Even if all insecure Open Source software would have been disabled, there would still be plenty of Closed Source software some of which has proven to be even more dangerous to the Internet. What is more, manufactorers of Closed (or Shared) Source Internet software would discredit Open Source competition as too risky to leave alone for more than a few months, and claim to "have the way out"...
I had the same effect with my rest-in-peace Jaz drive when it broke - the machine became slow and unreactive. Connection timed out... Or is the site simply/.ed?;-)
The "click of death" was very bad for Iomega. About six years ago I had a Jaz drive with six disks. As soon as the first became unusable, the Jaz took all the other ones with it, which became probably my worst data loss. If anyone of my coworkers asked me if I would recommend a Iomega NAS device, that is, any Iomega device, what would you really expect me to say, regardless of whether it might be the greatest device ever?
But what about somesort of compatibility for existing X apps?
Simply run a rootless X server (AFAIK XFree 4.2 can operate without a root window) or replace your graphical toolkits (Qt, Gtk+, Tk, FLTK) with their non-X variants.
Re:Starve record companies, not artists.
on
Chained Melodies
·
· Score: 2
Many people use Linux because they don't like the expense or anti-piracy policies of other options. Why not the same with music?
I'm comparing it to the software industry of the early 80s. Many big enterprises behaved like the music industry of today, introducing pay-per-CPU, pay-per-time, pay-per-data, pay-per-fart - to squeeze the last buck out of their customers. In 1984, some guy (RMS) was finally fed up and founded the Free Software Foundation and the GNU project, which we are using today, usually in its flavor GNU/Linux.
IMHO it's about two or three years away from some "musical RMS" to found something like the Free Music Foundation. Some similar approaches are even existing today, but they are quite unknown. So was the GNU project in 1984. It will take some more time for musicians to "produce" Free Music via the Internet, as well as to make it public.
One important obstacle - producing high-quality music with affordable equipment - has been solved with today's digital technology. Even with Free Software you can get some good results. Working on music via the Internet in the same way many people develop Free Software may even become superior to what the music industry is selling today.
Another major point is distribution. You'll have to find listeners. The most important distribution media is terrestrial radio. But most radio stations won't play any stuff not obtained from the "official" media channels, except for some rare events.
I predict that sooner or later one Free Music track will enter the charts and start a wave of artists bypassing the music industry. It will take about as much time as the GNU project needed to surpass, even to provide an equal or better alternative to its proprietary ancestors (what it has done today), but I'm quite sure within about 10 years Free Music will be as common as Free Software is today.
$ host cowboyneal cowboyneal.home.docsnyder.de A 192.168.0.1 cowboyneal.home.docsnyder.de A 192.168.0.2 cowboyneal.home.docsnyder.de A 192.168.0.3 [...] cowboyneal.home.docsnyder.de A 192.168.0.254
$ dig cowboyneal.home.docsnyder.de txt [you may guess...]
---
You'll always land on a box you might find useful.;^)
In a well designed DNS zone (don't think of running more than ten hosts without a local DNS), you'll distinguish hosts from services. For example "imap.home.docsnyder.de" will always be my IMAP server, regardless of which machine is actually hosting it. So are "mail.home.docsnyder.de", "proxy.home.docsnyder.de", "gw.home.docsnyder.de" and so on. Of course you can point "imap.yourdomain.com" to several hosts, resulting in round-robin load-balancing.
For actually assigning hostnames to hundreds or thousands of hosts, it's useful to take the IP host part of the _primary_ interface as an IP host part alias. For example (base and broadcast addresses included) "r0.. r255" = 192.168.0.0.. 192.168.0.255. Your DNS zone file will show one "$GENERATE" tag to assign A records to every host. Reverse-resolving is similarly easy.
If your network is larger than class C, use different letters. m0.. m255 for mail servers, p0.. p255 for proxies, w0.. w255 (be careful not to create hex numbers, so use g..z for letters) for firewalls. On a really large (Class B or greater) network, you might use combined letter-number schemes, e. g. g3f22 or x55h3. Another advantage of the IP host part alias is its independency of the IP network part - you can change IP networks without affecting any hostnames (well, that's what hostnames and DNS zones should be for;-)).
For the use of "real" hostnames, set one or multiple CNAME tags in your DNS zone, maybe use it as your primary host name, as long as the IP host address alias will work.
I wonder if John Gilmore administrates his mail server and reads Postmaster mails on his own. If he did, he would spend the whole day on cleaning it up.
A bit more than a year ago I worked at a company which was running an open relay to allow their customers sending mails through it. It has been blacklisted everywhere, no one has ever read Postmaster, they just reinstalled the mail server (out-of-the-box system, which they are developing) or removed the entire mail spool if it got too bad.
Yet they had of course plenty of problems with sending their own mail - so had their customers who used the relay, too. Being blacklisted on RSS, ORBS and dozens of other DNS-based lists causes quite some mails to be rejected - the percentage is certainly too high to ignore.
To make it short, it took several weeks to persuade each customer to change his mail server's configuration into using the ISP's mail relay instead of ours. Meanwhile the company moved its former 64k Internet connection to a 2Mbit/s line, which made relayed spam spread as fire.
Within the few weeks between the new line went up and we were finally able to replace the old mail server with a new system running Postfix, the mail relay was almost unusable for us - it took about a minute to even have a TCP connection of any type accepted, the system load was always between 10 and 20, and the ISP bill was _really_ high.
After putting Postfix into work, it was my job to keep the mail system running. As it ran on the same IP address as the old server, the spammers didn't stop trying to relay their trash through it. AFAICT almost no spam flood mailer checks SMTP return codes, and if it does, it tries to connect to the secondary MX. As a consequence the syslog has been filled with thousands of "Relaying denied" messages, SMTP sessions have been kept up for hours, and as they discovered after some time that this relay has been closed, they scanned our networks for some more open SMTP servers - not only - they scanned almost everything, so as if they can't relay spam through us, they at least want to look for an open FTP or HTTP server to share pr0n and w4r3z. It didn't take them too long to find an open proxy, and they caused 80 GB (the ISP bill was 6000 € that month) of bandwidth until we discovered it. They found an open FTP server, too, and uploaded about 5 GB of m0v13z until the partition went full what made us notice it.
What is more, the mail server has been fixed, but the IP address has still been blacklisted. After two weeks of notifying blacklist operators and having our mail server tested as secure, it has been unlisted from most services. Spam continued, of course, Postmaster notifications due to recipients who blacklisted our mail server manually continued to occur, and some customers who forgot to change their mail relay or were unable to do so (it's an easily-installable out-of-the-box system which they bought from us, so they just lacked basic knowledge to run a mail server). It has been a mess even months after we closed the mail relay.
So my advice for John Gilmore and anyone else who operates an open relay, intentionally or not: Close it! You are having the worst problems of all involved parties! If possible, move to a different IP network or you won't get any rest in the near future.
"Who cares? Linux can easily fill the void left by the loss of Windows."... which is a thought Microsoft doesn't want to have cross *anyone's* mind.
I'm sure Ballmer hasn't thought of this alternative, or he doesn't want to think of it.
Until recently a lot of IT companies and developers could rely quite safely on Microsoft Windows as a long-term platform. Many of them could even afford ignoring anything else and selling Windows-only products.
Now Steve Ballmer himself has told the world that the long-term availability of Windows is anything but certain, in fact Windows could be pulled from the shelves within a few months, if the court's ruling makes it impossible to continue shipping of Windows as long as it can't be unbundled from Internet Explorer and Media Player.
Can you imagine what would happen if Microsoft pulled Windows and the fallout lasted for a few months and then it was over and people found alternatives and nobody cared any more?
I compare it somehow to the "Y2K bug", which in contrast had a fixed, predictable date to occur, even if some of its side effects showed up earlier. In these times the whole IT industry boomed like never before, as there were plenty of things to do in order to avoid Y2K problems. Now the Y2K bug is history, the boom is over, and the subsequent crash has swept away any enterprise which was unable to survive by itself.
If you are running an IT company selling Windows-only products, and now you are reading Steve Ballmer's message about the future of Microsoft and Windows being as volatile as never before, what would you do? Bet your entire business on the faith of a single supplier whose boss is telling the world that its key product, maybe even its existance is threatened?
So I really have no idea what Ballmer hopes to achieve by threatening to pull Windows from the market.
IMHO, as seen many times before by other Microsoft people, Ballmer didn't think well enough about his statement and its side effects, and it wouldn't be the first time that a "tactical move" by Microsoft would turn out to be contraproductive.
Prior art means nothing to Apple when they'll present their iCeBox(TM) within a few years. So be careful to log the photos' timestamps, in case that we read a story on/. about Apple threatening everyone who puts plexiglass around a x86 box.
It wouldn't be too much hassle to automatically cache sites linked from a story or a submitted comment. For paying users, links on stories and comments will be redirected through the/. webcache for e. g. $0.01 per redirection or $0.05 per megabyte of traffic.
As a first advantage, target sites get less/.ed, saving quite some bandwidth and traffic costs to their providers. What is more, paying users could even view/.ed sites through the cache.
It seems like this is just another of these ongoing M$ vs. Open Source thingy, isn't it?
In fact it is. Quite some other public German institutions have already been using Free Software for some time. The main difference is the political importance of the Bundestag as a central part of the German government. The migration away from Microsoft and proprietary lock-ins towards Free Software and open standards would certainly be seen as a precedence, causing many other corporations, public institutions etc. to think similarly.
I'd probably go with a BSD on the servers and a custom Linux distro on the desktops
No problem with it. The most important topic in the Bundestux campaign is not GNU/Linux or Free Software everywhere. It's about open standards - getting rid of proprietary data formats especially in public and governmental institutions.
Once the Bundestag would use open, migration-friendly standards, file formats and protocols, switching between GNU/Linux, BSD, MacOSX or whatever, even back to the Microsoft world, would be quite easy. And what is more - nobody willing to communicate with members of the Bundestag would be kind of forced into a certain proprietary Office software.
The next-generation desktop which I'm thinking of doesn't need a single linuxkernel-in-less-than-one-minute-building numbercruncher. I would like to have a seamless multi-host cross-platform desktop, shared among e. g. a Sun running Solaris, a GNU/Linux workstation, a PDA, some recycled underpowered P100-class machines, an Apple Macintosh, maybe even a (ugh) w1nd0ze box. All of them would run different operating systems on many kinds of hardware.
A modern desktop environment is built on many layers, lots of processes and daemons, many interfaces and abstractions, most of which could be delegated to and shared among other hosts. Poor performance? No need to throw away the old box, just add a new one. With open and interopable interfaces like X11, CORBA, XML, HTTP or whatever, a next-generation desktop of this kind should be possible, especially with Free software.
In my view the most promising solution towards this concept is the GNU Network Object Model Environment (GNOME), largely based on CORBA, using only a few remaining locks which are likely to disappear within the next few years. If finally a common object model between GNOME, KDE, GNUstep and other backends can be established, the seamless multi-host cross-platform desktop could become reality.
The 2.6 GHz machine could then be used to build SETI packages and Linux kernels to heat up the office;-)
Re:Please seperate Linux kernel from Linux OS topi
on
Linux 2.4.18 Released
·
· Score: 1
I know it's redundant, but the so-called "Linux OS" has its own topic - GNU is Not Unix.
IANAS (I Am Not A Stallmanist), but without his work you would have to write your/. postings with Micky$hit Internet Exploder on W1nd0z3... that is, if/. existed at all.
I tried it via X11 redirection on my iPAQ (running Familiar GNU/Linux). It wouldn't take much hassle to make ROX the ultimative PDA environment: ROX is lean as in resources as well as in screen space, it's very functional and flexible, and it can be used with a stylus or with a one-key mouse.
"gconf" does exactly what the Freshmeat article describes: a unique way of storing configuration. Its frontend is abstracted from the backend which uses a hierarchy of small plain XML files per default but could also use a SQL database or a LDAP directory.
LDAP is nice on its own, too, with configuration being stored platform- and host-independently, as well as global, group-specific and user-specific settings. Netscape Roaming works this way.
Could it be that the US Department of Justice's web server is not/.-proof? I just wanna read the comments, but all I'm getting is this:
While trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/ms-major.htm
The following error was encountered:
* Connection Failed
The system returned:
(110) Connection timed out
The remote host or network may be down. Please try the request again.
Method to increase the choice on a public online opinion poll
Reference A shows an apparatus to perform a public online opinion poll (Reference B) which is to be increased by one option (Reference C) containing the nickname of a person related to the mentioned apparatus (Reference D)...
References:
A) "http://slashdot.org/"
B) "http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl"
C) "http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=740"
D) "http://cowboyneal.org/"
I know how to disable updatedb, but John Doe certainly doesn't.
Re:Suse go bad
on
SuSE 7.3 vs XP
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
SuSE's success is based on the distribution's quantity, not its quality. A few years ago, my coworkers and I made industrial servers based on
SuSE.
Very soon it was quite clear that you can't rely on any release of SuSE's distributions. Good choices in 1998/1999 were 5.3 and 6.2, in between that there was a major libc change (6.0 to 6.1) which messed everything up.
My nowadays coworkers tried SuSE 6.4 to 7.3, with especially the 7.3 sucking hell. They complained about (GNU/)Linux being slower on a P800 than Windoze on a P100. As I know that in such case something must be wrong, I checked it. After startup, "updatedb" was running, eating plenty of system ressources away from the user's frontend while indexing a 20 GB harddisk. After about 20 minutes ("updatedb" was still running), the user gave up and rebooted into Windoze... After me stopping that job, the box was about as fast as it is on Redmondware.
Our old file servers still run SuSE (dunno which version), with the system being about in the same state when the box was installed. No matter how easy it could be to upgrade the packages to current versions, nobody dares to risk fscking up a box with inconsistent packages obtained through auto-upgrade.
Now I'm using Debian and the problems are gone. You can rely on _any_ release, that is, from the stable (Potato) branch and in most cases from testing (Woody). Even the Unstable branch is more consistent than some SuSE distributions I used to play with. Debian is more difficult to install than SuSE, but it is much more easier to maintain if you know what to do.
People migrating from SuSE to Debian is only bad for SuSE, but people migrating vom SuSE to Windoze is bad for us all.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if all insecure Open Source software would have been disabled, there would still be plenty of Closed Source software some of which has proven to be even more dangerous to the Internet. What is more, manufactorers of Closed (or Shared) Source Internet software would discredit Open Source competition as too risky to leave alone for more than a few months, and claim to "have the way out"...
I had the same effect with my rest-in-peace Jaz drive when it broke - the machine became slow and unreactive. Connection timed out... Or is the site simply /.ed? ;-)
The "click of death" was very bad for Iomega. About six years ago I had a Jaz drive with six disks. As soon as the first became unusable, the Jaz took all the other ones with it, which became probably my worst data loss. If anyone of my coworkers asked me if I would recommend a Iomega NAS device, that is, any Iomega device, what would you really expect me to say, regardless of whether it might be the greatest device ever?
Simply run a rootless X server (AFAIK XFree 4.2 can operate without a root window) or replace your graphical toolkits (Qt, Gtk+, Tk, FLTK) with their non-X variants.
Many people use Linux because they don't like the expense or anti-piracy policies of other options. Why not the same with music?
I'm comparing it to the software industry of the early 80s. Many big enterprises behaved like the music industry of today, introducing pay-per-CPU, pay-per-time, pay-per-data, pay-per-fart - to squeeze the last buck out of their customers. In 1984, some guy (RMS) was finally fed up and founded the Free Software Foundation and the GNU project, which we are using today, usually in its flavor GNU/Linux.
IMHO it's about two or three years away from some "musical RMS" to found something like the Free Music Foundation. Some similar approaches are even existing today, but they are quite unknown. So was the GNU project in 1984. It will take some more time for musicians to "produce" Free Music via the Internet, as well as to make it public.
One important obstacle - producing high-quality music with affordable equipment - has been solved with today's digital technology. Even with Free Software you can get some good results. Working on music via the Internet in the same way many people develop Free Software may even become superior to what the music industry is selling today.
Another major point is distribution. You'll have to find listeners. The most important distribution media is terrestrial radio. But most radio stations won't play any stuff not obtained from the "official" media channels, except for some rare events.
I predict that sooner or later one Free Music track will enter the charts and start a wave of artists bypassing the music industry. It will take about as much time as the GNU project needed to surpass, even to provide an equal or better alternative to its proprietary ancestors (what it has done today), but I'm quite sure within about 10 years Free Music will be as common as Free Software is today.
--- /etc/bind/master/for/home.docsnyder.de
/. poll"
;^)
[...]
$GENERATE 1-254 cowboyneal A 192.168.0.$
cowboyneal TXT 1 "Today's
cowboyneal TXT 2 "Favorite hostname:"
cowboyneal TXT 3 "( ) homer"
cowboyneal TXT 4 "( ) linus"
cowboyneal TXT 5 "( ) neptune"
cowboyneal TXT 6 "( ) asterix"
cowboyneal TXT 7 "( ) cowboyneal"
---
$ host cowboyneal
cowboyneal.home.docsnyder.de A 192.168.0.1
cowboyneal.home.docsnyder.de A 192.168.0.2
cowboyneal.home.docsnyder.de A 192.168.0.3
[...]
cowboyneal.home.docsnyder.de A 192.168.0.254
$ dig cowboyneal.home.docsnyder.de txt
[you may guess...]
---
You'll always land on a box you might find useful.
In a well designed DNS zone (don't think of running more than ten hosts without a local DNS), you'll distinguish hosts from services. For example "imap.home.docsnyder.de" will always be my IMAP server, regardless of which machine is actually hosting it. So are "mail.home.docsnyder.de", "proxy.home.docsnyder.de", "gw.home.docsnyder.de" and so on. Of course you can point "imap.yourdomain.com" to several hosts, resulting in round-robin load-balancing.
.. r255" = 192.168.0.0 .. 192.168.0.255. Your DNS zone file will show one "$GENERATE" tag to assign A records to every host. Reverse-resolving is similarly easy.
.. m255 for mail servers, p0 .. p255 for proxies, w0 .. w255 (be careful not to create hex numbers, so use g..z for letters) for firewalls. On a really large (Class B or greater) network, you might use combined letter-number schemes, e. g. g3f22 or x55h3. Another advantage of the IP host part alias is its independency of the IP network part - you can change IP networks without affecting any hostnames (well, that's what hostnames and DNS zones should be for ;-)).
For actually assigning hostnames to hundreds or thousands of hosts, it's useful to take the IP host part of the _primary_ interface as an IP host part alias. For example (base and broadcast addresses included) "r0
If your network is larger than class C, use different letters. m0
For the use of "real" hostnames, set one or multiple CNAME tags in your DNS zone, maybe use it as your primary host name, as long as the IP host address alias will work.
I wonder if John Gilmore administrates his mail server and reads Postmaster mails on his own. If he did, he would spend the whole day on cleaning it up.
A bit more than a year ago I worked at a company which was running an open relay to allow their customers sending mails through it. It has been blacklisted everywhere, no one has ever read Postmaster, they just reinstalled the mail server (out-of-the-box system, which they are developing) or removed the entire mail spool if it got too bad.
Yet they had of course plenty of problems with sending their own mail - so had their customers who used the relay, too. Being blacklisted on RSS, ORBS and dozens of other DNS-based lists causes quite some mails to be rejected - the percentage is certainly too high to ignore.
To make it short, it took several weeks to persuade each customer to change his mail server's configuration into using the ISP's mail relay instead of ours. Meanwhile the company moved its former 64k Internet connection to a 2Mbit/s line, which made relayed spam spread as fire.
Within the few weeks between the new line went up and we were finally able to replace the old mail server with a new system running Postfix, the mail relay was almost unusable for us - it took about a minute to even have a TCP connection of any type accepted, the system load was always between 10 and 20, and the ISP bill was _really_ high.
After putting Postfix into work, it was my job to keep the mail system running. As it ran on the same IP address as the old server, the spammers didn't stop trying to relay their trash through it. AFAICT almost no spam flood mailer checks SMTP return codes, and if it does, it tries to connect to the secondary MX. As a consequence the syslog has been filled with thousands of "Relaying denied" messages, SMTP sessions have been kept up for hours, and as they discovered after some time that this relay has been closed, they scanned our networks for some more open SMTP servers - not only - they scanned almost everything, so as if they can't relay spam through us, they at least want to look for an open FTP or HTTP server to share pr0n and w4r3z. It didn't take them too long to find an open proxy, and they caused 80 GB (the ISP bill was 6000 € that month) of bandwidth until we discovered it. They found an open FTP server, too, and uploaded about 5 GB of m0v13z until the partition went full what made us notice it.
What is more, the mail server has been fixed, but the IP address has still been blacklisted. After two weeks of notifying blacklist operators and having our mail server tested as secure, it has been unlisted from most services. Spam continued, of course, Postmaster notifications due to recipients who blacklisted our mail server manually continued to occur, and some customers who forgot to change their mail relay or were unable to do so (it's an easily-installable out-of-the-box system which they bought from us, so they just lacked basic knowledge to run a mail server). It has been a mess even months after we closed the mail relay.
So my advice for John Gilmore and anyone else who operates an open relay, intentionally or not: Close it! You are having the worst problems of all involved parties! If possible, move to a different IP network or you won't get any rest in the near future.
"Who cares? Linux can easily fill the void left by the loss of Windows." ... which is a thought Microsoft doesn't want to have cross *anyone's* mind.
I'm sure Ballmer hasn't thought of this alternative, or he doesn't want to think of it.
Until recently a lot of IT companies and developers could rely quite safely on Microsoft Windows as a long-term platform. Many of them could even afford ignoring anything else and selling Windows-only products.
Now Steve Ballmer himself has told the world that the long-term availability of Windows is anything but certain, in fact Windows could be pulled from the shelves within a few months, if the court's ruling makes it impossible to continue shipping of Windows as long as it can't be unbundled from Internet Explorer and Media Player.
Can you imagine what would happen if Microsoft pulled Windows and the fallout lasted for a few months and then it was over and people found alternatives and nobody cared any more?
I compare it somehow to the "Y2K bug", which in contrast had a fixed, predictable date to occur, even if some of its side effects showed up earlier. In these times the whole IT industry boomed like never before, as there were plenty of things to do in order to avoid Y2K problems. Now the Y2K bug is history, the boom is over, and the subsequent crash has swept away any enterprise which was unable to survive by itself.
If you are running an IT company selling Windows-only products, and now you are reading Steve Ballmer's message about the future of Microsoft and Windows being as volatile as never before, what would you do? Bet your entire business on the faith of a single supplier whose boss is telling the world that its key product, maybe even its existance is threatened?
So I really have no idea what Ballmer hopes to achieve by threatening to pull Windows from the market.
IMHO, as seen many times before by other Microsoft people, Ballmer didn't think well enough about his statement and its side effects, and it wouldn't be the first time that a "tactical move" by Microsoft would turn out to be contraproductive.
Prior art means nothing to Apple when they'll present their iCeBox(TM) within a few years. So be careful to log the photos' timestamps, in case that we read a story on /. about Apple threatening everyone who puts plexiglass around a x86 box.
It wouldn't be too much hassle to automatically cache sites linked from a story or a submitted comment. For paying users, links on stories and comments will be redirected through the /. webcache for e. g. $0.01 per redirection or $0.05 per megabyte of traffic.
/.ed, saving quite some bandwidth and traffic costs to their providers. What is more, paying users could even view /.ed sites through the cache.
As a first advantage, target sites get less
Schroeder: Ich bin ein Pinguin...
(found within an article about Bundestux on Web.de)
i guess the main reason to keep windows on the desktops is to ensure compatibility with the rest of germany's industry and political infrastructure.
This kind of dependency is exactly what the Bundestux initiative wants to stop.
It seems like this is just another of these ongoing M$ vs. Open Source thingy, isn't it?
In fact it is. Quite some other public German institutions have already been using Free Software for some time. The main difference is the political importance of the Bundestag as a central part of the German government. The migration away from Microsoft and proprietary lock-ins towards Free Software and open standards would certainly be seen as a precedence, causing many other corporations, public institutions etc. to think similarly.
I'd probably go with a BSD on the servers and a custom Linux distro on the desktops
No problem with it. The most important topic in the Bundestux campaign is not GNU/Linux or Free Software everywhere. It's about open standards - getting rid of proprietary data formats especially in public and governmental institutions.
Once the Bundestag would use open, migration-friendly standards, file formats and protocols, switching between GNU/Linux, BSD, MacOSX or whatever, even back to the Microsoft world, would be quite easy. And what is more - nobody willing to communicate with members of the Bundestag would be kind of forced into a certain proprietary Office software.
The next-generation desktop which I'm thinking of doesn't need a single linuxkernel-in-less-than-one-minute-building numbercruncher. I would like to have a seamless multi-host cross-platform desktop, shared among e. g. a Sun running Solaris, a GNU/Linux workstation, a PDA, some recycled underpowered P100-class machines, an Apple Macintosh, maybe even a (ugh) w1nd0ze box. All of them would run different operating systems on many kinds of hardware.
;-)
A modern desktop environment is built on many layers, lots of processes and daemons, many interfaces and abstractions, most of which could be delegated to and shared among other hosts. Poor performance? No need to throw away the old box, just add a new one. With open and interopable interfaces like X11, CORBA, XML, HTTP or whatever, a next-generation desktop of this kind should be possible, especially with Free software.
In my view the most promising solution towards this concept is the GNU Network Object Model Environment (GNOME), largely based on CORBA, using only a few remaining locks which are likely to disappear within the next few years. If finally a common object model between GNOME, KDE, GNUstep and other backends can be established, the seamless multi-host cross-platform desktop could become reality.
The 2.6 GHz machine could then be used to build SETI packages and Linux kernels to heat up the office
I know it's redundant, but the so-called "Linux OS" has its own topic - GNU is Not Unix.
/. postings with Micky$hit Internet Exploder on W1nd0z3... that is, if /. existed at all.
IANAS (I Am Not A Stallmanist), but without his work you would have to write your
I tried it via X11 redirection on my iPAQ (running Familiar GNU/Linux). It wouldn't take much hassle to make ROX the ultimative PDA environment: ROX is lean as in resources as well as in screen space, it's very functional and flexible, and it can be used with a stylus or with a one-key mouse.
"gconf" does exactly what the Freshmeat article describes: a unique way of storing configuration. Its frontend is abstracted from the backend which uses a hierarchy of small plain XML files per default but could also use a SQL database or a LDAP directory.
LDAP is nice on its own, too, with configuration being stored platform- and host-independently, as well as global, group-specific and user-specific settings. Netscape Roaming works this way.
Could it be that the US Department of Justice's web server is not /.-proof? I just wanna read the comments, but all I'm getting is this:
While trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/ms-major.htm
The following error was encountered:
* Connection Failed
The system returned:
(110) Connection timed out
The remote host or network may be down. Please try the request again.
Patent-No. 3.14159265
Method to increase the choice on a public online opinion poll
Reference A shows an apparatus to perform a public online opinion poll (Reference B) which is to be increased by one option (Reference C) containing the nickname of a person related to the mentioned apparatus (Reference D)...
References:
A) "http://slashdot.org/"
B) "http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl"
C) "http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=740"
D) "http://cowboyneal.org/"
mebbe we can /. /.
/. had better response times than today...
Maybe we did it. Or is it just me? Even on Sep 11
Can't you just disable updatdb?
I know how to disable updatedb, but John Doe certainly doesn't.
SuSE's success is based on the distribution's quantity, not its quality. A few years ago, my coworkers and I made industrial servers based on
SuSE.
Very soon it was quite clear that you can't rely on any release of SuSE's distributions. Good choices in 1998/1999 were 5.3 and 6.2, in between that there was a major libc change (6.0 to 6.1) which messed everything up.
My nowadays coworkers tried SuSE 6.4 to 7.3, with especially the 7.3 sucking hell. They complained about (GNU/)Linux being slower on a P800 than Windoze on a P100. As I know that in such case something must be wrong, I checked it. After startup, "updatedb" was running, eating plenty of system ressources away from the user's frontend while indexing a 20 GB harddisk. After about 20 minutes ("updatedb" was still running), the user gave up and rebooted into Windoze... After me stopping that job, the box was about as fast as it is on Redmondware.
Our old file servers still run SuSE (dunno which version), with the system being about in the same state when the box was installed. No matter how easy it could be to upgrade the packages to current versions, nobody dares to risk fscking up a box with inconsistent packages obtained through auto-upgrade.
Now I'm using Debian and the problems are gone. You can rely on _any_ release, that is, from the stable (Potato) branch and in most cases from testing (Woody). Even the Unstable branch is more consistent than some SuSE distributions I used to play with. Debian is more difficult to install than SuSE, but it is much more easier to maintain if you know what to do.
People migrating from SuSE to Debian is only bad for SuSE, but people migrating vom SuSE to Windoze is bad for us all.