I don't know what that idea may be. It could be the ability to safely and seamlessly hop amperage and voltage to much higher levels based on communication between power-only hubs and devices. It may be an even better connection. It may be much faster data that requires two more wires. I really don't know.
This makes absolutely no sense. According to your argument, we should never standardize anything, because it might screw up someone's future idea. There are no features at this point in time that require a change to the already existing USB standard to make mobile phones work. They will charge in a certain amount of time via the powered line. They will transfer data at a certain rate because that's how USB works. I'd rather have a standard connector available that works in a known way right now than worrying about what the future will bring. Imagine what your house would be like if electricity never had any standards set. You'd have to make sure that the wall socket the electrician installed and the power cable for the new device you bought were compatible. In addition to different wattage of power supplies, they'd also run on dozens of different voltages. But, we can take it for granted. No one discovered something later on that overturned all of the standards we'd decided on for electricity. Are you seriously suggesting that USB is such an immature technology that the connectors and cables we already use are subject to change?
Note that some changes to the technology (such as your additional wires example) are not precluded. Remember 80-pin IDE cables? Increased transfer rates on additional wires without changing the motherboard's interface. There's only one reason to have no standards on data/power cables for electronic devices, and that's to sell the high-margin accessories. The data cable for my phone is stupid: it's a USB cable with a proprietary connection to the phone. As a result, the data transfer rate is only 115200 BPS instead of the 400+ Kbps of USB2. RS232 over USB -- how pointless.
However, we make it crystal clear there is zero tolerance for proprietary software that we can't provide license information for or running rogue servers. They know they will be in big trouble if they install recreational software that interferes with the operation of their machines or which launches an attack.
This is basically an honor system. There's plenty of software with legitimate and illegimate uses on a corporate network (e.g. Cygwin). If you let me install Cygwin, then I can do all kinds of fun stuff that I'm not supposed to be able to, and you can't tell the difference. You need to enforce the lack of rogue servers, backdooring and so forth. I don't really have a problem with the IT department telling me what to run. I've got my own computers at home for doing the stuff I want to do. Just make sure I have everything I need to do my job.
I'm a techie dweeb, and I'll fully admit that I have screwed up a corporate installation inadvertently. It's not fun being forced to use IE instead of Firefox, or the company's development tools instead of my own, but I need to have some respect for the IT department. They have a lot of people to look after, and many of them think that it's harmless to install just that one little application, or to remove that one annoying little folder/application/autorun entry etc. It seems that way until you need to install some licensed software on your corporate workstation and the enterprise management tools the help desk uses don't work any more. Just let those guys do their job and quit worrying about the "rights" you've had taken away from you. It's not like it's the first sacrifice you've made for the corporation.
WYSIWYG mathematics typesetting is the kind of application that people used to pay $100 for ca. 1995, and now it's not only free, it's open-source, and it's an app that you can just run in your browser, without having to install anything.
LaTeX + a WYSIWYG front-end whose name escapes me was free and available ca. 1996. It did a very good job with mathematical expressions, as I recall. Of course, that's because LaTeX does a very good job with mathematical expressions. The final product is typically a GIF file showing the equation. LaTeX may be obscure, but there are some good front-ends for it, and there's no desktop publishing app that can even come close today, IMO.
Meh. Caveat Programmer. If you work in a dynamically-typed language, you should know what the gotchas are. Perl has exactly the same problems (although it does have a dot operator to clarify some things). You always have to coerce the type by a construct like "" + 1 or the like in any dynamically typed language where the result is dependent on string type versus numeric type.
Don't do this, please. It's one thing to screen-scrape when there's no alternative available, but it's not like Google is removing SOAP support without a replacement. Then again, why bother worrying about manners when we're still worrying about the law?...
Of course the difference between this "Intellectual Property" concept and real property is what happens when it's stolen. So long as everyone plays fair, only one person will be profiting from the "property" at that time. It can't be in both my possession and the thief's possession simultaneously. I can prove that the thief stole it by producing some kind of record of acquisition (a receipt, perhaps) and show that the thief has possession of it unlawfully.
This doesn't work too well with theft of "Intellectual Property". Look at the way SCO tries to push the same argument about Linux -- you're a Linux user, so you're in possession of our property. The receipt in this case is quite vague, however. SCO is not being very specific about what's in my possession unlawfully as a Linux user.
If I work with someone on a project, we're both in possession of the same "Intellectual Property" throughout the course of our collaboration. If the collaboration ends, who "owns" the "property"? If there's fundamental disagreement among team members about what should be done with the "property", both of us can exercise our decision independently, even if the two views are mutually inconsistent. For instance, I might decide to release some code under the GPL, while my ex co-worker takes the same code and sells it to someone. It's a lot harder to enforce the GPL here, because two of us "own" the same "property".
That's why the term "Intellectual Property" is so misleading. The only way I could remove the "property" from my ex co-worker's possession if a judgement was made that I "owned" said "property", would be to hit him in the head really hard and hope for amnesia. I'm not saying that there's no laws about ownership of software and other digital content, just that the comparison to physical "property" is rather flawed.
Then don't call it a "logical leap". You're deliberatly confusing the argument. The formal logic is more or less: If the conditional is true, it does not imply that the converse (i.e.not white == not legitimate) is true. There's a special term used in formal logic to describe the situation where the converse is true, known as iff (if and only if). That's the "logical leap". Use something else to describe your moronic reasoning.
I've installed many bad RPMs (admittedly, mostly prior to RPM v4, but I jumped ship to Debian-based distros around that time) that have destroyed the entire configuration to the point where no dependencies resolve correctly any more. All of the responses I've heard about this sort of behaviour are something to the effect of "use the source RPM then", or whatever. The point being, things need to be painless. Sure, I could debug the RPM database (occasionally I had success in sorting out what went wrong), but it's a nightmare to try and use RPM to install proprietary software. You almost always have to force the installation using --no-deps --force, because RPM binaries are usually targeted at a specific distro/version. I remember mysql had big problems too, and Red Hat wouldn't upgrade from 3.23 for an unreasonably long time. Oracle had problems, again with dependencies. The list goes on and on. I also started using Red Hat around version 4. I've got plenty of bad experience with them, believe me. I've also got some measure of experience with every one of the alternative distros I mentioned, and have good and bad things to say about all of them.
Debian takes a somewhat draconic approach to package management, simply refusing any further package installation until you resolve the dependencies. I've never seen distro-specific.debs, just one. There weren't many of them until Ubuntu got big, but you can find anything (including proprietary, non-GPL software) packaged in Multiverse. I've installed software from all sorts of different sources, and I've never had to debug the installation from the command line, which is the entire point of the exercise, isn't it? I don't mind the inflexible nature of this package management. After all, it is the authoritative packing list for your OS. I kinda want it to be accurate, for auditing purposes.
The Forum excluded sole proprietorships, general partnerships and individuals because its members couldn't agree on criteria for validating them effectively, something some members said can be difficult.
From TFA, this is the reasoning behind the stocking saleswoman's problems. Now, I tend to disagree that it's difficult to find criteria for validating a Proprietorship, since I've formed one myself. While getting the trade certificate and license to collect tax are easy, obtaining a valid small business bank account is not. I'm thinking that those 3 taken as a whole should be enough information to determine whether the Proprietorship in question exists and is doing legitimate business, at least here in Canada.
I don't think Microsoft screwed up here, incredibly enough. They've released a new product based on standards (of all things!). It doesn't erroneously display this woman's site in yellow or red, and it will correctly display it in green when the forum which determined the new certificate standard makes it available to Proprietorships. The article accuses Microsoft of tilting the online commerce playing field heavily toward big business again, but this isn't really Microsoft's fault. I agree that the new certificate standard should have included everyone from the get-go, but you can't fault Microsoft for building this useful feature on the latest standard.
The error margin is low, based on our ability to accurately determine the wavelength of the radiation in question (I'm pretty sure it's awfully accurate). It was described to me this way (from Trefil's Reading the Mind of God): We are able to recreate in laboratories the conditions in the universe to within 10e-33 seconds of the Big Bang. Therefore, we know the exact temperature of the radiation emitted from the Big Bang. Assuming no other variables which could increase the temperature of the background radiation and knowing the current wavelength of the background radiation around us (it's in the Microwave range), we can tell the light is 14 billion years old by its wavelength. I hope I didn't screw that up:)
Even though I have switched distributions, it it possible that I may have stopped using Linux if I had come to the conclusion that Fedora was of too poor quality to use on a daily basis.
It's not?
Seriously though, I've never like Red Hat Linux. RPM doesn't work very well, and there were countless bugs in Red Hat versions of packages that didn't appear in the original source. Not to mention the configuration scripts that didn't work, or had problems. Don't forget the graphical auto-updater that hung and/or crashed on more than 5 packages at a time. I've never needed Enterprise support for any of my servers, so I can't speak to that. However, it's the only possible offering Red Hat could have that would be of any value.
The Fedora project was a disaster, IMO. They used it as a platform to find critical bugs in the code they wanted to use for the RHEL product. The quote I find most memorable about Red Hat (though not specific to Fedora, that's my own experience) was "Red Hat likes to live on the bleeding edge, and leave the bleeding to you". As a result of such experience, I turned away from the Red Hat distros.
Red Hat is important in only one way, from what I can see: they make Linux a commercial venture. Other than SCO, I don't think anybody has done a worse job from that perspective, either. Ximian, eventually bought by Novell, at least contributed to the development of Evolution and other GNOME software. Corel got into the Office for Linux market at a time when the biggest complaint about Linux was that there were no good applications available. IBM has contributed to the idea of commercial Linux more than anyone I can think of, both in terms of GPL-ed contributions to the codebase, and as a vendor promoting Linux-based solutions. Red Hat has been a purely profit-based venture, sacrificing the quality of the free distribution to make a few extra bucks.
So, yes, the concept of Fedora is important: free binary packages that the community can install relatively painlessly, with source available for those who want to debug and contribute themselves. There's also a place for the community to discuss the product and difficulties they're having with it. Of course, that's what Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu, SuSE, Gentoo and many others also do. The Red Hat implementation, however, leaves a lot to be desired.
...but something like "apple.com," while a name of a major computer manufacturer, would be perfectly valid had it been bought by a person who used it to sell bushels of apples online, or had apple-picking vacations for sale, etc.
Which in fact happened with the PGA.com domain in the early days. The Potato Growers of America (or something like that), however, did not refuse to sell, and I believe the price came in around $30k for the domain transfer. It's the right of the domain holder to develop his domain, so if there's no sale, there's no sale. Yet another gigantic corporation bullying people into doing business with them when they don't want to. Internet domains fall under Trademark law. I'm guessing it's also a no-go to register a Trademark with the sole purpose of forcing someone to pay for it, as this easily covers the domain-squatting aspect. It also covers the apple.com bit: apple.com is too generic to be a trademark of Apple Computers, Inc. but applecomputers.com wouldn't be.
There's far too many variable to consider. This smacks of propaganda to me. "Smile! It'll make you healthier!" I'll offer my own experience as anecdotal evidence that something's missing from this study. I'm chronically depressed, but I haven't had a cold in well over a year. Clearly it's not positive emotion that contributes to my health, nor does my above-average health eliminate the chronic depression. I take a mind-over-matter approach to dealing with exposure to a cold virus, which is quite common these days. I'm sure this is similar to the mind-over-matter approach to feeling positive that many psychologists and self-help gurus teach. There may be some parallels between positive emotion and resilience to the common cold/influenza, but I don't think they've found any causality here.
...your problem is not with the internet or it's services, it is with some other individual Precisely. Too many people blame the Internet for the malicious actions of others. True, it's a little easier to find victims now, especially since there's a general naivity of casual Internet users. However, it's still illegal to stalk somebody. It's still illegal for a legal investigation to violate your rights to find incriminating evidence. The big question, I guess, is whether the facility of the Internet improves people's chances of getting away with a crime. It's clear that the amount of permanent data about every individual within the Internet's "earshot" is going to increase, so trying to prevent this sort of technology from being implemented is basically impossible. We need to teach people Lesson #1 posthaste so they can prevent themselves from being victimized.
Security Software: OpenBSD 3.9. I upgraded from 3.5 this year without too much effort. Guess what? It still works, and it's still the most secure OS on the planet. Cost: $0.
Web Development Tool: Eclipse+Webtools. Webtools has incorporated the best features from JBoss-IDE and combined them with their already tres cool Webtools. Now I can get a vendor-neutral Web Development Tool whose features match or exceed anything out there. Cost: $0.
Application Software: Evolution 2.2. All of the features that everyone "needs" in Microsoft Outlook, as well as Junk Mail filtering based on SpamAssassin. Oh, it also works with Microsoft Exchange servers thanks to the Novell Evolution-Exchange adaptor. Cost: $0. (Firefox 2.0 takes up too much RAM:( )
Network Hardware: The RT2500 wireless chip. Open Source drivers, works with *BSD and pretty much any modern Linux distro. Allows for custom-built WAPs -- w00t! Cost: $100
Server Hardware: Whatever I manage to put together with the bits lying around my basement. It'll be running Linux, so it's still faster than a new Vista machine:P Cost: $0.
I missed a couple, but I'm sure somebody can finish the list. I guess I'm a cheapskate this year -- I won't be spending anything on my geek friends...
Theory is theory. I can post instructions on a fictional <insert crime here>, and the person who commits the crime is 100% guilty, even if he got the idea from me. Classic examples: The Great Train Robbery, Strangers on a Train, The Italian Job. The only thing that can be done is to limit distribution of such texts on the basis that they are harmful to society at large. This is the way that Hate Literature is managed; you certainly can't stop somebody from writing it, but you can bust him the second he provides his writing to someone else.
As to unethical, I'd say No. The case can be made that disclosing such information is in the interest of the general public. It could also be argued that it was done as a last resort: the vendor wouldn't deal with us when we went to them privately, so we released the information publicly. I'm sure Ralph Nader has released information that could be used to do something dangerous or illegal.
Dynamically generated content is one example reason; sometimes certain pages can be a big drain on your website
And dynamic content is, of course, the answer. If I'm going to put up copyrighted content in the future, I'd use one of a dozen schemes that regenerate the download link on a per-session basis. Obviously they're not going to honour robots.txt, but why are your links readable by such a basic spider? You need to:
Disallow anonymous downloads. You need to be logged onto the site to download anything, torrent or otherwise
Use a CAPTCHA to prevent spiders from signing up for said accounts
Use the session id to generate unique download links on a per-session basis
Change the key on your BitTorrent tracker every 12-24 hours. This will require that a downloader get the latest torrent from the original website (which requires login), reducing the impact of a leaked torrent
Compress and possibly encrypt the content so that it's less obvious what it is
Anyone who follows the above steps (and most sites already do most or all of this) won't be found by the spider. Period.
The only thing I can think of that this product would be useful for is to find people who have blatantly copied my website, but I'm sure you could find those people equally easily with Google.
In the Ruby/Rails world we have Capistrano, which provides a very nice *start* towards a comprehensive tool to help automate the deployment process (in various environments if necessary) for server application environments
I find XDoclet to be quite sufficient for dealing with deployment automation in multiple J2EE environments. XDoclet, and other AOP tools, allow the developer to deal with multiple deployment environments by embedding JavaDoc-style tags into the code. The XDoclet tool then generates all required XML configuration files. Used in co-ordination with Eclipse, XDoclet configurations can be maintained as part of the project and a packaging configuration can then create EARs for all the required deployments. Writing a shell script to automate the entire process via cron should be a trivial exercise now that the EARs are created. I think that writing your own scripts for deployment makes sense -- they don't take long to write, and they take into account the specific details of your infrastructure. e.g. one server might be deployed to via SCP, while another might use FTP.
Accelerator keys that give a quick and simple way to stay off the mouse(non existant in a Mac, on par with linux in my opinion)
You clearly don't know how to use a Mac then. I probably use hotkeys in OSX more often than any OS. Again, the comment above about people applying knowledge of "their" OS and comparing it to their limited knowledge of another OS stands. Your comparison to Linux is of the same poor quality.
Since I'm writing, I'll answer too. I hate Windows and Microsoft for a number of reasons. Most of them are historical. Historically, Windows has been more of a resource hog than its contemporaries (Windows 3.1 == Slower and hungrier than DOS and Minix, Windows 95 == Slower and hungrier than early Slackware, Windows XP == Slower and hungrier than Ubuntu). I've never had a non-obsolete (i.e. < 6 mo. from being the most modern) machine, so I chose the more efficient OS. Happily, I pocketed some extra cash since the more efficient OS was also cheaper.
Then Microsoft proclaimed that "Thou shalt not use Linux, for it is the Devil". Given that I'd put 2 or 3 years into learning Linux by the time Windows 95 came out, I thought it was rather unreasonable of Microsoft to tell me that I'd "wasted" that time. Microsoft and their legion of MCPs continues to tell me that I wasted my time learning Linux, and that seniority will be based on specific experience with Microsoft products, since Linux experience is irrelevant. So, yeah, I kinda don't like a bunch of people with less experience than me changing what they consider experience so they can be promoted ahead of me.
For me, it's a matter of tolerance. I will continue to use Linux, even if it's made illegal. I'd rather be a career criminal than have some monolithic company that doesn't even play by the rules itself decree that Linux people are evil and must be stopped. If somehow Microsoft culture changes to be tolerant of other users (I have nothing against Microsoft users, just the company itself), then I'm sure that my hatred will subside.
Can't remember the name of the book, but I know how this ends. Some guy who doesn't like me steals my ID card and/or replaces it with an invalid one, and I end up in jail because I can't prove who I really am. Federated identity is important; we can't have a single authoritative source for IDs or this sort of abuse will definitely happen.
Mental withdrawal effects can also be fatal, though not as directly. I'd bet that suicide kills a number of people suffering from withdrawal effects from substances such as alcohol, cocaine and heroin.
There's definitely a serious lack of thought if they can't figure out an ending for the Antichrist's side. I have absolutely no problem with the concept of this game, as I play Diablo myself and it'd be pretty hypocritical to judge another game with religious content. However, the fact that the game has only one storyline eliminates the idea that the character can make his own choices and learn the consequences of his actions. That's the whole point of RPG, IMO. I'm guessing that the limited playability will reduce the overall popularity of this game.
Thanks for this link. It was getting really difficult to tell whether this security expert was expecting too much from the PHP project or not, but a bug of this nature is very telling. Any programmer, experienced or inexperienced, could run into this particular bug. Even code analysis by an experienced web programmer would fail to expose the vulnerability. It is irresponsible of the development team to refuse to fix this bug. I'm guessing that many of the other vulnerabilities that he found would also be gotchas for the most experienced of programmers. Shame on the PHP team for allowing someone of Esser's caliber to get away -- just another reason for me to use something else.
Geez. The stuff I'm talking about doesn't even require sentience.
Analysis of page: 1) Sells product (bracelet thingy) 2) Contains phrase "fashion craze" -> tag "producthype" 3) Search for other instances of producthype for bracelet thingy (hmmm, all those domains got paid for out of the same pocket -> reduce PageRank) 4) Contains multiple instances of phrase "bracelet thingy" and closely associates with terms "thingy bracelet" "rubber thingy" "rubber bracelet" -> add secondary search terms 5) Check correlation of "bracelet thingy" with other secondary search terms on other pages (hmmm, you don't seem to correlate phrases the same way everyone else does -> less popular -> reduce PageRank)
Yes it requires software development, but I doubt any of what I'm outlining above is overly complicated for a Google developer. Google can cross-reference more information in a microsecond than either of us will in our entire life.
Slashdot Mirror
This makes absolutely no sense. According to your argument, we should never standardize anything, because it might screw up someone's future idea. There are no features at this point in time that require a change to the already existing USB standard to make mobile phones work. They will charge in a certain amount of time via the powered line. They will transfer data at a certain rate because that's how USB works. I'd rather have a standard connector available that works in a known way right now than worrying about what the future will bring. Imagine what your house would be like if electricity never had any standards set. You'd have to make sure that the wall socket the electrician installed and the power cable for the new device you bought were compatible. In addition to different wattage of power supplies, they'd also run on dozens of different voltages. But, we can take it for granted. No one discovered something later on that overturned all of the standards we'd decided on for electricity. Are you seriously suggesting that USB is such an immature technology that the connectors and cables we already use are subject to change?
Note that some changes to the technology (such as your additional wires example) are not precluded. Remember 80-pin IDE cables? Increased transfer rates on additional wires without changing the motherboard's interface. There's only one reason to have no standards on data/power cables for electronic devices, and that's to sell the high-margin accessories. The data cable for my phone is stupid: it's a USB cable with a proprietary connection to the phone. As a result, the data transfer rate is only 115200 BPS instead of the 400+ Kbps of USB2. RS232 over USB -- how pointless.
mandelbr0t
However, we make it crystal clear there is zero tolerance for proprietary software that we can't provide license information for or running rogue servers. They know they will be in big trouble if they install recreational software that interferes with the operation of their machines or which launches an attack.
This is basically an honor system. There's plenty of software with legitimate and illegimate uses on a corporate network (e.g. Cygwin). If you let me install Cygwin, then I can do all kinds of fun stuff that I'm not supposed to be able to, and you can't tell the difference. You need to enforce the lack of rogue servers, backdooring and so forth. I don't really have a problem with the IT department telling me what to run. I've got my own computers at home for doing the stuff I want to do. Just make sure I have everything I need to do my job.
I'm a techie dweeb, and I'll fully admit that I have screwed up a corporate installation inadvertently. It's not fun being forced to use IE instead of Firefox, or the company's development tools instead of my own, but I need to have some respect for the IT department. They have a lot of people to look after, and many of them think that it's harmless to install just that one little application, or to remove that one annoying little folder/application/autorun entry etc. It seems that way until you need to install some licensed software on your corporate workstation and the enterprise management tools the help desk uses don't work any more. Just let those guys do their job and quit worrying about the "rights" you've had taken away from you. It's not like it's the first sacrifice you've made for the corporation.
mandelbr0t
LaTeX + a WYSIWYG front-end whose name escapes me was free and available ca. 1996. It did a very good job with mathematical expressions, as I recall. Of course, that's because LaTeX does a very good job with mathematical expressions. The final product is typically a GIF file showing the equation. LaTeX may be obscure, but there are some good front-ends for it, and there's no desktop publishing app that can even come close today, IMO.
/me worships Knuth
mandelbr0t
Meh. Caveat Programmer. If you work in a dynamically-typed language, you should know what the gotchas are. Perl has exactly the same problems (although it does have a dot operator to clarify some things). You always have to coerce the type by a construct like "" + 1 or the like in any dynamically typed language where the result is dependent on string type versus numeric type.
mandelbr0t
Don't do this, please. It's one thing to screen-scrape when there's no alternative available, but it's not like Google is removing SOAP support without a replacement. Then again, why bother worrying about manners when we're still worrying about the law?...
mandelbr0t
Of course the difference between this "Intellectual Property" concept and real property is what happens when it's stolen. So long as everyone plays fair, only one person will be profiting from the "property" at that time. It can't be in both my possession and the thief's possession simultaneously. I can prove that the thief stole it by producing some kind of record of acquisition (a receipt, perhaps) and show that the thief has possession of it unlawfully.
This doesn't work too well with theft of "Intellectual Property". Look at the way SCO tries to push the same argument about Linux -- you're a Linux user, so you're in possession of our property. The receipt in this case is quite vague, however. SCO is not being very specific about what's in my possession unlawfully as a Linux user.
If I work with someone on a project, we're both in possession of the same "Intellectual Property" throughout the course of our collaboration. If the collaboration ends, who "owns" the "property"? If there's fundamental disagreement among team members about what should be done with the "property", both of us can exercise our decision independently, even if the two views are mutually inconsistent. For instance, I might decide to release some code under the GPL, while my ex co-worker takes the same code and sells it to someone. It's a lot harder to enforce the GPL here, because two of us "own" the same "property".
That's why the term "Intellectual Property" is so misleading. The only way I could remove the "property" from my ex co-worker's possession if a judgement was made that I "owned" said "property", would be to hit him in the head really hard and hope for amnesia. I'm not saying that there's no laws about ownership of software and other digital content, just that the comparison to physical "property" is rather flawed.
mandelbr0t
Then don't call it a "logical leap". You're deliberatly confusing the argument. The formal logic is more or less: If the conditional is true, it does not imply that the converse (i.e.not white == not legitimate) is true. There's a special term used in formal logic to describe the situation where the converse is true, known as iff (if and only if). That's the "logical leap". Use something else to describe your moronic reasoning.
mandelbr0t
I've installed many bad RPMs (admittedly, mostly prior to RPM v4, but I jumped ship to Debian-based distros around that time) that have destroyed the entire configuration to the point where no dependencies resolve correctly any more. All of the responses I've heard about this sort of behaviour are something to the effect of "use the source RPM then", or whatever. The point being, things need to be painless. Sure, I could debug the RPM database (occasionally I had success in sorting out what went wrong), but it's a nightmare to try and use RPM to install proprietary software. You almost always have to force the installation using --no-deps --force, because RPM binaries are usually targeted at a specific distro/version. I remember mysql had big problems too, and Red Hat wouldn't upgrade from 3.23 for an unreasonably long time. Oracle had problems, again with dependencies. The list goes on and on. I also started using Red Hat around version 4. I've got plenty of bad experience with them, believe me. I've also got some measure of experience with every one of the alternative distros I mentioned, and have good and bad things to say about all of them.
Debian takes a somewhat draconic approach to package management, simply refusing any further package installation until you resolve the dependencies. I've never seen distro-specific .debs, just one. There weren't many of them until Ubuntu got big, but you can find anything (including proprietary, non-GPL software) packaged in Multiverse. I've installed software from all sorts of different sources, and I've never had to debug the installation from the command line, which is the entire point of the exercise, isn't it? I don't mind the inflexible nature of this package management. After all, it is the authoritative packing list for your OS. I kinda want it to be accurate, for auditing purposes.
Maybe you just need some more Fedora experience.
mandelbr0t
From TFA, this is the reasoning behind the stocking saleswoman's problems. Now, I tend to disagree that it's difficult to find criteria for validating a Proprietorship, since I've formed one myself. While getting the trade certificate and license to collect tax are easy, obtaining a valid small business bank account is not. I'm thinking that those 3 taken as a whole should be enough information to determine whether the Proprietorship in question exists and is doing legitimate business, at least here in Canada.
I don't think Microsoft screwed up here, incredibly enough. They've released a new product based on standards (of all things!). It doesn't erroneously display this woman's site in yellow or red, and it will correctly display it in green when the forum which determined the new certificate standard makes it available to Proprietorships. The article accuses Microsoft of tilting the online commerce playing field heavily toward big business again, but this isn't really Microsoft's fault. I agree that the new certificate standard should have included everyone from the get-go, but you can't fault Microsoft for building this useful feature on the latest standard.
mandelbr0t
The error margin is low, based on our ability to accurately determine the wavelength of the radiation in question (I'm pretty sure it's awfully accurate). It was described to me this way (from Trefil's Reading the Mind of God): We are able to recreate in laboratories the conditions in the universe to within 10e-33 seconds of the Big Bang. Therefore, we know the exact temperature of the radiation emitted from the Big Bang. Assuming no other variables which could increase the temperature of the background radiation and knowing the current wavelength of the background radiation around us (it's in the Microwave range), we can tell the light is 14 billion years old by its wavelength. I hope I didn't screw that up :)
mandelbr0t
It's not?
Seriously though, I've never like Red Hat Linux. RPM doesn't work very well, and there were countless bugs in Red Hat versions of packages that didn't appear in the original source. Not to mention the configuration scripts that didn't work, or had problems. Don't forget the graphical auto-updater that hung and/or crashed on more than 5 packages at a time. I've never needed Enterprise support for any of my servers, so I can't speak to that. However, it's the only possible offering Red Hat could have that would be of any value.
The Fedora project was a disaster, IMO. They used it as a platform to find critical bugs in the code they wanted to use for the RHEL product. The quote I find most memorable about Red Hat (though not specific to Fedora, that's my own experience) was "Red Hat likes to live on the bleeding edge, and leave the bleeding to you". As a result of such experience, I turned away from the Red Hat distros.
Red Hat is important in only one way, from what I can see: they make Linux a commercial venture. Other than SCO, I don't think anybody has done a worse job from that perspective, either. Ximian, eventually bought by Novell, at least contributed to the development of Evolution and other GNOME software. Corel got into the Office for Linux market at a time when the biggest complaint about Linux was that there were no good applications available. IBM has contributed to the idea of commercial Linux more than anyone I can think of, both in terms of GPL-ed contributions to the codebase, and as a vendor promoting Linux-based solutions. Red Hat has been a purely profit-based venture, sacrificing the quality of the free distribution to make a few extra bucks.
So, yes, the concept of Fedora is important: free binary packages that the community can install relatively painlessly, with source available for those who want to debug and contribute themselves. There's also a place for the community to discuss the product and difficulties they're having with it. Of course, that's what Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu, SuSE, Gentoo and many others also do. The Red Hat implementation, however, leaves a lot to be desired.
mandelbr0t
...but something like "apple.com," while a name of a major computer manufacturer, would be perfectly valid had it been bought by a person who used it to sell bushels of apples online, or had apple-picking vacations for sale, etc.Which in fact happened with the PGA.com domain in the early days. The Potato Growers of America (or something like that), however, did not refuse to sell, and I believe the price came in around $30k for the domain transfer. It's the right of the domain holder to develop his domain, so if there's no sale, there's no sale. Yet another gigantic corporation bullying people into doing business with them when they don't want to. Internet domains fall under Trademark law. I'm guessing it's also a no-go to register a Trademark with the sole purpose of forcing someone to pay for it, as this easily covers the domain-squatting aspect. It also covers the apple.com bit: apple.com is too generic to be a trademark of Apple Computers, Inc. but applecomputers.com wouldn't be.
mandelbr0t
There's far too many variable to consider. This smacks of propaganda to me. "Smile! It'll make you healthier!" I'll offer my own experience as anecdotal evidence that something's missing from this study. I'm chronically depressed, but I haven't had a cold in well over a year. Clearly it's not positive emotion that contributes to my health, nor does my above-average health eliminate the chronic depression. I take a mind-over-matter approach to dealing with exposure to a cold virus, which is quite common these days. I'm sure this is similar to the mind-over-matter approach to feeling positive that many psychologists and self-help gurus teach. There may be some parallels between positive emotion and resilience to the common cold/influenza, but I don't think they've found any causality here.
mandelbr0t
...your problem is not with the internet or it's services, it is with some other individual Precisely. Too many people blame the Internet for the malicious actions of others. True, it's a little easier to find victims now, especially since there's a general naivity of casual Internet users. However, it's still illegal to stalk somebody. It's still illegal for a legal investigation to violate your rights to find incriminating evidence. The big question, I guess, is whether the facility of the Internet improves people's chances of getting away with a crime. It's clear that the amount of permanent data about every individual within the Internet's "earshot" is going to increase, so trying to prevent this sort of technology from being implemented is basically impossible. We need to teach people Lesson #1 posthaste so they can prevent themselves from being victimized.mandelbr0t
Security Software: OpenBSD 3.9. I upgraded from 3.5 this year without too much effort. Guess what? It still works, and it's still the most secure OS on the planet. Cost: $0.
:( )
:P Cost: $0.
Web Development Tool: Eclipse+Webtools. Webtools has incorporated the best features from JBoss-IDE and combined them with their already tres cool Webtools. Now I can get a vendor-neutral Web Development Tool whose features match or exceed anything out there. Cost: $0.
Application Software: Evolution 2.2. All of the features that everyone "needs" in Microsoft Outlook, as well as Junk Mail filtering based on SpamAssassin. Oh, it also works with Microsoft Exchange servers thanks to the Novell Evolution-Exchange adaptor. Cost: $0. (Firefox 2.0 takes up too much RAM
Network Hardware: The RT2500 wireless chip. Open Source drivers, works with *BSD and pretty much any modern Linux distro. Allows for custom-built WAPs -- w00t! Cost: $100
Server Hardware: Whatever I manage to put together with the bits lying around my basement. It'll be running Linux, so it's still faster than a new Vista machine
I missed a couple, but I'm sure somebody can finish the list. I guess I'm a cheapskate this year -- I won't be spending anything on my geek friends...
mandelbr0t
Theory is theory. I can post instructions on a fictional <insert crime here>, and the person who commits the crime is 100% guilty, even if he got the idea from me. Classic examples: The Great Train Robbery, Strangers on a Train, The Italian Job. The only thing that can be done is to limit distribution of such texts on the basis that they are harmful to society at large. This is the way that Hate Literature is managed; you certainly can't stop somebody from writing it, but you can bust him the second he provides his writing to someone else.
As to unethical, I'd say No. The case can be made that disclosing such information is in the interest of the general public. It could also be argued that it was done as a last resort: the vendor wouldn't deal with us when we went to them privately, so we released the information publicly. I'm sure Ralph Nader has released information that could be used to do something dangerous or illegal.
mandelbr0t
And dynamic content is, of course, the answer. If I'm going to put up copyrighted content in the future, I'd use one of a dozen schemes that regenerate the download link on a per-session basis. Obviously they're not going to honour robots.txt, but why are your links readable by such a basic spider? You need to:
Anyone who follows the above steps (and most sites already do most or all of this) won't be found by the spider. Period.
The only thing I can think of that this product would be useful for is to find people who have blatantly copied my website, but I'm sure you could find those people equally easily with Google.
mandelbr0t
I find XDoclet to be quite sufficient for dealing with deployment automation in multiple J2EE environments. XDoclet, and other AOP tools, allow the developer to deal with multiple deployment environments by embedding JavaDoc-style tags into the code. The XDoclet tool then generates all required XML configuration files. Used in co-ordination with Eclipse, XDoclet configurations can be maintained as part of the project and a packaging configuration can then create EARs for all the required deployments. Writing a shell script to automate the entire process via cron should be a trivial exercise now that the EARs are created. I think that writing your own scripts for deployment makes sense -- they don't take long to write, and they take into account the specific details of your infrastructure. e.g. one server might be deployed to via SCP, while another might use FTP.
mandelbr0t
You clearly don't know how to use a Mac then. I probably use hotkeys in OSX more often than any OS. Again, the comment above about people applying knowledge of "their" OS and comparing it to their limited knowledge of another OS stands. Your comparison to Linux is of the same poor quality.
Since I'm writing, I'll answer too. I hate Windows and Microsoft for a number of reasons. Most of them are historical. Historically, Windows has been more of a resource hog than its contemporaries (Windows 3.1 == Slower and hungrier than DOS and Minix, Windows 95 == Slower and hungrier than early Slackware, Windows XP == Slower and hungrier than Ubuntu). I've never had a non-obsolete (i.e. < 6 mo. from being the most modern) machine, so I chose the more efficient OS. Happily, I pocketed some extra cash since the more efficient OS was also cheaper.
Then Microsoft proclaimed that "Thou shalt not use Linux, for it is the Devil". Given that I'd put 2 or 3 years into learning Linux by the time Windows 95 came out, I thought it was rather unreasonable of Microsoft to tell me that I'd "wasted" that time. Microsoft and their legion of MCPs continues to tell me that I wasted my time learning Linux, and that seniority will be based on specific experience with Microsoft products, since Linux experience is irrelevant. So, yeah, I kinda don't like a bunch of people with less experience than me changing what they consider experience so they can be promoted ahead of me.
For me, it's a matter of tolerance. I will continue to use Linux, even if it's made illegal. I'd rather be a career criminal than have some monolithic company that doesn't even play by the rules itself decree that Linux people are evil and must be stopped. If somehow Microsoft culture changes to be tolerant of other users (I have nothing against Microsoft users, just the company itself), then I'm sure that my hatred will subside.
mandelbr0t
Can't remember the name of the book, but I know how this ends. Some guy who doesn't like me steals my ID card and/or replaces it with an invalid one, and I end up in jail because I can't prove who I really am. Federated identity is important; we can't have a single authoritative source for IDs or this sort of abuse will definitely happen.
mandelbr0t
Mental withdrawal effects can also be fatal, though not as directly. I'd bet that suicide kills a number of people suffering from withdrawal effects from substances such as alcohol, cocaine and heroin.
mandelbr0t
There's definitely a serious lack of thought if they can't figure out an ending for the Antichrist's side. I have absolutely no problem with the concept of this game, as I play Diablo myself and it'd be pretty hypocritical to judge another game with religious content. However, the fact that the game has only one storyline eliminates the idea that the character can make his own choices and learn the consequences of his actions. That's the whole point of RPG, IMO. I'm guessing that the limited playability will reduce the overall popularity of this game.
mandelbr0t
I'd read the DBI book (O'Reilly) and the CGI perldoc. That should be about 95% of the stuff that PHP is used for.
mandelbr0t
Thanks for this link. It was getting really difficult to tell whether this security expert was expecting too much from the PHP project or not, but a bug of this nature is very telling. Any programmer, experienced or inexperienced, could run into this particular bug. Even code analysis by an experienced web programmer would fail to expose the vulnerability. It is irresponsible of the development team to refuse to fix this bug. I'm guessing that many of the other vulnerabilities that he found would also be gotchas for the most experienced of programmers. Shame on the PHP team for allowing someone of Esser's caliber to get away -- just another reason for me to use something else.
mandelbr0t
Geez. The stuff I'm talking about doesn't even require sentience.
Analysis of page:
1) Sells product (bracelet thingy)
2) Contains phrase "fashion craze" -> tag "producthype"
3) Search for other instances of producthype for bracelet thingy (hmmm, all those domains got paid for out of the same pocket -> reduce PageRank)
4) Contains multiple instances of phrase "bracelet thingy" and closely associates with terms "thingy bracelet" "rubber thingy" "rubber bracelet" -> add secondary search terms
5) Check correlation of "bracelet thingy" with other secondary search terms on other pages (hmmm, you don't seem to correlate phrases the same way everyone else does -> less popular -> reduce PageRank)
Yes it requires software development, but I doubt any of what I'm outlining above is overly complicated for a Google developer. Google can cross-reference more information in a microsecond than either of us will in our entire life.
mandelbr0t