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OpenBSD 3.8 Released
Cowards Anonymous writes "OpenBSD 3.8 is out. It comes with improved hardware support, some improvements to the OSPF daemon, some new RAID management tools, among many others. Even if you plan on installing via FTP, why not order a CD copy, tshirt, or poster as well? "
Lots of folks use it. But many use it in a place you'd never detect it. Firewalls. Your 'netcraft' numbers won't report those, because in the vast majority of cases those will be totally invisible.
Which is why F/OSS is so wonderful if you're a decision maker. There is no death, so long as somebody out there with the skills is willing to maintain it. And by the law of large numbers, any sufficiently high profile project like this is a close to immortal as any software project can be.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
As a developer you should care about this release. The malloc/free implimentation has been changed to release memory immediately to the OS, causing any read-after-free bugs to immediately throw a SIGSEGV.
See theo's post to misc@.
Everybody is entitled to their own opinion, of course, but I personally think this release is a big deal. Contrary to what is usually the case with point releases, this one actually improves the state of the art - namely in security of Unix-like operating systems.
Some important security features have gone into this release (see, for example, this presentation), security that are almost certainly not found in any operating system you can mention. Besides the obvious benefit of making OpenBSD more secure, these features help catch bugs, and already some years-old bugs have already been caught. When these bugs are fixed, other systems using the software the bugs were in becomes more secure, too.
Personally, I am very impressed with how many security features the OpenBSD team manage to put in their system, without great sacrifices in standard-compliance and performance. I'm much more impressed by that than what great new features for games developers Microsoft has integrated, or how their new GUI toolkit makes their interface less ugly, or how Linux supports yet another hardware gadget, or how yet another distro promises that they will cause Linux to topple Microsoft.
In today's world that is run by computers, we need security. Worms, botnets, trojans, automated and directed break ins, website defacements, spam, and information theft demonstrate that we aren't there yet. OpenBSD seems to be the only OS project that seems to fully realize this _and_ have a production-ready system available. There is still much to be desired, but they're much further than the competition.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Performance is not an OpenBSD priority, but the interviews with
OpenBSD developers that have been popping up the last couple of
weeks seem to imply that the performance hit of the new malloc()
is minimal.
*sigh* back to work...
So no installer gui makes it somehow _bad_?
Sure, it's not newbie friendly (however, installed in conjunction with the Install Guide, a newbie can install it - I was an OpenBSD newbie once and I didn't have a problem with it). Once you've installed it on a couple of machines it is EXTREMELY fast to install. These days I typically PXE boot the installer, and I can go from a blank machine to a working OpenBSD system in around 5 minutes. This is something that cannot be done with a GUI installer.
OpenBSD is not a system for non-technical desktop users; it is a server operating systems for system administrators or clued people. As such, certainly I'd prefer their efforts to be focused on things like the new malloc(3) implementation than making eye candy installers.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I don't do mail order. If its not in a bookshop then as far as I'm concerned its not out there.
Any bookstore worth their salt will be more than happy to special order any in print book in exchange for prepayment, and take the order over the phone so you don't have to make two trips to the store; just pick it up on your next trip to the bookstore. If you are worried about someone nicking your credit card number when you give it out over the phone, just get a credit card that lets you generate one time use numbers (Citibank offers this service, for example). Now if you insist upon being able to saunter into J. Random Bookstore and walk out with said book, well, you're mightily limiting your choices in the technical field, not to speak of books in general.
Or you could have the book delivered to your office if you have one.
Or you could rent a private mailbox where they will sign the package for you and place it in your secure box; there are private mailbox places that are designed so their patrons can securely get in after-hours to get at the boxes. These are cheap, and open up mail order for you.
Bottom line, there are many ways to order these or any other books that should address your earlier bad experiences with mail order.