As soon as I read your post, this first response is exactly what I was thinking -- install it at home. If you have the hardware available to you, set up a lot of different configurations. Try not using your windows machines at all for a while and doing everything on Linux. If you don't have hardware available to you, get some. Linux runs great on machines 4 years old (yeah, yeah, we could run it on our 386's too -- but runs *well*) that cost $100 or are even free.

• Try:
• Linux as your firewall/router
• Install Apache - every good admin should know how to compile this and some basic configuration information
• Three words: "./configure", "make", "make install"
• Setup a second machine - test using NFS and Samba
• If you want to get a little adventurous, try NIS
• If you don't know sh, practice -- you'll need it -- same goes for VI
• RPMs (and I'm sure Debian's package manager also) make life easy -- if you want the easy way into linux, choose an RPM based distrobution like Fedora and check out YUM
• Having a weird problem that you can't easily solve? Google Groups are a good starting point.

I run testing on my web/mail server and recent upgrades have broken Apache twice. ... No enterprise could have their website down for a week.

Giving up mod points to respond to this, because it's stupid.

Microsoft jokes aside, no enterprise should be running testing-grade software. If you want stable, run stable, damnit! I can't stand the posts from people who whine about testing/unstable breaking their systems and being unable to fix it. If you can't figure out how to downgrade from broken packages in testing/unstable, DON'T BLOODY RUN THOSE BRANCHES!

Hey, I was a noob at one point too, and I sure still have a lot to learn. But you have to admit that was a pretty blatant display of ignorance.

As so many other people have mentioned in this article and others, stable is stable. No it's not the newest and flashiest, but you really need to ask yourself if running the latest software on your production servers is the smartest idea. If you really, really need feature X that's in a newer version than what's in stable, consider http://backports.org/ or doing the backport yourself. They're usually not too involved unless you're trying to backport something like Perl.

If you can't/don't want to do backports, then maybe you really should consider something nice and safe like RHEL.

I would like to share my 2 cent concerning my experience in Linux mandrake recently.

The Linux operating system was born in 1991 and was created by one
man, a Finnish student named Linus Torvalds. Since
these humble beginnings, a multi-million dollar industry has sprung up
to exploit the commercial potential of Linux, but until recently Linux
has eluded mainstream acceptance. However, due to the recent economic
downturn together with uncertainty over changes to Microsoft's pricing
policy, Linux is now being touted as a serious contender to Microsoft
Windows.

While there are many other alternatives to Windows, including
BSD which is based on SUN's (Stanford University Network)
server-grade Solaris operating system, none have commanded the
same level of media attention as Linux. Linux Mandrake is just the
latest in a long line of quirkily christened versions of Linux.
Previous versions of Linux have been named Red Hat, Slack Ware, Storm
and Coral. In stark contrast to the mundane names such as 98, ME or NT
preferred by Microsoft, the crazy names of each Linux release hint
at its zany nature.

My foray into the world of Linux began by downloading a "CD image"
from the Mandrake-Linux web site. But don't worry,

this isn't software piracy, it's perfectly legal! Linux is shareware,
meaning that it can be freely redistributed without fear of a visit by
the Business Software Alliance. The free availability of Linux is a
major reason for its popularity among cash-strapped students and
self-styled anti-capitalist hackers.

Before installing new software, it is always advisable to read the
documentation. Unfortunately, an unpleasant surprise was in store for
me in the "required configuration" section of the hocked to learn that
Linux Mandrake only runs on Pentium processors, meaning that my hopes
of testing the water with my old Gateway 486 were dashed. Furthermore,
a whopping 32 megabytes of memory are required to run Linux! Although
the advocates of Linux self-righteously boast the efficiency of their
chosen operating system and deride the
"bloatware" produced by Microsoft, it appears that their claims are
blatantly incorrect.

Although my humble 486 will happily run Windows 95, it seems that
Linux requires far more powerful, and more expensive, computer
hardware. Is this really the sign of a lean, mean operating system?

Of course not.

Sadly, not even being able to install Linux is just the first of my
many complaints. A brief perusal of the features of Linux Mandrake
reveals that Linux is sorely lacking many crucial productivity
applications. For example, why isn't the industry standard web
browser, Internet Explorer, included with Linux? Despite the best
efforts of the experts at the Internet Engineering Task Force to
encourage adoption of the Internet Explorer standard, the creators of
Linux seem to think that they know better. By refusing to adhere to
recognised standards, Linux is simply undermining its own credibility.

Similarly, almost all of the world's most popular and widely used
software is completely incompatible with Linux! It may surprise you to
learn that your copy of Microsoft Office, Outlook Express, or Lotus
Notes will not work under Linux. Those who wish to use their computer
for recreational purposes are also out of luck, for almost all of the
most popular games are unavailable for Linux. Although a wide range of
software is freely available for Linux, these pitiful offerings are
mostly unfinished, unreliable and do not bear comparison to their
commercial counterparts.

Computer security is also an area that seems to have been overlooked
by the developers of Linux. In these times when hacking and viruses
are commonplace, it defies belief to learn that no anti-virus software
is available for Linux. To add insult to i

Either way, show them how to make a kickstart disk or other ways to automate a custom installation.

Packaging managers are a must. Whether it's dpkg or rpm or yast, show them the different tricks and options. Also, if show how to roll a custom package, but choose one of the simpler ones.

For servers, cover iptables, tcpwrappers, inetd/xinetd, sshd, sudo and apache. System log file analysis is another must.

For desktop machines, cover KDE/Fluxbox/Gnome. Kiosk mode might be useful for some parts of your work environment.

Does anyone know whether StrongHold actually improves on Apache's security?

Well here is more info Redhat GFS knock youself out.

>Linux will never be as many flaws as there are with windows.
Are you sure ? 8)

imo tbh you can't be GPL compliant, use and compile 3rd party GPL code, and charge people money for it without the expressed consent of the contributing authors.

Your opinion, if I understand this sentence, is incorrect. The only requirement the GPL makes is that you make the source available, with the same rights. Therefore, he can charge all he wants for binaries, as long as he releases the source he used to get them. See the GPL

Don't believe me (and are too lazy to read the GPL)? Here are some "intuitive" proofs:

• RedHat sells linux binaries, along with much much GPL software, without the express consent of every contributor.
• SuSE sells linux binaries, along with much much GPL software, without the express consent of every contributor.
• Transgaming sells specialized Wine binaries on a subscription basis, without the express consent of every contributor. This is perhaps the best example, as they also provide the source in a manner similar to what should (probably) be done with xchat.

In summary: to make the mess go away, Zed can probably just post the xchat windows source tree in CVS, caveat emptor. Won't stop someone else from compiling it, or even selling it, but then same deal with Transgaming, and they're doing pretty well. IANAL and all.

I went to the redhat hcl. Surprisingly not a single card has been certified. Whatever happened to that Taiwanese chipset manufacturer !!

"C++ sucks if you want to use .Net anyway;"

It does seem strange. I don't think I would voluntarily use managed C++, only native C++ wrapped in C# (or even VB.NET!). The sheer annoyance of using a language that looks superficially familiar but is fundamentally different (all RAII code would break, IIUC etc.) would make it easier to learn a separate language for .NET-CLI work (like Java for JVM work).

But I like reading and writing as portable code as possible. I find reading code that uses eg. GCC extensions (PDF) unpleasant.

On reliability:
"After 3 or 4 power cycles, ReiserFS became corrupted to the point that the system would not boot up (the fsck failed and the bootup stopped there)." - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-Ju ly/msg00418.html

On code maturity:
"In contrast, ReiserFS' fsck is in its infancy..." - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/librar y/l-fs7/

Hans and co's attitude:
"For $25 you get an answer to any question we can answer with less than half an hour of working on it. fsck support sometimes takes more than half an hour" - http://www.namesys.com/support.html

When deciding which filesystem would be best for our first critical samba file servers, this post and other scattered rumors of unreliability scared us away from reiser3 for the time being:

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-Ju ly/msg00418.html

The date of the post caught my eye. The test was very recent. Ext3 won in this particular case, by a longshot, leading a Red Hat employee to respond "Your investigation proves that we default to the right mode ;)".

I haven't seen ext3 (ordered) lose in any reliability benchmarks versus jfs, xfs, or reiserfs, though it's hard to find many such benchmarks.

On the morning of August 24, GNAA announced complete purchase of namesys.com, makers of well known commie filesystem for Lunix, named ReiserFS. This purchase comes as a surprise to most unwashed Lunix users, as NameSys just recently announced release of Version 4 of the ReiserFS filesystem.

Hans Reiser shaked hands with GNAA president timecop, who said, "Dear nerds, Sorry, but there's not a single Linux program that us Windows users are itching for. Not one. May I suggest putting your programming resources into improving those pieces of shit that currently make up the vast majority of Linux apps? Maybe one day, you too can have a decent web browser!"

What does this have anything to do with ReiserFS", asked confused Hans Reiser, who arrived to GNAA Headquarters in Gnaa, Nigeria from his hometown of Moscow, USSR. "Your excellent programming skills will be put to work on creating 100% non-failing slashdot captcha processing algorithms, so that we can register thousands of Gary Niger accounts in shortest time possible", replied timecop.

Hans Reiser was given immediate lifetime GNAA membership, and arrangements were made to move his office from Moscow to Gnaa, Nigeria as soon as time permits.

Financial details of this transaction were not disclosed, though it is rumored this purchase cost GNAA financial operations somewhere around $3.1337 million.

About Namesys:
The Naming System Venture (abbreviates as Namesys) is a commie software development shop located in underground facilities in Moscow, USSR. Their only product is ReiserFS filesystem, which is supposed to be a "high performance" filesystem for Lunix.


About GNAA:
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.

Are you GAY ?
Are you a NIGGER ?
Are you a GAY NIGGER ?

If you answered "Yes" to all of the above questions, then GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) might be exactly what you've been looking for!
Join GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) today, and enjoy all the benefits of being a full-time GNAA member.
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the fastest-growing GAY NIGGER community with THOUSANDS of members all over United States of America and the World! You, too, can be a part of GNAA if you join today!

Why not? It's quick and easy - only 3 simple steps!

• First, you have to obtain a copy of GAYNIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE THE MOVIE and watch it. You can download the movie (~130mb) using BitTorrent.
• Second, you need to succeed in posting a GNAA First Post on slashdot.org, a popular "news for trolls" website.
• Third, you need to join the official GNAA irc channel #GNAA on irc.gnaa.us, and apply for membership.

Talk to one of the ops or any of the other members in the channel to sign up today! Upon submitting your application, you will be required to submit links to your successful First Post, and you will be tested on your knowledge of GAYNIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE.

If you are having trouble locating #GNAA, the official GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA irc channel, you might be on a wrong irc network. The correct network is

On the morning of August 24, GNAA announced complete purchase of namesys.com, makers of well known commie filesystem for Lunix, named ReiserFS. This purchase comes as a surprise to most unwashed Lunix users, as NameSys just recently announced release of Version 4 of the ReiserFS filesystem.

Hans Reiser shaked hands with GNAA president timecop, who said, "Dear nerds, Sorry, but there's not a single Linux program that us Windows users are itching for. Not one. May I suggest putting your programming resources into improving those pieces of shit that currently make up the vast majority of Linux apps? Maybe one day, you too can have a decent web browser!"

What does this have anything to do with ReiserFS", asked confused Hans Reiser, who arrived to GNAA Headquarters in Gnaa, Nigeria from his hometown of Moscow, USSR. "Your excellent programming skills will be put to work on creating 100% non-failing slashdot captcha processing algorithms, so that we can register thousands of Gary Niger accounts in shortest time possible", replied timecop.

Hans Reiser was given immediate lifetime GNAA membership, and arrangements were made to move his office from Moscow to Gnaa, Nigeria as soon as time permits.

Financial details of this transaction were not disclosed, though it is rumored this purchase cost GNAA financial operations somewhere around $3.1337 million.

About Namesys:
The Naming System Venture (abbreviates as Namesys) is a commie software development shop located in underground facilities in Moscow, USSR. Their only product is ReiserFS filesystem, which is supposed to be a "high performance" filesystem for Lunix.


About GNAA:
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.

Are you GAY ?
Are you a NIGGER ?
Are you a GAY NIGGER ?

If you answered "Yes" to all of the above questions, then GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) might be exactly what you've been looking for!
Join GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) today, and enjoy all the benefits of being a full-time GNAA member.
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the fastest-growing GAY NIGGER community with THOUSANDS of members all over United States of America and the World! You, too, can be a part of GNAA if you join today!

Why not? It's quick and easy - only 3 simple steps!

• First, you have to obtain a copy of GAYNIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE THE MOVIE and watch it. You can download the movie (~130mb) using BitTorrent.
• Second, you need to succeed in posting a GNAA First Post on slashdot.org, a popular "news for trolls" website.
• Third, you need to join the official GNAA irc channel #GNAA on irc.gnaa.us, and apply for membership.

Talk to one of the ops or any of the other members in the channel to sign up today! Upon submitting your application, you will be required to submit links to your successful First Post, and you will be tested on your knowledge of GAYNIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE.

If you are having trouble locating #GNAA, the official GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA irc channel, you might be on a wrong irc network. The correct network is

<a href="http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-l ist/2004-May/msg02114.html">Red Hat</a>
<a href="http://lwn.net/Articles/86835/">LWN</a&g t ;

Red Hat
LWN

Red Hat:
<URL:http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-t est-list/2004-May/msg02114.html>

LWN:
<URL:htt p://lwn.net/Articles/86835/>

Red Hat:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/20 04-May/msg02114.html

LWN:
http://lwn.net/Articles/86835/

<a href="http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-l ist/2004-May/msg02114.html">Red Hat</a>
<a href="http://lwn.net/Articles/86835/">LWN</a&g t ;

Red Hat
LWN

Red Hat:
<URL:http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-t est-list/2004-May/msg02114.html>

LWN:
<URL:htt p://lwn.net/Articles/86835/>

Red Hat:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/20 04-May/msg02114.html

LWN:
http://lwn.net/Articles/86835/

Fedora Project, sponsored by Red Hat

With developers like this, who needs enemies? I honestly don't expect them to get very far as long as they have employees that display that special combination of arrogance and absolute stupidity that's giving all Linux users a bad name. As long as bugs like that are intentionally left unfixed, I will never use Red Hat.

Hmmmmm, let's see...

1. RPM. Read the Linux Standards Base documents?
2. Anaconda, the install/setup program.
3. Kudzu, the hardware detection system used by Knoppix and others.

I could continue, but I think those three on their own more than justify the company's existence, if nothing else.
While I will admit that as an overall distribution I was not overly enamoured of Red Hat 9, RH have contributed solutions to a number of vexing problems for us, and also carry on a very active development effort at sources.redhat.com.
I'm also detecting some of the usual commie whining (No, I don't think OSS is communist, but this is) about a company that's daring to actually make a large profit here...as if every company purely by virtue of its existence had to inevitably emulate Microsoft's bad behaviour. However, it might behoove you next time to be a little more sure of your facts before you start bitching.

Hmmmmm, let's see...

1. RPM. Read the Linux Standards Base documents?
2. Anaconda, the install/setup program.
3. Kudzu, the hardware detection system used by Knoppix and others.

I could continue, but I think those three on their own more than justify the company's existence, if nothing else.
While I will admit that as an overall distribution I was not overly enamoured of Red Hat 9, RH have contributed solutions to a number of vexing problems for us, and also carry on a very active development effort at sources.redhat.com.
I'm also detecting some of the usual commie whining (No, I don't think OSS is communist, but this is) about a company that's daring to actually make a large profit here...as if every company purely by virtue of its existence had to inevitably emulate Microsoft's bad behaviour. However, it might behoove you next time to be a little more sure of your facts before you start bitching.

Doubtful. Stripping things out is easy. Writing new stuff that works is hard. X is already moving in the direction Gosling mentioned. Both GTK+ 2.8 and Qt 4 will support rendering via OpenGL. Once you're rendering with OpenGL, you're 90% to wher eGosling is going. At that point, the X-server (actually, the DRI), becomes mostly a manager of window contexts, and doesn't lie at all in the hot-path from application to GPU. Sure, the X servers unused features will take up some space (not too much, though, the X server is only 1.7MB on my system, much smaller than the OpenGL library!) but that's not a huge price to pay for backwards compatibility.

Seeing how RedHat 7.2 had a firewall enabled by default in it, how exactly would it get owned on a fresh install, shortly after connecting it to the internet, without even browsing the web like Windows XP does?

First, you have to obtai

5) no graphical interface (necessary to "visualize" the table formats)

jffs

Maybe one should make some kernel-patch that keeps track of the most written sectors, and the count.

Maybe it's already here.

You should get bzip2. Cuts down the filesize to about 34 MB...

If you need to use cygwin in a commercial setting where you don't want to license your source code under the GPL then you should consider getting a cygwin contract.

Well, sometimes business looks positively scary from an open source perspective.

Maybe these perspectives can meet somewhere in the middle and learn how to make things more efficient and better for everyone, including the customers, employees and business owners.

Most open source advocates were customers, employees or businesses owners once upon a time. But now they are scary...

Are they scary because they have long hair and a beard? Or are they scary because its hard to find RedHat's Linux distribution? Or are they scary because RedCarpet no longer exists? Or are they scary because successful business models never produce bad software.

Or maybe its a good thing open source doesn't come with beef.

From my POV the MySQL -> PostgreSQL migration isn't so important as the Oracle -> PostgreSQL migration. Having been a part of the migration team porting the Red Hat CMS from Oracle to PostgreSQL I can say that even when we started with PG 7.2 it was more than capable as an oracle replacement. With improved optimizer performance in 7.3 and now even better Pl/SQL compatability, native Win32, savepoints, PITR and replication available, there is even less reason to use Oracle. I think PG will be able to take a large chunk out of Oracle in the Low & Mid-range markets.