The good news is sometimes the police, vendors, or crafty network/system admins actually catch thieving scumbags. Tell Dell the system is stolen, and let them flag it as such in their system. Call your anti-virus vendor, and have them flag the system as stolen and they can track when the system checks-in for updates. File a police report in your local municipality and with campus security, document the serial number, MAC address, etc. Call local pawn shops and report the serial number as stolen, which may not help at all without some sort of police report. Google for some advice on recovering stolen property from pawn shops. It is, however, a long shot to actually recover stolen property from a pawn shop. Personally, I would even report the GMail account as compromised to Google, and explain your circumstances to the GMail support team.
The bad news is, after you put all this time and effort into recovering your laptop, you won't just get it back. If recovered by the police, the laptop will spend the rest of its usable life stowed away in an evidence locker. The police won't just hand your laptop back to you. At some point, depending on how much your time is worth, the number of hours spent tracking down your laptop will exceed the actual value of the laptop. Realistically, you still won't have the laptop in hand when it is all said, and done.
Automobile insurance typically only cover personal property, if it is permanently affixed in your car. In other words, you can get a new car stereo, if that happens to be stolen. Your laptop, on the other hand, is usually out of the question for recovery under an automobile insurance policy. If you have decent homeowner's or renter's insurance that would be your best bet in recovering, at least a portion of, your laptop's value.
Greg Kroah-Hartman, released one new stable kernel today and made backport commits to four other "stable" long-life development trees. GKH went on to make a vague comment on folks using the 2.6.27 tree, needing to re-base to the current changes. Since nothing else new and exciting was going on, we thought we could merely speculate on our blog, and then post a sensationalist summary to Slashdot. Then we just had to sit back and watch the money roll in from the ad-revenue.
Seriously though, I'm not trying to troll because there seems to be confusion about what makes a kernel tree "stable" these days. The author of the article confirms this suspicion with speculative reporting on their blog. For long as I can remember, this version confusion has been a problem ever since the new numbering system has been in place. In the previous numbering system, there was no speculation or confusion necessary. All one had to ask themselves, is the minor number an odd number? If yes, this is a "development" kernel. If the minor number is even, then it must be a "stable" kernel.
I have a paid vendor to alert me what has changed, and they are a party which can be held accountable for breaches of trust and security. The CERT also has a responsibility to disclose breaches of trust and security. Nobody is being obscure, other than the blogger, and they do not have an informed opinion on the nature of the changes. That much is evident by their post. The comment by GKH was meant for vendors and kernel developers who follow the LKML. Unless the blogger in question has commit access to the kernel tree, they have neither the expertise, or implied responsibility, to speculate on the degree of impact from a seemingly harmless comment.
As for organizations who only patch for security bugs. I personally find it prudent to review what it is I am patching. Then make an informed decision, before taking action whether the patch be necessary, or unnecessary. If there happens to be a bluetooth bug fixed in the kernel, it tends not to be a pressing issue on a server. On the other hand, an Open-ISCSI bug fix or device-mapper-multipath bug fix tends to be more pressing on a server impacted by such a bug. There are other factors to consider of course, such as the impact of availability to the business when rebooting a server for a kernel update.
In most cases, a business critical database server shouldn't be running a kernel.org issued kernel. Production servers are the reason for the existence of Linux vendors and their backported and tested kernels. A pre-production webserver, or a desktop Linux system, is a completely different animal though. Out of nearly 100 systems I touch, the only one running a kernel directly from kernel.org is my laptop. I want to be both on the bleeding edge, and have a reasonably stable kernel, on my desktop. I tend to stick to the almost monthly 3 numbered (2.6.x) releases which have had a RC feature freeze, prior to their release. I'm not sure anyone else officially considers a 4 numbered (2.6.x.x) release a development tree. But what else would you call the "in-between" a major release?
I disagree. I've read a few of the other blog posts from Wolfire that have been posted on Slashdot in the past. It seems to me, their views (Wolfire) are very much aligned with the majority view held on Slashdot. That is, that DRM is an ineffective combatant against piracy and that it only hurts legitimate customers.
If you read the link that you posted, more carefully, they point out that they are not taking action to stop piracy of their games. Their stance is that any kind of digital restriction imposed on their games could negatively affect a paying customer. He goes on to point out that the trade-off of hurting just one customer is a compromise they are not willing to make, just in order to combat the seemingly marginal effect of piracy on their sales.
If you check out some of the other blog posts on their website, they talk about how piracy is overstated and has a marginal effect on actual sales. In other words, piracy is not creating a loss in sales, because the pirate would never have been a paying customer in the first place. The motivation for piracy may vary from the inability to pay, compulsion to download, or even the challenge of cracking digital imposed restrictions. However, the average pirate may not be downloading software, music, or movies simply to use it. That is simply an ignorant point of view taken by the likes of the BSA, MPAA, and RIAA to justify overstated loss projections. What is more likely, and realistic, is that consumers get no value out of the respective products and sales have declined with value proportionately. It may be true that some consumers have turned to piracy for media they expect to consume, but the actual loss effects on the bottom line have very little to do with the majority of pirates.
So the question remains, how many paying customers do you have to piss off with digitally imposed restrictions before it has a real, and noticeable, effect on your bottom line?
I know I'm not the only person to get hung up on the feasibility of inter-operating with alien technology. He could have used cross-compiling, but that assumes the aliens were using some known CPU instruction set that was native to Earth.
Yeah, it's the rule where good guys always use Macs.
I always assumed the aliens were using Apple computers too, seeing as how Goldblum's character infected their ship with a virus written and compiled on his Apple laptop.
I never watched Dr. Who before, but I would like to give it a try. What should I watch to start?
You'll notice that many are recommending to start with the 21st century revival, beginning with the 2005 "Doctor Who: Season One". If you have Netflix, there is a ton of Doctor Who, available through Netflix Instant. If you get hooked on the new series, you can go back and watch some of the older Doctor Who serials. The old serials are not something that have to be watched in any particular order. A new plot begins with each story and wraps up in three to six 30 minute segments. Its a good thing one doesn't have to have strict continuity for the older serials, because quite a few of the earlier doctor's master tapes were overwritten. I tend to seek out serials involving monsters, aliens, and characters from the new series that I thought were interesting. I also enjoyed quite a few of the William Hartnell (1st Doctor) and Tom Baker (4th Doctor) series. There are some real gems in the older Doctor Who, but a few of them just bore me to sleep. The great thing about Netflix Instant is not having to waste a rental on something that will bore you, less than thirty minutes into it.
So they've made a step in the right direction for the newest version of Windows (version 6). That doesn't affect the majority of the Windows install base which is still XP.
Lysergic-diethylamide wasn't synthesized until the late 1930's. Through the Looking Glass was published almost 70 years before.
There are certainly a handful of drug references in the two books. The 60's counter-culture adopted the Alice adventures as their drug metaphor, not the other way around. It is a pretty shallow interpretation of the books, in my opinion. If all someone takes away from the story is, "whoa, this story is trippy dude", then maybe its time for them to lay off the hookah.
HTC is based in Taiwan. If Taiwan has no patent treaty or agreement with the US, would HTC or the Taiwan government even recognize Apple's patents? How does that work? Is it really patent infringement, for a foreign company to do business in the same country where a patent is held? Even when that patent has no legal standing in the home country of the alleged infringing company?
The original poster was vague about the type of open source software which is saving the taxpayers money. It may be a distribution, or it may be an entirely different animal, such as one single desktop application, or enterprise-level server software.
This means you could for-instance switch from Windows to KDE on 100 desktops and offer the KDE project the bargain basement fee of $10 per PC, per year to deliver the desktop the way you like and respond to concerns.
This means you could for-instance switch from Windows to KDE on 100 desktops and offer the KDE project the bargain basement fee of $10 per PC, per year to deliver the desktop the way you like and respond to concerns.
No, it doesn't. If the policy is, that you can't donate, then you can't *bleeping* donate. It is entirely possible this advice could lead to charges of fraud, other felony charges for misappropriation of funds, and jail time.
The support level circumstances vary per vendor, and size, of the Open Source project. For your particular example, there is no company, which I know of, that offers Support Level Agreements for "just KDE". However, if the OSS package is a "supported" package by your distro vendor of choice, then you legitimately purchase support contracts. Using your example of 100 KDE desktops, you could buy 100 Kubuntu Advanced Support contracts from Canonical at roughly $120 per year which comes out to $12,000, not $1,000 as in your example. Chances are that you are using more than KDE, as one component, in an entire distribution. If you are going to advocate buying support, then advocate buying a support contract. There are obviously other ways you can contribute to an Open Source distribution project, other than monetary contributions. Things that come to mind are: working on documentation or translations; filing bug reports; packaging software.
Many large and well-established Open Source products have companies that will offer paid support for that particular product. If my organization wants a support contract for wine, because they might need to run a Windows-only Office Suite or a particular version of Photoshop. Then they could buy a copy of Crossover Pro from Codeweavers for roughly $70 per copy, and a support extension for $35 year per copy. This money gets you both support, and directly supports the enhancement and development of wine. Although the prices vary, this same support system has been applied to other projects such as Samba. You can buy enterprise support from a company such as Likewise, a vendor who offers a "Samba-like" product and directly supports the enhancement and development of Samba through paid developers. Otherwise, you can buy support from a distro vendor such as Novell or RedHat at a cost of $60-800 per server each year, just for the base OS and standard server applications. Enterprise distro maintainers also have paid developers whom contribute a great deal to the enhancement and development of enterprise-level server applications.
Some exceptions are when you have a small, hobbyist, higher-ed, or government Open Source project. Maybe it is a new and small project. Perhaps they have only 1 or 2 developers that work on the project part-time. These type of projects probably do not have an established support system. The developers may not even be able to take monetary contributions, or have a system set up to do so. Some developers may have to opt for gifts purchased through an Amazon wist list for legal reasons. Accepting donations may be a legal issue with an employer who pays the developer to work on that particular Open Source project. It is another issue if the developer is a government employee and is forbidden to take large gifts, or accept money, which could be construed as a bribe (assuming they work on this project as part of their job).
I was involved in consulting work, a few years back, for a fairly large hospital. The hospital made use of Open Source Firmware for commodity Linksys Wireless Routers.
I have the same setup e6400 with an Nvidia Quadro NVS 160M running Ubuntu.
Here is how I detected the problem. Add a CPU frequency governor applet to one of your taskbars. If you choose the "performance" governor profile with the applet, and your CPU scales down to 800Mhz on occasion, then you are experiencing this problem. You can also use the gkrellm application to monitor CPU, mobo ambient, and GPU temperatures.
I've been monitoring the ambient temperature in my cube at work, and the temperature never goes more than a few degrees over room temperature. However the system begins running too hot, and scales down, for no obvious reason at all. A cooling pad or laptop stand, has mitigated the problem for the most part.
The problem is very noticeable when a laptop with 4 Gb of RAM, and dual ~2.5Ghz CPUs, suddenly starts acting like it is running on a 486.
I've convinced everyone in our Systems Admin team (there is about 7 of us) to use password safe. We have one group safe with approximately 100 to 200 passwords, out on a CIFS share. There are front-ends for password safe that run on both Linux and Windows, so neither the Linux or Windows administrators are left out. Most of us keep a separate personal password safe.
I've used PGP encrypted spreadsheets in the past. That becomes unmanageable as you add more people to a group safe. If you have to add a half a dozen, or more, PGP recipients then it becomes a huge problem. Plus you have to check the last time stamp to make sure you're not overwriting another person's changes.
Of the password safe front-ends which I have used. Each front-end is pretty good about locking the file in read-only mode anytime a second person opens the file. We had a bad experience with a bug in an older version of the MyPasswordSafe front-end. The bug would cause a crash upon saving the file on AMD64 architectures, corrupting the password safe. This bug had something to do with address space layout randomization, if I'm not mistaken. Even though that bug was present, the front-end would save a backup of the safe in the event of a crash. So even if your password safe was corrupted, there was always a backup copy present. This bug has since been patched.
Overall, it has been a handy program for all of us. The front-end programs make it a much easier format to use than PGP encrypting a file for multiple recipients. Although, you could accomplish the same purpose by using one recipient key for which the entire group shared the master pass phrase. I still wouldn't go back to our old way of sharing group passwords. I guess I must be spoiled by the password safe format, its versatility, and the ease of use of the various front-end programs.
Slashdot Mirror
Really, do you think that is correct?
The good news is sometimes the police, vendors, or crafty network/system admins actually catch thieving scumbags. Tell Dell the system is stolen, and let them flag it as such in their system. Call your anti-virus vendor, and have them flag the system as stolen and they can track when the system checks-in for updates. File a police report in your local municipality and with campus security, document the serial number, MAC address, etc. Call local pawn shops and report the serial number as stolen, which may not help at all without some sort of police report. Google for some advice on recovering stolen property from pawn shops. It is, however, a long shot to actually recover stolen property from a pawn shop. Personally, I would even report the GMail account as compromised to Google, and explain your circumstances to the GMail support team.
The bad news is, after you put all this time and effort into recovering your laptop, you won't just get it back. If recovered by the police, the laptop will spend the rest of its usable life stowed away in an evidence locker. The police won't just hand your laptop back to you. At some point, depending on how much your time is worth, the number of hours spent tracking down your laptop will exceed the actual value of the laptop. Realistically, you still won't have the laptop in hand when it is all said, and done.
Automobile insurance typically only cover personal property, if it is permanently affixed in your car. In other words, you can get a new car stereo, if that happens to be stolen. Your laptop, on the other hand, is usually out of the question for recovery under an automobile insurance policy. If you have decent homeowner's or renter's insurance that would be your best bet in recovering, at least a portion of, your laptop's value.
Here, let me fix TFA for you:
Seriously though, I'm not trying to troll because there seems to be confusion about what makes a kernel tree "stable" these days. The author of the article confirms this suspicion with speculative reporting on their blog. For long as I can remember, this version confusion has been a problem ever since the new numbering system has been in place. In the previous numbering system, there was no speculation or confusion necessary. All one had to ask themselves, is the minor number an odd number? If yes, this is a "development" kernel. If the minor number is even, then it must be a "stable" kernel.
I have a paid vendor to alert me what has changed, and they are a party which can be held accountable for breaches of trust and security. The CERT also has a responsibility to disclose breaches of trust and security. Nobody is being obscure, other than the blogger, and they do not have an informed opinion on the nature of the changes. That much is evident by their post. The comment by GKH was meant for vendors and kernel developers who follow the LKML. Unless the blogger in question has commit access to the kernel tree, they have neither the expertise, or implied responsibility, to speculate on the degree of impact from a seemingly harmless comment.
As for organizations who only patch for security bugs. I personally find it prudent to review what it is I am patching. Then make an informed decision, before taking action whether the patch be necessary, or unnecessary. If there happens to be a bluetooth bug fixed in the kernel, it tends not to be a pressing issue on a server. On the other hand, an Open-ISCSI bug fix or device-mapper-multipath bug fix tends to be more pressing on a server impacted by such a bug. There are other factors to consider of course, such as the impact of availability to the business when rebooting a server for a kernel update.
In most cases, a business critical database server shouldn't be running a kernel.org issued kernel. Production servers are the reason for the existence of Linux vendors and their backported and tested kernels. A pre-production webserver, or a desktop Linux system, is a completely different animal though. Out of nearly 100 systems I touch, the only one running a kernel directly from kernel.org is my laptop. I want to be both on the bleeding edge, and have a reasonably stable kernel, on my desktop. I tend to stick to the almost monthly 3 numbered (2.6.x) releases which have had a RC feature freeze, prior to their release. I'm not sure anyone else officially considers a 4 numbered (2.6.x.x) release a development tree. But what else would you call the "in-between" a major release?
Breech is a pun, dumbass!
The moderator who modded -1 offtopic, must be new here.
Does the picture remind anyone else of the weed vehicle from Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke?
I disagree. I've read a few of the other blog posts from Wolfire that have been posted on Slashdot in the past. It seems to me, their views (Wolfire) are very much aligned with the majority view held on Slashdot. That is, that DRM is an ineffective combatant against piracy and that it only hurts legitimate customers.
If you read the link that you posted, more carefully, they point out that they are not taking action to stop piracy of their games. Their stance is that any kind of digital restriction imposed on their games could negatively affect a paying customer. He goes on to point out that the trade-off of hurting just one customer is a compromise they are not willing to make, just in order to combat the seemingly marginal effect of piracy on their sales.
If you check out some of the other blog posts on their website, they talk about how piracy is overstated and has a marginal effect on actual sales. In other words, piracy is not creating a loss in sales, because the pirate would never have been a paying customer in the first place. The motivation for piracy may vary from the inability to pay, compulsion to download, or even the challenge of cracking digital imposed restrictions. However, the average pirate may not be downloading software, music, or movies simply to use it. That is simply an ignorant point of view taken by the likes of the BSA, MPAA, and RIAA to justify overstated loss projections. What is more likely, and realistic, is that consumers get no value out of the respective products and sales have declined with value proportionately. It may be true that some consumers have turned to piracy for media they expect to consume, but the actual loss effects on the bottom line have very little to do with the majority of pirates.
So the question remains, how many paying customers do you have to piss off with digitally imposed restrictions before it has a real, and noticeable, effect on your bottom line?
I know I'm not the only person to get hung up on the feasibility of inter-operating with alien technology. He could have used cross-compiling, but that assumes the aliens were using some known CPU instruction set that was native to Earth.
Yeah, it's the rule where good guys always use Macs.
I always assumed the aliens were using Apple computers too, seeing as how Goldblum's character infected their ship with a virus written and compiled on his Apple laptop.
While Microsoft did included an nslookup command with Windows, it is quite basic compared to the dig utility. Go download dig for Win32.
I never watched Dr. Who before, but I would like to give it a try. What should I watch to start?
You'll notice that many are recommending to start with the 21st century revival, beginning with the 2005 "Doctor Who: Season One". If you have Netflix, there is a ton of Doctor Who, available through Netflix Instant. If you get hooked on the new series, you can go back and watch some of the older Doctor Who serials. The old serials are not something that have to be watched in any particular order. A new plot begins with each story and wraps up in three to six 30 minute segments. Its a good thing one doesn't have to have strict continuity for the older serials, because quite a few of the earlier doctor's master tapes were overwritten. I tend to seek out serials involving monsters, aliens, and characters from the new series that I thought were interesting. I also enjoyed quite a few of the William Hartnell (1st Doctor) and Tom Baker (4th Doctor) series. There are some real gems in the older Doctor Who, but a few of them just bore me to sleep. The great thing about Netflix Instant is not having to waste a rental on something that will bore you, less than thirty minutes into it.
Nice find.
Here's the video ;)
So they've made a step in the right direction for the newest version of Windows (version 6). That doesn't affect the majority of the Windows install base which is still XP.
A buddy of mine, arranged a death by firing squad for his busted Xbox.
If so, what exactly stops it from wreaking havoc anymore than it does on Windows??
Design of OSX, Linux, or Unix. The user is separated from full system privileges.
Here are deconstruction photos of the former dome station.
Lysergic-diethylamide wasn't synthesized until the late 1930's. Through the Looking Glass was published almost 70 years before.
There are certainly a handful of drug references in the two books. The 60's counter-culture adopted the Alice adventures as their drug metaphor, not the other way around. It is a pretty shallow interpretation of the books, in my opinion. If all someone takes away from the story is, "whoa, this story is trippy dude", then maybe its time for them to lay off the hookah.
HTC is based in Taiwan. If Taiwan has no patent treaty or agreement with the US, would HTC or the Taiwan government even recognize Apple's patents? How does that work? Is it really patent infringement, for a foreign company to do business in the same country where a patent is held? Even when that patent has no legal standing in the home country of the alleged infringing company?
I think the parent poster was being sarcastic.
The original poster was vague about the type of open source software which is saving the taxpayers money. It may be a distribution, or it may be an entirely different animal, such as one single desktop application, or enterprise-level server software.
No, it doesn't. If the policy is, that you can't donate, then you can't *bleeping* donate. It is entirely possible this advice could lead to charges of fraud, other felony charges for misappropriation of funds, and jail time.
The support level circumstances vary per vendor, and size, of the Open Source project. For your particular example, there is no company, which I know of, that offers Support Level Agreements for "just KDE". However, if the OSS package is a "supported" package by your distro vendor of choice, then you legitimately purchase support contracts. Using your example of 100 KDE desktops, you could buy 100 Kubuntu Advanced Support contracts from Canonical at roughly $120 per year which comes out to $12,000, not $1,000 as in your example. Chances are that you are using more than KDE, as one component, in an entire distribution. If you are going to advocate buying support, then advocate buying a support contract. There are obviously other ways you can contribute to an Open Source distribution project, other than monetary contributions. Things that come to mind are: working on documentation or translations; filing bug reports; packaging software.
Many large and well-established Open Source products have companies that will offer paid support for that particular product. If my organization wants a support contract for wine, because they might need to run a Windows-only Office Suite or a particular version of Photoshop. Then they could buy a copy of Crossover Pro from Codeweavers for roughly $70 per copy, and a support extension for $35 year per copy. This money gets you both support, and directly supports the enhancement and development of wine. Although the prices vary, this same support system has been applied to other projects such as Samba. You can buy enterprise support from a company such as Likewise, a vendor who offers a "Samba-like" product and directly supports the enhancement and development of Samba through paid developers. Otherwise, you can buy support from a distro vendor such as Novell or RedHat at a cost of $60-800 per server each year, just for the base OS and standard server applications. Enterprise distro maintainers also have paid developers whom contribute a great deal to the enhancement and development of enterprise-level server applications.
Some exceptions are when you have a small, hobbyist, higher-ed, or government Open Source project. Maybe it is a new and small project. Perhaps they have only 1 or 2 developers that work on the project part-time. These type of projects probably do not have an established support system. The developers may not even be able to take monetary contributions, or have a system set up to do so. Some developers may have to opt for gifts purchased through an Amazon wist list for legal reasons. Accepting donations may be a legal issue with an employer who pays the developer to work on that particular Open Source project. It is another issue if the developer is a government employee and is forbidden to take large gifts, or accept money, which could be construed as a bribe (assuming they work on this project as part of their job).
I was involved in consulting work, a few years back, for a fairly large hospital. The hospital made use of Open Source Firmware for commodity Linksys Wireless Routers.
Let me plug that into my computer here. *crunch crunch* Ah here's the answer: 42.
Nobody writes jokes in base 230.
Response on the Direct2Dell community blog.
http://en.community.dell.com/blogs/direct2dell/archive/2009/12/02/dell-on-laptops-and-throttling.aspx
I have the same setup e6400 with an Nvidia Quadro NVS 160M running Ubuntu.
Here is how I detected the problem. Add a CPU frequency governor applet to one of your taskbars. If you choose the "performance" governor profile with the applet, and your CPU scales down to 800Mhz on occasion, then you are experiencing this problem. You can also use the gkrellm application to monitor CPU, mobo ambient, and GPU temperatures.
I've been monitoring the ambient temperature in my cube at work, and the temperature never goes more than a few degrees over room temperature. However the system begins running too hot, and scales down, for no obvious reason at all. A cooling pad or laptop stand, has mitigated the problem for the most part.
The problem is very noticeable when a laptop with 4 Gb of RAM, and dual ~2.5Ghz CPUs, suddenly starts acting like it is running on a 486.
I've convinced everyone in our Systems Admin team (there is about 7 of us) to use password safe. We have one group safe with approximately 100 to 200 passwords, out on a CIFS share. There are front-ends for password safe that run on both Linux and Windows, so neither the Linux or Windows administrators are left out. Most of us keep a separate personal password safe.
I've used PGP encrypted spreadsheets in the past. That becomes unmanageable as you add more people to a group safe. If you have to add a half a dozen, or more, PGP recipients then it becomes a huge problem. Plus you have to check the last time stamp to make sure you're not overwriting another person's changes.
Of the password safe front-ends which I have used. Each front-end is pretty good about locking the file in read-only mode anytime a second person opens the file. We had a bad experience with a bug in an older version of the MyPasswordSafe front-end. The bug would cause a crash upon saving the file on AMD64 architectures, corrupting the password safe. This bug had something to do with address space layout randomization, if I'm not mistaken. Even though that bug was present, the front-end would save a backup of the safe in the event of a crash. So even if your password safe was corrupted, there was always a backup copy present. This bug has since been patched.
Overall, it has been a handy program for all of us. The front-end programs make it a much easier format to use than PGP encrypting a file for multiple recipients. Although, you could accomplish the same purpose by using one recipient key for which the entire group shared the master pass phrase. I still wouldn't go back to our old way of sharing group passwords. I guess I must be spoiled by the password safe format, its versatility, and the ease of use of the various front-end programs.